ТЕХНИКА НАРОДУ

Perhaps because he was a philosopher rather than a novelist or poet,
Rene Guenon explored the Indian alternatives to the scientific and industrial
civilization of the West more thoroughly and cogently than any
other postwar writer. Guenon's early studies in mathematics gave his
spirited critiques of Western empiricism and inductive reasoning an
authority that the vague or sweeping strictures of Malraux and Elmer
simply could not match. His extensive and serious study of Hindu
philosophy made it possible for him to explain to Western readers the
Indian teachings and meditational techniques that he believed could help
the Europeans work their way out of the Kali Yuga (Dark Age) in which
he believed they had been entrapped for centuries. Guenon's vehement
rejection of what he regarded as the pseudo-Hinduism of the Theosophists
and his quarrels with the Freemasons gave his exposition of the
teachings of the Indian sages an added aura of authenticity.
Guenon explicitly challenged the validity of scientific and technological
advances as the supreme measures of individual human worth or of
civilized achievement. He insisted that "there are other ways of showing
intelligence than by making machines. " Guenon premised his challenge
on the supposition that there was a three-tiered hierarchy of human
cognition; the highest of these was metaphysics, not the sort of
scientific inquiry that for centuries had been dominant in the West. He
contended that only metaphysics was based on genuine intellectualism
and that metaphysics alone allowed one to explore the highest truths,
the ultimate reality. He considered science a lesser form of reasoning
which, because its objects were material and its methods empirical,
shared much with the lowest form of human cognition, based primarily
on sensory perceptions. Guenon believed that the approach to scientific
thought that had developed in the West since the Renaissance was narrower
and more applied than that followed by such thinkers as Aristotle
and the sages of Asian civilizations. Science had been transformed into
the handmaiden of technology, and both pressed into the service of
European inventors and engineers bent on manipulating the natural
world. The understandings achieved through experiment were necessarily
limited and provisional, as evidenced, Guenon surmised, by a
profusion of conflicting and transitory theories. He argued that this sort
of thinking posed little problem for Indian philosophers, who regarded
it as an inferior form of intellectual endeavor and preferred to concentrate
on the "immutable truths" that could be probed only at the highest
metaphysical level. But in the West, the sciences had come to dominate
thinking, despite the fact that they dealt with only the most superficial
aspects of existence. This dominance had resulted in an obsession
with material improvement and increase, which led in turn to greatly
intensified cravings for creature comforts and to discontent when these
could not be fulfilled. It had also brought into being a civilization that
was driven at an ever more frenetic pace by the machines and empirical
knowledge that its best minds had produced. The Great War and the
crisis of the modern, or scientific-industrial, order were the inevitable
result. But Guenon foresaw even greater calamities ahead, unless the
West fundamentally reordered its priorities and restored the primacy of
metaphysical thought. 
In questioning the superiority of scientific-industrial civilization,
which he equated with the modern, Guenon reversed many of the attributes
that the advocates of the civilizing mission had seen as vital
sources of European global dominance. He argued that change was a
symptom of instability; that progress was an illusion. What the Victorians
had disdained as stagnation, Guenon celebrated as the "Eastern"
striving for equilibrium and beyond that for the immutable-the highest
of all states. He saw the Westerners' need for incessant activity as a
sign of their shallowness and immaturity; he connected their restlessness
to an inability to concentrate or synthesize. Guenon felt that the
civilizing-mission ideology itself was little more than "moralist hypocrisy,
serving as a mask for designs of conquest or for economic ambitions." It is "an extraordinary epoch," he said,
in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being
given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed
of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization,
by being forced to adopt manners and institutions that were
made for a different race, and by being constrained to the most
distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for
which it has not the slightest use. For that is what is taking place;
the modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work
less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that
counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be nonexistent,
it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of
agitation and who does not produce much in a material way must
be an "idler."
Guenon also denounced the "savage competition" and social leveling
that had taken hold of modern societies. He yearned for the restoration
of social stratification, which he deemed attuned to the natural order of
things. He envisioned the creation of an intellectual elite that could lead
Europe from the abyss of materialism and violence into which it had
fallen. 

шумидер-модер wrote:Recimo, kako se dogodilo da tehnologija, takozvani tehnoloski razvoj, bude osnovna, glavna i jedina mera covekovog dostignuca?

No Country for Old Man wrote:

No to nikako ne znaci da tehnologija nije vazna, i verovatno presudna po sam nas opstanak.

шумидер-модер wrote:Afrika je, na primer, opstajala nekih nekoliko miliona godina bez tehnologije kao civilizacijske 'podloge', porodila covecanstvo, i ostala zabelezena kao najveci dostignuti stepen sklada okoline, okruzenja i stanovnistva.

шумидер-модер wrote:" It is "an extraordinary epoch," he said,
in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being
given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed
of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization,
by being forced to adopt manners and institutions that were
made for a different race, and by being constrained to the most
distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for
which it has not the slightest use.
...
Guenon also denounced the "savage competition" and social leveling
that had taken hold of modern societies. He yearned for the restoration
of social stratification, which he deemed attuned to the natural order of
things. He envisioned the creation of an intellectual elite that could lead
Europe from the abyss of materialism and violence into which it had
fallen. 

Radagast wrote:

шумидер-модер wrote:" It is "an extraordinary epoch," he said,
in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being
given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed
of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization,
by being forced to adopt manners and institutions that were
made for a different race, and by being constrained to the most
distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for
which it has not the slightest use.
...
Guenon also denounced the "savage competition" and social leveling
that had taken hold of modern societies. He yearned for the restoration
of social stratification, which he deemed attuned to the natural order of
things. He envisioned the creation of an intellectual elite that could lead
Europe from the abyss of materialism and violence into which it had
fallen. 

Guenonu je ideal slobode bila kastinska Indija, sa sve nagorim siromastvom, nedodirljivima, spaljivanjem udovica i kvazi-ropskim polozajem zena. Samo jedan iz niza potuljenih evropskih fasho-pacova, koji je umislio da je nekakav kurcev intelektualac-mistik, braman bele rase.

Leopold Sedar Senghor, Ethiopiques wrote:They are landing with rulers, squares, compasses,
Sextants
White skin fair eyes, naked word and thin lips
Thunder on their ships.

шумидер-модер wrote:
Afrika je, na primer, opstajala nekih nekoliko miliona godina bez tehnologije kao civilizacijske 'podloge', porodila covecanstvo, i ostala zabelezena kao najveci dostignuti stepen sklada okoline, okruzenja i stanovnistva.
Sa tehnologijom su dosli i problemi.

Guenon's early studies in mathematics gave his spirited critiques of Western empiricism and inductive reasoning an authority that the vague or sweeping strictures of Malraux and Elmer simply could not match.

William Murderface wrote:Pa kad na Amazonu ima sve!

uskok i ajduk wrote:Клима је ту исто неки фактор. Племена која су имала неколико месеци зиме нису могла да се ослоне само на ловачко-сакупљачку организацију друштва. Морали су да развију технологију за квалитетну одећу, станове, морали су да сакупе огрев и храну за преживљавање популације током зиме. То је све тражило технолошке иновације. А претпостављам да Амазонац може током целе године да буде поред реке у минимуму одеће, и да преживљава ловећи и берући плодове. Не требају му никакви планови за унапред и никакве специјалне иновације. Може без њих.

паће wrote:

шумидер-модер wrote:
Afrika je, na primer, opstajala nekih nekoliko miliona godina bez tehnologije kao civilizacijske 'podloge', porodila covecanstvo, i ostala zabelezena kao najveci dostignuti stepen sklada okoline, okruzenja i stanovnistva.
Sa tehnologijom su dosli i problemi.

Како то мислиш "без технологије"? Апсолутно невешти, нису умели баш ништа да ураде? Неће бити. Имали су своју технологију иначе их не би било. Спремали су шта ће појести, градили су насеобине, имали некакве алатке.

То кад кажемо "технологија" а мислимо на "технологија индустријског друштва, и новија" је у најмању руку лоше дефинисан појам.

То је као кад се каже да "имају одлично вино јер немају технологију" - имају и те како, али неку своју стару и неће да се упуштају у новије смицалице зарад веће зараде.

William Murderface wrote:Pa kad na Amazonu ima sve!

Verterdegete wrote:

uskok i ajduk wrote:Клима је ту исто неки фактор. Племена која су имала неколико месеци зиме нису могла да се ослоне само на ловачко-сакупљачку организацију друштва. Морали су да развију технологију за квалитетну одећу, станове, морали су да сакупе огрев и храну за преживљавање популације током зиме. То је све тражило технолошке иновације. А претпостављам да Амазонац може током целе године да буде поред реке у минимуму одеће, и да преживљава ловећи и берући плодове. Не требају му никакви планови за унапред и никакве специјалне иновације. Може без њих.

Ali premisa ti je skroz pogresna. Hunter-gatherer drustva su se po pravilu zadrzavala u predelima sa surovijom klimom, dok su se zemljoradnicka drustva zapatila upravo u predelima sa umerenijom klimom. Cak si kontradiktoran i samom sebi. Teza o Dinaridima kao ratobornom narodu, koju cesto forsiras, polazi upravo od toga da njihova borbenost potice od surovosti predela u kojima zive i nemogucnosti da se pripitome poljoprivredom.