The Anthropocene era has been argued as starting from when Rene Descartes proposed the split between mind and body through the maxim "I think, therefore I am" in the first half of the 17th century. From this moment onwards, humans have dominated nature, a point made very strongly by Karl Marx some 200 years later (approximately).
Rene Descartes in the 21st Century!!! (Source: Twitter.com)
So, where does Steemit come into this? Read on and be surprised.
Steemit is actually THE culmination of Descartes' rationality project. Everything that has happened over the last 400 or so years has led to this point in history.
You see, Descartes' mind/body split was the first moment in (recorded) history in which the mind became a free-floating entity which was not affected by the human body, and vice versa. Being part of Enlightenment thought, this was a peculiarly Western notion that, arguably, marked off the start of "civilisation" through rationality, logic, and the appeal to the superiority and life of the mind.
This idea was taken further by the sociologists of the late 19th century, including Emile Durkheim, another thinker in the French tradition. Durkheim transposed this idea to a social mind, or the "conscience collective" that directed society and effectively resulted in the development of a distinctive culture in each society.
In the 21st century, despite attempts, mostly by the self-help industry, to integrate mind, body, and spirit, we have not managed to move society towards such an integrated state. Steemit is a great example of this state of affairs. Steemit is THE very embodiment (irony!) of the separation of mind and body.
(Source: steemnews.online)
Being an online platform, it could be argued that Steemit is even more than this. The three most important aspects of Steemit are that it is online (making it free-floating), it is a repository for ideas that come from the mind (with no input from the body), and every idea/comment/interaction is administratively separated from all the others into individual blocks (of the blockchain), effectively rendering it an individualised technology.
One of the intriguing parts of modern western culture (for me) is the tension between what the neoliberal self-help "culture" proposes (the integration of mind-body-spirit) and the technologies that we use every day that maintain the mind-body split. To me, the attempt to integrate mind-body-spirit is very shallow and is basically an offshoot of corporate culture (because there is lots of money being made by these personal development self-help gurus).
My final point is basically a question: Is there anything wrong with maintaining the mind-body split? Especially, when it gives us the opportunity to express what is in our minds and transmit this to many, many people on wonderful platforms such as Steemit.
Rene Descartes? I'm with you!!!!!
