Novus Atlantis

A new architectural style for human cultures

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As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.”

Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”

Human civilization began with a single invention; writing. It started, mostly likely, with three threads; Mesopotamia (or maybe Egypt) around 3200 BC, China around 1200 BC and Mesoamerica around 600 BC.  Within these threads many discrete civilizations have risen and fallen.

The last of the three major threads was smashed by the first when the Europeans came to the Americas in the 1500s. Two endured into modern times, the Eastern and Western traditions. Early contact between the two goes back probably two thousand years with the Silk Road trade route that stretched from Rome to China but from the seventeenth century forward they were in constant contact. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they are rapidly merging into a single global civilization.

Clearly, for better or for worse, in the merger of these two great traditions, it is the West that is coming out as the dominant one.  This is dramatically illustrated by the economic system, art, and architecture to be found in the flourishing cities of China at the beginning of the 21st Century. They are all Western, one has to journey into rural provinces to find a truly Eastern perspective and even there it is not like it was. It is ironic that China at this time is probably more Capitalistic than most western countries even while it calls itself  Communist, but Communism too is  another western invention.

The remaining two threads have merged, civilization has become global, it is now Human civilization.  But just when we might expect a vigorous hybrid to emerge we find ourselves on the edge of disaster. Western civilization, even as it triumphs, is rotten at the core, the world is faced with “schism in the soul, schism in the body social.”

The Dali Lama once said, “You westerners are very good at developing your minds, not so good at developing your hearts.” A simple statement, but it is a recognition of the West’s core problem.

Evolution shaped man to live in nature, integrated into the natural ecology like all other living things. Like other mammals, humans have a complex, nuanced suite of social emotional responses. These enable cooperation and, where it serves survival, competition, both powerful survival mechanisms. Collectively, call them the sentient mind, these responces are the “heart” the Dali Lama was talking about.  The heart is not generally thought to be something that needs an in-depth education the way the mind does, we take it for granted.

Unlike the other mammals, humans evolved a powerful symbol-using intellect, the sapient mind, enabling them to construct useful abstract models of  the things presented to the senses. These models are our knowledge of the world.  When language came along (not an accident, since both language and knowledge are predicated on the same ability to process symbols), humans could share knowledge with each other. Once written language was invented, knowledge could be passed down the generations and, on the evolutionary time scale, civilizations blossomed over night.

Evolution has not adapted humans to live in civilization, humans cites are not like beaver damns or bee hives, constructed by a few simple compulsive reflexes. They are realizations of internal visions constructed from accumulated human knowledge. We build them and live in them because they are a mastery over nature that liberates us from the “nasty, brutish and short” existence that so often characterizes life integrated in a natural ecology.

But the human heart is troubled to live in an artificial place so different from the one for which it was shaped. Civilizations are fragile things, flourishing and then disintegrating in a brief spans of years, over and over again. They exist only as long as the inherent tension between our displaced hearts and our active minds remains in balance. The West, the world, has lost this balance. The end is near.

 What will rise from the ashes and when will it appear? And must humanity first suffer another Dark Age as it did after Rome fell? Perhaps this is that fear that has taken root in our public conscious spawning  one disaster scenario after another both in popular culture and in public discourse.

It need not be so.  Although the disintegration of a civilization is a singularity in history and no methodology can predict the course of events or guarantee a positive outcome, we are not totally helpless. Even in  chaotic  systems, if key boundary conditions can be managed, the outcomes are can be bounded as well.

A civilization is an organic structure, it has to be – all the parts must fit seemlessly together complementing and supporting one another. Hitherto all civilizations have risen out of chaos, their institutions and customs growing up like weeds among the ruined edifices of the past.

New Atlantis is a vision of a culture that can be grown, not out of chaos but out of cultivation, one that can be raised up from the chaos of the destructive “schisms in the body social” of the current global civilization. It is a child of both Western and Eastern traditions but a rebirth of neither, both must essentially die in giving birth.

It is not a utopian vision of the future, human nature, rough product of evolution as it is, can never conform itself to any clockwork paradise however artfully designed. Nor is it a patchwork, borrowing good things from present and past human cultures.

Yet it is a design, an architecture, that follows from a new understanding of what it means to be human and to experience life from a perspective that is fundamentally new. An experience that flows from educated minds in balance with wise and fully developed hearts.  As such every aspect of human culture is seen in a new light, every pillar of human civilization is redesigned, if not from the ground up, certainly with a new sensibility of what matters and what does not.

Sir Frances Bacon, published his “New Atlantis” in 1624. It describes a society based on Empiricism, what is now called the scientific method, which he pioneered.

“Generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit” would be the commonly held qualities of such a society, he believed.

Science has given much in the almost 400 years since he articulated this vision but western civilization appears headed into crisis rather than perfection.

However, this crisis may not be evidence that Bacon’s vision is flawed but rather that is on the cusp of being realized. It was first necessary for science, the child of empiricism to reach beyond the nuts and bolts of physics and chemistry all the way to the awesome complexities of the human mind and heart.

As with all organic structures New Atlantis will  spring from many roots. But if there is a tap root, a core that most contributes to the way and shape of growth of the whole it is this: that the development of human intellectual powers (the mind) must be balanced by an equal emphasis on human emotional development (the heart).

This core realization combined with the power of Bacon’s empiricism make possible the final reconciliation of what in traditional western culture were known as science, a product of the intellect and religion, a phenomena of the heart, except as it turns out, from the point of view of this new perspective, no reconciliation is needed.

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