Lyotard naturalized capitalism’s victory as pre-human cosmic natural selection

Evidence

The triumph of capitalism over rival systems, he now argued, was the outcome of a process of natural selection that pre-dated human life itself. In the incommensurable vastness of the cosmos, where all bodies are subject to entropy, an aboriginal chance — a ‘contingent constellation of energy forms’ — gave rise in one tiny planet to rudimentary living systems. Because external energy was limited, these had to compete with each other, in a perpetually fortuitous path of evolution. Eventually, after millions of years, a human species emerged capable of words and tools; then ‘various improbable forms of human aggregation arose, and they were selected according to their ability to discover, capture and save sources of energy’. After further millennia, punctuated by the neolithic and industrial revolutions, ‘systems called liberal democracies’ proved themselves best at this task, trouncing communist or islamist competitors, and moderating ecological dangers. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 78

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The sheer audacity — Lyotard, the philosopher of the sublime and the death of metanarratives, ends up writing the most grandiose metanarrative of all: cosmic natural selection for capitalism. This is the irony that defines his late thought.
• FICTION: Anderson’s framing of this as a ‘fable’ Lyotard knowingly constructed — ‘development is not an invention of human beings, human beings are an invention of development’ — is a genuinely strange, almost science-fictional cosmological claim worth re-encountering.
• XREF: connects to: Lyotard grounded capitalism’s force in neguentropy, not human desire — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 79; Culture clash arguments naturalize capitalism and gender as markers of civilizational progress — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 212; Lyotard’s ethic of schizophrenic desire is survival within capitalism, not revolution — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 69 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Culture clash arguments naturalize capitalism and gender as markers of civilizational progress #expands (0.78) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 212