Silo in Lisbon, 6th November 2006

Notes of a conversation with Silo in Lisbon, 6th November 2006


Humanist Moments

They are characterised not only by the fact that there are no wars. There is also a coexistence between cultures; societies in relation with the outside and the inside and the search for new truths.

They are not moments that can be produced; the impulse for relations is from the beginning and it can already be seen in the relationships of living organisms that come together, form tissue, form organs, there is cooperation among organisms, there is symbiosis, etc. So anomalies also form, when a few cells want to eat the others, generating a cancer that ends up completely destroying the organism and itself in the process.

So, human groups reach agreements. To start with they reach agreements to make another human group disappear, but we see here this impulse to put oneself in relationships. There is an impulse that exists in life and this impulse becomes ordered, producing relations among organisms.

Humanist moments should also be seen in context, because the arrival of slavery for example today horrifies us, however it was an advance with respect to the previous epoch when people were conquered and all the enemies were killed. Afterwards they could choose between death and slavery, it is an advance, seen from afar.

Generations

Over decades a generational abyss has been produced, the generational dialectic has stopped in the last 30 years and it gives the impression that history has stopped. There was no dialogue among generations, but neither was there dialectic. There is an abyss between generations. Now bridges and links are trying to be built between them. Generations are so separate that they are like different cultures and they should be treated as such. Let there be interchange between them, let there be friction. To build these bridges for this dialectic. This generational abyss is interpreted as if it’s the end of history. They cannot be taken seriously. They do not understand the phenomenon.

We have to put attention in interculturality of generations, with different times and spaces.

The adult generation is the present and wants to remain in power (in general) and make the present eternal. Youth struggles to displace this generation and so history moves.

We can also observe the division in society between men and women, with different characteristics, morphologically different. There have been epochs of matriarchy and epochs of patriarchy, also there have been moments of history where there where stages of ephebos, where there was an ideal of beauty with an aesthetic value. Also today with youth there is a larval ephebian moment, although it doesn’t function through comprehension but rather through intuition that youth will sort out everything.

In agricultural epochs, when the repetition of cultivation was observed, the cycle of seasons, and the agricultural cycle, it was believed that history moved in circles. Then it was observed that things change. How is it that there are things that repeat themselves but still things change? “It is not possible to bathe in the same river twice”, it was said. The river remained but it is not the same river. Not even to bathe once in the same river, said Nietzsche, but this was already a messed up mental idea.

We are talking about overcoming the generational alienation. The differences are welcome; there is no problem with that. What’s happening is that things are in progress. We are talking about putting bridges across the abyss, but not of “reconciling them”, it doesn’t matter if they reconcile or not, what’s important is that there is interaction. It doesn’t matter if the interchange is aggressive, in differentiation, what matters is that there is interaction. The same with the sexes, it is not correct to propose to reconcile the sexes, they are different organisms but they can complement. We do not mean for the sexes to be equal.

Culture

Culture is an issue that we have been talking about for 30 years; now everyone is talking about it and for us it’s boring. Soon they will start to talk about generations. We will be full of “generations” and they will say that we are saying things that are close to them. It is the epoch that is approaching our proposals and so it seems that we are entering better into the environment.

Thought has stopped in the West giving the sensation of the end of history although technology continues and successfully. It is the great gift of science. Tecne (technique) is the daughter of Episteme (science). The paralysis of thought was prior to the generational paralysis. It coincided with the European civil war that became global with the subsequent entry of Japan and the USA.

Thought is once more beginning to emerge today. We are seeing the first symptoms. A new way of representing the world can be seen in Prigogine and in others. But in the human sciences (social) it will take more time. For example the right still has the influence of Roman law (property law and inheritance law); they will take more time to be modified. It is still basically the same Roman law and societies have changed a lot since the Romans.

There is a change, there is a vibration everywhere and the new generations will be the fresh air as the air in this “room” is very polluted.

Dissemination

We need to think how to present our thing and that the people represent it well. The fundamental ideas have to be expressed correctly although others will not accept it for the moment. The issue is how it is transmitted. To transmit correctly. It doesn’t matter if the message is taken or not, but that what we want to transmit is accepted or rejected. We already have examples of distortion in what we have seen through experience like concepts such as humanism being translated as humanitarianism that is associated with a compassionate being and ends up in an NGO. While Humanism is more general, of greater context, it is more radical, it is a vision of the world; humanitarianism is more particular, more situational, it moves with the objective to end hunger without seeing where it comes from and in reality ends up without achieving its objective as there is a lie in the origin of the proposal. We are not saying that it is bad to help people, in health, education, water projects, etc., only that it is not humanism.

The intermediary step is missing between the Doctrine and what reaches the people. We have to adapt it, so a circle of people in the basic themes is needed to adapt them. We have to develop an ambit. For example the issue of cultures, the issue of generations, they are issues to develop. We have the fundamental ideas. We are not talking about starting now to make an Encyclopaedia of Humanism, above all as it has already been done.

We have to adapt the language. Language is very affected by social changes in the last 30 years. It’s a lot of change. We are dragging a language of another epoch. It is not a doctrinaire issue; it is a theme to study how it reaches the people. “To make it easy” is our problem. If we pass it to the publicists, they try to manipulate and not translate. The basis of publicity is in falsification. If we ask them to translate what they will do will be manipulation. We need to translate it ourselves and then pass it to them.

“How we are going to put it” for the old left was “so that they don’t notice who wrote it”. For us it is how we can do it so that the idea we want to transmit is understood. They are different directions. For Karl Marx, the youth, the ideology was “masking reality”.

What is the target group? Which generation? We are not talking about doing sociologism where the strata in which we want to spread a message is studied. We should usually direct ourselves to a target group of the future. We observe the proximity of the media to the middle class. It is they who reach the media, not the cartoneros, not the poor classes that many times don’t know how to read or write. The middle class has the capacity to homogenise codes. So the target group is the middle class that communicate with others (“those with common sense”, their feet on the ground, those who say; “from the darkness comes the Light” – Tomas de Aquino – or “from discussion certainty is born”, they are thoughts of the Middle Ages).

The doubtful will not be our target, because more than a typology this is a type of temperament that is found everywhere, it is a climate of oppression, it is a way of being in the world. An example of temperament is Nationalism. It is a type of temperament. It is something visceral, typical of the ideologies of the 19th century. Nationalists use a lot of adjectives. They have a romantic component that gives rise to literary, artistic and political currents. If Marxism had been visceral, it would have been developed as something mystical. In Marxism they censored themselves but if they hadn’t been so rational, they could have been soaked in the existential need of people, if they’d had a cold head. People don’t only have objective needs, they are also born, get married, die, need Meaning. They did not attend to any of this. A lot of self-censorship. In one of Marx’s books, when he tries to deal with social realities and arrives to the poets, he says “poets cannot be spoken of”. They cannot be spoken of because they take you to an inspired consciousness, they take you anywhere, they fill the kitchen with smoke.


The European Forum

We have seen new indicators in this Forum. There are expressions such as “Humanism as a work of art”. In the summary that was done at the end, things were said that were already outlined in the opening speeches about the situation in Europe. Here they weren’t saying the same thing, there was translation. People were making the proposals their own and rejuvenating them. It’s very impressive. In the European forum many new and good things were heard.

We are approaching a planet that is preparing itself for change and it is because something interesting is happening in the environment. The register of closure has to do with the lack of solving of problems and this is producing a need to open up to new solutions. The Europeans are on the point of making a jump. Europe has never advanced so much as now, it has never expanded so much as now, it has never given so many new responses as now. The USA, which is a region in itself, is on the other hand, in compression.

This new moment can also be seen in the European structures.
Ephebos comes from Greek and refers to adolescents but in art refers to male figures that were fairly androgenous.
Larval – coming from a larva, like a caterpillar does
From the Greek philosopher Heraclitus

For more information about Techne and Episteme here’s a reference: HYPERLINK "http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/
Ilya Prigogine, Russian born Belgian physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for his work on dissipative structures which led him to pioneering research in self-organising systems.
Cartonero is someone who in the streets of Argentina go through the rubbish and sort out what can be recycled.

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