The substance of this comment addresses one of the matters I'm presently writing about.
Here follows this commentary :
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“Cooperation instead of competition has never been a western concept or philosophy. For hundreds if not thousands of years the western dominance has left a sad legacy of exploitation of the poor by the rich colonial masters and of bloody wars”.
Yes this is the crux of the matter in term of differentiating the attitudes of East and West.
But how did East and West come to such radical different approaches ?
It all goes back to the historical transition from “non-power tribal-societies” to “power-societies”.
The East transitioned in “continuity” from tribal-societies and their worldview “animism” to “power societies” and “animism+” while in the TriContinental-Area (Middle-East) the transition operated along the lines of “rupture” from tribal-societies and their worldview “animism” to “power societies” and “religions”. Western Europe and its later territorial extensions then later inherited the “Middle-Eastern” model…
This transition ended up consecrating the institutional stabilization of power-societies which initiated the epochal realm of civilizational axioms :
— “continuity” in the East versus “rupture” in the West
— “animism+” in the East versus “religion” in the West
— “polarities” in the East versus “dualities” in the West
— “continuity through transformation” in the East versus “rupture through creative destruction” in the West
— and the list goes on and on.
What is intriguing is that these axioms of civilization today operate on the subconscious level and as such their existence has literally been forgotten by the individuals. But the impact of these axioms on our daily behaviors is nevertheless very real as the quote here above attests…
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I'm writing a new book titled "The continuity of the cultural field". Here is how I sum up what this new project is all about.
Culture is one of those words whose meaning varies from one individual to another and this necessarily leads to many misunderstandings and a lot of confusion. I have been directly confronted with this kind of confusion while I was thinking and writing about the meaning of art and the mechanisms of societal reproduction in which art plays such a determinant role. Art is an intrinsic part of culture, and it is also in the vanguard of culture, that’s how I came to delve into the meaning of the word culture.
In the process I discovered that what we habitually call culture covers in reality different concepts that apply to a similar cultural substance as it is expressing itself along different timescales :
1. a civilization emerges within a given territory and its axioms then spread a cultural continuum in the multiple societies that eventually emerge within its territorial sphere
2. a worldview Is a cultural narrative, about the working of reality, that is shared by the citizens of a given society along a historical era within the span of its civilizational continuum
3. culture is the sum of all human ideas, behaviors, and fashions expressed within a given society in the present. It derives from the interactions, between the axioms of that society’s civilization and its worldview, with its present contextual settings.
We have, as a matter of habit, considered that this similar substance, as it is expressing itself over different timescales, is culture. But the short characterization given here above suggests that this similar substance takes on a different character as it moves in the different timescales given by the present, or a certain time-span, or the civilizational continuum. The reigning confusion about the meaning of the concept culture originates in this mix-up.
I have been calling the transformation of a similar cultural expression as it manifests in three different timescales “the continuum of the cultural field”. It is the continuity of the field of culture of a given society from its civilizational continuum, to its historical worldview, and to its daily culture in the present.
The idea of the cultural continuum of societies parallels the biological continuum of individuals. Confronted with time this idea of continuum necessarily implies evolution ‒ the biological evolution of the individuals and the cultural evolution of societies. Both evolve and both participate in the evolution of the species. In that sense the cultural continuum within societies acts like the genetic code of the individuals. Biological evolution is imprinted in the genetic code of the individuals after a genetic mutation replicates over time. In the same vain societal evolution is imprinted in the cultural continuum after a cultural mutation (meme) replicates over time.
In other words the societal answers to imbalances, provoked by ‒ technological revolutions ‒ population explosions ‒ natural desequilibria ‒ forces originating outside of earth ‒ or other, are always the result of the synchronization of replicatable memes in the continuum of the cultural field. Societies adapt to imbalances when they are able to synchronize memetic mutations with the continuum of their cultural field. In the same vein the individuals adapt to imbalances when they are able to synchronize genetic mutations with the continuum of their biological field. But this also implies that societies, as well as individuals, die when they can’t synchronize mutations in their particular field with its continuum.
This conclusion goes counter to the traditional belief that societal change originates in the materiality of economic or natural phenomena. In other words cultural change had always been considered a derivative of material change. But this belief was grounded in the confusion of the different character that the concept culture takes on a as it moves in the different timescales given by the present, or a given time-span, or the civilizational continuum.
The fact of the matter is that the arbitration of the competition between different economic possibilities was always a cultural act. And the adoption of “the reason that is at work within capital” was and remains a cultural conversion of the mind. When we talk for example about ‒ economic novelty ‒ the societal treatment of health ‒ or their social outcomes, all are intrinsically particular forms of the culture of the day that eventually gets synchronized in “the continuum of the cultural field”.
The book that I'm writing presently is an ordered compilation of my multiple earlier writings about these 3 different cultural expressions and it attempts to structure them into the whole that I call “the continuum of the cultural field” which is the societal equivalent of the individuals’ ‘genetic code’.
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