Current Worldview

An Approach to the Present Time

Abstract

In this article, our objective is not to predict a future that, due to human freedom, is unpredictable, but rather to describe our present. To say that our present is complex is not enough. Reality is multiform, with diverse textures, height and depth, extension, temporality, and mystery. Every civilization is built on an ideal foundation: its worldview. A worldview is the spiritual matrix of one or even several civilizations, simultaneous or successive. In every worldview, there is a set of ideas about nature, and an absolute is discovered. These ideas are circumscribed by the idea I have of myself and of other people. In every worldview, there is a set of ideas about culture as a sense of history, on which depend a set of ideas about culture as a cultivation of the surrounding reality, through which a given historical period is characterized. Regarding our Euro-American civilization, the first Modernity of the 15th century - discarding the clear and distinct cuts of the historical periodization of the Enlightenment - begins in the 13th century with the reborn cities (boroughs), the spread of guilds, democratic ideas (assemblies of free men), universities and through them, the popular recovery of Greek thought (Aristotle). This modern worldview arose from the Christian philosophy of history, and from the 17th century onward, an idea of the meaning of history—which we can understand from the perspective of Gnosis—grew. This idea is recognized in the common thread that permeates many spiritualisms (including Christian ones), in new religious movements, and in the evolution of social organization. Key to this philosophy of history is the superlative appreciation of technology—as a shaper of the sensory, emotional, and spiritual world— with the renunciation of appreciation for itself and its purposes, transforming technology into an idol with a pretension of being absolute. The distrust in science that grew at the end of Modernity has not prevented the uncritical acceptance of technology as a superlative cultural position today. Humans have given it a messianic status; they have developed an expectation of it that will mitigate their suffering and fulfill their hopes, that will allow them a life of rotation, independent of identity and bodily state. Contrary to Adolf Eichmann’s argument that he was merely a cog in a machine that used him, there are always one or more free acts associated with achieving the result, as demonstrated by all those who decided to act against the Nazi machine at the cost of their lives. Every human act, including technology, is subject to the moral evaluation of itself and the ends it pursues, whether by one’s own decision or the decision of another.