Disease in Western Culture: The Other and the myth of progress (II) Diseases in the Culture of the West: Other and the myth of progress *
Part II
The centrality, orderly place, reasonable, ethical-political, hierarchical and cultivated the sacred area of \u200b\u200babsolute reality, linked also to the mountain or tree, mythical connectors between the higher and lower, works as a ordering principle, existential, geographical and cultural human reality and the world, offering the projection of different spatial regions, neither homogeneous nor indeterminate, but differentiated and prioritized from the center, ie from inside to outside. A characteristic of traditional societies is, in fact, the tactics opposition between an area "downtown" inhabited, and space "peripheral" unknown, mysterious and unknown that surrounds it: the first is the cosmos, the rest, forms a kind of external world, a strange space, chaotic, full of demons, of outsiders, is essentially , an unknown territory that participates in the fluid and larval appearance of chaos. If this space, profane, deals, and the human being installed on it, is symbolically transformed into cosmos. This "cosmization" of foreign lands is, in all cases, a kind of con-consecration. For mythical-religious consciousness, sacred space is therefore the only real and everything else is an extension report. This mythical vision responds to a conception of the universe and human culture established from an ethnocentric perspective and "absolute", ie a self-enclosed world, with a core and a periphery known mysterious, unknown, but over which There is, however, desire to learn, but always drew the privileged and culturally superior center (1). Ethnographic curiosity idealist who will be deployed on the external world and mysterious, unknown and feared, be construed as a claim ordering, such as a desire to control and subdue the world, trying to overcome, and the psychological impact trance imagine living creatures space chaotic, uncontrolled and unknown. This image, culturally consistent, almost xenophobic, where the center corresponds to the cultural refinement, impact on the ideal of knowing the world as a need to dominate in imagination, above all, not everyday spaces, those unknown and remote, indefinite and unlimited . The other vision, remote and exotic in the confines of the paragraphs and strangers, is a reflection of a "present" age, which forms the background of a corporate level corresponding to the oldest (or primitive and wild) stages of man. The "peoples" were conceived far in the background as men "Primitive," archaic and distorted versions of the remote ancestors, still living in the world today but in a different time and distance. The other, in this case, means in the context of an ideology of power, status of children of the people "downtown" have escaped (2). Fighting spaces would become, well, in a dramatic elimination of the bestial, hybrid and chaotic compared to the consolidation of the idea of \u200b\u200ban ordered world and culturally regulated. Cultural submission of distant peoples, peripherals, involves the demonstration of the power of a ruler on spaces or less culturally distant. Western modernity has led to an uprooting (3), a disenchantment (the ostensible aim of the intangible and magical-spiritual), giving absolute primacy to the individual and the reason, all motivated by a social resizing of religion. This has involved achieving a significant step, which occurs from a sacred social order to another secular. Each of these orders has its particular roots and, of course, its own identity, which amounts to saying that each one can imagine in a specific cultural matrix, which implies a sense of belonging. In the holy order man is integrated into society but does so in the constituent components of the universe in a nutshell, there is complementarity time-spirit, a kind of empathy, in the secular order, however, that cosmic unity is broken by the installation and exclusive dominance of modern humanism, which excludes, as it were, any link with the divine, with the past mythical. It protects, therefore, identity. Start a new man who seems to have gone through the past. Ultimately, what we have is a dehumanized individual, however, requires a transcendental holism, despite the overwhelming impression of Christianity in its various forms. The world of this guy who just mentioned is the formal political agenda, the public sphere and civil society. The new order secular is assuming the presence of a maturation process prior potential of nature, considered, yes, transcendent. This is the reason that exceeds the error, superstition, magic and myth is, in essence, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe myth of progress that weaves science and utopia, and embodies Europe as caput mundi, which implies a civilizational superiority paradigm that avoids the many forms worldwide, as well as otherness, which provides unlimited space and time unclassifiable. Is a reason to replace improperly causing an impoverishment of imagination by the character "reductive" in the same applied to the world created. This mythology progress in any case, does not cover, however, the forms and structures of the ancestral wisdom of the companies, nor the fact that the group feels that shares culture, language, history and common religion (in this sense the messianic -apocalyptic might be assumed, ironically, in the social imaginary) below historical contingencies or particular policy options (4). Europe is established as a myth of collective cultural belonging, and Western culture as a universal right, from a privileged processing of knowledge, shaped by the Jewish heritage through Christianity, coupled with the idealized intellectual self-consciousness of Hellenic; in this case, the truth has been added to the well and being. Western Europe has always had a certain idea of \u200b\u200ba supranational order, under which functioned relatively contingent, individual states. The myth of patriarchal production (associated with classical Greece and the Roman Empire, and made in Europe) is in the modern political logos most appropriate insertion in its attempt to entertain the truth illustrated, defined as the agreement between the Entity, ie The social reality, and the Mind, ie the state. This got a kind of secularization and disenchantment of the world demythologization archaic sense, relegating the archaic world of sense to the realm of the liminal, in marginality, almost nonexistence. Clear that such relegation has been and is, his disease, because therein lies the malaise of our Enlightenment ideology, the political dismissal of feeling and reduced to a merely functional significance, forgetting the mysterious and dark relegated mythic, symbolic, magical and religious (5). The logos, thus masking the background sacral ritual camouflaged, but the state. In short, the production-patriarchal myth symbolically repressed the axiological meaning of existence, only surfaced culturally. The scope of meaning is superseded by the cops and abstract political consensus. The discomfort and perhaps tragedy West, stems from the fact that culture can not save tax for the sake of the same modernist logic (6). Technological thinking and industrialization resulted in a cultural choice that has clearly opted for rationality. The renewed emphasis on regionalism prevailing, the heated debates about the grief that raise these modern times, the proliferation of sects and brotherhoods, and the culture of marginality, are reactions that testify to a profound malaise caused by the unstoppable tide of inhumanity. In short, a re-humanization, an appreciation of knowledge and the truly hidden in a horizontal world in a secular time where the current order posfundacional try to recognize more than one nucleus can, and should, be invoked as an absolute necessity. The bet must be, therefore, by a culture of respect, in the form of conversation, and not by a rigid structure, built on the epistemological foundations constrictor, allowing intimate with the sense that focus on demonstrating immutable truths.
Caracas, February 2011
Notes
1. These visions of the world are a persistent theme in Western culture from Greek conceptions, but are also present in societies culturally introspective, closed in on themselves and a large accumulation of historical events (India, Iran, China). See, the Espelosín Gómez, FJ, (trans.), Greek paradoxographic. Oddities and wonders, edit. Gredos, Madrid, 1996, specifically, pp. 13-14; the same author, The discovery of the world. Geography and travelers in ancient Greece, edit. Akal, Madrid, 2000, pp. 7, 18, 164 and 206, and Hartog, F., Memory of Ulysses. Stories over the border in ancient Greece, edit. FCE, Mexico, 1996, especially p. 16 ff, 131-132 and 133 et seq.
2. Antiquity, poured into images of distant places, like western ethnology. Remote and inhospitable places and ancient times, are unobservable and therefore fruitful, since it opens the door to imaginative projections. See, the Fabian, J., Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983, especially pp. 15-40.
3. About rootlessness in modern society see Gauchet, M., The disenchantment of the world, edit. Trotta, Madrid, 2005, especially chapter 2, pp. 64-70 et seq., And Taylor, Ch, Ob. Cit., Pp. 77-79 and ss. On man as an agent in your ordinary mundane see themselves self as an individual, is very suggestive Dumont, L., Essays on individualism, Alianza edit., Madrid, 1987, in particular, p. 45.
4. The idea behind the unit chosen by a company under common sense issues, there was invented a common past, which serves as a thread to the fabric of nationalism has been raised in Gellner, E. Nations and Nationalism, Alliance edit ., Madrid, 2003, pp. 25-30, and Hobsbawm, E., Nations and Nationalism since 1780, edit. Criticism, 1998, in particular, pp. 35-50 et seq. We would add that the imagined past paradigm is useful and therefore functional.
5. The ancient wisdom recognized as cosmocentric and ecocentric, is superimposed on the other knowing, rational, anthropocentric and technocentric character, somewhat dehumanizing. See, the Trias, E., The Age of the Spirit, edit. Mondadori, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2006, in particular, pp. 61-105.
6. See Lambropoulos, V., The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993, especially pp. 78-86, and Davies, MW & Nandy, A., Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism, edit. Pluto Press, London, 1993, especially p. 68.
BIBLIOHEMEROGRÁFICAS REFERENCES
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Espelosín
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* Paper to be presented at the Seventh Conference on Humanistic and Educational Research in the city of San Cristobal in early April 2011 Prof. Dr. Julio López
Saco School of History, VCU School
Letters, UCAB
PhD in Social Sciences, UCV
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