In order to maintain existing trends in the modernization process it was thought imperative that the mainstream society be directed towards certain modes of thinking. Our understanding of the meaning of life has been altered by the modern consumer consciousness, which we as consumers are encouraged to embrace, because it is now pivotal to the notion of success in modern society. It is for this reason that the influential aspects of our society have sought to collaborate to encourage social behaviors and worldviews that conform to what is often referred to as mindless consumerism–consumerism without a real a real understanding of the consequences of our behaviors as consumers. These influential groups all have a stake in ensuring that we consumer more as consumers. This hardly makes them unified on all the issues, for these influential groups compete for the minds of the people in the consumer society. Hence it can be said that we are governed by a plurality of influential groups: politicians, lawyers, doctors, architects, CEOs, unions and NRA members. Yet what unifies the dominant groups where it is important is in regards to working together towards an cohesive centrist ideology, that sustains the status quo of which they derive maximum benefit.
The Lowest Common Denominator
When the considerations of the lowest common denominator pervade our culture, we find it difficult to transcend to a higher level of existence because our society discourages meaningful accessing of our conscious selves into the sublime, restricting sublimination, because much if not most of the social influence is antithetical to those values. From such a standpoint, we might cease to sell the culture as providing a nourishing soil base for the human soul to grow, but instead seek to see it as more reflective of the analogy that Edward Bellamy made in his book Looking Backwards–in which he refers to it as the poison bog. People of all classes and professions–from all walks of life–are affected by the uptake of these poisons that constitutes the “vital atmosphere” of society.
“Quantifying the World”
The core economic systems that drive our economy require that people function in certain predictable manners, to facilitate maximum levels of production and consumption. Individual’s quests for true autonomy as individuals functioning independently of the social need to conform are discouraged. People are subtly discouraged from thinking critically and with fresh perspectives that are independent or antithetical to mainstream assumptions.
The reality is that the economy drives the society–this is the most basic conflict of interest that Marx talked about in his dialectic of materialism–the cultural, the social and the political. If the modern economy is based on the necessity of perpetuating a certain pervasive and alluring form of mindlessness, that from its perspective must be planted and then cultivated in the minds of the people so as to ensure continued economic growth through consumerism, then such larger social thoughts may constitute memes that alter human behavior and reduce the inherent qualities of the society consciousness–the sublime.
In pre-modern civilizations, the sacred implied something that was central to the worldview that sustained that particular civilization. One example of this is the unique level of veneration that many Hindus have historically given to their cattle. To challenge a “sacred cow” is to soil and desecrate that which is central and most holy to the society. The sacred cows of our society now revolve around consumption, and the icons and ideologies that sustain this consumer based capitalist culture. Neither mainstream politician nor social pundit will seriously and unequivocally challenge these assumptions and tenets.
True sacredness in life is a threat to consumerism. This assumes that if people were to rethink how they used their time money and energy, and reoriented themselves towards a more spiritual perspective, they might seek to reconsider many of their behaviors. A materialistic worldview is the “vital atmosphere” that ensures further economic growth in a consumer orientated industrial society.
The society does things in the process of creating the modern economic miracle–the price of progress–that repudiate the essential reason that modernization was justified by enlightenment thinking. Exercises that seek to visualize how all modern economic activities affect the world in a long term and interrelated way, at their core represent a questioning of reality that is very threatening to the powerful economic forces driving modernization. It is that such information from such a systemic standpoint is not at all ready for prime time, and thus the media filters such information, and cleverly renders it unsuitable for mainstream consumption, because it questions conspicuous consumption. Such questions commonly asked on a serious and very conscious level would undermine the core economic assumptions that sustain the economic systems that drives our globalizing world.
We emerge in what Ray Kurzwell calls The Age of the Spiritual Machines as the race to modernize transforms our notion of what it means to be human. This age is the result of the unification of business, science and art.
Michael Foucault used the panopticon–an ancient invention by an enlightenment thinker by the name of Jeremy Bentham–as a way to speak of how architectural spaces were subtly used to subvert the sublime by enforcing a strict conformity to the modern regimen.
William Burroughs used the notion of the “American Drag” in his books to refer to the way in which modern architecture has become a tool for commercial interests that alters our consciousness like no other system in the world–past or present. The American Drag is an alluring net that drags us into an unprecedented age of affluence defined by the excesses and wastefulness of sprawl, conspicuous consumption and the repetitive forms that dominate the landscape, and our consciousness.
Differences in perspective generate an impact on the aesthetics of a given time and space. H.W.F. Hegel put forward the notion of the Zeitgeist or time ghost. Each age is defined by a certain civilization, and each civilization is driven by a certain particular unique impulse that sets it apart from the competing civilizations of that age.
Within history there are three countervailing or competing “sublime ghosts”
1) The ghost of the collective consciousness.
The ghost of the collective spiritually possesses by pressuring us to conform to prevailing social norms and values–which are based on nostalgia and romantic notions about the state and society. What is particularly distinct in modern times is the rise of the “ghost of the machine,” where aesthetic and cultural needs increasingly conform and affirm the needs of the machine building complexes.
2) The ghost of the machine or the ghost of techne.
3) The ghost of the spirit
The ghost of the spirit refers to the wisdom of the prophets. Both other time ghosts reflect a sublime yearning to rise up to a higher state of being, however they have no connection between theory and practice. The ghost of the spirit rises up like a gadfly within us in the inner sanctums of our sublime, as our alter ego reminding of us our higher obligations in this life.