Ethos and Actuality. Living in Interregno

Abstract

This article seeks to enrich our awareness of actuality, since we live from what we are and how we are, and among what we are, there is the circumstantial being (nature) and in the how we are, our circumstances: Cultures, with their geographies and chronologies. To recognize ourselves also means to encounter the existential time (past-present-future) of our own people, and today, of the humanity in which that people exists. It is in our place and now (memory, initiative and waiting) that we can value what fulfills the measure of our existence, what makes us complete, happy, what saves us. Some have said that we live in an  age without values, but if there are humans, there is no time without values. It is human action that is valuable. Every human act involves an evaluation. We abstract values from concrete human acts. By their generality or representativeness, we  recognize them as the values of a specific period, we distinguish one epoch from another by what it was, or is, valued, and we imitate the behaviors that were abstracted from another or from many. From there, the gaze of what happened in the past acquires another depth, connects us with the development of the human in an era, and can enrich the gaze of the present. In our time several generations were caught in an interregnum between two eras, two ways of life, and consequently living with great difficulty in understanding themselves, finding patterns, security, and ascent. The fallen Modernity can be seen in the fall of what was valued during that era, and in the appearance of the values of relief. It was the crisis of a worldview in a civilization that had become almost global, and sought to stop history in an ideologically opposed world. But history has resumed, in a unique world of diverse civilizations. An exploration of the nearby Present points out the values of: Freedom, Technology, Tribe/Hive, Individuality, Disembodiment, Acceptance. This axiological change leads us to reflect on the crisis in the global: Civilization in Civilizations, Globalization in Globalization, and the “resumption of history”, with the decline of ideologies at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. That Euro-American civilization, which wanted to be the world civilization, is in crisis. A high point complicated by the need to recognize the other civilizations –outside and within their own territory– in their existence and confrontation.