The Demons of Work

Now-a-days I am preparing a paper sort of a ‘report’ (a dubious name to such a title which I will reveal just then after just now) on ‘Cultural Globalization’. I always tend to take long routes, taking more pain and not allowing my self the luxury of direct access to facts; this show how dim my perspectives are on things so real. But I can’t help myself avoid doing that. So I have started reading The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of Times to analyze the patterns of globalization in our world culture, rather to critique on the new spirits of time and et cetera, et cetera. This tendency of taking a long route by delving too deep in one concept only, thinking that if the nature of that single concept may be found the knowledge of others will show up like rays of sunlight do on a sunny day, has only contributed to low grades and low grades. In words of our liberal economics professor: 'God knows why'. What else should I do when I find, for instance, so-called scholarly books on subject globalization so biased that tinges of scholarly language seem to be only suicidal for ‘some inexplicit reasons’. They propound everything in favor of their theses ‘in the manner of jurists’ that one starts to believe in the relativity of truth. They start with premises and take them as absolute, so that all that follows must only under any circumstances conform to their personal likings and biases. But they do sound, somewhat, scholarly - 'depressingly so'.

I chose this book I already mentioned to write on the subject of modernism, hoping, as usual, to find an application on the culture the latter gave birth to, so as to reveal its actual roots, no matter how non-cultural the language of the paper or my ‘thesis’ (another dubious title), may sound. Knowledge is for its own sake. Unity is not uniformity; it is far more profound than the latter. And, this is the difference I can make here. What follows now is an introduction to this book, which I picked up to clear my mind of the illusions of the modern times:

“The Reign of Quantity is an attack on the scientism of modern World. In these beautiful and profound pages Rene Guenon looks back to an ancient Wisdom, once common to both East and West but now almost entirely lost. Contemporary civilization itself – with its industrial societies and illusory notions of progress – is his target. In particular, he shows that today’s sciences are dominated by a quantitative approach, that they neglect that idea of quality. To this “reign of quantity” he opposes the sacred metaphysics of the ancients, which he sees as rooted in Divine Truth. His book is ultimately a warning against the real danger that humanity faces today – a warning all the more urgent because that danger is unperceived by those from whom guidance is sought and expected.”

This is how Shaikh ‘Abdul Wahid Yahya, the author, describes the purpose of his book:

“Among the features characteristic of the modern mentality the tendency to bring everything down to an exclusively quantitative point of view will be taken from now on as the central theme of this treatise. This tendency is most marked in the scientific conceptions of recent centuries but it is almost as conspicuous in other domains, notably in that of social organization; so much so that with one reservation the nature and necessity of which will appear hereafter, our period could almost be defined as being essentially and primarily the “reign of quantity”. This characteristic is chosen in preference to any other not solely nor even principally because it is one of the most evident and least contestable but above all because of its truly fundamental nature for reduction to the quantitative is strictly in conformity with the conditions of the cyclic phase at which humanity has now arrived.”

Moreover, my instructor once told me that to know capitalism is to know globalization. Understand the former; you’ll get what the latter is, he meant to say. I hope this conforms to my personal likings.