FOUNDATIONS: Reason & Imperialism 6; Civil Society, Imperialism, & Mind

In Season 2 - our FOUNDATIONS series - we’ll examine European philosophers from the 17th through the 19th centuries, to see how their views have shaped and defined our own… whether we realize it or not.

Having examined the mechanisms of imperialism and “mind-changing” more closely in the last three episodes, we’ll pan out a bit to understand these ideas in a larger historical and philosophical context. First, we’ll seek to understand what exactly Imperialist thinkers, like Mill, intended to occur in the course of these processes.

Next, we’ll discuss the relationships between Civil Society and Mind as two highly complex systems that ultimately come to define and craft one another, cyclically, and continually, over time. Accepting that symbiotic, mutually defining relationship, we’ll re-frame our conversation about how Imperialism “changes minds” to how it manipulates Civil Society as a means of changing individual minds across an entire society.

Finally, we’ll examine the similarities between Colonialism, Imperialism, and other seismic changes to civil society, including those experienced during rapid conversions to authoritarian government… and speculate a bit further on the longer-term effects of this spread of the European worldview via Imperialism, which we’ve likened to the spread of a noxious weed across the “intellectual environment” of the globe.