On History

History as a mechanism to describe human progress or human development over the ages is a fallacy because human development has never rightfully taken place. Societies are no more human now than they have ever been, and where progress has taken place it has always been in the service of the interests and needs of wealth, never in favour of humanity.

We cannot therefore take the past on its own terms if we want to create more humane societies and develop a purposive, human future. The point now presently reached is the one in which we clearly see the nakedness of the emperor when we are told that he is parading his new clothes – the emperor here being a metaphor for the ugly nakedness of our civilisation. We should be all denouncing the crude reality, despite the narratives we are constantly being fed to accept the contrary. Instead, we get lost in the partisan ideologies that the emperor is naked only because he belongs to the party we never vote for, and that when our boys and girls are in power the emperor is or will be splendid.

The absence of human progress, however, does not mean that the narrative of history did not happen, but rather that the motives for its unfurling are very different to the ones we are usually fed. Once analysed from the perspective of humanity, the motives which have evolved throughout the world’s historical process are not at all favourable for the development and progress of any authentic humanity and the evolution of civilisation is quite simply a terrible error.

The problems in our societies are not the necessary results of any weaknesses in human nature, but rather in the fundamental greed of the general motor driving the mechanics of civilisations – and that pilot is wealth. Rather than seeing wealth as an integral part of human nature, it would be more correct to see it as the cultural of human societies that separates us from the possibility of truly embracing our human nature.

CIVILISATION – WEALTH = AUTHENTIC HUMAN SOCIETY

Since Voltaire and Hegel, then Nietzsche and Marx through Adorno, to Foucault and Žižek, we have been trying to subvert historical narratives in order to let humanity breathe the fresh air of a more authentically human future. That more than two hundred years of subversion has achieved so very little in terms of establishing authentically human narratives beyond the tyrannies of wealth is indicative of how powerful the self-interested discourse of wealth is. As Foucault said: “truth is not by nature free – nor error servile – but … its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.”[1]  

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[1] Michael Foucault, THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, Vol. 1, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 60

SELF-FULFILMENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSAL

Figure emerges from the cosmos

The idea that individual self-fulfilment can only be realised through a transcendence of the ego and an embracing of universal reality is a very old and culturally wide-spread one, deeply embedded in most oriental philosophies and prevalent in western cultures through the thinking of Pythagoras and Plato and disseminated through Christian cultures via the concept of prayer. Nevertheless, it has also been made deeply unpopular (or unfashionable) in our contemporary societies, which are driven by consumerism and the egoistic imperatives of want and take. The connection between self-consciousness and the universal (be it the Universe, God, or what Hegel termed as the Mind or Spirit with a capital M or S) or between the I and the We that we all are as human beings, is usually shrugged off today as mystical thinking rooted in superstition rather than any sane philosophy or science. Unfortunately, though, as a consequence of this, our contemporary downgrading of our relationship to the universal has placed us in the deep existential crisis that we are currently facing. We have overfed the individual ego and overlooked the importance of equilibrium to such an extent that the structural collapse of the planetary ecosystem that keeps us alive has now become the most likely scenario, and a complete extinction of the homo sapiens is an ever-growing likelihood.

This idea of self-fulfilment coming through an embracing of the universal, has traditionally but wrongly been associated with religion, and yet the materialism of Marx is just as deeply embedded in this spirit of universal self-realisation as any evangelist or religious fanatic. In fact a Marxist activist campaigning against the ills of capitalist consumerism may be considered more deeply spiritual in the sense of his or her connection with the universal reality than most of the faithful members of religious congregations.

Likewise, it is equally erroneous to imagine self-fulfilment to be achieved through a loyalty to the State or any other social unit that operates as a dividing, ideological, identity-forming force against the authentic universality of humanity. In order for the individual to achieve self-fulfilment through the universal there has to be an embracing of the universal form of our authentic selves, which is humanity. Only once that is done can we begin to see the purposiveness of our I and We in the rest of the cosmos, a reason for being which has to begin by overcoming our own collective suicidal tendencies and what seems to be an ever-growing desire to disappear.    

The End of the Family

All societies and States, are reflections of the family structure: Does this imply that a truly revolutionary process could only take place after we have re-structured, or transcended, the family form?

But how could any total restructuring of the family ever take place? Certainly, we have different kinds of families operating between the extended and nuclear forms, but in order to find anything radically different we would have to examine cultures which are less developed from a technological point-of-view.

For example, if we look at the traditional family structures of the hunter and gatherer tribes of Australian aborigines, we come across societies that seem incredibly complex from the perspective of our own WEIRD civilisation. On the surface this presents us with an irony: the less developed a culture is technologically, the more complex is its concept of kinship. And vice-versa: the complexity that advanced technologies impart on societies demands a simplification of family structures and responsibilities.

If this is so, could we conclude that the next socio-cultural leap our technological-society evolution will provoke will be a further simplification of the family and that eventually – in a not-so-distant future – the idea of the family will completely disappear opening the cultural field for the first time into the realm of authentic humanism.

DON QUIXOTE AS SANCHO PANZA’S DREAM

Part of the brilliance of Cervantes’ Don Quixote is that he remains such an easily recognisable symbol of the human condition, but to make the symbolism even more significant for our contemporary state of being we suggest changing the perspective of Cervantes’ narrative somewhat, do away with the realism of the Quixote/Sancho Panza duet and relocate the dreamer Don Quixote as a figment of the pragmatic Sancho Panza’s fantasy world.

This radical distortion of the original theme would bring the symbolism of the Quixote tale closer to a contemporary audience for the greater part of humanity are now really Sancho Panza figurines: modelled into, concerned with, and driven by the pragmatic dictates of modern life which, depending on what part of the pragmatic-life spectrum one belongs to, lies somewhere between a 24/7 quest for survival and an eternal struggle with the question ‘what should I do today?’. We would like to think that this pragmatic world protects against the dangers of wild fantasy, but in fact we are overwhelmed and swamped by reality, or at least until we can find the time to slip into the transcendent realm of imagination – either our own or through the stories of others created for our consumption – in which we can indulge in Quixotic, escapist dreams.

In other words, Sancho Panza is the real, and Don Quixote is an escape valve from an overdose of that reality.

Don Quixote’s madness, as such, is, in the contemporary world, really Sancho’s escape from the madness. Sancho Panza has to imagine the idealist, romantic, free-spirit of Don Quixote in order to liberate himself from the mundanity and drudgery of his own pathetically, practical life, which is really just a constant wading through an unstoppable accumulation of reality’s stuff that makes existence more of an endurance than a life.

So, while in Cervantes’ original narrative, Don Quixote is the dreamer, to contemporise him he must become merely a fragment of the frustrated Sancho’s imagination, but this is complicated by the fact that today there are two types of Sancho Panza: (a) the traditional Sancho who hallucinates a Quixote figure from his own imagination that this traditional Sancho is convinced exists and should be followed, and (b) a second type of Sancho who knows that Don Quixote is just a product of his own imagination and so, although he knows he needs the transcendence of the Quixote-figure he envisages, his Quixote-fantasy can be re-constructed or re-configured according to individual desires and needs. This latter, more contemporary version of Sancho Panza we will refer to as the enlightened Sancho.

For this enlightened Sancho, Don Quixote is a kind of Übermensch; the Superman that Sancho knows he will never be, because he does not dare to take the leap away from the pragmatic life that holds him into the stuff of the reality that oppresses him but must be endured because it is reality.

This modern conception of the Quixote as Sancho’s dream differs not just in the form and placing of the narrative’s voice, but in the historical viewpoint of the Quixotic ideal itself, although this is different according to whether we are talking about the traditional or the enlightened Sancho. Therefore, for the traditional Sancho Panza, the ideal, like the original Quixotic ideal itself, comes from an origin that was embedded in the past – an ideal grown decadent and corrupt – whereas the Quixote of the enlightened Sancho’s pragmatist’s dream, has to come from the future. The ideal lies no longer in what we used to be but what we could become.

By splitting Sancho into two, we are able to point to our current ideological separation, in which humanity is now composed of these two types of Quixotic figures: the Quixote in the mind of the traditional Sancho, with their dreams of an immaculate origin that needs to be reinstated through cultural purification, and the Quixote of the enlightened Sancho, who also fantasises about a better place and a better form of humanity, but a new form of humanity that has never previously existed but could be born in the future.

Of course these ideas are deeply antagonistic and great civil war of to come will be fought between these Quixotic fantasies of the two forms of Sancho Panza. A struggle between two very distinct ideas of what humanity is: i.e., (a) either the product of a determination (usually considered to be God’s determination, but which is really the determining forces imposed by civilisation) that have grown decadent or been perverted and must be rejuvenated, or (b) the image of humanity as a determining force in itself, capable of sculpting a better future for itself out of intellectual projections of what a better future would actually be like.                    

Work and Freedom

Work is only human when the worker is able to express him/herself via the process of work itself. Labouring in a way that only has the interest of making money and is devoid of any opportunity for self-expression, is a demeaning process for any human being and, because of that, it is anti-human.  

However, from this idea we run headlong into the question of what self-expression is, or more importantly, what would self-expression be in an authentically human society or civilisation? In an authentically human society self-expression has to be imbued with a human worth … But what does that mean?

As the product of rational (in the most part) or creatively irrational beings (at another level) all human activity, whether positive or negative adds to the richness of the experience of being human as long as it contributes in a favourable way to our standards of living and to human progress in the world. But progress can only be positive, and the quality of life can only be good, if the environment we live in, our world, is also cared for. Because of this, non-favourable human activity like the exploitation of other human beings and the rampant abuse of natural resources, intended for the simple aim of maximising profits, can only be considered morally reprehensible.

Yet this ethically unbearable praxis is exactly what our current economic system is designed for, and is meant to foment and propagate. As such, almost all of the daily activity in this global-economy fuelled world is a moral abomination for any authentic view of humanity. And this means that, in order to create an authentically human society, our economic model and its economic conceptions have to be completely demolished and revolutionary (or transcendentally) reconstructed.

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Traditionally, the idea of work has encompassed negative notions of uncritical sacrifice and devotedness. However, labour seen as a process of self-expression transforms those negative notions into positive concepts – the ideas of sacrifice and duty in the realm of self-expression are positive drives.

Likewise, as self-expression by a human being embodies an authentic human experience, the same human authenticity is embedded in every individual human-being’s sacrifice-through-self-expression to humanity. In other words: I express myself because I am human, and because of that my self-expression is a labour geared toward the whole of humanity. In this way, self-expression for humanity becomes a moral duty for all members of an authentically human society.

By aiming one’s self-expression towards our common humanity, human purpose becomes visible and feasible. And once clarity of human purpose becomes comprehensible and tangible, then it becomes more difficult for individuals to operate badly without abandoning that purpose.

Religions have always failed in their task of achieving moral rectitude precisely because the great monotheisms have always held human nature as something profoundly flawed and negative in itself. One cannot expect human civilisation to get better by following a precedent that all human beings are, by nature, bad. Quite the contrary: civilisation will only become meaningful for human beings when it is constructed on a bedrock of faith in humanity itself and embedded with an idea of human purposiveness.  

Hegel talked about spirit not yet finding its truly real substance. The human spirit will only be able to reach its truly real substance when it looks for it in the realm of humanity itself. A human being can only be really conscious of his or her substance when he or she is truly aware of him or herself as a human being amongst a civilisation and within a world full of other human beings.

We are all the same in our condition of being human, and separated by our individuality, and it is our individuality which is the only authentic separation we have. All others: gender, race, nationality, religion, or ideology, are non-authentic segregations and parts of our anti-human historical process that need to be rectified in favour of human authenticity.    

The Worth of Rational Beings

To say that rational beings have the same worth as I do, only makes sense if rational beings have any worth at all beyond being rational to themselves. Humanism can only exist therefore if we have first established the worth of rational beings in the Universe. Or in other words found a rational answer to the question: Why are we here?

If civilisation had been a building of society according to truly rational grounds – which it hasn’t been – then there would be no need for human-rights as these rights would have been built into the very fabric of civilisation itself.

For humanity to be a reality, the Bill of Human rights needs to be taken seriously at all levels of society. But in order for that to happen we have to also firstly develop a credible, coherent and easily communicable notion of what humanity is.

NOTES CONCERNING THE NOTION OF HUMANITY

What has deteriorated, or what was never properly formed in the first place, is our notion of humanity.

From a philosophical point-of-view it seems pertinent to ask ourselves if a NOTION OF HUMANITY is, in the first place, actually possible in the authentic sense. But this is a dangerous question. Before asking it we need to consider the idea of what a negative response would entail – that a surrender to the belief that an authentic NOTION OF HUMANITY is impossible opens the door unto the ethical wastelands and social voids of nihilism.

The need for avoiding nihilism – which in our case has to be contemplated as an escape from the nihilism that we are drowning in – demands a positive incentive toward the task of defining this authentic NOTION OF HUMANITY.

All notions are constructs, so how do we make our NOTION OF HUMANITY out of an authenticity? How do we make an authentic construct?

To make an authentic construct of humanity it has to be a truthful reflection of all human beings – the AUTHENTIC NOTION OF HUMANITY has to be one through which every human being can identify oneself with without exception. This may seem absurdly utopian, but each human being is human, and a NOTION OF HUMANITY must reinforce this truth. The NOTION OF HUMANITY has to be adequate to itself, i.e., it has to be adequate to humanity itself. The authentic notion can therefore operate in the Name of Humanity as a metaphoric substitute but also as an Ideal and an aspiration for humanity.

Whether certainty is in the being or the thinking (cogito), it is definitely embedded in the human and the NOTION OF HUMANITY also brings CERTAINTY to the UNIVERSE through the human.

The simple act of communication between human beings implies the existence of humanity, but in this information age that implied-humanity has been reduced to something which is forever taken for granted. By making this reduction the information-age has managed to diminish the notion of humanity to an almost non-existent state.

We are human and, because of that fact, in order to live a purposeful life we must act according to the dictates of a NOTION OF HUMANITY. But to do that we must educate ourselves humanistically in order to forge a shared will to believe in and understand the importance of the humanity that such a concept would be about.    

Our Common Ground

Essentially, different societies represent alternative possibilities and differing levels of complexity in the organisation of human beings. However, all human societies share the common ground of humanity. As such, any society that sees itself opposed to other societies has become alienated from the common ground and is therefore a perversion of the humanity it is part of.  Negating the commonality has a vicious circle effect. Being denied your affiliation to what you naturally are by another member of the common field you belong to generates a resentment, perhaps eventually a hatred of the one who is denying you your ontological right of mutual identity, and this bitterness will be reflected back in an exponential snowballing way that has been responsible for all human ills and tragedies throughout the history of civilisations.

Embracing our common ground would be the first step to resolving this inherent fault in all societies. However, why has this simple solution to all problems never been effectively carried out? Why is humanity such a problematic concept for human beings?

To answer these questions, we need not look any further than the current ideological makeup of today’s democratic societies, where we find a deeply embedded creed that warns us that we cannot embrace the common ground without surrendering our individuality and renouncing freedom.

However, this is simply not true: our common ground doesn’t negate our differences at all, it merely gives us what it is – a common ground that unites us despite our differences; a common ground that mitigates our differences; a common ground that affirms our similarities.

The only thing we would lose in an affirmation of our mutuality is our right to negate the common ground that exists between us, because negating what we affirm is an absurdity. In commonality-affirming societies, differences, repulsions, and attractions will continue to exist, but the negative force of our repulsion would be mollified by the positive reality of human fraternity. The common ground is the safe space enveloping all of our differences; a soft, warm blanket that we can be wrapped in whenever we should be aggravated by the deeds or beliefs of others.

Not only is understanding and meaning found through differentiation, it is buried in positive reference associations. This is obvious in the question of race and is applicable in all other differentiating circumstances as well.

Having a common ground is not only a good idea, to be able to quell conflicts, it is also a necessity, in order to make co-habitation possible, and, in fact, it is also required to make individuality and plurality possible as well. Humanity cannot exist without individual human beings, and individuals cannot co-exist without common grounds. Likewise, differences cannot co-exist without commonality; individuals need common grounds to meet each other in, and our most authentic and real commonality is our humanity.

But while this may seem like common sense, the truth is that separating and segregating ideological narratives dilute the understanding that most human beings have of their humanity, thinning it out into a liquified transparency that can have no effective influence on the will of those propagating profound human divisions at the social and national levels that do nothing but enforce the adage that man is a wolf to his fellow men. And while humanity is anaesthetised to itself, an enormous loophole is created allowing free space for a plethora of anti-human practices.

It is true that embracing humanity would probably have little effect on resolving our immediate discrepancies with our neighbours or family members – having a common ground doesn’t help much when our different behaviours are quite simply annoying for each other. However, what we need to be concerned with now is the bigger picture, and the global tensions caused by a globalisation which has always ignored the global sense of our own essential being that is the common ground we call humanity.                  

Purposive Science as a balance between Reason and Passions

We have been arguing for some time for the idea of a human purposiveness that is inherent (although repressed) in humanity via our sapiens quality of knowing through which comes our special partnership with the Universe, interlocking our existence with the existential fabric of everything. But does this mean that an unleashing of the purposive humanity should distance us from our other human qualities that we call our passions?

Of course this is not any new dilemma, it has been agonised over throughout history and lies at the basis of most psychiatric theory and in the misanthropic nihilism of religious moralities. Transhumanist ideas tend to overlook the problem or insinuate a nihilistic continuation of our technological evolution in which passions will dissolve with transhumanist ascendence. Yet while, be it in conservative or progressive thought, passion seems to be a problem, might the problem not be the passion itself but the nihilistic framework around those passions? No, human passion is certainly not the fundamental problem for humanity. For human purposiveness to become a driving force in civilisation, it needs our passions to fuel that leap forward. For transcendence to take place into the authentically meaningful being we are meant to be in this Universe, we need that inspiration and energy that can only come through acting passionately.

Traditional philosophical wisdom must be harkened to here: the key to progress lies in our ability to advance harmoniously. Our specialness resides in our ability to reason, and we have to let that reason mediate between passion and cold-blooded deliberation without allowing reason itself to become a moralistic dogma itself. Reason, when over-balanced in its own favour leads to creativity-castrating phenomena and philosophical nihilisms like relativism and scepticism.

Reason is often mistrusted because it too easily becomes dogmatic. Reason illuminates the mind and frames part of reality within auras of truth which are themselves misleading subjective truths, for reason itself is a relative concept. For each reason there is a counter-argument, and for each counter-reason a counter-counter-reason – this is what scepticism shows us. Purposiveness, therefore, always has to be a human leap beyond reason as such and into the anchoring passion of faith. Nevertheless, faith itself has to be tempered by reason if it is not to fall into dangerously simple interpretations of ambiguous scripture twisted to save subjective purposes that we see so often in religious and ideological practice. The most feasible anchor we have for faith, however, is the product of reason that we call science.

Science is knowledge that is the fruit of investigation and experimentation and a careful analysis and counter analysis of results. The truths of science hold an ephemeral firmness until they are disproved, which science always must allow for. Science has a common law which saves it from being dogma, i.e., this is what we know until we come to know something else. However, the science we have at the present is unfortunately tied, in most cases grudgingly and reluctantly, to the nihilistic and all-consuming forces of the capitalist economy, and it is for this reason that any purposive revolution in humanity needs to bring science under its wing before any radical steps forward can come about. Humanity’s transcendental leap into its own humanity as humanity-fulfilled must come about through a passionate approach to science and an impassioned development of technologies that will harmonise our relationship with the Universe that we are existentially bound to in the profoundest way imaginable, interlocking us with the existential fabric of everything.

On Freedom

The idea that one can be free by escaping from the clutches of any other in order to remain simply and solely in touch with oneself is an absurdity. Such a solitary existence would be maddening for most human beings quite simply because too much insolation removes us from humanity. Freedom is quite the contrary, it does not come through being able to cut oneself off from humanity but quite the opposite, it is found via our affirmation of humanity. The great prerequisite for feeling free is that we have others, other human beings, to enjoy that freedom with. Traditionally, individual freedoms have been achieved in an aristocratic sense by enslaving or exploiting others, in a capitalist one by accumulating money and possessions at the expense of the misery of others, or in a fascistic sense by exterminating any opposition to our freedom, but all of these instances are either merely subjective or relative examples of freedom that are, because of that relativity, ultimately an illusion. In an absolute sense, we can only be free when all humanity is free.

Once this premise has been established though, we have to ask ourselves why it is so hard for human beings to embrace this absolute sense of freedom. The truth is, humanity seems to encroach on us rather than liberate us; it swamps us with its enormity rather than invigorating us. And so we are pushed into a paradoxical relationship between freedom and humanity: what we need to be free is what we are most frightened of, and what we are most afeared of is what we actually are. The paradox seen in this way, is double pronged, and because of that it contains its own solution. By appreciating that the humanity we are so frightened of is what we actually all are, we can overcome our anthrophobic fear and set ourselves free.