Ideas emerge in the cultural field of societies

The following quote was copy-pasted from page 418 and following of "Knowledge Formation. 5.1. Ideation is rooted in the contextual substance of the societal cultural field".

This 1,150 page book will be available on my website this coming 27th of August.

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The societal field of culture generates the contextual substance out of which emerge ideation processes. That substance is given by the interactions between the 5 different components of the societal field of culture which are (1) : 

1. The archetypal model of society
2. The societal paradigm
3. The societal worldview shared by the citizens
4. The foundational worldview
5. The societal daily culture

The interactions, between these 5 different components of the societal field of culture, are shaping our societal systems of logic that procure their ideations processes to the individuals.

1. The societal paradigm 

"Societal paradigms fix the ontology of systems of knowledge formation. 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 sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation” 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. They are the substance that fixes the ontology of the knowledge formation of any given society." (2)

In theory an ontology is a vision about the working of reality while a paradigm is the choice of one specific ontology among the multiple visions that are theoretically accessible. But in practice humanity does not really choose a paradigm. The paradigm is forced upon it by changing contextual settings that are no longer suitable for the old paradigm and the system of societal logic that it impulsed.

We observe that the paradigm of humanity has shifted 3 times since small bands of hunter-gatherers were roaming the earth :

1. Small bands shifted to the paradigm of pragmatism

   From, whatever might have been their traditional paradigm, small bands of hunter-gatherers transitioned to the paradigm of pragmatism to alleviate the suffering of their individual members and this greatly eased the production of their daily life which had the effect of growing their population. And population growth had the nagging effect of destabilizing the organization of small-bands.

2. The shift from the tribal paradigm of pragmatism to the paradigm of religious belief shared by the power-societies in the Tri-Continental-Area

   Tribes inherited the pragmatism of small bands and some 100,000 years later they were forced to accept a transition in favor of the belief in a religious narrative that fostered the acceptance by the citizens, of the privileges of a minority, that eased the reproduction of this minority’s institutions of power.
   
   As seen earlier China did not shift to a religious narrative. It did not rupture with the past and the paradigm of pragmatism was retained in continuity under the Chinese power-society.

3. The shift from religious paradigms to the paradigm of Modernity

   The Western Christian religious paradigm eventually opened the space to the paradigm of Modernity that reads as “the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation”. This paradigm was so successful at enriching the capital holders who converted to it that ever more individuals were attracted to its rationality which became so successful at churning out material goods that society after society converted to it.
   
   China converted to the paradigm of Western Modernity in the second part of the 1970’s. But over the following decades the West adopted an ever more aggressive posture against that country that forced it to concentrate on its internal resilience in the fields of — the sharing of its worldview — the production of its science and technology — keeping the integrity of its production chains — the production of a successive defense against foreign aggression — the production of its food supplies — etc…
   
   But ensuring resilience, through internal self-sufficiency, implies that the country is forced to impulse its own version of certain aspects of Western-Modernity !
   
   A Chinese version of Modernity, that avoids the pitfalls of hegemony, automatically attracts the global South, which represents some 85% of the world population ! This is undoubtedly a game changer in the geopolitical arena which could possibly derail the plans of Western big capital holders, and their servants, to take ownership of the world’s natural resources.

4. The shift, from Western-Modernity, to what comes in After-Western-Modernity

   But if it were to be successful a Chinese Modernity would rapidly be confronted with the reality of “the Great Convergence of Western Late-Modernity”. And the necessity, to convert to a new paradigm celebrating “the First Principles of Life”, would necessarily force the adoption of a new form of society focusing on the local resilience of life which is the thesis that undergirds the argument about “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity” that is the subject of this collection.
   

Let’s observe here that each shift, to a new archetypal model of society was accompanied by its own paradigm that enfolded a given societal system of logic which concluded with — a new approach to knowledge formation (animism, religion, reason) — the adoption of a new model of societal organization (tribal-societies, power-societies, nation-states).

China did not follow that rule. It retained animism, all along, as its system of knowledge formation while its power-society, from the onset, was consecrating the cultural unity of its nation and its system of public governance. Today “the Great Convergence of Western Late-Modernity” is informing us that the paradigm of Western Modernity is no longer adapted to the present contextual settings. The present context is one of destruction of the habitat of living species which inevitably results in a process of mass extinction. And if we want Homo-Sapiens to have a chance to survive this great convergence we will rapidly be forced to, for the 4th time, to a new societal paradigm that this time will necessarily focus on the primacy of “the First Principles of Life”. But more on that in Part 8 “A new paradigm focusing on the reason of life”.

 

1.1. Small band pragmatism originated tribal societies

The individuals, of small bands of Homo-Sapiens, were equipped biologically to generate abstractions from their observations since about 300,000 years ago. They later eventually decided to adhere to the paradigm of “pragmatism through knowledge formation”. This decision was taken after observing that knowledge helps to alleviate individual suffering in the here and now. We can only speculate about the path they took to set up a systematic process of knowledge formation. But the distance in time gives us an hindsight on the changes wrought on humanity, and on life in general, by that this process.

The adoption of the paradigm of societal knowledge formation concluded with the following :

1. The ontology of animism

   The paradigm of societal knowledge formation fixed the ontology of a societal system of logic that evolved into a system of knowledge formation that we now call “animism”. From the get go the system, of societal knowledge formation, had focused on alleviating individual suffering and the easing of daily life. These targets were highly pragmatic and they projected their realism on the societal system of logic of late small bands and of the tribal societies that replaced them.

2. The paradigm of knowledge formation unleashed the process of societal evolution

   Animism eased the production of daily life and the population started to grow which destabilized the very small demographic sizes that bands were able to handle. And this societal destabilization forced the experimentation of new models of group organization that eventually concluded, after thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of years of trials and errors, with the tribal model of society that maximizes the efficiency of the group at an average of 150 individuals which was managed by a fission-fusion model of population control.
   

 

1.2. The sharing of a religious creed gave rise to power-societies

In the Volume 1 of this series we saw how chieftains were confronted to the impossibility of reproducing their institutions of power over any length of time. This is why the transition from tribal-societies to power-societies in the Tri-Continental-Area lasted a long stretch of 6,000 to 7,000 years.

It was the decision of the men of power to adhere to the religious paradigm, of some men of knowledge with a large following, that finally ensured the reproduction of their power institutions over many generations. All citizens suddenly shared a common worldview which boosted their trust in each other. As a result societal groups gained in cohesion which in turn eased the reproduction of their institutions of power.

The adherence to the paradigm of power-societies implied the following :

1. The assembly of citizens in power-societies

   The power-societies in the TCA were assembled by men of power through their use of force and cunning. This remains true to this very day. Most of the conflicts focus indeed on the defense or the acquisition of territory which includes its population. Ukraine is the last example of the Western-style application of the paradigm of power-societies.
   
   In East-Asia the passage from “Tribal Cultural Confederations” to “Power Confederations” spread over a few millennia and had thus imperceptibly transformed the symbolism of cultural unity of the Sage into a dynastic transfer of power to his son.

2. The sharing of a common religious narrative

   The sharing of a common religious narrative, in the TCA , fostered a common vision about the working of reality that quietened the minds and instilled trust among the individuals. This boosted the cohesion of societies thus easing their institutional reproduction while securing the reproduction of the species. So religious worldviews successfully satisfied their stated mission which was the reproduction of the institutions of power. But only the animism worldview successfully reproduced the institutions of power over the long haul as is illustrated by China.

3. The ontology, of the knowledge formation of civilizations and the societies in their realm, is rooted in the societal paradigms of power-societies

   The sharing of a common religious belief fixed the ontology of the system of knowledge formation of religious civilizations.
   
   As just indicated China was an exception. Its “Tribal Cultural Confederations” slipped imperceptibly into power-societies which ensured the continuity of animism and the execution of governance by the sage with the help of his (wo)men of knowledge. Animism fixed thus the ontology of the Chinese societal system of logic and of its system of knowledge formation.

The paradigm of power-societies reads thus as “the assembly of citizens by force and the reproduction of the societal institutions by sharing a common societal worldview by the citizens”.

 

1.3. Modernity emerged from the conversion to “the reason”

Sometime along the 12th century long distance Frank Merchants converted to the paradigm, of “the reason that is at work in the transformation of sterile money into a dynamic process of capital accumulation”. The rationality, of this paradigm gradually expanded into philosophic rationalism and science over the following 6 centuries.

In other words the conversion to the paradigm of Modernity led to the following :

1. The paradigm of Modernity fixed the ontology of philosophic rationalism, of science, and of classical economics

   A societal paradigm imposes a societal system of logic that permeates all the endeavors of that society until it collapses. This implies that the thinking, behavior, and actions of its individuals are irremediably rooted in the system of logic that is at work in its cultural field.
   
   Having left Europe at the age of 36 I have personally experienced the resistance of the system of logic of my country of origin. Belgium has never been a nation. It was recognized as an independent state in 1831; a state that was meant to act as a buffer between France and Germany. The new state assembled regions that had traditionally been parts of France, Germany, and the Low Countries which are a historical transition territory between the ancient Germanic and Latin ethnic and cultural domains of western Europe. Born in a Flemish family I was socialized in the Zeitgeist of the Low Countries but my education in Walloonia further socialized me to the French context. This means that my cultural heritage is mostly French and accessorily Germanic.
   
   Arriving in China at age 36 my conditioning was firmly imprinted in my biology and in my mind. It took me 3 decades to absorb the essence of the “Chinese Traditional Culture”. Living with my partner Xiaohong has greatly eased my enculturation in the Chinese society but my study of the Chinese Classics has ingrained the habit in my mind to reconcile the Chinese cultural field with the Latin and Germanic cultural fields.
   
   My perception of Chinese life and culture is thus at once the result of living in the Chinese cultural field and of rationalizing it. Having lived in the Chinese cultural field for the last 36 years I feel at ease and appreciate the pragmatism that pervades its daily-culture. But my rationalization of the Chinese, of the Latin and the Germanic cultural fields, has transformed my mind into a hybrid. I feel very much at ease in any one of those cultural fields but my rationalization simultaneously distances me from them.
   
   My personal experience indicates that, once the mind has been socialized in a given cultural field, it never forgets it. The longer I have lived in the Chinese cultural field the more I have been feeling at ease in it. In other words living in another cultural field has certainly transformed me as a person but it did not transform me into “a Chinese other”.
   
   Living amidst the Chinese has forced me to grasp the system of logic, that is at work in the Chinese society which, in turn has stimulated my curiosity to deconstruct the system of logic of European societies. And this deconstruction has illuminated my mind about the cultural field of societies, its components and their continuous interactions, that form the evolutionary being of societies and the evolutionary being of their citizens.
   

2. The ideological conversion to philosophic rationalism forced the certainties of liberalism which derailed the “First Principles of Life”

   The rationalist system of knowledge formation gradually destabilized the religious paradigm and later with the conversion of Western societies, during Late-Modernity to Neo-liberalism and Postmodernism, all grand narratives disintegrated.
   
   This loss of grand narratives terminated the assembly of believers in these narratives and this is when loneliness started to ravage Western social scenes. The loss of socializing was compensated by a boost of hyper-individualism that social media entrepreneurs plunged on to milk a hyper-individualist and disaffected youth.
   
   The convergence of — the disappearance of worldviews — the emergence of the societal sickness of loneliness — the fall in hyper-individualism and consumerism — and the rise of social-media exploded into a radical societal atomization3 that separated the individuals from one another, from their society, and ultimately from the traditional authorities of their power-societies. This separation of the individuals is atomizing their societies which implies that the latter are no longer capable of handling whatever grand project like the fight against Covid-19, like the re-shoring of production activities, or like a world-war for that matter ! The consequences of societal atomization are thus inevitably world-changing. But very few people seem to have noticed !
   
   Big capital holders certainly did not miss to be reminded of this by their servants and they sized societal atomization as an opportunity to push an agenda portending depopulation, through Artificial Intelligence and robotization, that brings them in a frontal collision with “the first Principles of Life”. This collision adds a whole new dimension to “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” (4).

 

1.4. What comes after Modernity will emerge from the necessity to convert to “the First Principles of Life”

“The Great Convergence, of the numerous side-effects of Western-Modernity,” is confronting us with a slew of thresholds that will inevitably result in tipping points. And each of these tipping points has the potential to unleash a new Geo-bio-chemical cycle. What is disturbing, to say the least, is that a new Geo-bio-chemical equilibrium is irreversible. This means that there will be no return to the present Geo-bio-chemical equilibrium which, for our species, implies high risks of societal destabilization that could eventually lead to high risks of extinction.

This reality is well known by the scientists who are specialized in the earth sciences. The multitude of scientific publications, on the mechanisms leading to tipping-points, is attesting the risks that are involved. But the fact is that other parameters of “The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity”, like the Western societal atomization and the crumbling of the western built world-order, are paralyzing the world institutions. And so the risks, of nearing tipping points, is not being addressed with the necessary urgency that would be required to prepare the human species to the emergence of such world-changing events.

The fact that human activities are already in the process of unleashing inevitable world-changing Geo-bio-chemical equilibria, while the Geopolitical context is impeaching our species to elaborate the necessary answers, this fact indicates that one or another of these new Geo-bio-chemical equilibria will most probably one day force ruptures, in our vital societal systems, that will force us to find an alternative societal paradigm.

This implies that we could soon be forced to experiment, new models of societal organization and new models of knowledge formation, in order to survive. But the biggest risk that confronts our species is the speed at which these Geo-bio-chemical processes are unfolding. All living species adapt to changing contexts but when the changes emerge faster than the capacity of a species to adapt that species goes extinct !

Seen that we are confronted with nothing short of a world-wide mass extinction event our next societal paradigm will necessarily try to reconcile our species with “the First Principles of Life”.

2. The societal worldview shared by the citizens

The traditional animist view was that no society can survive, for any serious length of time, without the sharing by its citizens of a common worldview or grand narrative about the working of reality and the place of the citizens in it. I share that view and I laid out the role of worldviews in the reproduction of the species in the Volume 1 of this series “The Continuum of the Cultural Field”.

Species have two major objectives :

1. They want to maximize the chances of their reproduction over the long haul

2. They want to maximize the complexity of their societies

The more complexity in the working of societies the higher are the chances they they will have a richer culture and this, in turn, implies that the richer will be the knowledge of such societies.

But to remain operational complexity must adhere to the “First Principles of Life”. These first principles keep complexity within the boundaries of life which implies that the complexity has to fit within the program of the Whole or U. In other words complexity must at all time be compatible with reproduction ! But the fact is that our Late-Modern mad rush, to churn out ever newer technological iterations of all kinds of non-essential gadgets, is not any bit concerned about its compatibility with the reproduction of the species.

The actors of Artificial Intelligence deny this compatibility principle by positing that AI and robotics are part of the natural evolution of Homo-Sapiens. The only problem with this affirmation is that all living species are composed of organic individual beings. This is not the case of mechanical robots that are controlled by an artificial intelligence.

These are inorganic human creations that don’t fit in the biological field of reproduction over the long haul. Human hubris might think that, over time, scientists will succeed to equip their creations with the necessary software to let them replicate. But natural evolution has been testing biological evolution and the production of novelty for some 3.5 billion years ! And the species in existence today represent less than 1% of all the species that have ever existed ! In contrast artificial intelligence and robotics are merely a few decades old and their approach is furthermore not compatible with biological evolution which started with the reproduction of unicellular organisms :

“Scientists are discovering ways in which single cells might have evolved traits that entrenched them into group behavior, paving the way for multicellular life. These discoveries could shed light on how complex extraterrestrial life might evolve on alien worlds. Researchers detailed these findings in the October 24, 2016 issue of the journal Science. The first known single-celled organisms appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, roughly a billion years after Earth formed. More complex forms of life took longer to evolve, with the first multicellular animals not appearing until about 600 million years ago. The evolution of multicellular life from simpler, unicellular microbes was a pivotal moment in the history of biology on Earth and has drastically reshaped the planet’s ecology. However, one mystery about multicellular organisms is why cells did not return back to single-celled life. ‘Unicellularity is clearly successful — unicellular organisms are much more abundant than multicellular organisms, and have been around for at least an additional 2 billion years,’ said lead study author Eric Libby, a mathematical biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “So what is the advantage to being multicellular and staying that way?” The answer to this question is usually cooperation, as cells benefited more from working together than they would from living alone. However, in scenarios of cooperation, there are constantly tempting opportunities “for cells to shirk their duties — that is, cheat,” Libby said. “ (5)

The observation of the facts of life leads to the following conclusions :

1. Scientific knowings, while numerous, are barely scratching the surface of the Whole’s reality

2. Any complexity that delves outside of the boundaries of “the First Principles of Life” is merely noise

   As noise it will eventually get erased for being of no utility, or for being a nuisance, to the working of the species and of the whole.
   
   Einstein's idea that “god does not play dice” was rooted in this assumption which can be summed up as follows. Everything in U has a function which implies that what has no function is useless and is eventually disturbing the harmony. And in this sense what is useless gets booted out of the system.

3. What is abundantly clear is that the rationality of Western-Modernity resides outside of the “First Principles of Life”

And because the rationality of Western-Modernity resides outside of the “First Principles of Life” it is most often in contradiction with these first principles which implies that the complexity generated by Modernity is nothing short of noise in the grand scheme of things.

The role of shared worldviews is to maximize the two major objectives of life, or of its substantiation in living species, and in light of this the “Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” is a ‘no go’ that destroys life. Religions at least recognized that the societal ‘here and now’ has to fit with god’s plans or in other words with the working of U or the Whole.

 

The only problem with religious narratives is that their ideological certainty, to detain the truth, has always put their adherents in the crosshair of the adherents of other narratives which often resulted in separation and wars. The same can’t be said of traditional animism which was not fashioned in ideological terms but in the long haul observation of the correlations between the patterns detected in the habitat with the patterns detected in the movements of the cosmic spheres.

3. The foundational worldview

A foundational worldview is the narrative of a societal vision of the world that is grounding a new model of society into a specific system of logic. And this societal system of logic is destined to prevail over the entire span of that model of society. It is rooted in a given societal paradigm and the axioms derived from its foundational worldview.

The paradigm, of the societies participating in the realm of the Western civilization, was inherited from the passing Roman empire which had forced :

1. The unification of the creed of Christianity

2. The sharing of Christianity as the official religion of the empire

3. The violent eradication of all other worldviews

4. The loss of its territorial realm after the collapse of the empire compelled Western Christianity to focus on controlling the territory of the Franks

In the process Christianity had acquired the certainty of being the exclusive belief system to have access to the truth. This certainty did not suffer any competition.

This certainly also distinguished Western Christianity from most other religions which accepted to coexist with other belief systems. Another unique characteristic of Western Christianity is that, when the Western Empire collapsed by the end of the 5th century, it lost the control over the North-African church as well as the Balkan church and part of the Italian church. This is the contextual setting in which it passed under the tutelage of the Eastern Empire. So the Roman papacy thought that it urgently needed a new base of followers to resist the pressure of the Eastern Orthodoxy and, in the context of Western Europe at the time, the territory of the Franks appeared to be Rome’s best bet.

The paradigm of Western societies originated in this specific context of exclusivity that pitted the Christianity of the Franks against all other worldviews and this resulted in historical genocides all over the world.

The political necessity for Rome, at the time of the fall of the empire, was to assemble a following of believers in the Frankish parts of Europe and this justified :

1. An all out elimination of the visual signs of the other worldviews that resisted being converted to Christianity 


2. A constant proselytization by the Franks, and by the institutions of the church, of the Western Christian creed.

All this imprinted a habit in the minds of Western European Christians to manhandle the people who shared other belief systems which culminated in the forced conversions of indigenous people during the voyages of great discoveries and the colonial period that followed.

4. The daily culture of societies

By the daily-culture of societies I mean the entirety of the thinking, actions and behaviors, of all citizens at any given time. This definition of daily-culture, in the largest sense, includes the economic and social behaviors, the formation of knowledge, the arts, the habitual domain of culture, etc…

Contrary to commonly held Western beliefs the societal daily-culture is not the outcome of the will of the people. It is merely the outcome of the synchronization of their present contextual settings with the continuum of the cultural field of their societies. Culture, in other words, acts more like the field of culture of the societies in which the individuals live.

Culture is an emergent field that substantiates in the present as the daily-culture. The daily-culture is given by the societal truths contained in — the archetypal model of society — the paradigm of society — the foundation worldview and its axioms. Daily-culture also evolves as a result of its constant interactions and synchronization with the historical worldview.

This uninterrupted synchronization cycle of the daily-culture unleashes a longer synchronization cycle of the historical worldview with the memes that replicate over the long haul in the daily-culture. Memes are replicating societal mutations that are synchronized in the historical worldview of societies which forms the substance of societal evolution. This synchronization is an analogy to genes that replicate biological mutations. Replicating genes are synchronized in the DNA-RNA code of the biology of living species and this action forms the substance of biological evolution. This process unleashes the evolution of societies that I earlier qualified as the internal evolution of the archetypal model of society.

This constant filling of the citizens’ minds with the substance of their cultural field, — archetypal model of society— societal paradigm — foundational worldview and axioms of civilization — historical worldview — daily-culture, is modulating the individual’s perception about their present contextual settings.

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1.  See “2.4.2. An ontological approach of knowledge formation” See also the following "What Is an Ontology ?" by Nicola Guarino, Daniel Oberle, and Steffen Staab. “On the Definition of ‘Ontology’” by Fabian Neuhaus.
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2.  See “The great turning. 10.2.3. paradigms shape systems of knowledge formation”.
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3. Societal atomization. See Volume 2 “Modernity 02. Part 4. 4.10. The cultural continuum breaks down”
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4. The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity. See Volume 2 “Modernity 02. Part 2. Great Convergence of late-Modernity”

 

5. "How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?", NASA Astrobiology, by Charles Q. Choi. 2017-02-13 

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