Seeing an orbital picture of planet Earth at night you straight away become conscious of 2 things. First how much energy is used to maintain the human experiment ; second, how inequitably it is distributed around the world. As James Lovelock latterly noted, civilization is energy-intensive yet the genuine energy that’s concerned in human existence can’t be seen as simply as the orbital photograph of our nightly planet commends.
The real energy driving the human experiment is psychic energy. There is undoubtedly some correlation between the physical energy emitted each night by our cities and the psychic forces that are driving late-modernity, yet this tells only part of a much bigger story.
Much of the mystic energy driving the human experiment is bounded by practices. Actually it is reasonably a credible offer to make a claim that customs are energy streams that draw on energy from past times, condense and focus energy in the present and, like a torch light, channel and project energy into the future. The fibre optic wires and satellite transmissions that bring speed and adaptability to the planet and its globalizing economy and culture, as well as the urban incandescence of the Earth at night, are in reality the by products of an invisible but obviously outlined confluence of energy generating conventions.
Roots & Brooks
Rabindranath Tagore, one of India’s great poets, describes creation as an awakening, an explosion of energy. Not the conventional Huge Bang, but something akin as Brahma awakens and its joy is limitless. The roots of the Indic convention lie in this expression of boundless-joy. Today this story has combined with many others like the course of the Ganges as it first meets the great brooks of Yamuna, Ghaghara and Kosi and goes on thru twists and turns, eventually spitting again in the monsoonal Delta of Bengal.
Similarly, the turbine engines of culture are alive with the dynamic dance of traditions, churning away like the great brook Ganges as it makes its ( untidy ) way to the ocean. The stories cultures tell themselves are the source of much energy, the dreams ( and nightmares ) that induce countries, drive business and government big wheels are way more strong than nuclear energy. The parables and metaphors that frame our comatose daily coming and goings are what we want to turn to when looking to rethink civilisation and our task in its upkeep.
The Educational Power Bill
When you think about conventions as passages of power it is possible to take a look at any social structure and ask about it : What practices power it? Who pays? Are there alternative energy sources?
Take one of societies most complicated and contested establishments : Education. Some distance from being monolithic education is a undoubted power grid generating large energy for the expansive and rapacious commercial and the cultural practices of a globalising world.
The energy of this system draws on an array of practices each bringing to the existing system energy in the shape of values, practices and principles. The humanism that drove education for hundreds of years has been soaked up by the practical wishes of a rapidly globalizing society. The pragmatic concerns of utilitarianism are at least in part off set by an opening up of democratic processes and a greening of the high school. Additionally , we also have the romantic convention putting the kid at the center of the learning equation. So we find humanist, practical, democratic, environmental and romantic strands at work ; all provide energy and work to maintain the coherence of the system.
And the cost? The humanist tradition privileged the old elites, where culture and money and power coalesced, the poor payed; the utilitarian, as power shifted from the old elites to the new, a new form of education emerged and the user pays, ultimately the poor are excluded and as money flows upwards, they pay again.
The democratic offers a way out, as does the environmental : both result from customs that challenge hierarchies, yet both are too fragmented to test the dominance of the practical, their effect is ameliorative but they contain the potential energy to test this dominance should a change in the world-system bring about a power failure – such a shift might be either social or environmental. And the romantic? Kid centredness is forceful, as it is the base of both soft and hard individualism, but it is too simply coopted by the dominant cultural elites, especially those looking for a cultural off-set for the vacuum made by the loss of humanism to utilitarianism.
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