2.1 Building a new civilizational order

An important transition between the 18th and 19th centuries culminated in an ‘overturning of the civilization’. While it created the working ‘institutional and organizational arrangements’ of ‘modernity’, it also destroyed the now obsolete great European social orders. The transition from feudalism to the Modern period¹ erected the buttresses of a new era extending from pre-modernity up until the present ‘globality’, described by various authors as second modernity, advanced modernity or late modernity. This breaking away from feudalism caused a decline in scholasticism and a rise in an episteme based in technological and scientific rationality. The modernization of this era was based on various outlooks, such as individualism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, anti-feminism, the fabrication of witches and witchcraft,² neo-colonialism, imperialism, ‘developmentalism’ and ‘capitalism’, and the human subjugation of nature.

As early as the late 15th century, scientific data show the acceleration of ‘colonization’ to be the source of the integration process of world populations to a civilizational model that had been promoted by modern developmentalism. In the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries, the modern new order had gained the potential for universalization such that it spread worldwide in half a century. For most of humanity, this universalization, as a developmental model, entailed a profound transformation and a convergence of economic, political, and cultural modalities for communal life.

Modernization through colonialism has generated its fair share of negative outcomes. It has occurred by and through social stratification (‘socio-identitary disparities’ as seen in social classes) and territorial stratification (‘socio-territorial disparities’ as seen in the divide between centre and periphery). Additionally, modernization through colonialism has :

exacerbated existing extractivism, i.e., increasingly structured and organized mechanical predation of natural resources. Destructive extraction processes have caused major disruptions of the Earth’s ecosystems, spurring on climate change, causing a decline in biodiversity, and producing many different kinds of pollution ;
intensified what David Harvey³ calls accumulation by ‘dispossession’.

Modernization through colonialism, which is individualist, patriarchal, developmentalist and capitalist, depends on an unstable equilibrium between order and chaos. This has given the global and planetary crisis its paradoxical nature ; torn between efficiency, as demonstrated by an ultra-rich private sector, and indecency, as characterized by nearly generalized poverty, among other things.

The current global and planetary crisis has numerous features.

It is socio-territorial due to the constant growth in inequality and inequity within, and between, nation-states ;
It pertains to identity because populations no longer adhere to the main “quasi-religious” beliefs and ideas of modernity, such as progress and growth (Ulrick Beck);
It is institutional in the way that institutions can barely carry out the duties for which they were created and that populations of different territories, disappointed by the ineffectiveness of these institutions, believe less and less in their ability to solve the main issues at hand ;
It is political :
- as a result of multiplying conflicts and social tensions :
  - local and regional wars are common ;
  - there is an ever-present threat of a major war, as demonstrated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ;
  - there was a shift of geopolitical balance after the two world wars of the 20th century ; and finally,
  - we have witnessed a multiplication and a diversification of tensions and conflicts between people, ethnicities and populations ; on this last point, if social diversity grows, we’ll also observe a recomposition of racist and discriminatory modalities between ethnicities and communities ;
- due to attacks on democratic ideals and scientific rationale : anemic attendance at the polls, loss of confidence in political institutions, a rise in populism, increased occurrences of fake news and anti-science rhetoric…
It is economic as :
- a continuous unequal reconfiguration of modes of production, distribution, redistribution and accumulation of wealth, to which both artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution have contributed, which aims to generate excessive profits in the hands of fewer and fewer people by falling profit rates with a technological rebound effect⁴.
- growth in and of itself is called into question through the degrowth movement and through well-being measurement methods. (Joseph Stiglietz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi⁵);
- we see a transformation of the labour market where unemployment and a labour shortage coexist ; where the value and meaning of work are being challenged and redefined ; and where, once digital technologies have been introduced, there is a transformation of the organization of work and the resulting social safety net.
It is cultural due to our collective struggle to imagine a radically new cultural perspective able to fully integrate social and artistic criticisms as described by Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski⁶;
It is ecological following a decline in biodiversity, a deterioration of our ecosystems, intensifying types of pollution and a rise in the number and strength of climate disruptions⁷;
It is moral and ethical due to the fractured common values of our communities and the loss of appreciation for diverse values.

In short, the current crisis is a global and a planetary one, defined by dwindling teleological progress and conducive to restructuring the present “civilizational order.” This restructuring seems necessary to counterbalance the fatalism that makes the extractivist development model inescapable and inevitable⁸.

Notes

1
“Modern times began toward the end of the 15th century and came to an end in the late 18th century during the 1789 French Revolution. The period was defined by two eras : the Renaissance (late 15th to late 16th centuries); the old régime and absolutism (17th century until 1789).” (https://misterfanjo.com/index.php/2017/06/18/temps-modernes-frise-historique-projet-p02/).
2
Sylvia Federici : Caliban et la sorcière. https://entremonde.net/IMG/pdf/18rupture-caliban-et-la-sorciere-web.pdf.
3
David Harvey (2007). “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.” The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 610 (1): 22 – 44.
4
“The progressive tendency of the general rate of profit to fall is, therefore, just an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productivity of labour.” (Karl Marx (1894), Capital (Volume III), p. 154).
5
See : https://www.vie-publique.fr/sites/default/files/rapport/pdf/094000427.pdf.
6
See Nouvel esprit du capitalisme and the summary presented in : https://www.multitudes.net/Vers-un-renouveau-de-la-critique/.
7
See Kate Raworth, the doughnut economics : https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/.
8
Integrating digital means in everyday production processes could, however, rejuvenate extractivism : henceforth, it is data that will be extracted, transformed, sold and used.