laodan's favorite uk pages, page 1

Last login: 6 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA.; Likes 1,600 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 222 fans • Received 65 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

Favorites » His uk pages

Display:
List
• Grid

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Documentary Archive | India Rising - New Wealth: Feb 6, 2007 11:15am 1 review uk, modernity, worldviews
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/documentary_archive/6319981.stm; India Rising - New Wealth via Innovation Watch, in BBC Online a series by George Arney
There are many things that haven't changed about India, but among the most visible and palpable changes among Indian consumer is both the ability and willingness to spend. This new materialism is shown in the new urban skyline, the luxury apartments, the shopping malls. But is this all a change for the better, are there costs, too? New Wealth India's Heart of Darkness TV Nation
Entering modernity means adopting new values: individualism, materialism, which lead to the the ideology of private property... This is a universal character that any nation entering modernity is experiencing. In my book Artsense I explain how this "early-modern values", in Europe, shaped the Renaissance of painting into the adoption of its early-modern subjects: landscapes around the mansion, portraits of the people in the mansion and stills of what's on the tables in the mansions. (a first degree image, of early-modern subjects of interest, that projects on the retina...) This BBC series also echos the debate about modernity / postmodernity of my last post. If modernity brings about a binge of individualism and materialism it appears also to empty people's souls. This explains how religiosity came back with such a vengeance in Muslim countries, in China and in India. The traditional answer of rationalists, against this recourse to religiosity, has always been to say that science is bringing the only valid answers to any question one could come up with. BUT this rationalist answer has by now proven that it has no merit. Rationality and science answer some questions, indeed many questions, but they are far from answering all questions. It is indeed as if new scientific knowings were always generating more non-knowings... Yes science gives us more knowings (bits of knowledge) but does this generate more knowledge? I mean knowledge in the sense of wisdom... In the end of the day the question that really begs an answer is "Is the human specie really smarter than the other species? " There is no doubt that the human specie is one of the youngest living species on earth (hundreds of times younger than many other). It, for sure, is generating faster changes than the other species but will it resist the long haul? Our globalized societal reality shows us without any doubt the answer to that last question: humanity does not seem to be very wise: it is indeed on the verge of provoking, if not its own extinction, the extinction of thousands of years of civilizational evolution...