From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Tue Jul 09 2002 - 08:24:03 MDT
"Heimdall will sound his Horn" [2002 theme at the Pio Manzł - U.N. Centre]
http://www.piomanzu.com/giornate2002/uk/indice_uk.htm
" The new identity of mankind is bound together by the common concern about
the uncertainty that prevails today, together with the understanding of that
relationship of inseparability, indeed indivisibility, we have with each other.
Difficult but not aleatory, is the struggle with causality which involves
a worldwide intelligence in the determination of an "ecology of action" useful
to all and with which all can identify.
But a new element of our times is that the demand for harmony has become
global. It is no longer a matter only for the religious or the individual, but
it has become a question of global concern opposed to emerging hatred. At the
beginning of the last century, more or less faithful to nineteenth century
positivism, Arturo Graf maintained the advantage of instituting a "cathedral of
ignorance" which " would represent the many things that we do not know", and
which "would keep alive and ever-present in our minds, problems both ancient and
modern."
Likewise, in this century, Edgar Morin urges the setting-up of a "Faculty
of Globalized Problems".
As yet, we do not know how to join together the different realms of
knowledge, and relate to them and each other in as much as we are a planetary
community, where we are all conditioned by the same possibilities for hope or
for destruction.
In spite of the uncertainties, "Heimdall will sound his Horn" to arouse us
all as individuals with responsibility for the future. This call invokes the
builders of harmony to create a network against brutality, An economic system
without consideration for the Natural World threatens not only the future of
development but the very future of humanity.
Technology, which is only consumed with its own fundamentalism, devours
all that is energy and growth, rendering inedible the fruits of the earth. Any
generalized monoculture, which drives out individual characteristics, creates
dispersion - (the diaspora of ancient times), and oppression. Thus a Europe
without an understanding of its origins in Africa is a Europe without roots. And
so harmony cannot be only a belief but a mutual search and a common basic
foundation, an interdependent destiny. It will be a source of strength and not a
"tearing apart" of wisdom.
There is no need to go too deeply into theoretical issues or depart too
radically from everyday practicalities to realise that today's world is subject
to two apparently irreconcilable forces vainly striving to coexist within the
framework of an image such as Heracleitus's famous bow and lyre. On the one
hand, there is the tendency to step up the output of the powerhouses of
capitalism, which is incessantly raising the stakes of its own development and
consumption of the Earth's energy resources, multiplying with titanic audacity
the presence of monsters and disharmonious furies on the face of the planet. On
the other, there emerges a clearer tendency in the form of a global demand for
harmony arising from individual suffering and the failure of human relations and
culminating in a new conception of the Earth based on the awareness of belonging
to a global community. It is in this situation, then, that signs are emerging of
a radical change in vision. Thirty years ago marked the start of a courageous
redefinition of nature and the universe which today gathers together all the
disjointed and widely scattered fragments of knowledge in a surprising new
vision of reconciliation and harmony. Thus, in the various realms of science and
learning, from medicine to biology, from evolutionary physics to ecology,
cosmology, psychology, sociobiology and bioenergetics, we are now witnessing the
advent of the so-called "sciences of complexity", which with some justification
may be alternatively defined as the sciences of harmony.
Fritjof Capra was right, when, in the context of a debate with David
Steindl-Rast at the Elmwood Institute in 1985 on the relationships between
science and religion, he prophesied "perfect agreement" in the light of the
dynamics ever present within the universe.
A great specialist in historical semantics and stylistics such as Leo
Spitzer, in an exceptional book devoted to the idea of "world harmony", talked
about a "global concept" that needs to be sought in all the nooks and crannies
of our languages and civilisations". In many ways these ideas prefigured the
present-day fusion of knowledge and responsibility that defines, within an
extended framework, the complex course of the new multidimensional
configurations and exchanges, as well the ordinary relationships, between the
sciences.
In other words there is a demand for harmony which stems from the
individual, invests entire communities and peoples and ultimately entails the
creation of a sustainable situation of "citizenship of the Earth". Mankind and
the world's economies, philosophies and arts are now in a position to respond
nihilistically, as has generally been the case in the course of the past
century, or with a sense of responsibility, re-routing and harnessing man's
spiritual forces in order to create a lucid network of builders of harmony. "
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