[Fis] THE ROOTS OF MODERN CIVILISATION

Sun Jan 8 01:10:56 CET 2023

Plamen — 

I am a bit surprised how this has begun, based on our many conversations about how modern institutions are broken.

My proclivaty would be to review history with an eye to where we went wrong. If we can sort out the way we think about the world through accidents of civilization, from more fundamental mechanisms, then we can revisit some of those accidents.

A general candidate is how civilisation spawned the notion of ownership, so our mathematical abstractions migrated to properties and numbers of objects, and thence to commerce and concepts of value. These notions of thingness, tense and numeration are assumed to be fundamental, and we build our abstractions of agency and thence information flow on these. But I hold that this is an accident of history.

I do modelling professionally as you know, and have my own views on where things went wrong in my discipline. Thomas Harriot is a godfather of abstract representation in my story. He published little because he was constantly being accused of heresy. For example, he wintered with a specific trading group of native americans in 1585–86 and reported that they had a coherent world view — described in kaballistic terms — but without a Jesus. He saw creatures not enumerated in the bible and therefore officially could not exist.

His nuanced notion of equality/equivalence may have been profoundly more useful for us today — what we have called introspective intuitionistic phenomenalism using modern labels. But Newton overrode that notion with a simpler enumerable equality. That’s an inflection point that has crippled us, I believe. I think there may be many others, and it takes a Kolmogorov or Voevodsky to see around those limiting abstractions.

So, I would see simple assumptions about the written word, spiritual ‘truth', and deistic agency more as problems than something to celebrate and honour, well before we note governing conventions (rulers, slaves, taxes, and state religions). If we assume that there are better ways to think about the world (and information flow is central to that), we have to think about why we aren’t naturally already there. Some of these great men hurt us by developing attractive abstractions.

— Ted
_______________
Ted Goranson

> On 8 Jan 2023, at 8:40 am, Dai Griffiths <dai.griffiths.1 en gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Plamen,
> I agree that it is important to recognise the value of monastic culture in the ‘dark ages’ and medieval period, and its continuing influence on Western culture. As you point out, in many ways the Catholic church is a continuation of the Roman Empire by other means (a man in a robe sits on a throne in Rome and issues commands). However, I am unconvinced that this is the entirely positive thing that you seem to suggest. Indeed, you mention that “Holland, France and England became colonial powers dominating the sea trade, yet at the price of slavery and exploiting the native population”, and slavery was certainly an example set by the Roman Empire. More generally, the Roman Empire was built on central authority and power, and the Catholic Church was constructed on these foundations, grafting them onto the decentralised and contemplative traditions of the early church. Intuitively, most people within traditionally Christian countries assume, with Pelagius (c. 354–418), that you get into heaven by doing good things. But this is not compatible with an imperial church, as you no longer need priests to achieve salvation, and hence have no authority or power over the population. Augustine succeeded in winning the argument with Pelagius, and establishing the doctrine of original sin, which can only be overcome through the grace of God, which is transmitted through priests. Hence infants need to be baptised to avoid being condemned to purgatory until the second coming. This is the doctrinal mechanism whereby imperial authority was maintained by the church. Unsurprisingly, Pelagius was condemned as a heretic. It is worth meditating on this a little: “If you live a good life you go to heaven” is heretical to the Catholic Church. I certainly find the implications to be horrendous.
> As a Welsh person, I am aware of Pelagius because he was a Celt (Wales, Ireland and Brittany compete for the honour or infamy of being his birthplace). The Celtic church was monastic (think of the Book of Kells), and in Wales it was a direct continuation of the Roman church in Roman occupied Britain. The Welsh church maintained a decentralised, Pelagian tradition until the annexation of Wales by the English in 1534. So there is nothing inevitable about the imperial nature of the church.
> In 1276 Ramon Llull established a monastic school in Mallorca, five kilometres from where I am typing these words (see https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.raco.cat/index.php/Contributions/article/download/95275/411648__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RLJhQZSJ_JM0C75p5v2cD1xgo03gtJlx6TSilEc2pOw-55j69Ykq2HLHNoJPVu-vHBnv4p6S8Gj64R9RWe12$ ). There, the students (Franciscan Minors) studied Arabic, and I believe also Greek and Hebrew, in line with Llull’s belief that the three ‘peoples of the book’ (Christians, Muslims and Jews) could be reconciled through learning and logical discourse. For his efforts Llull was excommunicated by the church, and conversion in Christianity and Islam remained linked to imperial conquest. Current events in Israel, Nigeria, and other countries are illustrating the consequences of failing to attend to his vision. In our time I have found Karen Armstrong’s writing valuable in underlining the common foundations of the major religions.
> I believe these examples help us “recognize the patterns that let us down before and now” which you mention. They help us consider how the Christian church in general, and monasticism in particular, could have evolved if Christianity had not taken on the trappings and political imperatives of the Roman Empire. The benefits of monasticism which you describe could still have been achieved, and perhaps we could have sidestepped some of the most noxious manifestations of authoritarian social structures and the “clash of civilizations”.  
> 
> On Fri, 6 Jan 2023 at 12:50, Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov <plamen.l.simeonov en gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> I wish you a HAPPY; HEALTHY AND PEACEFUL NEW YEAR 2023 !
> 
> It is my pleasure to announce, -- also on behalf of our generous and hard-working host Pedro C. Marijuan who has provided us with this forum of wonderful exchange for so many years (Hallelujah!), --  the opening of our New Year's discussion session under the topic THE ROOTS OF CIVILISATION. that will end on January 31st, 2023.
> 
> I am eager and curious to read your ideas. Please feel free to share whatever comes to your mind.
> 
> Here is the abstract with the focus and some idea we can extract/expect at the end:
> 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> THE ROOTS OF MODERN (WESTERN / EUROPEAN) CIVILISATION
> INTRO: We are living today in uncertain times with multiple overlapping human-made crises which an advanced civilization is supposed to anticipate and prevent -- ecology, epidemics, overpopulation, economy with disproportional energy and resources consume, cultural and generational polarization, even questioning science, moral values and an individual’s identity. Furthermore, ideologically led old ghost teachings of division, conflict and confrontation among social groups and utopic tech visions for remodeling and resetting the world with unpredictable consequences are contributing to the overall confusion and wrong choices, thus deepening the crises even more. Could we look back at the past for some lessons?
> THE MAGISTERY OF HISTORY: There have been many episodes of civilization crises along human history. Each one of them has left a "recipe" in our collective memory of how to overcome it. Maybe this time things have become too complex and multi-faceted, like society itself. Or maybe an evil intention is lurking behind? There are so many different aspects at multiple levels in social life all over the world that have been increasingly challenged by our tunnel vision on technology oriented towards more production/profit and less cleaning/reuse/benevolence, away from a stable equilibrium (“homeostasis”). They need to be reorganized coherently and in a commonly agreeable way, not in one imposed by self-proclaimed authorities who got used to changing long established definitions and rules of conduct following their own agenda. This takes time, of course, as it has always been. What about looking for lessons to learn from the past, or at least to obtain some orientation in order to make the right decisions in this difficult time? This appears to be more reasonable than starting to invent novel directive-guided solutions from scratch deploying not yet proven as safe technologies in a trial-and-error fashion. We have an intriguing proposal for you. Let us focus on a fascinating period in human history and find out how the Western world was rebuilt and reintegrated from the ruins of the Roman Empire.  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=1708__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RLJhQZSJ_JM0C75p5v2cD1xgo03gtJlx6TSilEc2pOw-55j69Ykq2HLHNoJPVu-vHBnv4p6S8Gj64aOPdYgA$ 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-paved-the-road-to-modernity__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RLJhQZSJ_JM0C75p5v2cD1xgo03gtJlx6TSilEc2pOw-55j69Ykq2HLHNoJPVu-vHBnv4p6S8Gj64YgrveBt$ 
> THE MONASTIC SYSTEM - A GREAT IDEA. A handful of people may be credited with the design and realization of this truly civilization project. During its golden ages, Rome was defended by more than 200,000 legionaries, but after its fall in 466 AD they were replaced by other, more powerful spiritual warriors. They gradually covered the fragmented (Western) Europe and expanded Christianity through missionaries in the North by a coherent space of several thousand Catholic Benedictine monasteries that peacefully preserved and cultivated education, technology, economy, medicine, law, art and moral values that integrated the wisdom of the classical antiquity (Rom and Greece) and enlightened the local communities through the Dark Ages. Their success in ameliorating and guiding the human spirit paved the way for the urban "cloisters" of universities during the Renaissance Era (XII century ff.) where the seeds of science found their fruitful grounds to grow. Thus, several major crises, incl. alien invasions, the plague, internecine wars and famines were overcome thanks to this new resilient social scaffold.
> 
> In Eastern Europe, the Roman-Byzantine Empire in Constantinople, although shrunk through the waves of plague and foreign invasions, survived for almost 1000 years thanks to expanding Christianity and culture to its new neighbor and rival, but also ally at times in the North, the Bulgarian Empire. The latter developed the Cyrillic alphabet during the IX century AD, translated the holy books/prayers/songs in their language and began disseminating them to the other Slavic people in today’s territories of Serbia and Montenegro, Wallachia (Romania), Ukraine and Russia. When the Bulgarian 3 kingdoms and Constantinople surrendered in 1396 AD and 1453 AD to the Ottoman Empire, the conquered people on the Balkan peninsula continued to exist spiritually through a growing network of Christian Orthodox monasteries that kept the local communities together and finally led them to freedom through the national liberation movements in the XIX century.
> 
> Both Eastern and Western Europe endured those crises, calamities and invasions because they maintained firm, sound civilization roots based on the monastic system, the universities and schools as education centers, and later on industrial corporations. From today’s viewpoint the monastic system is analogous to a modern resilient, redundant, fault-tolerant and flexibly configurable computer network, particularly with respect to its data storage and processing resources, capable of self-diagnosis and self-healing, a critical infrastructure per se. If a monastery was destroyed or burned, the monks escaped with most of their valuable books and artefacts via safe routes to neighboring monasteries, where they could be preserved, replicated and distributed again.   https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RLJhQZSJ_JM0C75p5v2cD1xgo03gtJlx6TSilEc2pOw-55j69Ykq2HLHNoJPVu-vHBnv4p6S8Gj64Y9yxsV4$ 
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.thebyzantinelegacy.com/boyana-church__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RLJhQZSJ_JM0C75p5v2cD1xgo03gtJlx6TSilEc2pOw-55j69Ykq2HLHNoJPVu-vHBnv4p6S8Gj64WhsHUzh$ 
>  THE SUCCESS OF THE WESTERN WORLD: Arguably, what we call cultural Renaissance followed by scientific and industrial revolutions were an evolutive product of medieval society and the era of great geographical discoveries in the New Worlds beyond Europe, North Africa and Asia. Quite probably, they were only possible thanks to the first missionary globalization and peaceful goods exchange along the silk trade route following the pattern of the Antique World trade across the territories surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Spain and Portugal brought to Europe not only spices and silk, but also fundamental technologies from Asia (gun powder, magnetic compass, paper, porcelain), and later on a regular maritime trade routes from China via Philippines and Mexico over the Atlantic that were active for more than 250 years before Holland, France and England became colonial powers dominating the sea trade, yet at the price of slavery and exploiting the native population. The further role of science and technology in the task of changing Western societies was awesome, perhaps with the infamous Cartesian breach between science and the humanities, which no doubt has delivered a biased conception of our rationality limits and led to awful ideological misunderstandings that are absent in oriental civilizations.  
> BACK TO THE PROBLEMS OF OUR TIME
> And here we are. In a world that again faces illnesses and adverse events from their anecdotic treatment to ask: “How is the state of our civilization and our roots today? What do we identify with today? Do we recognize the patterns that let us down before and now? Do we know what can reconcile and heal our multi-facetted society?”
> We modestly, as scientists recognizing the societal immune system, acknowledge the fact that we have the duty to contribute to recovering the system with coherent visions illuminating the "forking paths ahead" (as Borges put it). First of all, on our own turf -- the flagrant incoherence and misunderstandings around most fields where information and communication, meaning and knowledge, as well as collective intelligence need to be cleared up and nailed down. We need to clean up our own backyard on this planet and evolve to a new level, -- not necessarily a purely technocratic one, -- before we set off for new missions in space and meeting other civilizations out there.
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://interestingliterature.com/2021/07/jorge-luis-borges-the-garden-of-forking-paths-summary-analysis/__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RLJhQZSJ_JM0C75p5v2cD1xgo03gtJlx6TSilEc2pOw-55j69Ykq2HLHNoJPVu-vHBnv4p6S8Gj64Xa-BmVX$ 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RLJhQZSJ_JM0C75p5v2cD1xgo03gtJlx6TSilEc2pOw-55j69Ykq2HLHNoJPVu-vHBnv4p6S8Gj64R14_NwY$ 
> 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> With best wishes,
> 
> Plamen
> 
> ___ ___ ___
> Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov
> Director Research Integral Biomathics
> InBioCe – Integral Biomathics Centre phone1: +1 (213) 822-7245
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> email: plamen en simeio.org 
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