The Double Crisis of Modernity

Kishore Ghandi has written that "the double crises of civilisation and evolution today is the product of the human mind". What he means by this is that modernism has led finally to a crisis of space and time -- of the social organisation of space and time -- represented as "civilisation" on the one hand, and as "evolution" on the other, and that the roots of this disorganisation of space and time lie in the mind itself (or what I prefer to call a "mentality").

Nothing is more fundamental to our reality, and therefore our conception of ourselves, than the organisation of space and time. What we call "reality" is fundamentally an organisation and arrangement of space and time. It is, after all, what we mean by the word "Cosmos" (ie, order) as opposed to Chaos (the Void as the absence of space and time; or what terrified Pascal as "the silence of the infinite", and horrified Blake as the "Soul Shuddering Vacuum").

The part is made to swallow the whole and mind becomes totalitarian and self-enclosed (or what some have called "the Age of Monologue"). Only the indicative/analytical, third-person form of speech is credited with true reality, while the other social forms of speech -- narrative/epical (past), optative/lyrical (subject), or imperatival/dramatical (future) -- are dismissed as derivative and secondary. by longsword on Thu 10 Mar 2005 12:06 PM CST Permanent Link Cosmos