Towards the age of Meta Reason

Few books have the knack of timing their release right and this is one of them.

- V KUMARASWAMY

Although not event-based, the timing seems particularly apt for The Last Dance of Rationality, given the extreme flux in global affairs.

The book is about the rise and ebb of the main pillars of the age of rationality, covering roughly 70 years since World War II. The book, which is best read backwards chapter-wise, traces the major developments on the technological, geopolitical, environmental, financial, individual and international relations and showcases how several of the trends, processes and assumptions and "illusions" (as the author describes them) may have run their course. These developments will be disentangled, yielding to a new world of Meta Reason. The book, however, lays down only a broad sketch of the successor regime.

Section 1 deals with case studies on each sphere. Banks that have broken rules of responsible lending and consumption have decoupled from income due to cheap savings flowing from China. Although the US has yielded to China in many ways, the latter is yet to find success in dealing with several contradictions implicit in its ambitious path. Its trade tensions with the US, the frictions between big businessmen and the Communist Party, its failed attempts to use Huawei for overseas surveillance and failure to pump prime growth through construction, as demonstrated by the fall of Evergrande, prompts the ruling dispensation to search for solutions in the previously much maligned Confucianism.