Becoming - Part III

We are protagonists in the theater of the world. Whether we are a walk-on or the main actor does not matter. Whether we are recognized or not is of secondary importance. Change is what it is, we can participate and act in any way our personhood allows us to participate and act. And in doing so, we can move the world with us and be moved by the world.

We can probe how we are allowed to play in the theater of the world. And we can choose what waves we want to ride. Do we prefer an ascendant to a descendant type of life? Do we prefer a reactive to a proactive type of life? Do we prefer to be thankful or resentful? How we probe the current values and choose when to stand and what to ride counts.

Let me try to be a bit more provocative. The current juncture of issues and power setup directs our attention to one particular event: the formation of a planetary community. Although even in the Bronze Age humans traveled and exchanged goods and culture and illnesses and whatnot, only now we have a truly planetary connectedness brought about by new technologies – in particular solid state and integrated electronics and its impact, still in its infancy, on transportation, communication, genetics, etc. These new technologies are bringing us beyond the Iron Age and its culmination with modernity.

The evolution of transportation technology, traced by archeology as the study of the transferring of objects, made possible the physical coming together of the planet. If writing, and the specificity of meaning-transferring that technology allowed, as traced by history, increased the possibility of influencing and controlling people’s emotions, IT can both increase that influence and control and introduce chance and fluidity – the secondary orality – and deliver leadership within complexity through new ways of synthesizing the flood of information that is constantly created and transferred.

Can the subtlety and pervading character of the new technologies bring humans closer to transitioning from a reality of ‘being’ to a reality of ‘process’? Although that getting closer is made by a microscopic succession of ‘being’, and never a ‘process’, it is possible to accept that approximation if, and only if, the processes are not required to be logically consistent and complete – i.e. automatable and self-contained.

It seems to me that we are at a juncture of needing a redefinition of fundamental concepts like life, death, identity, nature, and reality. It seems to me that we need to be available to go beyond morality (Leiter’s Morality in a Pejorative Sense, or MPS) and strive for greatness in order to achieve this change. It seems to me that we have to redefine how we exchange the results of our activities, how we engage in conflict, how we deploy power. And we need to encourage those technologies, like IT, that can make new values accessible to the larger public so that the political and economic world is pressed for change.

Becoming - Part II

News media have always used anxiety as a hook to grab people’s attention. But let’s, for a moment, go beyond that and ask ourselves: what is that characterizes the present times? One way to answer that question is by looking at where leaders' and people's attention is now focused on. That certainly drives, in different degrees, how both popular and academic culture look at the present and at the past.

Energy. Natural resources and the environment. Population growth and migrations. New technologies – IT, biotech, nanotech, robotics, etc. – and their pervading character – in particular their utilization in biological, nuclear, and conventional weaponry. These seem to be large-scale themes – at least encompassing the planet and modernity. There are institutional issues, like the continuous instability of the nation-state, and education, health, and justice systems, and the particular approach we take with outliers of these institutions. We have then more immediate issues, like the current crisis of the financial system.

It is difficult to know what brings change and at what pace. But if the recent American elections are a sign of the times, it seems that the anxiety is high, and so is the appeal of hope – not only in the United States but around the world. The post WWII anxiety of the annihilation by nuclear disaster has been substituted by the anxiety about population management, resources, and environment. Whether that anxiety is justified is an open question – but it is fair to assume that the above listed issues can be disruptive. And this can drive people to believe that there is an opportunity for changing the way we are and we live our lives. The combination – of historical events and society emotional response to those – is certainly at an interesting juncture. A new direction seems possible.

If we think at power as the ability to drive change, then the question became: where is power? Geopolitically power seems currently in the hands of Russia, China, the EU, the USA, and to a lesser extent to India, Japan, South America, Africa, the ME and Iran, and Central Asia. This power is based on the ability to lead masses in some coordinated and synchronized fashion through the availability and control of technological and socio-economical means. Whether that is possible depends on how leaders can evoke a coherent emotional response from the individual components of the masses. A constructive resonant phenomenon needs to take place. To that end, the connectedness that media and in general IT can provide is certainly essential. But what is the message? And where should the message drive people emotions?

Events shake the course of society as perturbations on top of more massive waves, the massive wave of the narrative that defines us and our society. And we are probably surfing both growing and fading waves. Razionalization – in Max Weber’s sense. Monotheism. Slavery and exploitation of the many by the few. Are these waves still growing or fading? Are these merging in other growing waves?

Statistics and Society

Chris Jordan
Gapminder

Becoming - Part I

Bearing in mind that society is always changing, it seems that looking back in history (and pre-history, and as far as we can look) we identify periods of relatively stable character and periods of substantive change. In general, as it seems obvious, the closer in time to the present and the better the record keeping, the higher the narrative resolution over the time axis. However, different cultures have different approaches to the past, different historiographies. Mythology can be considered – not exclusively – a particular approach to the past, for instance. Overall, it seems there is a global convergence to a historiography based on digital technology, the last installment of the art of memory that found its stability through the development of syntactic language and consciousness.

We go from the evolution of the hominids to the successful adoption of language, from domestication and civilization to the end of the Bronze Age, and focusing on Western history we see the transformation of the Greek civilization between the 8th and 5th century BCE as pivotal to where we are now. The resolution is then higher, the records kept in large quantities – we also come closer to the present in time – a particular historiography (from Herodotus and Thucydides to Virgil and Procopius, with all their differences) converging to our current narrative. And certainly history has been re-written every now and then, in broad strokes – for instance during the Renaissance with the classical antiquity revival, and later during the Greek revival of the 18th and 19th centuries – and in subtle strokes too. Nothing is simple but we see our personhood through a simplified narrative.

Where are we now? Is perhaps the instauration of a planetary community (more than a global civilization) the truly new event of the current times? Does the technologies that brought that about take us to a different view of the world and ourselves? What is this world, and how do we fit in it?

Intersections and Interactions

John Zorn - Naked City - You Will Be Shot
Johannes Ciconia - Le Ray Au Soleyl

Intersections and Interactions

Decisions

En general no se dice que una decisión se nos aparece, las personas son tan celosas de su identidad, por vaga que sea, y de su autoridad, por poca que tengan, que preferien dar a entender que reflexionaron antes de dar el último paso, que ponderaron los pros y los contras, que sopesaron las posibilidades y las alternativas, y que, al cabo de un intenso trabajo mental, tomaron finalmente la decisión. Hay que decir que estas cosas nunca ocurren así. A nadie se le pasa por la cabeza la idea de comer si sentir suficiente apetito y el apetito non depende de la voluntad de cada uno, se forma por sí mismo, resulta de objectiva necesidades del cuerpo, es un problema físico-químico cuya solución, de un modo más o menos satisfactorio, será encontrada en el contenido del plato. Incluso un acto tan simple come es el de bajar a la calle a comprar un periódico presupone non sólo un suficiente deseo de recibir información, que, aclarémoslo, siendo deseo, es necesariamente apetito, efecto de actividades físico-químicas específicas del cuerpo, aunque de diferente naturaleza, come presupone también, ese acto rutinario, por ejemplo, la certeza, o la convicción, o la esperanza, no conscientes, de que el vehículo de distributión no se atrasó o de que el puesto de venta de los periódicos no está cerrado por enfermedad o ausencia voluntaria de propietario. Además, se persistiésemos en afirmar que somos nosotros quienes tomamos nuestras decisiones, tendríamos que comenzar dilucidando, discerniendo, distinguiendo, quién es, en nosotros, aquel que tomó la decisión y quién es el que después la cumplirá, operaciones imposibles donde las haya. En rigor, no tomamos decisiones, son la decisiones las que nos toman a nosotros.

José Saramago, Todos los nombre, paginas 46-47, Alfaguara

Introduction

Müsset im Naturbetrachten
Immer eins wie alles achten.
Nichts ist drinnen, nichts ist draußen;
Denn was innen, das ist außen.
So ergreifet ohne Säumnis
Heilig öffentlich Geheimnis!

Freuet euch des wahren Scheins,
Euch des ernsten Spieles!
Kein Lebend'ges ist ein Eins,
Immer ist's ein Vieles.


You must, when contemplating nature,
Attend to this, in each and every feature:
There's nought outside and nought within,
For she is inside out and outside in.
Thus will you grasp, with no delay,
The holy secret, clear as day.

Joy in true semblance take, in any
Earnest play:
No living thing is One, I say,
But always Many.

Epirrhema, Goethe (c. 1819)