2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions
The present post covers:
- chapter 2.3. Culture
- chapter 2.4. Collision of our cultural context with societal collapse
Next week’s post will cover:
- chapter 3. determinant factors driving the ‘governance-world’
2.3. Culture
The concept of culture has been used and abused to the point of meaning completely different things for different people. In my personal approach I view the concept ‘culture’ as being the sum of all societal characteristics, – behaviors – actions – creations – beliefs – knowledge – productions – fashions, that the citizens of a given society share in a specific ‘present moment’ along the entire time-span of that society. And in this sense culture is like the evolving skin of a society as it manifests in the present.
But how does culture evolve in its present manifestation?
Culture as a product emerging from the illusion of free will ?
Let’ be clear from the get go. Culture is not the product of an exceptional human inventiveness. It is nothing else than the skin of societal evolution as it manifests in the present. In this sense culture is largely a given that results out of the history of societal evolution. But does human inventiveness or individual creativity really have no place in shaping the skin of societal evolution in the present?
Let’s just observe how powerless humanity is presently to confront its destruction of the habitat of living species; its own included. The reality is that the destruction of a species’ habitat means that this species will soon go extinct which also means that the destruction of the human habitat will necessarily result in human extinction. We know all this for a fact. But watch how humanity in general mentally resists this reality. This example of humanity’s contemporary behavior portends – that our species has no real free will, – that the minds of the individuals are stuck in their beliefs and the satisfaction of what they perceive as being their needs.
As we have seen in 2.1 Axioms of civilization, and 2.2. Worldviews, societies evolved from a primitive form as bands of individuals to a more complex form that emerged with tribal societies. Later the axioms of civilization set the societies, within the geographic realm of a given civilization, on a given road and fact is that today the individuals just always drive further down that same old road. They seem not to be able to take an exit from that road. The reason for this is quite simple. Over time the axioms of civilization dropped out of the individuals’ conscious minds and they are now hidden in their subconscious. So they even can’t see that there are possible exit ramps !
Rediscovering the axioms of one’s civilization is technically feasible for an individual but it is certainly not an easy task. It takes a long effort to learn and understand that humans live in the bubble of their cultural context. And once the knowledge about the cultural context is eventually mastered it necessitates the will of this individual to re-align his behavior to comply with the newly gained knowledge. The difficulties involved in rediscovering the axioms of one’s civilization are such that the large majority of individuals will never come to realize that such axioms even exist. They remain stubbornly hidden in their subconscious and so they’ll never come to see that there are exit ramps on the road of their civilization. Only wise-men can come to see these ramps and if they so desire they can leave the road. Feeling helpless to enlighten his countrymen Laoze (1) literally did leave the road. He took an exit ramp and while leaving his ordinary world he wrote the “Dao De Jing”. Did he gain supreme consciousness and happiness after that? Nobody knows. But what we know is that, while the “Dao De Jing” was a prime source of inspiration for his countrymen over the last 2500 years, his society is still driving fast and furious along its civilizational road…
The axioms of civilization nullify the possibility of individual free-will. And free-will is thus a pure illusion. But societies nevertheless push this illusion in order to encourage the individuals to adapt their present daily culture to the changing conditions in their habitat. And there is more. Worldviews force a view of the world, a view of what reality is all about, in the minds of the individuals. Some of them may consciously gain an understanding of their worldview’s public narrative but they don’t seem to understand, or is it care, about its real purpose which is to solidify the cohesion of their society. For those individuals, who are gaining an understanding of their worldview’s public narrative, this acts as a powerful incentive to adapt the narrative to the cultural memes that actualize daily culture to the changing conditions in their habitat. And so the illusion of individual free-will performs the necessary actualization, of a society’s cultural context, to its changing habitat.
But what is a society’s habitat ?
The citizens of a society live in a natural context: nature, environment,... which procures them the air to breathe, the water to drink and all other resources to sustain their lives. The habitat is made of this natural context but it also includes – the interrelations of the individuals within a society, – the interrelations of a society with its neighbors, – the perception of a society’s citizens about their natural context and how it fits in the cosmic picture. All these factors evolve over time and their interactions constitute the changing nature of a living species’ habitat. Living species have to adapt to the changing nature of their habitat and failure to adapt automatically results in severe damages that may handicap the survival of the species, the reproduction of societies and of the individual particles. Societies magnify the individuals’ illusion in their agency in order to push them to adapt to their changing habitat. The individual particles are the acting principle of the whole of their species. So entertaining their illusion of free-will serves the pragmatic purpose of the adaptation of species, and their societies to a changing habitat.
Human inventiveness or individual creativity relates solely to this need of adaptation to a changing habitat. Point. Nothing more.
That inventiveness is furthermore restricted to act within the very narrow band defined by the axioms of their civilization and their societal worldview. It is in this sense that I speak of culture as a skin that covers the societal body.
Axioms of civilizations and worldviews force the shape of daily culture
Societal worldviews are derived as a set of logical consequences or conclusions from 'background' assumptions like the axioms of civilization.
But what about the assumptions of tribal societies ?
Interconnectedness and interdependence + the animation of all entities by spirits + the capture of the communications between spirits to help relieve suffering + the individuals’ communal perception; all were tribal background assumptions that shaped the daily behaviors and beliefs of tribesmen. But these assumptions were not the assumptions of a civilization. They were assumptions based on observation of facts that fostered experimentation of behaviors. The tribal assumptions were derived from facts while civilizational assumptions were derived from ideological preconceptions that most often were justified by reasons of power relations.
The narratives of Christianity and Judaism illustrate my point. These worldviews (a religion is a worldview) got their foundations in the killing of entire nations. Yahweh’s order of the slaughter of neighboring nations is indisputably described at length in the text of the Old Testament which is a sacred text shared by Jews and Christians. “Jeremy Cott summarizes the historic link between brutalizing violence in Canaan and Christendom:
When the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan, slaughtering the inhabitants (Jos. 11:20), raping women who were the mere booty of war (Dt. 20:14), putting whole towns to the edge of the sword, leaving “nothing that breathed” (Dt. 20:16; Jos. 11:11, 14; cf. 1 Sam. 15:3), they believed that they were the elect of God. When the Carolingians, led by Charlemagne in their project of Christianizing northern Europe, marched into Saxon territory, hanging 4500 people in a single day, they believed that they were the elect of God. The Crusaders, as we know, were animated by a similar inspiration “. (2)
Christians and Jews try to rationalize such violence against the other but their arguments fall flat on the concrete ground of pure thinking. Their rationalizations show them for what they are: protectors and apologists of an ideology that is disconnected from the facts. This compares with the ‘animism+’ attitudes of the Chinese that, for example, were demonstrated during the voyages of discovery undertaken under the helm of Zheng He who lead seven long distance expeditions to South-Asia, the Middle-East, and Africa between 1405 and 1433. The aim of these expeditions was to discover distant lands and opening up trade and the flow of people. This was done in a radically different state of mind than the early European voyages of discovery that were undertaken soon after.
The state of mind of the Chinese could indeed not have been further apart from the state of mind of the Europeans. Their voyages of discovery were powerful illustrations of how culture eventually expands to new populations. Let’s examine how the attitudes of Chinese and Europeans varied.
The “Changle tablets” erected in 1431 explicitly mention that the Chinese voyages “unified seas and continents" and that "the countries beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects and ... have come to audience bearing precious objects and presents" for the emperor. What motivated the undertaking of the voyages was thus primarily the old animist notion of cultural unification with the master shaman as symbol of the unity that had been further conceptualized under the Zhou dynasty as TianXia or all under heaven. Sailing far away with precious gifts was a way to make new friends with who the Chinese (the center) could be sharing a common cultural understanding under the symbolic governance of the emperor.
For Europeans the voyages of discovery were driven by the desire to plunder foreign lands from their gold and silver. Different factors motivated this desire to plunder:
From the early days of their encounter China rejected Western orders to submit. It considered itself to be self-sufficient and culturally superior to foreign lands which meant that the emperors thought that their country had no real need for outside resources and so orders of submission were laughed at. But for 3 centuries the country suffered the ignominies of what can only be called Western barbarity:
Modernity ingrained in human minds a pretension at exceptionalism and to this day Western minds are still imbued with such ideas of being superior to “the other”. But times have changed. China has risen and as Napoleon had forecast the giant is suddenly beating the West at its own game. In this new context Western ideas of exceptionalism are not helping the West to adapt to its changing habitat. The fact is that by Late-Modernity:
How could such a process of change, at the heart of our human habitat, not definitely destroy this Western pretension at being exceptional ? Well till now it has visibly not succeeded to destroy it. The West continues to believe that its ways are the only game in town and in the footsteps of Thatcher they continue to believe in TINA (There Is No Alternative). Think for a moment how the Chinese view this. They have inherited from their 3000 years old system of governance a political philosophy and a political theory that allowed them to manage with absolute success the entry of their country into Modernity. And now, that they are on the verge of consolidating their guiding role over the new center of gravity of the economy-world in East-Asia, Western propaganda is in overdrive taxing China of genocide, of muzzling its population, while stealing Western technology. But this will not stop China to continue to abide by the rules of the system that so rapidly propulsed their country to the top of the world economy. Only a fool would abandon the method that procured him success.
In these late years of Late-Modernity madness seems to have overtaken the Western world. Not only would it want China, to submit to neoliberalism and Western big capital, it would also want to write China’s laws… How preposterous is that ? The fact of the matter is that amidst this madness only a few sensitive and thinking individuals are conscious about our rapidly changing habitat. One would think that such a rapidly changing habitat would :
Free-will is a promise of cultural change. But now that the earth’s living habitat is in such an urgent need, of human inventiveness and individual creativity, the promise does not materialize. And it gets even worse. Instead of uniting with the rest of the world to search for answers to the side-effects of Modernity the Western part of humanity, that represents no more than 10% of the world population, is :
This begs the question ‘to what extent does cultural change really impact our worldviews’ ?
History shows that, under the impact of cultural memes that replicate over the generations, worldviews slowly evolve over the decades and centuries. This is not really encouraging seen the abrupt deterioration of our living habitat that we are experiencing presently which leads to the abruptness of present day life extinction.
From ‘climate change’ transforming into ‘abrupt climate change’, to the increasing quantities of plastic nano-particles that are being injected daily by the individuals of all species, it seems that the quantity of the different side-effects of Modernity multiplies into an avalanche leading to a great convergence from which emerge ever more feedback loops which, in turn, generate thresholds of probability that something fatal for the principle of life is actually happening.
In light of this great convergence, and the thresholds of fatality that it engenders, Western culture seems to have abdicated and has passed the baton to the gods of scientism and technologism. But where have we seen the sources of this kind of messianism ? Oh yes it was this graph.
The concept of culture has been used and abused to the point of meaning completely different things for different people. In my personal approach I view the concept ‘culture’ as being the sum of all societal characteristics, – behaviors – actions – creations – beliefs – knowledge – productions – fashions, that the citizens of a given society share in a specific ‘present moment’ along the entire time-span of that society. And in this sense culture is like the evolving skin of a society as it manifests in the present.
But how does culture evolve in its present manifestation?
Culture as a product emerging from the illusion of free will ?
Let’ be clear from the get go. Culture is not the product of an exceptional human inventiveness. It is nothing else than the skin of societal evolution as it manifests in the present. In this sense culture is largely a given that results out of the history of societal evolution. But does human inventiveness or individual creativity really have no place in shaping the skin of societal evolution in the present?
Let’s just observe how powerless humanity is presently to confront its destruction of the habitat of living species; its own included. The reality is that the destruction of a species’ habitat means that this species will soon go extinct which also means that the destruction of the human habitat will necessarily result in human extinction. We know all this for a fact. But watch how humanity in general mentally resists this reality. This example of humanity’s contemporary behavior portends – that our species has no real free will, – that the minds of the individuals are stuck in their beliefs and the satisfaction of what they perceive as being their needs.
As we have seen in 2.1 Axioms of civilization, and 2.2. Worldviews, societies evolved from a primitive form as bands of individuals to a more complex form that emerged with tribal societies. Later the axioms of civilization set the societies, within the geographic realm of a given civilization, on a given road and fact is that today the individuals just always drive further down that same old road. They seem not to be able to take an exit from that road. The reason for this is quite simple. Over time the axioms of civilization dropped out of the individuals’ conscious minds and they are now hidden in their subconscious. So they even can’t see that there are possible exit ramps !
Rediscovering the axioms of one’s civilization is technically feasible for an individual but it is certainly not an easy task. It takes a long effort to learn and understand that humans live in the bubble of their cultural context. And once the knowledge about the cultural context is eventually mastered it necessitates the will of this individual to re-align his behavior to comply with the newly gained knowledge. The difficulties involved in rediscovering the axioms of one’s civilization are such that the large majority of individuals will never come to realize that such axioms even exist. They remain stubbornly hidden in their subconscious and so they’ll never come to see that there are exit ramps on the road of their civilization. Only wise-men can come to see these ramps and if they so desire they can leave the road. Feeling helpless to enlighten his countrymen Laoze (1) literally did leave the road. He took an exit ramp and while leaving his ordinary world he wrote the “Dao De Jing”. Did he gain supreme consciousness and happiness after that? Nobody knows. But what we know is that, while the “Dao De Jing” was a prime source of inspiration for his countrymen over the last 2500 years, his society is still driving fast and furious along its civilizational road…
The axioms of civilization nullify the possibility of individual free-will. And free-will is thus a pure illusion. But societies nevertheless push this illusion in order to encourage the individuals to adapt their present daily culture to the changing conditions in their habitat. And there is more. Worldviews force a view of the world, a view of what reality is all about, in the minds of the individuals. Some of them may consciously gain an understanding of their worldview’s public narrative but they don’t seem to understand, or is it care, about its real purpose which is to solidify the cohesion of their society. For those individuals, who are gaining an understanding of their worldview’s public narrative, this acts as a powerful incentive to adapt the narrative to the cultural memes that actualize daily culture to the changing conditions in their habitat. And so the illusion of individual free-will performs the necessary actualization, of a society’s cultural context, to its changing habitat.
But what is a society’s habitat ?
The citizens of a society live in a natural context: nature, environment,... which procures them the air to breathe, the water to drink and all other resources to sustain their lives. The habitat is made of this natural context but it also includes – the interrelations of the individuals within a society, – the interrelations of a society with its neighbors, – the perception of a society’s citizens about their natural context and how it fits in the cosmic picture. All these factors evolve over time and their interactions constitute the changing nature of a living species’ habitat. Living species have to adapt to the changing nature of their habitat and failure to adapt automatically results in severe damages that may handicap the survival of the species, the reproduction of societies and of the individual particles. Societies magnify the individuals’ illusion in their agency in order to push them to adapt to their changing habitat. The individual particles are the acting principle of the whole of their species. So entertaining their illusion of free-will serves the pragmatic purpose of the adaptation of species, and their societies to a changing habitat.
Human inventiveness or individual creativity relates solely to this need of adaptation to a changing habitat. Point. Nothing more.
That inventiveness is furthermore restricted to act within the very narrow band defined by the axioms of their civilization and their societal worldview. It is in this sense that I speak of culture as a skin that covers the societal body.
Axioms of civilizations and worldviews force the shape of daily culture
Societal worldviews are derived as a set of logical consequences or conclusions from 'background' assumptions like the axioms of civilization.
But what about the assumptions of tribal societies ?
Interconnectedness and interdependence + the animation of all entities by spirits + the capture of the communications between spirits to help relieve suffering + the individuals’ communal perception; all were tribal background assumptions that shaped the daily behaviors and beliefs of tribesmen. But these assumptions were not the assumptions of a civilization. They were assumptions based on observation of facts that fostered experimentation of behaviors. The tribal assumptions were derived from facts while civilizational assumptions were derived from ideological preconceptions that most often were justified by reasons of power relations.
The narratives of Christianity and Judaism illustrate my point. These worldviews (a religion is a worldview) got their foundations in the killing of entire nations. Yahweh’s order of the slaughter of neighboring nations is indisputably described at length in the text of the Old Testament which is a sacred text shared by Jews and Christians. “Jeremy Cott summarizes the historic link between brutalizing violence in Canaan and Christendom:
When the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan, slaughtering the inhabitants (Jos. 11:20), raping women who were the mere booty of war (Dt. 20:14), putting whole towns to the edge of the sword, leaving “nothing that breathed” (Dt. 20:16; Jos. 11:11, 14; cf. 1 Sam. 15:3), they believed that they were the elect of God. When the Carolingians, led by Charlemagne in their project of Christianizing northern Europe, marched into Saxon territory, hanging 4500 people in a single day, they believed that they were the elect of God. The Crusaders, as we know, were animated by a similar inspiration “. (2)
Christians and Jews try to rationalize such violence against the other but their arguments fall flat on the concrete ground of pure thinking. Their rationalizations show them for what they are: protectors and apologists of an ideology that is disconnected from the facts. This compares with the ‘animism+’ attitudes of the Chinese that, for example, were demonstrated during the voyages of discovery undertaken under the helm of Zheng He who lead seven long distance expeditions to South-Asia, the Middle-East, and Africa between 1405 and 1433. The aim of these expeditions was to discover distant lands and opening up trade and the flow of people. This was done in a radically different state of mind than the early European voyages of discovery that were undertaken soon after.
The state of mind of the Chinese could indeed not have been further apart from the state of mind of the Europeans. Their voyages of discovery were powerful illustrations of how culture eventually expands to new populations. Let’s examine how the attitudes of Chinese and Europeans varied.
The “Changle tablets” erected in 1431 explicitly mention that the Chinese voyages “unified seas and continents" and that "the countries beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects and ... have come to audience bearing precious objects and presents" for the emperor. What motivated the undertaking of the voyages was thus primarily the old animist notion of cultural unification with the master shaman as symbol of the unity that had been further conceptualized under the Zhou dynasty as TianXia or all under heaven. Sailing far away with precious gifts was a way to make new friends with who the Chinese (the center) could be sharing a common cultural understanding under the symbolic governance of the emperor.
For Europeans the voyages of discovery were driven by the desire to plunder foreign lands from their gold and silver. Different factors motivated this desire to plunder:
- the memory of the plunder of Middle-Eastern countries during the crusades
- the desire to accumulate gold and silver in an easy and fast way
- the envy to reach China and its silk and porcelain luxuries
From the early days of their encounter China rejected Western orders to submit. It considered itself to be self-sufficient and culturally superior to foreign lands which meant that the emperors thought that their country had no real need for outside resources and so orders of submission were laughed at. But for 3 centuries the country suffered the ignominies of what can only be called Western barbarity:
- it had to concede parcels of its territory to Western nations,
- it had to open its borders to the import of opium forced on it by the Brits,
- it had to witness the destruction of its monuments,
- and more generally it had to endure the weakening of its systems of governance.
- no more unequal treaties = negotiations among equals
- no more submission = win-win outcomes
- if 1 & 2 are not possible China will resist and fight till the end...
Modernity ingrained in human minds a pretension at exceptionalism and to this day Western minds are still imbued with such ideas of being superior to “the other”. But times have changed. China has risen and as Napoleon had forecast the giant is suddenly beating the West at its own game. In this new context Western ideas of exceptionalism are not helping the West to adapt to its changing habitat. The fact is that by Late-Modernity:
- the center of gravity of the economy-world has moved to East-Asia,
- the side-effects of Modernity are there for all to see
How could such a process of change, at the heart of our human habitat, not definitely destroy this Western pretension at being exceptional ? Well till now it has visibly not succeeded to destroy it. The West continues to believe that its ways are the only game in town and in the footsteps of Thatcher they continue to believe in TINA (There Is No Alternative). Think for a moment how the Chinese view this. They have inherited from their 3000 years old system of governance a political philosophy and a political theory that allowed them to manage with absolute success the entry of their country into Modernity. And now, that they are on the verge of consolidating their guiding role over the new center of gravity of the economy-world in East-Asia, Western propaganda is in overdrive taxing China of genocide, of muzzling its population, while stealing Western technology. But this will not stop China to continue to abide by the rules of the system that so rapidly propulsed their country to the top of the world economy. Only a fool would abandon the method that procured him success.
In these late years of Late-Modernity madness seems to have overtaken the Western world. Not only would it want China, to submit to neoliberalism and Western big capital, it would also want to write China’s laws… How preposterous is that ? The fact of the matter is that amidst this madness only a few sensitive and thinking individuals are conscious about our rapidly changing habitat. One would think that such a rapidly changing habitat would :
- call for human inventiveness and individual creativity in searching for answers,
- call for the societal encouragement of individual creativity and for its guidance in the experimentation of new ways of living
- call for humanity’s adaptation to the changes taking place in its habitat.
Free-will is a promise of cultural change. But now that the earth’s living habitat is in such an urgent need, of human inventiveness and individual creativity, the promise does not materialize. And it gets even worse. Instead of uniting with the rest of the world to search for answers to the side-effects of Modernity the Western part of humanity, that represents no more than 10% of the world population, is :
- resisting the natural shifting of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia. This not only distracts humanity from focusing on what are the priorities of the day. It risks to engulf humanity in a fratricidal destruction.
- refusing to admit that there are any side-effects of Modernity that threaten life on earth. This is certainly the top of the present madness. These side-effects of Modernity are there for all to see… What about your grand-kids Mr. Trump ?
This begs the question ‘to what extent does cultural change really impact our worldviews’ ?
History shows that, under the impact of cultural memes that replicate over the generations, worldviews slowly evolve over the decades and centuries. This is not really encouraging seen the abrupt deterioration of our living habitat that we are experiencing presently which leads to the abruptness of present day life extinction.
From ‘climate change’ transforming into ‘abrupt climate change’, to the increasing quantities of plastic nano-particles that are being injected daily by the individuals of all species, it seems that the quantity of the different side-effects of Modernity multiplies into an avalanche leading to a great convergence from which emerge ever more feedback loops which, in turn, generate thresholds of probability that something fatal for the principle of life is actually happening.
In light of this great convergence, and the thresholds of fatality that it engenders, Western culture seems to have abdicated and has passed the baton to the gods of scientism and technologism. But where have we seen the sources of this kind of messianism ? Oh yes it was this graph.
The
axiom of dualism + the axiom positing the existence of limits + the
axiom positing a rupture between the present and the past or the future
===> these axioms anchor the belief, in Western minds, of the
‘all-power-fullness’ of the gods of scientism and technologism. There is
indeed no way to escape the conclusion that Western rationalism and
science are captive of the axioms of their civilization. It will be
interesting to see how Chinese scientists will approach this conundrum
of the impact of the axioms of civilization, and their societal
worldviews, on their observation that the living habitat is being
destroyed under our eyes. Chinese governance has already answered the
question by recognizing that the world has to unite under an ecological
civilization and a worldview centering on sharing a common destiny. This
is a momentous step in the right direction.
I think it is important that we recognize the fundamental responsibility that the axioms of the Western civilization assume in humanity’s present predicament. If there is a way forward for human life that way should clearly recognize :
The societal worldview shapes economic realities
Under TCC (Traditional Chinese Culture = animism+), as well as under Christianity, the population at large was until quite recently subsisting from agricultural activities. The collaboration of men of knowledge ensured that the men of power could trust that the minds of the populations under their control were firmly glued around a common worldview. This is indeed what affirmed their control over their agricultural populations. In the meantime the men of power had built the seat of their imperial institutions around their own dwellings. This initial concentration of population grew into cities that became ever larger. And the needs of this urban population were then satisfied by a market where craftsmen, merchants, and others offered their services to the court, its institutions, and to each other. Such a construct was localized and the institutions of power, of knowledge, and the economy could grow organically in symbiosis unobstructed by outside factors.
Modernity emerged in Western Europe as an accident of its Christian history. The crusades, indirectly, fostered the need for Middle-Eastern luxuries in the minds of the aristocracy. And this forced an operational long distance answer to satisfy the demands originating in the local context of European early cities. That operational long distance answer was given by long distance merchants who were forced to recognize that the reason at work within capital forces the holder of invested capital to generate profits. In other words what these long distance merchants recognized was that capital has an internal rationality that imposes a given economic order: as an investor the capital holder can only thrive by generating profits from the activity that his invested capital sets in motion.
This may sound like a tautology to Late-modern minds. But this is simply because the worldview of Modernity is so deeply ingrained in modern minds that they can no longer even conceive of the fact that people had other views of the world before Modernity. Let’s exemplify what I mean here with the case of China which had thriving markets since thousands of years before Western Europeans. But while having markets China did not gain access to the following insight:
China only got access to this insight, in the 2nd part of the twentieth century, and it was through Marxism. By then combining all the elements of this insights, with Chinese traditional State management theories and with TCC, the country unleashed nothing else than an economic miracle the kind of which the world never witnessed before.
But why did Europe initially discover the reason at work within capital and not China?
I showed here above how Europe gained its insight, into the reason that is at work within capital, as the result of a historical accident. In other words the European aristocracy answered the call of Rome to go dislodge ‘infidels’ from Jerusalem and once there they discovered an abundance of luxury goods and a richness of knowledge and the arts; all luxuries that were unknown in Europe. Later when back in their naked stone castles they yearned for such luxuries to adorn their walls and floors. It is that yearning that set in motion long distance trade between Europe and the Middle-East… And it is long distance trade that imposed the recognition of the reason that is at work within capital.
The context of life in China was different than in Europe and so the country never experienced the need to find an operational long distance answer to satisfy internal demands:
The following two factors explain why China never gained an insight into the process of transformation of money into capital:
The Chinese had to wait for Marxism to enlighten them about the reason that is at work within capital. In other words the Chinese learned from Marxism how to use capitalism to affirm the presence of their country into Modernity. And they used Modernity to build up the necessary strength to possibly safeguard their nation. They feared indeed that a weak China would be annihilated under globalization. And they also knew that their axioms of civilization + their worldview (TCC or animism+) + their traditional system of governance would ultimately preserve their national character. The prescience of the communist party leaders is presently being confirmed by the younger generations who are operating a return to their centuries old traditions...
Economic realities shape social and cultural realities
The awareness, in the minds of long distance merchants, about ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ emerged in Western Europe sometime in the 13th-14th centuries. Over the next 3-400 years the first age of Modernity spread a form of merchant capitalism that transformed the economies and the cultures of its nation-states. Private merchants accumulated capital. The arts glorified the bourgeoisie. Individualism was taking hold of the minds and rationalism was becoming the new philosophy of the day. Jealousy and envy of the merchants’ richness furthermore acted as a strong incentive, in the minds of those in the universities, to search for new production methods to substitute imported goods with local productions. And so emerged the second age of Modernity: industrial capitalism.
Industrial capital unleashed the age of the machines and of mass productions for consumerism. Advertisements and propaganda gradually molded the minds of the hordes of farmers, who entered the factories, trying to convince them to abandon their old ideas of economic autonomy for the purchase of industrially produced goods. This whole process was at work from the 2nd part of the 18th century to the 2nd part of the 20th century. China compressed what had been a 200 years process in the West within the span of a short 2 decades (2000-2020).
This massification of consumerism was accompanied by large scale and intense advertising, marketing, and propaganda which have assailed the citizens with a deluge of images preaching a cult of ‘happiness through material stuff’. An incessant barrage of lies and promises has literally brain-washed first Western populations then the populations of the rest of the world to submit to a system glorifying the dependence of people on the purchase of goods and services. This now forms the backbone of Late-Modern culture. Let’s remember that culture, in its broad sense, covers all beliefs, actions, and behaviors of the citizens of a given society in the present time. What I mean to say here is that the culture of Modernity has been forced on us by big capital in the form of purchasing ‘happiness through material stuff’.
After the 2nd world war this cult of ‘happiness through material stuff’ was amplified to a whole new dimension. Globalization forced open the countries borders to big capital and the production of goods was transferred to the countries of the South, and more particularly to China, where ‘externalities’ were cost free. In so doing Western countries got rid of a good chunk of their CO2 emissions, of their water, air and land pollution and now they perfidiously accuse China of being the biggest polluter on earth...
Globalization was accompanied by the following ideologies:
Technologism is an ideology pretending that science and technology have the answers to all the problems that humanity might encounter. But in the minds of big capital holders investments in science and technology had primordially to answer their need for fast and cheap communications to manage the subsidiaries of their Multi-National Corporations (MNC’s).
What is even worse is that these ideologies lobotomized and stripped the minds of all popular traditions. The countrysides were literally emptied and populations got stacked in urban high-rise boxes.
There was no better place than China to observe how changing economic realities shape a complete renewal of social and cultural realities. Increasing incomes have eased the citizens in their first decade of consumerism. For the moment life still centers on the family. And consumerism relates thus to housing, interior decoration, TV and the internet centering around gaming and ordering stuff and food and cars that reinforce individualism by promoting mobility in a box and a separation from the other individuals. But, as in the sixties in the West, Chinese urban younger generations start to put this whole model into question. Their answers are nevertheless radically different. The counter-culture in the West drifted towards individualism, hedonism, and Eastern traditions while the young Chinese counter the Western liberal model of consumerism by going back to their own traditions (Philosophic Taoism, Traditional Chinese Medicine, fashion dress, architecture, design,etc...).
The same happens in art. The most promising artists in china are rejecting the decades old practice of aping Western Schools. They are returning to the traditions of their country but this return goes with a twist. They search indeed to mold the present modern culture into the forms of their ancestral traditions.
I think it is important that we recognize the fundamental responsibility that the axioms of the Western civilization assume in humanity’s present predicament. If there is a way forward for human life that way should clearly recognize :
- that ideologies have to be superseded by pragmatism
- that animism+ offers a treasure trove of pragmatic instructions
The societal worldview shapes economic realities
Under TCC (Traditional Chinese Culture = animism+), as well as under Christianity, the population at large was until quite recently subsisting from agricultural activities. The collaboration of men of knowledge ensured that the men of power could trust that the minds of the populations under their control were firmly glued around a common worldview. This is indeed what affirmed their control over their agricultural populations. In the meantime the men of power had built the seat of their imperial institutions around their own dwellings. This initial concentration of population grew into cities that became ever larger. And the needs of this urban population were then satisfied by a market where craftsmen, merchants, and others offered their services to the court, its institutions, and to each other. Such a construct was localized and the institutions of power, of knowledge, and the economy could grow organically in symbiosis unobstructed by outside factors.
Modernity emerged in Western Europe as an accident of its Christian history. The crusades, indirectly, fostered the need for Middle-Eastern luxuries in the minds of the aristocracy. And this forced an operational long distance answer to satisfy the demands originating in the local context of European early cities. That operational long distance answer was given by long distance merchants who were forced to recognize that the reason at work within capital forces the holder of invested capital to generate profits. In other words what these long distance merchants recognized was that capital has an internal rationality that imposes a given economic order: as an investor the capital holder can only thrive by generating profits from the activity that his invested capital sets in motion.
This may sound like a tautology to Late-modern minds. But this is simply because the worldview of Modernity is so deeply ingrained in modern minds that they can no longer even conceive of the fact that people had other views of the world before Modernity. Let’s exemplify what I mean here with the case of China which had thriving markets since thousands of years before Western Europeans. But while having markets China did not gain access to the following insight:
- that money transforms into capital through investment
- that capital has an internal rationality that imposes a given economic order
- that to survive a capital holder has to ensure the reproduction of his capital base
- that a capital holder thrives by generating profits
- that to industrialize a country has to realize a primitive accumulation of capital
China only got access to this insight, in the 2nd part of the twentieth century, and it was through Marxism. By then combining all the elements of this insights, with Chinese traditional State management theories and with TCC, the country unleashed nothing else than an economic miracle the kind of which the world never witnessed before.
But why did Europe initially discover the reason at work within capital and not China?
I showed here above how Europe gained its insight, into the reason that is at work within capital, as the result of a historical accident. In other words the European aristocracy answered the call of Rome to go dislodge ‘infidels’ from Jerusalem and once there they discovered an abundance of luxury goods and a richness of knowledge and the arts; all luxuries that were unknown in Europe. Later when back in their naked stone castles they yearned for such luxuries to adorn their walls and floors. It is that yearning that set in motion long distance trade between Europe and the Middle-East… And it is long distance trade that imposed the recognition of the reason that is at work within capital.
The context of life in China was different than in Europe and so the country never experienced the need to find an operational long distance answer to satisfy internal demands:
- its territory is immense and so it could always satisfy its needs internally
- local trade was freely practiced by local private merchants (intra-regional trade)
- internal long distance trade was the monopoly of state owned corporations (inter-regional trade). The trade in salt is an example of such an internal long distance state monopoly.
The following two factors explain why China never gained an insight into the process of transformation of money into capital:
- the country never needed to find an operational long distance answer to satisfy internal demands
- private merchants were not allowed to handle internal long distance trade
The Chinese had to wait for Marxism to enlighten them about the reason that is at work within capital. In other words the Chinese learned from Marxism how to use capitalism to affirm the presence of their country into Modernity. And they used Modernity to build up the necessary strength to possibly safeguard their nation. They feared indeed that a weak China would be annihilated under globalization. And they also knew that their axioms of civilization + their worldview (TCC or animism+) + their traditional system of governance would ultimately preserve their national character. The prescience of the communist party leaders is presently being confirmed by the younger generations who are operating a return to their centuries old traditions...
Economic realities shape social and cultural realities
The awareness, in the minds of long distance merchants, about ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ emerged in Western Europe sometime in the 13th-14th centuries. Over the next 3-400 years the first age of Modernity spread a form of merchant capitalism that transformed the economies and the cultures of its nation-states. Private merchants accumulated capital. The arts glorified the bourgeoisie. Individualism was taking hold of the minds and rationalism was becoming the new philosophy of the day. Jealousy and envy of the merchants’ richness furthermore acted as a strong incentive, in the minds of those in the universities, to search for new production methods to substitute imported goods with local productions. And so emerged the second age of Modernity: industrial capitalism.
Industrial capital unleashed the age of the machines and of mass productions for consumerism. Advertisements and propaganda gradually molded the minds of the hordes of farmers, who entered the factories, trying to convince them to abandon their old ideas of economic autonomy for the purchase of industrially produced goods. This whole process was at work from the 2nd part of the 18th century to the 2nd part of the 20th century. China compressed what had been a 200 years process in the West within the span of a short 2 decades (2000-2020).
This massification of consumerism was accompanied by large scale and intense advertising, marketing, and propaganda which have assailed the citizens with a deluge of images preaching a cult of ‘happiness through material stuff’. An incessant barrage of lies and promises has literally brain-washed first Western populations then the populations of the rest of the world to submit to a system glorifying the dependence of people on the purchase of goods and services. This now forms the backbone of Late-Modern culture. Let’s remember that culture, in its broad sense, covers all beliefs, actions, and behaviors of the citizens of a given society in the present time. What I mean to say here is that the culture of Modernity has been forced on us by big capital in the form of purchasing ‘happiness through material stuff’.
After the 2nd world war this cult of ‘happiness through material stuff’ was amplified to a whole new dimension. Globalization forced open the countries borders to big capital and the production of goods was transferred to the countries of the South, and more particularly to China, where ‘externalities’ were cost free. In so doing Western countries got rid of a good chunk of their CO2 emissions, of their water, air and land pollution and now they perfidiously accuse China of being the biggest polluter on earth...
Globalization was accompanied by the following ideologies:
- individualism, consumerism
- rationalism, technologism or scientism,
- neoliberalism,
- postmodernism.
Technologism is an ideology pretending that science and technology have the answers to all the problems that humanity might encounter. But in the minds of big capital holders investments in science and technology had primordially to answer their need for fast and cheap communications to manage the subsidiaries of their Multi-National Corporations (MNC’s).
What is even worse is that these ideologies lobotomized and stripped the minds of all popular traditions. The countrysides were literally emptied and populations got stacked in urban high-rise boxes.
There was no better place than China to observe how changing economic realities shape a complete renewal of social and cultural realities. Increasing incomes have eased the citizens in their first decade of consumerism. For the moment life still centers on the family. And consumerism relates thus to housing, interior decoration, TV and the internet centering around gaming and ordering stuff and food and cars that reinforce individualism by promoting mobility in a box and a separation from the other individuals. But, as in the sixties in the West, Chinese urban younger generations start to put this whole model into question. Their answers are nevertheless radically different. The counter-culture in the West drifted towards individualism, hedonism, and Eastern traditions while the young Chinese counter the Western liberal model of consumerism by going back to their own traditions (Philosophic Taoism, Traditional Chinese Medicine, fashion dress, architecture, design,etc...).
The same happens in art. The most promising artists in china are rejecting the decades old practice of aping Western Schools. They are returning to the traditions of their country but this return goes with a twist. They search indeed to mold the present modern culture into the forms of their ancestral traditions.
Liu Dan, ‘Splendor of Heaven and Earth’, 1994-1995, Guggenheim Museum
As I see it, over the years to come, this artistic approach is going to re-fashion the entirety of Chinese culture. Don’t get me wrong. This is a process in development that still needs to age. But there is not the slicest doubt in my mind that over the next years, and decades, Chinese culture will mature into its own modern self, as a continuation or better, as a rejuvenation through further growth of the Chinese skin that covers the body of the entire Chinese cultural context (axioms of civilization + worldview).
Cultural memes that replicate over the generations enter the worldview
Cultural memes are to culture what genetic mutations are to biology. Both are mutations or transformations in the codification of their body. A cultural meme is a cultural transformation in the societal body and a genetic mutation is a genetic transformation in the body of an individual. A profusion of cultural memes and genetic mutations are routinely emerging but most are rejected or purged by the body within a short time-span.
Successful cultural memes and genetic mutations are the ones that succeed to be replicated over the long haul. A successful biological mutation is transmitted sexually to the next generations of individuals while a successful cultural meme is – first adopted by the minds of a large fraction of a society’s citizenry, – then it is eventually adopted by the minds of the next generations of individuals. And when successful such memes engage a lasting cultural transformation in the codification of their societal body. A successful biological mutation brings some lasting transformation in the genetic code of the individuals among a portion of the species and when super-successful the transformation goes global and is adopted by the whole species. A successful cultural meme brings some lasting change to the culture of a society and is eventually integrated in the societal worldview. When super-successful the cultural change goes global and is integrated in the worldview of all societies which means that it is being adopted by the whole species.
Successful cultural memes are being integrated in the worldview and are thus slightly transforming it. This is what explains how the worldviews, of the different parts of a society that splits, over time start to differentiate and evolve on different paths. East and West-Germany, South and North-Korea, are examples that immediately come to mind. But when looking at Western Europe we see that the same phenomenon of differentiation has been at work since Early-Modernity and the creation of Nation-states. Nation-states emerged in the footsteps of long distance trade and have separated Europeans in many ways: – language, – governance, – economy, – art, – consumerism, – etc... The recent phenomenon of globalization has put a stop to this kind of national differentiation and started to unify national cultures along the lines of mass consumerism and the offers of commodities and services by multinational corporations.
Culture and biology are generally considered to be stable configurations that reproduce over the generations. Transformations in those configurations are thus not the norm but more like exceptions. And if a given cultural, or biological, configuration were to be assaulted by a flow of massive transformations it would endanger the configuration which would be a threat to the existence of the society (culture) or of the individual (biology).
Cancer comes to mind as something that puts in motion such a flow of massive transformations that endangers the configuration of the individual body. Cancer is “caused by changes (mutations) to the DNA within cells. … A gene mutation can tell a cell to grow and divide more rapidly. This creates many new cells that all have that same mutation. … Normal cells know when to stop growing so that you have just the right number of each type of cell. Cancer cells lose the controls (tumor suppressor genes) that tell them when to stop growing. A mutation in a tumor suppressor gene allows cancer cells to continue growing and accumulating. ” (3).
The reason, that is at work within capital, puts in motion such a flow of massive transformations that endangers the configuration of the societal body. It acts somehow in the same fashion as the principle of life: – necessity to reproduce; non-reproduction means indeed extinction, – at the image of life the transformation of money into capital sets in motion a process generating increased complexity (generation of profits that increase the initial investment). So both life and capital have their own separate internal reason for being and for developing.
Life addresses the reproduction and development of species which are, lets never forget this, local applications that are running on the operating system of the whole universe. Capital addresses the reproduction and development of itself at the exclusion of everything else and in this sense capital is a parasite that sticks to the principle of life to ensure its own reproduction and development.
Capital is put in motion by individuals of the human species whose minds it captures at this effect. Capturing the minds materialized when money was invested to finance long distance trade. Over short distances the risk to lose the invested money was very low but over long distances the risks went up stratospherically. And it is the suffering by the merchant, from the extinction of his capital base, that converted him to the cult of capital and its reason.
And here is where the story really starts to be interesting. First let’s remember that a cultural meme is a cultural transformation in the societal body. What has been observed over the long history is that capital acts like a cancerous memetic mutation which forces a cultural transformation that grows and rapidly divides into many new cultural transformations “that all have that same mutation”. And as capital grows and grows, it metastasizes to the whole societal body.
There should be doubt any longer that the reason, that is at work within capital, is a memetic cancerous mutation that has metastasized to the whole body of the human species. Over the first few hundreds years the cancer metastasis resulted in a deluge of material goods and the human individual particles started to idolize these memetic cancerous mutations. The reason of capital gave rise to something that is akin to a new worldview, or a new religion, that gradually superseded Christianity. Capital appeared like a gift from the heavens that was never stopping to give and as a result the world population exploded.
The memetic cancerous mutation was so inconceivably successful at churning out ever more commodities that nearly nobody saw that rot was gaining nature and societies. By Late-Modernity the rot had gained all systems and sub-systems of societies and of the habitat sustaining life on earth.
Western societies had rationalized all kinds of intellectual theories sanctifying the cancer and Modernity built statues to that memetic cancerous mutation. But by Late-Modernity they had atomized which means that societal worldviews had completely melted away. Everyone now thinks he knows better about anything than everyone else. Societal atomization means that Western societies have completely lost track of the societal necessity of having a strong worldview. They have forgotten that high levels of societal cohesion are necessary to ensure the reproduction of societies over the long haul. Western societies are now so deeply fragmented that their systems of governance are in-operational and are of no help any longer:
- to address the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia and China
- to address the great convergence of the side-effects of Modernity
James Howard Kunztler gives the following description of societal atomization:
“The Internet is certainly the most complex assembly of human thought in human history and it is blowing back ferociously on humanity in ways that are far from obvious. It has set in motion countless recursive feedback loops of misinformation, disinformation, and ideas that are simply bad in the sense that they don’t comport with reality. Hence, the new elastic meaning of the concept known as “truth.”
The divorce between truth and reality is nearly complete now that everybody has his/her/zhe’s own truth, and the facts are just ornaments subject to rearrangement within anyone’s own story” (4).
Societal atomization renders modern developed societies in-operational and they become zombies that roll further for the only reason of their force of inertia. But the end is in sight...
2.4. collision of our cultural context with societal collapse
Western societal atomization signals that :
- Modernity is ending,
- the transition, from the worldview of Modernity to the worldview of After-Modernity, has been set in motion,
- the worldview of After-Modernity promises to be a new historical era on the evolving road of our species (that is if our species does not go extinct during the transition)
But what does this transition entail for daily life ?
Faced with what my eyes were seeing, and what my brain was computing, my conscious mind was having the feeling that it was losing its sanity and this is what somehow forced me to write. Writing helps me to clarify, in my mind, the finer points of the transition from Modernity to After-Modernity and the implications that these finer points are having for the principle of life. Along the way I soon came to realize that we are not really masters of our own thinking. And that’s why I spent so much time inquiring about the nature of our cultural context.
During our first years on this earth we have been domesticated and our minds had to absorb all kinds of beliefs and ways of doing. By chance during my youth I mostly socialized with nature (animals and plants) and I was shown another reality than what the domestication was fostering in the minds of the kids of my age. That other reality started to appear more real than what the domestication was projecting in my mind. And while continuing to follow the social path of the domesticated my mind started to drift away toward the margins of society where I discovered many other ‘possibilities’ than the domesticated path. For many years these ‘possibilities’ proved to be unrealistic in the sense that our existing societies would not let us experiment anything else than what is on their program.
But I have never let go, in my mind, of these possibilities. By chance I got some help along the road. I got introduced to the knowledge of the long forgotten tribal societies. Soon after I came to understand that living outside of society had become an impossibility in Western Late-Modernity so I did what was necessary to survive. But my mind was always seeking to save time for: – thinking by confronting the conscious and unconscious mind, – dreaming life in ‘the possibilities’ on the margins, – experimenting other ways than the domesticated way. This was mostly a trip alone in the wilderness and the unknown. Society does eventually tolerate one strange guy but it does not tolerate groups of strange guys. It views them as threats and eliminates them.
From this nearly fifty years old experiment I learned to see that life does not emerge as an individual particle but as a species. A species is a living entity that does what is necessary to survive and when its survival is ensured it eventually experiments new ways that might inject some complexity in it. So basically each living species is driven by two imperatives:
- the fight for its own survival: life means survival which is success (beauty) while death means extinction which is failure (ugliness).
- the expansion into more complexity: the principle of life implies that the arrow of time points to an evolution into something more than the status quo of survival which implies the idea of a process of development into ever more advanced stages. And in this sense life is a process of perpetual transformation into more complexity.
But how does a species ensure survival and development ?
To my knowledge the Western cultural context does not suggest any sensical answer to this question but I discovered that the Chinese cultural context does. The answer of the Chinese resides in the dance between an entity’s polarities. But let me first try to sketch how the Chinese civilization, and Chinese animism+ (TCC), arrived at their answer.
By adopting animism the Chinese civilization got access to the notion of ‘twins’. All civilizations did but in contrast with all other empires the Chinese one adopted the whole body of knowledge of animism as its worldview. And so the early Chinese power societies gained access to the idea that a spirit who successfully reaches mastery in her/his field gets called by the whole (the universe) to act as an intermediary to ensure its communication with the entities within her/his field or ensemble. To ensure this communication between the whole and its particles the spirit splits into identical twins. One possesses a female shaman’s mind and the other a male shaman’s mind. The interactions between this female shaman and her male counterpart would later eventually originate the notion of ‘master-shaman’, or ‘wise-man’, who came eventually to symbolize the tribal cultural unity over an ever enlarging territory. The first Chinese emperors of the first dynasty (the Xia; 4100-3600 Years Ago) were ‘wise-man’ and interestingly the emperors of the successive dynasties, all along the span of the empire, were always considered to be men of knowledge.
In China master-shaman assumed the charge of the first emperors. It is thus not surprising that they would codify a system of thought whereby reality is understood as the dance, between the polarities of all entities, that generates a process of perpetual transformation. This idea was later systematized, in the ‘Yi-Jing’, under the Zhou dynasty (approximately 3100 years ago).
How does the dance between polarities ensure the survival and development of a species ?
A species is an entity that has two polarities: – the individual particles, – their societies. The principle of life recognizes that the individuals and their societies have both a particular mission, or role, to play and so they are conceived as being complementary. These 2 complementary polarities execute their role by engaging in a dance for influence that sets in motion a perpetual process of transformation of the entity:
- the role of a society is primarily to ensure the survival of the species. It accomplishes this by ensuring its own reproduction eventually at the detriment of some individuals who want to change things. In other words societies favor the conservation of the situation as is because they perceive changes as a danger. The societal impulse is thus to ensure conservation which translates politically in conservatism.
- the role of the individuals is primarily to ensure the creation of novelty which could eventually result in injecting some complexity in the working of their society. It seems that the individuals, at least some of them, feel an urge to create and their creations most often call for changing the way things are done. But this will be resisted by the majority of the individuals who represent society. The creative is thus confronted at first by rejection of the changes he proposes. But perseverance will eventually gain him followers which, in turn, could eventually change the societal balance in his favor. This is how societies are induced to accept changes. The individual impulse is to ensure change and progress which translates politically in progressivism
Paradoxically conservative types in the West turn out to be anti-society while the progressives turn out to be asking for more societal intervention. This goes counter to the ways of nature that I just mentioned. The Chinese seem to recognize these ways of nature. The conservatives among them ask for state intervention while the progressives are asking for more space for individual initiative. How amazing that even the words can be interpreted so differently by Chinese and Westerners. But the fact is that the Chinese meaning of conservatism and progressivism is more in tune with the nature of things…
___________
Notes
1. Laoze (Lao Tze) lived sometime in the first part of the 6th century BC. He is the author of the Dao De Jing whose 81 chapters constitute the foundation of philosophic Daoism (Taoism) which itself became the foundation of religious Daoism.
2. «Let Nothing that Breathes Remain Alive» by Randal Rauser in Philosophia Christi. Vol. 11, No. 1. 2009
3. Cancer definition by Mayo Clinic
4. James Howard Kunstler. "The Truth Versus Your Truth"
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