This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.— T. S. Eliot
The full flowering of modernity is the end of the world. It is the end not just of some particular world — as when we speak of “the world of ancient Greece” or “the world of the Roman Empire” — but of any world at all. It is the end of the world as such, the end of the very worlding of the world, to borrow a way of speaking from Heidegger.
The lines cited above are the famous last stanza of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which was first published in 1925. Today, one century later, the sound with which the world ends has become even less audible, a mere whisper of a whimper. Even the whimper is buried by all the noise with which we are constantly dunning ourselves across all the wide diversity of our endless run of electronic devices.
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Held captive as it is by alienated mediations (tools, thoughts, false needs), the objective world—or nature, if you prefer—is now surrounded by a sort of screen which paradoxically makes it more alien to human beings even as they transform it—and themselves.
— Raoul Vaneigem
Those lines from the important Belgian thinker Vaneigem — a citation from a different book by whom I also used in a recent earlier post[1] — come from page 69 of a recent re-edition of Donald D. Nicholson-Smith’s translation of Vaneigem’s work The Revolution of Everyday Life.[2] The original French version of that same text under the title Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, which directly translates as Treatise on How To Live for the Younger Generations, first appeared in 1967.
That was shortly before the popular uprisings of 1968, most especially the uprising on the streets of Paris and other cities in France in May 1968, for which Vaneigem’s work is certainly relevant. The original French publication of Vaneigem’s book was also shortly before I myself first began seriously to read Heidegger, starting with his magnum opus Being and Time, which I read starting in December of 1967 and finished in January of 1968, a few months before the French uprisings.
Years before Vaneigem,[3] Heidegger pointed in the same direction — namely, toward the ending of the world, any world. What’s more, both Heidegger and Vaneigem also pointed in various works to the rise of the dominance of modern technology as being inseparable from the ending of all true worlds. I have written before on this blog[4] about Heidegger’s view that it pertains to the essence of modern technology to reduce both nature and humanity itself to no more than “stock” or “resources.”[5]
However, Vaneigem saw clearly something to which Heidegger’s eyes tended to remain closed: the inseparability of the rise of modern technology and capitalism. Thus, for example, a few pages before what I cite above from Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life he writes this, concerning the class responsible for the rise and the continuing dominance of capitalism, which went wholly global with the emergence of the so-called “neoliberalism” for which Ronald Reagan stands as the most famous spokesperson: “The bourgeoise for its part bartered being for having, destroying the mythical unity of being and the world as the basis of Power […].”[6] Ten pages after the citation I give above at the beginning of this section of today’s post, Vaneigem explains that what he is calling “Power,” with a capital ‘P,’ “is the sum of alienated and alienating mediations.”[7] Between those two quotations, comes this one:
We must renew our acquaintance with the shortcomings of feudalism — not to correct them but to supersede them. We need to rediscover the harmony of unitary society while stripping it of its divine phantom and its sacrosanct hierarchy.[8]
After a short citation from a different author, in the next and last section of today’s post I will add a brief commentary to those lines from Vaneigem, going in the same direction he points.
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The vision of the Kingdom of God that Jesus offered may not be immediately translatable into every real human social situation. Its relevance is that, as vision, it always exists in creative tension with every situation and all customary human arrangements—hopefully, spurring us to greater efforts to remove abuses and to embody justice. It announces a god of radical justice who calls us to establish nothing less than that on earth. If we reply that such is not possible, God might respond that, in the long run, neither is the world.
— John Dominic Crossan[9]
Just so far as there is injustice, there is no world: so long as injustice prevails, just so long does the world cease to world, to continue borrowing a way of speaking from Heidegger. For that very reason, the worlding of the world under Medieval feudalism was still to be awaited. It was not yet present, but still on the way.
Feudalism, after all, was a social system characterized by the ruling dominance of one class, that of the Lords, over all others, all of whom together counted as Peasants in service to the Lords. Justice — which is solely a capacitative power, a power that solely em-powers — has no presence in such a social arrangement, wherein one segment of society exercises coercive power over all others.[10] That, indeed, is precisely why such feudal society must be altogether “superseded” and not merely “corrected,” to use the same terms Vaneigem does in the quotation from him near the close of the preceding section of this post.
If the world is at last to begin truly worlding, rather than remaining perpetually postponed as it were, that is the most debilitating of all the “shortcomings of feudalism,” the one with which we must, above and beyond all others, “reacquaint ourselves.”
John Dominic Crossan in 2008
[1] Namely, in my post “Disaccustoming Ourselves,” which went up on September 23, 2024.
[2] Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012, a reissue of the Donald Nicholson-Smith translation first published in 1972, five years after Vaneigem’s original French text appeared.
[3] Sein und Zeit — the German original of Heidegger’s most famous work — was first published in 1927, forty years before Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations first appeared in print.
[4] See, especially, my post of February 13, 2023: “Homeless Human Resources of Peoples and Cultures.”
[5] Common translations of Bestand, the German term Heidegger uses.
[6] The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 63.
[7] Ibid., p. 79.
[8] Ibid., P. 64.
[9] John Dominic Crossan and Richard G. Watts, Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jeusus (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), p. 58.
[10] Concerning the distinction between what I call “capacitative” and what I call “coercive” power, see my book The Irrelevance of Power, available in the “Shop” at the top of this blogsite.