Re: enlightenment versus... what?

I also agree that "Hold the Tiller Firm" doesn't refer to holding onto
rationality, but onto world-systems, an entirely different issue.  This is a
debate about the significant boundaries of historical causality (and/or if
such boundaries can be delineated).  It is about world-systems vs. "world
system"?  This is another hoary historical debate that is really just
getting underway.   Even Braudel in _Perspectives of the World_ suggests
that his "world-economies" are less than clear cut empirical entities and
more conceptual networks.  Which is true thus true of world-empires because
they overlap with world-economies.  On the other hand...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wsn-owner@csf.colorado.edu [mailto:wsn-owner@csf.colorado.edu]On
> Behalf Of wwagar@binghamton.edu
> Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2001 11:18 AM
> To: Richard N Hutchinson
> Cc: Threehegemons@aol.com; FRISCH_DENNIS@smc.edu; gkohler@accglobal.net;
> wsn@csf.colorado.edu
> Subject: Re: enlightenment versus... what?
>
>
>
>       The best evidence for regression is the world of the past quarter
> century, which has seen an upsurge of nationalism, ethnicism, racism,
> and fundamentalism on a planetary scale, in the wake of widespread
> disillusionment with socialism and (in the once-called Third World) with
> Western neo-colonialism.  The Enlightenment of the Right has lost whatever
> moral advantage it may once have enjoyed by selling out more completely
> than ever to megacorporate greed and militarist adventurism, and the
> Enlightenment of the Left has lost some of its credibility by appearing to
> bear responsibility for the failures of socialist experiments in Russia
> and elsewhere.  What rushes in to fill the vacuum?  Look and weep.
>
>       So, yes, now is not the time to abandon ship, just because the
> seas are choppier and the winds fiercer.  As someone once said, hold the
> tiller firm!
>
>       Warren