Freedom and Civilization, a Western Perspective

The three papers which constitute this article stem from the fact that our major problems today are man-made, the result of our own actions. To gain freedom from wars, exploitation, hunger etc, we have first of all to accept responsibility for this fact, then to see these actions as a result of conditioned behavior either on the induvidual or the species level, and to find ways of changing ourselves towards more loving persons and make our environment more stimulating from the point of view of love rather than competition. This is hard to grasp because wars and exploitation are the results of a chain of actions, ways of life in which we are solidly rooted. The problem can be stated on a more abstract level as one of finding a new balance between adapting ourselves to making a living within the existing known conditions, at the same time changing them and ourselves towards the better. Any piece of work is a contribution to something. It is given from one human being to others and is as such a part of the process of life, giving direction to this process through its way of influencing the person doing the work and those receiving it. What is usually overlooked in the Western world at least seems to be the influence our work and education has upon ourselves, the direction the process of work gives to what we can accomplish in the future. In the sciences I have noticed, both in myself and in others, an unfortunate tendency to see objectivity as synonomous with having no feelings involved in the situation, i. e. to observe rather than to experience the situation in its totality. Now there is nothing wrong in observing per se: the damage arises when the person can do nothing but observe, because then he is cut off from life; and love and freedom become concepts to be reached through logical analysis and hairsplitting definitions rather than deep basic experiences from which our well-being stems and from which we can give to others. The 'observer-scientist' is locked into only being able to observe the existing reality, the pile of junk, and his only way out is by extrapolating from a bigger pile to a smaller one. This is so not because the world necessarily is a pile of junk, but because of the constitution of the scientist. I am inclined to believe that much of this observer-role comes from the natural sciences, which are largely based on the general procedure of considering the objects studied as dead, subject to certain laws of mechanics with which the observer does not interfere, of if so in a manner accounted for by laws of the same nature. When knowledge about our living conditions is pursued in this way, we are left with a lifeless mechanical universe, populated with

Action (physics) · Balance (ability) · Civilization · Competition (biology) · Control (management) · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · GRASP · Perspective (graphical) · Point (geometry) · Political science · Process (computing) · Sociology · Work (physics) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Ecology · Engineering · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

• The National World Picture

  Open Access•Claus Nelund•Journal of Peace Research•1978

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• The concept of violence

  Johan Degenaar, J J Degenaar•Politikon•1980

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