World Ethos 1
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 08.1
The cosmic cloak
The sun rises, the sun goes down, we say.
Regardless of the scientific revolutions, we keep orienting ourselves in the physical world using the same reference frame of our prehistoric ancestors. Before lifting the veil of immediate perception, humanity would, as young Adam, impose its dominion over nature by giving things a name. Chaos became a cosmos since reality became impregnated with humanity, since things became increasingly defined and domesticated.
In the Chinese language each ideogram represents a thing, and ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ are two sides of the same order of reality:
the Tao.
The emperor’s palace was structured to resemble the universe, with a throne room for each month of the year, and the sundial’s gnomon casting no shadow on the summer solstice, as to situate it in the center of the cosmos.
The Tao of the West is the logos, once again one fundamental axiom explaining both the natural and the political order. Romulus, Rome’s founding father, after digging a hole in ground, stuffed it with fruits, covered it with soil and erected a shrine. The pit was known as mundus. In Latin, this word is – recalls Plutarch – “synonym to the Universe, the name of the ‘world’.”
The City represented the intersectionary plane of the three levels of the universe: the heavens, the earth and the underworld.
The lord of the city was entitled, again in the words of Plutarch, to “a magnificent chlamys decorated with a mundus surrounded by the shining stars”: the ‘cosmic cloak’, a tradition held up until the Middle Ages.
That’s how, century after century, the imagination of the winners put together the colorful collage portrayed on today’s political atlas. A world-system made of flags around which – it’s now scientifically proven – whirls a chaos of electromagnetic storms, tearing apart the cosmic fabric with sacrilegious black holes. Science has proven that no, we’re not at the center, and that it’s quite meaningless to talk of center and periphery, since even our galaxy is only one between countless. The crumbling of the traditional geometries uncovers the void we carry within, the ancestral fear of being in this world without a purpose, without a reason to give a sense to the count of the days.
From this fear derives the
conventional human’s diffidence towards the wild, its obsession with taming nature,
which eventually resulted in the morbid relationship of the modern citizen with its ‘pet’.
Our new situation of ‘citizens’ of the world, requires a new language, which is already developing as the internet of things gains momentum.
The founding event (one between countless, and yet the most telling in my experience) dates back to the summer of ‘69.
That’s when we saw the Earth from space, and it was a bit like when Noah’s sons peeped the father’s nudity.
One thing are the scientists’ scribbles, another is a motion picture.
We have lost the innocence of the youth and we have entered the adult age of responsibility. Are we ready for it?
Looking around us, the picture looks grim: Humanity appears lost, immature, prisoner of its own bad habits as any spoiled teenager. And yet we’re not helpless. There is something which science redeemed from the depths of our mythical memory, and today strikes us as an undeniable truth:
‘biosphere’ is the real name for the cosmic cloak, that belt of living systems that originates and thrives on the outer layer of the planet, where the rays of father Sun meet our mother, Earth.
It was within this world-organism that generated the human phenomenon: the psychic wave emerging from the genetic memory folded on itself, and consciousness was born.
Human Consciousness,
breaker of the deterministic circuit, infinite prism in which the organic cell mirrors itself, looking for the meaning of life.
Up to a certain extent, humanity is always unconsciously driven by the physical, bio-chemical and psychic deteminisms that concur at its development. And yet, at this stage, humanity can live only if consciously aware of the complex unity of the life-system of which it is part.
Consciousness, hence, is really the process where the biosphere curves on itself, becoming aware of its holiness, and maturely responsible of its future.
The new responsibility
If humanity would completely evade the dynamic architecture of the biosphere, body of its body, it would cease to exist.
Feeding its flashing thought, is the same energy that transforms in vapor the water of the seas, and flowers the buds. Natural life is a regenerating order produced by energy, death is energy falling back into entropic disorder.
Seen in its entirety, life is following a trajectory that will inevitably result in total inertia, and thus, since the equivalence energy=time, in the end of time.
Time, hence, cannot be considered as the temporal ‘container’ of organic processes, as something pre-dating life that can be thought without it: Time is life’s most intimate substance, energy’s diversified deployment that proceeds as an arrow until the moment of its fall, or as an hourglass, inexorably filling up its base with sand, with no invisible hand to flip it over and start all over again.
Time is therefore irreversible because, in its movement towards the future, energy never finds itself in the same moment twice.
The mistake of mechanical philosophies was to consider time as a reversible trend of effects that can be repeated once the same causes are acted out. The life-system is so interconnected that each of its parts is a reflection of the whole, and each part is within the whole.
If a flower dies, nothing will ever be the same.
If I waste energy, I shorten the duration of Life.
Based on this assumptions, the new World Ethos is one for which good is what favors life, and bad is what accelerates its decline.
The recent series of environmental catastrophes is not an accident, it’s the necessary consequence of an outdated model of development delusionally oriented towards infinite growth within the context of a finite world. If Marx saw the evil of the capitalist way of production in the alienating effects it had both on the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, we can today update his analysis to the alienation of the entire biosphere, the reckless entropic acceleration we are currently witnessing.
At this point, a number of capital questions arise: Is this entropic drift unstoppable? Is it possible to alter the cultural course in time, and re-establish a sustainable pact between humanity and the biosphere?
One thing is certain: the culture we inherited is not functional to life and doesn’t comply with the meaning of our existence on earth.
Conventional moral laws are unable to fully express our present responsibility. We cannot any longer consider legitimate by default any human endeavor just because it doesn’t directly affect other humans. An evaluation of its conformity to the new ethos implies the examination of the connections that the particular aim of that operation has with the totality of the biosphere and how it affects it in the long term.
The old anthropocentric ethics made man the measure of all things.
The new World Ethos raises Life in its entirety as its ultimate measure.
The hypothesis of humanity being on the verge of an evolutionary leap is therefore scientifically grounded: our species always procrastinates until the deadline looms large.
