*Don’t Fear the 21st Century Renaissance: Become the Renaissance · *
Why is this moment different from any before it?
Periods of Renaissance have happened across the earth and across vast time periods of human history from the Paleolithic Renaissance to the Florentine Renaissance and smaller modern renaissances in more recent times.
How could we possibly take the view that modern history, as violent as it has been, could paradoxically, lead to a reflexive enhancement of human meaning? This question is one the book seeks to answer by investigating the shape of the historical patterns.
Human history provides us with a glimpse of kaleidoscopic patterns, as overlapping, complicated arcs and patterns which may come into greater focus, in retrospect.
It is these broad patterns we attempt to identify here.
Once again, we attempt to explain the rise of a new quantum human revolution, one where great ideas come into a sharp new focus. Contending with great ideas requires a broad and deep education. An education which guides individuals to be capable of flexible and intellectually nimble epistemological thinking.
We will devote a section to the description of these various renaissances as we contemplate the rise of yet another renaissance. Investigating the causes in place to indicate a renaissance.
Nashville is trying to become one of the great river cities of the world. Whether she makes it into this class of legendary cities depends upon the existence of great infrastructure and leadership. The leap from country music capital of the world to a city great enough to support a renaissance is a large one.
Nashville arises out of the American heartland. A central geographic location. A borderland where the confluence of rivers, highways and skyways merge with ancient wilderness trails. The kind of location where ancient cultures, music, stories & trade meet and merge into an eclectic mix.
Modern Nashville more than provides the extreme friction necessary for a renaissance. A rich borderland, where rich cross-cultural boundaries break down and sufficient chaotic diversity may transform into something new. Nashville feels in many respects like San Francisco did in the 1950’s as if something waited to come into being. Perhaps similar to other great cities and regions where a confluence of cultures and human meaning brought a renaissance into being. At once, a city and a human story - a borderland - where a people have come in search of themselves.
Nashville represents a new appreciation of the middle, of the heartland of a nation, of finding new patterns of human meaning, and of understanding how this meaning drives real progress. It most certainly represents a turning away from the coastal cities of America. Once legendary coastal cities where socialism and an advertised disgust for Flyover Country, became institutionalized. This renaissance represents a kind of social and personal coming-to-terms, a rejection of many worn out, warmed over, and tired old, rejected concepts.
This book looks past the renaissance to ask why we must have a renaissance at all. We may not need one, but renaissances have a way of arriving as a period of healing after periods of extreme friction. A renaissance which would seek to rise above such Nietzschean concepts as eternal recurrence. Breaking free of those recursive loops where history becomes mired in worn out ideas.
Entering a quantum paradigm, we find the concept of eternal emergence much more helpful than the concept of eternal recurrence. We may come to see that things look entirely different from a new perspective – great patterns in history seen with new vision.
It may even be that eternal recurrence, viewed from a different perspective, looks more like eternal emergence.
We shall find that the embracing of paradoxes becomes more necessary in the quantum paradigm.
Humans taking advantage of other humans did not begin with Europeans and it certainly did not end with them. Manipulation of humans by other humans is as old as humankind itself.
Instead, it has metastasized to infect the entire world and drives business as usual today with a mercenary zeal. Anyone who believes humanity has self-corrected might take a good hard look at human history, a deep dive into the evolution of the modern corporate culture and into the systems which govern institutions. Looking deeply enough we will find things we wish we would rather not know. “The horror… the horror.” Spoken by Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (portrayed by Marlon Brando), perhaps the most famous and haunting line from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 cinematic masterpiece, Apocalypse Now, echoes James Joyce’s nightmare from which he could not awake.
We consider these eras which we now look back on with the wisdom of hindsight all having played their parts in subverting human meaning. This book looks briefly at how we have arrived here and concentrates on realistic methods we may use to change.
European colonialism evolved as power was spread over a huge network of colonial outposts spread across the world. Increasingly brutal tactics were employed to keep control over colonial outposts. Between the promotion of colonial slavery and the subjugation of colonial citizens, brutality gripped the world, as early industrialism gained momentum.
While most colonial outposts remained under control, the American Revolution marked a distinct departure from normal as the Americans transformed the thirteen original colonies into a new nation with rapid expansion and increasing socioeconomic status.
Despite the philosophical and political benefits derived from the American Revolution, America struggles as much as any other nation to find a method of living up to such meritorious standards.
Was the American Revolution a failure? No, it was a misfire. A shot heard round the world – a world that was quite simply not ready for it. The very ideas of the revolutionary founders were regarded as a direct threat to everything European colonialism and corporate culture had managed to accomplish.
Is the world ready for the ideas of the American founders today? No, it isn’t and is unlikely to become so. Being ready for such idealistic thinking and ideas means we as human beings would have to change. Change, individually, from the inside.
The ideas promoted by the American founders, became a direct threat to European power and threatened both the class-based stability and the individual and national interests of the European continent.
Out of this vast insecurity of colonialism the European Enlightenment developed. Out of this enlightenment came the first great Industrial Revolution. The ideas of the American founders threatened the delicate and precarious networks which supported both colonialism and industrialism.
This book, and the 21st Century Renaissance it names, considers very ancient and powerful ideas. Ideas which we hold in new regard as we enter the quantum paradigm. May the best ideas win.
The European Enlightenment: increased social stratification, allowing increased elite power over workers. Wealth & power became merged into a system of increasingly Industrialized globalist socialist monopolies which erode both human and national sovereignty.
Industrialized Hegemony: post Enlightenment Industrialization - fed into the 19th century & helped fuel the American Civil War. Great paradoxical ideas of Globalism and Nationalism tore away at each other to bring increased inequality and to provide plenty of chaos, uncertainty and violence.
Both pillars led to steady decline in human meaning and free agency. Human meaning & free agency became pitted against globalist techno-feudalism. Industrialized techno-feudalism, increasingly dictated by globalism, began to tear the heart and soul from nationalism. Pitting neighbor against neighbor, turning ideas into intellectual property, turning independence over to corporate ownership and control.
Eventually both pillars merged into a singular horror as the European Enlightenment blended into Industrialized Hegemony and began to turn toward totalitarianism. Foundational fractures which came out of industrialized hegemony and post enlightenment industrialization, became wounds, wounds remaining unhealed after the American Civil War, leading to dystopian loss of human meaning and further erosion of individual free agency.
A half century of back-to-back world wars exacerbated the foundational fractures. Increased erosion of human meaning and free agency broke down into industrialized socialism. Industrialization quickly dispatched the independent rural population into the controlled urbanization of the great cities. The warp and weft of the social fabric began to go threadbare — giving way to globalist totalitarianism. Nationalism became perverted into extreme socio-psychopathy by the utopian fantasies of Maoism, Communism & Naziism. Human meaning eroded as rural populations were herded into cities where mass globalist corporations could more easily control production.
The generation born to WW II survivors inherited some of the most dystopian narratives of any previous time in human history. Caught in a Catch 22 between industrialized terror, torn between the existence of the atomic bomb on the one hand, and by a desire to break free and escape the dystopia of the past, on the other.
Many of the children born to WW II survivors left their families at young ages to join what they thought was a renaissance, advertised as the California/San Francisco “Great Hippie Freedom Movement”. Instead of encountering a Flower-Child renaissance, as advertised, these children encountered a trap. Placing themselves at the center of one of the most corrupt, inept and dystopian societies in history. Rather than a renaissance, they encountered the profound disruption which preceded the hollowing out of American industrialization.
Dark, Nietzschean philosophy drifted in among the bright dreams of the would-be Flower Children. As most great philosophers, and as all great ideas, Nietzsche was partially right about the future and partially wrong. He was right, there were recursive loops in history. People, ideas, great civilizations, whole cultures became stuck in downward trending vortices, where human ideas of progress seem halted for a period. But what Nietzsche forgot was that there are also periods where these entities break out of the negativity, as history then takes on more of a linear trajectory.
Instead of history being viewed as a non-linear process, trapped in recursive loops, we see that maybe it is both. Alternating periods – some nonlinear in nature - and some of a more linear nature. As humans we attempt to identify a linear progression in what may not be a linear process.
However, here we catch ourselves in an error, trying once again to push human conceptual limitations on such a force as history. We correct ourselves, recognizing that the opposite of a downward trending torsional vortex is the upwelling trending torsional vortex. In nature we don’t find many straight lines, but rather see curved shapes, shapes bent over curves, and wavelike patterns.
As we break free from human conceptual limitations, we see that recursive history holds us in a downward trending vortex. While discursive history holds us in an upward trending vortex. Although it may be premature and incorrect, we are going to dare to imagine the unimaginable. We dare to impose some human-derived set of shapes, to function as a theory upon which may eventually hang history.
Imagining that downward vortices trap us in a kind of gravitational weight, periods in which we might see a lack of progress. Conversely, seeing upward vortices as releasing us from that gravitational weight, into some type of nonlinear motion we might see as “progress”.
We have not seen the last of the human tendency to apply theory, for better or for worse, to a nonlinear system which is far more complicated than we are able to glimpse. In computer science we are physically applying human projection to engineered intelligence. Predictably we are finding out that our application of recursive loops is not working as well as we imagined, and begin to see we may have oversimplified how electronic intelligence actually works.
In nature curves do not work in some kind of linear regression or progression, but instead are based upon math which prevents both curved regression or progression from collapsing. The nautilus shell is our imperfect/perfect model for defining how perfectly the natural math reflects a natural real-world order.
The last thing this book seeks to do is to impose some arbitrary design or geometric patterns on nature. Patterns which could simply be wrong headed human projections. Take compute for instance. Engineers, accustomed to a kind of linearity achieved in digital technology, where the compute consists of either/or, of zeros and ones, of on or off, proceed successfully for now on this well-trodden path. Ultimately this linearity could become a trap – a linearity bias - halting progress instead of promoting it.
We see this linearity bias in biological science also, where we have imposed a simplistic linearity on our genetic code. While both compute and genetics do contain elements which may be laid out into linear patterns, they do not function in a linear fashion, but instead operate in a curved spiral pattern.
This directly affects everything we are writing about here and will take on more meaning as we progress onward. This narrative will follow a more natural curved, sometimes spiral trajectory in reaching the perceived goal.
Keep in mind that as human creative writing, including this writing, runs up against computerized linearity, the results can be interesting. It sometimes feels as if the nonlinear process of human creativity is being forced into sets of straight lines which proceed infinitely without ever meeting. By the end of this book a recommended resolution for this mismatch will be put forth.
**What in your own life tells you the ground has already shifted? What will you choose to do as someone who participates in a renaissance? **
This is from my book in progress, Don’t Fear the 21st Century Renaissance: Become the Renaissance. You can read the whole manuscript, chapter by chapter, on my site: theparallaxidentity.com/books/become-the-renaissance
