Fast-bigotry and Obligatory Obscurity: Revisiting Holmes

[The below is a more concise statement on the text originally reviewed in this blog on March 9.]

    While honest bigotry has numerous consequences, proximal and distal, at least the honest bigot is not sanctimonious.  Not so for the hypocritical bigot, whose disdain for honest bigots serves as shibboleth for inclusion in the superior class.  Holmes, in his Integral Europe, is unrepentantly of this latter type, formulaically delivering at once obligatory and offensive aren't-these-people-delusional commentary throughout.  That said, Holmes does at least seek to engage the honest bigots.  

    Unfortunately, Holmes does so through jargon held forth as words of significance, without signification.  Two terms, in particular, go unsatisfactorily explained throughout the text, despite frequent invocation.  The first, subsidiarity, is at best approached obliquely.  The closest we get to a definition is that "Subsidiarity requires..." on p. 52.  Indeed, had this sentence begun "The principle of subsidiarity is...", we'd have had an adequate definition, but instead we are offered a requirement of an undefined.  This, after a disingenuous 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, and the only effort required would have been to actually say "this term means", rather than such hand waiving.  The very next sentence tells us that "Subsidiarity denotes a means for...", 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." would be a comparably unelucidating move.  

    Holmes likewise foists upon us the hyphenated fast-capitalism as a shroud of obscurity, or perhaps vapidity.  Our author notes that his source for the term (Agger) "steadfastly refuses to define" it, by which Holmes apparently gains license to likewise use the word without definition.  A (very sparse) Google search result suggests two usages:  a) the edging out of capital production by financial speculation in instrumental markets; 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 so much hyperbole.  Given that Holmes attributes immigration 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, but an explanation, both of what the term means, and why it and not merely "capitalism" or some other vernacular would have been insufficient to express his conceptual intent, is, it would seem, intentionally withheld.  

    Yet hidden in this prejudice and obfuscation 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 political quadrants that recur in other models of ideological space for nominal political types in other sites.  Despite glaring flaws in his work, Holmes has provided a frame for development of deeper cross-cultural comparison of political cosmologies.