Pax Cultura
Nicholas Roerich

I started transculture in order to contribute my modest share to today's cultural, artistic and political endeavours, that are ambitious in the sense as indicated in sign 18 of the I Ging, KU - work on what has been spoiled. they are of interest to me as far as they are concerned with the emerging global civil society.

politics are the means to come to terms with issues the solution of which are surpassing the capacities and possibilities of an individual. thus - living in a society - we are, by nature, socio-political beings.

as such we rely on the ability and possibility to   t r a n s m i t   appropriate information and skills in order to create justice, peace and welfare.

the arts are an indispensible element in the ecology of symbolic languages, one of the processes, together with science and spirituality, that allow us to   t r a n s f o r m   the inner and the outer world.

to   t r a n s c u l t u r e   means to   t r a n s c e n d   the limits and conditions of nature without doing harm to her.

by way of many diverse activities around the globe we see people trying to resume their genuine powers in order to shape their present and future according to their own imagination, rather than that of merely economic interest. economy is an important and indispensible part of our lives, yet it has to serve a purpose beyond itself in order to be integrated into society rather than dominate it - or, if I should speak in utopian terms, it should be an economy of gifts.

the economisation of every aspect of our lives (its history lucidely being described in karl polany's 'the great transformation'), is knocking heavily at the doors of culture and the arts, and is also shaping cultural policies (GATS) in the name of a perverted free-market-ideology (masking its not even being true to its own hailed standards) with monetary profit as its only bottom-line, putting the common good at the disposal of an economy of greed.

what we are at risk of seeing destroyed is the civic public sphere, indispensible for individuals and societies to democratically negotiate public affairs and issues against a background of a consensus of values, that both precede and transcend economic utilitarian advantage.

one could argue, that even from an exclusively economic point of view, the production of symbolic capital - through cultural and artistic endeavours - is necessary for the exchange of economic capital to take place. but perhaps this is just naïve. as long as we are fed on the symbolic junk of the spectacle, there is little hope for us to get a real taste of what life can actually be like.

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