Oswald Spengler warned in 1933 (of all years) that the main threats to the Occident came from "colored peoples" (Farbigen).[5] He prophesied, not entirely without reason, huge uprisings of enraged peoples in the European colonies. He also claimed that after 1918 the Russians had become "Asiatic" again, and that the Japanese Yellow Peril was about to engulf the civilized world. More interesting, however, was Spengler's view that the ruling white races (Herrenvölker) were losing their position in Europe. Soon, he said, true Frenchmen would no longer rule France, which was already awash with black soldiers, Polish businessmen, and Spanish farmers. The West, he concluded, would go under because white people had become soft, decadent, addicted to safety and comfort. As he put it: "Jazz music and nigger dances are the death march of a great civilization."

If criticism of the West was influenced by half-baked ideas from Germany, more positive views of the West were also influenced by German ideas. The Slavophiles and the Westernizers, who offered opposing views of the West in nineteenth-century Russia, were both equally inspired by German intellectual currents. Ideas for or against the West are in fact to be found everywhere. The East does not begin at the river Elbe, as Konrad Adenauer believed, nor does the West start in Prague, as Milan Kundera once suggested. East and West are not necessarily geographical territories. Rather, Occidentalism, which played such a large part in the attacks of September 11, is a cluster of images and ideas of the West in the minds of its haters. Four features of Occidentalism can be seen in most versions of it; we can call them the City, the Bourgeois, Reason, and Feminism. Each contains a set of attributes, such as arrogance, feebleness, greed, depravity, and decadence, which are invoked as typically Western, or even American, characteristics.    more »

Although this new Renaissance spoken at the end of this essay may have more of a hybrid form than the authors imagine, the insights and critical analysis seem to resonate with some of the authors here rc   more »

Erik Davis is one of the most talented authors writing on the subject of technology, culture, and spirituality. This article from the book prefiguring cyberculture from MIT University Press is representative of the insightful work he has done. The concern of this piece revolves around the construction of subjectivity in an epoch which can perhaps best be called posthuman.rc

Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back to Zarathustra. Nearly across the board, contemporary thought calls us to defend and affirm the body that Descartes rendered a machine, a soulless automata under our spiritual thumb. It doesn't really matter that the body so affirmed is itself multiple and even contradictory: the materialist object of biology, the phenomenological bed of Being, a feminist site of anti-patriarchal critique, the New Age animal immersed in Gaia's enchanted web. Regardless of the framework, the song remains the same: we are bodyminds deeply embedded in the world. For many thinkers now, the sort of abstract, disengaged soul-pilot pictured by Descartes -- the "I" immortalized in the famous cogito ergo sum -- is not only bad thinking, but, ideologically speaking, bad news.

In many ways I share this urge to trace the networks that embed consciousness in phenomenal reality, and to insist on the extraordinary (though not exclusive) value of causal explanations rooted in the history of matter. But I am no absolutist. The fact that Descartes keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box suggests that a splinter of the cogito remains in our minds, some fragmentary intuition or insightful glimpse that we cannot accommodate and so wall off in order to reject. I am not interested in philosophically defending the cogito, or at least the metaphysical cogito we are familiar with: the rational and disengaged instrumentalist manipulating the empty machinery of matter. But I am interesting in probing for that splinter, which I suspect is lodged somewhere in the apparently yawning gap between self-conscious awareness and the phenomenal world -- a gap that, despite some hearty attacks from nondualists East and West, continues to inform subjectivity. ....   more »

(hybrid cow)

The technocratic and progress-oriented Nehruvian visions dominated independent India during its first two decades. The great celebrations of science were followed by a period of doubt in the years following the Emergency, in the 1980s and 1990s, when the philosophy of science in India was reinvented, by a grass roots movement. The overall critique can be mapped across the civics of technological transfer.

The Marxist inspired Kerala Sahitya Shastra Parishad, a leftist science movement in Kerala sought to take the scientific imagination and method to the villages through mass quizzes and plays. It probably enacted more versions of Brecht’s The Life of Galileo in Kerala than have been performed anywhere else in the world. Intermediate technologists such as Amulya Reddy at Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science worked on the recovery of local knowledge and material. Experiments centered around the rights of biomass societies and included experiments on biogas and cooking stoves. The Narmada struggle against large dams can also be located in this domain.   more »

This paper assesses, on the basis of key arguments from Pierre Bourdieu's work, how and why a consensus about the positive effects of globalization and liberalization could have established itself as a dominant discourse across Indian social space. Describing the discourse that validates globalization and economic liberalization as a particular worldview, which he terms 'neoliberalism', Bourdieu describes how neoliberalism establishes itself as a doxa ...   more »

Reference: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution

... As you may have noticed, Dawkins when discussing religion is, in effect, a blunt instrument, one that has a hard time distinguishing Unitarians from abortion clinic bombers. What may be less obvious is that, on questions of God, Dawkins cannot abide much dissent, especially from fellow scientists (and especially from fellow evolutionary biologists). Indeed Dawkins is fond of imputing ulterior motives to those "Neville Chamberlain School" scientists not willing to go as far as he in his war on religion: he suggests that they're guilty of disingenuousness, playing politics, and lusting after the large prizes awarded by the Templeton Foundation to scientists sympathetic to religion.[2] The only motive Dawkins doesn't seem to take seriously is that some scientists genuinely disagree with him.

Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins's work, I'm afraid that I'm among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.    more »

Reference: 100 years of Sri Aurobindo on evolution

Second of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in a Mystery that is irreducible. Interesting also is the fact that even as Jaron Lanier, Staurt Kaufmann, and others concerned with the science of complexity steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end they wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world.

Although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and the role of the observer, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem a bit lacking in its calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view, but the attempt is valuable nontheless rc...

Reductionism has led to very powerful science. One has only to think of Einstein’s gen- eral relativity and the current standard model in quantum physics, the twin pillars of twentieth century physics. Molecular biology is a product of reductionism, as is the Human Genome Project.

But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings. The reductionist worldview led the existentialists in the mid- twentieth century to try to find value in an absurd, meaningless universe, in our hu- man choices. But to the reductionist, the existentialists’ arguments are as void as the spacetime in which their particles move. Our human choices, made by ourselves as human agents, are still, when the full science shall have been done, mere happenings, ultimately to be explained by physics.

In this book I will demonstrate the inadequacy of reductionism. Even major physicists now doubt its full legitimacy. I shall show that biology and its evolution cannot be re- duced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came na- turally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. “Real” here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence. Weinberg notwithstanding, there are explanatory ar- rows in the universe that do not point downward. A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion. More, all this came to exist without our need to call upon a Creator God.....    more »

Donald Theall, Marshall McLuhan's first graduate student recently past away. Theall like McLuhan was also a brilliant Joyce scholar and saw much of what we now know as cyberspace prefigured in his works. - rc

The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics.

While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_" established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.  In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: ...
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It was in an equally desperate gamble at increasing popular awareness of the "flip" done to us by the age of electric circuitry that McLuhan undertook an essentially medical survey of technological society. McLuhan's "classification of symptoms" took the form of an elaborate and historical description of the evolution of technology from the "mechanical" extensions of man (wheels, tools, printing) to the mythic, inclusive technologies of the electric age (television, movies, computers, telephone, phonograph). His "diagnosis" was that the crisis induced by technological society had much to do with the "closures" (numbing) effected among the sense ratios by new technical inventions. McLuhan was explicit about the technological origins of the modern stress syndrome: "the outering or extension of our bodies and senses in a new invention compels the whole of our bodies and senses to shift into new positions in order to maintain equilibrium."
A new "closure" is occasioned in our sensory organs and faculties, both private and public, by new technical extension of man. And McLuhan's "therapeutic": the deployment of the "creative imagination" as a new way of seeing technology, and of responding, mythically and in depth, to the challenges of the age of electric circuitry. For McLuhan, the stress syndrome associated with the coming-to-be of the technostructure could only be met with the assistance of educated perspective. If it is the human fate to live within its (own) central nervous system in the form of the electronic simulation of consciousness, then it is also the human challenge to respond creatively to the "dread" and "anxiety" of the modern age. We may be the servomechanisms, the body bits, of a technical apparatus which substitutes a language of codes, of processed information, for "natural" experience, but this is a human experience which is double-edged. Without the education of perspective or, for that matter, in the absence of a "multidimensional perspective" on technique, it will surely be the human destiny to be imprinted by the structural imperatives, the silent grammar, of the new world information order.
But it was also McLuhan's hope, occasioned by his faith in the universality of reason that the electronic age could be transformed in the direction of creative freedom. After all, it was his over-arching thesis that the era of electric circuitry represented a great break-point in human experience: the end of "visual, uniform culture" based on mechanical technologies, and the ushering in of a popular culture of the "new man". which would be fully tribal and organic. In all his texts, but particularly in The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan insisted on teasing out the emancipatory tendencies in new technologies. Against the blandishments of an "official culture" to impose old meanings on novel technologies, McLuhan sympathized with "anti-social perspectives": the creative perspectives of the artist, the poet, and even the young, who respond with "untaught delight to the poetry, and the beauty of the new technological environment."
In his intellectual commitment to the development of a new perspective on technology, McLuhan was, of course, only following Joyce in his willingness to respond to the technological environment with a sense of its "creative process." "He (Joyce) saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it awake or awake or both." Anyway in McLuhan's world, in a society which has sound as its environment, we have no choice.
"We simply are not equipped with earlids."    more »

This demo shows the use of Second Life as a platform for Augmented Reality. With our modified Second Life client, avatars and other Second Life graphicss can be superimposed perspectively correct on a live video stream and in real-time.   more »

Augmented reality combines features of a virtual environment with the real world. Most often, the augmentation is visual, with a user sporting an eyepiece connected to a wearable computer and positioning equipment. By tracking where the user’s head is and what he is seeing, the computer is able to overlay graphics and/or text onto his vision.   more »

Barack Obama has made history. Here are some well considered meditations on the historic events and news coverage of the past week courtesy of Jon Stewart.   more »

First of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in an irreducible Mystery. Interesting also is the fact that even as Lanier, Kaufmann, and other complexity scientist steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world. However, although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and observation, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem lacking in their calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view rc...

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System....   more »

Nigerian child waits for food (AP photo)

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls "de-peasantization"--the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally...."   more »

Dr. L. M. Singhvi, an eminent Indian citizen and jurist who served India's cultural, literary, legislative and public life in numerous ways, including as Indian High Commissioner to U.K.; as Chairman of Jnana Pith Pravara Parishad, as Chairman of High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora passed away on 6th October 2007 at the age 76. Here, an Aurovilian remembers his association with Auroville and his service to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother....   more »

China's All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq...   more »

human/cow embryonic stem cells
Photo courtesy University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Although some have concerns about the crossing of human and ape species, the possible creation of a hybrid Hanuman or other entities previously thought to belong only to myth :

"In April 2005, the National Academies -- chartered by Congress to advise the nation on matters of science -- released a report affirming that scientists should be allowed to create such entities if the experiments were approved by special review boards. The advisers came down against the creation of human-monkey or human-ape embryos, as well as experiments in which a human-like brain might develop in a non-human animal" wp.

The UK has just approved research for the crossing the boarders of human bovine species limits to harvest stem cells:

"The bill would allow scientists to continue injecting human DNA into cows' eggs that have had virtually all their genetic material removed, as well as other hybrid embryo processes for stem cell research. Scientists say the embryos would not be allowed to develop for more than 14 days. "wp

In England apparently there has been a long reasoned debate on the issue, one has to wonder however what is going on with embryo research in emerging nations where the market for experimentation may be seen in only the context of its exchange value. Whatever the case it appears our future bodies will in some way or other cohabit, or draw upon a physical (subtle physical) world shared with other species

What follows is a report from the Washington Post on recent events in England along with some further context of chimeras from the Center on Bioethics and Public Policy. rc...

Inter-species hybrids and chimera are entities created from the mixing of two or more different species. Hybrids are organisms whose genetic make up has been created by mixing the genes of two or more species; typically the gametes of two species are fused to create a single zygote. Chimera are organisms consisting of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells; for example two fertilised eggs or early embryos may be fused together and develop as a single organism....
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A link will take you to Zizek's my space page, there you can meet some of his friends, Nietzsche, Freud, Jameson, Marx (Groucho) . The wild and crazy guy of critical theory does My Space. As a bonus included is also an article on the symbolic and real in cyberspace:

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real?....   more »

Dennett's singularly contentless commentary reminded me of this motto and its corollary, "When you have nothing to say, say it louder"—a tactic that got 450 prophets of Baal into terminal trouble with Elijah. Dennett devoted the longest chapter of his recent book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to what I described as "an excoriating caricature of my ideas, all in order to bolster his defense of Darwinian fundamentalism." In two recent articles in this journal, I presented a response that, although strongly worded in my own defense, presented a series of general intellectual arguments and specific documentations. In Part 1, I critiqued the three metaphors (and metaphor-making as a scientific tactic in general) that underpin the logic of Dennett's entire case: Darwinism as a "universal acid"; the image of cranes vs. skyhooks as explanatory principles; and the claim that evolution is algorithmic. In my own defense in Part 2, I then explained the potential importance to evolutionary theory of three arguments associated with my work, and falsely branded as trivial by an uncomprehending Dennett: punctuated equilibrium, spandrels, and contingency of evolutionary patterns. Finally, I quoted specific examples of his unfair rhetorical tactics in four categories: false assimilation to statements made by others, false characterizations, high density of factual error, and gratuitous speculation about motives.   more »

As I have stated elsewhere progress is a feature of the consciousness of the observer viewing the world. And George Bush certainly lives in a world of his own.   more »