Sunday, April 4, 2021

Civilization?



How did we get where we are? Looking at the trends and biggest ideas of the past can help answer this question. Ideas can be powerful. If they are good, we all benefit; but bad ideas can have disastrous effects when they are widely accepted. Cultural trends come and go, even the biggest may eventually run out of steam and fall from favor. A paradigm is an archetype that serves as a pattern or model. There are overlapping small paradigms and large paradigms. Paradigm thinking can sometimes give a sense of what might be next.  By examining the foundations of modern Western thought, we can discover a sequence ideas and beliefs that is revealing.

For thousands of years the church needed to prevent people from speculating about spiritual matters. "Tho shalt not" was at the core of that institution. Violators faced threats of excommunication and burning in an everlasting hellfire. Science and even literacy was discouraged in the name of denomination.

About five hundred years ago early scientists began to present facts about the natural world that were in conflict with scriptures. Also the invention of the printing press allowed people to read about the history of ancient civilizations and their ideas of philosophy and religion. This encouraged science and reformation and revolutions.

Scientists were emboldened to such an extent that anything that could not be weighed or measured was suspect and avoided. This amounts to part 2 of our present global systems crisis: SCIENTISM. The human psyche was split into a good and a worthless portion.

Also the industrial revolution provided the means for a wealthy few to become increasingly powerful. The result has been that wealth and power is now in the hands of fewer and fewer who are becoming dangerously powerful. They hire many advisors to increase profits at any cost to the rest of us and to the environment. The crisis has reached the breaking point.

Some thinkers subscribe to the linear theory of social change. According to them, society gradually moves to successive stages of civilization and that it advances in a linear fashion and in the direction of improvement. Such theories long dominated the sociological scene. Yours may well be the generation to determine if the human species will survive.

However current technologies call this theory into question. There have been many ancient discoveries around the world that make us question the historical accuracy of our documented. Ancient Discoveries unearths amazing technologies that we think of as modern, but which actually have their origins in antiquity.

Many discoveries feature a very different story of what happened in reality. These artifacts or evidence are called "out of place artifacts", and most of them indicate the existence of ancient highly advanced civilizations that preceded us.

Anthropomorphic discoveries have been found in geological strata formed before humans are believed to have existed. Anthropologists are finding evidence that humans have been around much longer than we thought. Repeated extinction events caused by meteor strikes, volcanism, and ice ages have changed sea levels drastically which has apparently concealed many ancient ruined civilizations.

The Eastern view of time is completely different to the Western view. An example of this is the Hindu time system called the Yugas. The word yuga in Sanskrit means age, cycle, or world era. Each cycle lasts for 4,320,000 years and repeats four yugas: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga.

 Recent archeological evidence reveals that there are ruins of cities from more than twelve thousand years ago that were quite advanced. The implication is that there were survivors from previous civilizations unknown to us or that there was contact with some other advanced beings. Some talk of Ancient Aliens making genetic changes to our DNA.
So, in retrospect we can see wave after wave of tyranny and imperialism being met by wave after wave of  the struggle for freedom, democracy,  and human rights. The dominant ideas of the 20th Century came from men and women whose ideas set these two factions at seemingly hopeless odds against each other. Our minds seem beclouded by an extraordinary, blind and unreasonable faith in a set of fantastic and life-destroying ideas.

We have been immersed in a long paradigm where everything seems to be for sale to highest bidder, the only game is a strange dynamic; more and more -- to keep the game going as long as possible, to keep exploiting until there is nothing left, endless awful circus to keep peddling stuff. There are countless amusements, entertainments and distractions, fads, celebrity cults, and "can you top this" media acts of violence and sex. For some, it may not seem to be so malevolent as just clueless intellectual bankruptcy. While for others, the poverty and violence is devastating.

Technology seems to be changing us as a species into a kind of aggregation of behaviors that are both wonderful and terrible. The oppressors have more advanced weaponry, but the oppressed are far more numerous and better educated. If seven billion people demand human rights and democracy,  or cleaner environment, it seems likely they can eventually prevail. The fact that you are reading this page makes it less likely that thugs can expect anonymity.

As changing paradigms create a vacuum, some turn to institutions for guidance, direction, a plan, an ideology, only to eventually come to see institutions as another hierarchy of control. Although some memberships may be necessary, it is the business of any "ism" to eat you. So there is a fear of being swallowed up, annihilated, and there is a longing to be free and minimize social organization. Some even try to find a way not to individuate by immersion into a tribe, a religion, or going into the army, or becoming a socialist or a recluse.

  Culture an language can become traps, though they they are the platforms for individuation. We appear to be separate and unique individuals, but it turns out that finding acceptance often compels us as much as finding food and shelter. So it is a serpentine path between individuation and a kind of collective organism and the hope is to learn to combine these two modes of existence.

Industrialization and urbanization have gone hand in hand with commercialization and commodification. It seems clear that this big paradigm of exploitation has become unsustainable. The modern age of industrialization has seen many innovations in energy, communications, transportation, medicine and various other sectors that make life much easier than that of even a couple of generations ago. But in some arenas innovation has outstripped sustainability to such an extent that almost everyone has uneasy feelings about the future.

Survival in this capitalist environment has been about predictably, on profitability,  the goal of maximum profit has been setting aside in the interests of “protection of nature,”  and the betterment of humankind.

Only a few generations ago most people lived rurally and actually participated in growing overproducing their own food. There was a general feeling of being part of nature, or at least close to the land and the ongoing cycles of nature. The passing seasons and even our own coming into being and passing away had a much more organic significance in the face of all creation.

People who used to identify themselves a a part of a community or neighborhood are facing issues of anonymity. Mechanization, pollution, depletion, alienation and violence have been steadily diminish the quality of life for some to such an extent that many are suffering. In fact most people have a nagging feeling that something is broken. Also, it seems that the next generation will have to make do with less than their parents had.

Sadly, most people seem to get their beliefs from the media, which is a colossal mess. Higher education has become a "conveyor belt of alienation from Western civilization." The cost of sanity in this society seems to be a certain level of alienation as education and welfare are being gutted.

Ideas and beliefs can unite us but can also be divisive and make us cynical. For a long time a very wealthy aristocracy joined with the church to maintain absolute control of just about everything. The suffocating atmosphere created by the rise of religious dogma and orthodoxy and intolerance of any thought that went contrary to it, was undoubtedly halting progress.

Until the invention of the printing press, most people were illiterate and virtually helpless and miserable. When books became available, within a few decades people re-discovered Greek democracy and idealism. The Renaissance spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, was marked by a humanistic revival of classical influence expressed in a flowering of the arts and literature and by the beginnings of modern science which  led to a growing desire among  free thinkers to be rid of the shackles of religion and charter an independent course. A very old paradigm seemed to be ending -- about supernatural entities creating and ruling everything.

Unrest had been festering for a long time. And the schism between science and religion, in the 17th century, was a necessary step in the advancement of human knowledge. But resistance by the church to the whole idea of science backfired, fostering ideas that set science and religion at seemingly hopeless odds against each other, and planted seeds of doubt that faith and reason coexist. This led to the rejection by science of the metaphysical,  which tended to remove God from His role as Creator, and the end of God’s role in human life, which placed science and scientists as the ultimate arbiters of true knowledge.

An analysis of the important ideas that have shaped the modern world suggests that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive but have several things in common. When the conscious mind is overwhelmed, we fall back on the subconscious and on instinct and beliefs.

Darwin, Marx, and Freud began by theorizing. Then they looked for evidence to support their theories and thought they had found persuasive evidence, only to have their “findings” called into question by later scientists and thinkers. Science proceeds by a series of  discoveries that usually invalidate earlier theories. Science suffers from a fatal flaw --scientists repeatedly assume they have all the cards in the deck. But the map is not the territory, and in fact, the territory may ultimately be unknowable in its entirety by humans. Dissecting life does not completely explain it.

Both science and war have concentrated political power into the hands of a few - and diminished the liberty of all to some extent. This power shift  fosters dictatorships and fascism and profiteers who sell weapons to both sides in the wars. The military industrial complex and the banking system have combined with government and science to become very dangerous.


 Dwight D. Eisenhower used the term in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:
    "A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...

    This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.

    We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

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