The Poverty of the Spirit

Srgjan Kerim

IANUBIH, International Academy of Science and Arts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo

Corresponding Author: Srgjan Kerim, IANUBIH, International Academy of Science and Arts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, Phone: +385 91 617 1233, e-mail: sakerim48@gmail.com

How to cite this article: Kerim S. The Poverty of the Spirit. Sci Arts Relig 2022;1(2-4):259.

Source of support: Nil

Conflict of interest: None

The digital age, as it is defined today, is dominated by information and communication technologies that produce information on a fantastic scale. This unprecedented technological progress has, among other things, created the so-called social networks. It has also become the main generator of globalization.

In the sea of information at its disposal, incredible superficiality, inertia, and improvisation have surfaced, grinding the human spirit and destroying its basic essence, which is human thought.

We are talking about the death of literature. What nonsense and decadence. What will feed future generations with brains? Certainly not robots.

The higher the level of development of communication technologies and networks, the lower the culture of communication. Defamation, insults, libel, and slander have become commonplace and are tolerated regardless of their consequences.

There used to be controversies at the highest intellectual level, and they were an integral part of social life, even in societies that are said to be close-minded today. But today, even though we live in a democracy, it no longer exists. Spin doctors and other types of schemes are at work instead as part of political campaigns.

Philosophy, which has always been the driving force of human thought and progress, sinks into oblivion and is pushed to the periphery of human activities.

Please name a contemporary prominent philosophical view in the ranks of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Ibn Khaldun, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx Elijah, and Max Weber. Thinkers at the level of Hesse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Karl Popper, to name a few. They simply don’t exist.

Astrophysicists who amaze me with their discoveries in the cosmos, like Stephen Hawking, are hardly recognized, not to mention that they are barely visible in the media. They do not burn them as they did Galileo, but they certainly ignore them.

Instead, they are dominated by mediocre characters from a political world dominated by populism, nationalism, exclusivity, religious intolerance, and racism.

Social networks are their miles, food, and generators, and vice versa. Look at the profiles of most of the so-called influencers. It is populism, extremism, right-wing savagery, and conspiracy theories.

WHAT PRIMITIVISM?

In a word, the poverty of the spirit is growing due to superficiality and improvizations that suppress true knowledge based on the development of thoughts.

It is a pure illusion that the myriad of information that information and communication technologies offer us is a substitute for that. The human brain will never be able to be replaced by any computer.

That is the biggest misconception of this time.

Take the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, for example. Instead of allowing medical science, biochemists, and microbiologists to do their job and engage globally, we have heard of all possible amateurish anti-vaccine appearances and political manipulations.

As scientists, we have a duty to defend the primacy of science and to expose all these “fake” ideas, platforms, and conspiracy theories that are the fruit of the superficiality and improvisation that I am talking about.

Politics, and to a large extent, the media, are full of these and feed on it. And with them, they bring a large following of ordinary people.

It is not the amount of information that raises the quality of knowledge but the analytical ability to direct and use it for the right purposes. And this can only be achieved by developing thoughts.

Education, science, and the arts are neglected in every way. This is reflected in their material status.

Today everything is measured by this in a world ruled by, as Slavoj Žižek said, “the lumpen bourgeoisie.”

To conclude, we have a duty to put all our intellectual energy and knowledge into the function of resolutely opposing it.

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