The Peripatetic Philosopher gets inside:

Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land

The Knowledge Keepers & Utopia!

PART TWENTY THREE 

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© September 29, 2016

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This is the penultimate segment of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, which has been an effort to put our current history and recent past into something of a perspective.  I like to think of this in terms of grammar (Past Imperfect, Present Ridiculous and Future Perfect).  

Those who have been reading these segments on Kindle know that it is a project that has been with me since the beginning of this new century with the first segment appearing on these pages on March 10, 2016.   

A version of this in book form was written in 2002 (CAN THE PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN?), then revised in 2004 (as NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND) and again in 2006 with the same title.  In the process, I became more adapt at adding graphics and pictures to the evolving story.

I have lived and worked in Europe when I was young (in my twenties) and again when older (in my fifties), and had a chance to see European colonialists in situ in South America, North Africa and South Africa (in my thirties). 

Moreover, I have spent some time in Morocco and Egypt in North Africa, and in Lebanon, Baalbek and Turkey in the Middle East.  Each place I absorbed the local culture as best I could.  

Always a note taker, as I suspect most writers are, I have lost myself in books about these places transporting myself as if in a dream world.  We are all more alike than different.

Some forty years ago I wrote a novel (A TRIPLE FOOL) about such a world which was never published.  As a writer, I have the peculiar distinction of not being an expert in anything I write about, but a peripatetic philosopher with an insatiable curiosity about people everywhere on this planet.

As an observer, I'm sure I am also a captive of my culture (Roman Catholicism), the United States (Midwest), and land grant public university education.  I am also a product of “The Great Depression of the 1930s” with a working class upbringing.      

You get the feeling when you see a lot and read a lot and reflect a lot that man has not changed much in 2,000 years.  Evidence of this is his insatiable attraction to Utopia, and like Sisyphus, being clobbered again and again for the attention.  

JRF   

DESCRIPTION

Knowledge keepers have moved into prominence in the 21st century as the explorer did in the 15th (discovery of America), theologian in the 16th (The Reformation), the Pilgrim in the 17th (Plymouth Rock settlement), lawyer/philosopher in the 18th (American/French Revolution), engineer in the 19th (Suez/Panama Canal), the manager in the 20th (mobilization in WWII), all with apocalyptical utopian Christian zeal to improve human nature and save humanity.

In the 20th century, this utopian passion appeared as a quasi-religious/military attempt to change the social order. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were principals in what became a reign of violence and terror. More than 100 million people across Europe lost their lives, many as collateral damage to the clash of these two ideologies, both of which failed to survive the century. 

Now, in the 21st century, we have the disruptive violence and terror orchestrated mainly in a stealthy fashion by ISSI and al-Qaeda through utopian jihads. The aim is to change human nature by first destroying it and then replacing it with a new version of Islam.

Meanwhile, the knowledge keepers in the United States, Western Europe, India and China are well ensconced in insular comfort mesmerized by the possibilities of this “Information Age.” They are essentially oblivious to the fact that this is their century, sitting at their work stations, dreaming of hooking up or texting friends, failing to get off their duffs and taking charge.

Terror and violence were the unanticipated product of the preemptive invasion of Iraq by the United States after 9/11, a war launched with messianic utopian zeal to right a wrong while unwittingly creating another. That tenebrous shadow still haunts the West, as it has plagued utopian thinkers since the beginning of the Christian era. 

Nowhere Land is the inevitable destiny of Nowhere Man whether the drive is predicated on improving or changing human nature.

 NEXT:

PART TWENTY FOUR – A Way Out May Be Here!