Posts Tagged ‘ The Modern World ’

Being Wonderful, Being Horrible

I grew up feeling I was both of these – at the same time. And it was driving me nuts. For one thing, it didn’t make any sense.

It didn’t make any sense, because the world I was in as an adult (more or less), and the world I grew up in as a child didn’t make any sense – and had no intention of making any sense. Gradually, as I have built a new world for myself – that old world begins to make some sense – and I can only be amazed as I think about it. I am amazed that I managed to survive.

The world has been devastated by a war on the human consciousness, and people have been reduced to living with a greatly reduced version of it. Before, various minorities had been targeted for destruction – but now the whole human race is the target. To put it another way: the end of the world, the human world at least, has already happened.

But who is our enemy? Us. Or, to be more precise: a souped-up version of us. The wonderful version of us. The part of us that we left behind is the horrible part of ourselves. Allow me to wax poetic, and quote Walt Whitman, who wrote in 1870:

Then not your deeds only O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, shall be justified,
All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d,
All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,
All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and link’d together,
The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely justified,
Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by the true son of god, the poet,
(He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains,
He shall double the Cape of Good Hope to some purpose,)
Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,
The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.

Whitman was speaking for the aspirations of the modern world (and its poets), but the destruction of that world was already underway, as he was writing.  Note the abundant religious imagery. I have spoken about this in my posting The Divine Machine. And in quite a few places I have repeated my observation that business, in its new and all-encompassing form, has become our new religion.

2011
02/10
CATEGORY
Poetry
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The Organization Destroys People

This is what it is for; that is its purpose in life – to create death.

One of Freud’s main contributions was the discovery of the death drive. From the excellent article in Wikipedia:

In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (“Todestrieb”) is the drive towards death, self-destruction and the return to the inorganic: ‘the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state’[1]. It was originally proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where in his first published reference to the term he wrote of the ‘opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts’[2]. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. The death drive is sometimes referred to as “Thanatos” in post-Freudian thought, complementing “Eros”, although this term was not used in Freud’s own work, being rather introduced by one of Freud’s followers, Wilhelm Stekel.[3]

We have overlooked this theory, preferring to think about nice things. But people are both good and evil – and always will be. We cannot be re-programmed (as NLP believes) to eliminate our dark side – for the simple reason that we are not computers – which, after all, are simply machines.

In our time, the Organization has come to represent the Death Drive – whose goal is to destroy people – and any human potential. I consider this perfectly obvious – having spent all my working life in them. But most people refuse to see this – and instead take great care to not exist – which eliminates their ability to see anything – which makes them nice people.

On other words, we have returned to being a traditional society, ruled by the rich and the powerful. As before, those who are ruled not only want to be ruled – but identify with their rulers completely. The process by which people become rich and powerful has changed, and they have developed new ways of displaying their power – but other than that, nothing has changed.

A quick historical review is in order here. An integral part of the Renaissance was Humanism – the re-discovery from the Classical World of the potential of of humans, and of their empowerment. This became part of the Reformation (although heavily distorted by religious passions) and then of the Scientific Revolution – and of course, above all, of the Enlightenment.

The Industrial Revolution was a different matter entirely, and resulted in today’s ascendancy of Business (with at capital B) as the power that rules the world – which is returning us to the Middle Ages. The Organization I refer to in the title, is just another word for Business, applied to everything else – the Pentagon, the Media, the Academic Establishment – and even our penal institutions.

The Pentagon deserves a few words of its own. Its objective is clearly to destroy people – which to Americans seemed an innocent enough matter – since the people being destroyed are not themselves. This overlooks the fact that attitudes are important – and the murderous attitude is basically the same whatever its target. The Pentagon was not only murdering Iraqis – but also the morality of Americans – and also, of course, their economy.

I am reading an interesting book now: Small Change: why business won’t save the world. The author, who has worked for philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and Oxfam, makes a simple point – Business cannot make a better world. I quote (from page xi):

Can we compete ourselves to a more cooperative future, or consume our way to conserved the planet’s scarce resources, or grow our way out of deep-rooted poverty and oppression, for fight our way to peace?

Businessmen insist in saying “Yes” – and no one can argue with them. We cannot say the obvious: that they are basically anti-human – that they are not the solution, but the problem itself.

2011
01/07
CATEGORY
Business
Psychology
Sociology
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The Relative and the Abstract

This is going to be one of my philosophical postings. Since I am a poor philosopher, you are warned about its contents. But my very inadequate mind has latched on to an idea and will not let go of it.

I hope I can explain this idea of mine. One thing I struggled to understand in my independent studies, was the Modern World. I didn’t have much help understanding it, although I looked high and low. I keep asking myself (since no one else was around) “What was it?”

There is no end of descriptions of the Classical World (Greece and Rome), and in the last one hundred years more and more about the Medieval World. But the Modern Word is still too close to us for us to understand it. I believe the Modern World is over, and we live in something else – which for a lack of a better term, we call the Post-Modern World. We know practically nothing about it – even though it is our world.

What is more, and this is the subject of this posting, the Modern World was a short event, lasting only about 500 years, but in my opinion, it was equal in importance to the Classical World – which, in the beginning it set out to emulate. It quickly moved into uncharted territory, blossomed, and then self-destructed – as all civilizations have. We are now in another boom/bust period with an even more violent, short-lasting dynamic. That is my Civilization 101 – and you don’t even have to pay a dime for it.

I believe the Modern World discovered a world of its own – much like it discovered the New World. I can’t claim this idea; Lewis Mumford says the same thing in his book The Pentagon of Power, part of his two-part series The Myth of the Machine. You know what they say about standing on the shoulders of giants. I feel the same way about Mumford. I will never understand why he has been forgotten – except maybe he got too close to the bone, and has been rejected. I feel the same way when I am in one of my paranoid moods – I, the genius, have been rejected. But let me continue, and forge bravely forward.

The Modern World discovered the Abstract World. Man has always been able to deal with abstractions – and even to be obsessed with them, as Plato was. This is what our religious impulse is – basically the same as our scientific impulse, as I have said elsewhere. But the Modern World achieved a breakthrough here. Which I am just beginning to comprehend – hence this posting. Traditional Man (everyone else but the modern variety) believed in a relative world, which he and God fitted into comfortably. In this world, everything is relative to everything else – a very sensible place.

The Abstract World is nothing like that. It does not relate to anything else but is independent of everything else. As I said, this goes back before Plato, so what did the Modern World add to it? It made this concept a practical matter by taking it seriously -and conforming its behavior, as well as its beliefs to it. This had never been done before. And it had an amazing effect: it made the Modern World.

How? With a new religion: Protestantism, part and parcel of the Modern World – and to be honest, also a technology: the Printing Press, which was part of the same complex. The whole thing simply took off – just as any major event in history – once all the parts were there. There were three components in this complex: new concepts of time, space, and morality.

Abstract Space was everywhere the same, and extended infinitely. The same for Abstract Time: it was everywhere the same and extended infinitely. Recently, with Relativity and Quantum theory, this has had to be modified - and this marked the end of the Modern World. Now everything is relative again. Most importantly, this sea-change effected morality – a very important area I now will turn my attention to.

Abstract Morality was also thought to be the same everywhere – it was independent of everything else, including us feeble humans. We had to conform to it; it was not going to conform to us. This had enormous benefits. Take Honesty, for example (with a capital H). For Modern Man this was an absolute matter – either you were honest, or you were not. God was looking down at you, and if you were not honest, absolutely honest – you were in big trouble.

This had an unexpected side-effect: it made Protestants rich. Honesty is absolutely essential for the business world – it, and it alone, enabled a new kind of business activity, with a much wider scope. People with widely different customs, as long as they were honest with each other, could all get rich. Anyone who was dishonest was immediately kicked out of the club – and never got back in. Reputation was everything. Once you lost that, you might as well be dead.

Here again, this was a world of abstract, absolute values. Something the undeveloped world will never grasp, because it never went through this painful process – a religious process, initially, which involved centuries of bloody warfare – before the Modern World finally wised up and came to its senses. But let me return to my main subject: abstract morality.

This was formulated by Kant in his Categorical Imperative. Admittedly, going into this in great detail, as the Wikipedia article does, is tiring. But the basic idea: that morality should be based on abstract rules, not relative ones – is sound. In our time, such an idea seems ridiculous to many. In their eyes, abstractions do not exist – therefore, they have no value. This regresses us to before civilization even existed, because it is based on abstractions of all kinds – writing, for example is based on the use of abstract symbols.

Our ability to understand abstractions is what makes us human – this is what has made us successful. If we lose this, we lose everything.

2010
11/10
CATEGORY
Morality
Philosophy
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From the Ruling Classes to the Power Complex

First, some definitions. Human societies usually became stratified, with some groups in them ending up with more than other groups. These groups controlled the others. They had more prestige and usually more wealth. They dominated the other groups. In a word, these ruling classes had more power.

The people in these classes were often related to each other, and comprised powerful families. Needless to say, there were often conflicts between these groups, and this is what history has been mainly about – struggles for power.

But on a different level there has also been the struggle between different kinds of societies – societies with different values and different ways of being organized.

I am now listening to a course about the Reformation – which was about one of those long, drawn-out conflicts. The one which produced the modern world, and a fundamentally different culture. And centuries later, in our time, a fundamentally different kind of power. One in which people are controlled by it.

The forty-dollar question, of course, is what is this it? Whatever it is, it has showed up and taken over without our being aware of it – almost as though we have been occupied by a force from another planet. Except that this force, whatever it is, must be been one of our own creations. It couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

So far in my struggles this morning I haven’t gotten very far, but I have re-defined the question to this “What have we done to ourselves?” The answer, which is certainly an unpleasant one, seems to be: we have destroyed ourselves.

I am certain this is the correct answer, but I could also have said: we have created a power complex – and given our power to it. This power complex is what I referred to earlier as simply it – for lack of a better term. Whatever it is, it is clearly in control. Now I want to say more about it.

Since the middle of the 19th Century, two things have happened: an increased understanding of ourselves (the social sciences) and high-technology. The first gave those in power, mainly the large corporations, the ability to control us, via the Media, which was created by the second: high-technology – which also (via the computer and the Internet) gave them the ability to create ever larger organizations – which eventually included everything – the Power Complex.

Previously, the ruling classes chose who would represent them in the power structure. Now, the power complex choses those who will serve it best, and gives power to them temporarily. There is only one rule they must follow: it must have all the power.

We have been forgotten, and it has taken over.

2010
08/22
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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People do not Live in the Real World

Mankind has always lived in a world of its own making. This had some overlap with the real world, because the real world is where he got his food – and even more importantly, his drugs. The human world has always included magical elements: spirits, who were thought to inhabit everything, animate and inanimate. The most sacred place in Islam, for example, is a huge rock out in the desert.

This changed with the coming of the Modern Era. People discovered the real world, what they called the Natural World, later called the world of Science – which included themselves. This give them tremendous new capabilities – and tremendous new wealth. Being in touch with reality, and being in touch with themselves, had great advantages.

But then they lost interest in both. There were many reasons for this, some of which we may never know. But the result was predicable: a return to the magical, or religious world – including the religious world of global business we now worship.

2010
06/24
CATEGORY
Religion
Science
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The Perfection of Nature

I am studying what the modern world was like, and one of my primary sources is The Making of the Modern Mind, a huge textbook written in in 1926 by John Herman Randall Jr., and still in use today. The early Modern Era was dominated by Isaac Newton, a man we cannot even imagine today. The following is from the chapter The Newtonian World-Machine, pages 275 and 279. He quotes Alexander Pope:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;..
All Nature is but Art; unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which they canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Nature, for them, meant the whole rational order of things, of which man was the most important part. Diderot wrote a paean to Nature in the 18th Century that is breathtaking. Allow me to quote it in its entirety. Take a deep breath before beginning, this is another era speaking to us:

O Nature, sovereign of all beings! and ye, her adorable daughters, Virtue, Reason, and Truth! remain forever our revered protectors! it is to you that belong the praises of the human race; to you appertains the homage of the earth. Show us then, O Nature! that which man ought to do, in order to obtain the happiness which thou makest him desire. Virtue! animate him with thy beneficent fire. Reason! conduct his uncertain steps through the paths of life. Truth! let they torch illume his intellect, dissipate the darkness of his read. Unite, O assisting deities! your powers, in order to submit the hearts of mankind to your domination. Banish error from our minds; wickedness from our hearts; confusion from our footsteps; cause knowledge to extend its salubrious reign; goodness to occupy our souls; serenity to occupy our bosoms.

Can you imagine anyone writing this now? He would be laughed off the block.

2010
05/12
CATEGORY
Science
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We Live in the Wreckage of the Modern World

In human society, there is the ever-present danger of despotism. Indeed, throughout history this has been the normal situation – the rich and powerful ruled to suit themselves.

The Modern World was able to overcome this tendency and establish governments that favored the newly industrious middle class – one that protected their property rights – but also, as a necessary part of that protection, their personal rights. As John Locke correctly noted, you cannot have one without the other. The government and the economy was supposed to serve the people (or at least the proper kind of people), and not the other way around.

This is no longer the case. The upper crust, which gets thinner all the time, gets the whole pie. What happened?

We forgot ourselves, that’s what happened. We paid so much attention to our bewitching new technologies, such as the movies, that they became our new reality – not the natural world (including ourselves) we had originally been so interested in. This is what make the modern world: an interest in the natural world – not the supernatural world.

And at the same time these new technologies made the business world  much more powerful. Financial independence became impossible: everyone had to work for it. It was not interested in the rights of the people because these people now worked for it, and had to follow its rules.

The end result was a transfer of power from the people to the power complex – which now became a universal despotism – one that seemed so natural it was enforced by the very people it subjugated. They still remembered what the traditional world (the pre-modern world) was like and this seemed like a return of normalcy – the return of a universal religion. The modern world was promptly forgotten.

And not only forgotten, but actively destroyed. Why we destroyed it, I am not sure. It is always difficult to determine people’s motives from their actions. But it seemed like we were possessed by a foreign spirit – one that we gotten from all our new things - one that hated people.

As a result, people were destroyed. We, as another kind of being (what I sometimes call techno-beings) live in the wreckage of our past.

2010
05/11
CATEGORY
Economy
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The Making of the Modern World

In the post-modern world, the world we live in now, we are fast forgetting the modern world – and I want to do a quick historical summary of that now – the most important development in human history – and one we are now rejecting.

Modernity was characterized by two parallel developments: a strong interest in the world as it really was, not as authority or convention declared it was – and every man had the right to see this for himself – and hence the other main interest: a belief in the importance of the individual – on which everything depended.

In our time there are strong reactions to both of these – and a return to group-think and conformity – where the non-conforming individual is in big trouble. The freedom to think as you please has been replace by the freedom to make as much as you please – regardless of the effect on society as a whole – which is no longer exits, in their opinion.

No more shocking idea could have been conceived of by the inheritors of the Enlightenment – but it is now common, if unacknowledged. The post-modern person is dedicated to knowing nothing at all (except what he is supposed to know) – in direct contrast to the modern person, who was dedicated to learning as much as he could.

As a result, the world is failing, and a new dark age is beginning. The modern world was based on the acceptance of the physical world and the human world – but the post-modern world is based on a rejection of both.

That’s it in a nutshell. Without the expertise to understand the world, and ourselves, we are doomed.

2010
02/24
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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