I uploaded "Modernity" : the 2nd Volume of the series "From Modernity to After-Modernity"

The second volume of the series "From Modernity to After-Modernity" just got published in e-book form and is available from my website. The 1st edition totals 1,022 pages.

The complete series will total 5 volumes :

Volume 0 :  From Modernity to After-Modernity      (100 pages Synthesis)
Volume 1 : The continuum of the cultural field
Volume 2 : Modernity
Volume 3 : The societal formation of knowledge
Volume 4 : The essence of the arts is societal and not individual
Volume 5 : Societal evolution

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Check the foreword to the book reproduced here under 

and if interested download the PDF

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Foreword

In Volume 1 of this series, “The continuum of the cultural field”, I approached culture from its different aspects as they interact in a societal field. This notion of a societal cultural field eliminates the habitual confusion that shrouds our thinking about the different aspects of culture as they express societally over different timescales : 

• the culture of the day

• the societal worldview (religion or other)

• and the civilization our society belongs to.

This idea of a cultural field implies that culture traverses society, through time, at the image of the field of molecular biology that traverses the continuity of the principle of life. And at the image of the continuity of molecular biology, that ensures the evolution of life, the cultural continuum necessarily implies the societal evolution of species. 

Both types of evolution, biological and societal, participate in the evolution of humanity.

Biological evolution gets imprinted in the continuum of the molecular biology of the individuals after a genetic mutation replicates over time. In the same
fashion societal evolution is imprinted in the cultural continuum of a society after a cultural mutation (meme) replicates over time and gets synchronized in
the Continuum of its Societal Cultural Field.

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The subject of the present volume is Modernity.  The new paradigm of Modernity emerged sometime in the 12th century in Frankish South-Western Europe and it then gradually expanded to the whole Western part of the continent.

In a first move South-Western European Franks, who already had beaten the Moors at Poitiers-Tours in 732, decided, by the end of the 11th century, to follow the call of Pope Urban II to go dislodge them, this time, from Jerusalem. Once there their minds got struck by the luxuries in Arab markets and their desire to possess such luxuries eventually fostered long distance commerce with the Eastern Mediterranean. In the process the first Frank long distance merchants got confronted with unknown and overwhelming risks. While their minds adjusted, to the context of Medieval long distance roads, they were struck by the sudden capital importance their gold and silver had acquired in their minds. In a moment of illumination they discovered “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” and their view of the world got definitively estranged from the traditional religious paradigm rooted in belief.

In a second move the Italian city-states, that had started to integrate the Muslim Mediterranean commercial shipping routes by the beginning of the 11th century, sized the new commercial opportunity emanating form the Champagne Fairs to compensate for a decline in the exchanges, between the Muslim
Mediterranean ports, that had set in sometime around 1050.

Transshipments to the Champagne fairs dramatically increased their exchanges in the 12th and 13th centuries which got eased in the 13th century by the
adoption of new payment techniques that eliminated the dangers which had originally illuminated the minds of the first Frank long distance merchants to
“the reason”. In this process the initial enlightenment of the Frank merchants got downplayed while it had nonetheless been the profound cause for the
adoption of these new techniques in the first place.

And so it happened that the object of the enlightenment of the Frankish merchants, “the reason”, remained largely unspoken until the classical economists rediscovered the notion of capital some 6 centuries later. But in their separation of daily human life and needs, in a hierarchical classification, they lost
sight of the spirit of “the reason” that had originally activated the transformation of money into capital.

And so the enlightenment of the Frankish merchants remained largely unspoken and the chief source of the spirit, or of the nature, of Modernity got completely lost and, by the time of High-Modernity, it looked rather odd that merchants could have been enlightened by the transformation of money into capital which explains why philosophers and other thinkers completely missed the link between "the reason", and rationalism, and science.

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This Volume 2 is about :

1. How the convergence of the continuum of the Western cultural field, with the internal contextual settings in South-West Europe at the end of the 11th century, enfolded Western Modernity which got then forced with such a totalitarian zeal on the rest of the world that its choice was limited to death or to submission.


2. How Modernity confronts us with a real paradox :
   
   
   
   • on one hand its success, at cheaply manufacturing an abundance of good, is so radical that it distracted human attention from the big picture of the only thing that really matters in the grand scheme of things which is life
   
   
   • and on the other hand its externalities have been left to accumulate so far over the centuries that now, that humanity finally awakens to its side-effects, some damages already appear irreversible.
   
   
3. How humanity is now confronted with a predicament of mass-extinction that has only one sensical answer which is to discard the hidden “reason”, that formed the paradigm of Modernity in the first place, and to write the narrative of the new paradigm of "the reason that is at work in the First Principles of life".