THE FUTURE
ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE (2007)
“I think
everything is just going to blow up,” a friend remarked
over lunch recently, as we discussed the quickening pace of
cultural change. He meant ‘blow up’ as shorthand for
general confusion, widespread malaise, ethnic tensions,
resource wars, explosions and Murphy’s Law gone mad.
My friend isn’t optimistic about the world’s prospects.
Like a lot of people, he even has doubts about his own
lifestyle. During lunch, he spoke of his habit of consuming
copious amounts of Hydro power with his high-end computer
and home entertainment equipment. “I’m as bad as anybody
else,” he said, shaking his head.
We joked about our complicity in a system we both believe
to be unsustainable, and our doubts about reforming the
system from within. Our token, eco-conscious efforts count
for something (blue-boxing, composting, half-assed
vegetarianism, etc.), but we know it’s not enough.
Obviously, I’m not the only one having this kind of
discussion with friends. For those of us who think about
this sort of thing, we don’t usually talk about it all that
freely or with great ease. This isn’t a common topic for
the family dinner or the company picnic. But once in a
while, we’ll open up and express a secret conviction: The
jig is up; time’s running out and we’re all heading off the
cliff in a Stretch Hummer. Or more succinctly, we’re
screwed.
Another friend, a retired prof, has put together a
well-reasoned, trenchant pamphlet on how BC can survive the
collapse of economic globalism. Others are even less
optimistic; one of my wife’s relatives has expressed the
belief that the human species won’t be around in a few more
generations. She’s not alone; according to polls, 72
percent of British Columbians fear the world will end in
two to three generations unless concerted action is taken
on global warming.
Simply put, more and more people are losing faith in the
system – the system being the consumer economy and the kind
of foreign policy necessary to maintain our living
standard. They’re convinced things have gone so far, for so
long, and that the collective behaviour is so entrenched,
that there is no way out other than to wait for the system
to collapse and then pick up the pieces to try to build
something more sane and sustainable.
A big factor in these glum tidings is the collective sense
that the times are moving faster and getting stranger as
they do. Most of us have the feeling that events are
speeding up out of control.
In the 1970s, the French sociologist Georges Anderla tried
to measure the rate at which information changed. Using the
binary notation to convert all human symbol systems into
the language computers use, he calculated the rate at which
the bits the units of information had doubled since the
time of Christ.
The doubling, he determined, has occurred in ever-smaller
time increments over the past 2,000 years. The first
doubling lasted from 0 AD to 1500 AD. It then took from
1500 to 1750 for information to double once again. By the
late twentieth century, it took only from 1967 to 1973 for
information to double.
By the late eighties, information theorists were claiming
that information was doubling every 18 months. Bear in mind
that this binary calculation doesn’t necessarily mean
knowledge per se; it includes all cultural information,
from academic journals to ham radio broadcasts to gross-out
film comedies.
By the late nineties, the idea of cultural acceleration had
moved from the obscure argot of futurologists to the
millennial musings of US talk radio host Art Bell, who
pegged it “The Quickening.” Bell’s notion was pretty much
undefined, beyond the sense of things picking up pace. But
he struck a definite chord in listeners, who called in to
offer news oddities and their paranormal anecdotes as
evidence that things were going at a breakneck pace to who
knows where, and getting more bizarre as they went. Bell’s
all-purpose catchphrase became a best-selling book and a
middlebrow seine net for anything new and unusual.
The Quickening: Today’s Trends, Tomorrow’s
World offers
the half-enthralling, half-appalling vision of Homo sap
hurling out of control toward some kind of cosmic
comeuppance. According to one frequently cited claim, the
Sunday New York Times contains more information than a
medieval peasant would have encountered throughout his
entire life. Perhaps this is one reason why we’ve become
the first people in history to know so little about so
much. With all this freely available knowledge, far beyond
the capacity of any individual to absorb the barest
fraction of it, why try to remember any information subject
to sudden, radical change? From the latest scientific
theories to the borders of troubled lands, it’s all up for
grabs. The average American high school student can no more
place Iraq on a map than you or I could name the varieties
of quarks in an atomic nucleus. (Yet most of us can name
all the Simpsons.)
A more rigorous assessment of cultural change is seen in
the recent work of Canadian sociologist Thomas Homer-Dixon.
In his 2006 book The
Upside of Down, he cites
the usual suspects for problematic change: global warming,
energy scarcity, population imbalances and the widening gap
between the rich and the poor. What concerns Dixon is that
these trends are not unconnected, and that together they
create negative feedback loops, in which each one amplifies
the effects of the others. He calls this deadly phenomenon
“panarchy.”
When it comes to our need for energy, Dixon writes, “Our
rich western societies aren’t that different from poor
developing societies, or for that matter, ancient Rome. All
of our societies require enormous amounts of high-quality
energy just to sustain, let alone raise, their complexity
and order.”
Civilization can only maintain its current state through a
cheap, abundant supply of oil. No renewable alternative
sources come close in energy output (the closest is solar
power). And for all the complaints about rising fuel costs
in North America, gasoline is still cheaper here by volume
than bottled water. Yet if the “peak oil” experts like
Richard Heinberg, Matt Simmons and others are correct –
that we are about to hit the halfway point in global oil
reserves – increased scarcity will become an even greater
factor in international and domestic tensions. (It’s now
blindingly obvious that the war in Iraq was about securing
Mideast oil and protecting the petrodollar. In fact, as
noted in a March 24, 2003 White House press release, the
original White House tagline for the 2003 invasion was
“Operation Iraqi Liberation” (OIL). But Karl Rove’s cynical
jokesters were being a little too obvious and the name was
quickly changed to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”)
According to Homer-Dixon, we First Worlders live so far out
of equilibrium with the carrying capacity of the
environment that the collapse of our civilization is a very
real possibility. Historian Jared Diamond, author of
Guns,
Germs, and Steel, considers
this such a probable scenario – especially given the
historical record of vanished civilizations – that he
titled his recent book just that: Collapse.
Similarly,
urban theorist Jane Jacob’s last book bore the uplifting
title Dark Age Ahead.
I once overheard someone at a party offer a capsule account
for our persistent historical habit of war: “The whole male
gig is build and destroy, build and destroy, build and
destroy. And women always get to clean up the mess.” But
does this picture of historical inevitability, from
Agamemnon to Halliburton, mean we’re fated to play out the
same dreary scenario of little boys smashing each other’s
sand castles, with the waves sweeping away their tiny flags
and pennants?
Some believe our willingness to buy into dystopic
projections is largely a function of modern communication
systems. In this view, things are neither better nor worse
than before; it’s just the widespread availability of
fast-reporting media that makes it seem so. Scary stories
once told around campfires have been processed and packaged
into high-end, prime-time frights of future catastrophe.
(Y2K, anyone?)
As they say in the news business, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Conflict sells, while the countless stories of people
around the world cooperating and conspiring for a better
future get short shrift and less coverage. Consider the
phenomenon of microcredits, which have transformed people’s
lives in the Third World by allowing them access to small
loans. Or web sites like Kiva.org, which enables First
World residents to send microloans directly to Third World
members. These may be small as individual efforts, but, in
terms of global change, the collective effects of such
connected, altruistic initiatives may be seismic. The open
source movement – in which anonymous individuals contribute
to the building of freely available software and databases
– demonstrates that the impulse to contribute for a greater
good, rather than compete for self-advancement, has been
woefully underrated by consumer culture.
With no shortage of bad news, we all want to hear news of
workable solutions, and new ways of thinking. We want to
believe that if we’re going to be around for a global
transformation, it’ll be one we can live with. This brings
us to the “spiritual” take on cultural change.
Decades ago, the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin reworked the Christian apocalypse with his idea of
an “Omega point,” a time at which the planetary mind, the
“Noosphere,” awakens from the sum of interconnected human
thought. In retrospect, the Noosphere sounds a lot like the
Internet. And there does indeed seem to be a planetary
awakening of sorts occurring, courtesy bloggers and
webmasters. The Internet may be a mixed bag, but on the
plus side there’s a wider spectrum of debate in these
ungoverned fairgrounds than is found under the circus big
tops of the mainstream media. With the latter dominated by
flacks and self-censoring careerists, the cultural
conversation has largely migrated to the Internet. The
blogs are leaving the newspaper editorial pages behind, and
it may not be too much longer before the respectable
print-based pundits find themselves at the children’s
table.
Hunter S. Thompson’s aphorism still stands: “When things
get weird, the weird go pro.” One of the weirder pros on
the cultural change circuit was the late Terrence McKenna,
a carnival barker for a lower-case apocalypse, who riffed
off the ideas of de Chardin. To this author of fringe
ideas, the sense that things are going faster (and getting
stranger) foreshadows a near-term transformation of the
human species. McKenna believed that increasing
synchronicity, among other distortions of the 9 to 5
reality, is the shadow, projected backwards across the
historical landscape of what he called a “hyperdimensional
object” at the end of history: the unitary end goal of
human spiritual/material evolution. He believed that the
human imagination will ultimately take us there – whatever
“there” means in this context.
Evolution may be far stranger than we think, McKenna
believed. The Internet, interfacing of humans and machines,
pharmacology, nanotechnology and the merging of databases
are all part of this “hyperdimensional object” pulling us
forward in time. But we will get the future we deserve,
depending on our intent. “All of this is coalescing toward
the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of
self-imaging of our culture... And the people who are on
the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying
full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a
100%-believing consumer, inside some kind of a
beige-furnished fascism that won’t even raise a ripple.”
Using the notion of the “timewave,” his eccentric measure
of cultural change, McKenna prophesied that information
acceleration will peak in the year 2012. This apparently
came independently of the work of writer Jose Arguelles,
and others, who believe humanity and the world will undergo
a transformation when the fifth Maya Great Age completes
its cycle on December 21, 2012.
In Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012:
The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the New
York author has a guardedly optimistic take on 2012 and the
Mayan calendar. Yet toward the end of this psychedelic
memoir, Pinchbeck’s shamanic journeying leads him to
believe that he himself is the reincarnation of the Aztec
god Quetzalcoatl – or at the very least, his mouthpiece.
Needless to say, skeptics weren’t persuaded by this bit of
plant-based knowledge.
The 2012 prophecies offer a multicultural twist on a
persistent Judeo-Christian theme: the End Times. Many
fundamentalist Christians are quite cheered that things are
getting worse rather than better. If the situation
continues to decline in the Mideast and even at home, for
the true believers this is simply Biblical prophecy playing
out to its cinematic finale. There is no effective way to
respond to the fundamentalists’ claims, except perhaps cite
these words from an Iraq war protest poster: “The Rapture
is Not an Acceptable Exit Strategy.”
Whether it’s the Revelations of the Old Testament or the
revelations of Daniel Pinchbeck, we have every right to be
suspicious of prophecy, given its track record (The Marxist
withering of the state, the Nazi Thousand Year Reich,
etc.). The notion of future salvation, including the
magical thinking that informs The Secret, seems reminiscent
of the post World War II “cargo cults” of New Guinea and
Melanais. At the war’s end, the allies’ cargo stopped
coming, so natives made mock airstrips, airports and
offices and even constructed “radios” made of straw and
cocoanuts, to draw “GI Joe” back. We may find these
primitive ideas amusing, but how different are they from
Judeo-Christian/New Age efforts to solicit supernatural
forces through prayer, sacrifice and credit card orders?
I’m not saying there are no such things as “supernatural”
forces; it’s just that clever monkeys probably shouldn’t
rely on angels, extraterrestrials or the “universe as a
store catalogue” to save their hides. The economy’s
energetic inputs flow from the finite planet and the
biosphere’s material abundance is not an infinitely
renewable resource. We’re embedded in the material world
and we can’t avoid the spiritual test of difficult choices,
just because we find it unpleasant.
Whatever the merit of his 2012 musings, Terrence McKenna
was always a tough thinker. “The apocalypse is not
something which is coming,” he insisted. “The apocalypse
has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only
because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and
social insulation that we still have the luxury of
anticipating the apocalypse. If you go to Bosnia or Somalia
or Peru or much of the Third World then it appears that the
apocalypse has already arrived.”
We live in one of the areas of greatest privilege on the
planet, and however messed up things look around us and
beyond, we can’t discount the collective weight of our
efforts, especially when virtually every healthy
First-Worlder still has more clout than a pedicab driver in
Bangladesh and a greater voice than a seamstress in the
Maldives.
If there’s anything to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s
assertion, “We are not human beings having a spiritual
experience. We are spiritual beings having a human
experience,” it seems to me that our temp work on Earth is
likely less about us manifesting miracles than mastering
mundane tasks, like remaining human in a world that seems
increasing hostile to human values.
For instance, I’m watching things speed up in my own city,
Vancouver, as legislators tighten the noose around
society’s most defenceless members. In the leadup to 2010’s
Olympic orgasm for developers, the city council has passed
laws to keep street people from sitting on park benches or
reclining in parks. Behind this crazy-making effort to
create a “civil city” is a conception of humans as rubbish.
It’s both a metaphor and a screaming red flag for the world
we are creating – or rather, destroying. In many urban
centres across North America, this kind of sociopathic
civic-mindedness has become the new normal.
As capitalism enters its cancer stage, we are watching the
scars and sores emerge on the body politic. That these
eruptions are living, breathing people is pretty much what
you would expect as things speed up and resources wind down
and the shadow of fascism creeps across the land.
“Business as usual is no longer an option,” wrote Terrance
McKenna. “There is no middle way. There is no Ozzie and
Harriet third millennium scenario.” He believed the choice
was between an enlightened world of limited, earth-friendly
consumption, with technology as ally rather than enemy, and
“… a hideous, nightmarish world, a Soylent Green kind of
world…where people of privilege defend that privilege with
tremendous establishments of armament and propaganda and
the rest of the world slips into poverty, starvation,
desperation and death. “This is the kind of world that
rationalists fear, and it’s also the only kind of world
they can imagine because they are bankrupt of inspiration
and ideas.”
The response of the “rationalists,” wrote McKenna, are
media which are “narcoleptic and deadening,” and
doctor-prescribed psychotropic drugs which are “not
transcendental and inspiring.” The rationalists’ largely
unconscious game, he believed, is to keep the population
anaesthetized as the collapse proceeds around us. But the
author didn’t believe a dystopia was set in stone. He
believed our species is approaching a fork in the road,
where we will choose either the angelic or demonic path. We
may quibble on the date – 2012 or whenever – but McKenna’s
brand of apocalypse more believable by the day.
Perhaps with our limited capacity to see the big picture,
we only pick up on the signs of cross-cultural sickness,
without recognizing them as part of a healing process. But
recognizing there is a sickness to begin with is the first
step. Denial and repression aren’t healthy options. This is
where the artists, musicians and creators come in, to do
their age-old, canary in the coal mine shtick.
I’ve heard from so many people who are disgusted by the
ascendancy of bullshit and hypocrisy over decency and
truth. And even those who avoid the newspaper and evening
news are feeling a free-floating anxiety about the world’s
state. They may disguise it with cynical humour or ironic
distance, but at its source, it’s about grief. I feel it
myself. But there’s an odd thing about grief as an
emotional state. It’s only a degree of separation, a
hair-breadth away, from joy.
Knowledge, in some esoteric traditions, is considered a
false crown. I suspect that it’s not cleverness, but
compassion, that will test our fitness as a species. I have
no academic citations handy for this, no journalistic
references. The closest I can come is an anecdote from
Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, about one of the twentieth
century’s great minds, Aldous Huxley.
As the author of Brave
New World lay
dying, someone asked what he had learned from a lifetime of
studying spiritual practices and traditions, as well as his
own experiences. His response: “It’s embarrassing to tell
you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning
to be kinder.”
Geoff Olson
