Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land – TWENTY-THREE
The Knowledge Keepers
&
Utopia!
JAMES
RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
Originally
published © September 29, 2016/©August 21, 2021
“As
a patterning system, the brain can only see what is prepared to see. The analysis of information will not produce
new ideas, merely a selection from existing ideas . . .To deal with the future
we have to deal with possibilities (not certainties). The analysis will only tell us what is
already known.”
Edward
de Bono (born 1933), Maltese physician and psychologist, Lateral Thinking (1970)
THINKING,
FEELING, SPECULATING, BEING & BECOMING IN A NERVOUS DANCE THROUGH TIME
Over the past 120,000 years, thinking man has made
the great journey to colonize the planet.
Today, it would seem at times that we are near the journey’s end. Along the way, thinking man has had many
occasions to face insurmountable odds always coming up with a “Cut & Control” tool to master the
situation in the short term.
Our leaders and institutions have always accepted
the challenges and used the new tool for its short-term quick fix value and
advantage. Likewise, these leaders have
consistently ignored the tool’s long-term consequences not only in a material
sense but in an immaterial sense as well.
Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884 – 1939) insists:
“Man
is a theological being and not a biological one.
It is as though German American Lutheran theologian
and existential philosopher Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965) were speaking. Tillich claims:
These two thinkers were of the same generation, a generation now gone and for that reason discounted as no longer relevant. Yet, what they say resonates with Saint Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430) and Danish existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855).
Augustine’s “City of God” (426) and Kierkegaard’s “Purity of Heart” (1938) are complements to man’s character. Rank’s statement is uncanny in that, he echoes that sentiment as a psychoanalyst in the world of science and not as a theologian.
THE MIGRAINE HEADACHE OF NOWHERE LAND
Carol Gentry suggests the impact of self-generating ambivalence in this “Age of Doubt” (The Tampa Tribune, May 16, 2006) is considerable:
“Migraine headaches emerged as the No. 1 cause of lost production time in a 2005 study of national companies by the Employers Health Coalition, Inc. For the diseases they studied, the monetary loss in productive time-averaged two to three times the health care cost. But for migraine headaches the cost was huge. ‘You lose $33 in productivity for every $1 spent on medical care with migraines,’ said Frank Brocato, President, and Chief Executive Officer.
“The health coalition survey found that migraines were only the seventh most prevalent illness among respondents after allergy, high blood pressure, arthritis, sciatica, depression, and spine problems. However, the time wasted on unproductive suffering – mostly at the office rather than at home – was greater for migraines than for the others.”
Modern workers are not happy campers and many health problems are psychosomatic, which doesn’t make them any less painful or debilitating. It does indicate that medical science has yet to be effective as a social palliative. The dictum: Social problems should be solved by physicians has not proven reliable.
It gives credence to the declaration of Otto Ranks that man is a theological being, not a biological one. Attention is given to psychosomatic problems when employees’ health affects the bottom line, but seldom before. What is ironic is that the migraine is a stealth syndrome, that is, mild and infrequent in the early stages, building to temporary debility due to stress and distress like “a shadow that stays with me,” as one employee described the malady.
The migraine puts the sufferer in Nowhere Land looking for utopian relief from the chronic pain with various over-the-counter headache remedies or with prescription drugs known as “triptans.” This is a family of tryptamine-based drugs used as abortive medication in the treatment of migraines and cluster headaches. It was first introduced in the 1990s. While effective, it is not a preventive treatment nor is it a cure, as it has nothing to do with the root causes of the condition.
Triptans disguise the various triggers such as sleep deprivation, stress, overwork, eating irregularities, lack of exercise, drinking and smoking too much, too much texting, television or computer exposure, poor lighting or ventilation, or other life exigencies such as being obsessive with success and failure, disappointment, personal sorrow, or trying to be perfect, which relates to utopian expectations of oneself or others.
The dream of utopian splendor finds few far from Nowhere Land as revealed by the chronic stress patterns that course through Western society. This short excursion endeavors to show that it is part of our cultural DNA going back to the early Christians. While we may make short shrift of the simple everyday migraine headache, it is a systemic indicator of a far greater societal impediment.
IS A SELF-INDULGENT MAN NEAR JOURNEY’S END?
As wondrous as these “Cut & Control” tools that we pride ourselves in having, they may be accelerating our collective doom. While our environment is being reduced to rubble, makeshift demands pull man hither and yon in constant ambiguity for what man has mastered has, in turn, mastered him.
Man feels torn precisely because he lacks no central gyroscope, no centering moral compass, no intuitive directional device for him to do what is best. He keeps doing what he is doing until there is nothing left in him for the enterprise. To get beyond the things of the world, man must find a way to reconnect the body with the soul leavening the material world with its immaterial counterpart.
The “Cut & Control” tools themselves did nothing to create immediate alarm or harm. They did change the way man saw his relationship to himself, others, and to Nature. Each time developing and using a new tool, society displaced old values with new ones. Each time the new tool was embraced the focus was on the benefit of the new not the cost of losing the old. Cumulatively, however, the cost would prove prohibitive.
For over 100,000 years, a thinking man was content to be a hunter and gatherer, to be a member of nature, not separate from the natural world. This changed 12,000 years ago when agriculture gave a man a quick fix on a short-term problem, a sustainable food supply. He now banded together into tribes with the population remaining relatively stable as deaths closely matched births.
Today, global agriculture is in a precarious state thanks to the spectacular success of scientific farming. It has resulted in an unmatched population explosion that is on its way to being 12 billion souls in the second half of the 21st century. Should that happen not only must the environment be treated with more loving care but people of the planet as well. The challenge then will be for the planet to be one people of great diversity and orientation, where common humanity will recognize people are more alike than different, more common in spiritual roots while uncommon in ethnicities. Nationalities and territorial imperatives, founded in mythology, will dissolve and diverse peoples will join the ranks, at least that is what utopian thinkers envision. As we shall attempt to show, there is more to Utopia than meets the eye.
At the end of the 19th century, more than four out of every five Americans worked in agriculture or support this industry in a population of 100 million. Today, with a population of more than 330 million, less than 3 percent of Americans are involved in agriculture.
Even then, agriculture is a very different business as it has progressed to corporate agri-business with few family farms any longer extant. Conglomerates now dictate what has become largely a synthetic hybrid industry of scientifically enhanced products that are likely to reach the dinner table.
Moreover, 90 percent of the world’s food supply is now produced from only eight species of livestock and fifteen species of plants. Genetic engineering has reached its apogee in agri-business and this, in turn, has quite remarkably changed the physical appearance of the 21st-century person.
When most people were close to the land, when they had an intimate understanding of the seasons of the year, of the life and death cycle of everything, they had roots and looked to a hierarchy beyond themselves to their God. They had a sense in their bones that everything was connected to everything else; that everything had to go somewhere; that Nature knew best and, in any case, could not be changed; that there was no free lunch and that in life every act had consequences whether intended or not. There was a maturity that has escaped postmodernity man.
With people of the land, religion and science did not operate in different universes and therefore were not a threat to each other. That division was spurned by the “Industrial Revolutions” (1760 – 1820) and has widened ever since.
Peripatetic savant Hungarian Arthur Koestler writes in The Sleepwalker: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959):
“The Philosophy of Nature became ethically neutral, and ‘blind’ became the favorite adjective for the working of natural law . . . As a result, man’s destiny was no longer determined from ‘above’ by superhuman wisdom and will, but from ‘below’ by the subhuman agencies of glands genes, atoms, or waves of probability. This shift of the locus of destiny was decisive. So long as destiny had operated from a level of the hierarchy higher than man’s own, it had not only shaped his fate but also guided his conscience and imbued his world with meaning and value. The new masters of destiny were placed lower in this scale than the being they controlled; they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values, and meaning.”
Five thousand years ago, we started our steady progression away from that idea. A lifesaving tool was invented that changed our attitude about infertile land. The tool was irrigation. Engineers have since ensured increasing water supplies even in desert communities. Today, wells go deeper than ever before to retrieve the water in the aquifers filtered through limestone beds that reached deep into the earth. Enormous reservoirs are available for hydroelectric power generation and irrigation. Major rivers have been diverted to supply entire countries.
Yet, every time this “Cut & Control” tool has been employed to materially improve the lives of people, the need for it has accelerated as the birthrate keeps climbing. The demand for water in the 20th century was so great that many reliable perennial water sources simply dried up.
Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, the forecast is not good. Global industrial and domestic water demand has quadrupled since 1950 without abatement. Scarcity is now common in 26 countries including Russia, Middle Eastern countries, and parts of India, Africa, and the Southwestern United States.
Today, fish farmers are failing and oceans are dying. According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, four of the world’s seventeen fishing zones are already over-exploited. Between 1950 and 1990, the catch increased in these zones fourfold. In 2000, many warned the world catch had reached the limits of sustainability. Meanwhile, saltwater contamination is posing a new problem for freshwater.
Koestler sounds the alarm in the last pages of The Sleepwalker:
Man had now acquired the means to destroy the planet. Evolution had granted him a technological capacity far above his spiritual capabilities. Thus within the foreseeable future, man will either destroy himself or take off for the stars.”
The message was clear for everyman as well as the scientist: spirituality and science need each other as survival is predicated on their acknowledged interdependence.
To give a sense of how a “Cut & Control” tool can misfire, take the Aswan Dam of Egypt constructed in 1965. With this magnificent structure, the natural discharge from the Nile River virtually ceased with a catastrophic impact on the southeastern Mediterranean fisheries. Many species disappeared completely; catches were often small and more often contaminated. An entire industry in this part of the world has essentially disappeared.
Elsewhere, human activities involving deforestation, mining, dredging, and erosion have created sedimentation that now fills reservoirs, lakes, and rivers. Sediments from industrial plants and home use of fertilizers have put nutrients into the discharge that has produced algae bloom contaminates that pollute lakes, rivers, and even oceans, resulting in massive levels of fish kill.
On the west coast of Florida in the United States, the “red tide” is a seasonal occurrence in this tourist-sensitive milieu with its unmistakable mind-wrenching stench of dead fish hugging the shore. This is not only an economic disaster but an embarrassment to the multimillion-dollar homes and condominiums that grace the waterfront.
A century ago, forests covered 90 percent of the Dominican Republic and 80 percent of Haiti. Today, the forests of the Dominican Republic have been reduced to 20 percent and Haiti to between 1 and 5 percent due to corporate lumbering and domestic use of wood for cheap fuel. The consequence is that these countries are subject to devastating mudslides from the mountains after torrential rains, destroying homes, businesses, entire communities while killing hundreds of people in their wake.
The famous Aswan Dam in Egypt was constructed in 1965
Sedimentation is also fatal to the coral reef which is called “bleaching.” This is now a world problem. Although coral reefs cover only 0.17 percent of the ocean floor, they are crucial to biological diversity and stability. The food they supply sustains a quarter of all fish types in the developing world. At the current rate of coral reef deterioration, it is estimated that another two-thirds of the world’s coral reefs will be lost in the next several decades.
One of the “Cut & Control” tools of technology is energy. Today, the effect of uncontrolled energy sourcing and exploitation has been globally distressing. Consumption of fossil fuels has grown in flagrant disregard for the consequences. Whether you believe in global warming or not, few can deny that in many cities and industrial areas the air is difficult to breathe.
The United States is only 1/20th of the world’s population, but it consumes 25 percent of its fossil fuel. Oilman T. Boone Pickens believes we’ll be out of the hydrocarbon era before the end of the 21st century. At the present rate of global consumption, oil reserves will be depleted in 50 years and gas reserves in 200.
These estimates were generated before the explosive industrial boom in China and India in 2005 and 2006. Consumption of fossil fuels of these two countries have resulted in wide fluctuations in the price of gasoline at the pump as political instability continues in the new century in the Middle East, while OPEC and the United States, as well as Argentina and Mexico, fluctuate in their production quotas.
An American marine biologist who quietly took on the agri-business
China, with its population of 2 billion has put aside its bicycles and discovered a mania for the automobile. The same is occurring in India, which is growing even faster than China and will soon overtake it in population. Likewise, China and India have the fastest-growing markets for energy-demanding technology. With an electronically connected world of the Internet and the iPhone, people in China and India, as well as many other Third World, developing nations, seeing how the other half lives on their modems, want a higher standard of living and the automobile as middle-class symbols of “making it.”
Not surprisingly, a vicious Third World cycle has developed. With insufficient gains in agricultural productivity due to inequitable land distribution, the high cost of Western farming methods, and constant warring factions within these countries increased land clearance has become necessary to feed the swelling roaming populations. This reduces forest and agricultural productivity which brings about the need for more forest clearance with long-term effects in erosion, mudslides, stream pollution, and depopulation of marine life, and so the vicious cycle continues.
American marine biologist Rachel Carson (1907 – 1964) alerted the public to these dangers in The Sea Around Us (1951) where she identified the effects of pollution on large-scale marine life.
Then she shocked the world with her international bestseller Silent Spring (1962) in which she focused on the disturbing impact of the use of synthetic pesticides such as DDT on agriculture and plant life as well as on humans. In her short life, she framed the ecological problems that have plagued us for the past 50 years. Chemists in her day failed to heed her warning while many in the agri-business disparaged her research methods and conclusions. This was not true of the former United States Vice President Al Gore. He writes:
“For me, Silent Spring had a profound impact. It was one of the books we read at home at my mother’s insistence and then discussed around the dinner table. . . . Rachel Carson was one of the reasons why I became so conscious of the environment and so involved with environmental issues. Her example inspired me to write Earth in the Balance. . . . Her picture hangs on my office wall among those of political leaders. . . . Carson has had as much or more effect on me than any of them, and perhaps than all of them together.”
Two journals of the period, Chemical & Engineering News and Chemical Engineering, both with proprietary interests faulted Carson for her gaffes in chemistry paying little attention to her environmental warnings. Frank Graham, Jr. in Since Silent Spring (1970) points out that while several states did ban DDT, a wide range of other pesticides more toxic than DDT continued to be used in high quantities. As late as 2004, the use of pesticides continued unabated with the US Government assuming little control over them.
Then in 21st Century Science & Technology magazine, entomologist J. Gordon Edwards penned an article, “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” indicating once again that scientists are human, and are equally good at coming out with a red pencil to someone else’s original and remarkable work as in other endeavors.
The massive use of fossil fuel for use as fuel, creating pesticides, and generating electricity have changed the earth’s atmosphere. This was ignored until a quarter-century ago. As the accumulation of carbon emissions in the atmosphere grew exponentially, a new phenomenon was noted: The Green House Effect. This occurs when carbon emissions are trapped in the atmosphere and prevent sunrays from radiating back to the earth. It produces what many scientists, but certainly not all, insist leads to global warming.
At this point, it is conjecture as to the actual level of the Green House Effect. Some suggest, based on studies that the polar ice cap is melting. This would cause a significant rise in sea levels. Others see major forests dying due to the instability of plant species to adapt to rising temperatures. The same problem would be true of crop yields. Meteorologists estimate a small increase in sea temperature would cause a greater frequency of major storms in South East Asia, Australia as well as in the South Eastern region of the United States, as well as states aligning the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Western Mexico.
Tsunamis have occurred often throughout history. So frequently in Japan that they invented the word specifically for the phenomenon: “tsu” meaning harbor and “nami” meaning wave. In 2004, there was the devastating tsunami in South East Asia, and in 2005, Hurricane Katrina in the United States wiped out a good portion of the Gulf Coast of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, turning New Orleans into a ghost town with 80 percent of its occupants forced to evacuate.
Scientists claim a sea-level rise would likely cause major population displacement and death among two-thirds of the world’s population that chooses to live on low coastal lands. What is clear is that even scientists don’t know for certain how bad things could be as such dramatic catastrophes go back hundreds if not thousands of years and conditions previously were quite different than they are today.
The world is rapidly moving towards a mass-produced uniform culture that takes the word of science as gospel but heeds it no better than the religious tenets that once guided that same world. This characterization of Nowhere Man has failed to be noted as the attention has been on utopia or Nowhere Land.
Mankind’s compulsion for self-destruction seemingly has not lessened in this age of science and political religion. Progress is the new mantra and everyone dances to its tempo. German social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980) sees this as evidence of the pathology of normalcy. You ask, how so?
Today, of the more than seven billion people now living on the planet, 100 million are homeless, 500 million suffer from severe malnutrition, 800 million are illiterate and 400 million have no jobs. These figures do not include the constant ethnic wars in Africa, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan or the threatening noises coming out of China and the Korean peninsula.
The 1992 standard of absolute poverty as an annual income of under $500 per year fit nearly one billion souls, most of them in Africa. In 2006, that figure passed the one billion mark. Meanwhile, the United States spends more than $5 billion a year on self-indulgent diets, and more than $2 billion on food and care of house pets, while American women spend $30 billion a year on clothes.
Insulated in the unconscious swirl of the moment, most Americans and Western Europeans comfortably ensconced in passable distractions experience little disruption to their lives even with the sporadic attacks of ISSI and al-Qaeda terrorists in their midst. The evidence? No one changes the focus or tempo of their lives except those who have lost loved ones.
Instead, they retreat behind the façade of seeing terrorists as simply evil scoundrels failing to appreciate their possible motivation. Terror may be the Court of Last Resort for impressionistic angry people who feel abused and slighted. They are then manipulated by truly evil people into a twisted religious frenzy with the cry of “jihad!”
French Islam scholar Olivier Roy (born 1949) in Globalized Islam (2004) sees the seeds of the current terrorism having Christian roots:
“The figure of the lonely metaphysical terrorist who blew himself up with his bomb appeared in Russia at the end of the 19th century . . . The real genesis of al-Qaeda violence has more to do with a Western tradition of individual and pessimistic revolt for an elusive ideal world than with the Koranic conception of martyrdom.”
British philosopher John Gray adds, “Nazism and communism are products of the modern West. So, too, is radical Islam.” The radical Islam leader and Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966) lifted many of his ideas from European thinkers, especially Nietzsche. He was executed by Nasser in 1966.
Nowhere Man prefers to differentiate the “good guys” from the “bad guys,” as if in a vacuum, separated from common roots shared in the radical history of the United States, France, Israel, India, and elsewhere. Nowhere Man is everyman when the cry of the tortured soul is the feeling of being left out and in the wilderness.
According to the World Resources Institute, by 2050 eighty-four (84) percent of humanity will be living in what is now the Third World, half of them in only five countries. These shifts in population distribution and density will have serious implications for food, resource distribution, and the political make-up of the planet.
There are no secrets anymore for with the Internet and clever technicians there is no way to hide greed and corruption as we already know.
This institute predicts that in another score of years industrialized democracies will be by comparison small populated nations. The United States population will be less than Nigeria. Iran will be twice the size of Japan. The population of Canada will be smaller than Madagascar or Syria.
Industrialization in the electronic age has tipped the scale in favor of population growth. We are seven billion today, and twelve billion by 2050.
It took 12,000 years for the population to reach the level of 5 million. Now more than 5 million are born worldwide every two weeks. Most of history associated high birth rates through religious practices, moral codes, and political laws against birth control, marriage habits, and family structures. High birth rates were countered by equally high mortality rates due to disease, famine, wars, and epidemics. Improved public health, more hygienic lifestyles, more reliable food, and water supplies, and better medical care have resulted in people living much longer and better.
Many Third World countries in the 21st century are succumbing to mass starvation because of tribal wars, droughts, and the lack of modern tools and techniques for self-subsistence. The common answer is to industrialize this world, democratize it, and make it into the image and likeness of the West.
Well-meaning Western democracies, as well as utopian-minded philanthropists are crippling these nations by their largesse because they fail to appreciate the cultures, histories, and motivation of the people they would aid. Consequently, rather than showing these people how to take charge of their destiny and carve out a new chapter in their existence, too frequently they unintentionally make these Third World countries are counter-dependent on the West for their security, sustenance, and survival.
Industrialization, per se, is not the answer. Nor are handouts. Too often corrupt middlemen take the major portion of the aid and little changes. Education and enlightened involvement and commitment to a viable process are fundamental to any chance of success.
This is not simply a Third World problem. Over the centuries, workers in emerging industrial societies have been excluded from the knowledge and information possessed by specialists. Moreover, they have failed to be made privy to the dramatic and subtle nuances implicit in new technology. Instead, they have been used up and discarded as no longer relevant, and then blamed for lacking the readiness to step into the new world and function competently.
The industrial workplace should function at all times as a university of emerging technology with workers schooled long before the new skills are needed.
Workers, American workers especially, have complacently accepted policies and procedures that treat them as if obedient children, and then management wonders why they lack the initiative to embrace challenges. Treat workers as children and they will behave as children into their fifties and sixties; treat them as adults in their twenties and they will remain so the rest of their careers. When people have been kept in ignorance and programmed in passivity, it becomes a terminal state of suspended adolescence and dependence in perpetuity.
We see this in the United States today. Modern technology is finding ways to bypass the need for factory workers, store clerks, fast-food servers, truck drivers, hospital employees as well as managers, administrators, engineers, and scientists. This “Cut & Control” practice, which technologists and entrepreneurs congratulate themselves in creating, leaves tens of millions of people without some kind of work, and work is necessary to have a sense of pride, dignity, and identity. To remove this sense from a person is to remove that person from himself and the consequences of the action that might follow.
To make the majority of people dependent on corporate welfare, to make them passive occupants in their bodies, to treat them as collectives in advertising and political campaigns, reducing them to demographic data is to rob them of the self-satisfaction that is provided by some kind of work, which as Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran says is “love made visible.”
Alas, even if people have jobs, if they do not accept ownership of the job, but treat it as a renter, then society has failed. Some might see this as moving into a bankrupt world in which the rich get richer but are only poorer for the failure to harness people's power. Billionaires don’t change the world the common worker does.
We are currently captivated by information technology as a commodity with all its useful and synthetic purposes. When primitive man fashioned the first stone implement and used it to change his existence, he took a step out of the cold and away from the hostility of his environment. He didn’t realize, immediately, what he had done. Yet, with this tool, he soon had a special power. While weak in comparison to nature’s giants in the trees, the bush, or on the veld, he no longer saw himself quite so handicapped. What separated him from other species was his specialness. We call this “knowledge.”
THE KNOWLEDGE KEEPERS
Knowledge is an aspect of the perennial utopian dream of serving the world and controlling it positively. Utopia is always about the Future Perfect after stumbling through the Past Imperfect and the Present Ridiculous.
Knowledge keepers control the process of change while being vulnerable to the new instruments of change, smitten with their versatility, complexity, and promise, failing to see such attachments can lead to becoming their prisoner. We refuse to acknowledge that utopia is dead, keeping that thought far from our minds while looking for the “magic bullet,” the ultimate tool that will rescue us from our retreat and advance us beyond our calamity.
How do we change the way we think in time to stop short of ultimate catastrophe? One answer may be with this new tool, Information Technology; the other is an old one, our brain. The only problem is that the new tool comes out of the old tool’s hardwiring, which is the way we think and address our difficulties.
So, while our “Cut & Control” dance into the future may not be an act of regression, it isn’t exactly a demonstration of progression. At the moment, assessing what we have lost for what we have gained, it would appear we are stymied in forward inertia, which is to say, not moving at all only unconscious or seemingly untroubled with the fact.
British historian Norman Cohn (1915 – 2007) in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), anticipating the 21st century revisits the Middle Ages. He sees the roots of the violence and terror now being experienced has roots in the fanaticism that accompanied a series of radical changes in Western society:
The Protestant Reformation;
The Industrial Revolution;
The American Revolution; and
The French Revolution.
The Roman Catholic Church, at the time, was in decline and science was on the rise with its special knowledge and insight into the workings of the universe. Western Civilization believed it had stepped out of the chaos and savagery of the past and was moving into the light of utopian rationalism, failing to see it was changing one absolute authority for another. Cohn shows that science and the “Age of Enlightenment” failed to escape the apocalyptical shadow of Early Christianity.
The historian traces back to the chiliastic upheavals that marred the revolutionary movements of the 20th century (chiliasm is a theological doctrine that Christ is expected to return to earth for 1000 years, thus the reference to millennialism). These 20th-century disruptions marked the belief that God had failed! The Inner Demons were on display in WWI and WWII with Soviet Communism and German Nazism being responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of minorities within Christendom and Jewish ghettos.
The Nazi Holocaust is known for killing six million Jews, while the Soviet Union, which Cohn shows annihilated millions more, is seldom in the conversation. This carnage was not unlike The Inquisition and wars that rocketed the late Middle Ages. The Inquisition was established by an ecclesiastical tribunal of Pope Gregory IX in 1232 for the suppression of heresy. It was active chiefly in northern Italy and southern France, becoming notorious for the use of torture. In 1542 the Papal Inquisition was re-established to combat Protestantism, eventually becoming an organ of papal government. It became even more brutal and consequential in Spain.
The Spanish Inquisition was independent of the Papal Inquisition. It was established (1478) by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with the reluctant approval of Pope Sixtus IV. One of the first and most notorious heads was Tomas de Torquemada, who could rival Adolf Hitler for his demonic mania. The Spanish Inquisition was entirely controlled by the Spanish kings with the Roman Pontiff only naming the Inquisitor General. The popes were never reconciled to the institution, which they regarded as usurping church prerogatives.
The purpose of The Spanish Inquisition was to discover and punish converted Jews (and later Muslims) who were insincere. However, soon no Spaniard could feel safe from it; thus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and St. Theresa of Ávila were investigated for heresy.
With the Spanish censorship policy, even books approved by the Holy See was condemned. The Spanish Inquisition was much harsher, more highly organized, and far freer with the death penalty than the Papal Inquisition; its autos-da-fé became notorious. Hitler had his gas chamber. The Spanish Inquisition had its burning at the stake.
The Spanish government tried to establish The Inquisition in all its dominions, but in the Spanish Netherlands the local officials did not cooperate, and the inquisitors were chased (1510) out of Naples, apparently with the pope's involvement. The Spanish Inquisition was finally abolished in 1834.
The point is that the utopian desire for perfection of behavior according to some authoritative script is not new, but part of Western history.
Norman Cohn identifies distinctive features of a utopian millennial movement:
· It is a collective in that it is enjoyed by the community of the faithful;
· It is terrestrial in that it is realized on earth rather than in heaven or an afterlife;
· It is imminent in that it is bound to come soon and suddenly;
· It is total in that it will not just improve life on earth but transform and perfect life;
· It is miraculous in that its coming achieves or assists in achieving divine intervention.
Millennial utopianism is as farfetched as anything believed in medieval times but it has the mesmerizing appeal in our day with the imprimatur of science and the belief that man can be delivered from evil by the power of knowledge. In its most radical form, this mirrors the revolutionary utopianism that defined our past two centuries.
This underscores the insatiable desire to find redemption with our newest tool as the instrument to reshape the world as it is into a kinder, gentler, safer, and more satisfying place for humans to be. The evidence thus far is that these tools often prove otherwise. Why is that so?
THE BRAIN AS A KNOWLEDGE MACHINE
For starters, it is clear the “Knowledge Revolution” could benefit from a better understanding of the brain as a knowledge machine. The maxim, “Garbage in, garbage out!” applies here.
The German gestalt psychiatrist Frederick Perls ((1893 – 1970) suggests as much in his book, Out of the Garbage Pail (1963), promoting a more holistic view of our dilemma. If we are what we eat, he argues, we are what we think as well. The core of Gestalt Therapy has enhanced awareness of sensation, perception, bodily feelings, emotions, and behavior at the moment.
Perls claims he stumbled on this insight when he considered relationships with oneself, others, and the environment, seeing them as not separate or conflicting entities but parts of the same whole. He died in 1970 and therefore had little sense those relationships would be reduced to texting, voice, and e-mail while learning would be reduced to tutorials surfing the Internet.
Knowledge workers are products of this new technology, workers largely involved in non-routine activities in which the intellectual capital is knowledge. We see them working as software engineers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, scientists, public accountants, lawyers, and academics whose primary job is to think to make a living.
Perls believed that if we didn’t like the biases programmed into us we could choose to think and behave differently. He didn’t envision people’s brains being freeze-framed at the moment as they are.
That said modifications to our brains happen frequently and naturally. The process started when we learned to read and write. This represented a major alteration to the natural processes of our mental development. Thinking with written words is different than thinking orally in language.
We experience the difference when we attempt to write down what we think finding it easier to express it orally, failing to realize what we think and say, and then attempt to commit to written words may differ widely. Likewise, a written novel converted to the stage or film has often little to do with the story between the book’s written pages.
Yet, thinking involves using “words” that are arbitrary inventions and only approximate what we see, hear, feel, taste, smell, or do. Consider this as a possible test: imagine you have an important paper to write, speech to give, or interview to make.
Chances are you go to bed and think about this with thoughts tumbling out of your head and lining up naturally and fluently so that you think you have a handle on your problem.
If you are like me, you go immediately to your study and attempt to transcribe what was so clear in your mind. And if you are equally like me, you become somewhat disconcerted when what you thought does not surface on paper or your computer screen as you thought, but only as a vague and unconvincing version.
Now, if you are equally like me, as I have been on occasion, you think “I’ve got it,” and you go back to sleep confidently it will come back to you in the morning. For me, at least, it never does.
Then, too, we even condition our minds to read from the left to the right instead of the right to the left, or vertically. We craft a certain world with this propensity, which differs from those who do so differently.
A more jaundiced look at knowledge workers might be to see them as serving the world to control people through mastering the control of what they do.
Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land, which is the theme of this series, attempts to show how knowledge has been used in “Cut & Control” fashion to dispatch or nullify “what was” to what is purported to be “what is,” separating the mind from the reality of that experience. We find comfort in the illusion that “what was” no longer contaminates “what is,” feeling superior in the new oblivious to what may have been lost.
The “cult of the exile” is the consequence of the brain on automatic pilot as the knowledge machine. Take commentators who promote globalization citing its connectedness and economic advantage, declaring. “The world is flat!” They fail to mention that if this is true then space and place are superfluous turning individuals across the globe into nomads. Permit me to explain.
People no longer need to leave their homes to feel connected. They have the world in their hands in their electronic gadgets. It brings information to them instantly from every corner of the world on the wings of electronic waves bouncing off satellites in outer space, allowing them to cross borders, invade heretofore secret spaces, and cultivate contrived relationships while remaining essentially stationary and unconnected except to an inanimate machine.
Knowledge workers combine convergence, divergence, and creative thinking.
With all this knowledge at our fingertips, it begs the questions: who are we, where are we going, and where do we belong? We are heady with the apocalyptic sense of being on the threshold of utopia with the progress of our quest for perfection, but do we know what or where that is?
Our cities across the globe are multicultural, multiethnic, and cosmopolitan with the sense of space and place retreating from our minds as home has become everywhere and nowhere. If home once denoted a certain kind of identity, we are displaced from that comfort zone as everything is now fluid.
Countries are now transnational configurations of economic networks of competing centers of commerce over which we have no control and no sovereignty.
Meanwhile, we have been distracted from reality to become pampered information junkies, bullied, seduced, and manipulated into voting blocks of contention by 24/7 cable news networks. There is no grand narrative coming out of churches or academic institutions but white noise from special interests competing for our attention, subliminally bombarding our senses reducing us to automatons.
We are not sure who to believe or what to believe, or what we stand for, even why we exist. We no longer have faith in some unassailable truth. It is for this reason utopia is intoxicating as orchestrated by the knowledge keepers in the language of destiny.
Many if not most of us are crazed victims of the utopian promise of this “Knowledge Revolution.” We live in the climate of intellectual homelessness with the unspoken dread of nuclear holocaust. There is no peace when the mind can find no shelter.
Life has been reduced to a metamorphic “house of mirrors” in which nothing is what it seems with fear and anxiety custodians of these distortions. A composite of these disguises blankets aggressors who look and seem like everyone else until they transcend that norm and commence to kill and maim the innocent on the street, in shopping malls, schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, and workplaces.
We ask why when these are not terrible people but people doing terrible things, and for a cause, they are unlikely to understand but still gravitate to for its identity and sense of belonging.
Indian scholar Homi Bhabha (born 1949) of Harvard University has studied mass migrations, cultural displacement, and the barbarism of colonizers who have uprooted and made millions homeless, only to have these perpetrators equally homeless as wanderers themselves across languages and continents. He writes:
“It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond . . . Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderline of the present.”
Mass confusion has reduced classifications to the shiftiness of prefixes: postmodern, postindustrial, postcolonial, post-Christian, post cultural, and so on. Borders are collapsing, states are becoming fluid, and people are living in ambivalent sponginess and constantly metamorphosing.
Formerly sacrosanct boundaries are now the place from which something begins as religious institutions and nation-states are no longer reliable reference points. It is in this climate that utopianism, heady with the “Knowledge Revolution” has once more come to the fore.
BIRTH & DEATH OF UTOPIA
British philosopher John Gray states, “Utopianism was a movement of withdrawal from the world before it was an attempt to remake the world by force.”
We have seen what the utopian idea proved to be when the United States attempted to affect regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan with Western-style democracies after disposing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Likewise, we have seen what Vladimir Putin has done with our Western market economy and democracy in post-Soviet Russia. Nothing has turned out as it was planned, but this is the common outcome with the birth and death of utopia.
British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) writes in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990):
“(Confidence) rest on three pillars of social optimism in the West . . . that the central problem of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle soluble; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole . . . this is common ground to many varieties of reformist and revolutionary optimism, from Bacon to Condorcet, from the Communist Manifesto to the modern technocrats, communists, anarchists, and seekers after alternative societies.”
The East as well as the West thinks it has a better idea if only the misguided and ill-informed would soften their resistance, adopt the proposed formula and realize the benefits and harmony promised.
The core feature of all utopias is a dream of ultimate harmony. Plato believed human ends were unchanging; Marx saw them as evolving through the scientific discovery of natural law, while Christianity has seen it as a matter of faith with human conflict left behind. All these utopian attempts have failed.
People of the Third World, where the focus has been, are not looking for handouts. They are unlikely to envy Americans or want to be like Americans. They want a more equitable share of their wealth to ensure national safety, security, and sustenance to which they have been denied by colonial expansionism.
Utopians believe the Third World is looking to the West to provide solutions and ameliorate its conflicts. This is delusional. The Third World has been exploited for time immemorial. These people prefer colonizers to leave, but to show them how to harness Western technology.
Conflict is a universal feature of human existence. Managed conflict is the glue that holds a society on task, not harmony. The United States, a natural divisive society of a diverse immigrant population, experienced this in WWII. The American people mobilized in less than a year to become the greatest war machine in the history of man. Once a people embrace conflict, it moves forward as one.
The idea of utopia is like the dream of winning the lottery. Once the excitement of the winning fades, and reality moves in, the winner is left with who and what he is and where he is.
Winning is unlikely to provide a quiet life in freedom and security because that is the reality of the dream and not of his existence. When the dream was achieved, the winner was introduced to his cruelest nightmare as wealth and its demands are likely to be foreign to his experience. Luckily, few win the lottery and therefore do not have to deal with its challenges and anxieties.
Utopian dreams in our waking hours are fantasies happily avoided because utopian projects are by nature, unachievable. Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711 – 1776) notes:
“All plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manner of mankind are imaginary.”
So, too, such plans are equally imaginary for the individual. Yet, in this age of exploding technology, where everything seems possible, there is little sense of the dangers of utopianism. Nothing appears to be stopping humans from remaking themselves from the outside, in, and the world with them.
It is because of this fabulist climate of unreality that dystopian novelists have come to the fore with such works as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Vladimir Nabokov Bend Sinister (1947), William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (1968) and J. G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes (2000), to name a few.
These authors take a prescient glimpse into the ugly reality that infuses this unrealistic utopian dream. Even so, it doesn’t seem to stop the motor of utopian visionaries. Invariably utopianism is associated with violence. We saw this with “The Reign of Terror” that followed the French Revolution when Maximilien Robespierre (1758 – 1794), himself a casualty of the Terror guillotine in 1794, advocated violence as a necessary form of social engineering to realize human perfection.
UTOPIA’S DANGEROUS MISAPPREHENSION
Early Christians promised salvation with apocalyptical utopian life in the hereafter, while many modern political religious sects offer salvation sometime in the future.
We have witnessed a decline in Christianity with a rise in revolutionary utopianism (e.g., Islam Jihad, Russian Soviet Communism, and German Nazism) along with associated terror and violence. Revolutionary utopianism, incidentally, has shifted from the far left in the 20th century to the far right in the 21st century.
Towards the end of the 20th century, utopianism entered the political mainstream. In this reconfiguration, the regime that came to be most prominent was that of America’s democratic capitalism.
Heady with the triumph of its systems in WWII, The United States with utopian zeal committed itself to install its form of democracy across the world. At the same time, after the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City where nearly 3,000 innocent working people lost their lives, the nation then launched its “War on Terror.”
Now, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the United States and the world are reeling from this grandiose utopian scheme orchestrated by President George W. Bush and his neoconservative Vice President Dick Chaney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
After seven years of work The Report of the Iraq Inquiry (2016), chaired by Sir John Chilcot has been published. He writes:
“(The planning and preparation for Iraq after Saddam) were wholly inadequate and the people have suffered greatly.”
British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft (born 1945), who has read the 6,275-page report adds:
“Those might seem like statements of the blindingly obvious, as does the solemn verdict that the invasion ‘failed to achieve the goals it had set for a new Iraq.’ It did more than merely fail, and not only was every reason we were given for the war falsified; every one of them has been stood on its head. Extreme violence in Iraq precipitated by the invasion metastasized into the hideous conflict in neighboring Syria and the implosion of the wider region, the exact opposite of that birth of peaceable pro-Western democracy that opponents of the invasion insisted would come about.” (Source: The New York Review, October 13, 2016)
Once the 9/11 attack became a messianic mission of President Bush, his presidency behaved like a revolutionary regime, personified with the preemptive invasion of Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein. Now, more than a decade later, the “War on Terror” has led to endless wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan.
Despite good intentions, countries and cultures have their history and way of dealing with problems. Consequently, initial utopian achievements are interrupted invariably by the reality of history.
Scientists look for a unifying theory in physics and mathematics; Western politicians look for a universal economic system with global capitalism. Utopian thinkers in both disciplines use reductive tools to leverage their visions. Meanwhile, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan remain part of the same tinderbox. No one seems to have the answer which is brutally apparent in The Report of Iraq Inquiry.
The world seems to be suffering something akin to a nervous breakdown that only time and patience will ultimately resolve.
The shifting allegiance of utopia from the far left to the far right is supported by the power of faith, but not of religion but politics. Politics has become a way of coping with human imperfection. The Right understands that human nature cannot be overcome; that it must be dealt with as it is. So, why has the Right abandoned this philosophy of imperfection, and embraced the pursuit of Utopia?
The Rightwing utopian movement started as a secular movement and then Christian evangelicals jump on board to make it a militant faith of neoconservatives. As the Utopian Right has become more militant, it has become less secular and more religious with powerful alliances with Christian fundamentalism.
Knowledge workers are caught in this madness without recognizing they are in the middle of the maelstrom. Ironically, President Bush appeared first obsessed with evil only to no longer believe in evil. He was followed by President Barak Obama who was equally obsessed with good as if evil was of no significance. Both presidents would have benefited from the Manichaeism of St. Augustine of Hippo, who in the City of God (426) differentiated the “Kingdom of Heaven” from the “Kingdom of Man,” where evil did thrive. He confirmed the existence of evil as a constant conflict with free will in the Doctrine of Original Sin.
Doubt is the essence of civilization while perfection through the violence of force or terror to remake history has led to the demise of utopia.
WE MUST TEACH OUR BRAIN NEW TRICKS
We don’t have to be stuck with our brains as they are. Our biases can be changed by the same means by which they were created. Modification to our brains happens frequently and naturally. The process starts when we learn to read and write. This represents a major alteration to the natural processes of mental development.
Some features of the brain are laid down even before we learn to read. If we do not develop binocular vision using our two eyes as one perhaps it is because we have some eye problem. Even then we are already programmed to a certain extent with the bias that “girls are not good at math” or “Americans are not good at language skills.”
We must learn to teach our old brains new tricks. The key to overcoming the problem made by our technological environment consists in putting things together in new ways. The brain function seems to acquire data the same way we serendipitously have life experiences.
We are a sponge but quickly forced to see and think in terms of hierarchies: parents/children; teachers/students; leaders/followers; gifted/slow-witted; highbrow/lowbrow; good/bad; superior/inferior; boss/subordinate; new/old; valuable/worthless; rich/poor; saved/damned; strong/weak; brave/cowardly; known/unknown; common/uncommon; right/wrong; white/black; God/godless; objective/subjective. What we are not told at an early age is that “the other” is always part of the former.
Management guru Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) recognized the absurdity, stating: “Strong people always have equally strong weaknesses.”
People are not a matter of “either/or” but a combination of both. We need not put ourselves down if we find ourselves incompetent in something, as everyone is. This should motivate us to find something we like doing, and chances are in doing so we will find competence.
We need each other because we are not equally competent in the same things but complement each other. We are one people. We are social animals. Hierarchical thinking inclines us to disparage our talent and exaggerate that of others. Likewise, it inclines us towards celebrity worship envying people who can do things that we value only much better than we can. We tend to imitate them moving us away from our strengths in imitation of theirs, then hating ourselves for not being as gifted. This drives a wedge between our “real self” and “ideal self” at the cost of self-understanding producing instead of self-estrangement.
It can result in an obsession with comparing and competing. Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher write in Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity (1966):
“Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and certainly the most destructive of all the many forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, if not overcome, it produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped individual who is devoid of initiative, imagination, originality, and spontaneity. He is humanly dead. Competition produces zombies! Nonentities!”
What if we thought in a way in which such apparent distinctions were treated as part of the same whole? What if we thought with our mind’s eye (imagination) as naturally as with our minds (data collectors), intuitively and routinely as we do cognitively? What if we used our right brain (conceptual synthesizer) fully as a complement to our left brain (information analyzer), what then?
Perhaps we would be less obsessed with control and more inclined to accommodate the requirements of the situation. Perhaps we would be more comfortable with uncertainty and the world of limits, a world that necessitates sharing.
Edward de Bono advocates lateral thinking to bridge our obsession with barriers:
“As a patterning system, the brain can only see what it is prepared to see. The analysis of information will not produce new ideas, merely a selection from existing ideas . . . To deal with the future we have to deal with the possibilities (not certainties). The analysis will only tell us what is already known.”
We are in a “Knowledge Revolution” with science priding itself with close to absolute certainty that mathematics and physics are successfully tracking the physical laws of nature to the benefit of man. But are they?
Mathematics is a language invented by essentially left-brain thinkers. Technology runs with the discoveries of science translating them into new products, new technologies seldom if ever stopping to wonder about the impact or consequences. Technology companies are heady with the products that will accrue from successfully filling the mainly imaginary longings of the buying public for something new, something that will allow them to escape the misery of their mainly humdrum existence.
It is no accident that the popular personal computer and the wonder of handheld electronic devices came out of toy-making designers. We are so enamored of these new gadgets that science has become the new god and technology creators the new high priests of the enterprise. Consequently, there is pressure for manufacturers to come out with new machines, or seemingly new machines, every year with the public standing in lines around the block for days to be first in line to make the purchase.
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955), who ranks with Galileo and Newton as one of the great conceptual revisionists, put mathematics and science in perspective:
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
Yet, we seem fixated on science and mathematics with utopian zeal. To overcome this all-embracing technological neuroticism, we need to discover ways to teach our old brains new tricks, as this software craze only reifies what is already known and therefore warps the brain into frigid conformity. The paradox is that a society committed to progress is retrogressing at Mach speed.
Possible Matrix of the Future
The brain is hungry for data but disinclined to innovation. The mind can get equally as fat as the body, but no one seems to notice, or if they do, only to sense an inevitable kinship.
Innovation consists of putting old things together in new ways. It is why chess, doing puzzles, or playing thought games are stimulating. Unlike sequential technological generated knowledge, imaginative thinking jumps the linear barrier in a non-linear conceptual manner.
There is a place for step-by-step Aristotelian logic, to reducing problems to their smallest parts as a matter of Descartes, even making exhaustive lists in an instant electronically, but this is not thinking. This is playing Ping-Pong with the cerebral cortex.
De Bono labels this obsession with problem-solving as critical thinking or the limitation of thinking of the problem with the same thinking that caused the problem. As a consequence, most problems are reduced to the symptoms of the problem, as the cause gets lost in circular logic. He states emphatically:
“If you are seeking to discover the truth, then you are not interested in creating truths.”
That takes creative thinking which involves pushing the barrier beyond smug beliefs to what is not known but can be found out.
As uncomfortable as it may seem, there appears an irrational component to the problem solving, the non-logical counterintuitive brain that is not limited by the complexity of data and is comfortable with contradictory information. This requires using both sides of an argument and both sides of the brain. Insight, or intuitive understanding, comes in a cloud burst that is not available on the computer.
We love the precision of the Matrix whatever the discipline.
The creative mind is not put off with the irrational or inexact or fuzzy concepts such as “almost two,” or insupportable quantum leaps. The irony is that Einstein had trouble with quantum mechanics which he helped to develop, a kind of physics and mathematics that wanders beyond the bounds of the conventional and is not limited to the automated universe.
We are in a culture locked in the rational, the verifiable, the logical while being intimated by the “arational” or thinking that is not sequential and replicable. De Bono attempts to address this gap with lateral and parallel thinking as a complement to vertical and hierarchical thinking. Groundless thinking began to be devalued after the “Scientific Revolution” (1550 – 1700) took hold and ultimately became the new religion.
Today, philosophers and religious thinkers, who jumped on the scientific bandwagon to mimic that community shredding their mystical and metaphysical propensities, are resurfacing as the material world finds it desperately needs to rediscover its spiritual moorings.
Caricature of the Knowledge Keeper?
No one knows precisely what thinking is or how the brain works. Radioactive tracers look at the brain when it is injured or diseased with magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) and computed tomography. They are now scanning the brain to see how it looks when people are solving problems. Alas, the biggest, fastest computer cannot match the insights of the gigantic system we have between our ears of which we still know so little.
NOWHERE LAND IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION
Utopian social engineers have found a powerful new tool on the Internet and in the diversity of software probing the darkness of human limitations. This will continue. Accompanying this utopian intensity is terror and violence. This is not the fault of the new technology but users with opposing utopian views. All societies contain divergent ideas of life. When a utopian regime becomes dominant in a society, philosopher John Gray warns, it collides with this ideal which can only lead to repression and defeat.
Utopian ideals have reproduced religious myths and inflamed mass movements since the Middle Ages. The secular terror of modern times has accompanied Christianity throughout its history. Christianity believed that Utopia could be achieved by human action.
Clothed in science, the early Christian myth of end-times has given rise to a new kind of faith-based violence. We saw this in the preemptive invasion of Iraq where the United States with utopian messianic zeal deposed the totalitarian dictator Saddam Hussein and attempted to install American-style democracy on a mixed tribal society of Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis with disastrous results.
Missing in this intervention was the understanding that people everywhere continue to be attached to familiar things – religion, nationality, family, and tribe – seeing efforts to separate them from such attachments as being atavistic. Iraq has been Nowhere Land ever since.
Utopianism tracks with the retreat and decline of Christian beliefs as human nature, at the moment, doesn’t seem interested in being improved much less perfected.
Equally alarming is that efforts at perfectibility were clearly apparent with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and now ISSI and al-Qaeda but with a radical difference to that of Christianity.
What these ideologies share in common is a commitment to totally change the social order by first destroying what exists, and then replacing it with the assumed mythical ideal. This differs from Christianity’s mission which is to improve human nature. Yet, in Christianity’s efforts to do so it has engendered terror and violence as well.
It is never the flaws of human nature that stand in the way of Utopia. It is the workings of evil forces. Ultimately, these dark forces will fail, but only after they have blocked human advance by every kind of terror and violence.
It is for this reason that it would be well for knowledge keepers to get inside the habits of radicalism. Terror and violence are as indigenous to the West as elsewhere, and its utopian inclination, although different, is equally destructive. Knowledge keepers, secure in their cubicles, may think harmony is the key to stability when it is managed conflict that is.
NEXT – TWENTY-FOUR – A WAY OUT MAY ALREADY BE HERE -- PSYCHIC ENTROPY
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