If anyone knows the actual Machiavelli of a certain Spirit of dynamic evolving, emerging Renaissance universality, ecumenical global communion sensibility and a powerful convicted commitment to whole individual, social and humane flourishing (though embodied in his native Christian tongue, text, context and dynamic anthropology as a member rooted, influenced and “made” in Western European political, cultural, linguistic, economic “embodying” (ie I am deliberately using this term in the sense of ontology, reality, being, habitus, common sense and social imaginaria, in contrast to ethics, epistemology and disembodied language-based “publics, traditions and unmoored peoples without borders, foundations and any particular solidarite, egalite or internationale but their own individual perspective and worldview!
Chalk one up for the powers that be! who now simply letting themselves go with the unaccountable and anti-democratic dehumanizing flow of the consolidated thoroughly saturating “Leviathan”
of a certain spirit to and fro in the Total Modern World enclosed and contained by the evolving, emerging triaxial tyranny of abstract unified commodifying technology-augmented powers embodied and mutually-confirming in State, Capital and Culture global governability systems.
I prefer a differing and wholly other world than this TMW one.
I prefer to deeply know by wholly being in the God Beautiful Reality embodying our unprecedented epochal age in all inspired evolutionary dynamic historically-situated peoples, traditions, agonizing struggles and triumphal accomplishments, conversations, canons and unfolding complex, various and diverse progression as a universal/particular/unfinished Civilization.
And thus we are a new cradling of all unique, original, first and last nations, civilizations and emchanted, beloved, eternal and powerful liberal, liberation and democratic Renaissance, Sermon on the Mount beautiful little children of innocence, fierce children of experience and then threefold epic grandeur children of transfiguring the powers that be, the traumatizing of our good humanity, our precious children, our cherished evolutionary arcs of magnificence across all cultures, places, literature and peoples of theology, science and history and of most urgent essentialist imperative, for this is catastrophic ending of our sustainable, delicious, fecund, abundant and flourishing good earth, and we myst be willing to get outside our heads, minds, worlds, comfortable conventional spirit of phenomenology privileging the consciousness of the few overt he embodying whole humane flourishing of the beaitifed poor in Spirit of not just consciousness, but the eternal powerful totality of soul, heart, mind , body and life as of evolutionary origins, beginnings, ends and middle journeys far beyond the tiny limited scope of our existential embrace of crises, our immersion and engulfment in the technology and science-driven modern executive dual processing integral organon of Systems 1 and Systems 2 thinking. Go to MIT as just one of these new modern brains enlisted by all the most “competitive, diverse and dynamic” powerful of the powers that be.
Note this phrase and concept of the “powers that be” has long been surpassed by the unbound titans today. It is now a quaint notion of the folk, democratic egalitarian radical
peoples in the making and of course the usual suspects of those ever returning new old Lefts and old new Rights who still keep their poet’s winter’s watch on the actual visible and actionable “beasts” who once could be revealed in the “powers that be.”
O what a wonderful world that once was, at least for those who are now first and last to be the most vilnerable, unusable and rightly subject to all hideous manner and strengths of exckusionary dehumanizing violence that is now the stuff of abundant fountainhead individuals and peoples, and their jaunty flying Science Space X G5 supercomputing dual processing financial, political, cultural and now even embodying the three XYZ eternal and immediate axes of what it is to embrace human finitude in astonishing illuminating relationship to all beyond and without, before and within, inspiring us of triumphal, better futures for all: theology transcendent Y, science immanent X and history kairos Z.
This too is now programmable. Thank God, almighty, for those ofnus who remain little children of innocence who are simultaneously of all impactful, visionary and heavenly
realities, visions, hopes, dreams, loves, solidarity and philosophies that unify, affirm and ignite the true, honest, pure and lovely We the People powers that be!! And thus we have three popular fronts of threefold eoic grandeur of trilogy metamorphoses: the mutually dependent, challenging, enriching, terrifying and loving powers, possibilities and abundance of humane flourishing bodies of science, theology and history that we can define, be, ascend, set goals, standards, measures and enter all arenas of power, policy, politics, culture and communications and transfigure these into three coequal places. The traditional two that are by nature of the public realm (remember Machiavelli as actually quite remarkable in proclaiming that in a body public (classical to modern republic or liberal democacy today) one must “assume vice to allow for virtue” ie the unseemly
reality is that all republics fail for not recognizing this necessary assumption due to the nature of the arena and not those who engage in it).
But that tragic fact remains and so now this third category must somehow cultuvate as much as possible the opposite assumption in the non-public realm, “assume virtue to allow for vice”. BTW, this critical distinction and qualitative threshold depends upon our cultivating of evolutionary unfolding embodied habits of the soul, heart, mind, body and life of the whole humane civilization in the making, our first hominid capacities still in each and every child’s individual, social and whole development in utero to their distinctive activating of this dynamic potentiality of utopian novums for complete flourishing, original oceanic creativity, indigenous unitive embodiment, instinctive empathy, utopian imagination, radical courage, rational/intuitive executive mind, etc such is the stuff the private sphere is made of. And if we can send the privileged few into their own self-serving enormous ego-centric and quite beastlike ascendancy for interplanetary travel and new colonizing,
Don’t you think we could try if only as a faith experiment, a scientific hypothesis, the very proof of our God’s overwhelming grace transfiguring and overcoming this world’s traumas and apparent death instinct of self and other loathing, fearing, judging, incarcerating, disenchanting and splintering into ever greater shards of broken glass as now blended in ever more powerful uses of paradoxical ancient to postmodern wisdom and agile, self-affirming good feelings of oneness. How wonderful for certain folks to have this philosophy and daily
practical life of accepting the world as it is while they can monetheless be in their own networked corporate interconnected improvement circles, anglican intentional commujities, and Voltaire skeptics separate gardens and literary salons. We are all now unmoored cosmopoles who are gifted, blessed and charismatic technology-drenched centering organons who can however we please, need, feel and desire self-actualize, self-empty, self-negate, self-transcend all material reality, the pathos of the idle, sick, poor, orphans, aliens, dehumanized, stigmatized and criminal is a sentimentality we can observe and then carry on in our own empowering fountainhead progressions, careers and abundance.
It is our selfhood and Godhead as joined in a sublime partnership of cocreating and coexisting that is truly the best of all worldviews in a world of privatized, diverse portfolio’d inner being, social protections, absence of empathy and happy, cheerful and successful high-performing individual pursuits of this, that of all other selfhoods of becoming based on resonating feelings, emotions and metabolic germinated, manipulated and deified inner joy of being!! Thus, we are present, enlightened, awakened, woke, mindful and set apart as the instrumentality of Godhead, Science Objective Reality and/or good players and interpreters of modern languages in great varieties of hunger games. for of differing alchemies, artistries and arsenals of luminous paradoxical infinite possibilities and oetmitations in the same bounded set.
But I still prefer my more sacred, sensual, hopeful, loving, XYZ embodied, embodying of our good oldnewmagnificent Earth, our common children, home, evolutionary arc, our great arch of civilization discovering, redeeming, celebrating and creating of all first forever good things of indigenous, utopian, liberal, liberation and democracy as more needed now than ever before.
But is any of this really desired now by people who are cosmic, interplanetary and in networked agile separate communities in the fellowship of all the peoples that are “us”
ie those who make us and themselves feel good, safe, affirmed and seeing and making their reality of radically amazing transcendent space y, immanent space x and/or kairos time z. For this too can mow be engineered!!
Why would anyone with the actual cake of being among the privileged few who can be in and of their own good lives enjoying unprecedented material, spiritual and artistic power, wealth, culture, authority and communications communities, relationships, systems and careers and then eat it too with their God and particular/universal participant partnering in their God/Science/History primary language ever want to try being “something new under the sun?”
You remember this phrase, don’t you? It is of course not at all viable in the paradoxical glory of our glorious “great container” and unfortunate but inevitable “dehumanizing confinement” for all those falling down in our various “just hierarchies”’ and tragic bottoms like the so-called dalits, nonbeing, enchanted amazing prophets, poets and loving peaceable warriors like James Baldwin, Walt Whitman but infinitely more witnesses across all generations who are not of this world’s seeing and making into the “untouchable, invisible, wounded, broken, traumatized and impoverished wretched of the earth.” or we are for them in their “living death poverty” and chant anti-democratic that they and we too but not really quite yet God’s least of the least whom we pray and give thanks that God prodigiously loves and holds them (and us if and when we need) in everlasting distant horizon arms, and we are off that hook, thank God.
Our total modern world of infinite meaningful individual worldviews and perspectives and constitutional political philosophy and free market presumptions is why I move away from ethics and epistemology and socalled postmodern linquistic turns that apotheosize all members of liberal democracies and glorious modernizing republics as individual creatives, artists, makers, technology-augmented best of all best, brightest, diverse, intersentional, computer-like artificial intelligence and those above them who make the states, markets, global theatres of culture, the rules of the road, the oceans that they must high-perform in all moments of time and space dendlessly to stay afloat in or swim beautifully and rise to the top or merely
fight like hell to be in the living waters, the original oceans and all other places free of these toxic, septic and smothering waters.
Thus we have three estates again as in the ancien regimes like all those of “old” recurring phenomena, patterns and dynamics as seen in our “lens” of historical pessimism like Europe, Asia, Africa, Americas, Australia and all peoples and civilizations compass points east, west, north and south before our becoming a We the People.
Those now like flying Leviathans optimizing from above the oceans;
Those in the oceans like big and middle and little fish doing the best they can in oceans increasingly hostile, alien, venal and dying; and all those in the bottoms not in and of any power, hope, desire or ability to be in the first and second estates.
Hmm…perhaps this is not such a world lost to itself afterall.
Vive, our democracy individual, social and whole humane revolutions, peoples and anundant world civilizations in the making again!
We are “something new under the sun” afterall!
In friendship,
Don | Donny | DL
