CONSCIOUS CIVILIZATIONAL CONSTRUCTION Georg Friedrich Hegel suggested that a civilization cannot become conscious of itself, cannot recognize its own significance, until it is so mature that it is approaching death. This was true of the ancient world, with the Roman Empire the final embodiment: It dissolved into something very unlike itself. Death is an apt description; it was not reborn. But, it seems to me, that any supposed civilizational death could, in some hypothetical instance, instantiate as a radical metamorphosis from one form of civilization to another form, if some of the most basic ideals, aspirations, world views, and bases for its material existence were to radically alter, but alter in a more or less conscious fashion. In terms of Western civilization (now globalized), what if radical changes were to occur in the economic system (now a failing global capitalist system), in the ideology of growth (which is increasingly faulted), in sources of energy (which are rapidly changing), in the masculine dominance of Western intellectual consciousness and the unconscious? The latter is being intensely examined as the source for lots of cultural imbalance. All these and more are up now for serious scrutiny. And, Western civilization already has had great civilizational change agents, such as Copernicus (who produced a cosmological revolution that decentered the Earth); Descartes (who produced an ontological [re the nature of being] revolution that separated the conscious human subject from the unconscious material universe); and Kant (who produced an epistemological [re the nature of knowledge] revolution that posited the world as mediated, contingent, relativized, situated, contextual, radically interpretive, theory-soaked, and essentially a construct made by the mind with no assurance that human cognition adheres in the object). Western civilization went to bed in a medieval world of considerable social and intellectual constraint and woke up in a Copernican-Cartesian-Kantian world of contingency and estrangement. Since we know that the world is in some essential sense a construct, we can bring (construct) a new world into existence. In some sense, because the (mature) spirit of the old Western civilization, it can be argued, has already died, it is nigh time for the birthing of a new one. Upon arriving in England, Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization. Gandhi replied, tongue-in-cheek, that he thought it would be a good idea. I think so, too. The birth clinic is now under conscious construction.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 07:47:32 +0000
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