Beyond Bigotry: European Political Types

    I've said elsewhere that I am the worst kind of bigot:  I am bigoted against people who are bigoted against bigoted people.  Call me a bigot in the third degree.  As much as I may disagree with the sentiments held by honest bigots, I am nonetheless deeply offended by the sanctimonious attitudes held by hypocritical bigots.  This, of course, makes me all the worse, as being bigoted against hypocritical bigots is still to be bigoted against bigots (even if they are bigots of the second order), but that is a cross I shall have to bear.  Holmes, in his Integral Europe, is unrepentantly a second-degree bigot, and this being the case, his obligatory aren't-these-people-delusional commentary throughout this text is deeply offensive, at least to me.

    That said, Holmes's does at least seek to engage the honest bigots he holds in such disdain.  He deserves credit for this.  Unfortunately, he does so through a cloud of jargoned theory that does more to mystify, in his opening chapters, than to clarify his project.  Two terms, in particular, go unsatisfactorily explained throughout the text, despite frequent invocation.  The first, subsidiarity, from Catholic social teaching, is repeatedly waved about in an oblique manner, yet never explicitly defined.  The closest we get to a definition is that "Subsidiarity requires..." on p. 52, this after a claim, on p. 30, that "The effort to define subsidiarity discloses not merely a single concept but a range of concepts...".  No such range is ever demarcated.  The very next sentence tells us that "Subsidiarity denotes a means of...", following upon which we are told something about what it does, but again, not what it is.  ("Hammering denotes a means of fixing materials to a surface.")  Despite a footnote claiming the contrary, Holmes never marks an actual definition of subsidiarity, preferring instead to tell us repeatedly of its centrality to Catholic social theory.  For a theme so central to the author's argument, it does not bode well that one must appeal to Wikipedia to get a clue what he's going on about.

    His use of the term fast-capitalism is likewise shrouded in obscurity, or perhaps vapidity.  Here, however, even an extensive Google search did little to clarify what the term means, as the resources using it all seem to assume its definition (much like Holmes does).  As near as I can make out, fast-capitalism (since when was "fast" a prefix?) refers either to:  a) the edging out of capital production by financial speculation in instrumental markets (as evidenced by share of GDP); or b) the convergence of capitalism, per se, with globalization, that hobgoblin of liberal thought we last encountered with Tsing.  In the former case, calling it "capitalism", fast, slow, orange, or strange, serves only as epithet.  In the latter, the "fast" prefix (again, how does "fast-" work?  is this like "post-"?) is so much hyperbole in the tired vein of "omg, the world is faster! smaller!! flatter!!! the singularity approaches!!!!")  Given that Holmes attributes the migration of southeast Asians to London's Isle of Dogs to the forces of "fast" capitalism, I will hazard to guess that it is in this latter sense that he uses the term.  

    What is most unfortunate about the above, is that hidden in this jargonbabble and racist baiting is what might be a useful account of political topology.  French social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal "fast" capitalism, and right-wing integralism, as developed by Holmes, seem recognizably congruent with the four political quadrants that recur in a number of models of ideocosmological space articulated in the American context.  This would bode well for a cross-cultural study of political typology, and in this sense Holmes has provided a rich analysis that would inform the development of such deeper investigation.