Ecoblogi – A Blog by Daniel Elkama

The end of the machine world, postmodern bubbles and unity from diversity

From about 1880 to 1945 we can talk about the modern era. In this way, technology, science and society changed and developed in many ways: electricity, telegraph, radio, car, airplane, etc. The world became smaller through technology (transportation and communication), the picture of the world became clearer with the help of science, the world became integrated (travel, gold standard, time zones, science, SI system) and became similar, modern globalization began and people’s material well-being mainly increased while environmental destruction worsened. Both the world and its territory and peoples and nature were colonized.

This time can be considered as the era of man and technology and progress. It can be said that in that period, however, man lost a piece of his soul: the romantic era that preceded it was replaced by a belief in progress and a mechanistic worldview. The world and society began to be seen as a machine and people as machine parts. This can be seen to have led to the contempt of ”wild” and ”untamed” nature, seeing nature as resources, natural resources and accelerating environmental destruction: oil was in barrels, wood in cubes and gold in carats. The colonized colonies in particular became raw material warehouses for Western countries. This had already started in the 16th century with plantations, capitalism and the birth of world trade. At that time, world trade was based especially on ”luxury products”, such as coffee, tobacco and ivory. This kind of commodity thinking broke the connection with the idea of nature as alive and sacred.

They also began to see the Western way of life as better and these years are also the time of the most intense colonialism. Africa was divided with a ruler at the Berlin conference in 1884. It can be said that racial doctrines also prevailed most strongly then. Earlier in the 18th century and even in the early 19th century, there was a perception of even the natives as ”noble savages” and nature was respected as beautiful, wild and original. If you look at history, you will see that the romantic worldview and the ”realistic”, mechanistic worldview have alternated all along.

It can be seen that Darwin’s thinking, misinterpreted, also led to thinking about lower species and races. The 1880s was the great era of Darwinism’s boom. However, people did not understand him and applied Darwinism to society, which should not be done under any circumstances. Society does not work like nature, with its values or laws. Hume’s guillotine principle says that from the way things are, for example in nature, it is not possible to deduce how they should be. For example, prairie dogs are polygamous and males have harems, but this should not be applied to humans. Animals eat each other, but this cannot be interpreted as meaning that humans should eat animals.

The mechanistic worldview and modernism led to competition between nations and culminated in two bloody world wars on the stage of world history. It can be thought that this competition was due to the pursuit of resources and on a finite planet this inevitably leads to conflict. Competition is not suitable for a finite earth. It can be thought that the competition was also first and foremost a struggle of ideas, where the free and democratic West, Hitler’s conservative ”utopia”-seeking Germany and the communist ”utopia”-seeking Soviet Union were opposite each other. The West was the heir of the Enlightenment, free and democratic, and Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were products of the modernist era. The Soviet Union and Germany were united by a strong nationalism and a view of society as a machine whose mission is to create progress and order. The individual was not valuable. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany hated the free West and free nature and inferior races. This had gruesome consequences that we know. The Nazis’ horrific crime against humanity, the Holocaust, was, according to Nazi Germany, ”weeding out”. The Nazis even classified wild plants and animals into ”Aryan” and ”non-Aryan”. Man wanted to rule the whole world, society and nature. Everything had to work as an artificial machine. As artificial houses of cards always do, this world order collapsed. The law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, always increases as time progresses. Entropy usually leads to the leveling of opposites and differences. States also follow entropy, and isolated nationalist islands and closed dictatorships will sooner or later disintegrate. Pressure from within is usually the main cause. It can be seen that Hegel’s dialectic is also partly due to entropy. There is a thesis, there is an antithesis and finally a synthesis of these, which is a good compromise between the two countries, for example capitalism and socialism (which is not the same as communism”

Society is not a machine, as technocrats or Nazis think, and it is not a business, that’s what economists think. Both of these ways of thinking lead to destructive competition and the trampling of individual rights. Only a certain elite will benefit. Society is a community of people that should work for the good of all its members. The primary goal of society is not order, functional aspects, progress, nor economic growth, but people’s happiness. We can say that the whole world is a community, a global village. Global thinking is necessary not only for the success and well-being of humanity, but also for the survival of the entire human species.

1945 was in many ways the end of the modern era. It was followed by the postmodern era, where society is democratic, free and a patchwork of small subcultures and the individual himself decides about the affairs of his own life. The UN and global thinking also rose from the ashes of the world wars. Postmodernism is characterized by the disintegration and fragmentation of a unified culture into several subcultures, there is no longer a typical Finnish or English person, but there are skateboarders, hip hops, greens, Rastafarians, heavy metal fans,, geeks, goths and manga fans. Finnish and English manga fans probably resemble people from their own country much more than others who do not live in the same genre and bubble. People are probably allowed to be much more like themselves than in a unified culture, because they can live in a bubble that suits them. However, it would be important and desirable for those in different bubbles to understand each other and be able to communicate with each other. This also usually happens. Sometimes, however, a bubble, such as the extreme right is very hostile towards everyone else, becomes embittered and isolated. This makes it difficult to communicate and work for the common good. On the other hand, it is very easy for geeks and manga fans to understand each other. The freedom brought by postmodernism was something absolutely important for humanity, but it is also important to look for a common value base.

The postmodern era is also characterized by existentialism, which is the complete opposite of the unified thinking, mechanistic machine thinking and unified culture of the modern era. Existentialism arose especially from the world pain and anxiety caused by the world wars (although existentialism began in the 19th century), ”angst”: being human was associated with the experience that a person has been thrown into the world and can choose their own way of being and living, choosing for themselves what the purpose of life is for them. It is generally thought that of the good alternatives, existentialism is not nihilism, but recognizes the existence of values, but emphasizes freedom. Existentialism thinks that there is no clear human essence or essentia (what everyone should be), but that we can be different people, as long as we don’t violate each other’s rights. A society with different people with different personalities, strengths and ideas is stronger, more creative and more prosperous. It’s good that we get to pursue the things that are important to us, as long as we don’t fool around more seriously.

Existentialism brought both freedom and responsibility for one’s choices. However, if misunderstood, existentialist and postmodern thinking can lead to a vacuum of values, which the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright warned about. A united culture often had shared, common values. In the postmodern world, values are very different and the danger is relativism and the rejection of objective values. However, we know for sure that there are both subjective and objective values. No sane philosopher would claim that values are entirely subjective. In a value vacuum, there is a danger of stopping and forgetting to strive for good. The value vacuum is often also filled by something, if it is filled by money or a consumer society, we are on the wrong track. Even a populist like Trump can easily fill that void with hatred and totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt emphasized that separated, disaffected people are easy prey for people’s agitators and dictators. Environmental destruction has continued to grow in the postmodern era, precisely because the vacuum of values has often been filled by vanity, greed and lust for money. It is true that some subcultures are very strongly in favor of nature conservation, and since the 90s and especially since 2010, nature conservation and environmental thinking have made their way into people’s everyday life, politics and economic life.

It is important that humanity searches for a common base of values, despite the division into different subcultures and the emphasis on individual freedom. It is important to seek the common good of all humanity. In the postmodern era, we have not completely lost unified thinking, but there are still values that the majority accept. It could be said that the old world of values has mostly been replaced by a new world of values rather than that the values have disappeared. One of the most significant new values is global thinking and emphasizing global responsibility. Even between completely different peoples and cultures and all the countries of the world, cooperation has created a deep understanding of what should be the common goals of the world. In 2015, the countries of the world agreed on common global sustainable development goals in New York: there are 17 of these Agenda2030 goals and they include eliminating hunger from the world, making clean water accessible to everyone, clean, renewable energy, peace work, cooperation, and the protection of terrestrial and marine life. These can be considered the common, shared values of humanity. They have been negotiated by all nations and the negotiations that have taken place are extremely long, starting with the Stockholm Environment and Development Conference in 1972. We can say that the guiding principle of the postmodern era is ”unity in diversity”.

Humanism has experienced a renaissance in the postmodern era. A person is an infinitely valuable individual, not a part of a machine or a pawn to promote an idea. A person is infinitely valuable, regardless of his abilities or production contribution to society. We are all equal. 1948 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was announced at the UN, which gathered the rights that belong to every human being from almost all areas.

A value is something worth pursuing, for example equality, justice, music or sports. Some of the values are objective and clearly good or bad. In his book Variations of the Good, Georg Henrik von Wright considers how language, like mathematics, mirrors reality. If we can justify with language that something promotes good, well-being or happiness, it is good, and things that, on the contrary, reduce these are bad. A value is something that brings more good, such as joy, love, health or wealth. The opposite of a value, i.e. a bad thing, is for example disease, war or climate change. The Dalai Lama stated that every being wants to be happy and free from suffering. Every conscious being is valuable and has rights. This is because a conscious being is an experiencer who can experience well-being or malaise. Without a conscious subject, there would be no morality. All of us humans and animals are conscious subjects of our own lives and infinitely valuable. We can choose some of the values ourselves, what is important to us in life. Some are values that touch everyone. This enables unity in diversity. I believe that humanity will develop in a better direction. Sometimes we’ve taken a lot of baggage, but as a whole we’ve flown light years from what was in the Middle Ages or the time of the Roman subjugation, when there were despotic kings and oppressed slaves and people were lynched as witches in the marketplace. The Roman emperor Galigula even appointed his horse as a senator. May science, freedom, democracy, wisdom and Civilization lead nations from the darkness of night to light, justice and truth.

”O Finland, look, Your day is coming
The threat of the night banished is already gone
And in the brightness of the morning skylark calls
As if the roof of heaven itself was ringing
The powers of the night, the light of the morning is already winning
My day is coming, O land of my birth

Oh get up, Finland, get up high
Get forged by great memories
Oh stand up, Finland, you showed the world
That you banished slavery
And that you didn’t bend under the oppression
The morning has begun, homeland”

Finlandia – Jean Sibelius

Daniel Elkama…