Farewell to Bourgeois Kings

Ce stil, domn'e, ce stil...

• de văzut şi o chestie complementară, "pescuită" de mine mai demult - aici
  

(doar câteva pasaje:)

Though it didn’t start out that way, the war in Afghanistan morphed over time into a sort of modern Verdun for the liberal world order, a Verdun in a very ideological sense. For the french in the first world war, the name Verdun was made into the symbol of the french national spirit and willingness to win. It was the battle that defined the spirit of the entire war. Afghanistan, almost a century later, came to take on a similar ideological life of its own, now as the focal point of an entire worldview and historical epoch.

It was in Afghanistan more than anywhere else, that the rubber hit the road for the post-Soviet, hegemonically liberal, ”end of history” era of human flourishing that Francis Fukuyama so famously (and somewhat ambivalently) christened just as the Soviet Union was rattling its final death throes. It was in Afghanistan that not just a new rules-based international order was to be formulated, but also the new liberal ”world spirit”, in the Hegelian sense of the term. Where Hegel saw the spirit of the new age in the figure of Napoleon riding through Jena, the spirit of the liberal age increasingly came to be consciously and rhetorically centered, at least in part, in the figure of the afghan woman finally getting a chance to play football, celebrate pride month, and studying critical gender theory. This is not a polemical point, by the way. Many might laugh, especially today, at the notion of the university of Kabul graduating its first class of gender studies experts, but this was a small part of a much greater historical and ideological puzzle, a mere step in the great march called the progress of mankind. Gender studies might be laughable even to some of its advocates, but the historical teleology that underpinned the effort in Afghanistan was no laughing matter to anyone.

Their spectacular failure on every conceivable level now brings us to the true heart of the matter. Western society today is openly ruled by a managerial class. Where kings once claimed a divine right to rule, and the bolsheviks of old claimed a right to rule as messiahs of a future kingdom on this earth (bearing a conspicuously strong resemblance to a very old tradition of messianic christianity with the serial numbers filed off, by the way) the technocrats of today base their claims to lordship not necessarily on the idea of the democratic will of the people, but on the historical inevitability of technocracy as such. Just as there once was a properly ”socialist” way to understand great literature, there is today a properly technical, scientific, or ”critical” (in the academic sense of the term) way of understanding war, nation building, cinema, primitive marriage rituals, or whatever else. Our managerial leaders deserve to rule us, because managerialism as a world ethos is the only means of effecting functional rule in the context of a modern, international, post-national, information driven, knowledge economy, rules-based… well, you probably already know all the familiar buzzwords beloved by this class of people. Kings ruled in the epoch of monarchies, because only kings could rule, or at least so they all claimed. Technocrats rule our post-Soviet era for very much the same reason; they are, according to the legitimating narrative of our age, the only ones that can rule. Much like you can’t put a monkey in charge of a battleship, you can’t possibly hope to rule a modern country without being part of the educated managerial class.