The Grand Narrative

 
Marx, has been so picked to the bone, one wonders whether he should not be sent into a well earned and long deserved retirement.

People might confuse good intentions with real action. Some really do, others are a little freer about what they mean by 'intention' as they start to sympathise with the view that we are all born with the same rights. It is more likely that this is a wish born of a belief in Man's essential goodness but as long as it is intention that dictates action, we will never even agree on why we rely on moral dogma to define justice. Without some clarity on the idea of communality, how might one interpret such a document as 'The Communist Manifesto'? And as long as differences between human beings do exist and the law says we are free, how can we ever agree on where to set the amount of a uniform income? This conundrum and therefore all the other related problems return directly as a critique of capitalism as long as communism thinks it too must sit on some sort of financial 'system'.

It is the discussion point of our time; the grand narrative, the attainment of social equalities: the eradication of racial prejudice, sexual relativity and women's rights are still not quite comparable to class struggle. Despite all the good intentions people have, there remains the huge question of economic disparity which renders one group of people with a great deal more resources (therefore power) than another. There appears to be something organic and structural in all this in the beehive of human societies. Role playing includes whether one serves or is served. The middle class which has welled up into a gigantic political conglomerate both serves and is served. It feeds on itself. Quite unthinkingly middle class people make those who serve them with goods and services into millionaires who in their turn ungraciously condemn every middle class person to a sentence of hard lifelong labour. Human society could well be symbolised by the serpent devouring its own tail.

There is an unhelpful assumption here that people hate work, which might be common, but people do it willingly and in many cases, work is actually pleasurable. Just ask architects and literary critics. The latter gets paid to write about writing, enjoys himself all day reading about imaginary places and people who don't really exist. However, the majority of people are given much more humdrum tasks that machines could do better. I mean it is now possible to pay bills that way. One boring job eliminated. Good! Or so it seems but what if you needed the money? Is that not why you sat there at the post office counter for 40 years? The grand narrative reduces to a very short story indeed in the post industrial society.

There are voices out there howling about climate change and the resultant catastrophe to come. The blame, directly or indirectly, is aimed at consumer capitalism. The climate change skeptic is a new profession. Some counter that the whole thing is a leftist plot to undermine the 'free' market. In real terms, the institutions that have the middle class over a barrell are the banks with everyone living in mortgaged homes. It is legal. The banks want the debts honoured. After all you agreed to the terms when you needed the money but questions remain. Is it just? Who set the prices of the houses in the first place? How much do we end up repaying more than what the houses are really worth? In the necessary social redressing, will it be religion or art that makes the bankers forgo what they have given? If the middle class has its collar strangled, it is nothing compared to all those governmental budget deficits heading straight for global bankruptcy. It is, to say the least, a most volatile existential condition. With all this uncertainty and seeming dangers, Fukuyama's insistence that history is finished does not quite ring true. The grand narrative, the human destiny, the power and the glory, its greatest moment, surely cannot yet have arrived.

 
ROMA, 6 11 2016