| from Baudrillard to Verger: Diversification Vs Global Norms | 2 comments |
 30 Jul 2010 @ 16:30, by Max SandorAnton Walter Smetak, 1913-1984, wrote in an enigmatic way, mixing contemplations of art with philosophical speculations and humanistic insights of profound depths. My take on his way of seeing life may not be accurate and I don't know therefore if he himself would have approved it or not. But he shares a particular direction of viewing, in common, interestingly enough, with fellow Frenchmen Pierre Verger (1902-1996), Claude Lévy-Strauss (1908-2009), and the Englishman David Bohm (1917-1992), to name a few, in that they touched Brazilian ground, especially the magic land of Salvador, Bahia, and reversed their occidental way of seeing Life, Universe, and Everything. Some, like Smetak and Verger, never left, others kept dreaming of being there (Lévy-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques & Saudades do Brasil) or traveled on to other mystic lands, like Bohm teaming up with Krishnamurti. They all seem to have parted from the nightmarish occidental vision of having fallen from grace, expelled from paradise and they do not endorse the Western lifestyle of consumerism, its ever more obvious decadence, increasingly so in recent decades. Some try to find their way back to nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson-style, and decry the impact of modern technology on human conscience, but they very well know that the wheel cannot be turned back. Setting foot on Brazilian soil changes perspectives, at least of some of the great thinkers of the past century, and, beyond mere escapism, enables a positive stance, a shimmer of hope, for societies of the future: Like Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) puts its [link] : "Perhaps Brazil, Italy and Japan are in this respect more advanced societies than America. Pessimism itself is something that only afflicts Western values and is itself part of Western values." Below, or behind, these contemplations we can find another paradigm, and Walter Smetak examplified this point clear and concise like no one else: the question of diversification versus global norms, the former a natural phenomenon in all cultures of the past around the world. the latter now imposed, and even enforced as necessary, equally on all countries on Earth. It seems that Brazil left the impression on the noted thinkers that it could escape this dictate and preserve at least a portion of its stunning diversity. As time passes on, this too seems an illusion, the tollbooth barring access to once public roads look alike in Brazil and Italy and the United States, and nobody seems to notice that it is a fall-back to medieval practices that were believed to have been overcome. The ever-expanding laws to rule the individuals and their families in every little aspect of their lives walk their grim path forward in unison in every part of the globe. Smetak proposes, carefully implicitly, that a standardization of cultures is AGAINST the law of Nature, that it may be even blasphemical to curb or squelsh the variety that the human mind produces. That any truly religious man, whatever denomination he may count himself to belong to, should stand up against it and insist that diversification is the 'will of Gxd', whatever name you'd call her or him, if there should exist anything beyond the symbol of itself. Nature's innocent vanity, its display of beauty on every dimensional level, from the stars at night to the fractal beauty of visualized mathematical formulas, and to the wondrous world under the microscope, indeed would seem to prohibit any 'norm' on any level as an interference with the divine will, the expression of the sacred behind the appearance of the ordinary. It seems that nothing can slow down the invasion of our last jungles by the global food chains which are implanting their plastic & uniformal trade-marked stamps on everything they touch as they eat they way through our societies. But it is the people, or better, the manipulated consumers who were made to think that they would have a 'choice', that makes it possible. And who could stop this disastrous march by simply insisting on their own culture. Or by creating other alternatives... |