Yusuf Kaplan
I have called the age we live in the age of digital civilization. In this column, I want to discuss what digital civilization is and what it is not.
The world has become global, and all borders have disappeared, but people’s horizons have narrowed, and people have become myopic.
The problem of myopia started with modernity and got out of control with postmodernity.
Modernity was man’s destruction of his inner world, his orientation to the outer world, and his control and colonization of the outer world.
Postmodernity, on the other hand, is a person’s being closed to his inner world, the temptations of his soul, being a slave to his pleasures, and becoming myopic.
Postmodernity means abandoning big questions and big problems, losing all ideas, and locking people into micro-truths and small stories.
The disappearance of the gaze and the horizon, the human being trapped in the detail, the piece.
The great wealth chain, narscism, order and humankind
Narcissism, the blinding of the gaze, the darkening of the other, the consecration of the self, the height of selfishness, and ultimately the ruthlessness of cruelty. All imperialists are narcissists. All arrogance is narcissism.
In the West, the system is narcissistic! The system is blessed. The system takes precedence over man.
“First the system, then the order” is essential in Western civilization.
In us, in Islamic civilization, “human first, then order” is essential. The result is regularity: It is aimed to build a balance between beings, both philosophically / ontologically, sociologically, and culturally, and to build flow-gaze, round-trip, and mutual nourishment.
Since the principle of “first the system, then the human” is dominant in Western civilization, the process of revenge, not order, is in effect: man is from God, nature, man is woman, woman is man; If he is white, he seeks revenge on the black, and the black on the white…
When the ontological hierarchy of existence is preserved, order, peace, and tranquility prevail both in the world of man and thr-oughout the world. The he-art of man becomes calm, he gives voice to the voice of nature and other beings, and he comes to himself.
When the ontological hierarchy of existence is destroyed, revenge, chaos, and conflict dominate both in the human world and between classes, races, species, genders, religions and cultures. Man becomes soulless.
The great chain of existence consists of the Creator, man and the universe. The ontological balance between the creator and the created will continue to exist if the hierarchical relationship in the great chain of existence continues, and a balance, peace, and order prevail both in the inner/spiritual world of man and in the outer/material world.
When the ontological hierarchy in the great chain of existence is broken, that is, when man attempts to become deified or dominate other beings, such as nature, such as other civilizations and cultures, a great depression arises both in the inner/spiritual world and the outer/material world of man; man’s life and the world of humanity turn to hell, where the “survival of the fittest” / Darwinian barbarism, where the strong are right and dominate, “laws of the jungle” are enforced; this is social Darwinism; civilized barbarism. This is only one dimension of civilized barbarism.
Digital civilization: Myopalism and civilized barbary
Digital civilization is also barbaric because it is narcissistic and narcissistic, where all borders have disappeared, but human beings are trapped in the virtual world of boundlessness, where they fall ill with myopia, where the key, source, and roadmap of depth, and therefore the truth, evaporates, and human’s horizon, gaze, and pleasures focus only on himself. is a civilization.
Myopia is a narrowing of the horizon that prevents people from seeing the hidden truths beyond the visible, looking to the horizon and beyond, throwing people to the threshold of a dead-end street, where the end is uncertain, loss of depth and being trapped in the surface, getting lost in virtual, parallel universes, everything turns into dust.
Digital civilization is the reign of meaninglessness and soullessness in the world of machine and virtual algorithms that virtualize and evaporate human’s instincts of seeing, hearing, and thinking.
Myopia brings about a loss of depth. The loss of depth also means that people are trapped in the surface and lost in their seductive journeys on the surface… Turning into an object… Turning them into an established machine, so to speak.
As digital civilization cancels the human faculties of hearing, thinking and seeing (in depth) and condemns humans to surface speed, pleasure, and temptation, we are confronted with a new form of barbarism: The civilized kind.
A civilization that forgot big questions lost the idea of unity and depth and was trapped in a myopic and seductive gaze on the surface and the superficial, would inevitably not be able to avoid writhing in the grip of minor problems, evaporating the truth, depressing and brutalizing people.
So what’s the way out of here? There are clues in the article, but opening and discussing them in depth is the subject of another article, of course.
