The environmental clock is silently ticking in after-postmodern

Since the clocks have batteries they are mostly silent. Before of it, they received energy from our hands, but in postmodern times they lost that singular ticking, and that thing was a demonstration of postmodern efficiency. Now, in after-postmodern times, all that could be scientifically predicted became strange in a way that the former efficiency is not anymore sufficiently efficient… But clocks and watches are still silent and we cannot hear the ticking of the environmental clock warning for the dangers of present and future… What were only feared in postmodern times nowadays are happening more and more, and an inefficient discussion about whom to blame, the men or the nature, continues…

We are talking about time and it is about time to do something about it…

Even there is some probability of global warming to be just caused by nature itself, pollution is stronger and has its consequences. Debates are necessary but not sufficient to solve problems if nobody does anything.

People like to talk about paradigm changing, it sounds beautiful, but few walk some step ahead… and the environmental clock is silently ticking…  

After-postmodern and “metaglobalization”

Globalization of economy achieved its acme in the end of the 20^th century, although some kind of global economy existed already as we can see for example with the international crisis of 1929.

Anyway, the so much praised “globalization” was that one of the pragmatic “postmodern period” and that is “a globalization” still in some way around… Nonetheless, with the end of the postmodern efficiency and the economic crisis going on, maybe the “main globalization” is the “net globalization” under cybernetics.

At the same time, after the falling of the Berlin Wall, several countries started to divide, searching for cultural roots and links stronger than some political or even economic relations that worked under some restraint. This kind of “geocultural” transformation spread over the world and manifold people are still looking to find their “collective intersubjective meaning” that binds them. So, under the view of Complexity, we can see intersections among several factors: net globalization, conventional globalization, arising of cultural roots, “democracy” of mobile phone, global environmental crisis, etc… Maybe we could call this a kind of “metaglobalization”…   

Why after-postmodern?

We can see by the news about the last occidental diplomatic steps that some postmodern political paradigms are surpassed by the pendulum of history. It is not a matter of support any side, but to recognize the strength of the pendulum of history. There is a moment when programs, strategies, projects, paradigms become exhausted.

The postmodern period was the second half of the 20^th century. Its principles were pragmatism, efficiency, results and bilateralism or even unilateralism in the end of the century with a certain globalization.

In the beginning of the 21^st century it was accentuated what Ervin Laszlo called ‘Macroshift’. In the transition between postmodern and after-postmodern period, we could see ‘inefficiency’ of ‘efficiency’, pragmatism starting to fail and the vision of ‘results’ more important than the methods vanishing under failure. Efficiency by efficiency only was exhausted because people did not see any meaning or target linked to the search for efficiency.

With that last news we can better understand why we call this period as “after-postmodern”.

We are not sure about what will come, but certainly big changes are coming in after-postmodern times…  

Overwhelming data and after-postmodern

In 1997, David Schenk published Data Smog, a book about the great amount of information on Internet that would reach a level that, instead of brings help, it would bring confusion and stress.  

In postmodern period there was enthusiasm with the possibility to easier achieve more and more data. The ‘information age’ was a common and very well accepted expression in those days. But, someone like Schenk had a notion of what that all was leading to. With the transition from postmodern to after-postmodern period efficiency of ‘easy data’ became ‘overwhelming data’ and ‘data smog’ became a usual expression appropriated to that situation.

And so, in after-postmodern times we must find ‘other efficiencies’… Big Data could be a way to select information. But ‘data smog’ refers also to media information…

In scientific information ‘text mining’ can be useful, but could be interesting to remember what Edgar Morin said about research. He makes an intriguing proposal: it is time to stop to neglect the regularly excluded data of research and start to put light on those excluded data and study them, submit them to research also.

By transdisciplinarity and complexity theory these paradoxical issues could be worked side by side.   

Cheap Oil, Expensive Nature, Complexity and After-postmodern

In the last years the expensive price of oil helped to think about alternative energy sources and to improve the practice of those possibilities. Nowadays the oil is cheaper and cheaper, achieving a level where sustainable sources of energy are becoming less interesting to profits. Someone is filling some kind of “come back” to decades ago; but now, Nature is demanding, charging other sorts of “profits” and pointing to a loss more complex then only money.

In after-postmodern times we need to use the tool of “complexity” to set paradoxical things such as all the sources of energy in a way that Nature could be respected and human being survives. Maybe we need now a pratice to manage “dissensus” instead of just wainting a “consensus” that is difficult to achieve in a short term.    

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”…