For the last 40 years I had the great chance of being a close witness of the Chinese story and I observed that to ensure the survival of their nation the Chinese, in a first move, largely copied Western Modernity.
With the benefit of hindsight it becomes evident that a second move down the road will enable them to walk their own national way into the future. There is no better guide than the artworld to understand how the country is generating its own way by forcing the integration of Modernity inside Chinese Traditional Culture.
And so under the sheer weight of population numbers China is quietly shedding Modernity’s old Western skin...
Modernity is a threat to non-Western nations
Looking at Modernity, from the perspective of the reason that is at work within capital, we are forced to recognize that it has been an absolute success. No doubt about that. By absolute I mean that the reason at work within capital is triumphing over any objections emitted by human reason even when human reason observes that the triumph of the reason of capital is pathogenic and destroying life on earth.
Modernity relates to an abstract form of rationality that is emerging out of the application of capital to all human activities. And once capital applies to something the nature of this something changes radically. Lets take art as an example.
During Early-Modernity the artworks commanded by the new rich merchants changed the nature of art from religious propaganda into their own modern propaganda (the 3 obliged subjects). And a lot later once Western Modernism identified with “whatever is art” this was abruptly rejected by society at large. Artists and intellectuals continued to talk about art for art’s sake but the public was gone definitively captured by consumerism and the spectacle of information societies.
The moment modern artworks were rejected by society at large art had lost its historical nature and this was sized upon as an opportunity by propagandists and merchants who transformed artworks into ready-made luxury commodities at the attention of financial speculators. This is how the historical nature of art died and was recuperated as a financial spectacle during Late-Modernity.
Similarly once Western capital applied its tentacles to the rest of the world the nature of the rest of the world was bound to change:
- during the first phase of financial capitalism (14th to 18th centuries) the rest of the world was raped and pillaged without resistance and Western nations accumulated a bundle of capital that was going to finance a revolution in world economics over the following centuries,
- by the 2nd part of the 18th century this Western private accumulation of capital was invested in research and development of textile machinery, steel industry, fossil fuel transportation equipment, electricity, and so on…
- the nature of reality in the Western world was abruptly changing. Western population levels shot through the roof. Speed of movement was catapulted from the speed of walking to the speed of train records while long distance communication erased the separation caused by long distance, etc, etc… The resulting abrupt change in the perception of reality gave rise to the questioning of the nature of art by the Modernist avant-garde…
- initially the demands for investments by Western private capital holders were motivated by the opportunity to substitute imports from third world countries, like Indian cotton cloth, Chinese silk and ceramics which were draining the financial resources in the home land, with local productions.
- once industrial goods, like cotton socks, started to roll out of British factories third world countries were conveniently seen as additional markets that had to be freed of all obstacles to the penetration of those goods. And what had been hitherto a flourishing Indian cotton industry, for example, was annihilated within a few years.
Being a market for Western industrial goods was one thing but what played an even more dramatic role was the plunder by Western industrial countries of all kinds of resources from the third world including the artifacts of its local traditional culture as is attested by the collections of those in western museums. The plundering was systematic. It was organized by a colonial system that was managed by white expatriates who worked as agents of Western nations or their corporate representatives.
Third world countries eventually revolted against the systematic plunder organized by colonial administrations.
But this changed nothing to their predicament. Their local or traditional institutions had eradicated and replaced by modern institutions during the centuries of colonization and their colonial liberation succeeded only to indigenize these “modern” institutions. Staffed by locals, holding degrees from Western universities and indoctrinated to serve the Western economic model, their institutions were definitely not going to liberate them from Western exploitation.
Third world nations needed to protect themselves against Western rapacity and destruction. It was China that finally lifted the veil on the secrets of liberation. What China taught the rest of the 3rd world was that:
- In a first phase the West has to be resisted by refusing to play the role it advises and by stealing its own methods; the methods that it applies back home. In other words resistance first and foremost means copying Western Modernity.
- In a second phase each nation has to liberate itself from the Western model by creating its own path. In other words what has been learned through copying has to be confronted with the local physical and cultural circumstances. The Chinese are insisting on the fact that there is no ready-made political model that can help a nation to draw its own path. The only valid path they insist is to confront, what a nation has learned from copying Western Modernity, with its own physical and cultural circumstances.
While 3rd world countries are reforming their institutions, with the hope to enter Modernity, first world countries are confronted by Multi-National Corporations (MNC's) asking them to transfer part of their competences to international institutions representing the interests of these same MNC's. And we observe that International trade agreements and treaties are giving to these international institutions the judicial power to punish nation states that are limiting the activities of MNC's through the application of national legislation that protect workers, the environmental, and so on.
What is more remarkable is that all this happens outside of the democratic framework of national institutions. The texts of commercial agreements and treaties are secret documents that even the elected representatives of the people have no right to consult. This is definitively robbing nations of their powers and an example of neoliberalism at work. Will the fresh wave of nationalism, led by Trump Salvini Orban Johnson, succeed to put an end to such a class war extravagance by big capital and their MNC’s? The future will tell...
China adopts the reason at work within capital
China rejects the notion of having a ready-made political model. But it is nevertheless the only contemporary successful example of a 3rd world nation that succeeded to liberate itself from misery and despondency. As such it can’t avoid being a lighthouse that attracts the interest of the rest of the 3rd world. Hey even the 1st world is impressed and studies what is going on there that it eventually could emulate.
Having watched China, for the biggest part of my adult life, it seems to me that the primary lesson we should all try to get our minds around is the following:
- China is an old nation that unified culturally over a very large territory. And its inhabitants have been sharing a common view of the world inherited from the animist knowledge base that had been accumulated over the last tens of thousands of years.
The nation’s first power institutions were governed, for its first two thousand years at least, by animist sages. In a 2nd phase, dynasties reigning over the center weakened while local kingdoms strengthened, the nation was in chaos for more than one millennia. Over the last 2000 years the Chinese men of knowledge were the mandarins and they stayed put managing the imperial institutions until quite recently; I mean until as late as 1910.
In summary the first Chinese power institutions inherited their axioms of civilization (polarism + other) and their worldview (Traditional Chinese Culture) from tribal societies... They did not cut with the animist past to invent new foundational stories or grand narratives as was the case in the Middle-East. This carved one of the deepest distinctions between East and West: knowledge formation as a process of rupture in the West versus a process of continuity in the East (incremental add-ons to the inherited knowledge base).
To my knowledge this puts China in a special category among all other nations. And knowing this; it is very wise indeed from the Chinese authorities to reject the idea that their country could be a political model for the rest of the world… - China got its intellectual understanding about Modernity from Marxism. And the core of Marxism is that money transforms into capital through an act of investment. In other words they learned that ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ dictates the need to follow a given methodology in order for a country to industrialize successfully. And this Marxist rational understanding of capital is what allowed the Chinese to beat the west at its own game… ah but the game is not done yet will be the answer. Watching how the gangster behavior of the Anglo-world is now in the open one can indeed have doubts.
- the
Chinese are unencumbered by ideology. Their understanding of the
operation of reality is fundamentally pragmatic. Reality is change.
Change is resulting from the burst of energy that results from the dance
between the polarities of an entity (as in the contact between the
poles of an electric battery that generates a burst of energy powering
an action that brings about a certain change).
Being unencumbered by ideology the Chinese are interested by pragmatic approaches to problem solving. And by pragmatic they mean solutions that generate tangible benefits in the production of their daily lives which means solutions that are equally satisfactory for the individuals and their society. Pragmatic also means that abstract solutions, that are not satisfactory nor for the individuals nor for society, have to be abandoned. The same goes for knowledge. So in their search for pragmatism capital is thus necessarily meant to:
- satisfy the individuals’ need for – a peaceful context without outside interference (foreign relations), – and a context that minimizes the obstacles to the individuals’ while they produce the daily lives of their families (individual enterprise). It is the Chinese view that these are the 2 core obligations of power toward their citizens.
- the satisfaction of these 2 core obligations is viewed as solidifying societal cohesion
- and a strong societal cohesion is understood to be the foundation of a strong and resilient nation
All
this leaves aside many important things like culture, the arts, and so
on. The fact of the matter is that, in its planified approach of
reforms, China prioritized some fields and some actions over other. The
state is viewed as the most strategic actor in impulsing the march of
the nation forward and private initiative is viewed as being
complementary to the actions of the state.
This view explains why some sectors are considered to be strategic and why they are made state monopolies (finance, military, health, energy,…). Other sectors that are considered non-strategic are left to the initiative of the private sector.
The state has long considered that material productions were crucial to grow GDP and so it largely ignored culture and the arts. That’s how the private sector has become dominant in those fields. But to make a quick buck the private sector gives precedence to profits over quality and this inevitably provokes wailing and gnashing of teeth in high culture circles which includes some individuals in the top leadership. A reaction was thus inevitable which was expressed in many speeches and gave way to inquiries about corruption in the cultural and art scenes.
Seen the importance of culture and the arts in building up societal cohesion it is inevitable, in my opinion, that the state will reassert a bigger place in those fields in the not so distant future.
This view explains why some sectors are considered to be strategic and why they are made state monopolies (finance, military, health, energy,…). Other sectors that are considered non-strategic are left to the initiative of the private sector.
The state has long considered that material productions were crucial to grow GDP and so it largely ignored culture and the arts. That’s how the private sector has become dominant in those fields. But to make a quick buck the private sector gives precedence to profits over quality and this inevitably provokes wailing and gnashing of teeth in high culture circles which includes some individuals in the top leadership. A reaction was thus inevitable which was expressed in many speeches and gave way to inquiries about corruption in the cultural and art scenes.
Seen the importance of culture and the arts in building up societal cohesion it is inevitable, in my opinion, that the state will reassert a bigger place in those fields in the not so distant future.
China integrates Modernity inside its own traditions
Public governance has never been detached from traditional teaching. But the cultural revolution destroyed peoples’ attachment to the national worldview (Traditional Chinese Culture). As a result the transition to Modernity in the eighties was a smooth, practically conflict free, process that rapidly started to satisfy the material needs of the population. This resulted in extremely rapid societal changes that for sure spun heads around.
But having been liberated from their most pressing material needs, in the context of a crumbling worldview, the population was facing a spiritual void that left their existential questions unanswered. And the whole of Chinese society was soon overwhelmed by an existential malaise.
By the mid 1990th local sects and cults started to sprout proposing answers to troubled minds. Those that successfully collecting cash for their services rapidly grew into large enterprises that spread their tentacles around the whole country (1). It is in this particular context that in April 1999 over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners demonstrated in front of the Northern Gate of Zhongnanhai (CPC headquarters and central government compound in Beijing) demanding legal recognition and freedom from state interference. Rumors maintain that Jiang Zemin, CPC General Secretary at the time, was furious and, against the opinion of his colleagues in the Politburo, ordered a crackdown of the sect.
There has been a general recognition over the last 2 decades of the ravages that this spiritual void was imposing on the country. And answers have started to emerge spontaneously at the grassroots level. What is remarkable is that the CPC and state institutions have acquiesced and have been surfing on that wave. As a general rule these answers call for a return to Chinese Traditional Culture (CTC) which was the worldview shared by all Chinese over the last five thousand years and more. CTC is the Chinese grand narrative about the working of reality that shows to the individual how to best position her/himself in order to maximize the return on her/his actions in term of – health, – economic well-being, – relations with family and friends and the other citizens, and so on.
A worldview is grounded in the axioms of its civilization. Here follows a sketch of the Chinese axioms (2) that are shared by all Chinese, even if it is most generally, in an unconscious fashion :
- Polarism = Yin-Yang
- reality is a continuous process of change that results from the dance between polarities. In this view reality is an all-embracing yin-yang organicism.
In the process of change the present is somehow evanescent. So the wisest attitude is to follow “the way” which is the path taken by the process of change. The way is the eternal dance between polarities, that balances all things and forces, so as to maintain a general state of harmony between the polarities and in the whole of the universe. By being aware of the way one maximizes the return on one’s actions… - the past has no beginning and the future has no end.
- Yin-Yang is the working principle of the whole universe or Taiji or the ultimate source of energy that powers yin-yang,
- Yin-Yang is the ultimate creative source of the process of transformation that gives rise to all the “ten thousand things” or “all there is under heaven”.
The Chinese worldview, or Chinese Traditional Culture (CTC), is derived from its axioms of civilization. It is a set of pragmatic applications that relate to the production of daily life. Chinese traditional knowledge, at the image of animism, was based on the idea that knowledge formation operates as a process of stacking incremental add-ons to the existing knowledge base. So all ancient texts that have been preserved to this very day are basically compilations of even more ancient texts to which the author has added some personal commentaries. Here follow the most important applications in the Chinese worldview:
- philosophy and education application: it primarily relates to 2 schools of though: Confucianism (education and state management), and Taoism. The classics of both schools were derived from more ancient texts among which the Yijing certainly played a central role.
- health application better known as “Traditional Chinese Medicine” or TCM which itself is composed of 6 specialized domains, medicinal herbs, Qigong, acupuncture, meditation, massage and diet.
- art application: music, poetry, calligraphy, Xieyi painting have always been an integral part of the teaching program of the mandarins.
- governing application: The Qunshu Zhiyao (3) is a 500,000 words Compilation of 14,000 Books and 89,000 scrolls of ancient writings dating from 600-650 AD that relate to the most Important Governing Principles discovered by men of knowledge of past generations.
- agriculture application: The lunar calendar is adapting each year to the particular cosmological characteristics of the year which means that the calendar changes from year to year. One of the most important roles of the calendar is to advise farmers about the most propitious plantation and harvest dates.
Today the return of the country to its cultural roots is branching to all fields directly relating to daily life: health, fashion, furnishings, clothes, culture, art, and so on. Let’s see how this return to the tradition operates in the Chinese artworld.
In the wake of the country’s opening to the outside the more adventurous among Chinese artists were risk takers who understood that they had to navigate Western Modernism and postmodernism in order to enter in the new era of Modernity. This meant copying the styles of its different schools...
After a few years a small minority among those risk takers started to integrate the traditions of their country in their practice of Modernism. This return to their national roots saved them from the ignominy of aping the West and injected a new energy and meaning in their works while those venturing in postmodernism lost themselves in incoherence and largely vanished from the scene.
A few thinkers among that small minority fused their Chinese traditional ways with Western Modernism and this acted like dynamite that exploded both traditions and Modernism into their constitutive parts. A lot of confusion ensued for sure. But what was startling was what happened next. Falling back to earth these parts automatically recombined into mindscapes, on canvasses and into musical compositions, that were like dreams of a renewing China. These mindscapes were the first signs that a Chinese artistic maturation is at work.
As was the case for Modernism in Europe the Chinese avant-garde searches to represent deeper dimensions of reality than past representations. But one can’t escape the observation that the outcome of this exercise is radically different in China from what it was in Europe.
In Europe the avant-garde broke with the past (rupture) and lost itself in incoherent meanderings to finally land in ‘whatever is art’ which became the opportunity sized by propagandists and merchants to literally own the artworld (4). Such an artistic and cultural putsch was to have deeply negative societal implications for the West as we are discovering today in Late-Modernity.
In contrast the Chinese avant-garde exploded both, traditions and Modernism, into their constitutive parts which automatically recombined into mindscapes visualizing sites of ‘deconstruction-reconstruction’ of a nation on the move (continuity). Such nascent artistic and cultural visions will have immense societal implications, for China and I think also for the whole world, during the unfolding of Late-Modernity into what comes After-Modernity.
In matter of fact the juxtaposition of the narratives, suggested by a Western artistic and cultural putsch breaking with the past (rupture) and the artistic and cultural visions of a Chinese nation on the move (continuity), gives us a first image of the future that is in the making today.
Societal atomization and loneliness in the West foreshadow falling societies while high levels of societal cohesion and trust foreshadows a Chinese society on the move creating the building blocks of its future. As a thinking human being who observes societal dynamics I have no doubt what side is on the right track.
Feeling that its hegemony is threatened the West agitates
Since my years at the Free University of Brussels, end of the sixties – beginning of the seventies, I have been convinced that globalization and the transfer of Western industries to the 3rd world was not an act of charity. The reality of globalization is that big capital was confronted at the time with falling profits. And to counter this fall in profits big capital holders devised a strategy of expansion of their reach to the whole world. What this meant was that the corporations invested by them (MNC’s) would henceforth be able to invest freely in all countries on earth. This was the true nature of globalization. It was a globalization of the reach of big capital while labor and governments were kept stuck within their national borders.
The globalization of big capital went hand in hand with an ideology pushing individualism while sabotaging the working of state institutions and disparaging the idea of society. Margaret Thatcher was shouting that society does not exist that only individuals exist.
The ideas, I expose here, were shared by a very small minority of intellectuals. The general context in the seventies was indeed dominated by a worldwide campaign of disinformation that presented globalization as – an aid to the third world, – and a shift of the first world from material productions to knowledge base activities.
The objection by labor representatives to the loss of good paying jobs was countered by an ideology peddling progress and the replacement of manual labor by better paid jobs in knowledge base activities.
The statistics about wages over the last 50 years are without appeal. The wages of the 99%, corrected for inflation, appear to have fallen while in the meantime the benefits of increased productivity were siphoned exclusively by the 1%. The resulting increasing levels of inequality have resulted in a growing social malaise and societal cohesion started to dwindle with all the consequences for the future of Western societies.
All this happened while, in the cultural and artistic fields, US big capital was throwing money and university chairs at French intellectuals who were promoting Postmodernism and its rejection of all foundational stories or big narratives. Marxism and labor unions were the first victims of this new ideology. This was very useful for big capital in pushing its neoliberal ideology at the forefront of the political debate. Very few people understood what was going. It was like nobody cared any longer for anything else than the societal spectacle of consumerism.
Art which had lost its historical nature, after the putsch by propagandists and merchants to own it, was now ordered by celebrated ‘master critical thinkers’ to confine its inquiry to reasoning about the bits and pieces composing reality. What came out of that was complete incoherence and sheer ugliness. But there was worse. The thought police had forbidden artists to think big, to think about what is reality, to think about the place of humanity in the whole universe, to think about the mind, to think about consciousness, to think about life, to think about what is art, to think about beauty, … Beauty was certainly one of the most disparaged among all ideas and it was no longer tolerated that art could celebrate beauty!
All big narratives were relentlessly attacked in the mainstream media and by idiot intellectuals and Western people started to be scared to be seen referring to such narratives. Christianity literally melted away while Marxism was made the enemy of individual freedom and people avoided it as the plague.
Neoliberalism and postmodernism were sponsored by Western propagandists and they were made to work hand in hand to achieve the complete domination of big capital over humanity. Now that the earth is over-populated and that the activities of humanity generate all kinds of side-effects that threaten life on earth some big capital holders are thinking that the solution is the elimination of 90% of the world population...
The 6th mass-extinction and the futility of hegemony
From the perspective of the agents of Western hegemony there is no doubt that the success of the reason at work within capital is absolutely total. And one is forced to recognize that this view is shared by the large mass of humanity which is intoxicated with consumerism.
But there is no longer any doubt that this success comes with numerous side-effects that are attacking the principle of life which is now well on its way to be annihilated...
What I mean to say here is that, while the hegemony of the Western world over the whole of humanity is dwindling, its components are ever more destructive of the principle of life. This is a radical contradiction indeed. We are faced on one side with the triumphant hegemony of Western thought and on the other side with the extinction of life on earth! One would think that the choice would be easy and that humanity would favor the reproduction of life. Without life there would no longer be any talk about hegemony... But it seems that the beneficiaries of Western hegemony, I mean the holders of big capital, can not let go of their privileges.
It is as if the components, of what makes up the hegemony of the West, were behaving like infectious agents inoculating the healthy cells of all living species (individuals) and thus unleashing a carcinogen process that eventually kills one living species after another. This process is called the 6th mass extinction.
When writing about the components of the hegemony of the Western world I mean the following factors:
- a Western initiated economic system, governed by the reason at work within capital, that defeats any opposition and leaves it to die (societies, languages, alternative economic approaches, ideas, political opposition, and so on).
- a Western initiated worldview, or view of the world, that does not accept any other views but its own which rests on the following 3 foundations:
- the philosophic “primacy of the self” which gives rise to the ideology of individualism,
- the economic “primacy of individual ownership” which gives rise to the ideology of private property rights,
- the political “primacy of individual free choice” which gives rise to – the economic ideology of “individual free choice” among the offer of products on the mass-market, – and the political ideology of “individual free choice" among the offer of candidates by the so called democratic political system.
The reason that is at work within capital acts like a religion for big capital holders. And so the only thing that counts for them is the growth of their profits and the increase of their capital base. In light of this the reason that is at work within capital is a total success indeed. Ever more profits are being generated and their capital base is thus constantly growing. Since their religion is so successful why doing away with it indeed? In their minds it would be sheer lunacy.
To guarantee the success of their religion big capital holders took ownership over the working of state institutions. And through state institutions they manipulated the populations to acquiesce to their activities. They first convinced autarchic farmers to go toil in the cities where they would lose their economic autonomy. And once the farmers were made captive of the market to ensure their daily survival there was no longer any limit to the ideological power of manipulation of big capital.
The worldview of Modernity and its foundations, “primacy of the self” + “primacy of individual ownership” + “primacy of economic and political individual free choice”, acted as support of that manipulation:
- first the 3 obliged subjects, of Early-Modern art, affirmed the foundations of Modernity in the minds of the citizens living in the “bourgs” better known as the bourgeois,
- secondly the success of the long distance merchants confirmed the truth of the foundations of Modernity in the minds of their fellow citizens. Meanwhile the 3 obliged subjects, of Early-Modern art, fashioned the public’s imagination about how the success of the long distance merchants materialized in their daily lives.
- thirdly the success of Western European long distance merchants rattled the minds of the elites of 3rd world countries confirming in the minds of their subjects the superiority of Modernity which was further largely amplified when Western industrial goods started to destroy their local craft economies...
This whole process developed, over the span of some 5-6 centuries, slowly in the beginning and ever accelerating thereafter. It enters now in the phase of its old age called Late-Modernity that witnesses the convergence of:
1. the re-organization of the governance-world with all the chaos that necessarily ensues:
- societal atomization in the West versus high societal cohesion in China
- Western democracy owned by big capital and the re-election curse versus Chinese competency, fairness, and care for the people
- the West wants to impose its thinking and its ways but China has its own thinking and ways so a clash ensues
- non-understanding between Chinese and Westerners → the axioms of the Western civilization clash with the Axioms of the Chinese civilization :
- the foundations of Western Modernity (ideology and propaganda) clash with the foundations of Chinese Traditional Culture (pragmatism and flow)
2. the convergence of all the side-effects and consequences of the application of the views resting on the foundations of Modernity:
3. environmental consequences of population growth + the primacy of the reason at work within capital :
We are individual witnesses of the behavior of our species and what we observe is that under Modernity humanity has been on an unprecedented path of life destruction that could very soon wipe out our species.
Faced with such an outrageousness our conscience is seething and shouting at us to act immediately.
My personal experience, from the beginning of the nineteen-seventies till today, can be summarized as follows:
Along the next chapters I’ll dig gradually deeper and deeper in the subjects mentioned in 5.
______________
- dualism: individuals-good versus society-bad + Western views resting on the 3 foundations of Modernity (primacy of self + primacy of individual ownership + primacy of individual free choice) → hyper-individualism + postmodernism: the end of worldviews → societal cohesion = zero → societal atomization → the fall of Western societies
- population growth: mass produced goods reduce costs. The burden on family life eases and the populations grow. The human demands on nature eventually surpass the carrying capacity that the earth can sustain …
3. environmental consequences of population growth + the primacy of the reason at work within capital :
- deforestation → soil Erosion + disruption of the Water Cycle + interruption of the absorption of CO2 and release of the CO2 stored in tree trunks and leaves + loss of biodiversity (extinction of species), …
- chemical pollution of water, land, and air → poisoning of species (our own included) leading to their eventual extinction…
- peak resources: energy, metals and minerals are rarefying → shows that unlimited growth in a limited setting is an impossibility → in conclusion Modernity gave rise to non-sustainable societies…
- an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over-insulates the earth and temperatures rise. The earth eventually overheats which changes the climate and species experience difficulties to adapt to the new weather conditions. The faster the climate changes the more difficult it is for species to adapt. The presently changing climate appears to be very rapid compared to past changes. This portends extreme levels of life extinction...
We are individual witnesses of the behavior of our species and what we observe is that under Modernity humanity has been on an unprecedented path of life destruction that could very soon wipe out our species.
Faced with such an outrageousness our conscience is seething and shouting at us to act immediately.
My personal experience, from the beginning of the nineteen-seventies till today, can be summarized as follows:
- will to act in order to bring change: localism → autarchy → participation in the political process,
- observing, that the human predicament is exorbitant, it appeared to me that my individual actions were absolutely futile
- depression
- acceptance of the facts
- pursuit of personal coherence through painting and thinking about life:
- the life of species is given by the dance between their polarities. For the human species this means the dance between the individuals and their society,
- the interconnectedness between all living species participates in the life of the earth,
- the meaning of the earth’s and its particles’ life and the function of life in the whole of our universe...
Along the next chapters I’ll dig gradually deeper and deeper in the subjects mentioned in 5.
______________
Notes
1. See “The eleven most active religious cults in China” published in ‘TheChinaStory’ on 2014-06-05.
2. The Chinese axioms of civilization were first described in the “Yijing” also called “I Ching” or “Book of changes” (oldest Chinese text first appearing sometime 3200 years ago but whose origins go a lot further down in time).
Some 2500 years ago the “Yijing” was adapted to the context of the day which got summarized in the “Dao de jing”.
3. Qunshu Zhiyao : The Governing Principles of Ancient China. Published by The World Book Company. Hong Kong.
4. See “Organic art = the patterns of life. (1). Note 2
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