On the Need of Our Time
On The Need of Our Time, Draft v.5.2
The Need is for a Planetary Wisdom Civilization
© By Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
Table of Contents:
The Concept of the Need of Our Time ................................................................................. 2
The Need for a Declaration of the Need ................................................................................ 3
The Nature, and Need, of the Time........................................................................................ 5
Wisdom Themes Needed for Our Time................................................................................. 6
The Need for Clarity on the Terms “Wisdom” and “Wisdom Civilization” ......................... 7
The Need for a New Guiding Story ....................................................................................... 8
…to tell us our identity: who we are, and the nature of our time in history .................... 9
…the old guiding story and exploitation of the common people ....................................10
The End of the Modernist Guiding Story of Unending Growth ............................................11
Beyond Modernity as a way of life, and beyond Modernism as a belief system,
in the time of the Wisdom Civilization................................................................................12
The Need for ‘after the Modern’ to be perceived as the nature of the time...........................12
The Need is to See What ‘Beyond the Modern’ Looks Like.................................................15
First Aspect: ‘Challenge and Response’ Elements ..........................................................15
Second Aspect: Creative Leadership Responses .............................................................18
Third Aspect: Collective Shift of Consciousness ............................................................19
The Need for Wisdom at a Time When Modernism is Unwise.............................................22
The Need for Mourning and Tragedy at the End of the Modern World................................23
The Need for a Transformational and Emergence Paradigm.................................................25
Cultural Evolution in Our Time: Making Leaps and Falling in Holes ..................................28
The Need for a Planetary Wisdom Culture............................................................................38
The Need for a Wisdom Epistemology at the End of Modernism.........................................43
Creating the Wisdom Possibility ...........................................................................................45
Collective Will as an Emergent Phenomenon Serving the Need...........................................48
Please note, this is a draft in progress and will change. Do
not cite, quote or plagiarize without permission from:
Paul H. Ray: [email protected], 415-897-2894
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
1
On the Need of Our Time
2
On The Need of Our Time, v.5.3
The Need is for a Planetary Wisdom Civilization
The Concept of the Need of Our Time
The Need of Our Time may be a big, new concept for the modern world, but it was a
familiar idea in many of the wisdom traditions of ancient civilizations. (Here I'm capitalizing
both Need and Purpose because neither are the small, personal phenomena we're used to talking
about when we use those words. They're collective and Big.) The Need mediates in an elastic
way between ‘what is,’ the objective facts on the ground, and an emerging collective sense of
grand Purpose for our time. Whoever recognizes the Need feels that larger Purpose both as a
sense of possibility and also as a vision belonging to our collective future. When the recognition
of that Need is operative within us, that Purpose tends to pull us forward, like a giant hand
reaching back from the future to our own time, requiring us to undertake new things as part of its
manifestation. It’s a big stretch between that and ‘what is,’ for us to stay rooted in the grounded,
practical details of ‘does it work?’ for individual, group and planetary survival and well being.
The Need is a transmission belt both ways between the two. I believe it to be objectively real.
Interestingly, Aristotle described this phenomenon in his biology and his theory of
causality, focusing more on the term telos: ‘end,’ ‘goal’ or ‘purpose.’ The moment a need is felt
or recognized, people create a goal related to meeting the need, and significantly, an image of
what’s possible. The word teleology comes from it. Then it’s a tiny conceptual step from small
purposes to larger purposes. Similarly, whenever we talk of technology or adaptive behavior we
are talking of how it happens that anything is created, or objects are made or goals accomplished,
and teleology is implicated in the processes and the action. In fact, a Need is often for adaptation.
Over the past three centuries many physical scientists and philosophers of science wanted
to get rid of any concept of mind, purpose or ‘final cause’ as a causal explanation in the physical
world. Early on, they needed to avoid conflicts with powerful religious authorities. Later, it was
to establish physical cause as all they needed to explain physical phenomena: "no miracles or
God-like interventions need apply" as potential explanations. However, in the latter part of the
twentieth century, just when secular notions had the upper hand over religious dogma, and when
systems thinking got around to the more complex parts of reality covered by biology, psychology
and the social sciences, a variety of newer theorists found we cannot do without such notions.
The paradigm is shifting back. That was anticipated by Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy.
Complexity theory, systems theory, and fields like ecology, with nonlinear dynamic
models keep finding ever more areas where something remarkably like teleology is essential to
explaining complex living systems. The latest philosophy of biology is full of arguments over
how teleology exists and works, not whether. Most theories of action also use the concept of
teleology as purposes needing to be achieved by the action. Both Hegel and Marx used teleology
in their philosophies of history. Most important for us, not only that kind of philosophy of
history, but theories of spontaneous self-organization, in both biology and society, revive telos.
So, when we face the emergence of our next planetary level of civilization, and the ways people
are reacting to the crises of global warming, the question of ‘What’s Needed Now?’ pops right
up. As Hegel would have put it, it’s the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time: It's in these senses that it
seems completely natural to talk in terms of the Need of Our Time.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
On the Need of Our Time
3
So, let’s start with the premise that in a time of cultural crisis and transformation, we are
not just helpless victims of fate, or of huge forces out of control. There’s actually an objective
Need for our awake and aware perception of what needs to be done, and our participation in it,
such that we do have somewhere to go with "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor"
besides merely falling into despair about some unformed sense of the inevitable downfall of
civilization. Perception of what’s in that Need is open to anyone who will undertake the inner
discipline of holding a steady awareness, and who has some ability to reason about the future. It
also helps to be well-informed about the planetary problematique from a viewpoint cutting
across specialist areas of knowledge, and to have a wider, more generous view of humanity.
In eras less secular than our own, perception of the Need was often treated as a form of
prophecy. The historical problem of ‘prophecy’ was that it tended to get frozen, and be edited by
religious authorities, to make it safe for the establishment of each age. Prophecies that did not fit
the needs of religious authorities were made to disappear—or found their way into feuding
among sects. In general, turning prophecy into official doctrines has been the bane of humanity.
So be warned that working with that sense of the Need of Our Time has that kind of risk to it.
What makes our time different from other times in history is that the Need of Our Time is
planetary in scope, and refers to the development of two aspects of one emerging phenomenon
(and yes, they too are capitalized because they're really, really Big):
a) a larger, overarching planetary Wisdom Culture (‘culture’ as subjective experiences, art,
literature, science, technology, philosophy, religion, spiritual practices, any published or
informational content, values, worldviews, lifestyles, habits, beliefs, norms, laws, rules); and
b) a Wisdom Civilization (‘civilization’ as a cultural supersystem containing many particular
organized societies and cultures, and including groups, institutions, markets, cities, networks,
armies, governments, corporations, industries, NGOs, etc.).
At the scale of this planetary Need, the appropriate time scale is centuries, and today it involves
all the people and ecologies of plants and animals on the planet. Some aspects of the Need may
be stated for particular peoples, or nations, or industries, or sectors, or ecologies, but that is
simply a part of its multifaceted character. The Need tends to be complex, rather than simple,
because it deals with the objective requirements of living systems, not merely with our mental
desires for clarity and simplicity.
The wisdom needed for our time will not necessarily be what was needed for other times
in history, because there is a unique Need in each time. A true “wisdom needed for our time” in
this new millennium will serve creation of a Wisdom Civilization. It will be yet another big deal,
Wisdom with a capital W, because it is emerging as a larger, broader, deeper, more
encompassing, more participative, more illuminated, more celebratory Wisdom than we have
known at earlier times in human history. That's partly because more diverse cultures, and more
levels of myth and consciousness will be involved than ever before. The emergence of a
planetary civilization is also deeper in time than we have seen, i.e., it requires us to take a far
longer time horizon than we may be used to, very likely at the level of centuries. Notice that
while we are used to talking about wisdom as a purely individual matter, in this paper I'm talking
about it as a cultural matter, part of the dual character of culture as both in-here-subjective in our
thoughts and experiences, and out-there-objectively-present all around us. It's important that this
kind of collective Wisdom is more "a developmental direction in processes that move toward
greater consciousness" than any particular set of "wise traits" of individual or group. (For why
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
On the Need of Our Time
4
this is so, see my paper "The Practical Wisdom Paradigm" which describes it as a systems and
process view of Aristotle's phronesis, using a Whiteheadian style of process philosophy.)
The Need for a Declaration of the Need
Our objective requirement is for an uplifting public declaration of higher possibilities for
our time—not just technotopia, not just an assertion of the wonders of greed and consumerism,
not just red alerts on potential catastrophes, however real and pressing they may be. The Need is
for imagery that corresponds to adding a wise and new planetary layer to cultures and societies
across the planet, so that they may rise up to a newly desired collective Image of the Future, one
that elaborates the heart’s longing of the people, in the largest sense.
That public declaration of the Need of Our Time will posit future images of Possibility,
because this is a necessary drawing forward of the collective consciousness, toward a ‘Positive
Image of the Future.’ This phrase comes from the book that started future studies, in the 1950s,
by Fred Polak, The Image of the Future. It describes a large-scale, shared cultural understanding
of what future possibilities are like, not just our own private possibilities, but all our children's
and grandchildren's. Historically, collective images of the future served as self-fulfilling
prophecies: Societies with negative images of the future failed to invest in their children, new
enterprises, infrastructure, etc. and often fell apart. Societies with positive images of the future
tended to do far better—even if they were not at all accurate. When elites impose an essentially
negative image of human possibility on their people, usually to justify the exploitive system that
they benefit from, the societies fail to develop their potential. Our positive Image of the Future
must be stated from a Wisdom consciousness, for as Polak said, the numinous quality that results
is essential to its proper reception, and to turning mere possibilities into realities.
However, let’s avoid fictional utopias. Our Need is to be explicitly ‘eutopian.’* That is,
we need to describe our planet, and its possible planetary civilization as a ‘good place.’ We
cannot afford the cynical nihilism of pop culture that a good future is ‘no place,’ or ‘outopian,’*
saying that good survival inventions are fantasy. [*From the Greek: eu=good, ou=negation,
topos=place] The title of the first utopian novel by Thomas More, Utopia, was a typically preElizabethan-era play on words for educated insiders to the joke, as if to ask, “What say you?
Does this book show a good place, or no place at all? Can we create a good place?” He had to be
careful to avoid writing anything that might appear revolutionary to the king. More was first to
attempt an answer to the question: “What would a wiser, better society look like, one that serves
our heart’s desire?” This kind of question was first seriously posed in the Renaissance, and then
aborted by religious wars for the next century after. Yet it has kept recurring for the past 500
years, if only as novels and seemingly innocent speculation, though often suppressed by kings
and despots. It now returns in our time. We have an opportunity to make good use of it.
Any new collective Image of the Future really needs to be explicitly practical because
what can now come forth are large numbers of actual designs for experimentation. The Need
is not to declare a final blueprint either as expert design or as prophetic revelation. Rather, it
is to declare an empowerment of humanity all around the planet, to create its own new
culture, free of rulers and generals, despots and tyrants, captains of industry and financiers.
We Need a Declaration that all of humanity is now empowered to manifest a higher
Purpose than the usual purposes of power and wealth—without the mediation of religious
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
On the Need of Our Time
5
leaders, political leaders, business leaders, or any other kind of leaders at all. These are new
strategies of participant design, or user design, not expert design.
All it takes is going to the appropriate new creative kinds of consciousness, to bring
through many thousands of parallel social designs, without domination of any ‘one best way.’ It
declares freedom! Not ‘freedom from external controls’ but ‘freedom to create’ and ‘freedom to
grow into our larger, better selves,’ to develop from mere ‘children of God’ into ‘adults of God.’
And it is a double freedom: both personal and civilizational.
That is, our best hope is to employ evolutionary design strategies, whereby many
alternatives are generated, and tried out. The key to an evolutionary design strategy is first to
massively proliferate a variety of forms out of ‘what’s possible,’ and then to edit later, by a
variety of criteria. Not all our images of possibility have to work, or even have a very high
success rate, so long as huge numbers of experiments are tried. So long as there are lots of
successes, many will find their niches around the planet. Get rid of 'the one best way'!
Most important is that we actually do continue to bring through what is new and
delightful, what is beautiful and satisfying to the hearts of humanity. Competition is worthwhile,
but winner-take-all solutions are dangerous. And the criteria of success will not only be found in
socialist vs. conservative production-and-distribution arguments over our wealth, or plenty, but
concerns for the development of a mature and wise humanity on an ecologically stable Earth.
The Nature, and Need, of the Time
The planet is moving into a time of cascades of crises. News reports say insurance
actuaries have identified about 400 easily-predictable, major crises that could hit the planet
within the next 20 years, each at a likelihood of about 5%, or one chance in twenty. That implies
they’ll average about one a year. But of course they will come in bunches. Modern institutions
simply are not prepared for that: market economies force them to hone themselves for efficiency,
not for robustness. Especially not the insurance industry, which says it will go broke just from a
higher frequency of major storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Europe and
North America. So to everyone’s surprise, European insurers now take a lead role against global
warming. But there is far more than that of course.
Worldwide, polls show big majorities in every country know the planet is in trouble on a
number of fronts. Climate scientists are now saying that global warming may already have
crossed the point of irreversible ecological harm, and be headed for a climatic disaster with a
runaway positive feedback cycle. People are trying to fend off its worst consequences, or to
avoid thinking about what feels hopeless and helpless. Yet, merely trying to fend off disaster is
not adequate, for it gives diverging actions that cannot yield a competent collective response.
Face it: we're being forced to grow up! Protest is no longer enough, nor is just trying
to assert our self-interest and tending our own gardens. If humanity can get a better sense of
“the nature of our time,” we will know that we are not just going down to doom and disaster,
but are in transition away from Modern civilization to a new, replacement civilization.
Part of the Need is to converge on positive images of the future that humanity can work
toward together because they express our collective hearts’ desire. It lets many new social and
consciousness movements be coordinated with one another, and with international NGOs, and
with new green businesses and new kinds of politics. Our Need is to elevate civil society to an
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
On the Need of Our Time
6
equal place in the public discourse with the polity and the economy. It gives a better context for
developing images of the possible, and created cultural innovations that add up to a viable future.
Part of the Need is the development of a positive substitute for the present inadequacies
of Modern culture that will draw us forward into the future. For example, worldwide ecological
sustainability will require wiser businesses and financial systems, wiser governance processes,
wiser citizen participation processes and wiser conflict resolution processes. That shows it’s a
whole system change, and we won’t get there without aligning the vast majority of Earth’s
citizens with the effort. Wiser systems and processes also require power to be shifted away from
wealthy elites in order to create institutions drawing on “people power.”
This mobilization of citizens for larger purposes and a better future is altogether more
interesting and profound than our small and boring everyday lives. It lets each of us align our
own individual sense of higher purpose with two much larger, wider Needs: the Need of the
Time and the Need of the Whole Planet. It can give one’s life a larger significance, not only by
identification with larger purposes and higher values, but also by contributing to a larger cause.
This is far grander and more fulfilling than self-interest, patronage and payoffs. Yet it does not
need to entail any more sacrifices than we're having to face anyway in our present period of a
cascade of crises. Choosing our own sacrifices is not only more pleasant, it's enobling, and a
salutary part of growing up, personally and as a species. It's the good kind of enlargement of the
self, not as imperial ego, but as a kind of generosity toward others, an openness to others and to
new possibilities, a softening of the egoic boundaries to let in altruism. At the same time it is also
providing better future for our own children and grandchildren, and all the children of the planet.
The Need for Public Declaration of Wisdom Themes for Our Time
It may seem obvious when we say it, that there is a great deal of public folly in our time,
and that it is endangering many people and other living beings on the planet. We need not even
rest our case with the Bush administration and Wall Street. There's plenty of folly to go around.
So what about the opposite? Isn’t there some wisdom Needed for our time? Well, yes, there is,
and it is not even that hard to name its features. But more to the point, we need a public
declaration of the need for more appropriate and wise behavior than we've seen lately, and a
public discussion of the fact that we not only expect it from public officials, and corporate
officials and leaders of civil society, we also need to start demanding it from them and from
ourselves.
Let's say it: We can do better than conventional stupidity. We're just not as foolish and
stupid as the collective folly and stupidity that we've lived with lately.
Yes, it's true that most pundits who write for the mainstream media might immediately
deny, and ridicule, the very idea of wisdom. Cynical rhetoric is very popular today: it helps them
hold off feelings of despair, helplessness and hopelessness that grow out of small ego's feelings
of incapacity in the face of really, really Big events. But then, once we start making the list,
something else comes up: The items on the list are kind of obvious once you say them, but in fact
nobody is saying them publicly. So publicly declaring these wisdom themes is another Need too.
We need it to counter the hopelessness and cynicism that so easily takes over now.
“The Wisdom needed for our time” will favor, and utilize, some or all of the following
wisdom themes (and will not favor, or utilize, any of their foolish opposites):
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
On the Need of Our Time
7
The Wisdom Needed for Our Time
Will have these wisdom themes...
Not these opposites, themes of folly
The wise elder’s long-term perspectives and
reasoning: what is good for all the children?
Not short-term, immature, selfish, greedy,
power-mad perspectives and reasoning
Linking future-oriented perspectives and
concerns to our deep collective past, and
drawing from its themes for legitimacy
Not just focused on our shallow past and
present to the exclusion of our evolution into
the future
Showing maximally inclusive concerns across
all kinds of people and all species, for humans
and nature alike
Not narrowly focused on particular tribes,
nations, traditions, or humanity only, and not
to the exclusion, or ignorance, of nature
Linking spiritual realization and concerns to
practical action to the needs of “the planet and
the people and species on it”
Not otherworldly, abstruse, or lacking
relationship to people’s real concerns in their
‘life worlds,’ and in their ecologies
Placing crucial emphasis on the growth and
transformation of both persons and the culture,
both organizations and life worlds, both spirit
and civilization, both local and planetary
Not static ideals, not moral absolutes lacking
reference to human growth/transformation; and
not focused just on individual change, lacking
reference to cultural change issues
Concerns of the elders of humanity for the
Not excluding anyone, not immature in the
well-being of all the children of the world, now manner of the adolescent consciousness typical
and in the longer term future
of humanity today
Accepting change in both planet and culture
Not rigidly traditional, not reactive
Possessing, and seeking even more
philosophical depth. Using modern process
philosophy and process theology to express
wisdom themes
Not philosophically shallow, ignorant of
philosophies of all civilizations, not theologies
of traditions, not hampered by academic
Western technical-language philosophy
It's rather obvious when you think about it. These criteria Need public discussion, and they Need
to be employed in evaluating what we see around us.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
8
The Need for Clarity on the Terms “Wisdom” and “Wisdom Civilization”
In part, this reflects the Need to use language that many people respond positively to. But in
addition, the term “Wisdom” does quite a lot of work for us. In fact it:
Sets a context for positive change — Wisdom demands: a wider context, longer term context,
higher standards for what is good, calls for more philosophical and spiritual depth, doing true
syntheses, and leading to the good of the whole, where that is perceived as ‘the whole planet.’
Bestows a consciousness-altering vision — Wisdom allows a positive image of the future to
pull us forward, to help us become what It wants to be—and lets the vision of what is possible
reveal itself and aid our hearts’ longing.
Generates a critique of what is unwise, or folly—Wisdom improves our social and political
critiques, from mere discussion of struggles for power and pelf, to speaking out against what is
not for the good of all, against what is foolish and misguided, or selfish and short-sighted, to ask
what is for the good of future generations, and to undermine the legitimacy of the Modern
system of power and money, and uphold a new wiser legitimacy in the polity and the economy.
Aids the recognition of helpful trends—Wisdom transcends Modernism’s denial, or doom and
gloom cynicism, over its own decline. It helps us to recognize the converging trends to the next
civilization, and to bear the ugliness of the time, deriving from the deterioration of Modernity.
Creates new kinds of strategies—Wisdom uplevels strategic gamesmanship from zero sum
games a) to seek wiser strategies and tactics for conscious, intentional change in the system (not
just winning games in the old system) and b) to have both better processes with fewer bad side
effects (e.g., win-win-win strategies that involve a third side), and better citizen involvement.
Enhances the legitimacy of a new politics—Wisdom calls forth a new order that is legitimate
because it is wise, not because of a mythology based on capitalism, the nation-state or premodern religions. The Wisdom Civilization will embody higher ideals, visions, standards, trends,
and strategies than what is current in modern or traditional politics.
Inspires realistic hope for the planet—Wisdom points toward a planetary civilization that goes
far beyond the old empires and colonialism, and beyond industrial modernity, and works on
saving the diversity of Earth’s peoples and its ecosystems.
The idea of a Wisdom Civilization states the above as going far beyond the context of
corporate globalization. It says, more accurately, that the planet is now becoming one world for
the first time. This idea reflects the planetarization of collective consciousness that has been
developing for the past century, and is now finding its way into actuality. Such a huge historical
process objectively requires Wisdom to succeed. It refers to a Civilization because it can
include many particular and diverse cultures, societies, ethnic groups, tribes, etc.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
9
The Need for a New Guiding Story
At present, the West lacks an adequate guiding story to link our personal concerns to the
needs of the whole society and the whole planet. This accounts in large part for many of the
failures of the media and the authorities to properly address the big picture of what is going on.
The Need of any particular time always includes a guiding story. It helps to make sense of the
question of how to link our individual self interest with the interest of the larger whole, so that
we do not sacrifice either of them on the twin altars of expediency or ideology. (One of the
abetting sins of the wealthy elites of American Modernism is their ideological denial of the
general good and the public interest altogether, and their systematic attempt to dominate the
media and educational institutions with a hyper-individualism that misleads and miseducates.)
A wisdom culture will need to do better than Modernity at linking individual needs and
the general good, rather than putting them at odds with each other. Today’s Modern institutions
fail to make this connection and that creates conflict and a kind of collective stupidity rather than
a collective intelligence. Our civilizational pattern grew unconsciously, and many of its design
elements are just poorly done. So we are forever cleaning up messes that ought never to have
been made in the first place, and working against one another: undoing work half done, and
trying to re-jigger half-baked designs for organizations, laws, regulations, materials, machines,
roads, networks, buildings, and cities. [See McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle]
We can expect the new guiding story to say something like this:
•
Humanity is all one people living on a small and fragile planet; and not only must we care for
our common home, we must share all parts of it with one another, and with other species.
•
We have a wonderful diversity of spiritual insights, arts, foods, and philosophies—and they
should be appreciated, enjoyed, and even celebrated, rather than fought over.
•
Each culture has some facet of a larger truth that no one of us has yet apprehended.
•
The real, spiritual center will indeed hold, because it is everywhere.
•
Unthinking Modern over-production and over-consumption are immature responses to the
world, often showing the affluent’s deprivation from real inner satisfactions, while the poor
struggle with physical deprivation.
•
The oppression of some of us oppresses us all, just as the excessive riches of the few
impoverish us all, for we are all in the same boat together.
•
The destruction of plant and animal species must immediately stop, because they and we are
part of the same planetary ecosystem; and by the same understanding, we must also restore a
great deal of nature.
•
The inner life will turn out to be far more important than the outer life of monetary and
political success, which the Modern world has so unthinkingly embraced.
•
The full development of each human being is a spiritual and psychological project of great
and ultimate worth, and will resolve many of the dilemmas of our time.
•
Our technologies are only of value if they serve us all, and express our collective wisdom,
not just our cleverness and egocentrism.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
10
The Need is for a guiding story to tell us our identity: who we are, and what is the nature of
our time in history. (This discussion has been started by Thomas Berry.) For example:
1. At this time of a cascade of crises, we need not succumb to fear, uncertainty, doubt and
despair (the FUDDs). For at this time in history when our problems at the planetary level are
becoming the most acute, our public and scientific awareness of the whole planet as a living
system is becoming most precise and vivid. Consciousness of the problems is a key
prerequisite for fixing them. What is new is the dawning realization that these problems
cannot be fixed within the same worldview that created them. And the worldview of the
Wisdom Civilization is appearing just in time.
2. We are also developing the greatest repertoire of means for meeting and solving these
planetary problems, and our late modern social system lends itself to positive change far
more than it used to. For example, in an information society some of the most powerful
leverage for change will come from challenging the codes, because information consists
mostly of codes, and changing the high level codes will ramify all through the system.
3. It is possible to realistically reframe a time of planetary crises as not a death spiral, but as a
planetary rite of passage, wherein we outgrow the adolescent stage of humanity’s
development and rebound from a general stripping away of the powerful System of power
and money that now dominates Modernity, to recreate our societies as part of a planetary
wisdom civilization. (See a discussion below of the Laszlo evolutionary model of nonlinear
change from one level to another.)
4. It is also a time when the Cultural Creatives are on the scene as a product of all the social
learning that has occurred since the Fifties. They are a population capable of carrying the
various movements beyond mere protest toward thinking of new visions and new social
designs. These will let us collectively create a new culture that is capable of carrying the
whole planet into a world worth living in. (See a discussion below of Cultural Creatives)
5. A key part of the guiding story must come from the visionary level. A Vision of a Wisdom
Culture is what will mobilize Cultural Creatives. Mobilizing Cultural Creatives will result in
part from having their future call to them, to draw them forward. This form of mobilizing is
not a political act nearly so much as it is a cultural engagement with one another. Today’s
politics is too thin, dry and unengaged, too focused on rule making and on conflict among
elites. It should occur after all else has failed. It is pointless to regard it as a spectator sport.
Creativity is all elsewhere in society, in the thick juiciness of culture. After a period of
creativity has invigorated democratic politics, political mobilization may improve.
6. This mobilizing of Cultural Creatives is for reinventing their lives and their children’s future.
It is for changing the institutions of society: taking apart obscenely rich corporations and the
overweeningly powerful military, requiring governments to be responsive to citizen wisdom,
putting churches and schools into a true educative mode instead of merely reproducing an
unwise past, requiring big media to be tools of reflection instead of selling and sleepwalking.
7. Religion must be neither a consolation, nor an egoic prop: it is to be a way of growing up. All
of life needs to be cognized and examined deeply in terms of higher purpose—no aspect can
be left unexamined. The conduct of daily life everywhere on this planet must be the
conscious substrate of a true spirituality—as participation in God.
8. To be continued…
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
11
The connection between the old guiding story and exploitation of the common people:
Throughout human history, whenever one people has conquered another, the new ruling class
has done all it can to direct the stream of wealth and benefits to itself at the expense of the
conquered. Some Colonel Blimp of the British House of Lords called it, “The good old rule,
the simple plan: That they shall take who have the power. And they shall keep who can.”
ƒ
They redirect trade and taxes to favor themselves at the expense of the old elites and of the
common people.
ƒ
They shower their allies and friends with gifts of land, economic organizations and new
rights, as a way to pay off loyalty, consolidating power and control. From time immemorial
most new inequality has been created by this kind of “kleptocracy” (rule by thieves) that we
condemn in third world countries today. The U.S.’s Bush administration is a typical example.
ƒ
New priests are put in control of newly installed religions to justify the new arrangements,
either bringing in, or making up, the conqueror’s myths and stories about where the world
comes from and what has “always” been so. They do all they can to rip away the conquered
people's own origin story. The conquerors change the old gods to demons, tear down the
forest altars, and dam up the sacred streams.
ƒ
It is essential to their success that the old ways and the old loyalties be forgotten.
ƒ
It is essential that the defeated take on a new identity as a subservient class. That is how both
the Romans and the Christians treated conquered peoples in Europe, how the Arabs treated
North Africa and the Middle East, and the Spanish and Portuguese treated the native peoples
of Central and South America. North Americans followed a more drastic pattern of attrition
by disease and reservations when we didn’t kill the native people outright, and the
Australians did likewise with the aborigines there.
ƒ
Each new story that was installed was able to help the conquerors consolidate their newfound
power and wealth, and to help everyone forget where it came from.
ƒ
So it was in mid to late modernism in the U.S. when we “forgot” that corporations have not
been on the scene forever, but are in fact new arrivals on the scene, who have gained powers
and wealth without responsibility, and act as tools of the new ruling plutocracy in every
industrialized country.
ƒ
This may sound familiar, just like the robber barons of the 1900s Gilded Age or the Bush
Regime of the 2000s present, both of which harkened to an older story to justify looting the
public treasury and concentrating wealth and power even worse than before. What that says
is that kleptocracy and lootocracy are forms of elite criminality normal to unwise societies.
ƒ
One of the key characteristics of unwise societies is that they must distort the truth for these
elites to stay in power. Denial is their favorite dish, and their Pharaohs are kings of denial.
That means of course, that their societies are also prone to catastrophic failures whenever
they have weakened or destroyed big parts of their natural or economic environment.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
12
The End of the Modernist Guiding Story of Unending Growth
We are coming to the end of the era of rapid economic growth and rapid increase of wealth,
and everything the Bush Regime is trying suggests their larger intent is to lock in vastly greater
wealth and power for themselves and their friends before it all stops. As Big Oil’s very own
politicians, they are very aware of this decade as the end of the era of cheap oil and gas at the
time of “Hubbert’s Peak”—the peaking and then decline of worldwide oil and gas production.
The high growth rates demanded by all financial markets depend on ever increasing
productivity. However, brute force materials and energy production have hit diminishing returns,
and are no longer profitable. Furthermore they are producing vast environmental destruction.
"Internalization" of the cost of ecological destruction will have to happen, as companies are
forced to start carrying the costs of restoration on their books, and the paper profits from brute
force energy and materials production and mass marketing will disappear. With the end of brute
force production, we are shifting to the high tech info economy as a hoped-for substitute, but the
info economy's rules are entirely different from those of the previous era. They will support
ecological sustainability, but probably won't support ever-growing profits for financiers. It is
unclear what alternative energy production combined with nanotechnology will do to the old
world of brute force production, but at the very least we are seeing the sunset years of a number
of fossil fuels industries: coal, oil and gas, and of the old heavy industry system that depended on
them, especially autos and steel.
The high growth rates demanded by financiers of the leading countries in financial markets
require either increasing market size, or the extension of markets to economies that never had
them before. As the planet becomes completely marketized, this growth vanishes at the same
time that ecological constraints really bite down hard. Their exploitation of poor countries is ever
more obvious, and capitalism’s trickle-down growth rationale is collapsing. The damage from
unlimited growth to societies around the world is so great that those costs have to be introduced
into our national accounting systems. At that moment it’s obvious: the game’s not worth playing.
Many lines of evidence agree that we are near the end of an era of exponential growth of
economies and populations. When growth slows down, we will no longer be able to postpone the
issues of social justice. It's already happening. This is bad news for the very wealthy of the
world, going well beyond the fact that they can no longer live off of coupon clipping. There are
growing demands for fairness and less inequality, both within countries and between countries:
As we become one planet, a large array of related values concerns will grow in importance.
Implications for us as individuals:
Consider two big alternatives:
1) If our civilization doesn’t change course, your own children or grandchildren will inherit an
unstable, ecologically degraded world much worse than the one you grew up in. From there it
is ever more likely to head toward still more pessimism and destruction, such that a fall of
civilization and a new barbarism is likely.
2) But if our civilization does change course toward building a positive new culture, a new
renaissance is likely. At the same time, across the planet, there are powerful and urgent
pushes away from our established and profligate ways, both to understand more fully where
we are now so that we can meet both the danger and the Need before us, and to actually
change our institutions. The Cultural Creatives are starting to be carriers of a new story of
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
13
who we are, where we come from and where we are going. They are potentially the creators
of a viable world our grandchildren will want to live in (as opposed to the desert planet that
is otherwise likely to emerge that our progeny won’t want to live in).
Beyond Modernity as a way of life, and beyond Modernism as a belief system, in the time of
the Wisdom Civilization
The “nature of the time” is that late modern civilization lacks an adequate image of the
future, and so the Need is for a positive vision that is not perceived as just another fantastic
invention of the Modern world. It must clearly be outside the Modern purview, and it must
partake of the sense that what such a vision shows is a clear successor to Modernity, superior in
some clear ways, but without merely rejecting Modernity. For example:
•
It can show a more mature consciousness, one that incorporates earlier levels and passes
beyond them, for wise adult functioning.
•
It can utilize, or at least point to, new dimensions of reality that are not encompassed in
Modernity, which we can all use for doing the work that is the Need for this time.
•
It can draw from non-Western cultures in ways that don’t belong to the Western invention of
Modernity, and carry them into the emerging planetary cultural synthesis. This may turn out
to be an essential part of restoration of the dignity of the non-Western cultures of the planet.
•
It can draw from ecological and living systems sciences, and from evolutionary and
complexity theories, that are well beyond Modernity’s linear cause-and-effect models typical
of mechanistic worldviews: Even though the emerging, new models draw from the old
without a clear break or transition, they transcend them in very important ways.
In general, “transcending” means both going beyond, and yet still keeping, the earlier,
less developed level(s) as an accepted part, not as a cut-off “shadow” part. A very large part of
today’s “culture wars” is due to Modernism’s attempt to reject, conquer, or overthrow
Traditionalism, without paying its respects, or giving it its due. This is yet another example of
Modernism’s folly. By contrast, it will be the task of a Wisdom Civilization to include and
transcend both Traditionalism and Modernism, without being caught in either their culture wars
or their immature demands. Within both Modern and Traditional cultures are conservative elites
who exploit ‘culture wars’ conflicts to their own advantage in hypocritical and self-serving ways.
The culture wars are unnecessary, and it’s time we were done with them.
The Need for ‘after the Modern’ to be perceived as the nature of the time.
Part of the meaning of the time is “after technological society,” i.e., “after a society that is
dominated by sheer technique, one that is without higher purpose or soul or meaning.” It is not
that in the Wisdom Civilization, technology will go away, but that it will be used in new ways,
whose purposes are subject to larger and more fundamental concerns. After a time when
technology and geeks flourish for their own sake, and magnify their folly in destroying the
planet, this may be a considerable relief.
Another part of the meaning of the time is “after capitalist society,” i.e., “after a society
dominated by economic/financial interests.” It is not that capitalism goes away, but that it too is
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
14
subordinated to larger visions, higher values, and deeper concerns. The economy takes its place
within ecology, so that no longer is civilization in denial about the nature and reality of living
systems. It will also be a great relief when greed, money and finance are no longer promoted as
goods in themselves, and are no longer permitted to proliferate wildly in electronic techno-space.
“Beyond techno-capitalism” is the Need to put emerging higher values in control. That is
beyond the capabilities of the Modernist worldview, showing the Need for a new civilization.
Similarly, the meaning of the time is “after nationalism and the nation-state.” There are
many things that the nation-state as the primary level of government doesn’t do very well. On the
one hand some powers of the nation-state can in many cases be devolved to lower, more local or
regional levels because that’s where the proper responsiveness resides, while on the other hand,
other powers can handed over, and raised up to the continental or planetary scale, because that’s
the scale that is needed, to see and properly respond to widespread problems. That is, the nationstate will persist, but in greatly diminished form as one level of government among many, and as
one locus of loyalty among many. We’ll come to see that there is nothing sacred about nations,
and that they deserve only some of our loyalties, which also belong to more local or more global
scales of reality. The nation-state becomes a mid-level part of a more encompassing system of
governance, as getting necessary stuff done. It’s a system within larger systems, and it’s made up
of smaller systems. Without the rule of the king, emperor or other monocrats, there is ever less
excuse for a single repository of loyalties, the one source of law and coinage.
We are slowly eliminating the excuses for wars and genocides, and with their decline we
are slowly being relieved of the nation-state in its role as a protection racket engaged in by the
kings/presidents and generals/admirals, aided and abetted by the bankers and coupon clippers.
The major risk of our time is that in peak oil and ecological decline will come new excuses for
terrorism and genocides, which give new excuses for hyped-up versions of the protection racket
by the likes of the neoconservatives under the leadership of would-be tyrants.
“Transcending” is far more than “post-modern,” which only points to the idea that
something comes later in time, after the Modern. Post-modernists are now perceived as no more
significant than an army of small crabs and greedy gulls picking apart the beached and rotting
whale carcass of Modernist ideology. Of far greater significance will be a Trans-Modern
synthesis of the Modern and the Traditional. It will cut right across Modernism to include what
most Modern elites have foolishly regarded as inferior to their own understandings and ways of
life, especially the deep traditions of various cultures around the planet. The planetary synthesis
promises to be one of the more exciting projects of the next era, where cultures proudly examine
their heritages to see what unique contributions they can make to the richness of planetary
culture. It’s the exact opposite of globalization’s McWorld-leveling to commercial sameness.
While a few Moderns may perceive what is coming at the next level of integration, most
of these new developments are well beyond the horizons of Traditionals’ understandings. [See
the discussion of Adequaetio below.] Even when a Wisdom Culture makes good use of elements
of Traditional culture, it will have to help Traditionals see those memes anew at a higher level of
consciousness. That uplevels the ‘normal’ to what Tradition once attributed only to the Masters.
It is what they could only have gaped at in the past: to worshipfully put it on a pedestal, and
declare it beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, as mysterious and from the beyond, or else to
condemn it as “of the devil,” as uncanny and evil. As the Trans-Modern culture provides
opportunities and respect for Traditionals and their children, many will embrace it. However,
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
15
their acceptance may well depend on accidents of symbolism and doctrinal compatibility. On
such pedestrian matters hang religious wars.
Symbolic legitimation turns out to be a Need, in nearly all social situations, and not only
with traditional populations. This requires the metaphor of “drawing the bow”:
Drawing the Bow
To shoot an arrow of collective intent into the future, we must firmly grasp the bow of
mythic and symbolic explanation in ways that fit the present, but we must also pull hard on
the bowstring toward the deep past, to give that arrow enough energy to propel it into the
future. No fundamental change in society was ever legitimated only in terms of the
goodness of the new, or universal principles (however true both may be). Rather,
throughout human history, whenever a successful move to really new culture was made,
even the most radical change advocates have reached back into the past of the culture for
symbolic legitimation, saying something conservative-sounding like this:
“Our deep ancestors had wonderful principles, and symbols, and myths, and what we
are now doing is restoring the ancient goodness and virtues that past heroes, spiritual
leaders and/or philosophers advocated. Our present situation shows that at some time
between then and now, we got off course, and now these innovations are restoring the
correct course of matters. We will restore our society to what it has always needed to
become, and us to our original natures. And look here, this is how the symbols work…”
Symbolic legitimation requires smart activists to reinterpret the past to suit the needs of
their present and future. In most cases, there has been a breakdown of conventional ways, and
they are making a virtue out of necessity. In some cases, an opportunity opens up, and past
symbols and myths are reinterpreted to justify taking advantage of that opportunity. This is
where ideologues come in with doctrinal reinterpretations, or just flat-out propaganda for various
regimes. Whoever is for large-scale change seems to make use of this principle, which includes
both the pre-industrial elites of the Third World, including reactionary Islamists, and their
opposites in Trans-modernizing elites, such as Cultural Creatives. Even when there is a massive
conversion process to a new charismatic leader, such leaders often claim they are actually
restoring eternal verities, universal rights that go back to the original humans, or restarting an
older cultural model sufficiently far back in the past that no one can check it out. That way, they
bring many Traditionals and conservative skeptics along. The more radical the change from
present ways, the farther back into the deep past, and fundamental symbolism, they must reach.
Today, most Moderns simply want to hear that they have a good chance to be winners in
the next game that will be played, and if so, they will scramble to become up-to-date and get on
the bandwagon of the Next New Thing. Many are opportunistic, and less attached to the forms,
yet most will still want the kind of legitimating process that’s in “drawing the bow.” However, it
may be more as a matter of reassurance than strict necessity. This suggests that the Need for
symbolic legitimation is a universal, and is important for most intentional change processes.
Failure to do deep enough symbolic legitimation means falling short. Many activists on
the conventional Left seem to believe they can do without this, or that reaching back to the late
19th century or early 20th century is adequate to their needs. Today’s business and social
conservatives are reaching back to symbols and concepts from the 18th or 19th century. This
shows how thoroughly within Modernist ideology both sides are, since those centuries were the
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
16
height of Modernism. But we are leaving the Modern era for a new level of civilization. Hence,
not one of those Modern ideologies uses concepts and symbols that are fully adequate to give
symbolic legitimacy deep enough for the extent of change in our time. All that can be legitimated
within that set of symbols and concepts are further moves within Modern culture. The actual
Need is to transcend the belief system of Modernism. Anything less is folly.
The Need of our time is for a set of concepts adequate for people to think within. Thus,
Trans-Moderns probably need to reach back even earlier than the Renaissance and medieval era,
to set up the symbolic correspondences, and also make use of key concepts from the Modern
period, plus the latest ideas of the present transitional time. They may need to go back to the
Classical civilizations, and to other cultures of ancient times. Trans-Moderns will also need to
find cross-cultural concepts from other traditions than the European, looking across the deeper
traditions behind other high civilizations to cover the planetary context. This is imperative for
reassuring non-Western peoples as to the bona fides of a Wisdom Civilization. (However, it will
not reassure Western xenophobes and racists. Indeed, nothing will, so let’s neutralize them, not
try to buy them off.) The point to developing a trans-modern conceptual framework is to find
symbolic correspondences at more fundamental, and more universal, levels. That means working
from levels of consciousness less caught up in the egoic presuppositions and biases of particular
cultures, especially the American and Western European. Good candidates for the new worldmythos-and-symbolism include most of the classical high civilizations of the past: e.g., Classical
Greece, classical Islamic renaissance Sufism, classical Indian culture, classical Chinese culture,
classical Japanese culture, and a few selected cultures of more shamanic kinds that nevertheless
carry wisdom themes (such as the Iroquois culture that American democracy borrowed from).
The Need is to See What ‘Beyond the Modern’ Looks Like
First Aspect: ‘Challenge and Response’ Elements
Naming “the kind of time we now live in” is a Need, because if it is paired with a positive
vision of the future, then skillful means can ensure a flow of social inventions more appropriate
to the Need, and create an ethos of heroic reconstruction of the planet. Framing the time as a
period of challenge and response (in Toynbee’s sense) can call forth a joyful sense of heroism
and adventure that is the opposite of a guilt-laden, suffering response, premised on deprivation.
The list of “challenge and response” elements includes:
a) A key challenge is global warming and growing ecological destruction and species
extinctions, with its attendant suffering.
A wise response says that current and emerging technologies, plus a caring population, make
this unnecessary, so long as exploiters are curbed in time. Amelioration of environments and
aid to suffering people can be structured to be major opportunities for the youth of the next
period to become heroic world-servers and world-savers, by systematic investment in new
education, new businesses and new infrastructure that promote ecological sustainability.
However, that wise response needs to be coupled with the other wise responses below.
b) Big commercial broadcast media are a challenge of our time, because:
ƒ They hold up a distorting mirror to our world, providing incompetent-or-lying feedback to
the population on themselves, on their governments, on corporations, on most aspects of
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
17
social life, on most aspects of planetary developments, and on war-and-peace. This
reinforces all the worst aspects of our time, with folly at every level, and may make it
impossible to get the honest feedback that would make a wisdom civilization possible.
ƒ They are saturated with advertisements that promote unwise consumption, and their content
is mindless distraction, coupled with corrupt, incompetent news broadcasts that reinforce
the worst violence, nationalism, and greed of Modernist corporations and governments.
ƒ Their coverage of crime, wars, conflicts, and new dangers (social, health and
environmental) tends to worsen disasters, pessimism and inappropriate responses.
ƒ Their short-term view is almost completely oblivious to new developments that affect the
longer term, from ecological problems to the emergence of a new culture.
A wise response says no simple fixes are possible, and that minor tinkering won’t be enough,
so that a complete redesign of the media around wisdom principles is a major task for the
immediate future. At this time it is unclear what most of the redesign of the media might
include, who must be involved in doing it, and on what scale (local to national to planetary).
Major power and wealth centers have large investments in the media both for control and for
personal benefits. The media acts as a gatekeeper for Modernist ideology, so much of the
backlash against the new civilization may come from the media. This requires change agents
to use wiser change processes than Modernity would itself use for reform efforts.
One typical wise response is that whenever media-disruptive technologies come along, such
as blogging and the Internet, our transformative world-servers need to leap on them and
develop them as Trans-modern vehicles. The development of serious alternative capabilities
to conventional news media is a true Need of Our Time. Once there are opportunities to have
new media vehicles, the next task is to redesign the media to go beyond disaster news and
cover positive developments around the world that are creative and adequate responses:
•
dramatic and effective acts of caring,
•
creative acts of redesign of systems that aren’t working,
•
loving acts of reworking personal lifeworlds,
•
moving acts of redesign of all the arts, spirituality, science and philosophy, ß
•
gracious acts of restoration of ecologies, and
•
sociable acts of rebuilding all sorts of communities.
c) Financial markets are an active force for evil developments in the world, and a key
challenge for our time. In aggregate, they are more powerful than any wise or unwise
national government and can wreck a national economy, or whole continents. They can
rapidly topple the management of any nonconforming (wise and responsible) corporation.
They create and constantly reinforce all tendencies to corporate folly and irresponsibility:
externalizing all costs and short term thinking at the expense of ecological sustainability,
destroying the well-being of workers, wrecking the future prospects of most of the Third
World, and concentrating wealth in the hands of ever fewer people. They are a social
invention gone bad, one that came with Modernity, and helped to define it.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
18
A wise response says no simple fixes are possible, and that minor tinkering won’t be enough,
so that a complete redesign of the financial system around wisdom principles is a major task
for the immediate future. This will be every bit as unclear, hard and intractable as redesign of
the media, and wiser change processes are very much in order. It is not as clear that there are
disruptive technologies lurking behind the scenes as there are for media, however.
One typical wise response is to invent new forms of money, and new kinds of markets for
them. The Need for investment in our next civilization, and the mobilization of capital for it
will not go away, so once again we’ll need to include and transcend today’s financial
markets, not to wantonly destroy. New technologies, new businesses and new infrastructure
based on ecological sustainability are essential to our collective survival, and they can be
reframed as the next big investment opportunity of the era, especially if money systems are
changed toward what Bernard Lietaer calls Yin complementary money systems. (See
Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money)
d) Nationalistic governments are a challenge, not only as war-makers, but sellers of arms
worldwide, and active collaborators with corporations in setting up destructive financial
globalization and trade policies. Nationalism is well into its dotage, and becoming quite
incompetent, though still dangerous. Most governments are becoming corrupt in the late
stages of Modernity, and business conservatives who ought to know better are busily tearing
government apart, on the fallacious excuse that markets will do everything better. Meanwhile
the same business conservatives are the corrupters.
A wise response at the national level includes the linkage of Government to Civil Society,
creation of a new social contract (to be described in Creating a Wisdom Culture), and
developing a major role for Nongovernmental Organizations in delivering services in place
of government outsourcing to business.
A wise response at the planetary level includes planetary coordination of efforts linking
International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) with new international laws, with
new treaties and with far more cooperative national governments. These are not only
necessary for collective prosperity and peace, but positive opportunities to meet the emerging
demands of new political forces. Civil society is now promoting the end of perpetual wars
and production of small arms as well as weapons of mass destruction. That has the potential
to add about 25% to the conventional Gross Domestic Product of every economy, and for
those in desperate straits from long-burning wars, it lets their economy work properly for the
first time in years. It also can end some of the most egregious ecological destruction.
e) To be continued…
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
19
Second Aspect: Creative Leadership Responses
The Need is for opinion leaders: writers, spiritual teachers, movement leaders, new
kinds of business leaders, even political leaders, to prophetically name and give support to the
idea of a Wisdom Civilization. In so doing, they can name the fact that millions of Cultural
Creatives are re-creating thousands of different facets of our lives, in the leading sectors of most
countries.
The Need is for spiritually adept activists to keep inducting change agents, opinion
leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, etc., into processes whereby they see and share with one
another the Truth of what is both possible and desirable. In other words, must be perceived as a
real vision. They also need to agree together that they are doing it for all the children of the
planet, those of today and those of the future.
A parallel Need is for an ethic of caring to start to take hold around the planet, not just
caring for other people, but all the beings on the planet. It will very likely come from large
numbers of more enlightened women coming into leadership. That may mark an effective
counter to the predictable cascade of crises of this coming period.
The Need is to eliminate the naming of enemies, working to diminish threats and fears,
angers and hatreds. There are indeed dangers to be avoided and challenges to be surmounted,
but to try to handle them by going after enemies is pure folly. All the people of Earth are
potential allies of this movement: just ask in what ways they can be allies. Even the worst bigots
want a good future for their children and grandchildren, and sometimes for others’ children.
The Need is to start with shared values, i.e., with people’s deepest life priorities, not
with their differences and hatreds. They don’t have to start out liking one another, they just
need to find ways of cooperating in win-win-win games, where a third side, of wise community,
is always present. The larger community of Earth must always be named as a stakeholder, and
must get its chance to name its concerns and its creative solutions.
The Need is to diminish the Bigs in size, money, power and control. The Bigs are:
ƒ
Big Financial institutions and markets (Wall Street, London, Tokyo, etc.)
ƒ
Big Governments and nationalistic supports (US, Russia, China)
ƒ
Big Military machines and weaponry (US, NATO, China, Russia)
ƒ
Big Media corporations (print, radio, television, internet)
ƒ
Big Extractive Industries (oil, gas, coal, metals mining, lumbering, fishing, agribusiness)
ƒ
Other Big national and multinational Corporations
In parallel with the above, the Need is for Restoration of the Earth to be a huge action
theme for the generation who are children today. They are already there in spirit, as individuals,
so they simply need to be empowered to work together on it. They’ve all seen the nature films,
and they know broadly there’s a problem, and have a broad sense of how it should be. They want
to act, and the System is preventing it. Restoration will be the great make-work program of the
millennium, but unlike most such work, the capital gains from restoration are enormous, almost
incalculably large, compared to all the economies of Earth. There is a great potential for whole
new industries to appear, entrancing the investors with the possibilities. However, the capital and
technologies show a Need to be mobilized without concentrating power and wealth further.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
20
Third Aspect: Collective Shift of Consciousness
As the West moves past the scarcity mentalities of our ignorant past, we will be
motivated to let go of our nervous insistence on giving top priority to the value of Plenty, which
has dominated the era of rapid growth. [Unfortunately that value and its imagery now saturates
the planet because of movies and television.] The rich and powerful everywhere grow satiated
with mere goods. “More” loses its quantitative fascination, and “Better” comes into fashion with
the children of the elite, and with affluent people everywhere. But once the reign of Quality takes
over from Quantity, the doors of higher consciousness are wedged open for an often-improbable
population. Now the quality of our perception is at stake, and refinement of the senses
immediately follows, and then training of the perceiver is put in train, immediately giving rise to
issues of consciousness even among the most sensate. Many children of the rich and powerful
start to betray the central materialist self-interest of their parents.
Any well-cared-for child longs to know of “essence” or “being” or “true nature.” And
there you have real leverage. In a world that is below replacement population, children should
become ever more valued, and have the best given to them. Once that criterion is introduced,
concern for expanded consciousness can become a widespread new trend, even normal, as
concerns for enlarged consciousness spread through the society. Feedback of new cultural forms
is needed to reinforce the psycho-spiritual processes, however. It is a Need that large portions of
the population be self-consciously mobilized to create a symbolic legitimacy for it.
Naturally, such a simple scenario for the success of a growing trend to more and higher
consciousness ignores other counter-trends that lead in regressive directions. The System of
Power and Money will most probably react negatively, and attempt a clampdown on
consciousness issues. Negative trends, such as huge die-offs with accompanying wars in various
parts of the world, rearguard actions by cultural conservatives, fascist takeovers in the face of
widespread chaos, uncertainty and danger, can all put positive new trends at risk. Having large
numbers of deprived or brain-damaged children due to starvation or inimical chemicals can also
put major populations of the world out of the reach of good trends. In the past, people were
merely ignorant about the planet and projected their fears on strangers. Today we know about the
planet, and other ways of life. Refusal to care about the rest of the world, in the face of knowing
about their problems, can be disastrous to all of humanity, and to most of the natural world.
The Need is that large portions of the population be self-consciously mobilized to
counter these regressive developments, and to create robust new institutions that will
continue to work appropriately despite bad trends and hostile responses.
Thus, ‘beyond Modernity and Modernism’ is not just going past earlier lifeways and
beliefs, while still maintaining the same view of reality. It is abandoning the Modern materialist
view of reality. It is crucially important to see that in the next Wisdom Era, the sane people of
the near future will believe in many worlds of consciousness as part of a multi-level reality. It
will be a subtler reality, in which the material plane is seen not as primary, but as an effect of the
operation of more fundamental realities. Quantum theory and the technology of virtual reality are
each preparing popular culture to believe that already. Beyond that, a trans-modern epistemology
will become primary, because awareness of the many ways we can know reality moves to the
forefront of our concerns.
Training in multiple kinds of consciousness will become the next Mastery, and it will
become a ‘given’ that different tasks or even fields of endeavor, require different states of
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
21
consciousness for peak performance in those domains. Peak performance goes beyond athletics
or mechanical skills or performance techniques, to the training, honing, and refinement of
consciousnesses that are appropriate to each domain. For example, today’s top sports competitors
are all learning visualization techniques as part of their preparations—in the name of peak
performance. That is not only a matter of success, but of one’s ‘personal best,’ because mere
outer success in the Modernist mold turns out to be not enough. ‘What works best’ in skillful
praxis will more and more be seen as a matter of trained consciousness. The high-performing
elite will consist of both specialists and generalists. Specialists will have awesome powers in a
single, often very narrow, domain and its associated states of consciousness. Generalists will
operate across many domains with great flexibility, and with mastery for the larger good.
The spiritual then becomes blended into daily life as partly ‘this-worldly’ and partly
‘otherworldly.’ Peak performers will routinely speak of ‘guidance’ and ‘mastery’ without
accusations of flakiness, and decisions will start to come from this population with a
recognizable ‘higher and wider vibration’ or quality of awareness. That means the result is not
just ‘smarter’ in some technical sense, or temporarily ‘successful’ in some payoff sense, but
‘wiser’ in some fundamental ways: a) wider in scope, b) more future-oriented (yet redolent of
symbologies of the past), c) deeper in understanding, and d) higher in purpose. Such
developments will work better in the long run as well as in terms of short run adaptations, and
they’ll avoid leaving further conflicts in their wake. Based on these skill-sets, and on practice,
practice, practice, ever-growing numbers of people will directly apprehend high Purposes of the
Divine, and the Need of a situation or time, and they will start to converge on a mature collective
understanding of what our collective Purpose is as a planetary system.
What will be awesome to Moderns is that so many people can perceive all the above
accurately, and then act from it. Success leads to many imitators. Ambitious Moderns will drop
old approaches very rapidly, and crowd into any classes or other approaches that promise they
too can be part of the latest and greatest. Some typical straws in the wind: Yoga has grown from
9 percent to 19 percent of the population in under a decade, and it clearly is built around selfmastery and issues of consciousness, especially for women. The same can be said of oriental
martial arts, especially for boys. Even conventional stress treatments for high blood pressure and
heart disease now include both diet and meditation. These may all start as ego projects, but that
is inherent in duffer’s mind, and many will go past that, especially if there are support structures
and rewards built into the culture.
Any Wisdom Culture will insist that high-performance elites be unselfish about passing
their non-material skills and states of consciousness on to everyone who can benefit. Depth
education of whole populations across the planet will become highly adaptive in the coming
future, because less physical consumption is required, and it moves the whole population to its
next level of functioning. The more this occurs, the greater the demand for cultural supports. The
more the culture successfully supports, the greater the success of new kinds of peak performance,
and the greater the further demand. It is another example of a virtuous spiral.
The next stage of this culturally shared, extended set of perceptions and skills will be the
creation of a true Wisdom culture that can serve as a ‘holding environment’ for the cultivation of
enlightened beings. It will then be a consciously elaborated culture that seeks to create a total
environment that is harmonious and beautiful and supportive in all dimensions of life. If such a
development starts in earnest, people will be convinced they are in the midst of a new
renaissance, a true cultural rebirth. And it will be so.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
22
Such an environment might be highly localized at first, concentrated in isolated sacred
spaces, special learning centers, and well-trained populations. But it is almost certain that the
general population will not allow this development to go into another elite pattern, and that they
would instead start to spread it throughout world culture. Civil society organizations will make
new social-and-consciousness movements to ensure that this is so, and it will also be a kind of
consumer demand for true development throughout one’s life. Each local culture would be drawn
into the emergent planetary synthesis across cultures, by participating in this higher spiritualcultural synthesis of whatever are the consciousness-enhancing cultural settings. It will be the
new race for supremacy, but a race to the top. While it is conceivable that opposed forms of
spiritual development will compete, it is difficult to believe that this can persist for long.
On the one hand, the planetary culture will be participated in by each ethnic group or
tribe bringing its own unique contributions to poetry, art, music, literature, architecture, math,
science, engineering, ecologies, etc. In the name of self-preservation, the arts of appreciating
other cultures will have to be cultivated, and narrow-mindedness be quashed. On the other hand,
the structure of the new understandings will lead to a subtler realm of meta-culture, which turns
out to be a synthesizing mode shared across the planet. That meta-culture will be what creates
the holding environment for great numbers of enlightened beings to emerge. A synergistic
takeoff effect is very likely from that process.
At that moment in history, all of the planet will start to move consciousness and life
participation into another level of being. What emerges next is beyond our present capacity to
imagine. Out of the chrysalis emerges the butterfly, too beautiful and different for our caterpillar
minds of today to imagine. We can only boggle at the prospect.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
23
The Need for Wisdom at a Time When Modernism is Unwise
The ideology of Modernism believes that it is impossible to know what is wise. Indeed,
any comprehensive view of public statements by Modernist leaders shows that they are premised
on unwisdom, on being surrounded by unwise actors with a strong tendency to folly—and on
getting away with it! Our new approach takes Wisdom itself as its source of legitimacy, not
traditional or modern formulations, which tend to folly whenever those forms of legitimacy are
invoked. That is because they are no longer responsive to the Need of the time. The belief system
of the Wisdom Culture will be that anyone can develop to the point where they know how to
attune to wisdom, that it is not just a province of a few specially privileged people. The
institutions of a Wisdom Civilization will be based on practical access to wisdom by the many.
We need to be critical of Modern life, both in its ideological justifications, which are
Modernism, and in its institutional manifestations, which are Modernity. But this is not to be
critical in the manner of social conservatism. Rather, it is to be critical from the stance of the
new, emerging planetary civilization (institutions) and the new culture and belief system. That
stance will be explicitly:
•
Spiritual, not exoteric religious and churchy, nor secular and anti-religion
•
For ecological sustainability, not merely for environmental management, nor for defense of
industrial destroyers of the environment
•
For women’s and children’s well-being, not merely pro- or anti-feminist
•
For planetary integration, not pro- or anti-corporate-globalization
•
For peace institutions, not merely anti-war or pro-militarism
•
For complementary health care for all, not just for alternative health care or for conventional
corporate medicine
•
Add to the list…
In summary: We are advocating Wisdom Culture (values, beliefs, worldview) set in the
context of a Planetary Wisdom Civilization (institutions and networks), such that both are
seen as the replacements for tribalism and nationalism, of the traditional and modern kinds. It
is Trans-Modernism, which means it cuts across modern life to create a synthesis that includes
elements of deep traditions, not the shallow neo-traditionalism of today. Trans-modern is in
contrast to Post-modernism, which is part of the folly of late-modernity.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
24
The Need for Mourning and Tragedy at the End of the Modern World
Overcoming Modernism’s Refusal to Mourn and Evasion of Tragedy:
‘Death with Dignity’ is not only a slogan for those individuals at death’s door, who often
want desperately to avoid being medicalized at the time of their passage into another realm. It is
clear to them that the heroic measures proposed have to do with the doctor’s needs not theirs.
Well, guess what, it’s also true at the level of the whole of Modern Culture.
The end of Modernity, the institutional forms, and of Modernism, the ideology, has been
creeping up on us for two or three generations now, at least for 50-75 years. It is high time that
we got on with acknowledging the evidence for that, rather than ideological denial, and time that
we look at the implications of that evidence. We cannot merely say that the old is over, so let’s
begin the new. The transition process may well be long and bloody, though we all hope not. But
even if not bloody, it needs to be sober and sorrowful rather than merry and triumphalist. And
that is as it should be. An integrative development in our culture needs to re-honor some of the
oldest of human cultural forms: the forms of dying, mourning, burial and rebirth.
When a person is dying, the mourning process can begin with the acknowledgement that
the end is in sight. It would be highly appropriate for us to begin an honest and sober mourning
process for Modernity: We need to remember the gigantic crimes that it has committed through
its wars, genocides and ecocides. We need to sort out its overweening triumphalism from its
noble and dignified aspirations and from its glittering economic and scientific successes. Most of
all, we need to come to terms with the fact that in the end, much of it has been a stark tragedy,
for most of humanity, and for most of Nature. Mourning is needed before we can move on to the
new civilization. We must truly let go of the old before we can have the new. But Modernism has
often incapacitated our mourning, by flattening its affect in the name of rationality, or cut it short
in the name of “putting it all behind us” and “taking care of business.” Furthermore, while the
personal mourning that many of us are familiar with is necessary, it is also much inferior to the
community catharsis of tragedy, of which Aristotle spoke. And we may well need a revived
community response to tragedy.
The collective tragedy of Modern times finds its roots in two kinds of new developments,
twined together like the snakes around Hermes staff: a) the departure from tradition that enlarged
our worldviews with science, rationalism, humanism and individualism, and b) the magnification
of human powers through the national state, corporations, modern armies, technological systems,
the money system and the marketized industrial economy. None of these is a bad thing in itself.
Each has been a partial triumph of human genius and invention. However, the growth of each,
separately and in conjunction with all the others, has also contributed to the destruction of other
institutions of society: family and clan, neighborhood and community, church and civic
associations. When armies get gigantic technologies and the power of the industrial state behind
them, then World Wars and nuclear arms races result. (Here I need to put in a list of intertwined
inventions that are in aggregate dangerous and of unprecedented scope and destruction) Each
Modern development has also been subverted by the unregenerate aspects of humanity, like its
racism and xenophobia and religious intolerance, to produce more death and destruction, and
more danger to the planet, than at any prior time in the history of humanity.
In traditional societies, the tragic sense is ever with us, but a concomitant of that
dramaturgical three-act view of tragedy is that very little development occurs, that things are
restored to the status quo ante. The community may experience redemption, but not the
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
25
individual. Starting with Shakespeare at the beginnings of Modernity, when comedy adds
another act or two, it leaves the tragic structure in place, and shows “what happens next” as
redemption of the individual—yet here’s the rub: there may be less caring for the community.
Furthermore, transformation may well be “what happens next.” This affects all our hidden
symbology and formulas for “how it’s s’pozed to be” in the West. Adding individualism adds the
possibility of individual transformation. However, there are major problems…
In the Christian West, which started and proliferated the Modern world, we lost track of
the classical communal tragic theme, by an exclusive focus on individual sin-and-redemption.
The negative side of that is that the apparatus of blame, sin, confession and absolution-andforgiveness is dragged out whenever things go wrong—whether it’s appropriate or not.
Westerners have a very restricted range of ways to come to terms with the unacceptable and
tragic. As a consequence, we literally have no good ways of coming to terms with the ineluctable
workings of tragedy at a large collective level, as opposed to individual criminality. So
Modernism does not include “working through” tragedy. We can’t escape the Need to restore a
tragic sense, for huge collective destructions like:
•
The death of more people in Modernist wars than ever lived in the prior history of humanity
•
Genocide against Native American people, Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, Rwandans, etc.
•
The threat to all life on the planet posed by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and in
the future, by nanotechnology—not to mention the chemical industry
•
The massive destruction of huge swaths of the planet, (whether it be global warming, or the
seas, the forests, the fields, the Arctic, the air, or extinctions of millions of plant and animal
species, or the proliferation of estrogen-imitator chemicals)
Hence, one of the critical tasks of this period is our Need to do the hard work of
cultural, symbolic and psychological endings, of working through the end of the Modern
world, with all of the horror and facing up to horror that it implies. Our Need is to recover our
own collective shadow, to uncover the hidden crimes of humanity against humanity and nature.
The sad facts are these: Many of our ancestors were both oppressors and victims of these crimes,
we ourselves are not guiltless, and both we, and our descendants, may end up paying for the
crimes of others.
Our Need is to face our own implication in a tragedy yet to come: the impending
collective death of major portions of humanity when our world overpopulation comes to an
overshoot of the carrying capacity of the earth, with a die-off of billions of humans and many
other species, as ecosystems collapse.
Our Need is to face the fact that each of us is part of the West’s over-consumption that
will be implicated in the die-off of more millions of people than would otherwise be likely. If sin
and guilt are things we don’t want to let go of, then let us face these, our own sins.
Our Need is to face the fact that most of our business and political leaders will certainly
be regarded as criminals by our posterity—and that we ourselves may have our names reviled by
our own descendants, as fools or villains, or both.
Finally, before we can truly move on to celebrating the coming of a new culture, we Need
to let go of the old, and its hold on us. After we mourn Modernity, and the loss of its creature
comforts, and the loss of its familiar ways, then we must bury it.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
26
The new world will undoubtedly be not only more virtuous, but simpler and more
appropriate to our reduced circumstances. We can go to it willingly and consciously, or
unwillingly and unconsciously and fighting it all the way.
Voluntary simplicity has the virtue that we ourselves have chosen it, and have some say
about it, and that makes all the difference from involuntary poverty, starvation and destruction.
This is not a dour, hairshirted and puritanical way, but it most certainly is making a virtue of
necessity. It certainly will be replacing a world of shallow material satisfactions with simpler and
more spiritual ways that offer deeper satisfactions. (And there is little reason to expect
unregenerate materialistic and/or style-conscious Modernists to believe that for even a minute.)
When all that has passed, then we may go about the creation of a Wisdom Culture to
replace the old Modern ways.
The Need for a Transformational and Emergence Paradigm
The subject of “transformation” is, quite simply, discontinuous, nonlinear change of
structure and function within living systems. Often it is one kind of part, or subsystem, being
replaced by another, rather than growth or incremental change. More and more it is coming to be
obvious that with whole living systems, that discontinuous, disruptive, nonlinear change is the
only important kind of change there is. The growth kind is piddly stuff.
The Between is where transformation is found:
In well-formed rites of passage, the first stage is stripping away the old roles and ego
structure, and the dissolution of the old structure, including the old identity; the second stage is
being nobody and nothing in the Between, i.e., without the old ego identity; and the third stage is
moving on to a new identity, understandings, capabilities, norms and responsibilities to be
reincorporated in the group.
Social transformation is similar: starting with the tearing apart of old institutional rules
and forms, and the familiar understandings and ways of life. What’s hard for most intellectuals
about this is that our standard 20th century mental models/schemas are not remotely adequate to
what's going on. This is not just howling for the ancestors. There are new scientific models and
metaphors available, and the new sciences are showing up just in time in the life of our
civilization: fractals and holarchies, dissipative structures, punctuated equilibrium, emergence,
nested ultra-complexity, self-organizing criticality.
There is a powerful principle that comes from the ancient wisdom traditions of the West.
It’s called Adequaetio: the lesser is not adequate to understand or encompass the greater. (There
is also a medieval scholastic use of the term Adequaetio, concerning whether a set of logical
premisses are fully sufficient to generate a conclusion. This is a more specialized usage than
ours, which is an earlier, more general spiritual term deriving from the esoteric traditions.) For
example, adolescents don't really grasp such things as adult love among older people, childbirth,
taking on responsibility, taking on adult moral issues, or seeing the larger and longer-term
picture. Just as an adolescent cannot yet understand the more mature adult world, so the spiritual
student cannot yet understand or encompass the mindset or many experiences of the moredeveloped spiritual master. Similarly, the simpler culture or society cannot understand or
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
27
encompass the more complex culture and activities of the more developed civilization. The last
point is the one that applies in force to our own time. Just as the barbarians could not understand
Greece and Rome without education, and the medieval culture could not understand modernity
without conversion to its usages and education, so modern culture cannot understand the
emerging Wisdom Culture that will replace it, until its members embrace a new kind of
consciousness, and the practices and experiences that go with it.
The higher level of consciousness implies a new level of identity, both at the personal
level and the cultural level. The one who goes through the Between of a transformative process
has acquired new experiences, new identity, new realizations, new knowledge of the process. So
the people who start a transformation process really have no more than a vague idea—and cannot
deeply understand—what they are going to go through while they are in the Between, or what
they're about to become afterward. Because to know and understand that would require that they
already have had the experiences, and already are at the new level of development, and already
know what they have not yet learned.
Note that Elders carry the higher level’s experiences, identity, realizations, and knowledge
of the process, and that is why they and Elder Wisdom are necessary to a transformation process.
Those processes of transformation that are most valuable as metaphors-analogsexperiences relevant to the Between (and rites of passage) are often treated by Western elites as
of no consequence because they are related to women's work (or farmers' work). Being pregnant,
baking bread, making a soup or stew, fermenting wine, weaving and knitting, etc. Such processes
often have a long process of "cooking" or "gestation" where it may seem like nothing's going
on—as seen from outside the container. Think of the use of bread and wine in religious rituals.
The esoteric significance of making the bread and wine as transformative processes related to
rites of passage and spiritual development have apparently been lost by both the Christians and
the Jews during the Modern era, possibly for longer, over the past millennium. By contrast, Sufis
continually use cooking as a metaphor for transformation.
Gestation is a key word. Managers in modernism don’t trust the natural unfolding of
things: Instead they try artificial, technological ways of getting quick results. Consultants often
say Modernist managers have little interest in or respect for process in their goal-directed ways
of working. They are interested in the beginning and the end, startup and payoff, and nothing in
between. Sherry Anderson says it’s the little god of modernism, the (enneagram) “3 culture”, at
work. ‘I have to do it all, and can't trust there's anything but egoic me functioning.’ There’s no
trust in the process. Nor do they invest in the creation of a worthwhile container that one can
trust to hold the energies and the process.
In some ways, this is something that every good cook and every woman who has had a
baby already knows. The pregnant woman has to trust in the process, and hopes to be able to
trust in the quality of the container (not only in her own womb, but the container around her
pregnancy). Notice that there are what Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine called “dissipative
structures” at work in pregnancy: She's not only eating for two, but shitting for two.
Notice the Need: We may Need to develop containers for social transformation processes.
In a very real sense, Modernity is the adolescence of humanity. Moderns typically don't
understand the intricacy and completeness of what primitive and agrarian people knew, often
nonverbally and through mythic imagery/analogies, about how living systems work as
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
28
dissipative structures. Worse yet, they have not been through spiritual schools, rites of passage
and initiations themselves. So Moderns will tend to short-change and underestimate the
importance of transformative processes. They will have quite understandable, but wholly
incorrect, tendencies and reactions in the presence of the Between. All their favorite forms of
expertise are likely to be not only wrong, but also wrongheaded, i.e., headed in exactly the wrong
direction. That means you really may not be able to trust Moderns to survive the Between, nor to
make the time in the Between survivable for others.
There’s a big temptation to go wandering off into a kind of neo-primitivism, picking up
the details of the way of life of archaic peoples as if that held solutions for us. Though traditional
tribal hunting and gathering people were well adapted to their environments, they were operating
on automatic, and that includes their views of the world. It seems likely that the most they have
to offer are insights and analogies, for their way of life was adapted to a low density world of
large territories in which there were far fewer people than today. Their insights may well be
crucial, but anything we do will have to be adapted to the world we’ve got — and it’s not their
world.
At the end of Modernism, the new sciences are appearing with ideas/cosmologies that
may well be adequate to transformation processes. Finally we're able to talk about what's going
on--at just the right time when we need it. It is also possible that design sciences that work with
more complexity can build on the base that Modern culture has created: the powerful science and
engineering means for that can alter our physical world, but guided by new designs that let us
adapt our world to new ways of life.
The science of dissipative structures is just now appearing, late in the game, while the
cruder engineering of lots of processes around nonliving materials has been powerful for 200
years. Westerners are better at cognizing the way nonliving things work than any humans in
history. We’ve subdivided our knowledge however, so people know the various pieces of each
individual process, when it’s based on physics, chemistry and machines — without seeing the
whole system. With all of our scientific progress, we've merely gotten smarter at artificial
processes, but we've lost contact with natural processes, and have poorer intuitions about them.
The side effects are what create the most dangers; for those are what our engineers and
corporations don’t pay attention to, destroying environments and ecologies. It’s not just about
waste and pollution during the process, because to drive industrial processes, industries are doing
something more thoroughly unsustainable than ever seen before in the history of the earth: In the
process of extracting and transforming the metals and energy they need, they are using vast
amounts of ores and metals that should not be out on the surface of the earth, and vast amounts
of petroleum and coal that shouldn’t be out on the surface, or be burned. This is degrading the
planet as a living system, dramatically depleting the amount of life around us. Even if we were
so stupid and heartless as to not care about other species, we’d still have to face the grim fact that
in aggregate, all of this is drastically worsening our own survival chances as a species.
Yet we are thoroughly adapted to using machines at every level of life, and cannot throw
away engineering and science advances, for humanity is now so numerous that we depend on
them, and indeed the entire industrial world keeps going because of them. But our machine
civilization is now a clear and present danger to the life field of the planet. This is our very own
paradox, and like all paradoxes it cannot be solved within its own terms, but must be transcended
by going to a new level of system. The way out is not to fall back to archaic ways, but to find a
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
29
way to leap out of our present level. What this paradox is telling us is that our established way of
operating is what is killing our world, so that we must have a new social and cultural design. And
it says that there are design constraints that cannot be violated without killing us.
Nevertheless, Secular Modernism's lack of understanding of what's needed for
transformation is all pervasive and deeply rooted. i In part that reflects being an adolescent
culture. Like an adolescent who has an extraordinarily difficult time imagining what he/she will
be like as an adult, or what adults do and what viewpoints they take on, Modernist culture will
have a hard time imagining what its successor Wisdom Culture will be about. The adolescent has
put all his or her energy into stepping away from childhood and disidentifying with Mom.
Similarly, Moderns are fixated on how much they are not like the Traditionals, how much more
worthy and efficient and smart and up-to-date cool than Traditionals.
However, now Modernism is forced to take on new energies and structures to be driven
to the next level, and it clearly does not understand the process it's in. But if the container isn't
there to hold the process, then there's all too likely to be a fall below the present level of
integration (Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia” and drug addiction model for adolescents). The
downside of bifurcation is all too likely when they don't understand and trust the process, and
don't know how to make containers. In fact, a media-driven Modernity is all too likely to fall into
a panicked fixation on not-dying in the downside of a bifurcation process, because all they allow
themselves to see is the fearful part, and that could set off pathological dynamics that cause
death. Not grasping what’s going on, because they have no models for it, they miss out on a
bounce out of the transformational "hole" to the next level. (See the Laszlo Diagram)
Cultural Evolution in Our Time: Making Leaps and Falling in Holes
Modern evolutionary theory and modern nonlinear systems dynamics theory are finally
looking shyly at one another, though it is too early to predict a marriage, shotgun or otherwise.
But certain natural affinities are there.
Whatever is alive has to use restorative processes to stay healthy, and to keep their
structures intact. Some restorative processes are for what’s routine, like crop cycles and business
cycles; but other restorative processes are for what’s not routine, like what happens to your
adrenalin, heartbeat, breathing, body temperature, and brain chemicals when you encounter
danger. Every plant and animal is embedded in a whole ecosystem, and that means that they
normally have cycles, in a complex dynamic stability that gets shocks from time to time. The
ups and downs are built into all living systems, from day and night, winter and summer, activity
and rest, and when they are whole populations of people, or plants and animals, the cycles also
come from giving birth and dying, eating and being eaten.
But to understand what is happening to us now as a civilization, we need to look at what
happens in a longer time perspective and at a planetary scale. We need an evolutionary
perspective. The little changes of everyday life that keep us alive as individuals, or even as a
whole species living in an environment, are not the same as what happens in evolution.
Contrary to what Darwin thought, plants and animals don’t show much sign of gradually
evolving from one species to another. They have a strong tendency to stay in equilibrium: to
keep doing what works, for thousands or even millions of years. Eventually, the climate changes,
and they move to a new territory, and then the evolutionary changes come in bunches, in
cascades of change.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
30
That’s not something our Victorian ancestors wanted to hear. They wanted to believe that
“Nature doesn’t make leaps” (Natura non facit saltus), but it now appears that most evolution
does happen by leaps. This was not only the bourgeoisie fearful of revolutionary change. It was
partly a matter of natural scientists wanting to say that nature is uniform at all times and places,
which works well enough for laws of physics and chemistry, but doesn’t work so well for life,
not even for geology. Those scientists had an agenda, which was to get past the Biblical accounts
of God, man and nature. They wanted to eliminate miracles and catastrophes, like Noah’s Flood,
of course. They were under pressure from religious authorities all through the nineteenth century.
In fact, the latest wrinkle in the theory of evolutionary biology [Refc. Steven Jay Gould,
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory] is called punctuated equilibrium. It’s a testimony to the
fact that the fossil record shows long periods of stability are indeed interspersed with leaps: stepfunction changes. But systems theorists add that these are not just any old kind of leaps—they’re
chaotic. The key idea is that big, discontinuous-looking changes are well within the range of any
living systems that have moved far from equilibrium, and that applies to populations of plants,
animals and humans. [See the Laszlo diagram.]
The diagram shows three stair steps of change, leaving out the immense period of time
humanity was hunters and gatherers. We could take them to be three kinds of civilization: the
ancient agrarian empires, the modern urban industrial world, and the new emerging culture. It
shows that the stories we normally tell ourselves about big changes are just too simple—and
wish away some of the difficult, critically important realities we will have to cope with. Once
you understand this, you will better understand how to live in the new world that is before us.
CULTURAL EVOLUTION: THE NEW PICTURE
LEVEL 1: HUNTING AND GATHERING : 250,000 YEARS
1st Crisis: Overpopulation of hunting grounds
1st Surge: Adoption of agriculture
LEVEL 2:
EARLY FARMING: 5,000–10,000 YEARS
2nd Crisis: Overpopulation of farmland, plus war
2nd Surge: Invention of Cities and Empires
LEVEL 3:
URBAN-AGRARIAN EMPIRES: 5,000 YEARS
3rd Crisis: Overpopulation & Ecological Traps
3rd Surge: Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America
LEVEL 4:
MODERN WORLD: 500 YEARS
4th Crisis: Too Much Growth, Too Little Development
4th Surge: Restorative Economy + Globalization +
Accelerating Technology + Consciousness
LEVEL 5:
PLANETARY WISDOM CULTURE
In the diagram, the cultures at each higher level (on the vertical axis) are more complex, flexible,
creative, efficient, and make more effective use of information than the previous levels. Along
the horizontal axis is evolutionary time. The cultures at each stairstep level act self-protectively
to keep their long-established structures and patterns intact as much as they can. Each level is in
a kind of equilibrium (their self-corrections are shown by the wiggly line). Staying in a pattern
doesn’t mean no change, but rather that there are oscillations and cycles within a stable way of
life—like the business cycle, cycles of fashion, and the alternations of liberal and conservative
administrations in Washington
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
31
Evolutionary Transformation as seen
in dynamic models of living systems
Systems model of the messy
reality of all living systems
Complexity
Efficiency
Use of information
Dynamic stability
SURGE to New Level
Dynamic stability
SURGE to New Level
CRISIS
Dynamic stability
unsuccessful bifurcations
below a stable new level
CRISIS
potential decline into death or extinction
Time
The special case of rites of passage
Building appropriate
capabilities convertible
into new structures
during a life transition
The old status and identity
Stripping away
the old identity
The new status and identity
About here, in a rite of passage, it's as
if the one undergoing a transformation
falls into a hole, becoming invisible to
the outside world.
The Between:
the liminal (threshold) period
By contrast, when cultures change from one established level of organization to a new
one, there is more of a wrenching change, a sudden leap to the next pattern. That’s what
happened in the changeover from the medieval way of life to the Modern, passing through the
Black Death, and through the industrial revolution. Sometimes such big changes are triggered by
a breakdown, like losing a big war, or an invasion from a neighbor with a different culture. It can
be very messy, in fact: the way that Russia was dragged out of a feudal despotism by the Czars
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
32
and then the communists, and its even worse messiness after the fall of communism. The old
level of organization has to give way before the new one can come in and take hold, and there’s
often a transition period when neither system is working properly.
There is another big source of change that corresponds to what we are seeing now. All
over the globe, wherever modern culture has been adopted, it shows more of a built-in dynamic
of change than any other kind of culture in history. At first we thought it was just the West, but
now we see it all over Asia and Latin America: the economy grows and changes, technology
keeps changing, the people become more secular, the politics goes toward a mass politics pattern
that destabilizes the traditional nobility (though not always toward democracy), and the deep
values of ordinary people move away from survival concerns toward more inner concerns and
more planetary concerns. What is notable is that these are all incremental changes, changes in
quantity decade after decade, over several centuries. Yet after enough small shifts, somehow they
have turned into qualitative changes, making the kind of culture very different than when
modernization started in any given society. But there is something even bigger, and it’s a key
part of the destabilizing of our present day world: modernization seems to undo the old pattern
of the society, weakening institutions like family, community and church, and as economic
development succeeds, it also undoes the established relationship of humans to nature, and starts
killing off huge natural areas and creating ever more species extinctions. The more successful
economic growth is at the modernist program of prosperity, the more it destroys old cultural
forms and nature, and the more each national culture starts wandering away from its old
equilibrium pattern that it had through most of the modern period of history.
This pattern of starting to wander far from equilibrium is very familiar to systems
theorists, who look at the dynamics of whole systems. A living system, including the way a
culture lives in its territory, starts to take on a pattern of chaotic and unpredictable fluctuations.
But they aren’t just disorderly or social disintegration: rather there is an underlying order to the
chaos. The new movements aren’t cyclical, but take on a quality of what systems analysts call
“hunting.” That is, the chaotic dynamics seem to explore new possibilities in a way that suggests
the whole system is looking for a whole new evolutionary level: not just a new pattern, but for
the possibility of a more efficient way of life.
As the modernized West has started to depart from its old cultural pattern, two things
have happened. First, the early Modern ways are no longer maintained, and the Traditionals are
there to say it loudly and bitterly. But at the same time that breakdowns of old ways occur, the
culture’s “wandering far from equilibrium” has taken on a kind of goal-seeking pattern that
doesn’t seem to settle back into the old ways, but seems to go off into looking for new ways
where there might be a stable equilibrium. That is what we think we are seeing with the way the
new social movements are doing their reframing, and the way the Cultural Creatives are opening
up their lives to new possibilities. As this era goes beyond modernism, the innovators of the
West seem to be looking for a new kind of culture. The fact that there is a general movement for
change suggests they are not just looking for a different pattern within Modernism, but a pattern
at a higher level of organization.
The Laszlo diagram is taken from his book, The Choice: Evolution or Extinction. That
says it all. The diagram shows that successful evolutionary surges to a higher level come with a
big, nasty chasm just beforehand. One way of seeing this is that the old system falls apart and its
energies and resources are converted into a new form that enables the leap to a new level. Laszlo
argues that evolutionary leaps are likely to be preceded by ever-bigger shocks and chaotic
stumbling into mega-crises that cannot be resolved at the old level—giving really serious, though
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
33
temporary, declines. We fall into a hole. That hole could have a lot of disorganization and deaths.
Not a pretty prospect, even if it is followed by enormous and chaotic surges to some new level of
system organization. But it is important to say that by “chaotic” we don’t mean it’s all disorderly
and terrible. Rather, we mean that the outcome not only has many possibilities, it is also
uncertain and unpredictable —and it might give us a wild ride along the way, the kind of thing to
give an insurance actuary a heart attack.
There is a dotted line that goes downward at the bottom of the hole. There is a small
possibility that if we believe all our doomsaying, and fail to creatively provide for our future, that
a fall into barbarism and death could happen. It’s the Mad Max scenario of road warriors in a
desolate post-apocalyptic world. The dotted lines that branch off before the system gets to a
higher level show the possibility of falling short: incomplete transitions with partial failures.
And it’s not only to be found at the bottom of the crisis period of decline. It’s also possible that
the rebound and surge might not make it all the way to the next stable level, and settle back into
decline. It’s really that uncertain. You really can’t predict who the winners and losers will be.
What the Laszlo diagram shows for the whole developed world is both more hopeful
than the doom-sayers would hold forth, and much more dismaying than cornucopians would
ever want to admit.
That Hole is What We Call “the Between” [See rites of passage diagram]
There’s plenty of evidence that in the next twenty years or so, the whole planet is going
into a crisis. You can see it in the pattern of the period of shocks and decline of each previous
system level before rebounding. One reason that living systems are vulnerable to shocks is that
their old ways of operating are not able to cope with the kinds of shocks that they encounter. In
the case of Modernism, we have listed some typical shocks and some typical failures to cope.
The obvious—and probably wrong—response is to project the line straight down, to see it as the
kind of disaster that leads to the fall of civilization. Instead we must take a larger, longer-term
perspective, and remember all living systems fluctuate, so the line can swing right back up again.
That decline and recovery maps onto the familiar elements of a rite of passage, that kind that is
seemingly hard-wired into our species’ neurology: First there is the stripping away of the old
identity, and the old institutional supports. We can expect major losses of wealth, property,
population, efficiency, and organizational effectiveness along with a breaking up of old forms:
perhaps nation-states, or multi-national corporations, or giant cities, or our exploitative
relationship to the ecology, or our exploitation of Third World poverty, etc.
But the curve says, just like the rites of passage, you don’t get to immediately go off into
the new identity—nothing so nice. In the midst of the crisis is a liminal, or threshold, period, in
which something of the old identity dies, and in some cases, you really might die... The imperial
ego gets shrunken or killed. We get to be in a time of being nobody and nothing, in which the old
assumptions no longer work and the new story is not here yet. Even after the surge begins, there
is a long way to go before the levels of the previous system are restored, and we can’t go back to
the old places and old ways—like our ancestors who turned from hunting and gathering to
agriculture, or like the Jews wandering in the desert of Exodus, or like the end of medieval
Europe and the beginnings of Modernity.
Let’s be clear about the liminal time of wandering in the desert, the time of deep crisis.
We’ve been traveling along with such fluctuations as a world war here and there, expecting
civilization to go on much as it has for the last 500 years, or in the case of our ancestors, the last
5,000 years, when suddenly the whole culture falls in a hole. And because it’s a collective rite of
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
34
passage, in many respects we, and our problems, are invisible to the rest of the world. There’s no
nice easy transition, no applause until the end when we get to the new place. It’s not a publicly
visible image of our wellbeing suddenly dropping then bouncing back, like an economic
depression—no, it’s a real hole, and we get out of it ourselves, or die. It’s a worldwide transition,
and no angels or aliens from space will come down to rescue us from ourselves. And there are no
guarantees about how we come out of it, or even who we will have become when we come out of
it. Assuming we do, of course.
It’s only a crisis...not a death...
Let’s not take the oscillating line of the Laszlo diagram as telling us everything about the
decline and replacement of the old system. It’s more a heuristic than that. If literally everything
were to fall apart, then death surely must follow. No, this is just using a measure of one or two
indicators of the size and capacity of the system. But other relevant aspects, such as collective
memory, wisdom and technological know-how, are preserved, even while the old identity, and
old habits or old institutions are stripped away, and none of those can be shown on the diagram.
In fact, we can speculate that if the transition is going to be successful, many capacities must
have been built up that are not diminished too badly by the Between’s crisis phase. These are the
capacities that can be used to transcend the old system. A rite of passage should enhance them.
The crisis frees up those capacities to power the surge to the new level, in part because
the dead hand of the past won’t be as strong as it used to be. Look at the way northern and
western European countries cleared away the power of the Church and the feudal nobles to keep
things frozen. Eastern Europe couldn’t clear them away, and was left behind in the surge to
modernity. Whatever succeeds in becoming the dominant social form in the Wisdom Civilization
will probably be the forms that compete best. Historians call the previous successful ones the rise
of the bourgeoisie, coming of industrialism and capitalism, the rise of the nation-state, the rise of
modern armies, etc. To be stable, whatever dominates the next level after Modernism must also
turn out to be the smartest, best organized and most efficient.
This is precisely what we think is signaled by the appearance of the Cultural Creatives,
and their new worldview: that parts of our civilization have already started to build up our
collective capacity for transformation. The only element missing is the connection among the
Cultural Creatives, and their collective visioning of a positive future, a Wisdom Culture, that can
survive our big crises. Again, we insist that there is nothing so powerful and useful as a viable
positive image of the future, especially if it leads us to invest in a better, more viable future.
On the other hand, we may not be justified in an excessive optimism, for the new level
may be both better and worse than the old. Look at our past civilizational crisis. Not only did we
get growth in science, commerce and industry after the Black Death, but a reintroduction of mass
slavery, and the Inquisition, and an excursion into otherworldly salvation-oriented Christianity
that ultimately became fundamentalism. In many ways, industrialization did a lot of good, but in
the short run, it was very bad for both peasants and workers, and in the long run it has caused the
worst extinctions of species in history. In each of our great transformations it seems our world
has gotten better and better, and worse and worse, faster and faster. As we look around us, we
can hardly doubt it today. So it is not at all obvious that our generation will applaud whatever
comes next, should we still be living when it emerges on the world stage.
At this precise point, some tough-mindedness is called for, so that we do make a big
enough surge to carry us all the way to the next viable level. The surge to the new level must not
be aborted by our collective cowardice, by our clinging to the old forms of the past. It must not
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
35
be aborted by our political correctness, insisting in some liberal politics-as-usual that no one at
all can possibly be hurt. It’s going to be a real crisis and people will be hurt. And it must not be
aborted by the dead hand of today’s elites of wealth and power, any more than the feudal nobles
and churchmen did. For the new level may not resemble the old civilization in more than
superficial ways, so the odds are poor that the bases for elite power and wealth will remain the
same. The more elites hang on, the more difficult it will make the surge to the next level, and the
more it is likely to be aborted in some similar kind of new society that turns out not to be stable.
But of course they do not want to hear that they will be replaced, and can be expected to try to
suppress any stories in the media that may suggest it is so.
The new story of humanity
The new story is full of drama. It says there were three big crises in human history, each
followed by a big evolutionary surge. And now it’s happening for a fourth time, and we can go to
a fifth level. The diagram shows what happens when societies go from one kind of civilization to
another, say from hunting and gathering in crisis to agriculture in crisis to industrialism in crisis
to a planetary civilization. There may finally be closure to our process when we integrate the
whole planet—for there’s nowhere else to go—except into space, and who knows (!?), perhaps
integration into a galactic civilization would be the next level of transformation.
Moving Toward a Wisdom Culture
We are the first beings in history who can reflect on our own evolution. There are three
kinds of responses to knowing we’re going into a major crisis with a probable evolutionary
surge. The first two responses are bad mistakes:
1) Denial. Business as Usual
Belief in smoothly accelerating growth forever, and that ever-rising profits and capitalist
technology will save us. If you’ve read this far, you know that’s dumb.
2) Paralyzing Fear, Gloom and Doom, Declinism
If all you do is focus on preventing/ameliorating the Bads, you’re not putting energy into
creating the new way of life. It’s hard to survive the crisis.
3) Preparing for the Grand Transition is all that makes sense. It has 3 parts:
a) Preparing for Shocks and Instability, by investing in a more robust system (rather than
shaving down robust responses to get more profits)
b) Designing a New Way of Life, by mobilizing people like the Cultural Creatives to create
the new culture, an Integral Culture.
c) Seeing Ourselves as One Planet, One Humanity. If people are poor and ecosystems are
poisoned, we harm ourselves—there is no “them.” A very unequal and poisoned planet will
perpetually be unstable.
The kind of crisis we are discussing is hopeful in a paradoxical way. If all we can do is
the speed of response that we’d expect of ourselves using a smooth sigmoid-curve of innovation,
reform and progress in normal times, then we will be too slow to adapt, and our grandchildren
have no future. We need a much faster response time to handle our world’s ecological crises. But
the crisis-and-surge systems evolution pattern could take us through rapid changes. Even rigid
systems will sometimes change their structure in a crisis.
The de-institutionalization that is happening in the Modern world may actually be
helpful. This permits rapid, though often chaotic, change—both up and down. Granted, that is
terribly uncomfortable for financial analysts and experts, and for the elites who own them, even
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
36
to contemplate. It feels risky and unpredictable for the bottom line, and indeed, it actually is.
There will probably be big losers as well as big winners. When cultures change in the time span
of centuries, we are used to thinking of them as givens, but such rapid change means everything
that we take for granted in our culture will need to be re-examined in our lifetime. To historians
this might seem like a time of discontinuous change.
There are historical precedents: the Black Death in the 1300s led to deaths of one-third of
Europe’s population, and a temporary de-institutionalization—of feudal land holding, of
control by nobility, and of control by the Catholic Church. That permitted a host of technical
and social adaptations in the empty farming areas of Europe, and also more trade and usury
in decontrolled urban centers, and to the Renaissance period (partly with the fall of
Byzantium to Islam), which combined with the opening of the Americas, led to
Modernization and the Industrial Revolution.
In this situation of worldwide chaotic change, those cultures (or for that matter, such
American subcultures as the Traditionals) that cling most tightly to the past will almost certainly
not make it. It is those who are most inventive, creative, and adaptive who will survive and even
prosper (such as the Cultural Creatives):
The rule of evolutionary adaptation in times of major shifts in evolutionary level is:
proliferate lots of divergent inventions/adaptations first, and edit them down later. That
is, trim away failures as you learn from hard-won experience—because you just never
know ahead of time what will work.
This applies with great force to your own everyday life (yes, you, reading this!):
These next few decades will not be a stable period, and everything that goes with stability
will be due to change. If people who are immersed in Modernism think that they can simply
climb ladders of job success today as their parents did in the past, they are laboring under a
serious illusion. Jobs and careerism are quickly becoming a thing of the past. People will have to
personally face the possibility that if they do not altruistically help our society adapt to the new
kind of world we are in, then they are helping it to self-destruct. Their own approach to life is
implicated in the larger whole. Ours is one of the few times in history when we are poised at a
cusp or pivot point, where the collective action of individuals and groups of people can make a
big difference—for better as well as for worse.
It is not just that there are dreamers and altruistic idealists with a long view and cynics
with a short view. The selfish careerists and the destructive cynics with only a short-term view
are interfering with our collective survival, but so are the dreamers who don’t want to act. Those
who only want to dream or only want to take care of themselves are equally at fault in the next
era. They will fail to build the capacity we need to surge out of crisis. One kind of approach will
work: practical idealists with a long view who help the world to make it.
Modernism is used to condemning or belittling both theorists and idealists as ungrounded
and not really practical. That view is passé. In the next decades there will be nothing so practical
as good theories of change and ways of creating idealistic action. We cannot afford the
fashionable cynicism that parades under the banners of post-modernism and of corporate
conservatism. It is part of what is helping Modernity to destroy our world. If such cynicism is
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
37
left to its own devices, then we shall most certainly go deeper into this crisis period with no new
capacity for inventions and adaptations that would let us surge to the next level. Without that
adaptation our only way through the crisis is death.
The fashionable despair and declinism both of liberal intellectuals and of activists can all
too easily be part of what is wrong with Modernity. If we simply seek to avoid, condemn or push
away from what we see as wrong with the destruction of our world, then we are guilty of a kind
of meliorism and reformism that is “too little, too late.” We cannot afford to focus all our
attention on overcoming the “bads” because concentration on them offers no positive direction
for change. We need a positive image of the future to draw us forward into inventing a better and
more workable world—but even more do we need practical new social designs. It is this addition
of inventive capacity to our social capital that will permit the surge upward to the stable new
level that is Integral Culture.
In our present era there is nothing more practical than that kind of “radicalism” that
analyzes social and technical processes down to their roots to find out how to redesign our
relationship to the natural world, and to find out how to eliminate systematic social injustice and
war. This thoroughgoing analysis and reinvention of ourselves is critical to permit the surge
beyond modernism that will avoid a mere slide into barbarism and a fall of civilization. If we
won’t correct them because it is right, then we can do it because our world can’t stand the
destabilization that results from ecological collapse, injustice and war.
There is nothing so practical as the kind of “utopianism” that compares alternative social
designs to see what will be viable. Without attention to ecological sustainability, most utopias
truly are impractical dreaming or critiques of modernity lacking in substance. A “new eutopian
design science” must draw upon design constraints posed by all social and natural sciences, and
by what we know of several centuries of debates over what is the good society. New social
designs without design constraints are like playing tennis without a net.
It is important to remember that time is not on our side. Ecological deterioration is
accelerating. If it goes too far, then economic collapses will soon follow. At that point another
kind of pathological process will almost certainly take over, which is chaotic scrambling for
individual and small group survival, and warlord or corporate attempts to monopolize scarce
resources in a shrinking world economy. Then long term concerns would be abandoned, and
short term survivalist thinking would take over in the most destructive and militaristic ways.
Should that occur, then the whole game is lost, for we would have moved irretrievably into
barbarism and the collapse of this civilization. Call this the Mad Max scenario of survivors
fighting over a post-holocaust, desert world.
In that case, humanity may never recover to another high civilization that could move on
to planetary Integral Culture—the modern world has already used up all the easily mined
materials and fossil fuels, and ruined too much of the ecology of this planet. There would be no
way for the next civilization to come along and lift itself by its bootstraps in the kind of technical
and economic development process that we have seen in the last two centuries. This is our last,
best chance.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
38
The most important of the cultural containers Needed for this gigantic transformation is an
integrative one: Community
This includes communities as local areas of life (neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities) and
communities as friendship networks both in person and on the Internet, and communities of the
faithful in various spiritual and religious forms.
In any and all forms that it comes in, community Needs to be distributed everywhere through all
sorts of structures. What will be containers, and how will they work? Some people have to have
the wisdom to create and hold the container. Who are those people? In all likelihood they will be
the elders and the spiritually advanced.
What we're going into is what people historically most feared, and certainly both the ego
and the teenager most fear it. Therefore those Moderns who still are adolescent at some level are
likely to fear this most. We have to tell people that the "you=identity" that you went into this
process with is not the "new you=new identity" who will come out. The ego does not get to be a
tourist who collects new experiences and comes out substantially unchanged. Moderns do not get
to come out with their worldview, ideologies, and favorite ways of life unchanged. It's a different
process. You get changed: the “old you” may be said to have died in favor of the new.
Many lower level and adolescent desires will not be fulfilled:
•
It will not be over soon. (The process takes a good long while when you're talking of changes
at the scale of a whole civilization, and it's a cumulative change that builds over a substantial
period of time. It takes as long as it takes: years, decades or centuries.)
•
We will not get to "put it all behind us and get on with business as usual." (Business may be
bad, what comes out won't be business as usual, and putting it behind you is a form of denial
that is so maladaptive in this kind of transition process that it creates a true death space.)
•
You don't come out unchanged. (No playing tourist, and no avoiding transformation.)
•
You don't get to look good. (Egoic narcissistic posturing may well be overthrown.)
•
You can't do it all by yourself. (American individualism won't work.)
•
Not all of it will be pleasant and comfortable. (Traditionalist longing for safety and comfort
fails, and so does Modernist longing for permanent prosperity. There are hard times in this.)
•
You can't do it unconstrained and free (It will be constrained and within a container—or die).
•
You will not be expert about it. (It will feel highly uncertain, even dangerous—and may be.)
•
You will have to be responsible and come into wisdom. (It may help to remember the ups
and downs you went through in adolescence, if only so that you can let go of the present
consciousness and go on to the next level of integration.)
•
Familiar institutions and ways of life may well not make it to the other side. (It probably will
be a wholly unfamiliar world, unguessably different than now.)
While most rites of passage were traditionally designed to be safe, this new collective rite
of passage may well not be safe. There will be failures along the way. Not everyone who goes
into the Between in a time of new, risky, and even shattered, containers will come through, or
come through whole. The whole point to ‘rites of passage’ in supposedly primitive societies was
to provide a container that made the transformational process safe for initiates, guided by the
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
39
same elders who buffered the space and time of the whole vision quest, or other time of passage,
providing a "supportive stretch" for those who were going through it that was neither trivially
easy, nor impossibly difficult, but ‘just right.’ If you don't know ahead of time that you come out
as a changed being then the whole thing fails. Since Modernism doesn’t believe in this any more,
the odds are that such a culture can’t create such processes, especially if Moderns have not
themselves been through vision quests or rites of passage. When they have they are likely to
convert to a non-Modern worldview, in part, because “I’m not the person I once was.”
Leaving/departure requires dropping the old attachments/worldviews. Disenchantment
means, "the scales fell from my eyes," e.g., loss of belief in the old worldview and ways of life.
So a new worldview is sought as they depart from belief in the old: "I had more experience than
my mental models could organize." Traditionalist responses may well be to refuse the departure,
or to depart for an old and familiar worldview different than Modernism, but inadequate to the
present. Not good enough. Lincoln said, "as the times are new, so we must think anew."
The Need for a Planetary Wisdom Culture
This Planetary Wisdom Culture must exist simultaneously at local, national, continental
and planetary levels of functioning, well beyond ethnic, tribal or religious levels. It is to be the
next synthesis of the cultures, worldviews, spiritual insights, art forms, values, and philosophies
of all the world’s peoples. It will contain multitudes of diverse ways, but also show clear patterns
of universals that all of humanity can claim to be part of. Small cultures and large will work hard
to see what are their unique gifts that they can give to the common pool of wisdom. It will be a
radical reconstruction of the world’s social structures, transforming the structure of economies,
polities and civil societies according to their hearts’ desires, transforming old enmities into new
relationships, and ensuring ecological sustainability for the long run. It will be considered a
golden age when it is spoken even now, from the viewpoint of most of the world’s peoples. In
future millennia, it will be considered the beginning of a golden age.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
40
5 Sectors for Design of a Planetary Wisdom Civilization:
1. From Elite High Culture / To The Wisdom Level
Note: this is mostly about cultural content and process, as well as cultural organization
- Science & Technology & Mathematics & Philosophy
- Co-intelligent Cultural Production & the Arts
- Enobling Professions & Deeper Crafts
- True Education for Wisdom Throughout the Life Cycle
- Media & Communication & Co-intelligent Wisdom Councils
- Worldviews & Religions & Spiritual Beliefs & Practices
2. From Personal Life Worlds / To The Whole Person in a Mature Society
How we live, love and behave at the interpersonal level in:
- Workgroups,
- Communities,
- Associations,
- Neighborhoods,
- Friendship groups,
- Extended families-of-choice
3. From Human Exploitation of the Natural World / To Humans in Gaia
Our need is not only to avoid destruction but to rebuild our relationship to nature, by
redesigning the following from a whole planetary ecosystems perspective:
- Extractive industries: Agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, oil and gas
- Artificial industries: Manufacturing, bulk processing, construction, transportation
- Tertiary industries: Tourism, commerce, entertainment, urban commercial centers
- Direct humans-to-nature interaction, beyond sentimentality to participation
- Preservation, Cleanup, Restoration of Ecologies
4. From 'The System' of Money and Power / To The Society of Organizations
The 'Bigs' exist to concentrate money and power, are all too large and need to be
redesigned to be smaller, and their functions both reassigned and redesigned:
- Big Military
to Minimal Self-defense Forces + Citizen Nonviolent Forces
- Big Finance
to Multi-level Currencies and Finance imbedded in communities
- Big Corporations
to Limited-size Corporations imbedded in communities/ecologies
- Big Science
to Limited-size Science, imbedded in Wisdom philosophies
- Big Technology
to Socially- & ecologically-responsive Technologies
- Big National Governments to Multi-level Governments/Citizenships: Local to Planetary
- Big Urban Metropolises
to Multi-level towns & small cities, few or no metropolises
- Big Mass Media Networks to Dispersed, multi-level media, with citizen control
- Big Markets
to Dispersed, multi-level markets, moral and ecological controls
5. From Colonized Communities in Decay / To New Kinds of Communities
Reclaiming currently fragmented, colonized pieces of communities as:
- Quasi-kin extended-families-of-choice, out to extended networks
- Extended friendship networks, in person and electronically
- Local places: neighborhoods, small town centers, and small-city civic spaces
- Civil societies' associations (built around values, human-scale relationships)
- Communities of faith/belief
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
41
Aspects of Human Culture That Need to be
Redesigned For a Wisdom Culture,
Requiring New Kinds of Leadership to be
Sustainable, Trans-Modern, Fully Conscious, Spiritual
"High Culture and
Value-Laden Beliefs"
Science/Technology,
The Arts & Literature,
Architecture & Design,
Philosophy, Religion,
Education, Ideologies,
Spirituality, etc.
"The System" of
Power and Money
run by "The Bigs"
Big Corporations,
Governments, Armies,
Corporate Media,
Finance, Cities,
Networks, Markets
Community
Local Areas of
Life = Towns
& Neighborhoods;
Belief & Faith
Communities;
Online
Communities
Humans in Gaia = Human Ecosystems
Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, Mining,
Energy, Transportation, Cities, Tourism
Ecologically Restorative Activities
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
Our Personal
Life Worlds
based on
face to face
interactions:
Family,
friends,
neighbors,
co-workers
42
Some Social Inventions for a Wisdom Culture, by Sectors
(Here is what other groups have thought of: we should all be able to think of dozens more)
1. Act as the Conscious Part of Planet Gaia: Cultural Change for Ecological Sustainability
ƒ Make Bicycles, Fuel Cells, the Hypercar and Mass Transit universal in land transportation
ƒ Make vastly more efficient water and air transportation
ƒ Create the Hydrogen, Solar and Wind-Powered Energy-economy and -transport
ƒ Develop Sustainable Organic Agriculture, everywhere
ƒ End mass-processing industrialism: in extraction, farming, manufacturing, distribution, etc.
ƒ Restore Natural Areas, forests, plains, seas, etc., Not just preventing their destruction
ƒ Do Clean Mining, plus implement the Materials Revolution more thoroughly
ƒ Do Universal “Cradle to Cradle” Ecologically Sustainable Design Standards/Practices
ƒ Reduce the aggregate throughput of advanced economies
ƒ Reduce the overconsumption of the West, and the overpopulation of the Third World
2. Change “The System” of Power and Money: Cut Back the Bigs, Restore Equity
ƒ Political Imagery/Identity Goes Beyond Right and Left, The New Political Compass
ƒ Restore participative political campaigns in a democratic politics
ƒ Politics based on People Power — instead of Money Power
ƒ Develop Complementary Currencies: Both local and planetary
ƒ Democratic control over the media, instead of advertiser controls, include covering political
campaigns free of charge
ƒ National militaries reduced to defense, plus Planetary Peace-Making Forces
ƒ Destroy all weapons of mass destruction, everywhere
• Go to Five-Tier Government Functions: Local, regional, national, continental, planetary
ƒ Citizens Wisdom Councils at all levels of government, for any large issues
ƒ Citizens’ Science Courts, to evaluate all new science and technology developments
ƒ Explicit control of all major technology development on the planet: materials, electronic, and
information technologies, plus emerging nanotechnologies and biotechnologies
ƒ Remove all personhood from corporations: Subject them to responsibility charters
ƒ Punish all corporate contributions, gifts, graft to politicians, on both sides
ƒ Put an upper size limit on corporate and individual, incomes and wealth—above each limit
require breakup, or prestige-building donations—vary by industry, by region, by culture.
ƒ New Social Contract: Restore “social responsibility+altruistic service” industries to
nonprofit/NGO status as a new social sector: bodily and mental health, education, any kind of
insurance, certain media, religious organizations and their properties, employment services,
charities, social welfare services, child welfare, ecological restoration, adult education, trash
collection, cleaning public spaces, etc. Require them to deliver most government services
paid by taxes, and require everyone to volunteer some hours in some social sector service of
their choice, under supervision of altruistic professionals.
ƒ Require 2 or 3 years of “national service” or “planetary service” for all youths, and a
“national labor tax as volunteers” for all citizens in addition to income or environmental
taxes (see previous social sector revival).
ƒ Require the advanced world to support the non-destructive development of the rest of the
world, to end hunger and disease, restore natural areas, educate all the people, house all the
people consistent with indigenous traditions, personal skills development, etc.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
43
3. Community: Rebuild and Reinvent All Forms of Community
ƒ Neighborhood as Village Community: The local area of life as a real place, with a list of the
normal functions of life that should always be present in a good, functioning neighborhood
ƒ Develop traditions of neighborhood-level ritual occasions and parties on regular dates
ƒ Workplace as Village: Community in the workplace, as real humans, not fillers of job slots
ƒ Communities of faith and spiritual practice: Developing sanghas to support personal growth
ƒ Online communities: solidarity, support and communication with distant friends/colleagues
• Develop traditions of “sister neighborhoods” and “sister cities” for mutual aid and learning
4. Support the “Lifeworld”: Develop authenticity in all forms of interpersonal
relationships, and Maximize the development of individuals
• Workplace as Village: Authentic, committed human relationships, not transitory workers
• Village/Neighborhood as Workplace: Reconnecting family, home and work
• Rework and Heal historically, exploitive relationships: gender, race, ethnicity, class
• Toward companion families rather than patriarchy
• Bring more feminine-relatedness approaches into interpersonal relations in all areas of life
• Initiations at all stages of the life cycle: adolescent, young adult, mature adult, elder
• Develop traditions of one-child families, with children treated as precious
• Develop traditions of complementary support of adolescents and elders
5. Reinvent Ideas, Beliefs and Spiritual Practice for a Planetary Wisdom Culture
ƒ Develop skills and processes for collective invention of facets of a Wisdom Culture as a form
of play and social contribution by groups and communities of any size or composition
ƒ Collective development of a positive image of a future Planetary Wisdom Culture
ƒ Develop social/cultural responsibility and ritual functions for the arts, at all levels of society
ƒ Revival of nobility, idealism and the sacred across the arts
ƒ Develop traditions of “elder wisdom” for all people to aspire to as a later life stage
ƒ Develop systematic investigation and comparison of all cultural traditions to share their
unique contributions to the pool of Planetary Wisdom
ƒ Subsidize development of Integral philosophies and sciences in conjunction with arts and
literature that carry ideas and philosophies to a higher, more inclusive, and integrative level
ƒ Develop a Transpersonal Ecology: ecological ethics and spirituality
ƒ Link consciousness issues to science and philosophy
ƒ Systematic comparison and sharing of spiritual traditions and practices across the planet
ƒ Systematic recovery of “deep-and-ancient-traditions/symbols” around the planet
ƒ Develop “world arts,” “world music” etc. symbolizing planetary solidarity
ƒ Develop worldwide “youth festivals” for youths to meet, share, develop friendships for life
ƒ Examine Materialist Modernism as a previous, failed culture, to sort out what does and
doesn’t work from its institutions, practices and traditions
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
44
The Need for a Wisdom Epistemology at the End of Modernism:
New, Wiser Ways of Knowing might look like this:
1) Turning to personal experience (both inner and spiritual experience) as authority for truth
2) Use of enhanced perceptual devices in science and technology to extend our senses to the very
large and the very small results in growing awareness of other realms, but also use of enhanced
spiritual-psycho-technologies to perceive nonmaterial reality better and more accurately.
3) Growing openness to the views of other cultures: not only ideas, but also perceptions
4) Larger, more generous awareness in taking in new knowledge, not intellectual so much as
emotional and perceptual.
This has two important results:
1) Creation of a holarchical perspective, both intellectual and perceptual, that sees ourselves as
living systems that are part of a larger living system: the whole planet, as seen from space, and
planetary ecology.
2) Growing acknowledgment of our need to face and resolve certain problems that are seen as
"impossible" for Modernism to confront and solve—the planetary problematique. The need to
solve these problems for our collective survival often serves as a useful reality constraint on
wishful thinking.
Several new ways of knowing have come into the West since about the end of WWII.
1. We have developed new ways of being co-intelligent (see Tom Atlee) in groups/communities
2. We have extended our modes of perception beyond what was typical of medieval and early
modern periods up thru 19th century. However, we do need more instantiation of ongoing new
developments in the following areas:
a) Physical - our capacity to perceive has expanded in scientific and technical areas far beyond
what our unaided senses are capable of: the very large and distant (optical and radio
telescopes), the very small (optical and electron microscopes), and interiors of objects and
living things (X-rays, CAT scans, MRI), and views of ourselves and the Earth from space.
b) Consciousness of how our mind/body systems work: introspection in psychotherapy,
psychoanalysis, bodily perception, and meditative traditions; use of biofeedback and
visualization both for improved peak athletic performance, and for healing; systematic
development of old and new forms of consciousness that link meditative traditions to science.
c) Understanding the natural world from different states of consciousness, as in the shamanic
traditions of native peoples’ herbal, healing and vision quest traditions, but also through new
forms of phenomenology.
3. Turning to personal subjective experience (interiority) as an authority for what’s true: not just
religious, scientific, medical or political authority, not tribal custom nor elders. Realizing that
you can form your own values, theories and worldview separate from what the authorities tell
you. Realizing that consciousness itself is central to reality, as well as to perceiving reality.
4. Openness to different ways of knowing from other cultures: both ideas and perceptions. This
goes with a larger, more generous view, that is more respectful of different ways of knowing and
perceiving, one that seeks diversity in knowing, and uses multi-level diversities in cognition.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
45
Growth of knowledge at the
messy exploratory frontier:
the ragged leading edge of
the Modernist world view.
At
first it looks chaotic and divergent .
Growth of
Knowledge
in Modernism
Modernism assumes
that if new knowledge is
true that will simply
extend its frontiers, and
whatever doesn't fit is
incoherent, "far out,"
"beyond the pale," or
"flakey." If it does not
make sense in the old
world view, then this
ideology tries to isolate,
invalidate, marginalize
the people and the
knowledge
In Fact: We find convergence
and synthesis in new knowledge
that both breaks open the old
world view, and extends it:
Not ungroundedness, confusion,
divergence, or arbitrariness, despite
convergences from very different fields
Knowledge for a
Planetary Integral
Culture, both as
new reality and as
positive image of the
future.
IF in fact there is somewhere
else to go, to a new culture,
THEN we can predict that
there should be converging
lines of development of new
knowledge—as indeed there
are. The new story-tellers,
those who carry a new world
view, need to hear thenew
story, so that they do not only
look back to the old story,
become disheartened, and
fail to depart for the new
world, one that is integrated
rather than fragmented.
Those who are at this ragged leading edge of new
developments outside modernism may still be in the
habit of referring to the old story Because they think
that is the only one there is, and that they are alone.
They may even marginalize themselves.
New Ways of Knowing:
From Modernism to Integral Culture
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
46
The various streams of knowing that have entered into contemporary life since the 1950s
lead to an overdetermined result: a substantive change in world view, values, life style and sense
of identity—both collective and personal—for a significant proportion of the population. These
changes amount to a change in culture. How you understand reality and your place in it
determines everything that matters, everything gives meaning to your life. [Use the Thomas
Berry quotation on “the old story” and follow that tone]
These new ways of knowing are leading to certain strong convergences in our
understanding of how to see reality: See the diagram on convergence of “deviant” new
knowledge on new world view that is an alternative to modernism, not just flakey and divergent:
a) Through new ways of knowing we get a worldview that recognizes living systems at
three mutually validating levels:
@ Personal/subjective level: participatory in living systems: knowing, caring and valuing
@ Scientific level: analytic and synthetic schemas of living systems
@ Native traditions’ intuitive level: mythic participation and direct knowing
b) Through new ways of knowing we get a worldview that recognizes and utilizes intraand inter-personal processes, and develops appropriate skills at four mutually
validating levels:
@ Spiritual level: processes for introspection, awareness, and maturation
@ Body-mind level: healing, peak performance, creativity and artistic performance
@ Interpersonal level: new processes for psychological and spiritual counseling
@ Group level: new kinds of non-hierarchical and participatory group process and
organizational development
c) These are more productive, and they are what leads Cultural Creatives to see alternatives
to the reality painted by Modernism. But they are also part of what is showing the way to
new civilization that has solutions that work to the problems that Modernism can't solve,
and, importantly, will be a vastly more satisfying way of life for most people on the planet
[even if not to elites that now control modernism.]
Creating the Wisdom Possibility
The Wisdom Possibility: Our Need is not only for the vision of what is possible but for the
movement of collective conscience: The realization that many people and parts of our planet
are being harmed, that it's objectively bad (as well as bad for us) and it needs to be stopped.
Every historical social movement has been a movement of conscience. There are two ways to
branch from that: one is to be angry and smash the bad things/people in revenge or retaliation,
and the other is to envision what’s better and move constructively toward what is now needed
instead.
Many hundreds of writers have been articulating the Wisdom Vision of what is needed
instead of Modernism and thousands of activists have actually been trying out pieces of it. Part
of the improved rhetoric of our time in history is: “We're here to say that both the articulation
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
47
and the social movements have been doing some good. We want to explore what that is together,
and tell how that vision is actually emerging in our daily lives.”
What will make this Wisdom Possibility real?
•
A social movement centered on positive developments, not enemies
•
Many new kinds of businesses that are more responsible than corporations have been
•
A different kind of politics and new governmental organization
•
A change of personal identities (who we think we are) on a massive scale: It’s not mystical,
in any traditional sense, though the emerging spirituality has plenty of mystical aspects.
Though we individually seem to be grown ups with grown up capacities, we've collectively
taken ourselves to be adolescents or children, because at the level of the whole, we're acting
irresponsibly with short time horizons, are only concerned for friends and family, are trying
to maintain ways of life that aren’t viable. So we're taking ourselves to be like youths, when
we have both capacities and problems of adults. So we need to mature collectively.
•
The point to developments such as bioregionalism and new cosmologies, is that if you
understand the whole process of a living system, and widen your new identity to be part of a
global system, then the goals you have and the actions you'll take will be more appropriate to
who an “expanded-you” is (not discounting the future, or thinking too small, etc.) So we have
to grow into the objective demands of our new larger identity, or watch our whole living
system start to die. When we are collectively enlarged, then we'll set natural processes into
motion that heal the system and work on integrating it, making a Wisdom Civilization.
We talk about Wisdom Civilization finally integrating those communities, institutions
and groups that markets and power-centers have been particularly active in taking apart over the
last three centuries. When we add values discussions by the Cultural Creatives, we are going to
do something that is unfashionable in secular Modernist culture: We will talk about morals and
morality as part of the reintegration of the lifeworlds of individuals, and as part of bringing more
humanity into the workings of both corporations and government. (However we do not need to
talk about them in the arrogant, sanctimonious and self-righteous terms of the far left or the far
right which start by calling other people immoral, and as they gather steam, use such
denunciations to justify their favorite witch hunts and reigns of terror.) It is inescapable that
when we talk about Wisdom Civilization, we are going to talk about what is moral in new terms,
terms that will vastly broaden the moral discourse. Traditionals will be dismayed that they hold
no high ground here.
Here are some typical elements of a public agenda embracing a new morality:
•
Safeguarding the ecology of the whole planet
•
Dealing with the rights of all people to adequate medical care, housing, nutrition, education
•
Expecting more responsibility from parents about their children
•
Rebuilding friendship networks around mutual aid and caring, without monetary benefits
•
Making the development of all children a higher social priority
•
Finding more ways to support families and improve relationships
•
Rebuilding communities and redoing transportation systems
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
48
•
Fending off the impact of potentially dangerous new technologies until their impact is clearer
(starting with biotechnology and nanotechnology)
•
Expecting, and getting, more social responsibility from large corporations (as with revocable
charters and sunset laws)
•
Getting social control over the markets and financial institutions
•
Restraining corporate exploitation of the Third World and of natural areas across the world
•
Taking the corruption out of the electoral/governmental process, especially campaign
funding, and lobbying by special interests
Though these are not explicitly stated as moral issues, you can tell they are by the way Cultural
Creatives react to them.
Our values express our life priorities, our deepest longings, our ultimate concerns, and
they also express our criteria for what is good and bad, better and worse, beautiful or ugly, in
whatever we encounter or do. What has made many of the CCs unhappy is their impression that
there is little likelihood of having their own longings made real in their lives. They are tired of
living by other people’s criteria of what has value, and tired of having their own criteria
derogated in the official culture. (In that respect, they are not so different than the traditionalists
and cultural conservatives in their dismay about the poor values of Modernism. The difference is
that they are not triumphalists who want only their own values at everyone else’s expense.)
When CCs hear about how many people share their values, they can anticipate getting
social support for those values for the first time. Moreover, they also realize that what they fear
about the future of the planet may be prevented if enough people are able to act, and that what
they long for really is possible. Many have had crippling doubts instilled by the cynical and
feckless media. Again and again, what we hear when the CCs find out their numbers is: “So
there is hope after all!”
On having shared values, there is also the fact of simply being heard, the pleasure of
acknowledging that what you care about is shared by a multitude of others. In this sense, that not
only are you not alone, but that you can get acknowledgement for who you are, and about what is
important—instead of feeling invisible. It is often argued that this precise feeling of impotence
and invisibility is what so often drives young men to violence in the Third World.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
49
Collective Will as an Emergent Phenomenon Serving the Need:
The question is: Given that many people care about what is happening to the planet and
care about what is happening locally in their cities and communities, and given that many people
have information about the urgency of the need to act,
•
Are they acting? And with what quotient of Wisdom?
•
How will appropriate action take place—especially with individualism?
•
Where, or how deep a place, will the motivation come from?
I think all these questions are part of the question of Will. Where is the will coming from
that is already emerging: is it only a different set of values being embraced, and a new worldview
emerging, or is it a growing alignment with Divine Will? We're witnessing this in the privately
held values of Cultural Creatives, in the desire of many to express what they care about and have
not revealed publicly. It also appears in their wish to hear the diverse voices, to hear all the
voices. We're also witnessing the emergence of a new worldview in the arts -- theatre, poetry,
performance art, and music -- and in the astonishing strength of feeling about ecology, and in
finding community or creating it. It’s a belief in a collective creation which has many artistic
aspects to it, that many people have facets of an emergent design that is not yet known, and that
has a numinous, sacred quality to it.
So we know about the valuing, the caring, concern, and interest in the insinuation of the
spiritual and the planetary into the emerging future. The next step is: how will these values be
enacted? How will Cultural Creatives walk their talk? Will they?
1. Tactically, there is a straightforward solution to the problem: Cultural Creatives are multiple
social and consciousness movement junkies. On average, they have identified with 3 to 6 at
any given time. The flip side of this is that means there is a 40-80% overlap in the believing
constituencies of any pair of new social movements. And the movements are converging on a
single new planetary wisdom culture worldview. That is essential to our understanding: this
is the opposite of single issue politics. It’s overlapping issue politics, and civil society
participation is the key to it. The new social movements that arose from the Sixties onward
have been immensely successful at the cultural level in persuading people to see the world
through their frames. Unfortunately, in the political arena, Big Money owns the politicians,
buys the media, and dominates most of the public discourse. Civil society gets to creep
around the edges, like little mammals at the edge of a clearing where the dinosaurs are
fighting their last battles. So, if all you know is the media treatment of new social
movements, you’d say they failed politically, rest in peace.
But that conventional wisdom is both cynical and naïve, both willfully ignorant and
superficially informed. That’s because there’s a major opportunity for mobilizing 50 million
Cultural Creatives. We can do it by connecting them to Core Cultural Creatives opinion
leaders who can be given something to say about the emerging culture, and connecting
together the movements whom the Cultural Creatives favor. They simply need to be offered
the insight that they can win, by connecting together in a general movement for change, by
creating social and business inventions, and by raising up a whole new class of political
leaders, because each of those will offer a way of pushing us toward a Wisdom Civilization.
It will take attractive projects like the Apollo Alliance (a blue-green alliance of unions and
environmentalists promoting alternative energy projects to revive America’s industrial base)
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
50
that allow movements to coalesce. It will also take a major alternative media effort, and ways
of building Cultural Creatives databases. Both of the latter are very do-able as businesses.
2. There is a critical juncture here. In a Modernist culture, if you see a need or have a goal, you
hop to it ASAP: arrow to target. In the emerging new worldview, in spite of the urgency of
the need to act, there is an equally potent need to consider the long-term consequences of
your action, as well as the breadth of the consequences in the present. One way of putting
this is that where modernity has approached problems through analysis and isolating parts,
performing controlled experiments, dissecting bodies, we are moving into a time where this
approach clearly does not work. We need to consider the living systems, the whole systems
over the long term, before we intervene. So a key part of the question of choosing to act is: a
determination to consider the action in its full systemic operation, intuiting the superorganism in its whole life course.
Intimately related to this considerateness is a corollary: the one who is looking is a part of
the system. We don't need to appeal to quantum physics for this; biologist E.O. Wilson talks
about it as “the Biophilia Hypothesis”: the loving recognition that we are all kin; feminists
refer to relationship; native peoples to connectedness, etc. In practice, it means that
considering the external facts also requires bringing in the internal experience of the actors as
parts ‘seeing on behalf of the whole from multiple vantage points and identities.’ In a
Wisdom Culture, the soul qualities of the work are important as the work itself. So it seems
that a key part of the question of will is a discussion of how you choose your actions, how
you decide. And the “you” is not merely a Modern’s “lone individual,” but a Trans-modern’s
“aware person-as-holon who operates from depth experiences.”
3. A second piece of this is the question of motivation, or the inner spiritual flame. What is it
that is inspiring and moving CCs to act? What does higher will look like in a Wisdom
Culture? The familiar motivations of materialist culture are not absent, but there is something
additional operating here -- a different relationship to will than the Horatio Alger or frontier
mentality of gritty determination. What we are seeing is a different kind of engagement,
including a surrender into higher purpose, so that It does the deed that serves the Need, by
acting through us. [Show essential will through examples. It may be too abstract otherwise.]
3. A third piece of the question is collective will: how will the collective be mobilized?
What are the specific images, myths, sacred stories that we are hearing today that seem to
capture the imagination and inspire our collective hearts towards community action? And
what are the rhetorics used to put people in motion?
One set is based around the earth story as a new story of who we are. One powerful
image from this is the photo of the blue pearl that the astronauts brought back from space. It
was not only beautiful but our precious, fragile home, lacking the internal boundaries we
assumed. “The planet Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth. We do it for Her.”
But the one that we heard repeatedly as we traveled across the continent was the image of
forests, virgin old growth forests, or individual trees. Ginkgos in Ontario, beech trees in New
York City, palm trees in Sarasota, and of course the towering redwoods of the California and
Oregon coasts. The trees seem to offer a familiar, even intimate, understanding of what we
need and what we have been lacking: a rootedness, a dependence on the natural world of
sunlight and rainfall, a tendency to grow best in spacious communities of others, and
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
51
prodigious gifts that come as a result of these needs being met. Trees hold the soil, clean the
air, and provide food, firewood, shade and shelter for many species. And they are beautiful,
graceful, and generous (as well as tough, coevolutionary, chemical competitors to insects,
weeds, animals). The model is of a large, stable, slow-growing climax forest, not of the
weeds in a ecologically disturbed clearing, which react much more like some corporation’s
hot-market-opportunity offering rapid growth.
In the stories we heard about the sense of purpose and the choice to act, trees were often
the nexus, the centerpoint. And closely related to trees and forests, was the image of the
green man and the goddess: dynamic spirits enacting a defense of life itself. It was a will to
completion, to mature complexity, to altruistic emergence of something beautiful and strong.
4. A fundamental feature of the emerging Wisdom culture is related to “who is looking?”
Modernism is to the emerging culture, as callow adolescence is to mature adulthood.
a) Most adolescents do not understand the adult level of functioning when they look: not
mature adult love, not mature adult responsibility, and not mature adult experience of the
world. This is called Adequaetio; the lesser cannot encompass the greater. Neither
Materialism nor Fundamentalism can encompass mature spirituality. Nationalism cannot
encompass a planetary perspective, and the ideology of Modernism cannot encompass the
emergent worldview of a Wisdom Civilization.
b) The developmental task is different too. Where the adolescent's task and accomplishment
is to become autonomous and independent of parents, the adult's task is not to keep the
adolescent identity, but to grow into responsibility and capacity to act. That’s not only for
oneself, but for family, community and nation. Conventional adulthood is often neither
mature nor wise. If adults limit their responsibility to include only their own family, their
own home, their own immediate kin, then even to become an adult is well short of the
maturity and wisdom needed now. These can come in adulthood now, but at one time
only the elder could summon that up. (Perhaps it was because most people died before
50, or perhaps it is the maturation of humanity as a collective consciousness.)
What we need is the power and long vision of a mature and wise adult, or elder, who cares
not only for her own children, but for all children, those living now and those not yet born. Here
are two stories: William Kent creating the redwood preserve that became Muir Woods, “for
children who haven’t even been born yet,” and the old woman who planted a date tree that she
knew would not bear fruit until 50 years after she died. Both show a long distance vision and a
love not restricted to an immediate relationship, to illustrate some of the features of a wise
maturity.
(Be sure to paste those stories in here)
i
The Modern world has gone through transformational processes, transforming the agrarian and
empires world, just as it had transformed the pre-agrarian horticultural and hunting and gathering
societies before. If Modernity had its own incubation process, it was very dispersed through the various
Western societies, and reflected countless innovations that were nurtured by individuals and small
groups and then spread. Our culture does not have self-consciousness about what actually happened for
it to emerge, and whether it created itself, or ‘just growed’ like Topsy. Historians are silent on this.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007
52
Now here's a tough empirical question: Does a gestation analogy hold? Did anything create a
‘holding environment,’ or supportive structures, for modernity to appear, and was there any obvious
analog to a gestation or maturation process? History doesn't seem to have recorded it. Maybe it wasn't
there, or maybe the historians just have not recognized it for what it was. It wouldn’t be the first time
that academics had an incapacity to see something that was right under their noses, such as when art
historians could not recognize the fact that Leonardo da Vinci single-handedly invented mechanical
drawing for engineering purposes, not art, and so they incorrectly translated what he wrote in his folios.
(See the marvelous PBS documentary on Leonardo’s inventions.)
Similarly, twentieth century social science believed that all psychological, social and economic
life could be depicted by linear models, and bent their analyses out of shape to come up with data and
descriptions that fit their convenience and preconceptions. This is a false and misleading belief (they
fell into it because linear models are analytically tractable, rather than what's true). For example, all
living systems, dissipative structures and self-organizing systems are extremely nonlinear, and that
reality just happens to cover the bases of all social and psychological phenomena.
Experts may have a trained incapacity to think about ‘support structures’ for the development of
any civilization, because of modernist ideology. Thus, market economists want to deny that there is any
cultural/institutional matrix in which markets are imbedded, and want unending growth, and this
ideology was the cause of the Russian economic development fiasco after the collapse of communism.
It is important that institutional economists and economic historians warned that there was a paucity of
supportive institutions in Russia, and they were ignored Similarly, imperialists, businessmen and
generals want always to keep expanding their range of dominance without limits or containers on their
power. We now can point to a similar fiasco in Iraq as in Vietnam.
If we go looking, however, we may find the evidence of some kind of developmental supports
was there all along, and historians simply need different concepts and indicators to recognize it.
© Paul H. Ray, 2003, 2007