On Anthropocenism, part 1 of X
What is anthropocenism? Unlike anthropocentrism, which is the ideological formation that humanity is central to everything in the universe, anthropocenism is a function of evolutionary psychology which has emerged to reflect the current status and condition of humans in a post-industrialist, capitalistic, highly globalized world. It is the reflexive psychological condition of an individual human or collective human society in a world which has emphasized anthropocentrism for a precipitously long time.
Structured Reactionism
When reactionaries tell of a time in the past upon which all of their sociopolitical dreams had been realized and all their earthly desires fulfilled, they are conjuring up a largely false version of history — not simply a faulty version, but an outright false one, pieced together from the fragments of contemporaneous modernity which reflect not the values of the past, but the lacking values of the present.
These values may, on occasion, reflect the individual desires of the individual reactionary — as with incels, who dream of an era when the rules of relationships were held more greatly in their favor. Or these values may reflect the desires of a group politic and an intentionally structured (most often fascist) reactionist movement, as with the belief that a return to some modified version of Bismarckian nationalism would rectify Weimar Germany’s existent socioeconomic woes and restore some concept of greatness to the German nation.
There is typically a sole fragment of modernity, or a series of fragments scattered apart from each other, which appear to reflect a ray of contemporaneousness in a particular way so as to make it seem that a piece of the past is itself reflected. To adhere to the above analogies, for the modern incel, this fragment reflects the evolution of relationships and sexuality away from a binary and towards a spectrum. Such a sociocultural evolution can, in many ways, be tracked across various societies throughout history — but as the human life is short, and the human memory even shorter, most modern incels eschew the set of values held by, for example, ancient Greece, instead supplanting a more recent “pre-evolutionary” stage, representing a point linear to the current stage of sociocultural evolution, and one to which they seek to return. (Of course, not all ideological inceldom is precipitated on reactionism.)
In the Weimar analogy, as with all issues involving body politic, there were many more fragments of modernity which appeared to reflect actual elements of the past. The Third Reich promised a return to the second Reich in many forms, beyond a Germany ravaged by war and isolated from the fledgling international order over the course of proceedings in Versailles circa 1919. When pieced together deliberately by a self-interested political party, these fragments of history appeared to form a shape which, in fact, never truly existed to begin with.
What may look at first glance to be a fragmented return to a lost history in fact reflects, when taken as a whole, an advance towards an entirely new system of society and process of governance. This is the prime danger of reactionaries, as they nearly always tend to trend towards fascism: mass followers of a particular reactionary movement will tend, in general, to genuinely desire the return of some element apparently lost to them. Yet self-interested parties at the decision-making levels of a given reactionary movement have the capacity to “game” the ideological outputs of their movement, and in turn, direct the emotions and desires of their followers into the establishment of an entirely unique social and political economic structure. Imperial Germany was endemically anti-Semitic, but Jews were not hauled off in cattle cars to die in a gas chamber built by the state. This historical anti-Semitism was simply a reactionary fragment taken to its nonlinear conclusion.
In this sense, all of reactionary politics is uniquely structured, in a manner inherent to the intended structural outcomes of the reactionary movement itself, rather than a manner inherent to the broader facets of society and political economy in which the reactionary movement is taking place. This means reactionaries have no true rightful claim to history: whichever aspect of the past they’re attempting to reconcile with the present is split with its historical evolution at the point in which an ideologically motivated party attempts to willfully re-piece fragments of modernity into a new framework of society. Jewish genocide in Nazi Germany can thus be viewed as reflective of a historically ingrained German anti-Semitism, but not as its direct evolution. Inceldom is reflective of a particular longstanding cultural myth, but the concepts of applied persecution do not directly evolve from the concepts of chivalry.
In this sense, as well, we can imagine reactionary politics as being distangent from the elements of the past supposedly being reflected upon. A matter of social evolution being emphasized within a particular reactionary movement does not inherently invalidate its pre-evolutionary form as perhaps better than its contemporaneous form. (This concept is often not useful, particularly with most quality-of-life technological advancements.) In other cases — in particular, arguments could be made for the overarching system of capitalism and for the historical frameworks of mass industrialization — there exist certain logical arguments that pre-evolutionary conditions themselves are preferable to contemporaneous ones. As with the theme of this series, there also exist certain arguments that pre-evolutionary conditions themselves are both necessary and unavoidable in the long term.
However, these conditions must be taken in their full structural context, and must be addressed as such: when split from the evolutionary history of a given society, any fragment of modernity which had once genuinely reflected a point of pre-evolution in a given society thus ceases to reflect the historically rooted woes of the body politic and instead emerges as a facet of “post-modernity” in the structures and systems imposed by the reactionary movement. Some post-modernist ideological movements, like anarcho-primitivism, are sufficiently disconnected from the broader evolutionary context of society and political economy, and thus have never come to pass. In other cases, however, this “post-modernity” continues up until the point in which the reactionary movement has sufficiently encompassed most functions of the state — at which point these facets of post-modernity once again become facets of modernity itself.
