Secularization in the UN Reform E-Book

Jahyr Jesus Brito

• Herausgeber: Editora Max Limonad
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 165

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Interdependence in the contemporary world is an undeniable fact, and globalization is but one side of this multifaceted and extremely complex process. The outset of the integration of individuals dates back to the origin of human existence on Earth, as human beings and civilizations have always sought expansion for a number of reasons. Specifically, after World War II, there was a considerable change in several societies across the planet. Technological development caused changes that had never been experienced before.

Leseprobe

Jahyr Jesus Brito

SECULARIZATION IN THE UN REFORM:

The sovereignty in the twenty-first century

SECULARIZATION IN THE UN REFORM: The sovereignty in the twenty-first century

Copyright: Jahyr Jesus Brito

Copyright da presente edição: Editora Max Limonad

ISBN: 978-85-7549-124-9

www.editoramaxlimonad.com.br

This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the Lord. JEREMIAH 9:23-24

1 THE QUESTION OF METHOD

In the early stages of planning a project, the first question asked is: what method is to be used? There is a concern underlying this question: the veracity of what is being produced. Rupestrian paintings in prehistoric caves may be an indication of how far back human eagerness for answers goes. Men of that time, despite lacking writing abilities, wanted to perpetuate the accounts of their existence. The Development of writing marks a turning point to historians. Early on, rupestrian artists wanted to record their experiences in the form of drawings. In later years, ancient wise men sought veracity, and for this reason, they shifted from explaining the myths to mulling over the world. Questions about our origin, existence, and destiny remain unanswered. There is a fierce struggle between Science and Religion to find meanings. Moving from concrete to abstract thinking triggered the greatest revolution of our species. And what have we achieved so far? The answer is theories. What are theories? There are a number of classifications: the action of contemplating, regarding or trying to observe a phenomenon, an accepted overview of different hypotheses, where none is necessarily wrong. A theory does not need to be proven; being acceptable and producing meaning will suffice. When a theory is proven, it ceases to be a theory. This is more commonly observed in Natural Sciences.

In reference to Social Sciences and Humanities, the veracity of a theory will be proportional to the pace of change in a society. The faster the pace of change in a society, the less up-to-date theories become, and the stronger the need for explanations that foster new theories, and so forth.

In theWest, pre-Socratic thinkers, such asParmenides, defended that, in essence, things are immutable. On the other hand, toHeraclitus, everything flows and nothing stands still.

In theEast, in a more ancient civilization, such as the Chinese, we can find such perception in ideogram 回 (huí), which means go back, return, turn around, rotate. These spirals are ancient versions of the ideogram that represents the revolving streams of water. Overtime, the ideogram has embodied new meanings, being used in association with others, forming new words and phrases (HSUAN-AN, 2006). Conversely, ideogram 恆 (heng) means constant, lasting, permanent (HSUAN-AN, 2006). We are not claiming that the Western Philosophy is equal to the Eastern Philosophy, or that the former was influenced by the latter. And one of the reasons is that the Western School of Thought considered for a long time, and some still consider, that the term Philosophy can only be applied in reference to the Western knowledge. As a consequence, can reason be identified in a geographical space?

In the West, it wasEmpedocleswho promoted the dialogical combination between Parmenides and Heraclitus. To Empedocles, water cannot turn into fish and vice-versa, but water can move, and fish can transform themselves. What form of thinking is that? That is ambiguity, the possibility that one message bears two or more meanings. This is usually produced by poor organization of the words in a statement. Ambiguity is a special case of polysemy, the possibility that a word bears various meanings in one context.In the East, such quest for the ‘truth’ existed among philosophers, as well.

From Zhuangzi’s point of view, the debate is doomed from the start. In a debate, the debaters aim to persuade the other to see his or her point of view. TheMohistsandConfuciansare adamant that their respective views are the correct one. Their assertions of correctness assume both the objectivity and universality of their views. (LAI, 2009, p. 173).

The question here is that, whether the discussion of ‘the truth’ was conducted by people of theWest, whose languages stem from an Indo-European base and used phonetic writing, or among thinkers of theEast, whose linguistic branch was Sino-Japanese and the writing was ideographic, the problem is exactly the same: the limitation of language in face of the limitation of humans in time and space. Men can only perceive one facet of reality, which is larger than human comprehension. These cyclic, dialectic or sequential and linear ways of reporting events are quite dichotomic. Monolithic and monocausal explanations have lasted to date.

In Biology, Fixism proposed to explain the origin and the diversity of species. According to it, species first appeared just as they are known in current days and remained unchanged along time. This theory supports that the species were created independently from one another. Fixism was accepted for many centuries and backed by the observation of continuous generations of living beings that kept looking the same. Later on, the Darwin’s Evolution Theory, with a dialectic narrative, built a scenario where species more adapted to the environment would perpetuate. In Chemistry, Lavoisier contributed with his ‘nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.’ In Social Sciences, fixist ideas reemerge in the school of Functionalism according to which each individual would play a certain role, like gears of a machine that cannot be replaced. Conversely, the Marxist narrative assumes the opposite: societies live in constant struggle, and conflict is the rule rather than the exception. While interpreting religious thought and behavior, Weber reached the dialectic conclusion that the gods of yesterday are the demons of today. Our objective is not to build a historiography of ideas, but simply demonstrate that there is a significant limit between what theories speculate and what reality is. And what is the reason for this limit? A thinker is human, mortal, limited to time and space. Men cannot go beyond truth, as it is larger than men. Theories are precisely a reflection of humans: imprecise, incoherent, incomplete, flawed, antagonistic, contradictory, mysterious. Men do not exert sovereignty over time; it is time that exerts sovereignty over men, who is ephemeral. To be sovereign is to be perennial, eternal.

In theEast, the ideogram that represents eternity 永 (yong), overall, expresses the absence of origin, absence of destination; one does not know where one comes from and where one is going to: this is the idea of eternity in the Chinese culture (HSUAN-AN, 2006). While the eternal is timeless, human existence is limited. Only the eternal can be sovereign. The eternal does not have to find the truth; the eternal is the truth itself. As presented, the theory is directly connected to conceptions from both the ancientEastandWest. In current times, there have been exactly the same discussions as those of Empedocles, Parmenides and Heraclitus in theWest, or in the Mohist and Confucian schools in theEast, thousands of years ago. A contemporary theory, to use computer language, can be found inMorin, to whom‘the new logic is not about the abandonment of the previous explanations, but about a dialogic combination’(MORIN, 2000, p. 201).

1.1 How to make this dialogic combination?

The main work of Edgar Morin,The Method, comprises 6 volumes. It was written along three and a half decades and stands for one of the major works in Epistemology available. The early writings ofThe Method, in 1973, start with the publication ofThe Lost Paradigm: Human Nature, which questions the conceptual and paradigmatic inflexibility of sciences. Morin (2000) states that, with the complex problems that contemporary societies face, only studies of inter-poli-transdisciplinary character could result in satisfactory analyses of such complexities. To him, classical science is sustained by two pillars: the first is the mechanical notion and the second is the Cartesian separatist notion. As a reaction to the classical model, he observes that, after one fourth of a century, ‘systemic sciences’ were developed, bringing together what is separated by the traditional disciplines and whose objective is composed by the interaction of the elements, and no longer by their separation. ‘The complex thinking calls, not for the abandonment of inductive-deductive-identity logic, but for a dialogic combination between their use segment by segment and its transgression where it ceases to be operational.’

The author highlights three theories that support systemic thinking:

I – The Information Theory;

II – The Cybernetics Theory;

III – The Systems Theory.

After presenting the above listed theories, the author concludes that fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanistic, disjunctive and reductionist thinking breaks down the complexity of the world and pulverizes it, separating problems, separating what is joined. In order to think about complexity, he proposes the following seven basic principles

I – The Organizational System or System Principle;

II – The Principle of ‘Hologram’;

III – The Principle of Feedback.

IV – The Principle of Recursive Loop;

V – The Principle of Autonomy/ Dependence (self eco-organization)

VI – The Dialogical Principle (The Principle of Dialogue);

VII – The Principle of Reintroduction of Cognitive Subject in the Cognitive Processes.

Initially, we will summarize each one of the three theories that support systemic thinking, detect common and conflicting points, and then demonstrate that the only way to conciliation is to resort to the dialogical principle.

2 THE INFORMATION THEORY

Information Theory or Mathematical Theory of Communication is a branch of the theory of probability and statistics that deals with communication systems, data transmission, encryption, coding, anomaly detection, error correction, data compression, etc. It should not be confused with Information Technology and Library Science. In this theory, communication presents itself as a mathematical problem strictly based on statistics, which has provided communication engineers with a means to determine the capacity of a communication channel regarding the occurrence of bits. The theory does not concern itself with the semantic data model, but can involve aspects related to the loss of information during compression and transmission of messages with channel noise.

Today, Information Science is an interdisciplinary field primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, handling, storage, recovery and spreading of information,i.e., information is studied from its origin to the process of making data into knowledge. Also, this Science digs deep into the application of information in organizations and its use, as well as interactions among people, organizations and information systems. Logistics and information planning, data modeling, analysis, and organizational theory are the main areas of study. All fields of knowledge are fed with information, but few turn it into a subject matter, and so is the case of Information Science.

As a result, while information is subject matter of Information Science, it also pervades concepts and definitions of the field. And despite information can neither be measured nor defined