painting and thinking: The great turning (11)

10. A new worldview in After-Modernity

The historical combination of the societal disintegration of the West, with China’s economic rise to the top spot, have initiated the hope in the Global South of a potential liberation from Western hegemony. But, notwithstanding this potential, it is already a mathematical certainty that lifestyles comparable to the present ones in the West will never become available in the Global South !

The energy, that would be necessary to power the supply, of such a lifestyle to the world population at large, is simply not available physically on this earth. And the same is true for many other resources that are scarce like minerals and metals. But the fact is that humanity is not ready yet to recognize this bitter truth and I fear that it will fight till exhaustion to try to prove the contrary. But in the end the principle of reality will impose itself and humanity will come back to its senses. Unfortunately when this happens very little time will be left to adapt our way of living to what the earth can sustain. What humanity faces today is a world-wide predicament of life extinction that is caused by “the great convergence of Late-Modernity”.

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To start answering our present predicament it is imperative to get all nations, and all individuals onboard, to cooperate in order to possibly implement the necessary remedies. Having said that our natural sense of empathy forces us to recognize that the West, not only has robbed the rest of the world of so many of its resources during the last 5 centuries, but that it has also been living a lifestyle that is directly responsible for the multiples side-effects of Modernity that we observe nowadays.

To get all nations, and all individuals, onboard of a worldwide cooperation it will be necessary to operate a rapid equalization of lifestyles. Ensuring the survival of our descendants implies the cooperation of all. This is an imperative necessity ! And so an equalization of lifestyles has to start by a fall of Western lifestyles so that the people of the South get the perception that an opportunity opens up for bettering their own lives. This implies, first and foremost, a drastic fall in the consumption of energy and material resources by the West ! And this still says nothing about the impact of an eventual increase in the consumption of energy and material resources by the Rest !

In summary the economic challenge of the coming decades will be to balance world lifestyles at a level that the earth can sustain without damaging the chance to live of our descendants. Two scenarios are currently competing for the future of humanity :

Western post-humanism and the end of human societies

The traditional Western hegemonic bullying way of the last few hundred years, that is presently consuming the bio-capacity of the earth that future generations would need to live, could eventually be reset along the lines proposed by the World Economic Forum. (1)

This is the path of reform that the Western unipolar world order wants to impose by force to its own people and to the Global South. This path is being promoted by The United Nations Global Public Private Partnership (G3P) (2) which has been summarized by the WEF under, a slogan that made some noise a few months ago, “You will own nothing but you will be happy”.

In other words the Great reset is a societal engineering enterprise that proposes to render useless the majority of Western and Southern white and blue collar workers ! These are the useless people that Yuval Noah Harari says will soon have to be supplied digital games and drugs in order to keep them, in their rooms, distracted from the transformation of their post-modern societies into the new era of post-humanism. This transformation is determined by the investments of Western big capital holders who rely on innovations by scientists to maximize their returns on investments. The present round of scientific innovations focuses on the digitization of all human activities and on Artificial Intelligence to create robotic applications that will replace the human workforce. Owning the patents related to these innovations, as well as the robots themselves, Western big capital holders firmly believe that the world population can soon be made to shrink at sustainable levels by non replacement of the useless class. The remaining useful class would then be composed by themselves and their servants, the scientists, the financiers, the managers of the automated production units in charge of servicing the needs of that small useful class.

Such a social engineering would be the ultimate outcome of the paradigm of Modernity : a societal imposition of rationalism that would confirms the true totalitarian nature of Modernity !

In theory this new reality would undoubtedly eliminate the bulk of the side-effects of Modernity as well as the contradictions of the present governance-world. In other words, in the eyes of Western big capital holders, and their servants, post-humanism could potentially solve the predicament engendered by “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity”. Note that this kind of thinking is in line with the dualism of beginning and ending in which the end is the paradise of Christianity...

But in reality the strategy of Western big capital holders, and their servants, would come at the cost of rendering Homo-Sapiens useless as all the functions, to keep the species alive, are being replaced by the robotic reproduction of technical artifacts. Would this not be the ultimate postmodernist irony ?

Having said this the fact is that the whole reasoning about post-humanism was fatally flawed from the start. The Great reset failed indeed to imagine the possibility that Western big capital holders could have been beaten at their own game by China’s state capital ! This brings us to the 2nd scenario.

A community of sovereign nations sharing a common future rooted in the First Principles of life

The new multipolar world order that is proposed by the Global South, with Russia India and China at the core (RIC), envisages a multipolar world order that respects the sovereignty and the equality of all nations on earth which would thus be sharing a common future.

This intention certainly reflects the wisdom of the grand-mother of all civilizations. Unfortunately the conversation among the countries of the Global South has barely started and in its present stage it addresses solely their Geo-political opposition to the diktats of the Western imperial hegemon that invariably result in the plundering of their resources.

XI Jinping proposed the expression “a community of nations with a shared future” which is a first step in the direction of an equitable sharing of the bio-capacity of the earth :

“The concept of ‘a community of shared future for all humankind’ can be traced to the essential connotation of China's five thousand years of civilization. The concept, embodying the Chinese people's hope for a harmonious world, is a creative development of the traditional spirit in the new era of globalization, where all countries around the world share prosperity and losses, and are increasingly interconnected with one another.

… According to British scholar Martin Jacques, a professor at Cambridge University, China has provided a new possibility, that is, abandoning the law of the jungle, hegemonism and power politics and the zero-sum game and replacing them with win-win cooperation and co-construction and sharing. This is an unprecedented pioneering work and a great creation to change the world.” (3)
But the road to an effective equitable sharing, of the bio-capacity of the earth, would necessitate many more steps which implies that an equitable sharing is still far from the implementation stage. This certainly does not bode well upon the capacity of this community of nations to counter the predicament of “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity”.

And there is another determinant question that until now has not even emerged in the conversation of this community of nations. It concerns the finality of this community. What I mean by this is the following. The entire world has largely converted over the last half century to all the tenets of Western Modernity.

Is the community of nations of the Global-South just going to pursue on that road without any conversation about the finality of “the reason” , about rationality, and about the side-effects of Modernity ? As I argued in Part 9 the outcome of the rationality of Modernity is life extinction. And in note 1 of this summary of the economic challenge of the coming decades I concluded that the ultimate postmodernist irony would be that the robotic reproduction of technical artifacts would render Homo-Sapiens useless.

The world is slowly slipping into a new world order and, as the physicist Aurelien Barrau (4) likes to repeat, now is the time to stop everything we do in order to think what it is that we want life to be for our children. In other words the community of nations of the Global South has thus to conclude what is the finality of its enterprise.

But we are forced to observe that the emergence of a new world order is a far slower process than the unfolding of “the great convergence of Late-Modernity”. And the fact is that the Global South is still in reaction mode against the hegemony of the West while its societies are still navigating according to the tenets of Western Modernity !

Humanity is thus confronted today with 2 immature scenarios :

Western post-humanism is already well advanced and, without knowing it, the countries of the South are playing ball with it. But this scenario runs counter to “the First Principles of Life” and it is thus bound to get crushed by the physical and biological realities that sustain life !

The community of Southern sovereign nations is still in reaction mode against Western hegemony. But it has still to clarify the finality of its enterprise otherwise it will simply reproduce continue to reproduce Western Modernity !

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Our Late-Modern societal systems are very complex and because of their hyper-complexity they are also very fragile. To survive the great convergence these systems need to be reshaped and re-built, as rapidly as possible, for a different lifestyle that is resilient which means that it is rooted in “the First Principles of Life”. Unfortunately the human institutions of Modernity are deeply rooted and are thus not capable to generate decisions that are adapted to the great convergence.

In consequence the passing of tipping points is most probably going to destroy them before the individuals can adapt to the new realities on the ground. And so instead, of our present top-down systems, at some point necessity will force us to build newer ones from the ground up. In other words under the necessity of survival we are going to start building local autonomous systems of cooperation from scratch !

Necessity will most probably oblige local communities to cooperate with neighboring communities in order to produce adapted daily-use low-technologies and instruments of exchange to satisfy their needs of exchanges. And this will most probably force a coordination between local communities to save the most noteworthy technologies of the modern age :

The brain of humanity, or the World Wide Web, is the communication and collaboration engine of the citizens on this earth. It is difficult to imagine that local communities would not rush to save their brain after the coming institutional collapse sets in.

The human eyes in the sky, that observe the earth from space, inform the brain of humanity of future dangers so that decisions can be taken locally and regionally in order to protect the population.

Both of these technologies have shifted the paradigm of human communication. But their implementation and maintenance depend on an interconnected supply-chain that could easily be terminally disrupted. Scientists in these fields should thus need to think how to build resilience in the implementation and maintenance of these technological systems, while they still have the opportunity.

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Whatever path, humanity finally adopts during the unfolding of our future reality, one thing is already sure. The following decades are going to be perceived, by the individuals, as a very wild societal roller-coaster ! The quest for the meaning, of life and of reality, is thus unmistakably going to re-impose itself in the minds of the individuals as being determinant for their mental sanity. In what follows, I’ll address the need for a new thinking about the following 3 factors : — the reason for being — the new paradigm of After-Modernity — the new shared worldview of After-Modernity.

10.1. The reason for being

Life is like one of the applications running on the operating system of the universe. It is not a pre-ordained affair in the sense that the conditions that are at work within its local habitat are shaping its ultimate form and substance. The application starts to run, in other words life emerges, when the necessary ingredients for its emergence are present in the local context of a sub-ensemble of the whole. And once it has emerged life spreads in multiple species that complexify under the dance of their polarities the individuals and their societies.

Once running the application furthermore uses death as a mechanism that forces the reproduction of life by accumulating and diversifying the knowledge of the species. This mechanism of reproduction is animated by the male-female polarities of the individuals while the knowledge gets stored in the DNA-RNA of each individuals from where it gets activated by “the body’s processing machine”.

Over many million years this storage of knowledge also leaves patterns in the data stored within the DNA-RNA of the individuals that, somehow, infuse a certain awareness in their minds. This idea of patterns suggests that they are there to offer a guidance to the individuals. And it seems that this guidance uses aesthetics to convey an awareness to the individual about “what works for life” and “what does not work for life”.

Beauty is the word we use for the individual perception of “what works for life” while “what does not work for life” is perceived as being ugly. And the individual perception of beauty is rewarded with pleasure which is the most potent incentive to act according to what is perceived as being beautiful. In contrast the individual perception of ugliness is rewarded with suffering which is the most powerful incentive to run away from it.

This ultimately implies that life is not exclusively given by the operating system of the universe but that it reserves a space to the individual to shape her or his life according to her or his awareness and consciousness. This ultimately implies that life is not random at all but that the individuals are programmed in such a way that their life can eventually participate in the unfolding of the whole.

Understood in this sense life acquires a profound spiritual meaning that Modernity has terminally erased from the minds of Westerners. This spiritual meaning gives a glimpse of the path taken by the whole and it procures to the individuals a sight on the openness of that path. It is as if life were existing to activate some function, a function that we know nothing about yet, but that is necessary for the universe to complete the grand scheme in which it is the principal actor at least from the point of view of its very small particles.

It could also be that ultimately our universe is merely one player among many. But this is something that should remain outside of the concern of the domain of life on earth. Since it is inaccessible it is merely a distraction. Pragmatism teaches us, that we the individuals and our societies, should focus on life in our own habitat as our prime concern. The rest is bound to remain a chat matter.

This idea, that life has a profound meaning and that it participates in the universal scheme of things, obliges us to recognize that the individual particles of all living species are here to execute a common function. We share indeed a common “reason for being” which is to participate in the grand scheme of things of the “whole”. And its grand scheme of things is to keep the fire of life “a-live” in all its sub-ensembles. Keeping the fire of life “a-live” on earth is Homo-Sapiens’ “reason for being”…

I personally use the terminology “whole” because this appellation fits well with the data in my personal knowledge base. But I understand that others might be more inclined to adopt other appellations like god for example because such an appellation better fits in the worldview that they personally subscribe to for whatever reason.

What is the grand scheme of “the whole” remains a mystery and is perhaps meant to remain a mystery forever. So I will not attempt to speculate here. I feel indeed that on the scale of the “whole” our imagination is seriously handicapped. But from a pragmatic perspective, at the local level where we live, there are nevertheless many valuable lessons in this idea of the participation of the particles of all living species in the grand scheme of the “whole”. Here are some that immediately jump to mind :

This idea indicates that all living species, and all their individual particles, are acting in unison to keep the fire of life “a-live” in their habitat

By acting in unison to keep the fire of life “a-live” in their habitat they cooperate in the common accomplishment of the grand scheme of things of the “whole”.

If all particles are associated, in the common accomplishment of the grand scheme of things of the “whole”, this implies that there are paths of cooperation between the societies of a same species to attain that common accomplishment.

And if the societies of a same species, within a given context, dispose of paths of cooperation this suggests that there must be life application gateways that bind all species together in cooperation.

To possibly start to comprehend what such ideas imply for us personally, for our societies and for our species, we have to focus more particularly on the evolutionary paths of our societies that have brought us where we are today.

Our present reality did not fall from the sky nor did a grey giant create it as per a miraculous act. Our species evolved biologically and societally into our present reality. So to grasp our present societal reality, and how we fit in it as individuals, we have to understand how the balancing path, taken by the dance between the polarities “societies and individuals”, materialized the historical path that conducted to our present moment.

10.2. A new paradigm for After-Modernity

Today the community of human nations faces a moment of truth. To survive the totalitarian dystopia of the hegemony of Western Modernity that is being controlled by Western big capital holders and their institutional servants, the human species needs alternative narratives to the paradigm of Modernity. This paradigm sustains the ideologies of Neo-liberalism and Postmodernism that have driven Western nations into their present pathology of societal atomization.

We need a new paradigm that could expand into a vision of reality that drives societies on a path of physical and cultural sustainability. By chance this is something that starts to be vaguely perceived in the north as well as in the south.

But what is a paradigm ?

In “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Thomas Kuhn wrote that revolutions in science result from a shift in the worldview, or the paradigm, of an epoch. A paradigm is the shared perceptual consensus in a given epoch about the matrix of reality :

"A paradigm is a basic framework of assumptions, principals and methods from which the members of the community work. It is a set of norms which tell a scientists how to think and behave and although in science there are rival schools of thought there is still a single paradigm that all scientists accept uncritically." (5)

Kuhn furthermore considered that the theories, and the rationality at work in different periods, are not comparable because their paradigms are incommensurable which means that the view of the world, that they suggest, is rooted in incompatible approaches that share no common ground nor any standard of comparison :

“What man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conception experience has taught him to see.”

People in different epochs share indeed different approaches to reality that instill their own rationality and their own truth and in this sense :

“The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.”

To get to the crux of the notion of societal paradigm that I have in mind lets rapidly compare the paradigm of Modernity with the paradigm of animism that the whole of humanity shared for some 100,000 years before it got destroyed in the Tri-Continental-Area by power-societies and their religious worldviews.

10.2.1. The paradigm of animism

The paradigm of the animist (wo)men of knowledge was pragmatism which is the ability to minimize the suffering of the individuals and to maximize the success of their endeavors. These (wo)men of knowledge specialized in a system of knowledge formation that focused on the observation of the celestial spheres over the long haul of tens of thousands of years. That’s how they discovered that the surface of reality is patterned. And they made it their task to decode these patterns and to superimpose their codes on the reality that they observed in the habitat of their tribes.

Practiced over tens of thousands of years this kind of superposition, of the moves by the celestial spheres on top of the changes occurring in their local context, procured them robust pragmatic responses to all kinds of questions arising in the minds of their fellow tribesmen. And these celestial patterns, and their implications for life in the local habitat, got transmitted orally, and in secrecy, from generation to generation. This is how they grew in a vast body of pragmatic knowledge.

In the wake of the destabilization of tribal societies in the Tri-Continental-Area, at the tail-end of the Younger-Dryas, a rupture occurred with that body of pragmatic knowledge and it got definitely lost leaving retreating tribal groups, that were fleeing the violence of candidate men of power and their agricultural economies, merely with a shadow of its memory.

The tribal (wo)men of Knowledge had been sharing for tens of thousand of years the pragmatic responses, induced by this body of knowledge, with their fellow tribesmen. And so formed gradually a worldview that got called animism by Western anthropologists during the 19th century. This vast body of pragmatic knowledge, that remained at all times secret, helped the tribal (wo)men of Knowledge to execute their obligations towards their fellow tribesmen and these obligations consisted in the following :

To guide their tribes on the path of a “gift economy” which de facto fostered peaceful egalitarian relations among tribesmen and also with the neighboring tribes. In the normality of “the Reason”, and rationalism, this notion of a gift-economy appears as something strange that conflicts with its mental vision of a normality that is rooted in individualism, in materialism, and in competition. In contrast a, “gift economy” is rooted in communitarianism, in the perception of the animation, and the interactions, of all particles in their ensemble, which implies their cooperation.

To guide their fellow tribesmen into cultivating a profound trust in the community that resulted in levels of societal cohesion that are no longer fathomable to us Moderns.

To guide their fellow tribesmen to collect the resources necessary to ensure the health of their bodies and minds.

To guide their fellow tribesmen in managing the level of their population (Dunbar number) by splitting their tribe when their population grew over a certain threshold or by fusing with another group when their population fell under another threshold.

To guide their fellow tribesmen in the management of the conflicts between individuals and between tribes.

To guide their fellow tribesmen in treating their health holistically by harmonizing the activities of their bodies and their minds.

10.2.2. The paradigm of Modernity

As I laid-out extensively in “Modernity” the paradigm of Modernity illuminated the minds of the early Frank merchants and it shifted their attention from the paradigm of Christianity which was rooted in a shared belief in a religious narrative that the Roman empire had imposed as the official religion to its subjects during the 4th century.

The religious narratives, that are still successfully remembered today, were all imposed by a power-society that succeeded to develop a civilizational realm. The religious narrative of Christianity had been imposed by the Roman empire on its citizens in the hope of gluing the empire together in the face of a society that had been emptied of its cohesion. And after its fall the Western church spread its narrative among the Franks living in Northern and Western Gaul.

A few hundred years later after their illumination the Frank long distance merchants started to venerate “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”. And after some 5 to 6 centuries of financial successes Western European merchants had gained the mental assurance that they had what it takes to port “the reason” to the altar of academic correctness for further spreading to all fields of human life in the form of rationalism, science, and ultimately in the form of the technological scientism that wants to force Western Late-Modern societies into post-humanism.

The paradigm of Christianity ensured the mental bondage of the citizens of the Roman empire and later of the Medieval powers that were controlled by the church of Rome. In contrast the paradigm of Modernity fostered a rationality that served capital accumulation. And to generate returns on their investments big capital holders, and their servants, acted as the masters of science by financing its operational costs. Science was thus made captive of “the reason” since the get go.

Scientists need cash to live and most of them do not mind where the financing of their activities originates. But cash is what procures the authority, to the supplier of the funding, to decide what kind of research should be undertaken. Since the start science was thus essentially a service to big capital holders to help them generate ever more profits. Such an instrumentalization necessarily led to short term relative conclusions that compare poorly with the conclusions reached by the animist wo(men) of knowledge over their very long haul observation. This is not just an affirmation. The very poor judgment of science is largely confirmed by the side-effects of Modernity that are at the roots of the human predicament residing “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity”.

But the paradigm of Modernity got hidden under a thick layer of obfuscating abstractions that idolized individualism and materialism. Science and philosophy have been celebrating the individual creativity and the special cognitive capacity of artists and of scientists while economics celebrated the rational behavior of the economic actors. This is the subterfuge that justified Europe’s celebration, of individualism materialism and rationality, as the forces that unleashed the European Enlightenment, philosophic rationalism, the scientific method, and the industrial revolution.

The materialism, of “knowings about bits and pieces of reality”, was after all the sole matter that interested capital holders and their servants. These “knowings” have been known since the industrial revolution to help them generate fabulous returns on their investments. But European minds got nevertheless swamped in these obfuscating abstractions and in the meanwhile the paradigm of Modernity remained a non-entity during the whole of Modernity !

10.2.3. paradigms shape systems of knowledge formation

“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.” (6)

Paradigms are the cultural and societal equivalent of mathematical theorems. Societal paradigms are logical derivatives of civilizational axioms and of societal worldviews that eventually mutate when exceptional contextual settings synchronize with the continuum of a society’s culture.

And it is certainly a fact that exceptional contextual settings, conflicting with the societal cultural continuum, are first detected by those who are detached from a daily application of the existing paradigm. As Thomas Kuhn mentions in the quotation here above

“...the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game…”.

Societal paradigms expand into systems of knowledge formation that fix the ontology of their own field. That’s how the field of mathematics, ontologically, is abstract rationality for its own sake just like “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” is another abstract rationality for its own sake which gradually displaced the religious paradigm of belief in a narrative that got imposed by power.

Societal, or cultural paradigms, occupy the entire field of the cultural continuum that animates the evolution of societies within a given civilizational realm. They are the substance that fixes the ontology of the knowledge formation of any given society.

After rupturing with animism, some 10,000 years ago, the societies in the Tri-Continental-Area elaborated religious narratives and those that got retained by the men of power got eventually shared by the citizens of their empires. While not following the same developmental path the Roman empire, sensing the risk of its collapse, made Christianity its official religion at the end of the 4th century in the hope that it would keep its cohesion empty society glued together. But the rot that had set in, after the emptying of its societal cohesion, was so advanced that the empire definitively collapsed barely a century later.

By the 12th century the paradigm of Western Christianity was faced with a new paradigm, “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”, that emerged in the minds of Frank long distance merchants. Over the centuries that new paradigm slowly forced a new reading of reality to the urban populations. Paradoxically that new reading got encouraged and in many instances it was even initiated by progressive Christian clergymen like Thomas Aquinas who argued that divine law was extended by human reason.

But all this changed in the 18th century with the expansion of this paradigm into philosophic rationalism, the scientific method, and the political militancy of liberalism which were the 3 legs of the European Enlightenment.

Western European intellectuals had unfortunately misunderstood the Enlightenment thinking that it originated in the ideological abstractions of individualism, materialism, and anthropocentrism that had been growing over the past centuries. They thought that these abstractions formed the substrate out of which rationality emerged. But in reality these abstractions were merely outcomes of the application of the paradigm of Modernity in the daily life of ever larger sections of the populations of Western European nations.

To better situate how the paradigm of Modernity fashioned a system of knowledge formation that is rooted in “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” I will now compare the formation of scientific knowings with the formation of animist knowledge.

In the differentiation, between animist induction of knowledge from very long haul observation and the scientific instrumentalization that forces short term bursts of observation and deduction of knowings, resides an irreconcilable difference of essence that separates the process of “Animist Knowledge Formation” from “the scientific method of Modernity“ :

Animist knowledge versus scientific knowings :

Animism shaped a pragmatic knowledge base by observing over the very long haul, of tens of thousands of years, the unfolding of the movements of the celestial spheres and of the elements in the local habitat. And unsurprisingly this long haul observation necessarily fostered the same kind of answers all around the world. That’s why animism was a global belief system whose substance was uniform around the world but whose form varied with the variations in the local contextual settings of the human habitat.

In contrast Modernity forms scientific knowings by momentarily observing the particular unfolding of the elements in their context. But because this particular unfolding of elements is not validated, over the very long haul, science recourses to a stratagem that, at least, superficially puts to rest the need of a validation over the long haul. The scientific stratagem is the scientific method or the repeatability of an experiment. The essence of the difference between scientific repeatability and animist long haul observation resides in their time-frame : short term repeatability versus the long time-span of observation over tens of thousands of years !

Both approaches start with observation but the scientific stratagem gives only a certainty of repeatability in the short term. In other words the scientific validation does not give access to the observation of repeatability over the long haul nor does it give access to the long term consequences of the application of its scientific observation :
- 1.1. Long haul observation :
  
  Long haul observation detects patterns of repeatability that inform of the possible re-occurrence of particular natural phenomena in the local habitat. This explains why tribal populations, as well as wild animals, had the reflex of fleeing the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (7) while the tourists and the locals, steeped in Modernity, perished !
- 1.2. Science is blind to long haul observation :
  
  The time frame of scientific repeatability, through experimentation or observation, is restricted by its financiers to the short time-span of their interest that resides in generating surpluses on their investments. And while it is blind to the long haul observation, in which is rooted the application of the precautionary principle, science does not take any responsibility for the consequences of its blindness. The mRNA vaccines to counter Covid-19 have made this evident once more lately…
  
  The animist process of knowledge formation is undeniably of a more fundamental nature than the scientific approach. It is what motivated the Kogi people, in the nineteen-eighties, to come out of their hiding from the modern world in order to inform “their little brothers” that if they continue to destroy the habitat humanity is very soon going to go extinct (8).
- 1.3. Animism and science serve different ends :
  
  The more fundamental nature of the animist method of knowledge formation related to the trust between the wo(man) of knowledge and her/his fellow tribesmen. Trust excluded anything else than a pragmatic service to the community. This was the way of tribes before the emergence of power-societies and agriculture.
  
  Since the emergence of agriculture and power-societies tribes have constantly been fleeing in more remote corners of the world where they lost ever more — of their memory of the body of knowledge of their ancestors — of the bio-resources of the earth. Comparing today’s tribal remains, with the tribes before agriculture and power-societies, is therefore a fundamentally dishonest proposition.
  
  In contrast, to the knowledge of the animist (wo)men of knowledge of yesteryear, the mission of the scientists is, for at least 95% of their productions, limited to the instrumentality of “knowing tricks” that momentarily allow its purveyors of funds to generate higher returns on their investments.

Two radically different approaches :

Animism and science are rooted in two radically different paradigms. From the perspective of societal evolution one inspires trust. The other, over its short life-span, has succeeded to inspire suspicion ! Societal evolution is about the conciliation between : — how best to ensure the reproduction of society — how to harness the creativity of independent thinkers in order to inject more complexity in the societal systems.

In other words societal evolution is about keeping the two polarities of species (individuals and their society) in a state of balance. This inevitably requires a strong bond between the individuals and their society. Late-Modernity has made us first hand witnesses of the human predicament in which science had played a determinant role. Knowing the direct responsibility of science in our present predicament it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that science is not worth the trust, nor of the individuals nor of society. No surprise thus that its implementation in Modern societies has eventually fomented distrust.

But this does not imply that we should throw science in the garbage bin. We better force the re-orientation of its service to capital holders to servicing the reproduction of the human species…

The differentiation between Animism and science leaves no place for doubt. Our ancestors were definitely on the right track while science is merely rooted in an abstraction that became a fad which merely lasted a blink of an eye, on the scale of societal evolution, before its inventions bequeathed “the predicament of late modernity” to humanity.

10.2.4. Conclusions

Our ancestors, who most of us Moderns view as primitives, survived the very harsh and unstable climate conditions of recurring cyclical cycles of glaciation. They survived because they conscientiously adhered to the laws of nature and to the rules of biology that governed their bodies. Once biological evolution had completed the addition, to their brains sometime 300,000 years ago, of the Neo-cortex they gained the capability to induce abstractions from their observations. This eventually allowed them to complete a process of knowledge formation sometime 130,000 years ago or perhaps even earlier.

What is important to remember, for us moderns, is that knowledge for them had to have pragmatic uses. Knowledge that did not have such pragmatic uses was considered superfluous and discarded.

The emergence of power societies in the TCA ruptured with this pragmatism. In a first phase, starting some 5,000 years ago with Early-Empires, knowledge was made to serve the men of power and the men of knowledge. And its nature eventually morphed into an instrument to consolidate power institutions that took the form of religions and empires.

In a second phase, starting some 900 years ago, knowledge was made to serve Western European long distance merchants and so emerged the paradigm of Modernity which is “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”. In both of its power-society phase, and its modern phase, knowledge got separated from its holistic nature and got instrumentalized to serve special interests. Because the consolidation of power institutions in East-Asia got realized by the animist men of knowledge the pragmatism of knowledge survived in what is called the Chinese Traditional Culture and its scholastic of the Dao.

We saw here above that ontologically the field of mathematics is abstract logic for its own sake while ontologically the field of culture, by synchronizing the present contextual settings of a society with its cultural continuum, is shaping societal evolution.

In “The Continuum of the Cultural Field” I examined how societal paradigms are fixing the ontology of knowledge and culture :

The paradigm of tribal societies, and animism, was pragmatism or the focus on the ability to minimize the suffering of the individuals. The well-being of the individual was thus at the core of the paradigm of tribal societies.

The paradigm of power-societies, and religions, is belief in a religious narrative which was instrumental to the reproduction of power institutions. The justification of power and its reproduction in the hands of the men of power is at the core of the paradigm of power-societies.

The paradigm of Modernity is “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”. This reason is the essence of capital which is at the core of rationalism and science.

The predicament of humanity that results from “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” is now forcing humanity to adopt a new narrative rooted in “the First Principles of Life”.

10.3. The worldview of After-Modernity

By necessity of survival the most sensitive among us have unconsciously awakened the seeds of “the reason that is at work in the First Principles of life”. The first of those seeds are now starting to sprout and they are initiating the hope that humanity will possibly be able to answer “the great convergence of Late-Modernity”.

While the initiation to this new paradigm was operating largely unconsciously it was already alienating large swathes of people, from “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”, and everything that relates to it. But having said this it would be presumptuous to believe that we possibly could determine with any level of certainty what will be the outcome of “the great convergence of Late-Modernity”.

It appears nevertheless evident that the governance side-effects of Modernity are not going to be left playing-out all on their own. The physical side-effects of Modernity are indeed starting to interact ever more ferociously with the Geo-political games that accompany the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia.

What I mean to say by this is that the present Geo-political conflicts, between the USA who want to command a unipolar world order and Russia India and China who want to guide the Global South on the path of a multipolar world order, are going to appear as trivialities once tipping points, in the interactions between different side-effects of Modernity, will plunge humanity on the margins of its bandwidth of life.

Falling outside of the bandwidth of life’s sustainability humanity will be shaken into awareness about the triviality of Geo-politics. A worldwide call will soon rise suggesting that the inhabitants of this earth’s shift their worldview along the lines of “the reason that is at work in the First Principles of life” . The rationality of “the First Principle of Life” can be summarized along the following lines :

“The reason that is at work in the First Principles of life” conveys a simple narrative rooted in a vision of the future that centers on — life — the place of life in the universe — the place of the individuals of all species in the grand scheme of life :

The embodiment of life :

After all the necessary conditions had been assembled locally on earth, the implicate order of the whole eventually enfolded its universal potential for life to sprout. And the emergence of the first prokaryotic organisms rapidly evolved into different species that eventually transitioned into eukaryotic cells which further evolved into more complex species. The similarity between all species is their concern for their own reproduction and for their complexification.

The narrow bandwidth of life’s sustainability :

The potential, of “the Implicate Order” (9) of the ”whole”, is infinite but its seeds can only sprout after the right conditions are assembled in a local sub-ensemble. Life then develops in a very narrow bandwidth :
"As strong and resilient as the human body seems in some situations, considered in the context of the cosmos as a whole, it's unnervingly fragile.

Many of the boundaries within which a typical human can survive have been fully established; the well-known "rule of threes" dictates how long we can forgo air, water and food (roughly three minutes, three days and three weeks, respectively). Other limits are more speculative, because people have seldom, if ever, tested them.

… According to a 1958 NASA report, people can live indefinitely in environments that range between roughly 40 degrees F and 95 degrees F (4 and 35 degrees C), if the latter temperature occurs at no more than 50 percent relative humidity." (10)

This narrow bandwidth of life sustainability is the physical and biological field of life’s tolerance which varies for each species. The life of the individuals gets crushed when they step outside the width of this band which ultimately implies that there are physical and biological constraints to the search for novelty by living species !

Universal Interconnectedness :

The interactions of living species with the local elements in their habitat procure them directionality but life remains nevertheless at all times bound — to the flow of possibilities originating in “the Implicate Order” of the “whole Universe” — to the imperatives originating in the inter-relatedness of all the elements in the local habitat — to the physical or biological field of tolerance within the narrow band of sustainability of life.

This implies the inter-relatedness, and interconnectedness, of all living species in a same sub-ensemble of the whole. Our Earth is such a sub-ensemble which means that, not only are all humans interconnected in their absolute need to compromise in order to avoid their Mutually Assured Destruction, but more importantly all humans are also interconnected in their absolute need to maintain, and defend, the narrow band of sustainability of life on earth…

The societal settlement of differences between polarities → the growth of complexity :

The negotiated settlements of conflicts occurring in the interactions between the two polarities of a species (individuals → change / society → conservation) result in a higher societal complexity which, in turn, results in the higher complexity of the species and of the whole Universe.

The same is at work in the negotiated settlements of conflicts occurring in the interactions between nations or groups of nations. This implies that a negotiated settlement of the present Geo-political conflict, between the camp of unipolarity and the camp of multipolarity, would result in a higher societal and Geo-political complexity that would be beneficial to both sides !

Growth in complexity fosters individual awareness :

The growth of societal complexity results from the negotiated settlement of conflicts by the polarities of species. It is one of the two imperious objectives of species : — reproduction of life — complexification of life.

Complexity eventually fosters an individual awareness that later may develop into an increasing consciousness that contributes to the growing wisdom of individuals and of their societies.

This process of complexification, that leads to awareness, is at work every time societies are confronted with the necessity to find solutions to a problem. In other words, amidst a complexifying context, necessity eventually fosters awareness about life…

The growth of societal and Geo-political complexity results from the negotiated settlements of conflicts occurring in the interactions between nations or groups of nations. Societal and Geo-political complexity eventually foster a national awareness that later may develop into an increasing consciousness that contributes to the growing wisdom of the individuals and of their societies. The process of societal and Geo-political complexification, that leads to awareness, is at work every time societies are confronted with the necessity to find solutions to a problem. In other words, amidst the present complexifying Geo-political context, necessity eventually fosters awareness about its own triviality in the face of the higher necessity to keep humanity within the margins of its bandwidth of life.

Ugliness outside of “the First Principles of Life” :

The navigation outside of “the First Principles of Life” results in irrevocable damages to the individuals, their societies, and their local habitat, which plunges them in the realm of ugliness and reduces their chances to reproduce over the long haul.

What works and what does not work over a few billion years, first biologically and later societally, is stored in the patterns of the data stored in the DNA/RNA of an individual. These patterns instill an intuitive awareness and feeling in the minds and the bodies of the individuals. When those feelings arise they foster physical and mental vibrations which awake an innate sensitivity, or an early awareness that attracts the individual towards what works and dejects her or him from what does not work.

Humans have gradually encoded this physical and mental sensitivity in their languages under appellations like “beauty” and “ugliness”. These words arouse individual feelings most difficult to describe but that elicit strong reactions which force choices.

The expansion of the whole universe, and its parts, into ever higher levels of physical and mental complexity signifies that it is alive :

Individual and societal wisdom generate thinking and behavioral habits that are being reflected outwards to the whole Universe and they participate in the expansion of its consciousness about its wholeness and about the evolution of its parts.

This process is expanding the whole and its parts into ever higher levels of physical and mental complexity which implies that the universe is somehow alive and, as all life forms, it is thus destined to contract and to die.

Do polarities apply solely to all entities within the whole universe ? Is our whole-universe itself one polarity of an entity in a larger ensemble ? The answers to these questions remain unknown and are perhaps destined to remain unknown for ever to the minuscule particles that we are.

As in a fractal like thinking process this kind of questions always make me wonder what bacteria in our guts might be thinking — about us who are the whole in which they are the tiny particles — and how they participate in the life of that whole.

Life is on a mission :

The 7 preceding points imply that the true nature of our life, as minuscules particles of the sub-ensemble earth, has nothing to do with randomness. Life is on a mission to ensure — the growth in complexity of the physical and mental polarities of all entities in the local habitat — the growth and complexity of the species themselves — the growth in complexity of the whole universe.

But life has first to reproduce over the long haul in order to satisfy its urge for novelty. This forces species to focus primarily on their local context, on their own reproduction, and on the reproduction of their polarities which explains the strong attraction of the individuals of all species to pragmatism…

The species and the individuals, that for whatever reason go against these 8 universal principles, are condemning themselves to a meaningless life made of suffering that puts them on the path of extinction and, in reverse, the species that accords with these 8 universal principles grow ever closer to the finality of the whole which means that they follow a harmonious evolutionary path.

Notes

1. "What Is the Great Reset?", Imprimis. December 2021 | Volume 50, Issue 12, by Michael Rectenwald

2. "What Is the Global Public-Private Partnership", The Disillusioned Blogger, by Iain Davis. 2021-10-06.

3. "' A community of shared future for all humankind' -- a Chinese concept winning U.N. recognition", Xinhua, 2017-03-20.

4. "Barrau chez Janco : exposé devant le shift project à Lyon", Youtube, 2022-09-14.

5. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, University of Chicago Press, by Thomas Kuhn.

6. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, University of Chicago Press, by Thomas Kuhn.

7. "Did Animals Sense Tsunami Was Coming?", National Geographic, by Maryann Mott. 2005-01-04. "Ancient Tribe Survives Tsunami", CBS, by Neelesh Misra and Rupak Sanyal . 2005-01-04.

8. The Kogi people have been retreating ever higher, since the Spanish invasion of the 16th century, in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in Northern Columbia. They avoided all contacts with Modernity until the nineteen-eighties when they came to the conclusion that the activities of whitemen, and their followers, are destroying life on earth…

"From the heart of the world. The Elder brothers’ warning”, original 1990 TV documentary for the BBC, by Alan Ereira

"The Kogi: An Urgent Call from Guardians of the Heart of the World", Cultural Survival Magazine, by Atossa Soltani and Evelyn Arce. 2014-03.

“We are now living outside of the laws of nature where nature is now turning against man and becoming the enemy. Climate change is the consequence of the fact that man is operating outside the laws of life and laws of nature, law of the balance of the world. And doing so will destroy the balance.” --Kogi

9. The implicate order : see “Wholeness and the implicate order” by David Bohm

10. "What Are the Limits of Human Survival?", Live Science, by Natalie Wolchover. 2012-08-10.

painting and thinking

2022-09-29

The great turning (11)