Doctoral Degrees (School of Public Leadership)
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing Doctoral Degrees (School of Public Leadership) by Subject "Aesthetics"
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemRestoring and holding on to beauty : the role of aesthetic relational values in sustainable development(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010-12) Swartz, Moshe E. Ncilashe; Swilling, Mark; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. School of Public Leadership.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Unless Africans and their leaders make a concerted effort to rid themselves of the harmful legacy of colonial spirituality by adopting new motives for living, entering into new relationships with themselves on the plane of beneficial values, Africa will not be able to escape the social, environmental, political and economic afflictions that currently beset her. The colonial forces that burst into Africa with violence from minds bent on foreign conquest were primarily driven by an ethos of covetousness that has come to characterize the existing international order. Stealing, not only of natural resources has continued side by side with the denuding of the very souls of people – as has happened so successfully in Africa – of their humanity. There is evidence that human existence has been beleaguered and governed by an unviable microphysical framework (mindset and spirituality). In the midst of what appears to be a bewilderingly dynamic, turbulent and complex world, this spirituality looms large, gaining a stronghold resulting in disconnectedness among self-worshipping humans and their environment. We now live in a world governed by a distructive innate iniquity that produces overwhelming inequity among humans and unprecedented damage in the natural environment that sustains us. This study draws from and connects the evidence provided by ancient history with current macro-physical endeavours to demonstrate that this micro-physicality still holds sway, albeit under various manifestations. Having been in a state of war with itself and its living environment, humanity has reached what observers have acknowledged as a crossroads. In the violence that has engulfed all humans since time immemorial, as evidenced in the co-existence of poverty and affluence, pandemics driven by a wide variety of illnesses, huge disparities in wealth within and between national economies, energy and environmental depletion and degradation that have earned us the unprecedented crisis of global warming, this crossroads has made itself very present. A particular kind of mentality and spirituality has taken us to this point. It is a spirituality that is obviously devoid and incapable of producing beauty of harmony and communion among us irrespective of our diversity, whether in race, culture, knowledge discipline or geographic space. The macro-physical condition we are experiencing cannot be viewed in isolation from the spirituality that produced it. We are now in an unsustainable world that must have been the fruit of an unsustainable spirituality. The answers to our global dilemma must fundamentally be sought not in any new technologies that emanate from the same mindset, but in a renewed mind and in a different pattern of spirituality. This study probes the dominant world mindest that directed the globally pervasive Western civilization and reviews some major historical and cultural trends that, it argues, have brought humanity to the zenith of its “world-hunt”-culture. This is a “world- hunt” of self-mutilation that manifested itself in Europe, the near-east, Asia and Africa over more than four millennia ago. The deforestation, land degradation, oppression of the poor, hunger, hatred that drives terrorist attacks, climate changes that drive natural disasters and the loss of species, are all the unmistakable bitter fruit of such a culture. It is a culture characterized and propelled by the absence of what this study coins as “aesthetic relational values”. This dominant mindset has strewn all over our globe various rule-based governance institutions characterized by an ethos of central control, manipulating people’s lives for self-centred gain. Though many of these institutions come in various garbs of apparent benevolence, faith-based, trade-based, knowledge/science-based and political governance bodies, all are adherents of the same worldview that is firmly grounded in a merciless and destructive pantheistic, and nature-worship belief system traceable to ancient Egypt. Many of these institutions, today, publicly claim to be proponents of sustainable development, the eradication of poverty and peace among the nations of the world, yet they are still clinging, esoterically, to a cosmological perspective of nature-worship that glorifies self-worship and disregards the well-being of others. The study contrasts this dominant spirituality with the Afrocentric one based on a knowledge system that propounds a belief in a compassionate and merciful Creator-God who is the source of all nature, including the human family, as illustrated in the daily lives of amaMbo peoples whose geographic origins are traced to ancient Ethiopia. As the former continues to make a nonentity of the Creator-God, Africans, realizing the spiritual bankruptcy of a self-glorification ethic that has polarised the people and ravaged their continent through rule-based institutions, are returning, in large numbers, to this knowledge system of their ancient fathers on which their social institutions of shared and consensus-based decision-making and governance, from the basic social unit as the family, to national political relations, were founded. In several encounters these patterns of spiritualities have produced unsavoury outcomes. In the Cape’s more-than-a-century long, bitter and protracted encounter between a branch of amaMbo called amaXhosa, that began with the seventeenth century arrival of the Western “world-hunt” culture through the Calvinist Dutch East India Company traders, Africa and the entire world have been provided, simultaneously, with indisputable evidence of the destructiveness of self-indulgent living on the one hand and the efficacy, on the other, of a relational aesthetic as a viable alternative out of the humanitarian and environmental crises that confront our globe. Views and principles regarding the harmonious living of life on earth have been advocated by many a great leader since antiquity. They have been vindicated in the lives of ancient Israelite patriarchs such as Abraham and Moses, who led his kinsmen out of the Egyptian bondage that lasted over four centuries; in the life of Tolstoy, who chose to be excommunicated from a society that regarded these principles with disdain; to that of Gandhi, on whom Tolstoy was a tremendous influence, and effectively applied them to unshackle a whole nation from British subjugation; and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy’s compatriot, who first referred to these as “aesthetic views”. These relational principles were embedded in the lifestyle of ancient Israel, lived and advocated later by the Jewish Rabbi called Jesus, whose very own people chose to shamefully murder Him rather that accept His teachings. These principles were taught, practised and handed down to His followers to influence humanity as never before. In their ancient setting these principles clashed with those of the pagan lifestyle of Egypt, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome, which culturally shaped the Western civilization that pervades our globe. The results were centuries of enslavements, dispossessions and persecutions. In the course of history pagan beliefs crept in and mingled with orthodox Jewish rites and worship, producing an adulterated Christianity and a plethora of what are known today as nature-based religions, which still uphold and advocate the individual gods to whom honour and worship is due rather than the Creator in the Hebrew and Afrocentric cosmologies. This study traces the effect of the absence of these relational values on the quality of the life of nations and their leaders. A remarkable trend and pattern characterized by self-mutilative living emerged among all such nations and people. Their efficacy and mutual beneficence, on the other hand, was unmistakable in societies such as that of amaXhosa, in their pre-colonial state in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. As all of nature “groans” under the human self-mutilation caused by the impoverished spirituality in aesthetic relational values, this study argues that salvation lies in ibuyambo, the recalling of these under-appreciated relational values, and in ensuring the re-education of ourselves and our future leaders in them. The focus of the study is what these values are, the effect of their absence, how different they are to what are known as “social capital”, how they have been manifested and preserved in ancient African institutions such as the weekly memorial day of rest – the Sabbath in the creation narrative – in the lives of some individuals and people on our planet, particularly Africans and amaMbo, and the benefits they derived from respecting them. A vital observation in this study is that social systems that are driven by the motive of individual, corporate or national self-exaltation are invariably rooted in strife and discention. The conclusion is drawn that these under-appreciated relational values, aesthetic relational values, are not only a vital ingredient to the quest for and in all known facets of sustainability in development efforts, they hold the key to unlock the door to the mystery of “harmony” that has proven so elusive to individuals, families, communities, societies, nations and their governance systems. The study concludes, with Dostoevsky, that aesthetic relational values contain “a guarantee of tranquility” for all humanity and the natural environment that sustains them. The restoration, not only by all of Africa, of the lost spirituality of aesthetic relational values cherished by their ancient forebears, is key to the renewal of our world.