Living in the Abhinav Age (∆/∆)
Invitation to an exploration
न हि ज्ञानेन सदृशं पवित्रमिह विद्यते ☀️
I am going to use this medium as a place of serious reflection, exploration, and intellectual experimentation. I will use the following sequence to explain my basic drive:
1. We are not the middle children of history but are living in interesting times. More like drowning.
2. This is because we are unable to understand our reality in a purposive way - future and past linger but do not flow seamlessly from/into the present.
3. This is a creative problem that can be solved. The right way through is confusion → curiousity → purposive understanding → purposive action → discovery.
4. Talking and writing clearly about this is like therapy 😇
5. Periods of liminality - where old certainty is lost but the new one is not ready, are also the periods of profound genius. A great parallel to our times existed in remote history, what philosopher Karl Jaspers called ‘The Axial Age’, a revolutionary period of global human thought from 800 to 200 BCE in which “the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece. And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.”
6. Many material transformations contributed to the advent of this paradigmatic philosophical age - great cities were born, coinage was introduced on scale, market emerged as an idea, the overall level of complexity of life could not be meaningfully processes in old forms of thought. Hence axial age philosophies rose to answer new grand questions of life that made people feel unimportant. All of these philosophies rose to a level of monumental universalism in their own unique ways.
7. In our own times, complexity is at a threshold when mental models of our existence are being acutely tested and will soon give way. In a philosophical sense development of internet is profound, its alchemical properties for transforming human thought and behavior are endless. It is no longer an appendage to our reality but very much the mode of our commonsensical existence. The emerging constellation of technologies - “the most disruptive and far-reaching transformations of human civilization — redesigning the genome and creating intelligent machines — are no longer science fiction fantasies but materializing reality.”
8. Compared to what we have now, the raw material on which Axial Age acted was like a little baby. We are indeed at the beginning of a new paradigmatic age - the Abhinav Age.
9. This is not a prologue to a metatheory of history, it is merely to clarify my basic sentiment that what our solutions now can not be derived merely from a permutation and combination of the old - we must seek radical novelty while of course repurposing whatever is useful.
10. What I mean by Abhinav (meaning ‘new’ in Sanskrit) is better understood by associating it with the following words - Renaissance, Rejuvenation, Infinity, Space, Frontier, Dharma. All of these themes will be explored later.
11. ∆ → Abhinav, ∆ → Age. The Greek letter ∆ stands for change. Welcome!