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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On ART in the future.

This article is a follow-up of:
- What is modernism after all?
- Scientific visualization. Is it art?
- About the ways of seeing reality.
- Soulless science and rationalism
- Etymology to the rescue of sense in art.



In the air of our times something is brewing that we still can't see nor comprehend very well but that is bound to change drastically the way we understand what is reality. Four factors, it seems to me, are the ingredients of that brew:



1. The mis-understanding in Late modernity that "art is whatever".

If we agree with Marcel Duchamp that "In fact until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious, it had all been at the service of the mind but this characteristic was lost little by little during the last century" then we have to answer the question "how did art come to forget about its function?". Answering that question imposes us to resolve the problem of the mysterious disjunction between power and knowledge that happened sometime during modernity:

- when the worldviews of the men of knowledge stopped to be imposed on everyone by the men of power. That is when visual artists were freed of their ancestral obligation to illustrate subjects that had always been imposed on them. In this freeing the artists got to illustrate whatever they wanted...
- when freed from an imposed worldview everyone started to consider that their own views were reflecting the "truth" about "reality" better than the ones of the others.

This was indeed the fertile ground out of which societal confusion would grow and develop unhindered into the aberration of late modernity that is characterized by a complete societal imbalance, extreme individualism tilting toward the atomization of our late modern societies. Such an imbalance is deadly. We are indeed acting as if we were atoms of a "material entity" that were going it their own way. But this is pure delusion for the atoms are nothing on their own. The nature of their being is no more than to be a particle of the "material entity" they are a part of. That is what gives sense to their own existence. Going it their own way the atoms would only succeed to destroy the "material entity" they are a part of which would be synonymous with their collective suicide.

The history of visual arts after the second world war follows that path toward atomization and it is in this particular context that the art market imposed its rules of value. Those are rules of financial value that imposed themselves over an atomized visual art landscape wherein the idea that "whatever is art" finally led to that other idea that "art is dead" for the only reason of the loss of any societal functionality. In Danto's words "Art today is produced in an art world unstructured by any master narrative at all, though of course there remains in artistic consciousness the knowledge of the narratives that no longer apply". From the recognition of the disappearance of any societal functionality at all Danto then concludes: "I myself argue here and in a number of places, that the end of art has come, meaning that the narrative generated by the concept has come to its internally projected end". (note 1)

At that point "whatever is art" became the norm in the game of visual art creation... but it seems to me that the theoretical foundations bringing about "whatever is art" are ultimately very thin and fragile.

Through the whole timespan of human history visual arts have always been a function of society.
I mean that our visual sense is the most powerful sensor that we humans have at our disposal and societies needing some gluing of the individuals that compose them, through the sharing of a common worldview, in order to possibly achieve their reproduction, well because those reasons, the men of knowledge who produced or held the keys of the common worldview of a given society used images to convey the content of their worldview for easy sharing by all the other members of their society. This process has been going on since the beginning of the history of mankind till sometime around 1900 in the Western world and I posit that the necessity of this process has not vanished, that on the contrary, it has never been more urgently needed than in late modern societies.

The question that arises then is "what is the worldview" that should be illustrated by visual artists today? Furthermore where are the men of knowledge of our times? In short the answer is that, if there are still some real men of knowledge, societal atomization has put them on a level playing field with all kinds of charlatans and their worldview is being overshadowed by the noise and furry of the cacophony resulting from the public debate.

In this particular societal context visual artists are like being blinded. I posit that the only and exclusive answer to this blinding is knowledge about the workings of our societies and the road to the future they are on presently.



2. Scientific imaging is confronting us with an exponential rise in realist images of things our eyes can't see directly.

The complexification of the content of available knowings often gives to an image a higher communicational trust or skill than a thousand words. Scientific literature thus logically embraced the trend with no restraint. Such images accessed through the lens of a telescope give us views on the macro realm, accessed through different kind of lenses they also give us views from the micro realm or simply of abstract thinking or of complex processes. All this has been rendered possible by our use of electronic microscopes and telescopes or databases and mind mapping software or new digital captioning technologies that appeared along the last two decades.

Technology liberated us from the limitation of our visual sensors (after all they were only tools given to us for assuring our individual survival) and multiplied the scope and breadth of our observation field. We are no longer bound exclusively by what our eyes see and their transmission of signals to the brain for it to process orders for the defense of the body. The brain is now, directly or indirectly, creating images for the eyes to see allowing them to discover dimensions of reality that were inaccessible to them before.

With the detachment of only a very short period of time since such images became accessible to the public we nevertheless already had the chance to become aware of the fact that such images are ushering us into a whole new visual dimension that somehow reflects the futility of traditional first degree images, realist photos or paintings of landscapes, portraits and stills.

The newly gained profound depth of comprehension about reality, that we gain from such images, instills in our minds the idea of a very strong positivity emanating from such postmodern realism. Unmistakably this is bound soon to shame all those who theorize, practice and finance the "whatever is art?". We'll then witness, within a relatively short timespan, the fall of "whatever is art" into the dustbin of history in the form of a "liquefaction" of modern art assets that had been thought of so highly by the bureaucrats of the art market.

But far more important than this loss will be the fact that the postmodern realism that I here describe shall be instrumental in devising for us a whole new paradigm about "what is reality".

Here follow some examples of such postmodern realist images.


Composite Crab. Credit: NASA - X-ray: CXC, J.Hester (ASU) et al.; - Optical:ESA, J.Hester and A.Loll (ASU); - Infrared: JPL-Caltech, R.Gehrz (U. Minn


Pinwheel galaxy. Nasa / ESA Hubble Space Telescope image.


Botanical Visualization of Huge Hierarchies. Author(s): Ernst Kleiberg, Huub van de Wetering, Jarke J. van Wijk. Institution: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science - Eindhoven University of Technology


Copyright © 2000 - 2006 AguaSonic Acoustics. All Rights Reserved.


Copyright © 2000 - 2006 AguaSonic Acoustics. All Rights Reserved.


Cystine a amino acids (very small biomolecules with an average molecular weight of about 135 daltons. © 1995-2006 by Michael W. Davidson and The Florida State University All Rights Reserved.


Taurine a amino acids (very small biomolecules with an average molecular weight of about 135 daltons. © 1995-2006 by Michael W. Davidson and The Florida State University. All Rights Reserved


The least we can say after viewing such scientific visualizations is that the images they stumble upon are very seductive from an artistic point of view. And what amazes me the most is that those images are often far superior, in artistic terms, than much of the art produced by contemporary artists. Just for the sake of the experience compare the painting here under by Willem De Koning that sold recently for $63.5 million to the images here above. Everyone, not just the art specialist, shall be able to form valid conclusions. I hate the idea of appearing here to downplay a fellow artist, this is not my intention, but I guess that Willem De Koning would have been the first to poke fun at those who throw such amounts of money after that particular work of his and he would also have been one of the first to recognize the importance of scientific visualizations for the visual arts.



Willem De Kooning Revocable Trust/Artists Rights Society, New York. David Geffen sold Willem De Kooning's "Police Gazette" for $63.5 million to Mr. Cohen, the founder and manager of SAC Capital Advisors in Stamford, Conn.



3. The objectification of beauty.

Beauty is most often presented, by the art market bureaucracy, as being contained in the eye of the beholder meaning that it is thus purely a subjective matter.

A few days ago the National Geographic published an article by John Roach titled "Your DNA Is a Song" that should awaken us to the real possibility that beauty, musical or visual, is simply the memorization somewhere inside our DNA of the musical sounds and visual patterns that the principle of life successfully retained along the whole time span of evolution. This comes, kind of, substantiating what I'm writing about in my book Artsense.

Following this idea that visualizations shed more light, and faster, in the brain of the observer than a thousand words biologists started to convert DNA and its components, amino acids and proteins, into musical compositions (see notes 2, 3, 4)

"By listening to the songs, scientists and students alike can hear the structure of a protein. And when the songs of the same protein from different species are played together, their similarities and differences are apparent to the ear. " 'It's an illustration transferred into a medium people will find more accessible than just [text] sequences. If you look at protein sequences, if you just read those as they are written down, recorded in a database, it's hard to get a sense for the pattern.' " (see note 5)

Here are a few exemples of such sound conversions:
- the amino acid scale by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University
- Drosophila Protein by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University
- Heat Shock Protein by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University
- Collagen PBD by John Dunn

One of the most prolific in the field, and an artist on his own, Nobuo Munakata shows that musical sounds can in turn be converted into visualizations and thus help the brain to form an easier interpretation of something that initially seemed quite abstract in words and letters.
Three Faces of Genome Guardian: P53 Tumor-Suppressor Protein (3D, 17.1MB) by Nobuo Munakata.

Those conversions from biological code to sound and then to image are as valid a representation as the language of mathematics or physics or chemistry or biology. They indicate the background noise of phenomena, and also their own conversations. As such those musical and visual conversions are an integral part of our tool-set for describing reality and they suggest that our universal background is interwoven by an infinity of particles and ensembles that are interacting upon themselves like a giant interactive multimedia orchestra that is projecting the sounds and lines and forms and colors in the memory of all its actors.

In substance, I posit that, if we are all attracted by musical beauty it is because it reproduces the harmonics and rhythms of successful evolution and the same goes for visual beauty. By that I mean that visual signs are equally under the determinant influence of all forms and lines and colors that have been successfully retained along the whole evolutionary timespan of the principle of life. All of us humans are thus somehow un-conscientiously under the influence of some kind of automatic pilot inducing us to appreciate the successful evolutionary forms, colors, lines, harmonics, rhythms... and this pilot is our DNA and its genetic code that stores the memory of the entire evolution of life on earth.

We are also, let's not forget that point, induced to abhor all unsuccessful forms, colors, lines, harmonics and rhythms. Such unsuccessful sounds are quite easily recognizable, for, our ears do not seem to tolerate them, as if it were a question of hearing-physicality, while in the visual realm acceptable signs seem more dependent on our cultural build-up that spans tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years back which should explain why our eyes are able to look at whatever. It is indeed our value system that makes us eventually reject an image or a visual sign and not our physicality.

What I write here is not something so radically new. It is only the transcription of an eternal artistic truth into a present day form that grows out of our contemporary knowledge-base. Kandinsky is assuredly one of the thinker-artists who best described this idea of objective beauty. "Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. ... There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. When there is a similarity of inner tendency in the whole moral and spiritual atmosphere, a similarity of ideals, at first closely pursued but later lost to sight, a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age. An example of this today is our sympathy, our spiritual relationship, with the primitives. Like ourselves, these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form." (see note 6)

Kandinsky's idea of internal truths is founded upon a firm conviction that something objective is hidden deep inside all of us. But he very well knew that in his age those internal truths remained hidden and that "this all-important spark of inner life today is at present only a spark."

Whatever the advances of science one hundred years after Kandinsky wrote "The art of spiritual harmony" we still, today, have not grasped the profundity of his intuition.

Notwithstanding our general ignorance it is nowadays a well accepted fact that life is governed by forms, colors, lines, rhythms and harmonics that are not directly accessible to human sensors. We know they are there but that is about all we know.



4. Globalization and the great melting-pot.

"Whatever is art" shall not vanish from our sight like erased by a single swoop of my words nor shall scientific imaging be integrated into the consciousness of all by any more swoop of my words nor shall the objectification of beauty materialize in knowledge made of stone.
Those three seem to be, no more than a sign of the times under late modernity in the Western world which including Japan and some other isolated countries (the North) represent barely 15% of the world population and this figure is bound to decline further in the foreseeable future.

The brew of those three ingredients, in the North, is a process that will be taking a long time before completion. It would be day-dreaming to believe that we'll be given to taste it soon and there is one more complication. Even if we succeeded societally, here or there to near completion of this postmodern brew, force is to recognize that its taste should not be mature, for, if modernity could mature and even reach its late stages within the confines of one, two or three regions, in contrast, postmodernity is a global affair that comes after the completion of the expansion of modernity to the 4 corners of the world. Post-modernity will definitely include much of the thinking and philosophical background of the Chinese, and the same I'm sure can be said of, the philosophical background of the Indians, the Africans, the Arabs, the South-Americans.

What I mean to say ultimately is that the Western intelligentsia's approach towards postmodernity is definitely totally out of touch with the reality of 85% of the world population and in the present times of capitalistic globalization it makes no doubt at all that such a Western-centric vision is doomed. See the visualization of the evolution of the distribution of economic power around the world given in this stunning eight images slide-show of Der Spiegel Online: "Postponed Power: The Rise of China and India"



World in 2005. Copyright Der Spiegel Online


World in 2050. Copyright Der Spiegel Online.

I'm not a divinator, I can't see into the future. But I believe that, out of the process of change that is taking place nowadays within the timescale of the "long history", we can determine the factors that will be most determinant in the shaping of the future of humanity. Some of those factors are already visible for those who care to accumulate the necessary knowledge and who furthermore care enough to look attentively at what's going on around us today and I firmly believe that the 4 factors that I introduced here above constitute the core of what lies ahead in the making of our future visual reality.

As a visual artist I feel that it is my duty to understand the following questions:

- What is art?
Answer: art is the illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day at the attention of their contemporaries. So who are the men of knowledge of our days? I dare to venture that we are like in a "hole" in late modernity not knowing clearly any longer who are the men of knowledge of the day. For sure we all know that the scientists are accumulating vast pools of "knowings" but we also have this confused feel that somehow they do not succeed to transform those "knowings" into workable knowledge that could transform into a worldview to be shared by all.

- What is the knowledge of our days?
"Men of knowledge" are no longer readily available in the North, as was the case since the start of humanity's history till somewhere around 1900. So the only valid answer at the disposal of visual artists is to accumulate by themselves the necessary "knowings" in order to weave a valid knowledge-base that they could then transform into visual signs or signals of the worldview of the future that is starting to form in our days.

Marcel Duchamp said no less when referring to painters as "being dumb as a painter"... The drama of our age in the visual art world is that schools and art academies only teach kids the use of a tool: a pencil, a brush, a computer program or else out of any understanding of what the use of such tools should be set to accomplish. But the problem runs deeper than the education system. It is indeed the whole bureaucracy of the art market that does not get it. The art market pretends it is content driven but very few critics, dealers and even less buyers are intellectually capable of understanding let alone putting a valid interpretation of the working of reality into their words to communicate them to the public and the public art institutions.

Artistic qualities are not being determined by the art market.

Only time shall determine what remains artistically valid half a century, a century or more, from now. But again time is only a convenient way to put things, for, it is the knowledge shared by the people of the future that will in fact determine if a work realized today has its place in front of their eyes. If we are really conscientious of that very fact then I believe there remains only one choice for all those who are active today in the art world and that is to accumulate the necessary knowings to grasp the wave of humanity's "globalizing worldview"... and then to surf on that wave as best as one can.



Notes:

1. Arthur Danto. "After the end of art". Princeton paperbacks. 1997.

2. Amino acids.
Amino acids have the following general chemical structure (C = carbon, H = hydrogen, O = oxygen, N = nitrogen). All amino acids have the same general structure, but each has a different R-group -- the chemical group represented by the designation "R".
The carbon atom to which the R group is connected is called the alpha carbon. See table of amino acid R-groups

3. Proteins.
Amino acids are connected to make proteins through a chemical reaction in which a molecule of water is removed, leaving two amino acids residues (i.e. what's left when the water is removed) connected by a peptide bond. Connecting multiple amino acids in this way produces a polypeptide. Proteins are polypeptides composed of 20 different amino acids.
The linear order of amino acids in a polypeptide is called its primary structure. The primary structure is represented in the protein databases by a string of single letters, like a long word or sentence. The order of letters is the order in which the amino acids were strung together when the polypeptide was synthesized.

4. DNA.
DNA is a two-stranded molecule. Each strand is a polynucleotide composed of A (adenosine), T (thymidine), C (cytidine), and G (guanosine). Each strand has polarity and runs antiparallel in such a way that one strand runs 5' -> 3' while the other one runs 3' -> 5'.
One strand of DNA holds the information that codes various genes; this strand is often called the template strand or antisense strand (containing anticodons). The other, and complementary, strand is called the coding strand or sense strand (containing codons).
The Genetic Code is known as "universal", because it is used by all known organisms. So the genetic code is the code of the principle of life. The universality of the genetic code encompasses all animals (including humans), plants, fungi, archaea, bacteria, and viruses.

5. "A Protein Primer": a Musical Introduction to Protein Structure.
An accessible presentation by M. A. Clark. Texas Wesleyan University

6. Vassily Kandinsky. "Concerning the spiritual in art".
Dover publications.1977. (First published in London in 1914 under the title "The art of spiritual harmony")
____________________

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

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.

About the ways of seeing reality.

I first published this article on my Saatchi blog and on The way things are on 2006-07-05. What follows is a doctored version of that article.

I just had an interesting read in The Guardian, an article by Jonathan Jones titled "Ways of seeing" (lost the link). It concerns the passage from a religious imagery to the modern imagery and how science and art inter-played in this process of change. This article gives us also food for thought about the state of our present-day imagery.

In modernity there was first a recognition of the "truthiness" of the image projected on the retina which after transfer to the brain induces conclusions in the mind. This "way of seeing" was limited to seeing this first degree image that was projected on the retina and absolutely nothing else. Such first degree images have been the only accepted images from the Renaissance till near the end of the 19th century.

During the period of religious hegemony the dominant idea had been that god was the ultimate creator of everything and reality was thus conceived of as being shaped through god's will. Humans had thus to show their respect for god in all their undertakings and avoid any personal enquiry about reality.

Modernity revisits this postulate. An initial accumulation of richness and luxuries undertaken through plunder and violence since the crusades imposes the logic of capital on its holders. This complex economic-like process spreads over a few centuries and will gradually impose its own cultural set of values in the form of the idea of private property and the idea of the primacy of the individual over the collective.

Individualism unleashes the rejection of the religious edicts in favor of the logic of capital that is thought to be more reasonable than blind belief. This process of rationalization also establishes the primacy of vision, of what the eyes are given to see, over belief. Vision takes thus precedence and in such a mindset "in Renaissance Italy, there was no separation between art and science. Artists were at the forefront of scientific research - Leonardo da Vinci championed experiment a century before Galileo, and even anticipated, without a telescope, his observation that light reflected off the Earth illuminates the moon" (from Jonathan Jones' article).

So came about the reign of the image projected on the retina which after transfer to the brain induces conclusions in the mind and so thus has been opened the road toward philosophic rationalism that would appear a few centuries later.

Under the hegemony of individualism and private property the next centuries will champion visual signs representing portraits of the family members of the new rich, landscapes surrounding their mansions as well as stills of what lay on their tables. All signs that were like a glorification of their newly found values.

Some 6-7 centuries after private property and individualism popped into Western Europe's consciousness, around 1900 to be precise, the thinker-artists of modernity rejected such first degree images (Kandinsky, Miro, Masson, Breton,...). But force is to a-knowledge that they did not succeed in forcing their way into a new visual paradigm... they have indeed been stuck in tricks, in formalism and without any doubt they did not reach the new content they were searching for.

Only recently is a new visual paradigm emerging, not at the hands of artists but, out of scientific endeavor. First there were those images from the macrocosm (telescope) and from the microcosm (microscope) or from scanning what is there (body, materials,...) then came images as illustrations of abstract reasoning or of patterns detected from long series at the hands of computers (Internet network visualizations, cellular automata's, etc).

This kind of visualization comes to the eye not as a first degree image of what is there that projects on the retina but as an illustration of something that is not directly accessible to the eyes, something that appears as a dimension of the mind.

Visualization is now acting as the illustration of processes initiated by the mind.

Those images are being used to gain a better grasp on the existing level of scientific abstract reasoning and also to help scientists project their abstract reasoning a step further. This is most visible in the neurosciences where scientists are observing how the brain reacts to this or that stimulus through scan "imaging". The image of the scan gives them the location where an action takes place in the brain and from there they can zoom into the molecular structure in order to understand the biochemical processes at work at the micro-level.

The lessons from what is going on in the scientific world have vast implications for visual artists. Unfortunately the art academies are still rooted in past realities and are thus not preparing the brains of future artists for this new age. As Marcel Duchamp famously said this leads to "being dumb as a painter". What Duchamp meant was that artists need more than just the knowledge of brushes and pigments. They first and foremost need a deep knowledge in science for being able to put their feet on reel visual steps towards a representation of the worldview of our times.

But scientific knowledge is not enough. Science is one of the drivers towards post-modernity, that's a fact, but it is not the only one. A cultural mutation is also been generated out of economic globalization that will have an impact as important on the fashioning of our understanding of reality as science itself.

Modernity has been conceived inside the mold of the Christian worldview.

Globalization unleashes the economic renaissance of China, India, South America and Africa that in turn will unleash a new kind of cultural mold on the world. The "ways of seeing" of 85% of the world population are inevitably bound to have a dramatic impact on the future understanding of reality by those privileged 15% of the world population that have been living in advanced industrialized societies. This seems an absolute evidence but it is nevertheless so badly understood.

I believe that, in the same fashion as the real artists of the Italian Renaissance were also the scientists of their time, today the real artists have to absorb the content of science and of the Asian worldviews in order to keep themselves afloat in the maelstrom leading to the real future. Those who succeed to do just that could well appear, in the future, not just as artists but as the men of knowledge of postmodernity.

"Whatever" has no place here any longer.

Now is the time of the brain. The brain giving to see to the eyes. At the image of the "primitive accumulation" of financial capital the present revolutionary process starts with the "primitive accumulation" of knowings in science and worldviews.

Necessity shall act as a catalyst on the emergence of that process.
The side-effects of modernity are indeed so severe already that we can say without a shred of a doubt that the survival of life on earth, in the not so distant future, will depend on our capacity at realizing a fast and dramatic "primitive accumulation", of knowings in science and in the worldviews of the different cultures of the South, out of which a postmodern worldview would then emerge that rejects the diktats of the logic of capital and its mechanist rationalism.

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.

Wordviews

Worldviews are transmitted from one generation to another over the long haul.

A worldview, as its name implies, is a view of the world a shared understanding of reality. When we speak about reality what we mean is nothing more than our perception, our understanding, our consciousness about our environment from infinitesimal to infinity and our place inside that environment.

Reality is inaccessible to us we are indeed only tiny specks of dust within its vastness so the best we can hope for is to gain a perception, an interpretation, a conscienceness that would be as near as possible from the real thing. Our understanding fluctuates along the lines of our knowledge base and force is to admit that knowledge evolves... prompting fluctuations in our interpretation, our consciousness, about what reality is all about. This in turn further up the societal level is gradually shaping our worldviews.

Knowledge is the fact of thinkers, and other adventurers on the slopes of reality, they constitute only a tiny minority within their societies while worldviews are the result of a shared knowledge by all members of a society.

In the contradictions that unfold between the minority that creates new knowledge and society at large that tries to protect itself from change lies the energetic substance that will bring societal change. This is what I call "the road of humanity". It is a process that can take centuries if not millenia to mature and it fluctuates and changes along the lines of the polarities of the ensemble "humanity". What do I mean? We are trying to understand how worldviews evolve and change. I posit that worldviews change as a result of the dynamics inside the ensemble "humanity" and what powers those dynamics are the polarities that are shaping the ensemble itself: societies versus individuals.

Individual innovating visions are not readily accepted they need to undergo a process of sociatal acceptance. Societies, in whatever form, try to protect what is established against change. Change is indeed considered as destabilizing and eventually dangerous that's why societies made the sharing by all of the worldview of the moment as the ultimate glue that would keep the societal building from falling apart.

Historic evolution is like a quantum wave made of energetic (societal) and magnetic (individuals) swirls that are pulling societies forward. In the following graph I borrow the substance of the "Wave theory" by Dr. Chaim H. Tejman to illustrate the mechanics of societal change.



























Historical facts do by no means confirm the primary role of one or another of those factors in the formation of societal change: arts, culture, knowledge and the economy. On the contrary history does indicate that at times one of those factors can be preponderantly influential while being totally absent of the equation at other times.

There is simply no beginning and no end in this swirling cycle of change there is only a beginning and an end for each specific moment in time corresponding to a snapshot of change. It should be noted here that historians, economists and other specialists have all too often fallen into a one-sided absolutist vision of change and universities are thus filled with chair-holders behaving more as faithfull clergymen spreading their gospel and arguing between themselves than as true scientists.

For what we know history witnessed 3 epochal worldviews: animism, religion and modernity.

A fourth is starting to shape nowadays that should bring us a radically transformed view of the world in the future. I argue in my book ARTSENSE that the interaction between science and technology on the one hand and on the other globalization that will spread the cultures worldviews and civilizational axioms of the future economically dominant countries through the windows of each and everyone; this interaction is starting to shape for all of us a radically new worldview that for the first time in history promizes to be a globally shared worldview over all the earth.

From what is going on today in the world we see that our model "the road of humanity" is kind of riding on 3 wheels only as if the tire of the wheel carrying arts was flat. In late modernity the wave of humanity has been interrupted, stucked as it is within the economic polarities of societies (knowledge versus economy) that are themselves nothing more than one of the polarities of the road of humanity (societies verus individuals). Societies are no ends in themselves they are only instruments in the hands of humanity on its evolutionary road.

The economy nowadays imposes on all individuals the illusion of their freedom through the offer of merchandises to be consumed. Knowledge is then generated quasi-exclusively to produce always more alienating merchandises. But in this process, force is to recognize that, knowledge has been reduced to "pre-knowledge" or one could also say that it has been reduced to scientific or rational "knowings" that are of interest to the economy for sure but offer very little substance to societies and individuals in their dance along the road of humanity.

Is this sounding paradoxical to you? I guess yes so let me try to shed some light on this phenomenon from another angle. The economy is being driven by the "logic of capital" and the logic of capital has muted ideologically into rationalism that has become the hegemonic model of thought imposed on all of us from kindergarten to university. Shocking isn't it? How could it be that we have been thaught to reason but ever been forbidden to question reason? Reason is no more than the transfer to the process of thinking of the rules that were imposed by the "logic of capital" on those who were holding capital; in contravention with the edicts of the church I have to add. So we start to understand that capital holders had a very strong incentive to finance the expansion of the "logic of capital" into an ideology for all to follow. The acceptence of the ideology of rationalism would indeed increase the "playing field" of the logic of capital making it possible to generate always more surplusses (benefits) . Globalization has to be understood in the same light, for, when national bases offered no more or only little potential to expand the "playing field" the continuing increase of surpluses could only come from outside the national boundaries where those surplusses had been generated hitherto.

The use of the ideology of rationalism was not limited to the expansion of the "playing field" of the "logic of capital" (demand) it also became instrumental in the development of always more merchandises (offer). The application of knowledge, derived from the use of rationalism, into solving technical problems of production allowed indeed for the "massification" of the market and later for the incessant offer of different merchandises. Knowledge to solve technical problems is technoscience which is a major misappropriation of knowledge that hitherto had always been conceived as the way we understand reality or to say this otherwise the way we understand our environment from infinitesimal to infinite and our place into that environment. How did we come to replace knowledge with technoscience? The interest of capital holders and researchers is to perfect and diffuse innovations that can occupy market shares and this explains the mutation of knowledge into technoscience. Technoscience is applied science which is built upon existing general knowledge but it fast appeared that our general knowledge base had also to be expanded to allow further developments in technoscience that's how financing was then diverted to "fundamental science" meant to expand our general knowledge base.

Being derived out of the reductionist ideology of rationalism fundamental science is just not capable of generating real knowledge that gives meaning to people's lives and then this blind following of rationalism that sings about better tomorrows extinguishes breathless... Scientific knowledge, applied or fundamental, is thus not real knowledge at best can we speak of "knowings"; a multitude of knowings or of little pieces that await to be inter-woven with a more globally encompassing philosophic vision into a new paradigm of reality.

The complete corruption of "the road of humanity" that started with "the logic of capital" destroyed art and knowledge that are absent now in the dance between individuals and societies and humanity fell sick, very sick as well as mother earth that sustains us all.

Hope is on the way, for, the speed and the sheer size of our accumulation of "knowings" are giving us to see signs of hope. Humanity seems indeed to dispose of the technical solutions or is very near of finding those technical solutions that could eliminate all the scourges that afflict us todat: poverty, environmental degradation, diminishing fossil fuels and other raw materials, etc.
But humanity just can't put its act together it seems, for, having the technical solutions to its problems is not enough it should implement the application of those technical solutions and initiate the process of change out of its problems and into a liveable post-modern world. Here is undoubtedly the weak link in this process of change, for, bringing all the people on earth to share a same understanding of the urgency of humanity's problems is still a far-away possibility it seems.

I nevertheless see encouraging signs. First on a macro-level force is to recognize that with globalization the worldview of the whiteman that has shaped the modern world until now will soon come under the assault of the worldviews of some of the countries that are emerging as the soon to be economic powers of the world. I'm speaking about China and India principally. The axiomatic foundations of their civilizations being so far apart from the Western axiomatic foundations changes in humanity's behaviors are necessarily on the horizon. I shall write more extensively about that point in my next post titled "civilizations". The second encouraging sign is the frenetic search for answers to fill the void of sense or of meaning about life that is so prevalently felt nowadays by most citizens in Western or better in advanced industrialized countries. Knowledge encompassing the present realities has still not matured and shall in all evidence not stabilize as a result only of internal elements of those countries, for, the energizing of the world now comes from other skies.

According to the traditional vue of the function of art in societies the artist role is to give visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge at the attention of his fellow citizens. The knowledge of our days having still not yet maturated the artists are left without a message to illustrate and not surprisingly most of them landed into confusion-land believing that "whatever" is now a good enough subject for their craft. But they are flat wrong the only thing they attain is total insignificance making Marcel Duchamp's words "being dumb as a painter" look premonitory. Considering that the only possible thing that truly can be considered as art are the visual works realized today that will make sense in the eyes of the people 50 or 100 years from now we can but conclude that "whatever" is not art for it will not reflect the worldview of those people no more than the works reflecting past worldviews as religious works, landscapes or portraits . The unmistaken conclusion we arrive at is thus that the only escape for artists today is to build up their knowledge base in terms of scientific knowings and in terms of other civilizations' foundational axioms, for, out of the interaction between those two will emerge the post-modern worldview of tomorrow.


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