After-postmodern and Peace - Part 2

One era starts in the era that comes before. The Middle Ages started in the Antiquity. The Modern Era started in the Middle Ages. And so on...

The after-postmodern has roots in postmodern movements and thoughts.

The idea of cooperation to be so or more important than competition and struggle started in the transition of 19th and 20th centuries with the Russian thinker Kropotkin, but acquired argument and strength in the last decades of postmodern era, with some thinkers as Stephen Jay Gould.

After-postmodern and Peace

The after-postmodern conditions lead to Peace, is what seems to someone that looks to postmodern and after-postmodern times. We can think it is a kind of utopy, or dream, but Peace is not something that is definitive and closed. Peace is something under construction all time. But modern times and post-modern times were times of confrontation. Even the anthropology thinking explained Evolution by confrontation at modern and postmodern times. Nowadays the cooperation is more importante than the confrontation. So the anthropology understands too, about the cultural Evolution of Mankind.

The “End of Normal” and the After-postmodern era

     When James K. Galbreith wrote about “the end of normal” he was not talking about some kinds of “normal” that we can find in several discussions, mainly in Humanities. We can see, for example, in the book of the French physician and philosopher Georges Canguilhem, “On The Normal and the Pathological”, a discussion about the concept of “normal” under biological conditions and studies of the constrution of medical knowledge. In a general way, what is “normal” in one culture, can have a diferent meaning in other culture, and so on.

     The “end of normal” for Galbreith is the end of the paradigm that says that the world economy can grow on and on, under a traditional concept of progress. Now we have to put in this equation the factor “resource” and “sustainability”. In postmodern times, this was a kind of dream, although the environmental movement was already present. So, the pragmatism of industrial,technical,etc development need to change in After-postmodern era. Maybe it is even a new kind of pragmatism dictated by the necessity of Mankind’s survival.    

Singularity and After-postmodern

Singularity is a word that is used in some ways not exactly with the same meaning.

In Medicine we can use Singularity to mean that we try to see each paciente with its individual characteristics. Other way in Medicine to use this word is to refer to the individual genetic code. Another way is to mix the both.

In Transhumanism, the word Singularity is connected to the individuality, but in a sense of the possibility of changes in the body, whenever necessary to keep alive, without limits. What can be asked about it is: where is the “subjectivity”? All those changes that happen are objective changes, not subjective.

In the 1980s the french philosopher Guattari was worried about “the end of subjectivity” in the West Culture.

Nowadays, in After-postmodern times, Subjectivity is coming back, because Objectivity is not enough to find and keep a meaning for life.

And we are trying to find the singularity of subjectivity.

The Crisis and "The End of Normal”

“To keep growing” is the usual way to look for the global economy, in global or local vision. However, natural resources cannot grow forever.

James K. Galbraith wrote about it and emphasize that the “normal” paradigm did not look for resources, but other variables as gross domestic product, work and jobs.  

In after-postmodern times, “normal” is not enough anymore for mankind to keep living well. Maybe we need to change the concept of “growing”. Maybe the “new growing” is a kind of “balance” that keep natural resources at same time that people can change its way of life to a better level, but without too much consuming and excessive accumulation.  

“Slow Medicine Movement” and After-postmodern

The standard of modern university was the University of Berlin founded in 1810 by Wilheim Humbolt. At this institution, for the first time the laboratory, that was inside Academies and outside the universities, started to be together with the traditional faculties. The Modern University had the ideal to make the “cultural person” and this model spread around the world.

After the Second World War, with the beginning of the Postmodern Era, the University became also “postmodern”. So, pragmatism, production, results, were the main objective of the university and not the “cultural person”.

Together with these two movements in history, the Medical Thinking and Medical Attitude had also two patterns. In the Modern Period, from 1800 to 1950, the Medicine was also idealistic, humanistic. In the postmodern era it became pragmatic, reductionist, dehumanized...

We are in a time of “macro shift” as Erwin Lazlo said. The first decade of the Millenium started with a time of transition, as we saw with the tragedy of 2001 and the crises of 2008. The model of postmodern times is exhausted. It does not work as before, even still working a little for while, as a transition goes...

We are in a after-postmodern era, with new paradigms arising. So, the postmodern model of medicine is changing. The Slow Medicine Movement is a sign of a new way of teaching and pratice of medicine. In some way is a return to the medicine of modern period; in another way is a new pattern to deal and understand the technical progress of medicine. 

About “The End of Normal” by James K. Galbraith and after-postmodern times

     James K. Galbraith writes in the book about the Great Crisis of 2008, “The End of Normal”, that there was a belief that “growth was not only desirable but also normal, perpetual, and expected”; and “the idea that unlimited growth and improvement were possible, with each generation destined to live better than the one before”.

     It seems to us that this kind of thinking is something original from mankind itself, something “normal”. In true, it is a theory invented by economists after the Second World War. This theory is still orienting many institutions, but in the After-postmodern Times it is not working like before.

    Someone could say that “the crisis is ending”, but we can see, for example, that the Brexit is not yet really resolved. We are in a transition from Post-Modern to After-postmodern Times.

     The growth based on competition maybe has to be substituted by collaboration.

     Theories (until 1970ies) about the beginning of mankind stipulated that evolution was based on competition. In the end of the 20^th century there were new theories that stablished “collaboration” (more than competition) as a mechanism for humanity to evolve: mankind needed to be together to face several difficulties.

     Maybe now we are discovering that we need to come back to a similar step to evolve again…