Old Holotopia

Holotopia

Starting anew. For the old text see Old Holotopia.

Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes 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.

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

Modernity ideogram

We need new 'headlights'

The way we see the world

The COVID-19 crisis and its fallout reminded us once again of the connectedness and the vulnerability of the human world. And of the importance of those 'headlights'. This crisis was still a relatively minor disturbance—compared to the irreversible changes that are expected to result from, for instance, the climate change. Shall we, in the absence of true understanding, resort to age-old scapegoating and blamede "the lazy people on welfare", the immigrant workers, the 1%, the blacks or the whites? Or shall we see our situation in a way that will empower us to resolve it truly, by finding a new course?

We have 'candles' as 'headlights'

How exactly we ended up with a dysfunctional and obsolete way of comprehending the world is illuminating, and we must return to it, however briefly.

Around the middle of the 19th century, our societies began to change by a landslide: Our countries became democracies, our worldviews became scientific and secular, and our lifestyles became mechanized and modern. The way we looked at the world also changed—and then for about a century remained frozen!

During that century, our academic understanding of things of course continued to evolve. But it remained confined to disciplines, which grew and got fragmented into subspecialties, until they lost contact not only with the world at large, but also with one another. Entire academic fields failed to communicate to the world even their most basic insights.

Massive academic publishing made things worse.

And so did the new media, which got appropriated by commercial and superficial actors—who used them to appropriate the public's attention.

Neil Postman described the situation that resulted as follows:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

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Neil Postman

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