Sunday, April 22, 2007
Base Institutions of the Urbane
I have just started reading "The City in History" by Lewis Mumford, and the chapter on the first urban implosion spoke about the time when the 3 key "governing" institutions of the city were in the forming - namely, political, economic and religious agencies.
In this trinity, it may appear that religious agencies do not wield as much power as they used to. However, if we view the religious agency as that which provides psychological support by way of explaining our origins, why our environment behave the way it does, etc, then the religious agency has been taken over by science. An alternate view could be that religion has since been replaced by the arts and culture, where we forgo or lower the importance of an articulated "supreme being/s", and focus instead on the merely unexplainable sublime.
From this perspective, perhaps we can see the three fundamental roles of the trinity agencies:
In this trinity, it may appear that religious agencies do not wield as much power as they used to. However, if we view the religious agency as that which provides psychological support by way of explaining our origins, why our environment behave the way it does, etc, then the religious agency has been taken over by science. An alternate view could be that religion has since been replaced by the arts and culture, where we forgo or lower the importance of an articulated "supreme being/s", and focus instead on the merely unexplainable sublime.
From this perspective, perhaps we can see the three fundamental roles of the trinity agencies:
- Political - Governing interaction
- Economic - Governing survival
- Religious - Provide a psychological pillar
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