The elusive prophecy
January becomes the month of arts and science for Santiago and other cities of Chile. During this month happen theatre festival “Santiago a mil” and the conference about science and technology “Future Congress.” In this 2018, also Chileans receive the visit of the Pope Francis, which fill press with the ecclesiastic news. This simultaneous agenda of unique plays, talks, workshops and discourses crossover the main paradigms of the Chilean society, and a reflection of the cultural moment that Santiago currently lives.
Almost 75 years before Benjamin Solari Parravicini, draw a psychography which claims “Chile, cultura en elevacion” [Chile, culture on elevation]. Under a prophetic stance, his illustrations represent bubbles of the past and the future, to alert the alienation produced by artifacts. His draws and phrases establish a way to imagine local futures under the uncertain of 1940 and beyond.
The overlap and tensions between reason, imagination, and faith embodied in Santiago this week could be interpreted as an opportunity to assess Chilean culture and their interest in the future. In a country with high depression rates, low educational performance, a systemic institutional mistrust, and others psychosocial ills of modern societies, we can exemplify the lack of cultural sense urges to develop societal tools to approach these collective needs. Future is a place without hope when society is unable to imagine it.
Julian Huxley was a contemporary of Solari Parravicini. He invites readers to imagine and integrate our thinking about the evolutionary challenges that societies face. Huxley proposes an evolutionary humanism to understand human challenges, a systemic approach to describe our complex cultural and physical transformations as psychosocial beings. I consider that the lessons of the dynamic Chilean agenda could be increased if we observe how cultural boundaries (as like C.P. Snow recognize in his two cultures) are blocking the interaction of psychosocial public spheres. The construction of evolutionary humanism, based on cybernetic principles of Julian Huxley, was a tear of Chilean culture for social and historical facts in its past. Under these conditions sciences, arts or even religion remains in a cycle of self-repetition where each one talk for themselves.
Huxley could offer an alternative to transform Chilean paradigm: To create a better future requires collectively embrace the complexity and uncertain. Evolutionary humanism recognizes how cultural improvement is not continuous, “take place in steps, by a succession of successful or dominant types of organization, each endowed with new capacities and possibilities.” Chile requires identifying their complexities not on economic or political stability, if not in its limitations for upgrade cultural institutions as universities, churches, and theaters under social ecology approach. For this heavy January agenda, a remix of interpretations is expected to understand what is going on in the long and thin country.
If the prophecy of Solari Parravicini has some sense for the near future, is because Chileans begin to understand the connections and interplays in their current history, avoiding shortcomings to redesigning their cultural institutions. Something to learn from Huxley is that psychosocial systems change all the time, and we need to give the next step to evolve into something new. I want to believe that this January agenda in Chile are going to start to think about the limitations of historical, economic and epistemic silos. Any possible future recognizes the limitations an opportunity to connect with something unexpected to embrace the changes of complexity, as Huxley propose. Maybe, under this paradigm, Chileans could start their way to achieve the elusive prophecy about the future of a new culture.
