Holotopia

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Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it?

Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.

Modernity.jpg Modernity ideogram


Scope

"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",
Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. Of course those people love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking them was to 'pull the brakes'; and when our 'bus' is more closely inspected, it becomes clear that also its 'brakes' are dysfunctional.

So who will lead us through the next urgent task on evolutionary agenda—empower us to update the systems in which we live and work?

Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" as institution would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But they were ignored—and so were Vannevar Bush and Norbert Wiener before them, and the others who followed.

Why?

It is tempting to conclude that the academia followed the general trend, and became a power structure. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.

As we pointed out in the opening paragraph of this website, the academic tradition did not develop as a way to pursue practical knowledge, but (let's call it that) "right" knowledge. Our tradition developed from classical philosophy, where the "philosophical" questions such as "How do we know that something is true?" and even "What does it mean that something is true?" led to certain "academic" standards for pursuing knowledge. The university's core social role, or that is in any case how we, academic people tend to perceive it, is to uphold those standards. By studying at a university, one becomes capable of pursuing knowledge in an academically correct or qualified way in any domain.

In the opening paragraph of this website we brought up the image of Galilei in house arrest, to pointe out that this fundamental and seemingly only "philosophical" pursuit has a tremendous power. The Inquisition, censorship and prison were unable to keep in check an idea whose time had come—and the new way to pursue knowledge soon migrated from astrophysics, where it originated, and transformed all walks of life. "A great cultural revival" was a result. In the opening of our website we asked "Could a similar advent be in store for us today?"

In what follows we offer an affirmative answer to that question.

In what follows you will recognize the core of our proposal—we'll propose to change the relationship we have with information. But here we'll make a case for that proposal on fundamental or academic grounds.

The spontaneous pursuit of knowledge of knowledge has brought us to a point where changing the relationship we have with information has become immanent—also for intrinsic or fundamental reasons.

Diagnosis

Early in the course of modernization, we made a fundamental error whose consequences cannot be overrated. This error was subsequently uncovered and reported, but it has not yet been corrected.

Without thinking, from the traditional culture we've adopted a myth incomparably more disruptive of modernization that the creation myth—that "truth" means "correspondence with reality". And that the purpose of information, and of knowledge, is to allow us to know the reality "objectively", as it truly is.

The 20th century science and philosophy disproved and abandoned this naive view.

Einstein-Watch.jpeg

There is simply no way, scientists found out, to open the 'mechanism of nature' and verify that our models correspond to the real thing.

So what, then, are the origins of our "reality picture"? How do we decide whether something is "true"?

"Reality", it has been reported, is not something we discover; it is something we create. Hence we shall from here on prefer to use the verb, reification.

Part of our "reality construction" is performed by our cognitive system, which turns "the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience" into something that makes sense and helps us function. The other part is performed by our society. Long before we are able to reflect on these matters "philosophically", we are given certain concepts through which to look at the world and organize it and make sense of it; and through innumerable 'carrots and sticks', throughout our lives, we are induced to "see the reality" in a certain specific way—the way of our culture.

There are at least two reasons why we should not waste more time, but abandon this dangerous "reality myth" as we abandoned other such myths and prejudices from the past.

To see the first, we invite you to a simple, one-minute thought experiment. We invite you to follow us on an imaginary visit to a cathedral. No, this has nothing to do with religion; we shall use the cathedral as one of our metaphorical images or ideograms, to help us see things in proportion and make a point.

What strikes us, as we enter, is the architecture, which inspires awe. We hear the music play: Is it Bach's cantatas? Or Allegri's Miserere? There are frescos by masters of old on the walls. If the cathedral of your choice is the St. Peter's in Rome, then Michelangelo's frescos are near. And there is the ritual...

There is also a little book on each bench. Its first paragraphs explain how the world was created.

Let this difference in size—between the beginning of Genesis and all the rest—point to the difference in the importance of the roles of the factual or "objective" information—and the one that is implicit in everything else we call "culture"—whose role is to create (let's call it that) a symbolic environment by which our socialization takes place. By which our inclinations to feel and think in a certain way, and our values and our "human quality" are created. We are making no value judgment, and you should not do that either. We are only pointing to a role or a function.

What happens with this function when we, considering the worldview to be the point, replace the worldview of the tradition with the "scientific" one? Who becomes responsible for our socialization? The answer is obvious. A superficial look around will suffice to see just how much our contemporary symbolic environment is a product of advertising—whose function is to give us the kind of "human quality" that will make us consume more, so the economy may grow; and not to help us become the kind of people who will make things whole. But explicit advertising is, of course, only a tip of an iceberg, through which our socialization is takes place.

So the first reason why we need to abandon the "reality myth" is that it it alienates us from a lion's share of our cultural heritage—and makes us abandon the creation of culture and "human quality" to power structure.

The second reason is the role in which "constructed reality" plays within the power structure.

It could be sufficient for our purpose to only point to "Social Construction of Reality", where Berger and Luckmann pointed out that throughout history, the "universal theories" (about the nature of reality and how it is to be understood) have been used to legitimize a given social order. But this theme being central to holotopia, we here give a gist of a more thorough explanation.

This being only a teaser and a summary, we do that by giving only broad contours of a thread—in which three short stories or vignettes and strung together to compose a larger insight.

The first vignette in this thread is a real-life event, where two Icelandic horses living outdoors, aging Odin the Horse and New Horse, are engaged in turf strife. We'll ask you to just imagine their long hairs waving in the wind, and their display of power—as Odin, who had been the stallion and the king of the turf, tries to keep New Horse away from his mares.

Bourdieu-insight.jpeg

The second story involves sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and his "theory of practice"—where Bourdieu provided a conceptual framework to help us understand how socialization works—and in particular how it works through creation and use of what he called "symbolic power". Our point will be to combine these two stories, and show that "we have a problem" (or more to the point—that we need to see things in that way), which we have not yet seen and understood. We too are (need to see ourselves as) "territorial animals"; only our 'turf strifes' are incomparably more diverse and subtle than the ones of the horses—just as much as our culture is more complex than theirs.

Bourdieu has two keywords for this symbolic 'turf', "field" and "game", which he uses interchangeably. He calls it a "field"—to suggest both a field of activity such as an academic community or discipline or any other institution; and something akin to a gravitational field or a magnetic field—which subtly, without us noticing, orients our seemingly random behavior in a certain specific direction. When he refers to it as "game", he suggests that there are certain semi-permanent roles in it, and allowable 'moves', which serve to organize our 'turf strife' in some specific way.

To explain the mechanism by which the symbolic power induces a field, Bourdieu uses additional two keywords, which have a long academic history: "habitus" and "doxa". The habitus includes embodied behaviors and predispositions, which are part of everyone's 'role' in the 'game'. A king has a certain distinct habitus; and so do its pages. The doxa refers to a form of experience, or a belief, that the given social order is the reality. "Orthodoxy" is a related terms, where multiple "realities" are acknowledged to coexist, of which only one is the "right" one. Doxa ignores even the possibility of alternatives. Here we may complete this brief sketch by observing that the habitus is an instrument, by which the positions on the symbolic 'turf' are maintained through direct, body-to-body action (everyone bows to the king, and you do too). Doxa then serves as cement, to make it all stable and permanent.

Antonio Damasio completes this thread as a cognitive neuroscientist, to help us see that these "embodied predispositions" reach far deeper and wider into our cognitive structure and inclinations than what was believed earlier. That they act as a cognitive filter—determining our priorities, and even what we may consciously consider as possible. (Why, for instance, we don't consider the option of taking off our pajamas and running into the street naked.)

And now our point.


In our hitherto modernization we have learned to harness the power of the rivers, the sun, the wind and the atom. What remained as our next task is to harness the power that has remained as the largest in our Earthly abode—the power of our socialization. It is the largest because it determines how all those other powers will be used.

The socialized reality, as we've just outlined it, is the reason why we, for instance, still use 'candles' as 'headlights'; we have reified them as such. For us, the candles are headlights. The work of journalists, and of scientists, is not a means to an end; science "is" what the scientists do, things like physics, biology and chemistry.

Our social reality is kept from evolving by a doxa—which is deeply grounded in the way in which we see the function of information; and of knowledge.

But if information and knowledge should now liberate us—as they did our ancestors following Galilei's time—then once again the very relationship we have with information will need to change.