10. Some thoughts on the Open Monastery Project from "The Protectors of the sunken Neuronal Treasure"

First, I want to express my best wishes for the Open Monastery Project which will hopefully lead into a substantial endeavor contributing to the future and survival of mankind. Here are some thoughts that I would like to contribute to the Project. I don't know if these will fit in with the processes going on at the present stage of the Open Monastery Project. If I understand it correctly, the Jan 2002 Open Monastery meeting will be largely about practical matters with the situation and the surroundings at the planned site, about the feasibility of the project at all, and about some basic guidelines, what can be done to lay the foundations.

I have worked off and on at ideas of connections between "spirituality" [178], needs and prospects of the "information" [179] age, and neo-monastic structures since about 1983 when I wrote an article in the German magazine "Hologramm" under the title: "Computer, die Heiligen Schriften und die Wendezeit". [180] From that time, I remember a lively discussion with a high Jesuite official from the Munich Jesuite headquarters, who made it clear to me in no uncertain terms what kind of a blasphemy I was committing to think of such a high and lofty spiritual affair as a monastic project in the terms I had been doing. I have to admit to my shame that I was actually thinking along some lines of the Rabelaisian "Order of Thelema" and I had been naive enough to present such a thing to one of the staunchest representatives of this very elite church organization. I should have known better.

Lately I had come in contact with the Open Monastery initiative through Franz Nahrada and Jes Christensen. Unfortunately, in the last months of 2001, I had been under considerable pressure and could not work much on a proposal for the Rome meeting. Also, a planned meeting with Jes on Dec. 11/12 in Munich didn't materialize, and then I was informed that email from Jes was (possibly) infected with a virus. After that I didn't dare to open attached .doc files any more. (It would be better to put in attached letters as rtf.) It seemed as if the cosmic en-ergeia [181] was not aligned in the right constellation for my immediate participation in the project. So I let go of my plan to participate in the Rome meeting. But if I can, I would like to contribute something, and I wish to stay in contact with the project. I also hope that with present www technology, it will be possible to keep contacts virtually, without being physically present on all the meetings. Virtuality is one of the great promises for ecologically sustainable global cooperation, eliminating much need for energy- and time-consuming, environment-polluting travel. To use virtuality in a project like the Open Monastery initiative one needs good software tools for the cooperative work, and a lot more could be done towards this end, since the usual email connections are far too clumsy to be useful for anything but point-to-point connections.

The monastery system of Europe's christian epoch between 500 and 1800 surely was one of the more important driving forces in the creation of the social infrastructure of this civilization, and leading into our present one. It was Oswald Spengler who has given us one of the most beautiful and striking characterizations of that spiritual drive that ensouled the quest of the early christian monks, which combined the most lofty spiritual ideals with a most practical down-to-earth ingenuity. There is a grain of wisdom to be found among many strange and otherwise unsupportable ideas in his voluminous work, "Untergang des Abendlandes". This he called the "Faustian drive" of our western civilization which set it off from any other civilization of mankind. This drive originated with the christian monks, and finally, by many detours, it led into the mechanical and electronic revolution happening in Europe and North America in the last 300 years. David Bolter had written on some of this in his book "Turing's Man" but he missed out on Spengler's unique contribution. The title of the German translation of the Book: "Der digitale Faust" gives at least some hints. The main authors who followed up on Spengler's ideas were Gotthard Günther and Joseph Campbell (1996).

I will start with a very pragmatic and mundane aspect of the christian monastery system: it was a wildly successful example of social engineering. [182] Ernest Gellner had stated in "Plough, Sword, and Book" (1993) that the monasteries were well-kept hostels with orderly management and house rules to bring some order into the uncontrolled movement of thousands of wild-eyed free-lance mystics and anachoretes that had populated the deserts and wild places througout the dilapidating late-roman civilization in the first centuries. The monasteries and the church system as a whole were a population regulation measure to provide a place for the later-born sons and daughters of the nobility and farmers who had no inheritance rights and therefore no marriage perspectives. Their celibacy removed them from the procreative pool, while their economic utility was maximized through the "ora et labora" principle, an important new feature that the christian system had added to the originally buddhist recipe. The many practical technological, medical, and other civilatory benefits of the christian monastery program have been recounted many times, so it is not necessary to repeat them here.

I would like to turn the attention to indications of an antagonistic effect: that a continued success contains the root of failure. The rise of european civilization also led to the "de-enchantment of the world", to its mechanization. It should not be forgotten that a crucial precondition for this development is the linearity of time. Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are based on a linear, reversible concept of time. The mechanization and linearization of time was pioneered by the clocks invented in the monasteries (Mumford). It is even possible that the christian celibacy system amounted to the overall effect of a 1500-year genetic-engineering and trimming program of the european populations: since it specifically selectected those people who showed some musical, literary, or spiritual talent, it removed them from the procreative genetic pool, and this potential was systematically thinned out from the european populations. Those who did the procreating were more of the down-to-earth-types, and besides the great mass of peasants and coutry people I would list the rise of the european burgher class as a possible effect of this empiristic genetic program. (With some additional effects through the extermination of witches from the gene pool. Not to forget the destruction of 1/3 of the european population in the plague in the 1300's that may have changed the european consciousness profoundly.)

When we take Spengler's arguments with a grain of salt, we can still learn a lot from him. There are of course many reasons why he went "out of fashion" in the latter half of the 20th century. The main reason was his "Deutschtümelei" which made him popular with the Nazis (but they not with him), and therefore after 1945, it amounted to professional and political suicide for anyone of any social standing to pay him too much lip service. This trend has found a reversal since Huntingdon's "Clash of civilizations" and more visibly so since Sept. 11, 2001. Spengler's views were simply "not politically correct" in the dominant ideological climate of an ever-expanding European/American capitalistic power machinery. Many of his points can be disqualified on grounds of incorrect interpretation of data, but his central view has nothing to do with that: He entertained an essentially cyclic world view, in which cultures rise and fall, but no culture can hope to keep on continually rising and expanding, like it was the dominant ideology of capitalistic industrialization in the last 200 years. This was the evolutionary ideology of linear progress which pervades all strands in the fabric of the present globalized societies led by the US financial / military / industrial complex. The cyclic world view is expressed in the Chinese Yin / Yang symbolism and the I Ching, "The Book of Changes". Everything developing carries the seeds of its opponent or antagonism within itself, and while it is developing and unfolding, its imminent opposing forces will continue to build up until the development topples and reverses.

In the framework of the cyclic Yin / Yang view, the civiliatory seeds that were sown with the European Monastery system led into an extreme de-spiritualization of the world, its present state of globalization and the absolute rule of capitalism. While the inherent dynamics of the power systems drive them to their utmost extremes, the processes working from within will bring them to disintegration and disruption. It is clearly apparent today that humanity is speeding with full gallop into the ecological holocaust, but it is not so apparent that our knowledge systems are disintegrating with equal speed. Superficially, it seems as if the industrial knowledge machine, the "Baconian Program" still runs with full speed and full efficiency, and more knowledge is generated every day by more scientists and engineers living today on this planet, than have ever lived on this planet. [183] But the pure mass of this knowledge has long exploded the human potential to utilize it. It is not the knowledge itself, but the medial form, with our writing systems, which overload the limits of the human brain. The "Baconian Program" and all of science with it, is based on a knowledge technology that had been pioneered in ancient Greece and was brought into its present form by the European Monastery culture, up until about the Renaissance, until 1500. [184] From then on, it passed into different channels, but its inner form had alredy been imprinted so not very much changed in that sense. In view of the onslaught of the exponential growth of knowledge by powers of ten in the last 300, 200, 100, 50, and 10 years, it may be very difficult and very debatable to say that nothing much has changed. But the old french saying is: Le plus ça change, le plus ça reste le même."

Extending the arguments of my "Neuro Papers", I believe that attempts at reviving the 5th to 15th century monastic ideal of scholarship and learning will be useless today, if the existing paradigmata of knowledge are simply copied. Nothing new or more useful would be gained since the existing institutions are so specialized and effective that nothing could be done to offer anything comparable. In the early middle ages, the monasteries were islands of learning in a desert of cultural disruption. This is completely different today. But the current knowledge systems themselves show many signs of over-loading and breakdown under their own weight. It is time to re-think the issue of knowledge radically, from the roots up. And this might very well be the place for a spiritually-inspired movement, by whatever definition of spirituality one might go.

[182] The idea of social engineering programs in the early christian centuries may sound strange to us, unless we come to recognize that the Roman Catholic Church war the heir of a super-secret program that had been going on for quite a few centuries in the Roman Empire from the time of Augustus onwards. The Roman Emperors had all the power and obviously no "human rights" qualms to try out all sorts of measures to make their super-empire more manageable. The switch was made when Constantine made Christianity a state religion, and later the Roman Pope assumed the title Pontifex Maximus, which had been the high seal of the Roman Emperor. Unfortunately, because this was a super-secret program, we today know very little of it, and those in the Catholic Church who know more about this, also have good reason to be discreet about it. The general ideas are easy to trace though: In the early Greek republics, all sorts of experiments with constitutions were made, and we still have some surviving social engineering sketches, like Plato made in the Republic. Obviously, the Roman program didn't work out as planned, since Christianity had been planned to become the religion of the servant population, of the lower classes, and to keep them there, but no one had foreseen that it gained so much foothold in just 200 years, that they made their way through all of society, just like a sour dough.

[184] The date is just to make figures appear more even, for no specific historical reason. I could have said 1350, and it would have been about the same. The plague may be more of a cultural watershed than the Renaissance. With so much cognitive overweight directed towards history-book events, it is all too easy to forget how much of history is shaped by lowly germs and plain cabbage (or the lack of it). From about 1200 onwards, the European climate steadily became worse and worse. And the rise of "the enlightenment" (Hobbes, Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton) also coincides with the great catastrophe 1600 to 1640 of the 30year war and some of the worst weather of all times until then.

10. Some thoughts on the Open Monastery Project from
"The Protectors of the sunken Neuronal Treasure"

10.1. Introductory thoughts

10.2. The European Monastery System and the Rise of Turing's Man

10.3. Introduction and Abstract of the "Neuro Papers"