From Modernity to After-Modernity (34)

Book 3. Divination

1. the future emerges in a given context

1.1. The quasi-Worldview of Modernity

1.1.2. Power ideologies mold the minds

In “Book 2. Volume 1. About the formation of human knowledge. 1.1. The context.  I defend the thesis  that the nature of reality is largely inaccessible to humanity (1). I further wrote that “We better recognize, early on, the fact that the whole universe is immensely vast; so vast that its true nature is inaccessible to human reason. … Inaccessibility implies the unknown and humans don't like unknowns. They have no problems with unknown "unknowns" for the good reason that unknown "unknowns" simply don't pop up in their consciousness but they feel utterly ill at ease when faced with known "unknowns" such as those nagging questions resulting from the inaccessibility of the whole universe to the human mind. Such known unknowns become obsessions that drive people in the throat of anxiety from where they search to escape at all costs. This is how societal groupings, along our entire history, have been seen coming in the picture by proposing approximations of reality, and of what the unknown is all about, to be shared by their citizens in order to sooth their anxiety. When shared by all citizens such approximations crystallize in a societal view of the world or a worldview that all consider as being the truth of the matter and this rewards those societies with higher levels of cohesion which, in turn, facilitate their reproduction from generation to generation.”

From Modernity to After-Modernity (33)

Book 3. Divination

1. the future emerges in a given context

1.1. The quasi-Worldview of Modernity

Modernity is not a worldview in the real meaning of the term. It is a quasi-worldview. A worldview relates to a holistic narrative that all citizens can share as their own understanding about what reality is all about. In other words the ideas generated by Modernity, and the facts those ideas derive, are not weaving a holistic narrative about human existential reality. As a matter of fact nor Modernity, nor science which is its active method of inquiry, are offering a narrative about what reality is all about... In this sense we come to understand why Modernity can’t answer the existential questions that pop up in peoples’ minds and why peoples’ minds are thus filing with anxiety that isolates them in the disturbing feeling of not really belonging to their societies. 

From Modernity to After-Modernity (32)

Book 3. Divination


1. the future emerges in a given context

Obviously the future does not fall from the sky.

The future is resulting from the arbitration between the multiple determinant factors that are competing in the present. In other words the competition, between the multiple determinant factors in the present, is what shapes the context out of which the future emerges.

From Modernity to After-Modernity (31)

Part 3. Divination
Introduction (continued. 4)

The future as a probabilistic outcome

The alternatives, that are shaping in the present as potential futures, are not readily visible and so the substance of the future remains invisible to the naked eye for the majority of citizens. But it is nevertheless accessible to inquiring minds. To detect these alternatives in their very early stage, I mean at the early stage of their formation as potentialities in the present, one has to entrust the subconscious by entering states of altered consciousness. It is indeed only after they have already emerged as selected future alternatives that conscious observation will possibly detect them. The fact of the matter is that the substance of these alternatives is being formatted inside the context that is shaping in the present which means that, while this context has still not been substantiated yet, future alternatives are already forming in the midst of the presently forming context. This whole process remains largely hidden to conscious observation and its visibility will only arise with its substantiation.

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 (19)

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


4.7.2.4. The Chinese empire

I mentioned in “4.7.2.3. The transition from tribes to empires. A. What is an empire?” that the word “empire” is a European construct and that the understanding of the concept in the European acceptance is not adapted to all contexts. But more to the point; the way Europeans have defined the concept around the exercise of power has no place in the Chinese context and more particularly in its early phase of unification and centralization 

From Modernity to After-Modernity (18)

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

4.7. About the institutions of governance (part 2)



I touched very briefly on the subject of Chinese governance in "4.6.3. Societal reproduction – Individual communion 2. China unified its early kingdoms along the Yellow River some 3000 years BC under the '3 sovereigns' and the '5 emperors' ". What follows is an expansion on the content of that text.

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.

Loss of certainty and the purpose of life?"

This post is a follow-up of my commentary in StumbleUpon about Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia by Spengler that was published by AsiaTimes.
________________




"Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation." writes a proud Spengler.

Rationality versus religion, a non-sense debate.

To make any sense about religion and rationality, it seems to me that, we have first to situate them in a societal evolutionary perspective and I'm afraid that the question has to be viewed from within the more globally encompassing framework of what is humanity and how it does operate. What I mean to say is that the reproduction and then the evolution of humanity (as an ensemble) necessitates a balancing mechanism in order to keep in check its polarities: societies and individuals.

Individuals tend to push the envelope of individualism which leads to change while societies tend to preserve, at any cost, the existing against such change.

With the start of civilization physical force appeared insufficient to keep in check populations scattered over always enlarging territories. When the men of power awakened to this reality they understood that the only way out for guaranteeing the reproduction of their power over their subjects was to find some psychic glue, in the form of the sharing by all of a common worldview, and impose it on their subjects.

In the Middle-East the men of power recoursed to religion as the shared worldview. But the religions of the word got their biggest boost from the Roman Emperor Constantine's decision to impose Christianity as the official religion of the empire. This is what made Christianity to become the shared worldview of all in Europe and of all in Europe's outposts around the world.
Force here is to observe that in other geographic areas the men of power did not recourse to religion but used the existing animist philosophies of life: Hinduism, Taoism, ... to unite their subjects.

What is slowly starting to sink in our consciousness is that:
1. individuals can't survive without belonging to societies
2. societies can't survive without the sharing by the individuals of a common worldview.

Animism, religions, philosophies and rationality are "worldviews".

In Western late-modernity religion can only be considered as a reliquary of history while science and rationality are the "worldview" of the men of knowledge of modernity. What I mean to say here is that to each particular period of history in each particular area of the world corresponds a given reality and a given "worldview" and it just makes no sense to try to re-apply today the worldview of past conditions.

On the doorstep of post-modernity we vaguely sense that the worldview of modernity, rationality, will necessarily be overtaken by a more globally encompassing knowledge system... The philosophy of rationality was derived out of the application of the logic of capital along several centuries. It laid the groundwork for the blooming of science that radically swept away past conceptions about reality but, in the end of the day, we are forced to observe that science left us in a societal quandary.

Tt appears clearer every passing day that the belief in science as the ultimate discoverer of reality was no more than adolescent certitude. The overwhelming immensity of our universe starts only to sink in our consciousness but it already let's us perceive the impossibility for science to ever come to the end of its quest for understanding. This means that we are bound, in essence, to remain in the dark about the nature of the whole in which we are such tiny particles... But this does in no way diminish the fundamental jump in the quality of our observations and deductions that science helped us to reach along these last centuries. This only brings us back to our senses from our adolescent dreams.

At this point two factors impose themselves to our attention:

1. Science is not a complete system of understanding, in other words, it can't offer us all the answers and, it is by now proven scientifically that, it never will. From this we know that science could never bring us a satisfactory story about reality for all to share.

2. For reasons that are still not well understood science, as the worldview of modernity, has been left to fight for credibility on the societal "level playing field" with all kinds of charlatans. The men of power under modernity did not further impose any worldview on their subjects. In other words the separation of power and knowledge under modernity left both isolated in their specialization and each went it alone along their own way.
Even if we make abstraction of this separation of power and knowledge, we have to recognize that the body of knowledge accumulated by science is nothing but a very complex system that can only be approached through many, many, years of studies without ever a chance of an end in sight. Such a system does not exactly qualify to be reduced into a simple story that could be given to all for sharing.

For reasons that I wrote about, in my book Artsense and in articles in Crucial Talk, I believe that our future shall witness a radical departure from the present and that post-modern societies will be given to share a new worldview answering the conditions of those particular times.

Under the aegis of "necessity" the knowledge level playing field, where the complex system embodied by science is left to compete for attention with all kinds of simple "foundational" stories, has a high probability to be superseded in a foreseeable future by a re-convergence of power and knowledge. My writing and my painting are entirely focused on the new knowledge that, I think, is bound to spread in the future. The power aspect is not a concern of mine but I nevertheless think that power shall eventually be involved, at a certain stage, in the spreading of that knowledge...

Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power

Worldviews, civilizations and culture

I concluded my last post with the following words: "The European and by extension the Western civilization finds its roots in Christianity. In contrast the Chinese civilization seems to have been built directly out of its Animist societal experience". The ground where both civilizations sprouted and the roots they grew could thus not be further apart.

It is generally accepted that humans' present day form and fully grown brain potential were reached some 100,000 years ago. We have thus to assume that the earliest cultural development of humanity starts at least at that time. But recent scientific descoveries about animal societies conclude that animals have languages, societal organizations and their own cultures. Force is thus to assume that human culture goes back far earlier than the last 100,000 years.

The point here is not to engage in a scholastic debate about the time span covered by human culture. The point is simply to recognize that for well over 100,000 years humans were observing the earth and the sky and their cycles. Those observations then led them into thinking about their place in what they saw. The perception they so developed helped them to set up and adjust their early societal organization and thus emerged human culture.

I started this post writing about civilization and here I'm writing about culture and those who read me regularly know for a fact that I'm very often referrring to worldviews. But what are the differences between those concepts? Many writers use them as if they were interchangeable as if they were meaning the same thing but nothing could be further apart from the reality of their meaning. If we want to understand the evolution of human thinking, the evolution of human societal organizations, we better clarify the differences between those 3 concepts and how they relate to one another.

I'll try to clarify this question in my next 3 post.


Technorati tags: modern art, art theory, visual art, society, worldviews, modernity

Western versus Chinese civilization

In Western eyes, the traditional model of societal development that has been teached for ages goes something like this. (The timeline goes from left towards right.)










We should be aware that this is somehow an Eurocentrist model and it should thus not be generalized to the rest of the world. But let's nevertheless see what its application returns from a comparison between the developments of Europe and China.











































From those images everyone will rapidly come to the same 3 conclusions:
- animism has decidedly been, at least in terms of its timespan, the overwhelming stage of the human theater of societal evolution and this stage of development was similar in Europe and in China.
- on the right side of the graph a stark differentiation appears between the European and Chinese societal developments.
- religion seems to have been a uniquely European reality.
Let's now zoom on the developments that are nearest to us.


Europe.


















China.




















For sure these visualizations are crude "impressionistic style" generalizations but they are nevertheless exact reflections of the reality of societal evolution and those images undoubtedly leave us with a very strong visual impression of the differences between the roads taken by Europe and China.

So let's examine what are the strongest differentiations.

1. In Europe the passage from Animism to Christianity seems to have been a rather gradual experience. But while Christianity borrowed some Animist traits it remains nevertheless that in the end it eradicated with a vengence the last vestiges of its competitor for the control of people's minds. Books were burnt, statues were destroyed, temples were demolished, public signs were eradicated and feasts and festivals were converted to the new creed. The natural consequence of such a barbarity has been the irremediable loss of the observations and knowledge that had been gathered by earlier generations along the preceding tens of thousands of years.
In contrast China kept that heritage intact.

2. European and by extension Western civilization finds thus its roots in Christianity. In contrast the Chinese civilization seems to have been built out of its Animist societal experience.


Graphs Copyright Laodan

Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, power, society, culture, civilization, animism, religion, modernity