Our present mood shapes our reading of the future.

 Does it matter if Chinese and Western perceptions about societal reality are growing further apart?  Whatever people may be thinking the fact is that this disconnect is going to have a decisive impact on how humanity's future will unfold and so I believe that those whose minds are still open and curious about the fate of humanity better watch carefully.

From Modernity to After-Modernity. (27)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations 

Summary sketch of part 2.

Life is one of the applications installed in the operating system of the universe and it emerges eventually in those of its sub-sets whose context contains all the ingredients for life to emerge.

Humanity is one of the youngest species to have evolved from such a process of emergence on earth. As all species humanity is subservient to the application of the principle of life. By that I mean that we can’t escape its rules; we are merely dancing to the tune of its music.

From Modernity to After-Modernity. (26)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations 

Chapter 5. About the arts

What follows is the table of content of the 25 posts I published during the past winter 2015-2016. These posts form part 2 of "From Modernity to After-Modernity" that addresses my personal theoretical views about societal evolution and the arts. This part 2 ended up totaling 204,122 words or some 750 book pages. I thought a table of content of this material could be useful to those of my readers who would want to read or re-read some specific parts of the content.  To find the post relating to the subject that interests you please go here.

Part 3 will address the paradigm shift that has already been set in motion during Late-Modernity. In other worlds part 3 shall address the formation of a new worldview, a new form of societal organization, and a new understanding of the arts that will replace the models of Modernity in the coming future... This will be the subject of my writing during the winter 2016-2017.

Until then I wish you all a very creative summer.

Laodan

From Modernity to After-Modernity. (25)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations 

Chapter 5. About the arts

Chapter 5. About the arts


5.4. the arts in what comes after Modernity
As I have laid out extensively already Modernity is in its late phase that I call Late-Modernity. This new context is made of multiple existential crisis that prepare the conditions for the seeds of what comes after Modernity to sprout. What is at stake here is the birth of a whole new societal paradigm that emerges as an answer to a falling model.
One of the most interesting aspects of the new paradigm relates to knowledge formation and acquisition.

From Modernity to After-Modernity. (24)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations 
Chapter 5. About the arts

Dear readers I'm really sorry for this late publishing of the last articles in this series.  A software glitch left me stranded in Beijing and I could not find a way to access Blogger. There are 3 more posts to complete the publishing of what I wrote along the last winter. I'll post them weekly as I did in the past.
I wish you all a great summer. I'll be back publishing next November.
Best,
Laodan

5.3.4.3. Numerous contemporary ideas about the future.


People generally agree that modernity has yielded a series of bottlenecks but they widely disagree on their future outcomes for human societies. The range of future possible outcomes varies along the line between the following two extreme beliefs:

• the belief in technological singularity
• the belief in the collapse of modern civilization.

From Modernity to After-Modernity (22)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations 
Chapter 5. About the arts

5.2.3. From biological evolution to societal evolution

What I propose here is that biological evolution has been a first mover in the process of the evolution of life. It has bestowed on us our biological characteristics in a process of natural selection that operated over hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore the near infinite chain of its successful mutations have imprinted patterns in our biological code that act as a predisposition of the individual to prefer beauty over ugliness, love over hate, cooperation over competition, winning over losing and so on.

From Modernity to After-Modernity (16)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 4. About societal governance and societal evolution



4.6.  Twenty determinant 'individual-society' interrelations  (Part 3)

The graph that follows illustrates the dynamic that forms the reality of species. Each living species has two polarities: societies (positive) and individuals (negative). The interactions or the play between these polarities is what creates the reality of species.

Nourished by the sap bubbling from our civilizational roots.

It's like a given for all of us that people of different civilizations are and behave very differently. We all inherited stereotypes about "the other" but once we start to better know people from another civilization it seems that those differences are fast melting away. In "the other" we discover a human as ourselves. But is this the real thing happening or is it only a mirage given by the picture of our perception in our heads? In this post I posit that civilizations imprint a subtle code of behavior within societies that reflects upon individual attitudes.