Nourished by the sap bubbling from our civilizational roots.

Abstract:
It's like a given for all of us that people of different civilizations are and behave very differently. We all inherited stereotypes about "the other" but once we start to better know people from another civilization it seems that those differences are fast melting away. In "the other" we discover a human as ourselves. But is this the real thing happening or is it only a mirage given by the picture of our perception in our heads? In this post I posit that civilizations imprint a subtle code of behavior within societies that reflects upon individual attitudes. This civilizational code remains largely ignored, for, to decode it you would need to understand the axioms upon which civilizations have been built originally. My plan is to illustrate the working of such a code, in people's daily lives, in China and in Europe (valid also in its geographic extensions). The following expands on my last post Loss of certainty and the purpose of life?".
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1. How daily life compares between Westerners and Chinese.

Food, health and belief are the main fields of the daily life of each of us on this earth. I'll succinctly dwell in each of these fields hoping to illustrate how the axioms of the Chinese and the European civilizations are "determining" the attitudes of the individuals. But ultimately I hope to succeed letting the reader discover how radically different are the views of Chinese and Westerners in all of those fields.


- Food.

We eat because we feel hungry and we are biologically tricked into pleasure when satisfying our hunger. This programming of our physical bodies acts identically anywhere and should I add anywhere for any species. While the pleasure of extinguishing hunger appears as the end motivator for all some attach an aesthetic component to the act of eating. Historically simple local and traditional cuisines for the people developed in parallel with more aesthetically pleasing cuisines reserved for the kings and their aristocracies. The same phenomenon can be observed the world over in association with the social polarization established since early kingdoms and empires.

While over the long time, in Europe, simple popular cuisine developed some local gustatory branches of sophistication the European immigrants in the Americas under duress of survival had to satisfy themselves with extinguishing hunger by filling their stomachs. And the available quantity of food thus developed into the form attribute of pleasure. All this helps us understand why industrial foods found such an easy access to American tables while locally crafted Cheeses, wines, butchery-specialties, breads and fine-pastries keep industrial foods away from French tables...

In the West the top of all aristocratic cuisines is without the shred of a doubt the French which later also developed as the premier Western commercial cuisine. "French cuisine has evolved extensively over the centuries. ...The national cuisine developed primarily in the city of Paris with the chefs to French royalty, but eventually it spread throughout the country and was even exported overseas". 1 In analogy to painting French cuisine is typically an art for art's sake. What I mean by this is that in French cuisine the aesthetic of the palate has taken the driver's seat displacing the original function of extinguishing hunger that eventually was forgotten over time. Food was not rare for the kings and their cohorts of aristocrats and the same aestheticism found in their appreciation of music or painting was thus seen at work at their dining tables.

This art for art's sake that characterizes aristocratic and later commercialized cuisine in the West is so firmly contrasted by Chinese cuisine that our comparison takes the traits of a caricature.

The the axioms of civilization of China are firmly at work in its cuisine as well in the emperor's cuisine as in the people's cuisine. In sum food is considered to impact the health of the body and as a consequence it is considered that food needs to help the body reaching its energetic and mineral balance. Aesthetics are not rejected they serve as gustatory and visual dress-up of a functional role. And in consequence the serving of food at a table has always to satisfy this idea of a functional balancing of the polarities of all unities seen to be active in the body - Yin and Yang, cold and warm, etc... -. Just as an imbalance between yin and yang is considered to produce destructive forces the Chinese also consider it is imperative to keep the 5 elements in balance, for, the deficit or excess of an element can lead to illness.

All this helps us to understand how food is considered the first component of a whole battery of instruments in Chinese Traditional Medicine. Harmony in the culinary sense concerns the balance of what is on the table while in TCM harmony rest in the body of the patient that has primarily to be balanced through the intake of a given food composition.

Summary table given in "The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques, and Ingredients" by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

Element	Yin	Yang	Feelings	Colors	Tastes
Wood	Liver	Gall Bladder	Rage	Green	Sour
Fire	Heart	Small Intestine	Happiness	Red	Bitter
Earth	Spleen	Stomach	Thought	Yellow	Sweet
Metal	Lungs	Large Intestine	Sorrow	White	Spicy
Water	Kidneys	Bladder	Fear	Black	Salty

This caricature about the different perceptions of food in the West and in China gives us to see how the Chinese culinary culture integrates the axioms of its civilization while in the West the best we can see is some application of art for art's sake.


- Health.

In China food and health are intertwined in the application of this idea that the energetic and mineral components of the body have to be kept in balance. Exercise is then conceived of as the ideal complement of food in order to keep healthy. The cure of sickness is done by treating the underlying causes that provoke the sickness. In other words Traditional Chinese Medicine considers that an initial chemical or energetic imbalance in the body is what causes sickness and so they act to re-establish the chemical and energetic balance of the body.

The following instruments of the Chinese medical orchestra are meant to complement food and exercise:
- pharmacopoeia containing thousands of substances of plant, animal, or mineral origin to complement food.
- Qigong and Tai Chi: as practices to balance the flows of energy in the body. Those are the two most practiced suite of exercises to complement the intake of foods in order to balance the body. Qigong is also a fully fledged component of TCM that is used by Chinese doctors to control the flow of QI (energy) and is implemented in association with other forms of care to treat specific illnesses. Qigong is also used to regulate breathing and in a holistic approach to health is used as a technique for deep meditation.
- acupuncture: is the control of energetic flows by the insertion of needles at given connection points.
- massage: is the control of energetic flows by rubbing muscles.

A healthy state is considered, by the Chinese, to be a good balance of the energetic flows and mineral components in the body. As such health is the source of a permanent attention and medicine is then predominantly a question of prevention wherein food plays a central role.

In contrast the health practice in the West is characterized by the waiting for symptoms of sickness to manifest the existence of a health problem. Even in prevention doctors search for symptoms or pre-symptoms. And when a symptom manifests itself the medical practice consists invariably in its suppression through chemical attack, radiation attack or the attack of the knives. In other words Western doctors focus on trying to cut the symptom. For sure Western medicine has evolved and new technologies are now the order of the day but in its most general application the description given here above is till largely valid.

The defining characteristic that best exemplifies how China diverges from the West in term of health lies again in its integration of the axioms of its civilization at the core of its health practice and that gives Chinese health care its holistic character (vision of the whole). Western medicine also takes its cues from the axioms of its civilization: good versus bad, healthy versus sick, etc... After observing sickness the West applies rationality in solving the problem and thus focuses on the body at its microscopic level trying to understand the mechanism at work behind an organ or a component of the body in order to find possible corrections to the mechanism. As such Western medicine is predominantly intervening to correct or to eliminate symptoms of existing illnesses while largely forgetting about prevention.


- Belief

The observation of the rhythms of nature along the long haul concluded in the Chinese psyche with an abstract system regulating their actions based on the reproduction of the rhythms and patterns detected by their ancestors in all unities at work under the sky. That system continues to help them to surf the waves of incessant transformations in the present. The active principle of that system are the polarities that they observed at work in all unities and they designated those by the abstract symbols of Yin and Yang:
- day and night, visible and invisible colors and absence of colors, white and black and so on in the cycle of days that they understood as the result of the rotation of the moon around the earth.
- women and men, female and male, weak and strong, and so on that allow humanity and other living species to reproduce.
- water and fire, cold and warm, and so on
Basically the interactions between the polarities of any unity generate bursts of energy fueling changes and transformations that are as the seconds on the ticking clock of evolution. The code of that system of action is given in the Yi-Ching the oldest book on earth. Archaeological evident suggest that carvings of Ying and yang and their derivations dating 6000 years BC were discovered near Luoyang in Henan.
The Yi-Ching is like a software modeling the changes that construct reality. Its principles have been put in application in all aspects of life:
- The "Yellow Emperor's book of health" dating back to 3000 BC approximately is still considered today as the way of Medicine and cuisine.
- The "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tze dates 600 BC approximately and is the way of behaving through righteousness and morality. It's content is embedded in Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, the culture of the mandarins, Chinese music, Xieyi painting and so on.
- The Confucian Classics cover the way to govern the country applying righteousness and morality.
- The classics about strategy, among the most famous Sun Tze's "Art of war", cover the way to win in a competition.

The stories of the Bible give the axiomatic roots of Western civilization. It all starts with a " first mover" that puts reality in motion (what Aristotle calls the "final cause" in a process of causality that powers change. After giving god as the starter of reality it is only logical that reality was given an ending point being the reunion in eternal happiness of "good men" in the kingdom of god. Such a system of causality with a beginning and an end gives life as the expression of the will of god and humans have then no other choice but to follow the rules. The religions of the word, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are thus canons of rules that humans have to follow if they don't want to end up burning in permanent suffering in hell.
Those canons were selected among many others by the men of power because, for given reasons, they appeared as opportunities in their quest to control their populations. They were thus imposed as the law of their kingdom or empire. To give maximum traction to those canons of laws all vestiges of past belief systems had to be eradicated and thus the disappearance of the body of knowledge that their people had accumulated over the haul of many tens of thousands of years.
And so all practical knowledge related to daily life was lost where the religions of the word (law) triumphed.

The axioms of their civilization give the Chinese a more pragmatic outlook on life than Westerners who see everything through the lens of the values of their system of belief. The axiomatic inscriptions in what happens in their daily lives, food and health for example, gives the Chinese a direct framework of reference for action while the belief system of Westerners seems to distract them from taking action on the realities that shape their daily life.


2. The impact of people's worldviews on their daily life.

The sharing of a worldview:
- supplies the individuals with peace of mind. ( Kauffman, meaning of life
- supplies societies with the psychic glue to bond the individuals which, in the last instance, assures their reproduction. ( rationality versus religion, rationality without soul, worldviews and visual arts, art answering "What is reality", Atomization, sick art )
Those general principles have been in application in any society as far as our eyes can see along the path of our history.

But this is one of the aspects that are the least well known in history. Societies are like living organisms and the worldviews shared by the individuals are an essential parameter of their state of health or sickness.

Let's say we want to understand the huge educational differences between the West and Confucian Asia (China, Korea, Japan). What springs immediately to the eye is that the enormously high financial inputs in the West are failing to generate the level of success reached in Confucian Asia with far less money. And the only way to start to understand the formation of such disparities in term of output is to look at how the differences in the worldviews of each side are impacting on their educational results.
Confucian Asia has a high respect for older age, for authority and education while in atomizing Western nations the individuals consider that the only thing that matters is their own satisfaction and their own beliefs. In such a contrasted environment knowledge takes forcibly a different dimension if you are in the West or in the Confucian world. In the West the road of the men of knowledge was separated from that of the men of power and as a consequence the men of knowledge had to compete on the level playing field of the market for ideas with all kinds of charlatans and the eruption of the web in our houses only de-multiplied the number of such charlatans. The result of this downgrading of knowledge to the level of a commodity has weakened it significantly by taking away from it the eyeballs of the citizens. In contrast knowledge is still a very much respected value in Confucian lands where the knowledge of the men of knowledge is still being "imposed" by the men of power on all of society. You'll eventually think that these are only words but I would like to dispel that idea by focusing on simple attitudes in daily life.
In the West teachers are poorly paid and as soon as they can get a better job in the private sector they leave the education system. This has led to a lowered social status for the teaching profession that was followed by a shrinking respectability for the teachers that irremediably weakened their authority over the kids they try to educate.
Contrast that with Confucian nations where teachers are well paid, receive high social respectability and are attributed a high level of authority on the kids they educate. If you think that these are still no more than words then check the results of different international competitions: PISA, IMO. Most countries placing at the top of the list are Confucian nations. And the few egalitarian Western European small countries placing equally at the top share a high social standing for their teachers that procures them the respect of parents and students alike.

What I mean to show here is how a radical difference, between East and West in term of the sharing of a common worldview by the individuals, is bringing about quite contrasted daily behaviors. In Western countries there is no longer a common worldview being shared by all and as a result societies have atomized into so many beliefs and ways of doing that somehow erased all that was a given in earlier times. In the East the individuals continue to share, most often unconscientiously, the axiomatic roots of their common understanding of reality and this, in the end of the day, is what homogenizes their behaviors in daily life.


3. Modernity and civilizational axioms.

We live with the assumption that once economic modernity has injected the rationality, that is inherent to the ways of doing and behaving proper to the logic of capital, all humans will behave in very similar ways. But is this a fact or is it no more than a rationalist reduction of all things of life to the logic of capital? In other words does modernity erase the historical particularities of daily life by homogenizing us all as actors on the level-playing-field of the market or is there, eventually, a civilizational substract that resists market homogenization?

I wrote here above "In the East the individuals continue to share, most often unconscientiously, the axiomatic roots of their common understanding of reality". This unconscious is, I think, the keyword from where we should start in order to understand what is going on under modernity.

Basically East and West diverged radically at the point of emergence of agriculture and power that followed the decline of plucking and hunting. The changes that were occurring were economic in nature. Women who had plucked fruits and collected seeds for tens of thousands of years had observed how seeds germinate in spring and this lead them gradually to help mother nature by throwing seeds in specific areas of their chosing. This learning process which spread over the long haul eventually resulted in fields that could sustain the population of the tribe and in consequence more children were surviving increasing gradually the population of tribes. All this weakened the absolute necessity to garner meat from hunting and the aggressive skills of men had to find an exit. They found it in wrestling the control of the tribe from the women and having eaten the fruit of power they wanted more of it which led to the desire to control more tribes. So the economic process of change toward agriculture was followed by a political revolution. But this political revolution that had been realized through the exercise of brute force found its limits with territorial expansion. It appeared indeed that, while force allowed to control the people where force was used, it was of no help where force was absent. And the more the territory was growing the weaker force became at sustaining its control. That's how emerged, in the minds of the men of power, the necessity for a control of the minds. It's at that point that East and West diverged.

In the East the men of power cultivated relations with the shaman who received, through oral transmission, the body of knowledge accumulated by their ancestors over tens of thousands of years. That's how the men of power used the shaman, the men of knowledge, as actors in their quest to preserve their power. The knowledge of reality under animism would thus become the glue that would glue the tribesmen into the unity of their tribes and the evolution of knowledge under Eastern civilizations would then be constituted by cultural and scientific add-ons to the body of knowledge arrived at with animism.

The story in the West took another turn. Tribes in the Middle-East rejected the body of knowledge accumulated by their ancestors and developed new, simple, foundational stories to supersede animism. Western civilizations and knowledge then developed through cultural and scientific add-ons to the body of knowledge contained in the initial foundational stories. The mechanism of the passage in the West from animism to simple foundational stories is not very well understood and I know of no historian who specialized in such study. The best I encountered is Arnold Toynbee but the subject of his studies concerns what follows the passage from animism to simple foundational stories. In other words Toynbee narrates the power struggles between tribes and early kingdoms after they had adopted their foundational stories. If you encountered something more specific about the passage from animism to simple foundational stories in the Middle-East your comment on the subject is most welcome.

With this advent of the men of knowledge being used by the men of power to preserve their power the world has witnessed a forking into civilizations rooted into animism versus civilizations rooted in the word of simple foundational stories.

It comes thus as no surprise that the simple foundational stories that sprouted in the Middle-East would eventually be displaced by the rationality that emerged out of the application of the logic of capital. In other words the stories of the religions of the word have gradually been undressed by rationality and appearing naked to the eye they lost their appeal for most of the people. For sure things are different for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Modernity has swallowed Judaism and Christianity but Judaism is well alive while Christianity can't resist the push of rationality in advanced nations. Things are different for Islam. Modernity has only touched the surface of Muslim societies, at the point, where opportunistic men of power and their cohorts convert the result of plundering their citizens into Western commodities. But, all in all, Muslim societies are resisting modernity to the chagrin of Western rationality and capital holders.
Whatever the particular circumstances of the countries that emerged within the realm of civilizations built on the words of simple stories, their people still believing their foundational stories or being converted to rationality, the fact is that the axioms built in their simple stories are guiding the daily actions of all their people. The same dualism is well alive in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Good versus bad remains the story of the day for believer as for rationalists. The good guys have to annihilate the bad guys, the bad sickness has to be extirpated, the good market has to displace any bad non-market exchanges, and so on and so on. While giving the general directions of Western actions dualism and other axioms of the simple foundational stories of the word are very poor in useful knowledge to be applied in people's daily lives. And this is perhaps the most striking and significant difference between the West and the East.

Being derived from the body of knowledge arrived at under animism the evolution of knowledge in Eastern civilizations could only be pragmatic and applied to people's daily lives. Such pragmatic knowledge can't be eradicated from people's ways. The end of history is thus not really in our sight.

Observing the enormous economic changes that have been wrought upon the Chinese population over the last 30 years one senses how deeply its traditional societal organization has been disrupted. But what impresses me most is the complete liquefaction of the foundational story that kept the Chinese in togetherness. What remains of Communism is only a word that has been emptied of its significance and the Chinese traditional philosophies, Taoism and Confucianism, have been broken by force under the vengeance of a ten years span of cultural revolution. One can understand that facing a ruthless Western power engine third world leaders fell they had no choice, their countries had no choice. It was either the demise of their countries, their nations, or the adoption of Western capitalistic ways toward the build-up of national power. But this engulfed their people under a cultural tsunami. Certainties became less certain and people began to doubt and then started to search for the comfort of foundational stories. Some fifteen years ago Falun Gong erupted in Chinese minds but it has been ruthlessly crushed under the hammer of communist power. Today there is a wide revival of religions of all kinds. Christianity is one of those religions gaining many adherents. But belief in China is not acting in the way it does in the West. The knowledge derived from the axioms of their civilization is indeed always firmly at play in the shaping of their daily lives and religious belief in China is thus more than anything else an opportunistic way of handling momentary uncertainties in the comfort found in belonging to a closely knit community. But such belief is bound to vanish as soon as traditional philosophies bloom again. And a revival of Chinese spiritual traditions is well under way. Sensing the direction the wind is blowing China's central authorities are moving to try to glue the Chinese population behind their traditional values. Their goal is to bring their population to accept the present changes being inflicted so ruthlessly on it by an elite that has an elaborate strategic vision of the role the Chinese nation should play in the future. It all starts with the idea of societal conservation. I mean that the Chinese leaders understand the social and political risks of destabilization that their push for China's entry into modernity entails. They think rightly that if the entry of the country into modernity should conclude with the dissolution of the Chinese nation the experiment would not have been worth the exercise. So the recourse to the Chinese spiritual traditions is meant to glue the individuals in a common worldview to assure the preservation and reproduction of the Chinese nation and society. If the Chinese nation is successfully preserved through its long march towards modernity then unmistakably it will soon be playing a leading economic role in the affairs of the world. Nobody contests that point. But what is most often forgotten is that economic might has always been followed by cultural hegemony. So the recourse to the Chinese spiritual traditions is also meant to offer the world a typically Chinese worldview that could successfully compete with the Christian worldview for gaining acceptance around the world.


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Loss of certainty and the purpose of life?"

This post is a follow-up of my commentary in StumbleUpon about Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia by Spengler that was published by AsiaTimes.
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"Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation." writes a proud Spengler.



Christianity has indeed been the ideological instrument used by tribe "unifiers" and builders of kingdoms and empires around the Middle-East and in Europe. But let's take a closer look at the emergence of its dominance. The place of Christianity was consecrated on the worldmap with its promotion as the religion of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine. Proclaimed Emperor in 306 (tetrarchy) the emperor converted to Christianity in 312 and in 313 he issued what later would come to be known as the Edict of Milan that put an end to institutionalized persecution of Christians in the Empire. In the following years "Constantine considered himself responsible to God for the spiritual health of his subjects, and thus he had a duty to maintain orthodoxy. For Constantine, the emperor did not decide doctrine - that was the responsibility of the bishops - rather his role was to enforce doctrine, root out heresy, and uphold ecclesiastical unity. The emperor ensured that God was properly worshiped in his empire; what proper worship consisted of was for the Church to determine". ...In 325 he summoned the First Council of Nicaea, effectively the first Ecumenical Council, which ... formulated the Trinity as it is known today. It also resulted in the formulation of the common Bible of Today.. 1



The promotion of Christianity has been realized at the price of a tabula rasa policy that destroyed the knowledge base that the people under the authority of Rome had accumulated along the previous tens of thousands of years of observation of all fields related to the principle of life. The societal ground had indeed to be cleared of all anterior beliefs and ideas for the Christian foundational story to possibly take root. And thus Christianity replaced the animistic body of knowledge with a simplistic foundational story that the West still largely lives off today. In short:


- History as a straight progressive line with a beginning and an end:

* The beginning of the story of human reality is presented as having been unleashed by a "first mover" called god.

* The end of that story is a promise to the "good people" that they will join god in eternal happiness while the bad ones shall be suffering for eternity. (in the meantime you better behave and practice the teachings of the creed!)


- Reality presented as a cauldron of cooking dualism 2:

* everything is seen as being on the side of, or good, or bad

* this unleashes a perpetual fight between good and bad

* and humanity is thus being extracted out of its organic ground to fight for the good.



This is quite far apart from the idea that "...it is the great migration of peoples that prepares the ground for Christianity, just as it did during the barbarian invasions of Europe during the Middle Ages".
But Spengler is absolutely right in writing that "When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral". This is true for traditional life as well as for modern life. But as an apologist of Christianity Spengler would like us believe that his religion is the absolute answer to any vacuum of "a worldview". This is simply grotesque.


Humans need to share a worldview in order to feel at peace with themselves 3,4. And, furthermore, the sharing of a worldview is what unifies all the individuals within their society. A worldview is a view of the world and of reality and as such it goes without saying that many worldviews can arise according to the local conditions and the history of the local people. And those worldviews can be not only of a religious type but also of a philosophic type.



What is grotesque in Spengler's view is that Christianity would be like spontaneously emerging anywhere people are "landing" into a void of belief. As if Christianity were contained in the structure of human DNA. This is simply absurd and so much more so coming from someone who can't fathom the idea of a spontaneous emergence of life.



Humanity has lived for tens of thousands if not for hundreds of thousands of years under a worldview that we came to call animism. That worldview was based on the long haul observation of nature, of the earth and the sky, and not surprisingly the building blocks of that worldview were similar the whole world over. China's civilization, and the civilization of India for that matter, did not erase the body of knowledge built under animism. Those civilizations simply further refined and developed the knowledge it contained. This also explains why China and India were having such an advanced and refined civilization in comparison with Europe that remained so utterly primitive in all aspects till well after the "great discoveries" had transferred to it the richness accumulated by long lines of generations all over the world.



Modernity has not shown to have been better than what existed earlier 5, 6. It only is more "EFFICIENT" 7 at exploiting man and nature. And the Western successes at exploiting man and nature resulted also in a bigger efficiency in term of their capacity to fight with others. All nations and people of the world have unfortunately suffered at the hands of that Western efficiency and the only way for them to resist has been to adopt the rationality of capital that emerged in Europe with the "great discoveries" in the hope of strengthening their own economies.



But the adoption of the logic of capital and its ideology of rationality while rendering a country more efficient is also very destabilizing socially, culturally, and so much more so when the leap into modernity is realized at such a neck breaking speed as it is happening in China. This is the reason why China is experiencing so much instability presently. How could it be otherwise? There are just no certainties left in such a maelstrom of societal changes and most people are thus yearning for some stability in their lives and in their miThat's the ideal swimming pool for religions and sects of all stripes. But rest reassured this is not a malady restricted to China alone. Something of the same nature is going the world over. 8, 9, 10



The Chinese authorities are well aware of the void and are eager participants in the debate that is taking place on the role to assign to Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism in a modern China. It is to be noted that this debate has now been raging for nearly a decade in intellectual circles and that it appears to have ignited a strong renaissance of traditional Chinese systems of thought. 11, 12, 13



But while Chinese traditional systems of thought are making a reappearance in urban areas Christianity is progressing in the rural areas of the country. Does this not tick a bell in your mind? Some story with red and blue states?



The renaissance of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism is bound to evolve their animistic roots into a postmodern worldview that will reconcile the Chinese with the world around them and with nature. There is ample evidence of something of this sort already being at work in their foreign policy and their environmental and social policies. 14, 15, 16



Christianity has been proselytizing for centuries and, discovering that China and India are bound to dominate the world in all aspects within the next few decades, it tries to position itself in order not to fall at the margins of the "worldwide worldview" that shall be endorsed under the weight of sheer necessity by all the citizens of this earth in the not so distant future. A "worldwide worldview" that is already on the Chinese and Indian drawing boards.



Totally buried under the weight of his Christian views Spengler can see nothing else than an evolution of the world according to the axioms that are deeply buried in his religion. Dualism is at the center of such a view. On one side the good Christians, on the other the bad Muslims and in consequence he sees their fight going on for ages in the future. As for the Chinese and all the other people, well, they will be the future armies of the good Christians against the evil Muslims. What else could they be doing? Having understood the tectonic shift at work in the world economy his dualism had to find a satisfying outcome. And voila the Chinese are enrolled as soldiers of his wars.



What amazes me most is the arrogance that underlies such thinking and how easily it makes him forget about the fact that the Chinese civilization has a history of over 5000 years. Any sensical being would think that to keep alive so long it must certainly have something that works in term of its view of reality; is it not? Some very powerfull axioms about reality have indeed withstood the long haul in China. For one's own sake would it not be worth to take a peak at those?



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Rationality versus religion, a non-sense debate.

To make any sense about religion and rationality, it seems to me that, we have first to situate them in a societal evolutionary perspective and I'm afraid that the question has to be viewed from within the more globally encompassing framework of what is humanity and how it does operate. What I mean to say is that the reproduction and then the evolution of humanity (as an ensemble) necessitates a balancing mechanism in order to keep in check its polarities: societies and individuals.

Individuals tend to push the envelope of individualism which leads to change while societies tend to preserve, at any cost, the existing against such change.

With the start of civilization physical force appeared insufficient to keep in check populations scattered over always enlarging territories. When the men of power awakened to this reality they understood that the only way out for guaranteeing the reproduction of their power over their subjects was to find some psychic glue, in the form of the sharing by all of a common worldview, and impose it on their subjects.

In the Middle-East the men of power recoursed to religion as the shared worldview. But the religions of the word got their biggest boost from the Roman Emperor Constantine's decision to impose Christianity as the official religion of the empire. This is what made Christianity to become the shared worldview of all in Europe and of all in Europe's outposts around the world.
Force here is to observe that in other geographic areas the men of power did not recourse to religion but used the existing animist philosophies of life: Hinduism, Taoism, ... to unite their subjects.

What is slowly starting to sink in our consciousness is that:
1. individuals can't survive without belonging to societies
2. societies can't survive without the sharing by the individuals of a common worldview.

Animism, religions, philosophies and rationality are "worldviews".

In Western late-modernity religion can only be considered as a reliquary of history while science and rationality are the "worldview" of the men of knowledge of modernity. What I mean to say here is that to each particular period of history in each particular area of the world corresponds a given reality and a given "worldview" and it just makes no sense to try to re-apply today the worldview of past conditions.

On the doorstep of post-modernity we vaguely sense that the worldview of modernity, rationality, will necessarily be overtaken by a more globally encompassing knowledge system... The philosophy of rationality was derived out of the application of the logic of capital along several centuries. It laid the groundwork for the blooming of science that radically swept away past conceptions about reality but, in the end of the day, we are forced to observe that science left us in a societal quandary.

Tt appears clearer every passing day that the belief in science as the ultimate discoverer of reality was no more than adolescent certitude. The overwhelming immensity of our universe starts only to sink in our consciousness but it already let's us perceive the impossibility for science to ever come to the end of its quest for understanding. This means that we are bound, in essence, to remain in the dark about the nature of the whole in which we are such tiny particles... But this does in no way diminish the fundamental jump in the quality of our observations and deductions that science helped us to reach along these last centuries. This only brings us back to our senses from our adolescent dreams.

At this point two factors impose themselves to our attention:

1. Science is not a complete system of understanding, in other words, it can't offer us all the answers and, it is by now proven scientifically that, it never will. From this we know that science could never bring us a satisfactory story about reality for all to share.

2. For reasons that are still not well understood science, as the worldview of modernity, has been left to fight for credibility on the societal "level playing field" with all kinds of charlatans. The men of power under modernity did not further impose any worldview on their subjects. In other words the separation of power and knowledge under modernity left both isolated in their specialization and each went it alone along their own way.
Even if we make abstraction of this separation of power and knowledge, we have to recognize that the body of knowledge accumulated by science is nothing but a very complex system that can only be approached through many, many, years of studies without ever a chance of an end in sight. Such a system does not exactly qualify to be reduced into a simple story that could be given to all for sharing.

For reasons that I wrote about, in my book Artsense and in articles in Crucial Talk, I believe that our future shall witness a radical departure from the present and that post-modern societies will be given to share a new worldview answering the conditions of those particular times.

Under the aegis of "necessity" the knowledge level playing field, where the complex system embodied by science is left to compete for attention with all kinds of simple "foundational" stories, has a high probability to be superseded in a foreseeable future by a re-convergence of power and knowledge. My writing and my painting are entirely focused on the new knowledge that, I think, is bound to spread in the future. The power aspect is not a concern of mine but I nevertheless think that power shall eventually be involved, at a certain stage, in the spreading of that knowledge...

Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power

Soulless science and rationalism

Alan Finder had an interesting piece this morning in the NYT: "Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus": Peter J. Gomes has been at Harvard University for 37 years, and says he remembers when religious people on campus felt under siege. To be seen as religious often meant being dismissed as not very bright, he said.
No longer. At Harvard these days, said Professor Gomes, the university preacher, 'There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years'. "


What's going on?

Science and rationalism have never offered a simple and all encompassing worldview answering the many foundational questions that each of us hears popping in his mind at one or another moment in his life. Where does the universe come from? How do I fit in the wholeness of the universe? What is life? Is there life after death? And so on.

It is not as if it were impossible to find credible answers to those questions from a rationalist or scientific standpoint but fact is that only those who accumulated a vast body of scientific knowings can possibly find such credible answers out of rationalism. That means that the vast majority of students and should I say the vast majority of citizens do not have the means to find such answers through rationalism.

But living without shared certainty in your head about those foundational questions can be distressful, for, you will never find peace of mind and you will also never fully sense the warmth and security offered by a participation in a group or society.

Individuals, at the image of atoms, are components of the grouping they belong to. Atoms of iron unrelated to other atoms of iron are nothing. It's the iron indeed that confers them an existence. The same goes for human individuals. We can't possibly exist by or on ourselves. It's the grouping we belong to that confers the viability of our individual existence. And the belonging to a grouping is, first and foremost, a question of psychic bonding with the other members. This is realized through the sharing of a common worldview that acts as a gluing of the individuals into the group.

The sharing of such a worldview is also what ultimately assures the reproduction of the group and its development.

It is as if life, or humanity for that matter, were only springing into existence when their polarities are interacting: on one side the group, the society and on the other the individuals. The contradictions between those poles appear as generating the energy that drives their unity to change, to evolve, down the line of time.
Take out the sharing of a common worldview (belief system) by the individuals or give them latitude to believe in whatever they want and the contradictions between them and the group they belong to fade away thus reducing or eliminating the production of energy that is necessary to power the evolution of the unity they belong to. That's when the grouping starts to disintegrate. The same mechanism would equally be at work if society were covering the whole space of life. This would indeed suffocate the individuals to their death.

The Wolfram Demonstrations Project gives an excellent visualization of the "Yin Yang" that perfectly illustrates my comments: "variations of the classic Chinese symbol that animate the motto of Niels Bohr: Contraria non contradictoria sed complementa sunt. (Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.)"

In fact Yin-Yang are no opposites as suggested on Wolfram.com they are indeed acting more like the polarities of any unity.

Let's say for the sake of convenience that white represents society and black represents the individuals. What we see, from Wolfram's visualization, is that when black covers the full space of the unity represented by the circle then there remains no white which would mean the total disappearance of society...

For the Chinese the Tao of life is to avoid all excesses and harmony is to be found in the middle-ground where the 2 polarities find their maximum breathing space. The dynamic visualized by Wolfram's demonstration shows the range of movements that changing conditions possibly can follow within any given unity along the span of time. In some periods the white of society can be dominant but if society were to represent the whole of humanity then there would be absence of black meaning no individuals any longer... and by definition that would also represent the death of society. In other periods the black of individuals can be dominant but if it were to represent the whole of humanity then there would be absence of white meaning no society any longer... and by definition that would represent the death of the individuals. What this shows us is that all white or all black are an existential impossibility.

The ill-feeling experienced by many individuals in late modernity could thus be understood as a natural mechanism, biological perhaps?, of rejection of the atomization of their societies that on Wolfram's visualization corresponds to an ever increasing blackening of the circle...

Late modernity concludes with such a societal atomization and the fact is that societies really appear starting to disintegrate. On one side the individuals follow their own belief system that is formed as their life goes by but on the other side they also feel more and more ill at-ease and experience a growing yearning for sharing a common worldview with others. This is what Alan Finder's article is all about and, by the way, it is also what many Chinese are experiencing nowadays after the chaos unleashed on them by the excessively rapid entry of their country into modernity...

Understanding the societal need for a strong worldview to be shared by the individuals is one thing. But we better be aware that past worldviews, if they possibly could satisfy the individuals, never will they satisfy their societies. Today's conditions on the ground, in terms of established knowings, are different from the time when those past worldviews emerged. And so societies that would be driven by hegemonic past-worldviews are bound to lose out to those that succeed to devise worldviews out of present realities. Their citizens will indeed find it difficult to admit, adjust, and surf on the waves of their time while the citizens of societies that will succeed to adopt a worldview adapted to the present times will assuredly be better equipped to let the waves of our present reality carry them forward.

This religious story of science.

Since long I sense that the more knowings (parcels of knowledge) I accumulate the more evident it becomes how little I really know about the whole of reality. What I mean to show is that a large accumulation of knowings does not necessarily preclude knowledge. Here follows an awakening call from particle physicists and cosmologists that seems to say just that.
"Twenty years ago most physicists would have said, on the basis of 450 years of science, that they believed that there's only one allowed law of nature that works, that ultimately we might discover fundamental symmetries and mathematical principles that cause the nature to be the way it is, because it's always worked that way. So that is the way science has worked. But now because of this energy of empty space -- which is so inexplicable that if it really is an energy of empty space, the value of that number is so ridiculous that it's driven people to think that maybe, maybe it's an accident of our environment, that physics is an environmental science -- that certain fundamental constants in nature may just be accidents, and there may be many different universes, in which the laws of physics are different, and the reasons those constants have the values they have might be -- in our universe -- might be because we're there to observe them. " (Lawrence Krauss in THE
ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO in Edge Magazine 7.6.06)

We have been dream-talking in "Western Late Modernity" about a science that would explain everything and make us at the image of the gods in religious foundational stories. But such a faith in science is no more than a naive religious-type belief in a very poor story. I have this feeling that what humanity is most urgently in need of presently is not to be found in the stars nor in sub-atomic particles but in its own substance, the balancing act between its polarities, individual and society. If societies collapse science shall murmur bye bye to the individuals... and this poor religious-like story of science shall then simply vanish with the individuals who created it in the first place.

Science is radically revolutionizing our understanding of reality and this causes an enormous stress on the individuals who feel at a loss faced with the disintegration of their traditional belief systems while not being able to understand the new scientific paradigm. Furthermore the equalization of life styles between the North and the South that has been initiated by globalization is fast destabilizing every society on earth. In the presently growing chaos wrought upon us, by the interactions between the productions of science and of globalization, what is most urgently needed is a worldview uniting the individuals around the idea of bringing about a livable, and possibly a better, future for their children. Such a worldview will not reject science. On the contrary it will integrate science into a more globally encompassing system of thought that shall be derived from the holistic vision projected by the diverse philosophies and religions of the people of the earth.

Change, and more particularly societal change, comes out of necessity. Whatever idealist intellectuals may think about societal change; will-power on its own has never shaped societal change. Leninism may have given the illusion for a short time to the contrary. But barely seventy years after having imposed their will-power on the Russian society necessity found its way around state force. What I want to say is that, while there is a credible argument to be made that late modern societies are in a dire need of some sort of glue (worldview) to bind their individual atoms in order to avoid collapsing into atomization, imposing a worldview that was shaped under past conditions has just no chance to work. Religions and philosophies that were shaped over past centuries, if not millenia, do not answer present necessities and recoursing to them to stabilize present societies would only end up in the collapse of those societies a little later at the image of what happened not long ago to Leninist controlled societies.

Necessity is out there banging on our doors. The present-day necessity is for answers to the deluge of problems that is flooding out of the side-effects of modernity: climate change, poisoning of water, air and foods, decreasing rates of Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH), deforestation, mass extinction of species and so on. The more time passes and the more those side-effects of modernity appear indeed to threaten the very foundation of life on earth.

Modernity was founded on the recognition and respect, over the centuries, of the logic of capital. In short, money invested in a venture becomes capital and people soon understood that they needed to follow the logic inherent to capital, for, not recognizing this logic was immediately sanctioned by a decrease of capital's monetary value that could possibly lead to the total extinction of that monetary value. Merchants and bankers were first to recognize and respect the logic of capital and found themselves antagonized by the clergy and the aristocracy who followed the edicts of the scriptures. The contradictions of the logic of capital and the edicts of the scriptures paved the way for the ideological contest between rationality and belief. Respecting the logic of capital was thought a rational behavior while belief in religious stories was gradually thought of as irrational. We all know the outcome. But force is to observe that in as short as a few centuries the logic of capital and rationality brought us on the brink of life extinction...

In our present-day peculiar societal reality the role of art is to give visual signs of the coming postmodern worldview for all to share.
Easy said is it not? But where to start?

Knowledge is the answer and this starts with the accumulation of knowings about science and philosophy and then the understanding of our present-day times and how we personally fit in the time. Only the works of those artists who make the effort to go through such a process of learning have a chance to remain of interest in the eyes of those who will be living a century from now. "Whatever", sharks or drippings, shall have vanished from their memory.