Questions Toward The Impact Of Human Nature

I've been doing a great deal of research and thought toward The Glorious Revolutions series we've been running over on Rebel News. Much of this kind of work occurs behind the screen. For instance, the rough document for the first two essays was over 20,000 words long, while the essays themselves wound up being about 1,500 words a piece. Similarly, each required the reading of 5 to 10 books. (In addition to whatever was ready at hand from past reading, with a little Internet refreshing.)

So... it's a process. But the next one I have planned has had me held up for a while. I've had a few conversations that have helped me spell out where I'm stuck, which have been both illustrative and interesting, so I wanted to share one here, while I continue to mull it over...

Kairos II: La Révolution Post-historique

Oh no! It's Da Bomb!

         Arnold Gehlen, in ¨The Roll of Living Standards in Today´s Society¨ (1952) and Hendrik de Man (Paul´s uncle), in Vermassung und Kulturverfall (1952), present another “end of history” scenario emphasizing das Posthistoire [1], the-post historical period; that period into which we entered after the Second World War (and of modernity, see exhibits: a) the unprecedented scale of the war, b) Auschwitz, and c) the Bomb), and made possible by the post-war economic and technological acceleration, which ensured that all could enjoy a high standard of living as compared to before (this parallels Kojève´s footnoted suggestion that the classless society was in fact American consumer capitalist society). 

 

Hiroshima, Post-Bomb

The mathematician A. A. Cournot had envisioned, as it was about a century before the phrase post-histoire was coined; then, Cournot wanted to designate the position that emerges when any human invention or innovation has been so perfected that every further morphological change appears closed off...the conclusion that our culture has filled its “archetypal” sense and is thus has entered a phase of meaninglessness; the alternative was then, viewed biologically, death or mutation...Post-histoire is not concerned with the lethargy of a culture in which its vital powers have been extinguished, rather with the entry to a phase of world-events occurring overall outside of the framework of History because they lack any noticeable historical connection between causes and effects. [2]

Social Evolution: Harking Back to Move Forward?

By Gunther Sonnenfeld
[The following was a real exchange between my friend, Brendan, and his wife, Maureen, over breakfast just the other day. Quick note: Brendan is on the content side of the media business, Maureen deals in social marketing.]

Brendan: "We're so lucky, to be in a moment in time where (storytellers) can literally communicate globally, in real time, about what matters. Beethoven and Picasso and Da Vinci would've given their eye teeth to have what we have. I used to think we had to storm the barricades. But there are no barricades. That's the revolution. There are no barricades."

Maureen: "Yes. We're a new aristocracy -- in the Jane Austen sense: we have the tools and the time and the causes that we can advocate for, because of who we are and because we know these technologies. It's not about an aristocracy of money, either, it's an aristocracy of responsibility and listening. We can lead responsibly, collaboratively, transparently. ‘Social media’ or whatever you want to call it... It's us, because we know how to listen. We are all media. We are all narrative. We are all consensus builders. We are all responsible because we're privileged to understand these technologies and how they change relationships.

By learning how to listen, we've gone back 200 years. Maybe more."

Brendan: (stunned silence)

The transportation of ideas and intentions have existed for centuries. People always were the telegraph system. And when couriers brought messages via horseback, conversations were seeded. People gathered at train stations to discuss the news of the day. In American urban and rural centers, the town hall meeting was a means to converge around economic problems in the community, and there, right in that physical time and space, people made critical decisions and took action.

Technology will always be here with us, or even ahead of us, waiting for us to help it guide us down empathic or ethically-driven paths. The questions remain as to what we are willing to do to make these systems main veins into collective consciousness and civil application, or simply disruptors that enable the manipulation of our individual thoughts, our hearts and our circumstances.

Perhaps the identity of the self can really only be defined through meaningful contribution. And perhaps the social evolution we are witnessing on a global scale is driven by that mythical imprint. It is the ability to harness a narrative through one's own genealogy, and through the promise that biology can be hyper-extended into new spaces in which the choice to become whole is manifested by those truths which really are self-evident.

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.