By: Nicanor Wong Arch Ortiz / / jnwong@cap-regionallima.org
Summary: Anthony Giddens (1) in the text "Consequences of Modernity" describes the current situation in which we live that would be only the radicalization of the Enlightenment principles of rationality or modernity. Is it possible that humanity out of this impasse?
Ideologies - apparently - are driving the movement worldwide. Giddens is one of the contemporary thinkers who have accurately described the current situation in which we live. As
from physics is necessary for any item not cause any effect to occur over another, just as disclosures of contemporary thinkers modify the act of political elites to the way meteorologists can predict the climate of the world based on some data that do not become completely regular. Climate aspects
Climate, refers to a certain atmospheric conditions of each country, and telluric. The concept of "space located" or "where" is a prerequisite in order to place mentally. However, the "when" save a different interaction.
Classically, the "where" and "when" were two related concepts, resulting from the observation of nature that surrounds us and transformations suffered during the various seasons. However, the abstraction (2) of the time appears in a double process: the formation of cities - and the subsequent bipolarity city-country - and the spread of the mechanical clock that expresses this dimension "empty" of any location. The concept of "time" is organizing the pace of city life, while the "space" becomes - in contrast - imaginative. Note that this is nothing more than a mere appearance. Time as succession quantitative "before" and "after" is based on "material space." It is only in the "where" the physical space in which changes are made that can make us see the change, the succession. The development of mapping the planet divided meridian and parallel to that in 1884, reaching an international agreement by which the planet is divided into 24 time zones using the meridian, being the home of Greenwich.
However, this appearance that "time" is disengaged from the "space" for our modern conception is a key precondition. Modern man, along with technological advances in transportation, control your life through time over space.
This dislocation space-time affects, positively or negatively, the world-historical framework of action and human experience, namely, customs and local practices. Uprooting of social relations from local contexts of interaction would re structuring in space-time intervals spooky in an eternal present unpredictable climate.
A new global mapping
The social map of our society is characterized by diversity and individuality. If the proposed Enlightenment rationalism global adherence to the project of achieving universal happiness based on the progressive development of technique and the reason (evolutionism progressive), that universal adherence has not reached all the inhabited world and in industrialized countries or the first world is in serious question.
representative or symbolic technique (3) world map, considering the world as the land lease still took second place with sound project. The astrolabe and quadrant to locate, whether a particular individual or group, would be replaced by money. Keynes (4) distinguish the "cash-on-account" of the money itself. The first is subject to loan facilities, debt, credit and weather: the banking system, a key feature of the capitalist process reported by Weber. The appearance of these credit schemes can be read as another consequence of the gap between time and space. The ability to be present in the world would be detached from the physical location of the accumulation. Where we make our credit card transactions.
The cartographer
The modern system legitimize the individual in relation to a profession that has learned through a body established and regulated by the nation state: the School. Foucault (5) indicate that prisons, schools and workplaces (6) are strictly modern institutions.
expert cartoonist modern world map, capitalist and industrialized, should not only represent but also to monitor the activities of people in the political and economic, says Giddens. As quadrant (7) would use the new systems of information, as astrolabe (8) faith in the stars continue to maintain the position that suits the drawing of the map. How else could explain how the economic crisis happening in 2009? Is not it assumed that the "professional expert" can and should monitor these developments and predict what is adventure? The United States, the world's largest economy, exceeded their mortgage before a housing bubble in the amount of the currency seems low. Will be one of the characteristics of capitalism (9) and industrialism (10) modern view, the map, not as a useful and "safe" to move but as a product to sell to the highest bidder.
Map
The product itself any cartographer's work is adequate representation of a map to guide it safely to travelers and sailors on their journeys.
rely on the map is a sine qua non "for individuals and institutions, but this human condition is based on a less tangible: faith. Both signals
symbolic as money or expert systems as certified professionals need this ability abstract respect for the value of the action they perform. For Simmel (11) the reliability is related to public confidence in government institutions. Forms of reliability rest on vague and partial understandings based on knowledge, a weak inductive knowledge (12) "I have faith that everything will be fine." The cartography of passes to the realm of the possible, probable and available.
The risk of running aground
Luhmann (13) recognizes that the reliability and confidence are closely linked but with a nuance of difference that then mention.
Both words are understood in relation to the lack of knowledge since they would not trust or rely on something that if I knew that the result would be good or not harmful.
The "risk", a term which - apparently - only appears in the modern period ("risk" comes into English via the English in the seventeenth century, probably through a nautical term that means danger of crashing into a cliff). Given the recent introduction of this term to the English lexicon, assume it is a characteristic of modernity. It does not mean that the modern pre not distinguish these terms but were steeped in religious cosmology. The possibility of an accident was defined as a plan of divine providence which God, would take a good lesson from it: "Omnia in bonum" (everything is for good). However, the Enlightenment rationalism denies the religious concept, introduced the concept of "random" and "coincidence." Each "citizen" is called to be responsible for the consequences of their decisions and actions. In the analogy with "the map", it does not matter, what matters is the election so that "if one abstains from the action does not run any risk." Giddens indicates that there is an error in this statement since it does not consider external factors to inaction. The axiom is valid outside of reality but not in the same one where the action has some impact on another, and others. Does modern banks do not have qualified personnel in the best educational institutions, not to have realized that the profit motive would leave no equity in their home loans and would go bankrupt?
is therefore that "trust" assumes the risk difference confidence and both of the possibility of failure.
The helmsman
All cultures of the world maintain a tradition that pays tribute to the past and value as symbols perpetuate the experience of generations. This control integrates civic attitude reflective of the community managing time and space in continuity with the past with the present and the future. It is not static, as it has to be reinvented by each new generation to be made of the cultural heritage of those who precede them.
However, in cultures the concept of oral tradition passed diluted. Just writing is marked with a gap between time and space in which the reflexive appropriation of knowledge can highlight this tradition so that the past has much more weight than the future.
contrast, Enlightenment rationality to the routine of daily life has no connection to the past. The "so it was always done" in light of new knowledge would be only valid as a matter of principle. In modern cultures routine practices are altered with the progressive discoveries.
Despite our age of information overflow, the decision to trust is not gone, just because - given the wealth of data - there is no certainty of truth. Nobody trusts who is transparent in their actions but who does not provide complete information in which we trust to be true. It is here where lies the difference between reliability and trust. The first is closely related to contingency or chance, while confidence in the honor of someone at risk. That is, I trust the helmsman of the ship and the trust the cartographic map and good weather.
Reliability is the link between faith and trust that - as argued by Giddens - comes from a weak inductive knowledge. It is trust in a person or system.
A journey into the "Finis Terre
The belief that the earth was flat and floated on a sea was eternal and mysterious for centuries, empirical truth to the sailors stopped stepping out of the course charted by the coastline. Could say the trip was "safe" since the set of hazards were minimized within an acceptable risk.
During the rationalist, who could place in the thirteenth century, this human capacity should have been able to establish true and enduring knowledge. However, what Giddens calls "reflection" is not meant as a reflection on something called the "real external" but on "depicted in our knowledge." So can it give us certain knowledge of rationality? Karl Popper (14) ensures that we can never be sure that knowledge will not be reformulated in some of its elements as "science rests on quicksand "(15). There is no certainty of truth but pure conjecture. Spared the risk of misunderstanding and irresponsibility factual consequence before the error, any speculative proof is equally valid.
Although the French Enlightenment had a penchant for redefining the world - as did Adam commissioned by God to put a name to each animal - starting with the zoology and botany, they found a quick definition for the child "image and likeness of God ": to be rational, ceasing to be a compound of body and soul are they complete the two definitions? While the first emerges within a context Deist (16), the second comes from the scholastic (17) medieval. In my opinion, the most appropriate definition would be "the Incarnate Word (18) to combine in this way their social power speaker, so wise and body or material interests.
could say that in Modernism the epistemological foundations are fallible, that history has no teleology - so the idea of \u200b\u200bprogress can not be defensible - and the social agenda becomes important ecological and new social movements. Speaking of the postmodern as a replacement of modernity is impossible since only reflections concerning aesthetic elements of modernity. Socially could refer to the social trajectory that departs from the modern institutions and lead us to something new and different, but this does not prove its existence.
agree with Giddens: "We have not moved beyond modernity but are living the phase of radicalization," whose features are:
- The dissolution of evolution
- The disappearance of historical teleology: progressivism
- Recognition of rational reflexivity
- The Fall of the West
The changeable and unstable nature of reality, which denies modern rationalism, promoted as a social habit uncertainty into the future. Trust, based on personal values, is also subject to cognitive orientation created by the changing perspectives of the social world: there is no transcendent basis of the same but rational and, therefore, uncertain.
If mundalización or globalization, as characteristic of modernity, is based on the spatio-temporal distance, social relations can become an ocean waterway long as the anthropological find appropriate wording - beyond rational reductions , linguistic or emotional - and recover the notion of truth and transcendence. Otherwise, this barge we call world inevitably precipitate in that mysterious eternal sea of \u200b\u200buncertainty.
Notes:
(1) Anthony Giddens (London, England, January 18, 1938) is a British sociologist, known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. Based on the book referred to in this essay is: Giddens, Anthony "The consequences of modernity", Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1990.
(2) Separate operation through intellectual qualities of an object to be considered in isolation or to consider the same object in its pure essence or notion.
(3) Giddens indicates that one of the detaching device, ie, a mechanism that removes the social relationship of immediacy in context: separation of time and space, is the creation of symbolic tokens for excellence will be the money.
(4) John Maynard Keynes, first Baron Keynes, CB (Cambridge, June 5, 1883 - Firley, April 21, 1946) was a British economist whose ideas had a strong impact on modern economic and political theories and also on the fiscal policies of many governments.
(5) Michel Foucault (Poitiers, October 15, 1926 - Paris, June 25, 1984) was a philosopher, French historian and professor at several French and American universities and History Chair systems of thought at the Collège de France (1970-1984).
(6) Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment. Allen Lane, London, 1977
(7) The quadrant is an ancient instrument used to measure angles in astronomy and navigation.
(8) The astrolabe is an instrument to determine the positions of stars on the sky.
(9) Capitalism is a system of commodity production focused on the relationship between private ownership of capital and wage labor deprived of property, with this relationship that sets the main focus of the class system. The company depends on production for competitive markets in which Prices are signals to investors, producers and consumers.
(10) Industrialism is the use of inanimate sources of energy material in the production of quality associated with the central role of machinery in the production process. Presupposes a social organization of production regularized coordinates human activity, machinery and inputs and outputs of raw materials and products.
(11) Georg Simmel (Berlin, March 1, 1858 - Strasbourg, 28 September 1918) was a German philosopher and sociologist.
(12) Inductive reasoning is a form of deductive reasoning is to draw conclusions general from premises that contain private data. For example, repeated observation of objects or events of a similar nature provides a conclusion to all objects or events of this nature.
(13) a sociologist Niklas Luhmann was born in the city of Lüneburg, Lower Saxony in 1927. He died in 1998. In 1964 published the first book devoted to analyzing sociological problems from the use of systems theory, "Funktionen und Folgen Formal Organisation" (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1964).
(14) Karl Raimund Popper (Vienna, July 28, 1902 - London, September 17, 1994) was a philosopher, sociologist and theorist of science born in Austria. He outlined his views on the philosophy of science in his work, now classic, "The logic of scientific research," 1934.
(15) Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge, London, 1962.
(16) Doctrine which recognizes a God as author of nature, but without admitting revelation or external worship.
(17) Philosophy of the Middle Ages, Christian, Arabic and Jewish, which dominates the teaching of the doctrines of Aristotle, concluded with the respective religious doctrines.
(18) The term was removed from the Bible or Christian book called Neo Vulgate, specifically the Gospel of John 1.14.
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