"The continuity of the cultural field". (2) Modernity is dieing. What comes after Modernity ?

While writing my earlier books I published a first draft  week after week.  

For the present book I will, from time to time, publish some parts that I think illustrate a particular   flavor of our present air of the time. 

 

Today I offer a chapter about what comes after Modernity.
Your comments are welcome.

 

 

The word “post-modernity” etymologically means "what comes after Modernity". Unfortunately the word has been set to marinate at all kinds of ideological sauces and its meaning is thus diverging far apart nowadays sowing a lot of confusion in the minds. While having used it in the sense of "what comes after Modernity" in my book “Artsense”, published in 2004, I started to feel some years ago that for the sake of clarity it was time for me to discard it in favor of the words “what comes after modernity” or "After-Modernity". 

 

What comes after Modernity will be a third civilizational evolutionary age or an evolutionary age that brings about humanity's 4th historical worldview era. As an observer of the world I become ever more convinced that the first roots, of After-Modernity presently starting to emerge, are announcing us that what comes after Modernity is the fall not only the fall of the last Western originated worldview that has spread to the whole world but also the fall of Western civilization. Humanity's turning to its 4th historical worldview era follows :

      1. animism which was the worldview shared by tribes over the span of tens of thousands of years
      2.  the first religions and philosophies were the worldviews of early kingdoms and empires that launched civilizations. Later the territorial sphere of civilizations eventually divided into multiple societies that gradually adapted the original worldview to their particular contextual settings which differentiated the societies within a same civiilizational realm (Christian Western Europe : France, Germany, Italy, Britain, etc… Confucian China : China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc…). 
      3. Modernity was the quasi-worldview imposed by “the reason that is at work within capital” that gave way to nation-states, rationalism, materialism, consumerism, hyper-individualism and finally societal atomization. 
      4. After-Modernity is the worldview our descendants will come to share when coming out of the chaos of "the great convergence of Late-Modernity" (side-effects of Modernity + governance-world).

Observing how ‘the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity’ is unfolding we come away with the conclusion that its effects are destroying the habitat of life which weakens ever more deeply the societies of Late-Modernity thus threatening the very existence of the model of governance of power societies and their civilizations.  

 

This fourth worldview historical evolutionary age will bring about a new paradigm of societal reality that unmistakably will reject ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ while converting the minds to ‘the reason that is at work within the principle of life’. The narrative summing up this new paradigm will regrow societal cohesiveness through the sharing of a worldview which, unfortunately for us, will only become recognizable long after its maturation. This is why I simply call this new historical era “After-Modernity”. But what already strikes me is that the new paradigm of “After-Modernity” will inevitably be adopted for the following reasons :

    • under the sheer pressure to conserve the species humanity will have to accelerate the adaptation of its societal evolution to the realities of a seriously downgraded ‘life habitat’. No technological miracle can erase the damage that is already locked-in and so the only choice available will be to adapt to the new contextual settings

    • the acceleration of the adaptation of human societal evolution shall be abrupt. It is bound to occur within a very short time span compared with similar turning points in the past and it will plunge our descendants in an unfortunate struggle for survival that will eclipse humanity’s memory about scientific and technological knowings

    • all societies on earth and their hyper-complex systems, throughout all civilizations, will abruptly fail and the individuals will be left to fend for themselves and their families. I’m nevertheless convinced that the Chinese model of governance will be the last standing and that, before coming down, it will succeed to attenuate the damages of the re-localization of its citizens’ activities.

 

The superseding of modernity by what comes after Modernity is bound to be more than a paradigmatic shift of our societal worldviews. It is going to dramatically shrink world population levels within a relatively short time-span and the radical shock this will provoke is necessarily going to awaken us to the necessity to invent radical new ways of living. This is going to affect the axioms of our civilizations, destroy our present worldviews and revolutionize our cultures everywhere around the world. 

While we have no way to know in advance how "After-Modernity" is going to turn out we nevertheless can already observe some first signs :


1. Human responsibility :

       Following the catastrophic maelstrom of destruction unleashed upon the principle of life on earth, by ‘the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity’, the necessity for humanity to accept its responsibility will slowly and gradually begin to be internalized in the individuals' consciousness. We already start to understand, indeed, that the human individuals will be left on their own to nurture the very conditions that will ensure the survival of their own species and that will also ensure the well-being and potential evolutionary rise of all other living species around them. This will invariably lead to the adoption of the following founding principles of a new culture of life:


2. Necessity to find a balance between individual and societal interests :

       The ultra-individualism characterizing Western Late-Modernity is simply not working. It is killing the principle of life on earth. A balance will have to be found that takes into account the necessity to reproduce societies over the many generations while preserving some room for the individuals’ self-expression. This is indeed the only way to guarantee an era of human responsibility that will recognize:


3. the organic character of life :

       Life was considered to be god’s will under religious worldviews, or the flowing of “the way“ under the Traditional Chinese Philosophical worldview, and it was considered to be like mechanically driven under modernity (life as an engineer's dream). Our future understanding is going to let transpire life’s very deep micro roots, at the biochemical and energetic levels, and this will force us to recognize the ultimate binding, or communion, of all living particles within the whole. In this sense ”After Modernity” is going to be integrating the observations of the latest science and will then connect these observations, with the visions of animism, in a kind of completion of the societal evolutionary spiraling cycle of humanity's worldviews 


4. the un-attainability of the whole :

       Late-modernity concludes with the fall of civilization under the hubris of Western modern man. After the costs of the side-effects of modernity start to appear unbearable to them the scientific and business communities are soon going to recognize the futility of following "the reason that is at work within capital". We will then all be freed from the ideological straight jackets of Modernity and rediscover that the whole in which we are such tiny insignificant particles will never be attainable nor to our understanding nor to our observation.

       This will assuredly be a radical departure from the modern certainty that the power of rationality and science shall conquer nature and the universe one day in the future. Such a shift of perception will inevitably question the validity of the scientific approach and impose a re-framing of its methodology in light of the imperious necessity for all human activities to be beneficial to the common good and the evolution of the principle of life in general.

       I think that humanity will re-consecrate the necessity of human responsibility to the level of a prime societal imperative. This is when science will be detached from the straight jacket that was imposed on it by capital in the form of its choice of what to research that, in finale, was decided through financing which led to the scientists' “syndrome of the soldier” obeying orders without questioning the sense and the morality of what is being asked from them.

       The notion of human responsibility that is soon going to impose itself to human societies will squarely front the scientists with their societal responsibility for the consequences of their work. While appearing at first sight as a limitation societal responsibility will free scientists to follow the path that they deem should be taken in light of their understanding of what is best to generate a better tomorrow for the human species. This will free science from the shackles of the profit motivation and as such will liberate it to work in the interest of the common good.


5. The whole of our reality is perhaps only one among other :

       Outside the borders of the ensemble constituted by “the whole of our reality”, or what is more commonly called our universe, are eventually other ensembles corresponding to other “dimensions of reality” or other “ensembles creating their own whole reality”, or what is called other universes. But as they are unattainable to us they don't really matter out of perhaps inspiring us an eternal feeling of awe, of wonderment, for the mystery of the unknown.


6. Ontological primitives are the most basic ingredients of the reality of the self :

       Our daily experiences are the only things in our lives that appear to really matter in our minds. What I mean by daily-life experiences are the subjective feelings that conjure our state of suffering or our state of happiness ‒ a headache ‒  the taste of a strawberry ‒ the love of others ‒ and so on. These are the ultimate ingredients of our personal reality. Consciousness then procures us a supplemental awareness of the vital importance of the interactions between ‒ our body and mind  ‒ our body-mind and the other entities around us. And this is how we suddenly discover that our local habitat is an interconnected web of life.

       Acquired knowledge then projects the abstraction of our interconnected web of life further from us in the dimensions of larger sets. But these projections act like light that is being projected upon something that appears outside of ourselves, outside of the domain of our ontological primitives, and as such this something outside of the domain of our ontological primitives, depending on the context, may or may not impact our subjective feelings.

       Our deep reality is thus constituted by ‒ our subjective feelings ‒ the conscious or unconscious interactions of our body-mind with the other entities around us in our local habitat. These constitute the ultimate and intimate reality of our “self”. Acquired knowledge sheds light outside of the ultimate and intimate reality of the “self”.


7. The reality of the “self” versus the whole of reality :

       The ultimate and intimate reality of our “self” ends with death. It is like a temporal island somewhere in the infinite ocean of “the whole of reality” that seems to have no end. Both are ultimate realities in their own right. They are ultimate in reference to their own web of life. The self’s  web of life is the universe of her/his local habitat while the web of life of the whole of reality is the whole universe in which the species living in their local habitat are merely like colonies of bacteria in the local habitat of the gut of the individual.

       The universe of the self is a parcel of the whole universe and as such its properties and character are derived from the whole but simultaneously, like one bacteria of a colony in its habitat the gut of the individual, it participates in impacting the health of the whole. In other words the universe of the self acts perhaps like a fundamental particle of the whole universe. It is a part of the whole but it operates autonomously within the universal constraints.

       If observed, from outside its habitat by an entity in a higher spatial dimension, its behavior would appear impossible to forecast. Perhaps like scientists in the human universe, who observe what from their vintage point appears as fundamental particles, these entities in a higher dimension would also conclude that the behavior of the  fundamental particles, constituted by human individual selves, is impossible to forecast. Some of them would then eventually hypothesize that the working of reality at the nano-level of their observation is not following the laws of their rational system and would then propose that reality at that level behaves quantumally.

       We, humans living in our own habitat, know for a fact that the self resides in its own local web of life where it has a propensity to lean on its ontological primitives to maximize its daily-life experiences. From the perspective of the species, and of society which is its agent, this propensity, of the self to lean on its ontological primitives, acts like a shout-out for pragmatism at the hart of our societal worldview. This was the path taken by East-Asian ancestors when they initiated their civilization.

       The Middle-East and later Europe, for reasons that I’ll expose further, took the path of rupture. In a leap of faith they postulated that the ultimate and intimate reality of the “self” is given by the absoluteness of the whole of reality. From their vintage point, in the particular context of the transition from non-power to power societies, they posited that an all powerful god created the whole of reality and was now maintaining it in good order.

       The result was the elaboration of a religious and ideological narrative that is totally detached from humanity’s ontological primitives sometime 5 to 6,000 years ago. This new narrative was adopted societally after satisfying the following ‒ the separation of the individual minds from the ultimate and intimate reality of the “self” which calls for the easing of daily life by reducing suffering ‒ the affirmation by the men of power of their control and privileges over society ‒ the gluing of the minds around a new worldview that cohered societies and helped them to reproduce their institutions of power over the generations.

       This kind of rupture of the propensity of the self to lean on its ontological primitives took different forms within the confines of other alluvial plains. In the Indus Valley, for example,  it was posited that the whole of reality was the ultimate reality and that the self was an illusion. The ultimate salvation from suffering was then presented as being pure consciousness which is the consciousness from the vintage point of the whole.


8. Beauty and ugliness are not in the eye of the beholder :

      During Late-Modernity we have been bombarded non-stop by a mechanical regurgitation of the counter-truth of Postmodernism that was no more than an advanced stage of societal deconstruction before the atomization of society and its death at the end of inertia.

      Beauty is nevertheless an objective form, or better the only workable form, of whatever emerges and grows successfully in reality (local and whole). Outside of that particular form reality can simply not emerge. Ugliness is indeed the pattern of unsuccessful evolutionary patterns. As objective forms that solidified, over the long haul of life's biological evolution, beauty and ugliness became lightning rods for all living particles in the present.

      The patterns of beauty and ugliness impose nothing. It is up to us to tell them apart from the rest in the fabric of reality and to make good use of the information that is contained in them in order to successfully conduct our reproduction as individuals, as societies, and as a species.

      Beauty and ugliness solidified as patterns along the evolutionary path of the principle of life. They simply signal to us what works and what does not work in real life and that helps us to understand what works and what does not work in shaping our individual lives and the path of our societies. But it takes a lot of effort and a lot of patience learning to understand how those patterns operate and only the wise-man, in the end, has the mental rigor necessary to SEE the way of what works, and what does not work, in our personal and societal lives.

      It is in this particular sense that Aesthetics emerged initially at the dawn of societal evolution. Aesthetics emerged in the minds, of the animistic (wo)men of knowledge, first as consciousness about the propensity of the self to lean on its ontological primitives and later it served as the guiding principle in the delivery of visual signs, music, and dance that each in their own way helped the (wo)men of knowledge in sharing the narrative of their worldview with their fellow tribesmen. 

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I personally think that, in Late-Modernity, only a real artist can train his mind to recognize those patterns in the lines, forms, colors, sounds, smells, and so on...  in the air of the times and render these on  her/his canvas, her/his music sheet, or in her/his life. When she/he masters her/his art on the canvas, or the music sheet or in her/his life, she/he is able to distinguish those patterns at work in the reality around her/him. This is what gives real artists and sages that ability to ‘smell’ the active principles that are emerging in the air of their times way before their manifestation becomes evident to others.

That ability was recognized historically as the wisdom of the sage. 

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