Let us federate our culture's foundations

Naturally, Werner Kollath, Erich Jantsch, Douglas Engelbart—and also Werner Heisenberg and so many other 20th century's visionary thinkers who saw elements of an emerging paradigm—made their appeals to academia. With astonishing consistency, they were ignored.

It is the academia's privileged social role to decide what ideas will be explored taught at universities, and given citizenship rights. The standards for right knowledge, which the academia upholds in our society, decide what education, public informing, and general information consumption will be like.

What are those standards? What are they based on?

Nobody knows!

The foundations on which truth and meaning are created in our society, and which determine our cultural praxis, are composed of vague notions (such as that science provides an "objectively true picture of reality") and historical prejudices, which have been recorded and interpreted by different people a posteriori, in a variety of different ways.

During the 20th century a wealth of insights have been reached in the sciences, humanities and philosophy, which challenged or disproved the age-old beliefs, out of which our culture's foundations have evolved.

But they too remained ignored!

We use the holoscope, and the light of information, to illuminate the foundations on which the relationship we have with information is based; and on which our cultural reproduction has been developed.

We show that when federated, the 20th century insights constitute a foundation for a completely new culture.

Just as the case was in Galilei's time.

"Reality" is a faulty foundation

"Correspondence with reality" cannot be verified. The very idea that what we see or experience or grasp by an "aha experience" corresponds to reality tends to be a product of illusion.

Why base our pursuit of knowledge—an all-important human activity—on a criterion that cannot be verified; and which itself tends to be a product of illusion?

To federate this point of view we provide two quotations. The first one is by Einstein and Infeld, from "The Evolution of Physics"; the second one is from Einstein's "Remarks on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge". Both are presented here.

Causal explanation is not the way to reality

Even our common sense is a product of (our and our culture's) experience, with things such as pebbles and waves of water. We have no reason to believe that it will still function when applied to things we do not have in experience—such as small quanta of matter. A complete argument, based on the double-slit experiment, is in Oppenheimer's essay "Uncommon Sense".

By stating his "epistemological credo", in the introductory pages of his "Autobiographical Notes", Einstein too legitimized this position; see it quoted here.

"Reality" is constructed, not discovered

During the 20th century, the philosophical preoccupation with reality (how to find a way to reality by right thinking), gave way to the studies of the ways in which we construct reality—in biology of perception, psychology and sociology. In our commentary we represented them by Maturana, Piaget and Berger and Luckmann, see it (with introduction) here.

"Reality" is an instrument of power

Here comes Bourdieu's "theory of practice", and the story about how Bourdieu became a sociologist, in Algeria, while observing how power morphed—from the kind of power that kept Galilei in house arrest, to (what Bourdieu called) symbolic power, which deprives the contemporary Galilei from influencing the opinion of the masses. Ironically—also Bourdieu's...!

Bourdieu's theory is how socialization works—as an instrument of power structure.

Let us just highlight here a single concept, doxa, which reached Bourdieu via Weber, and all the way from Plato... This keyword stands for the experience that our social reality is the only one possible. As we shall see, the academic tradition may be seen as an age-old struggle with (power-motivated) doxa. Bourdieu left us a detailed theory of the inner workings of symbolic power; see a brief summary here.

The following excerpt from Berger and Luckmann's "Social Construction of Reality" will also be relevant:

As more complex forms of knowledge emerge and an economic surplus is built up, experts devote themselves full-time to the subjects of their expertise, which, with the development of conceptual machineries, may become increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Experts in these rarefied bodies of knowledge lay claim to a novel status. They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality. They are, literally, universal experts. This does not mean that they claim to know everything, but rather that they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does. Other men may continue to stake out particular sectors of reality, but they claim expertise in the ultimate definitions of reality as such.

This theory about the nature of reality, then, becomes an instrument par excellence for legitimizing the given social reality:

Habitualization and institutionalization in themselves limit the flexibility of human actions. Institutions tend to persist unless they become ‘problematic’. Ultimate legitimations inevitably strengthen this tendency. The more abstract the legitimations are, the less likely they are to be modified in accordance with changing pragmatic exigencies. If there is a tendency to go on as before anyway, the tendency is obviously strengthened by having excellent reasons for doing so. This means that institutions may persist even when, to an outside observer, they have lost their original functionality or practicality. One does certain things not because they work, but because they are right – right, that is, in terms of the ultimate definitions of reality promulgated by the universal experts.

Reflection

A historical introduction to the foundations of culture

This is a point to take a moment and reflect about the historical roots of the cultural disparity (between our immense scientific and technological know-how, and our lack of cultural "know-what", as Norbert Wiener called it), which is the holotopia's core theme. See A historical introduction to the foundations of culture.