World Community 1
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 09.1
By the ruins of Babylon
The original event of the philosophical call in young Nietzsche was, in his own words, the casual encounter in a flea market with the major work by Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation.
At page 416, young Nietzsche noticed and read the powerful description of Man facing the illusionary veil of Maia, the passage which inspired his Apollo, God of all the figurative Arts, in his literary debut The birth of Tragedy only a couple of years later.
“Just as the sailor sits in his little boat, trusting his fragile craft in a stormy sea which, boundless in every direction, rises and falls in howling mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering, the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis”
The lone human that wanders through the stormy seas, self-confident thanks to a willful effort to believe the representation of his own mind, is the same human about whom Hegel, in the same years, wrote: “Since Nature has almost become a rational system intelligible to the human mind, Man now finds himself at ease, and only by feeling at ease he can then feel free, thanks to his knowledge”.
By focusing on himself, on the archetypes of his own reason, modern man was admittedly able to analyze and understand many processes of the physical universe and the human evolution. The ‘breaking’ news is that recently that order started falling apart, the self-confidence to tremble, and even the identity principle itself appears fractured by dangerous cracks.
Just by limiting ourselves to the historical horizon — of the physical one we have already said — the traditional habit of applying the principle of finalism to human history has become unacceptably naive. The proud feeling of accomplishment, as we noted before, gave modern man the illusion of having found the definitive order, along with a huge confidence boost. But now “mountains of water” are forming around “his small wooden boat”. The tumultuous events happening outside the perimeter of what he considered normal roar, with increasing insistence around him, and force him into unexpected territory, for which he lacks of categories. Many human groups have already started moving outside the traditional order, proceeding at astounding speed in new, unpredictable trajectories that far exceed the most audacious science-fiction forecasts. To the shock of the central planners, the patterns arising are starting to suggest some invisible hand is indeed connecting the dots, yet pointing in the only direction they wouldn’t even consider: losing their job and privileges.
The mortal crisis of all traditional ideologies has also this common explanation: their inability to explain the changing reality, the failure of their plans to control nature and their promises of manipulating the world until it becomes a safe and comfortable mansion with Mankind as the landlord. The domestication of nature, humanity’s leap forward in the early Neolithic, had the side effect of domesticating humanity itself, up to a point when it became so alien and disconnected from the living source that it got sick and started behaving like a cancer cell.
Every late Neolithic cosmology share this cancerous bias:
the myth of man somehow culminating the creation, and chosen by the gods to rule the Earth.
The recent discovery that the present lifestyle hurts our body and mind and that if endured would destroy the world of our children brings with it an irreversible loss of innocence, the naive enthusiasm held by most pioneers of modernity, sure of holding the secret key to a perfect humanization of the world. The ethical principle of the Enlightenment had been the “sapere aude!” that from the Kantian theory to the capitalistic practice openly disdained the respect of the limit — in Hegel’s words “the bad infinity”. The individual would delusionally think of breaking the limits of his own finiteness by projecting the existence in the self-referential loop of the Spirit of Human History. Who wouldn’t dare to break those limits, as Kierkegaard for example, was condemned to an introspective and resentful exile full of repressed anger against the architects of history, now apparently armed with very efficient tools for their grand-plans of world domination.
Our generation has a privileged perspective to see the dismal failure of such projects.
Us, inhabitants of the last Age of Modernity, have under our eyes the secret drive that guided this extraordinary adventure of homo sapiens. We see, through the veil where history and material world appear as a cosmos, the neolithical chaos against which Adam erected a wall, a fortified city, the model that inspired him the architecture of his language and sciences.
The first cosmos was the city,
indeed an ‘order’ if compared to the earlier hunter-gatherer societies: an order founded on violence. Especially in the Middle East and Europe, where the memory of these events is more recent, the founding of a city is always accompanied by the murder of the nomadic brother (Abel, Remo) by the hand of the farmer (Cain, Romolo).
Jericho, the oldest city our archaeologists have uncovered, was fortified by immense walls and surrounded by a moat 8.25m wide and 2.75m deep.
The city is born by walling off the surrounding environment and then proceeds to strengthen its position by organizing an armed force to deal with the neighbors (military) and one to maintain internal cohesion (police).
Cities provided safe shelter to their citizens, and promised times of peace and prosperity. Their strength was an ability to accumulate capital (food, technology, people), hence to plan in advance, and to deal with emergencies.
This leap of human intelligence we generally refer to as Neolithic revolution was characterized by an enhanced ability to rationalize — that is — to make ratios, parts, out of the whole. Humans living in the cities became slowly domesticated to
the idea that rational coincides with real, and that god is measure: justice, number, money.
Human existence, organized in a hierarchical order, became more productive, efficient, and predictable. Capital could grow and the city flourish, until the system would hit its limits and had to expand. The necessity of periodically expanding the order of the city resulted, within a densely populated environment such as Mesopotamia, in a sharp acceleration of the technological progress due to intense competition between the tribes (military or commercial). Seeing it from today, the city-state Civilization, with its cycles of molar incorporations(empires, monopolies) and molecular disintegrations (fortified cities, market), managed to delay, century after century, the world unification of the many (polis) tribes into one human organism. The internal mechanisms of defense once erected by the central planners around our cities and inside our minds proved so successful to remain unquestioned for thousands of years, through cycles of war, peace and revolution.
Until recently, when the instruments of human domination over nature and enemy advanced so far to threaten the destruction of the entire object they were trying to control: planet Earth.
And yet, we would be lying against the historical evidence if we forgot to mention that humanity, even when moved by aggressiveness, was always simultaneously guided by the other polarity of life’s impulse, love, whose aspiration was never domination, but communion, inspired by a mutual recognition of every personal and cultural difference.
What we inherit from this civilization is not completely biased by violence: the same technology we can blame for so many man-made disasters, is also what allowed us to develop the new connective tissue of the species, the info-structural conditions to realize a dream that without technology was doomed stay confined inside the fascinating but sterile realm of our imagination. When today we say that the world is our home, we are stating a self-evident fact, not a rational deduction. And even when we admit that chaos is reemerging behind the old veil of the cosmos, we believe that another cosmos is possible, only not ordered by the violent hand of human civilization. In order to survive this epochal crisis, humanity must recognize its symbiosis with Nature, and learn from her how to gently intertwine diversities without killing them. To love Nature is also to accept its imperfections, its limits which we find reflected in ourselves:
“This Nature — writes Edgar Morin — that became so dear to us, isn’t but a tiny island of life lost between the thermonuclear fire of the stars and the freezing emptiness of space, and yet this island is, for the scale of each individual as well as for the entire humanity, an ample and embracing placenta.”
We feel deep inside our conscience the call to become her loving partners, to inspire dialectically her spiritual development, but also to listen to her cycles and learn to dance along. To believe in her in the good and the bad times, since fear kills love and without love, there can be no children.
Our civilization — Babylon — was patriarchal and power-obsessed. Unity was only in the mind, above the eyes, erected by sacrificing the individual subjects in front of the Will of the Great Architect, with an act of violent coercion.
The myth recalls that the builders wouldn’t even understand each other, divided in order to be controlled, until the tower collapsed on their heads.
The World Community is in turn dynamic and life-conscious. The individuals and the groups are free to move and design their eco-communities and express their creative potential.
The World Ethos that inspires it, is embodied in an open, consensual set of ethical standards, that enables free world wide communication, synergy and synchronicity while positively incentiving local practices and networks.
As the early Christian communities, or maybe the forgotten pre-Neolithic societies, the World Community is founded on the recognition of the Other as a guest and a friend.
This transition calls us to leave our cities, redesign integrally our everyday life.
It’s really going to feel like going home. We are called to be the new Adams and Eves, and this time around, God is on our side.
