New humanism, Highwayman of Jimmy Webb and Interstellar

Humanism was a kind of movement (if we can say so, because the word “humanism” was created in 19^th  century) in the 14th century started by the Italian Scholar and poet Petrarch (1304-1374). He was inspired by letters of the Roman orator Cicero. Cicero proposed the term studium humanitas for his contemporary version of the Aristotelian Liberal Arts, the studies recommended from Aristotle to the parents for a better education to their children to grow a truly person. The Liberal Arts were composed of Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic) and Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music).  It was not a great novelty the use of those studies; the novelty was the new use mainly of language and a new time for poetry. More than just get back the ancient texts, the humanists applied the critical analysis of those texts to build a new vision of old and new times. The called the middle Ages (the term middle Ages was coined later) “obscure” not by the ignorance, but mainly by the absence of poetry (new studies showed that mainly Enlightenment thinkers elaborated the bad stigma of middle ages). Looking to the way the language was used the humanists started a new way to see the world, the society and to see themselves.

By the pendulum of history, some kind of humanism comes back under certain conditions and circumstances. In current after-postmodern times we are living a “macro shift” and we do not know for sure where it all is leading to. This is a time for some “new humanism” related to these days. What could be the tools for a kind of humanism in times of cybernetics and space technology?

Again, by the pendulum of history, we could see the seventies of the 20^th century as a forgotten decade, similar to the “clever side” of Middle Ages. Pop poetry and music of seventies could be better remembered and studied by “an after-postmodern reading”.

In that decade Jimmy Webb composed “Highwayman” after a dream he had about being someone else. An interpretation of the lyrics is about a bandit that is reborn in three other people: the last of all “a starship captain”. Maybe another way of understand is considering that kind of reborn as a “survival of humanity” through historical crisis. The starship captain could fit to the main character of the movie “Interstellar” and those emotional links leaded him to a specific space-time where he met humanity again…

Dark Ages, Middle Ages, New Ages - Part 2

Today, in history studies, the researchers do not assume anymore a fixed unique date to separate the historic eras. They see the transitions as processes evolving step by step before and after remarkable events. But, in some moment, a new paradigm arrives…

When Thomas Kuhn wrote about “paradigm” he meant only “scientific paradigms” in “scientific revolutions”; he even was not sure about use his concepts to understand biological sciences. Anyway, with the success of his ideas, other fields of knowledge started to use de concept of “paradigm” to understand several kinds of changes under human thinking. So, in the transition from Middle Ages to Renascence Period, it came a moment when people, mainly scholars and professors, did not see anymore themselves and the world as people of decades before. In a certain way we could say that “suddenly” Gothic Art became “strange” or “ugly”, Aristotelian knowledge lost part of its force, and so on… In 14^th century Petrarch started to think that Ancient Times, the time of Romans and Greeks, was a time of knowledge, and between those times and his own time it was a kind of “dark period”. Later this was used to reinforce the caricatured image of Middle Ages that was built mainly by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers.   

For Petrarch the old was new, and the new was old. This is a key to understand certain moments and concepts in history.

From time to time in history and even nowadays someone like to speak about something that he called “new”, but in true it is something older than several things around. The vice versa happens too. Sometimes when someone try to start something really new, quickly appears another person to label it as “old”, just to devalue that innovation. Under that way of expression there is also some kind of prejudice about anything considered “old” or even the concept of “old”. In after-Postmodern times is yet difficult to say what is truly “new” or truly “old”…  

Dark Ages, Middle Ages, New Ages...

Most of us received information in History about “Dark Ages”, or “Middle Ages” as a time of ignorance, superstition, disrespect, prejudice, etc., and other “negative” things, and that all of these was overcome with Renascence, Humanism and Enlightenment.

Currently historians know that Dark Ages were not so dark… Middle Ages were not so ignorant… In true, the names Renascence and Humanism were fixed centuries after they occurred. Men of Enlightenment saw their own time as a “time of light”, under the “light of reason” and Middle Ages as a “time of obscurity”. Dark Ages and Middle Ages are concepts created later then the supposed eras. Throw research historians now know that at those times it was light and darkness, as in anytime. We do not know which century was better or worst. Each century has its light and its darkness. Sometimes it seems that the 20^th century could be the worst, other times it seems that could be the best. Anyway, we could say that we are now in a “macro shift” in history, or we could say that we are in after-postmodern times. We are not sure about “new ages”... But, as in all human history, light and darkness are still around… 

Memory and after-postmodern – Part 2

Maybe the Big Data is a new level of memory, a new kind of memory, a kind of individual and collective memory that is stored in the virtual world, outside of any head. At same time, if people refuse handwriting, if people give up handwriting, if people “forget” handwriting, it can be a kind of memory loss. One is the language of Big Data, other is the language inside the brain without handwriting, and other is the language using the fingers holding a pen, even supposing that the words are the same.

Memory is stored based in senses strongly connected to verbal language. The brain cannot achieve complexity without the body and its sensory stimulations. Also, using the brain to activate the body can improve the brain capacities.

In the Postmodern Period we used to think that there were “brain people” (intellectuals, artists) opposed to “body people” (athletes, hard work). Nowadays step by step we understand that brain and body depend on each other and can help each other to improve both capabilities.

In the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st century there were produced several movies about memory loss and manipulation of memory, mainly in Science Fiction. It was arousing a perception that humanity was at an increasing risk of memory loss. Memory and identity are connected things and Occidental Culture could be in a risk of identity loss in the transition from Postmodern to After-postmodern.

Is our collective memory vanishing together with “the language” of the muscles of our hands?          

Memory and After-postmodern – Part 1

The last decade of the 20^th Century was called “the decade of the brain”. Under the postmodern culture, the brain could be the last frontier to conquer by the power of chemistry… mind and soul were maybe only some kind of illusion produced by the machine of brain.

At the same time the Arts started to focus on variations of “memory”. Could Science manipulate memory? Could Science make us forget painful moments? Or maybe some new kind of power, political or scientific, could take over us controlling our memories?

That theme is now perhaps stronger and maybe nearer to happen in some way, although we have apparently better conditions to keep data in digital archives.

But maybe we are living some other kind of memory loss. If we do not use some of our oldest capacities, as for example, the ability of handwrite, we are losing “body-memory”, “hand-memory”, even some “neuron-memory”, as cultural memory as well. 

Piketty’s book and after-postmodern economy

The book of Thomas Piketty “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is a best seller and has raised many debates and several divided opinions. But here, in our forum, it is secondary to choose among those opinions. What does matter is that the book was written in after-postmodern times. The debates are after-postmodern debates about what can be the after-postmodern economy. Even if we conclude that “nothing changes under the sun” throw decades or centuries, this conclusion still is an after-postmodern conclusion.

All that discussion shows that we are not anymore in “post-modernity”. So, the book of Piketty is also a tool to try to understand what is going on in after-postmodern social structure and what is going to be the after-postmodern economy which seems no to be yet very well established.  

After-postmodern University and “1968”

Humbolt started the Modern University when he founded the University of Berlin in the beginning of the 19^th century. It was the “University of Culture”. In the second half of the 20^th century emerged the Post-modern University or, as Bill Readings used to say, the “Post-historical University”, and also as he wrote, the “University of Excellence”, that replaced the University of Culture. According to Bill Readings, the students’ French movement of 1968 was ambiguous between the former two models of University: the Ancient University and the Modern University. They did not want the oldest model or the modern one. In a certain way that movement helped to establish the University of Excellence: a kind of excellence that has no center point for the university except “the excellence itself” instead of the idealistic aim of Culture for the former Modern University. Felix Guattari was enthusiastic for the movement of 1968, but he became disappointed after the eighties, because he saw that cultivation of “subjectivity” was not valorized and he adverted that if someone do not take care of its own subjectivity, “something” outside would have power over it. So, he used the term “ecosophy” to explain an idea of ecology of the external but also the internal environment inside the human being. Readings just lived until the apex of Postmodern Era and he saw in the University something happening similar to what Guattari thought about subjectivity. They both did not see the coming of the After-postmodern Era and the weakness of pragmatism, efficiency and Excellency. Toward the University goes one cannot say, but it is neither “modern” nor “postmodern”… Maybe the after-postmodern model could come from theories and practices of transdisciplinarity and complexity.