I just uploaded the new edition of "Concepts and synthesis", the Volume 0 of the series about "The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity". It is now available on my website.
Here follows the foreword
The series, titled “The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, was first published in the form of blog posts over the span of 5 consecutive winters from 2012 to 2017. I formatted these posts into book form over the years 2017 and 2018. Once fully formatted I left the material simmer in my subconscious and immersed myself in digital variations, of my “grand project” series of paintings. Some of these variations illustrate this series. By December 2020 I was ready to terminate the editing of the first volume1.
Writing was not customary to me. I only started writing, at the age of 50, to answer the questions that popped up in my mind while painting. Over the previous two decades, I had let my brush wander freely, but I was constantly confronted with questions like "what is the function of visual signs?", "what is art?".
In a text from 2004, I concluded that superficial answers, about the form of visual signs, did not answer the essence of these questions. But being unable to find reference points in daily-culture, or in what remained of traditional historical worldviews, I concluded that the best would be to explore why and how art had emerged in the first place because this would unmistakably point to its existential function.
In the process I discovered that archaeologists had unearthed massive quantities of remnants of material culture, in Africa, dating from 100,000 years ago and earlier. A material culture can only emerge from a systemic process of “societal knowledge formation”. Evidently all the necessary ingredients need to have been assembled before a catalyst can possibly animate such a process and when the process has been animated it materializes in objects, relating to daily life, that are shaped in the forms, lines, and colors of a societal daily-culture.
The broader context, of a systemic process of “societal knowledge formation”, was the prior emergence of the brain’s potential power of abstraction, which Homo-Sapiens had inherited between 300 and 400,000 years ago from a biological process of evolution that had spanned over the preceding hundred thousand years. The potential of the brain to derive abstractions, from the data gleaned by the eyes, got eventually animated by a catalyst which was the conscious realization by Homo-Sapiens that individual suffering is alleviated by knowledge formation.
This conscious realization must have surfaced slowly in the minds, over many tens of thousands of years, following the emergence of its biological potential in the brain. The simple fact of thinking about this potential has pulled me, in the blink of an eye, in a quest for knowledge about all matters pertaining to the cultural evolution of species. In this quest for knowledge I stumbled upon many discoveries that form the content of this series.
During my inquiry I observed that climate heating events had caused the abrupt turning of long Glaciation-Periods into shorter Interglacials. The Eamian Inter-Glacial lasted roughly from 130,000 years ago to 115,000 years ago while the Holocene Inter-Glacial had started about 11,700 years ago. During both of these periods the existing model of society got destabilized which forced a process of transition to a new model of society having the ability to handle larger populations. The Eamian started with a “Small-Band model of society” but ended with a “Tribal model of society” while the Holocene started with a “Tribal model of society” that eventually transited to a “Power model of society”.
The differentiation of these models of societies is so stark that they appear like Archetypal. This discovery implies that, in analogy to epigenetics, epicultural factors, like an abrupt climate heating, caused at least two great turnings of Homo-Sapiens’ Archetypal models of societies.
I also observed that the cultural field, of the various societies participating in one given Archetypal model of society, was synchronizing the present with the past and the past with the present. This synchronization, of the cultural field of societies, sustains their cultural evolution which also happens to drive their societal evolution.
The conclusion of this series is that, by causing “the great convergence of numerous self inflicted side-effects”, Western-Modernity has unleashed, among other, an abrupt climate heating that fosters an infernal spiral of societal destabilization. Out of the chaos will most probably emerge a new “knowledge paradigm” and a new “foundational worldview” that will eventually engage a new “Archetypal model of society”.
I focus thus extensively on how Western-Modernity caused such a disastrous outcome for the whole of humanity but I refuse to entertain a gloom and doom frame of mind, for, I imagine a path forward that could finally do justice to the appellation “Homo-Sapiens” that Western European scientists invented to justify the exceptionalism of their species.
But Homo-Sapiens are definitely not exceptional. We are one species among many and, as all species, we are driven by the Geo-physical order of the universe and by the bio-chemical properties of the sub-sub-sub-ensemble earth.
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