Where to now?

The postmodern experiment or project has served its purpose. It really is the death rattle of modernity and so leads no where else. It is the unwelcome messenger who delivered the news but who no refuses to leave the funeral. And it is long past the time when we closed up the earth over modernity and dispatched with the miscreant messenger.

But that leaves us in the difficult position of not having a new humanistic project. Ever since the Renaissance western civilization has moved successfully from one age to the next. The Enlightenment gave way to the Industrial Revolution which produced Modernity and its antithesis the various Romantic revolutions that tried in van to resist the age of the machine.

We have survived most of our terrible errors but at horrific cost and the bill has not yet been fully tabulated. The industries that brought us to our current state of excess remain dominant, resisting our hopes of restoration of the fragile ecosystem. They insist they must plunder it further so that we avoid some dreadful economic collapse. Pity that we may not survive to enjoy the fruits of our labour. But then it does seem to be more than a little poisoned.

Where are our great thinkers today? Will we ever produce another Kant or Hegel? Can we ever expect that another Socrates or Plato, a Mary Wollstonecraft or even a Sappho will grace our lives? We are at an impasse where all we have are the reactionary wars between Socialists and Marxists. Feminists still struggle to liberate women as they seek to bring the long overdue equilibrium and equality to our world. But theirs is a necessarily a narrow vision that does not seem to me at least to move past the problems of the day, the injuries of the past.

This is not an age where much credence is given to thinkers. This is the age of glamour and fame where the shallow pathetic life of the latest Hollywood star or the drug abuses of the current top athletes absorb the masses.

Yet there has seldom been a time when we were more in need of a visionary mind that could articulate this madness, to speak to this society that cannot seem to resist the excessive consumption that must in the end destroy it.

Perhaps this is the end of philosophy, the final failure of humanity to exceed its own limitations to surpass its own humble beginnings. Perhaps not...