Are we living in the New Dark Ages?

Philip Blond explaining the Big Society

The answer is that we ARE living in a new Dark Ages. What makes this time a new dark age is that the light of reason is being snuffed out. We have people here who claim to be children of the enlightenment, but they are philosophers and thinkers who actually do not believe in the power of philosophy, in the power of rational thought, or in the ability of humans to act forcefully and rationally upon their environment.

The philosophers began by imagining what a good society would be like. The 'Good Society' is the objective of most decent political philosophy. The Good Society can make rational decisions about the way society should be run, which is why capitalism opposes it.

How on Earth can we live in a society that does not believe in the intelligence and capacity of human beings and human societies to solve the problems that confront it?

In the New Dark Ages theorists are forced to use a religious language of the market, they are forced to accept the basic premise that humans cannot directly govern their own society, that they have to defer to a deity, in this case the market. How can we be said to be living in an age of enlightenment when our rulers abdicate moral responsibility and relegate human welfare  in preference to the workings and processes of wealth accumulation?

It becomes clear in our New Dark Ages our governments are not capable of taking rational and enlightened decisions and seeing them through. They do not have the power to do so. They do not have the power to decide:

- whether to go to war,
- whether to regulate the banking system,
- whether to mitigate the effects of climate change,

Our governments are so manipulated and corrupt, so in hoc to the real economic powers in our countries, for example to the Murdochs, to  BP, to the Barclay Brothers and to  BAE Systems,  that they suffer extreme paralysis of the will - aboulia. Obama promised to get the US out of Afghanistan and Iraq - not going to happen. Obama promised to regulate the banking system - not going to happen - Obama promised to take measures to prevent global warming - not going to happen. Obama promised to change the nature of alliances in the Middle East - not going to happen.

In the dangerous New Dark Ages we abdicate will and reason and decision making, the people are marginalised and ignored and kept in the dark and fed shit. Our governments  abdicate reason and instead listen to the soothsayers who speak of market forces. These market forces are up, they are down. The market feels buoyant, it is worried, it is cautious it is positive.

This weakness of mind is revolting. It is disgusting. It shows a lack of virility of fertility of thought and a lack of intellectual energy.

The social sciences are corrupt to the core. Successful social scientists are all nearly all co-opted. They work in the ideological skunk works of Capitalism. They produce their own versions of the Kubark Manual. The academic nomenclature have no shame in the pursuit of personal gain and influence.  Ideologues are paid directly and indirectly in all the social sciences from Economics, Politics, History, Sociology, Art and Psychology, to help reproduce the conditions to help the money river continue to flow asymmetrically in the direction of the powerful.

The Nobel Prize giving in Stockholm, for example,  has been an embarrassment. Ridiculous ideology disguised as theory is dished out to left wing and right wing governments alike and they swallow it all up..

There has been a generational failure of the will. A generational failure of western human beings to resist the powerful and use the intellect and act reasonably and forcefully in favour of rational governance.

We are not the same people who warred against fascism in Europe, we are merely their dumb, philistine children, and grandchildren. Our parents and grandparents were, in the main, capable of confronting fascism and the holocaust and Stalinism and dealing with the bastards who wanted to destroy the world. They could face up to their death properly and use their lives to some purpose. Not my generation. Not the generation that preceded it or the one that followed it.

We should remember the writing on the wall:

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin You have been weighed and found wanting.

I have more hope in the current generation, the people in their teens and 20s who can see the problem of the New Dark Ages laid bare in 2011, yes, even the looters.