Posts Tagged ‘ The Modern World ’

The Inner and Outer Self

The human situation is complicated, we can all agree on that. But in the last 500 years or so it has become much more complicated. But we cannot agree on that. Why? That is the subject of this posting.

Every organism is part of something much larger. All life is closely related – we are all built of cells, which are much the same the world over. Except for one kind of cells – nerves, which in the human brain have become incredibly complicated.

Actually, the right world to use here is not complicated, but complex. And complexity theory tells us something amazing – as systems become more complex new behaviors appear – out of nowhere. These are called emergent properties.

The human brain is full of these properties – as is human behavior, which is derived, somehow, from our over-developed brains. I want to talk about two of them – the inner self and the way we have become extended – the external self.

We have always been part of our technologies – this is what civilization amounted to: a complex of new technologies – including writing. And they have never been under control – we become whatever our technologies want us to become.

You may object that technologies do not have minds, and cannot will anything. You are right, technically. But practically, the combination of technology and people always results in people modifying their behavior to make maximum use of the newest, most successful, technology. This is what makes a technology successful.

This is most easily seen in warfare – a very human activity. A man with a spear is much more powerful than a man without one. And a phalanx of men armed with spears is more powerful yet. In such a situation the individual man disappears – and only the group remains. A transformation many find hard to resist.

This is the basis of the individual – group conflict. Which is usually resolved to benefit the group.

Modern history began with the Middle Ages – from which it emerged. Modernism was an incredibly complicated (or actually, complex) development – that people are now ignorant of – as they are of most everything. This posting is about how modern history evolved into post-modern history. Another very complicated development – which I can only scratch the surface of.

The big change involved the creation of mass production and mass man. This was a very clever idea – although not a new one. The Greeks had pottery factories operated by slaves, and hundreds of thousand of their pots still exist.

But the Industrial Revolution had something new - energy from fossil fuels – first coal, and then oil. And an explosion of new machines. This, as always, made a new kind of people – the human mass. Here again, this was nothing new. Ancient Rome was full of useless people who demanded bread and circuses - and got them.

But their modern counterpart was different – they could be put to work in the factories, manufacturing mass-produced commodities – at very low prices – to the immense profit of a few. This became know as Capitalism – whose most obvious feature was its ruthlessness.

But this is not what I started to write about. Completely unnoticed, something else was happening – people were extending themselves outward and becoming part of their technologies – which were themselves becoming more and more extended. As I said, this very important development has not been noticed – except for a few, and these have been ignored.

People could not resist this shameful new development – and they didn’t want anyone calling their attention to it. What was shameful about it? It meant they were abandoning their inner selves – which, after all, were their real selves.

Now I must start of the development of today’s subject – the difference between the inner and outer self. The outer self is all our possessions – which possess us. In the Computer world, this means we are networked all over the place. The Economy is also networked, which in practice means it can be manipulated by a few to their benefit. But this is nothing compared to the damage to our inner selves.

Every person, in the course of his (or her) normal development, develops his own personality. In Jungian terms, this is called individuation. And every individual is different. And is accepted as being different. In my little town in Costa Rica I can see this just by walking down the street, and taking note of the people there.

By contrast, if I go a two hour bus ride away to the Central Metropolitan Area (where most of the people live and most of the jobs are) the people have become homogenized – where everyone is much the same. And where everyone studiously ignores this.

I summarize – when people develop in externalized self, they lose their inner self. And cease to function as normal human beings.

You might ask “If you are right, why hasn’t this been noticed?” The answer seems to be “This is normal human behavior (which made it invisible to us) – but carried to extremes – which produced effects that we could not have anticipated.”

Of course, you will ask “What’s the solution?” My answer is “I don’t know, but the first step would be recognizing where we are – which seems impossible.”

2012
11/14
CATEGORY
Economy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
The Self
Leave a comment

Thinking Has Become Painful

It is painful because it can get you into trouble, and because you discover too many things you don’t want to know. One discovery can lead to another, as it almost always does, and before you know it you are in deep shit. Not someplace you want to be.

The only sensible solution is to not think at all – the solution used by almost everyone. It is much easier – and safer – to latch onto someone else’s thinking and call it your own – after making sure, of course, that everyone else has decided to do this also. Doesn’t this imbecility bother people? Not at all, because all this is unconscious behavior which can be indulged in freely. As a culture, we have agreed not to notice it.

Someone like me can talk about it as much as he wants, without bothering them in the least. They have all agreed not to follow unwanted thoughts into forbidden waters.

Isn’t this dangerous behavior? Isn’t a culture that cannot think bound to get into big trouble? Absolutely; and we are in big trouble because of this. But it all happened by degrees, over a long period of time.

Initially, we made certain decisions about how we were going behave and what we were going to believe. Decisions made at the beginning of the modern era, that seemed sensible and necessary at the time. Northern Europe made one set of decisions that Southern Europe rejected. The Reformation started in the North, which was countered in the South by the Counter-Reformation.

All of this has conveniently been forgotten, swept under the rug, and ignored. Everyone, North and South, is demanding “What has this got to do with us now?” The answer, dear friends, is: everything. These are the decisions and biases that formed the present – that we are determined to ignore. Every schoolchild should know about them – but instead the educational establishment ignores them completely. Even Philosophy has ignored them – with only a few exceptions (such as Ortega y Gasset). Even Buddhism, which was initially formed to solve this kind of initial problem, has been unable to comprehend how they developed.

The end result is that we are in really bad shape – so bad, it is painful to think about it. So we don’t think.

2012
01/14
CATEGORY
Education
History
Philosophy
Leave a comment

Real People Don’t Read Poetry

Instead, they avoid it like the plague – while remaining completely oblivious to this – and nearly everything else. They have no objection to poetry, they say, they think it is wonderful – they just never get around to reading it.

As part of my innate stubbornness, I am determined to make it part of my life. Although sometimes, as part of the herd, I find myself rejecting it too. In one of my better moments, after reading an excellent review of it, I bought the book Dickinson - which contains a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems, and a commentary on each of them.

As the author, Helen Vendler, says in her Introduction, Dickinson has survived four “Ages” – The Age of Publication (after her death, when her poems were “cleaned up”), the Age of Biography, the Age of Editing, and the Age of Commentary. In her poem listed as number 930, she says

The Poets light but lamps -
Themselves go out -

Poetic influence does not die with the death of writer.

2012
01/05
CATEGORY
Poetry
Leave a comment

The Infantile Need for Certainty

I lead a strange life. I am about as socially isolated as a man can get. I don’t live in a desert island, but culturally Orosi, Costa Rica might as well be. The gringo drifters who end up here are sorry specimens of humanity. To balance this, I have a fast Internet connection right to my bedroom, and I get my mail flown in from Miami to the nearest large town, where I go once a week to get it and shop at the Wal-Mart supermarket.

I end up with one or two large bags of good stuff that I stash on the overhead racks of the bus for the ride home. The locals never do this: shop in Cartago, where the prices and selection are much better, and then lug the stuff home. They are extremely local, and live in their own little world – except when they go to work, when they get on that same bus again at five in the morning, for a three-hour ride to work, and the another three-hour ride home again in the evening. Life in the undeveloped world is tough.

Last week, I loaded up on books from Amazon – five substantial ones in all. Two of them were promptly trashed and carted off by the garbage truck this morning. I am very picky about my reading. Life is too short to waste it on trash, which is now turned out in amazing quantities.

The book I am going to write about now is The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty. From the Preface:

Most people would identify science with certainty. Certainty, they feel, is a state of affairs with no downside, so the most desirable situation would be one of absolute certainty. Scientific results and theories seem to promise such certainty. The popular belief in scientific certainty has two aspects: first, that a state of objective certainty exists and second, that scientific kinds of activities are the methods through which this this state can be accessed. Yet I will make the case the absolute certainty is illusory and that the human need for certainty has often been abused with noxious consequences.

This is an understatement, the need for certainty was one of the driving forces behind the construction of the Modern World – as another book, Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity points out. The Reformation caused some of the worst wars in history – and the need to overcome these conflicts, that were tearing Europe apart, drove us to replace religious certainty with scientific certainty.

This is what another book called The Heroic Model of Science. This was the model in vogue when I was in high school, I was going to become a scientist myself and become a hero. But it didn’t quite work out that way. I return to The Blind Spot again:

Yet modern civilization is in crisis! We face not just one crisis but a series of interconnected crises – the economic crisis, the environmental crisis, the the crisis in relations between the secular and religious worlds, especially the world of religious fundamentalism. There is a deep connection between these crises and the modern world of science and technology. In fact, a better way to think about the present situation is that what looks like a series of disparate crises, is really one crisis that manifests itself in various ways – one all-encompassing crisis that arises from inner contradictions that are inherent in modern culture…

The problem lies not with science but with the point of view I call the “science of certainty,” a particular approach to science in which the need for certainty, power, and control are dominant.

He is overlooking the elephant in the living room, the amazing ignorance and self-destructiveness of mass man. This seems like a cop-out to me, but perhaps he does not want to be ridden out of town on a rail, covered with tar and feathers.

2012
01/05
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Science
Leave a comment

The Only Important Thing in Our World Should be Us

It should not be our things, which have become more important than we are.

Before now, I (and many other people) have addressed this problem by talking about technology. This was a mistake.  Using this particular word drags in all kinds of connotations, and we end up talking about something bigger that life. Technology, I suspect, has taken the place of God in our minds – without our being aware of it at all.

We need to back off, and get in touch with our basics again. But we cannot do this, because we have lost touch with them. To do this, we have to go back to our beginnings, and recognize our built-in attachment to our things (which easily becomes an addiction).

This is not easy, because we are such clever devils. We have invented language, for example, which is both a curse and a blessing. We have invented music, and all kinds of social activities associated with it, such as dancing. And most important of all – we have invented greed and power, which are now embodied in the world of business – which has taken the place of religion.

It is not easy to separate our precious things from this matrix – but this is exactly what we have to do. Consider them by themselves, unattached to everything else. For example, consider the car. This has become something we cannot resist because we did not carefully note how it was affecting us. We just fell in love with it, and did whatever it demanded.

That last sentence is important –  it indicates that our extensions (to use McLuhan’s term) rule us, instead of us ruling them. Every step of the way we should have been asking ourselves “How is this affecting us?” But we never thought to ask that, and kept adding technology on top of technology until we were lost to sight. At the time, we didn’t think about this, but felt we had to.

Probably most would agree with my line of reasoning here – but that only shows the limitations of reason. Our emotions easily override our reason. This is where the rubber hits the road, to use a modern metaphor. This is where our unconscious drives take over.

Does this mean we are doomed? Probably, but not absolutely. There is nothing set in concrete about our future. The cards may be stacked against us – but there are always wild cards in the deck.

This in continued on Using the Computer to Empower Our Minds.

2012
01/02
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
Leave a comment

Five Centuries of History

I keep noticing this – five centuries of history, from the 15th through the 19th Centuries, the most important centuries in history, the era of the Modern world, have been carefully ignored as though they never happened.

I got a new book today, hot off the press – Too Big to Know: rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room. This is a brilliant analysis of our information/networked world. To my way of thinking it has one fault – it is five centuries too late; or at the very least, two centuries too late, if we reset our clocks to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The author, David Weinberger, does not ask himself why most of the people in the room will not read his book. He just assumes we don’t want to talk about how the masses do not matter.

I must be smarter than everyone, or dumber than everyone – or both, to insist on going back and looking at how technology flooded our consciousness, and created mass man.

I may be smarter or dumber, or both, but that doesn’t matter. I am being ignored just as five centuries of history have been.

2011
12/29
CATEGORY
History
Technology
2 comments

China and Religion

I am tempted to repeat Dickens line about the best of possible worlds and the worst of possible worlds – only I would reverse the order. I am a witness to the complete collapse of the modern world, where most of the people are not interested in learning anything. At the same time, the amount of things to be learned, for those so inclined, has never been greater.

I subscribe to the New York Review, and it shows up, after being flown in from Miami, on my desk, eager to have me read it. I always skim through the book advertisements – every serious publisher, especially the university presses, advertises there. Of course, I look at the reviews also, and spend time on those that interest me.

The Dec. 22 issue has an article China Gets Religion (on page 35), which caught my attention this morning. Religion is not one of my favorite subjects, and I had overlooked it at first. As I have said many times, I am fortunate to have plenty of time on my hands – which means I am rich that way. I wish you could read it online, but for some reason the Review doesn’t have it available there. I will attempt to give you some of the flavor of that article anyway.

First of all, China has had the most sustained attack on religion in history. This included all religions, including Buddhism. China had been the heartland of Northern Buddhism, an amazing adaption of Buddhism to Chinese conditions – which resulted in a new religion. With the coming of the Cultural Revolution, millions of Buddhism monks and nuns were slaughtered, and their temples ruined.

Underlying these changes was the attack on what had been seen as the country’s soul. If religion had previously held together ancient China’s social and political system, it now became the target of China’s top-down modernizers…

China had become a de-centered religious universe, exploding centrifugally in all directions…a de-centered society, a de-centered China: a Middle Kingdom that has lost its Middle.

This secular vision of [of the good life] never materialized, and despite, or perhaps, because of the stunning economic growth of the past thirty years, millions of people were more dissatisfied than ever…

After three decades of prosperity – the first significant period of stability in 150 years – Chinese have been quietly but forcefully initiated a religious revival.

So did the people who became Mormons, my own ancestors. I can’t see it did them any good, but they will not give it up.

Religion is something the non-religious have to tolerate as best they can. It looks like the Chinese government will have to also.

2011
12/21
CATEGORY
History
Morality
Religion
Leave a comment

The Non-Linear World

We have moved from a linear to a non-linear world, and the shock of this has been more than we can handle. What do I mean by this? I am talking about rate of change. Previously, this was manageable, now it is not. I am reminded of a Sixties song “Stop the world, I want to get off!”

This is related to the impact of technology on our lives – technological innovation has gotten faster and faster, with the result that social change got faster and faster. We did not see this as a problem – quite to the contrary, it seemed very exciting and profitable. Innovation was seen as a good thing – and the more there was of it, the better.

We actually thought everyone was going to get rich – in the new economy. Instead, everybody got poorer – except the very rich, who had too much already. This was innovation, but not the kind we wanted.

What I am going to do now, is what we all should be doing – but are not – going back over our past in an attempt to understand it. And to see where we got off the track.

I am hardly the first to try this, everybody and his brother has had his hand at it – and many of the are far better qualified. But one more voice in the crowd cannot hurt.

First, a definition. It started with a development in mathematics, which effected physics, which caused the Industrial Revolution. Isaac Newton, like everyone else of his time, was trying to understand the world. Then a strange idea occurred to him: that the world must be governed by mathematical laws. What a strange idea, right?

The math necessary for this had not been invented yet, so he, along with Leibniz, invented it – what we now call calculus. The basic idea here is simple: change could only happen so fast and this rate of change could be expressed by a mathematical formula, using a new notation. To this day, few can understand this – including the math instructor who taught it to me in a religious college I was sent to by my parents.

The impact of this was amazing: Newton had broken the code of how nature worked! The world (later dubbed the clockwork universe) was simply mechanical, through and through! The social implication was also amazing: people knew they could figure out how things worked, and use things to their own advantage, because the world was linear (it didn’t have any hidden surprises)!

For two hundred years this was thought to be the way things were. Then two things happened about the same time: modern society broke down, and so did Newtonian physics. The 20th Century experienced WW1 and WW2 – part of the move, as it turned out, towards Globalization. Einstein saved Newtonian physics with Relativity, but also helped invent Quantum Mechanics – which he later regretted, and fought against all the rest of his life.

Why was this? Because Quantum Mechanics was non-linear, things could jump from one state to another, and not change smoothly. No one was comfortable with this, but it quickly because obvious that this was how the world of the very small worked – not at all as larger things worked.

But that was not all: digital computers took over. When I was going to Electrical Engineering school in the Fifties, they did not teach digital computers, but analog computers – something you only see now in science museums. They were linear, something they were comfortable with.

But that didn’t matter, digital computers took over, and this opened up a whole new world. A short review is in order: in digital computers, only two states are allowed: a zero or a one – and nothing in-between. The real world, the analog world, has to be digitized before a digital computer can work with it. Digital computers needed software to run them, and eventually the Internet (completely digital) showed up to form an entirely new complex: the computer/software/internet (CSI). It quickly took over our world, and took control of it.

It should seem strange to speak of a technology controlling the world – but there is no better way of saying it. People have become addicted to their things – and, as with any addiction, it controls those addicted to it. In our case, our technologies, which have gotten out of control.

2011
11/16
CATEGORY
Economy
Education
Sociology
Technology
Leave a comment

We Know Everything Already

This is the basic belief of our post-modern, globalized world. Globalization has been poorly defined, although I have tried to do so – and defined it as the takeover of a power complex: the global integration of all power structures. This means nothing to the people in this complex, because they have been instructed to know nothing. Why? Because they already know everything, and any additional so-called “knowledge” would only pollute this perfect knowledge.

I am getting a lot of blank stares from my readers right now: “What on earth is this guy talking about?” (Or even less polite language.) Or more likely, an instant judgment that whatever it is, they don’t want to know about it. Automatic filtering is taking place at the unconscious level – where most of our decision-making goes on.

The subject of the unconscious is a huge one, and I want to spend some more time on it. There are quite a few people (cognitive, behavioral-modification psychologists, for example) who deny its existence completely. In their view, if something is not physical it does not exist.  This is an extreme view, almost impossible to defend philosophically – but they are not interested in that. They are expressing the core belief of our new religion – which only exists in our collective unconscious.

It is interesting that no one was aware of the unconscious until Freud discovered it. Perhaps it was a product of modern society in its final phases – when it had hide much of its behavior, because it was morally unacceptable. This didn’t work, and the modern world self-destructed.

Not too long ago I became interested in knowing what this modern world was – and made a serious effort to find out. Strangely enough, no one else seemed interested in knowing this. This amazed me at the time, but now I understand it. The post-modern world does not what to know about the world it came from! But this is not all, it doesn’t want to know much of anything! Why?

Because they are not supposed to know. And being a fearful people, they obey this instruction faithfully. This brings up my next important subject: our new religion. Man is a naturally religious creature, and always creates new religions appropriate to his times.

For our unconscious society, he has created an unconscious religion. This is very useful, because its beliefs are also unconscious – and cannot be critically examined. Nevertheless, some of them are clear enough because it is so closely identified with the power complex – in fact it is part of this complex. At this point I need to make a historical diversion.

The Modern world was a product of the Medieval world. And a key component of that world was The Church. An important activity of that church, an activity which has persisted into our time, was the destruction of heresies – by a mass killing of their adherents. Islam, a close cousin of Christianity, did the same thing. In summary: the Medieval World was a religious world, but this religion was a conscious religion.

By contrast, the post-modern world (which is still in the making) has an unconscious religion – which also persecutes its heresies, but only in its collective unconscious. A persecution which is nevertheless totally effective – and even more so.

It is now time for me to make my Grand Summary. I am aware of the parallel here to the one made by the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov:

The Grand Inquisitor is a parable told by Ivan to Alyosha in Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880). Ivan and Alyosha are brothers; Ivan questions the possibility of a personal, benevolent God and Alyosha is a novice monk.

The Grand Inquisitor is an important part of the novel and one of the best-known passages in modern literature because of its ideas about human nature and freedom, and because of its fundamental ambiguity.

Our new religion believes that the world has been perfected (by our highly-advanced technologies), and now stands in a position similar to that of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages – which was the direct representative of God, who was perfect.

The believers in this new religion are therefore perfect themselves – and already know everything. True, they occasionally need to be reminded of things they already now – and this is the function of the news. And also to provide spectacles for their viewer’s edification: scenes from all over the world, from places which have not reached perfection – and are therefore really important.

Stated this way, this belief is unacceptable. But we must remember we are dealing with unconscious beliefs here, which do not have to justify themselves rationally – or even to admit their existence. They can easily deny they exist, without effecting their power in the least.

2011
03/13
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
1 comment

It Has Overwhelmed Us Completely

What on earth am I talking about? What is this it?

It is the thing I am using to write this posting, and you are using to read it. It is the result of a whole chain of events that started with the discovery of electricity, strange stuff our senses cannot understand – unless we get hit by a bolt of lightening, which would will probably be the end us – just as its many refinements have also been the end of us – because we cannot resist them, we have accepted them without question – and still refuse to consider their effects on us.

We insist it is only some technology, something that does not affect us at all – when it has completely changed what we are (not who we are). If one of us were magically transported back to 1600 (hardly no time at all) he would die of shock as surely as if we had been transported back ten thousand years to the stone age. He could recognize his fellow humans as being almost like him – but at the same time so different as to be incomprehensible.

If he were in England he would still be able to understand the language, which hadn’t changed very much. He could have understood  the necessity for all of the horses, and even perhaps delighted in them – if he was a horse person and didn’t mind all the horse manure. But the slowness of everything would have been incomprehensible. Power would have been limited to animal, water, and wind power – as it had been for thousands of years. The world would have been more natural, more human. The arts would have been flourishing (as in the Renaissance) as they have never done since then.

The only drawback would have been the high death rate – but this was compensated for by the high birth rate – as it always had been. Mortality and decay were a common fact of life, one could see it everywhere – it was not put off and denied, as it is now. People had always lived with it, and learned to cope with it – a common theme of poetry, for example.

But then something happened that has overwhelmed us completely. The world started changing so rapidly we could not keep up with it. Things took over and we became nothing but their means of reproduction and improvement – their reproductive organs, as it were.

Most felt this was an excellent bargain, who doesn’t like being a sex object? Who doesn’t like change and novelty? Who doesn’t like having unlimited amounts of power? The only thing we lost was us as humans – which we were not anymore.

Indeed, most cannot now imagine what being human could be – or once was. They are now much better than human (they feel), and they like being that way. They like being inhuman – to put it bluntly, because they are now something much better.

I myself like technology, I am spending part of the precious time I have remaining to learn programming again ( a very strange world, believe me). I have my own espresso machine, so I can have the most decadent coffee available (something also completely unnatural) – and at one time I had a car, an airplane, and a motorcycle, and have the scars to prove it.

But I am also regaining my humanity in a culture that is not so obsessed with progress. The main business of life is being human – not being a machine.

2011
03/10
CATEGORY
Technology
1 comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 360 other followers