Global Hermitage is a phrase Soleri used to express a concern about the misuse of technologies and the Internet and how they are separating us from each other.
I suggest that a evolution of the concept would be to refer to it as the USA Global Hermitage Model of Development as it reflects not only the prevailing socioeconomic dynamic in the USA mainstream society but also is being rapidly exported and spread around the world through corporate globalism/globalization and neoliberalism.
Definition of Hermitage
Although today's meaning is usually a place where a hermit lives in seclusion from the world, hermitage was more commonly used to mean a settlement where a person or a group of people lived religiously, in seclusion. So hermits were often monks who lived in monasteries.
What Soleri Meant by Global Hermitage
What Soleri terms Global Hermitage is related to rapid exponential growth in the quantities of things that we associate with modern success and the impact on the lifestyle of the modern person. We have more than ever before, links spreading all over the globe and yet for many this seems to be only leading to a hermit's existence living in isolation from a world of meaning and intrinsic value. So the alteration of the term as it is used by Soleri may be explained by the distortion of hermitage in the modern world, so that the shared values of consumer culture create a "global" hermitage of people. Despite all their links and connections, supported by advanced technologies they are basically living in seclusion from the "Real World." The key missing elements are their lacking of any integrity of living in tune with one's values and also not having real solidarity among a community of people with similar shared values.
Basically it goes like this: as people become more attached to virtual life they are separating from real life.
How the Marketplace Benefits from Global Hermitage and Isolationism
There is a compelling rationale for making authentic community values and locally based culture obsolete. The lifestyles that revolve around locally based cultures have a tendency to discourage conspicuous consumption and materialism by focusing more on quality of life issues, while also dismissing the relentless need to increase productivity by any means necessary. Within the modern reality, the idea of a lifelong commitment to community is neither sustained nor supported by the prevailing systems of the USA mainstream society, because there is no obvious, short term, monetary benefit to such thinking to those who hold the economic power. Its important to note that while these forces exist in all societies and are embedded within the dynamics of the nature of human societies, there is a clear difference between the USA body-politic and that of Europe. With Europe setting up strong social systems that protect these communities and limit the growth of isolationism. Yet with the continuing weakening of the social welfare state in Europe and the growth in income inequality, we can expect to see Europeans societies increasingly the US Global Hermitage Model.
The celebration of the Global Hermitage must be subtle, as no one profits from the open discussion of the growing prevalence of it in modern society and how its a major factor in many of our social ills such as drug abuse, other forms of addiction, suicide and depression. No one benefits financially from highlighting the promotion of Isolationism as something the corporate world regards as an attribute of the masses because of its discouraging affect on civil discourse, an informed citizenry and active public participation - except when it comes to selling books and raising political donations for progressive initiatives and campaigns. The idea of living life without strong, direct and interactive links to culture, politics and social experiences in society, and how such trends leads predictably to a passive and easily manipulated public, is only glamorous or desirable to discuss in urban, elite, intellectual circles where people usually have time to spare to discuss such things.
Yet the necessity (at least according to the status quo) is that a large section of the society must be atomized and function as Automatons in subservience to the ruling power elites at the top of the society. Many community advocates would say the real indicator of poverty in the modern world is an existence lacking a rich community and family life. Under these conditions, for many people, the only real drivers of hope and inspiration are making money, working and consuming. So ironically, it has become a reality that lines between poverty and wealth have become more blurred, as many people accumulate great and significant amounts of money, but end up living in mental emotional and even physical squalor. The Wage Slave is not so much about people's physical inability to escape the bondage of the rat race mentality of living to work/spend/consume and perpetuate those cycles of the economy that profit from our mental emotional and spiritual bondage, but about their own virtual imprisonment in a reality that makes them miserable and is slowly killing their spirit while they are still physically alive.
Soleri sought to highlight the Global Hermitage phenomenon within the context of Suburbia. It not just defined by a single phenomena such as TV, but refers to an overarching and Synergistic process by a variety of social forces and technologies. Its possible that there is an indirect "comparative economic advantage" in keeping the individual isolated, automatized and pacified.
Similar to human induced trends that are moving ecosystems all over the planet towards entropy, there is a pattern and convergence of forces in the commercial and corporate cultures of contemporary society that appear almost to work synergistically to create a predictable and reinforcing set of behaviors among consumers. Not only that, but its evolved to the point where high evolved technocratic marketing, public relations and advertising groups with very complex jargons and systems and who are well compensated by encouraging human social devolution by focusing on promoting Lowest Common Denominator values of society such as elevating money to Godhood while objectifying women's bodies as a way of monetizing them along with everything else that can be profited from. Thus what emerges in this process are the icons of contemporary American society working together to maximize consumption, but not necessary promote intact, sustainable and authentic community and family development:
Corporate Media led by the TV and video to broadcast entertaining and addictive content to replace local and indigenous cultural content
Car Culture and the worship of the car as the icon of success, mobility and freedom in the modern age along with the single family home
Coal Oil and Gas Sectors and centralized energy distribution infrastructures to enable cheap and reliable fuel supplies to sustain rapid increases in consumption and production
Food and Confectionaries where people were seduced into consuming huge amounts of food that was beyond the means of both the consumer's bodies (hence record obesity rates) and the lands where they came from
Home and Commercial Building boom enabling a proliferation of Commercial Culture and a unprecedented market bubble in the construction and real estate finance sectors
Freeway and Road Building subsidized by the government and enabling and ensuring the continued viability and dominance of Car Culture in America
Silicon Valley Cyberculture producing massive amounts of hardware enabling the broadcast and sharing of cultural content aimed at addressing Global Hermitage agnst and isolation among the masses
Because if people are not able to make informed and autonomous decisions on their own, then they will be prone to make decisions in various aspects of their lives which reduce their autonomy, while giving power to the people marketing the alluring products, services as well as ideologies to them. Its not being suggested that Power Elites officially or consciously conspire to encourage the social isolationism that drives us towards Global Hermitage. However their may be a convergence of Vested Interests that are empowered by the reality of the nature and dynamics of social relations. indeed this is usually what lobbyists do: they work to ensure that interests of their rich clients by "working" the politicians in Washington and the State Capitals and "buying" access to political power through favors and political campaign donations.
The community values that previously sustained our identity within the culture of the pre-modern world, have been made obsolete by the modern understanding of what is real and important within contemporary reality. The idea of a lifelong or long term commitment to community is neither sustained nor supported by the prevailing systems of the mainstream society. An example of this is how the nuclear family was conceived as a way to ensure rapidly adaptability and modularity of the industrial workforce in the industrialization process in the early 20th century. And with the rise of suburbia that modularity benefited a get-rich quick mentality in which people rapidly moved as the short term prosperity of a region quickly collapsed - so as was the case in the urban industrial heartland of the USA - and greener pastures emerged in new suburban Utopian planned communities like Levittown NY and later in the West, South and SW, in places like Sun City AZ and Anthem AZ.
Postmodernism and Growth of the Hyper-consciousness
Technology although necessary to modernization and further human development, is creating structures of complexity that are distancing people from each other, while at the same time, it creates the illusion that we are closer together through things like texting, Facebook and other social networking devices that take up an increasing amount of our time.
We have in the process of modernization, says the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, built on a pre-modern authoritarian architecture, a social architecture where we exist in isolation of each other and in fear of the state - Panopticon. If we accept the reality that Global Hermitage is merely a way of defining the socioeconomic establishment hardly surprising that we live increasingly fragmented lives.
The reality that we are inter-connected and interdependent flows from the essence of existence, however, embedded within the dysfunctional political geography of our rapidly globalizing commercial culture, is the need to increase the distance within the human to human and human to planet relationships.
Coming together to become one seamless web or Matrix, these sectors often backed with subsidies from federal, state and local governments, stimulated very rapid growth in the American economy and enabled the myth of American Dream to briefly become a "sustainable" reality for millions of Americans. This was particularly evident in the growth of Sunbelt states like California and Arizona, where now much of these regions have only a artificial and corporate instilled sense of community. The growth of these built environments was driven by a highly corporatized, mass production mentality that was designed to enable maximum profit and overriding other community needs and concerns.
The "growth of the hypers" hyper-consumption, hyper-hedonism and hyper-materialism, for example may have led to a greater sense of material success in accumulating and consuming greater numbers of things, but in many respects it has left the modern individual increasingly isolated. This isolation as a byproduct of modernization has actually been seen an opportunity for growth in the so called new economy.
Green Thinking and Sustainability as a Better Kind of Wrongness
An example of what Soleri terms a Better Kind of Wrongness is evident in the more advanced development of the Global Hermitage. Internet and telecom technologies like Facebook, Twitter as well as dating services and of course cell phones have sought to make up for the lacking of meaning that many of us feel in our modern lives by offering us greater community and connectivity in the modern world. The community values and locally based cultural and social identities that previously sustained our sense of self within the culture of the pre-modern world, have been made obsolete due to the rising pre-eminence of the global economy and marketplace. Modern technology driven society and its relentless need to increase productivity by any means necessary has sought to push aside considerations of Sacred Spaces and non-monetized values in cultures. Within this modern reality, the idea of a lifelong commitment to community is neither sustained nor supported by the prevailing systems of the mainstream society.
Arcosanti Paradox: CyperSpace as Potentially Expanding Human Consciousness
Not only do we need to think in terms of local community, but we have evolved into needing a planetary consciousness which goes beyond the inhuman, technologically driven society with its relentless need to increase productivity and weapons by any means necessary. Cyberspace can potentially enable us to more clearly envision and articulate the dismal architecture of the present system, while also seeking to visualize and implement the lean alternative, a grand architecture (Arcosanti is just one idea among many alternatives to the present system) that is encapsulated within the ecological/sustainable economics.
In response to the modernization and corporate revolution in our societies, many within the counterculture and the voluntary simplicity movement are trying to move beyond conventional mainstream assumptions about success and progress. One way they see to do this is by simplifying their lives. This is linked with the desire towards localization, bioregionalism and increased local autonomy as an alternative to the current corporatist model of economic social and political centralization.
Neo-monastic was a term Soleri spoke of during the "Paradox era" at Arcosanti in which he offered Arcosanti to Cybernauts restless with being involved in the "Matrix" of Silicon Valley. He invited the Cypernauts that came to the Paradox I and II to come to Arcosanti and invest in the effort to build an Arcology as an alternative to the Global Hermitage that they were now invested in and beholden to.
Indeed the representation of the twin demons of consumer culture hyper-materialism and hyper-hedonism was evident in Soleri's design for the Hyper Building which was completed for a group of Japanese entities in the 1990s. In that project he sought to put forward the Hyper Building as an architectural manifesto seeing the proposed location of the building as located in the Mohave Desert between LA as Hyper-hedonism and Las Vegas as Hyper-Materialism. The location of the building in the desert definitely was a statement that had Neo-monastic (see Neo-monasticism) implications.
The term Global Hermitage expresses concern about the misuse of computer technologies and the Internet, which Soleri feels is separating ourselves from each other and the world beyond Cyberspace. Not only do we need to think in terms of local community, but we have evolved into needing a Planetary Consciousness (see Noosphere) which goes beyond the inhuman, technologically driven society with its relentless need to increase productivity and weapons by any means necessary. The concern is that people are using technology to isolate themselves from each other and reality rather than to build community--build sustainable relationships--and within that goal, also aspire to develop a deeper more intrinsically based sense of existence.
Arcosanti Global Hermitage?
Soleri refers to consumerism and sprawl creating a global hermitage. Yet he often has eschewed the kinds of things and approaches needed to make Arcosanti a compelling antidote to those trends or tendencies observed in the outside world.
Soleri was unable to develop a way to make Arcosanti an organic and dynamic working alternative to mainstream practices. If we accept the viral nature of ideas and how they are shared culturally and socially, then we see that any alternative cultural or social experiments if they are strongly innoculated against mainstream contagion are prone to infection by mainstream memes subtly re-installing themselves likes parasites on the prototype.
Having an openness to collaborate with people as co-creators or stakeholder in a process of building a model or prototype for more conscious living that might be seen as a working alternative to what has been observed in the mainstream society. Obviously we must agree with something of what he has been saying or we would not have come here and invested the time? Soleri though never thought the people who came there evolved to a high enough level of understanding to be given any serious leadership role.
Part of it relates to the low energy at Arcosanti. People are not inspired by each nor are they inspired by the leadership. Really leadership in order to do its job which is to lead is supposed to inspire people. We know of course that America today is in decline because it has a leadership crisis. Systems are breaking down because the health and quality of life of people is not the most important thing. Leaders are thinking for themselves before the common interest of society or humanity.