Re: Going extinct on the pain of missing the reality

Ah, very precisely so! This goes much beyond (and, should we say, deeper?)
than the common pol sci and geopolitical analysis of hegemonic decline.
Something has happened with the very social texture. Forgive my lack of
appropriately theoretical language for writing on such issues and, please,
suggest if such a language exists.

Point 1. The most simple. Some 200 years ago it became organizationally and
technically possible to defeat the non-European armies at a cost so low
that colonialism actually began paying for itself almost anywhere.This
imbalance of power has changed after 1945 when the Marxist-Leninist
organizational tool of party and the Soviet- or Chinese-supplied AK-47s
robbed the West of its colonial advantage (recall the illustrous graduate
of our department, Eduardo Mondlane, founder of Frente da Libertacao de
Mocambique) Cruise missiles and stealth bombers are a rather desperate
attempt to maintain some superiority due to the increasingly
capital-intensive weaponry. Looks unpromising.

Point 2. Big puzzle. Somehow enthusiasm is gone from the world, especially
its core. The conquistador or imperial enthusiasm, the revolutionary
ideological enthusiasm, the rock-music enthusiasm. The last epoch of great
icons and great hopes was the early 1960s. Have you seen in the recent
couple decades anything comparable to the stature, the charisma, the mass
frenzy of: JFK-Che Guevara-De Gaulle; the Political Causes; Yuri
Gagarin-Einstein-Neil Armstrong; The Beatles, Blue Jeans, Ford-Mustang; add
the names of sports stars (I would know soccer - Pele and Lev Yashin -- and
chess -- Tigran Petrossyan, Bobby Fisher ) I would leave the list BIG NAMES
in theory and sociology.
Today Ortega-y-Gasset, Arendt, Marcuse and Adorno are so obscure because, I
dare suggest, the great intellectual fear of Mass Society,
One-Dimensionality, Totalitarian control (by either the Government, the
Party, Big Business, or an abstract Big Brother) is gone somehow.
The process is uneven. In Iraq supposedly there is still a cult of Fearless
Leader. There is Lukashenka in Belorus, beloved by the rural elderly. But
even in such places this looks archaic (but it didn't in the recent times
of Nasser). Indicatively, there is no such leader anywhere in the Balkans
or in the Caucasus despite the occasionally severe intensity of conflicts.
Miloshevich doesn't  try to emulate Tito's cult.
These are just observations, so far. It remains to answer what accounts for
my observation, if it is correct, and that would enable us to say how
enduring might be this (pardon me) post-modern condition.

Point 3. Closely related. There were all sorts of legitimating devices used
in history but so far we haven't seen a world where a significant and,
perhaps, growing portion of the population considered all the elites
self-serving crooks (even likable ones -- Clinton at the height of recent
scandal) or where the populace realized that "state and war (and business)
making are organized crime", and that the world leaves no decent place for
them -- despite their modern-era expectations.

Yours,
Georgii

Georgi M. Derluguian
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
(847) 491-2741 (rabota)