Sapiens Rising: Beyond the Babel Factor
A Manifesto for
the Children of the 21st Century
Neil Freer
This era of global transition
will result in the redesign of the fundamentals of human activity.
People and organizations that look for new ways to deal with unprecedented
events will be better prepared to survive and prosper. To be part of
that group, you must be willing to unleash yourself from the past and
be willing to take risks. You must objectively search for novel tools
and perspectives.
John Petersen
Part 1
The Status
Quo: Totem and Taboos and You .... and I
Our planet, this agonizingly beautiful little planet, is on
hold. Seeking relief and release, in a perverse ecology we recycle
outmoded, primitive paradigms, shuffling our feathers-and-molasses confusion
between hands. In a time when we are required to deal with the politics
of non-overlapping alien realities, we are not able to resolve the separations
caused by our overlapping intra-species realities. It has rendered us
theologically inane, philosophically naive, scientifically cramped, socially
isolated, ecologically damaged, politically challenged and intellectually
bewildered.
It is clearly evident, after thousands of years of trial and
disastrous errors, that the relief and release from our racially adolescent
immaturity we seek as individuals and as a planetary species will not
come from yet another econopolitical experiment, yet another U.N. negotiated
conflict resolution, religious ecumenical conference, new age vision,
academic philosophy, imposition of theocracy, new constitutional political
format, much less some new twist on the MAD scenario, or war to end all
wars.
The purpose of this paper is to point out an overarching new
paradigm that redefines and, thereby, resolves and supercedes the most
fundamental cause of the divisions and conflicts between us and illuminates
the now and future trajectory of the new planetary human.
A very fundamental, critical question, therefore: Is it even
possible to arrive at an overarching new planetary paradigm so comprehensive
and robust that it corrects, subsumes, completes and outmodes all previous
partial paradigms, explains all our previous explanations, with the
scope and power to unify and pacify the planet? Unequivocally,
yes. We are not incapable of getting off “maybe”. We are blocked only
by primitive, antique legacies and the way to expunge them from the
fabric of our cultures is now available to us.
How adolescent a species are we?
We are accustomed to analyze, evaluate and react to significant
positive or negative events in the public and private sectors in terms
of political, military, economic, scientific, psychological, sociological,
or religious factors and ramifications. We do this in the context
of a primitive economic, competitive mammalian politic based on territory
and the defense of limited survival resources when national boundaries
have been rendered meaningless and free energy sources are already
available. The least evolved among us, in a perversion of the word
“conservative”, preserve their wealth, built on limited energy supply,
by deliberately suppressing developments that would make it limitless.
As most current example, if confined to this context of mammalian politics,
we surely will see, the “end of the west” --- the “wild”, Paleolithic,
west at least --- and the rise of the European Union in its turn in the
dreary cycles of competitive mammalian economics. Then the “rise” of China,
perhaps, etc., etc..
Politically, we have created governments peopled largely by
the cynically devolved, many sincere, perhaps, but myopic, in a time
when sincerity alone is tragically inadequate. We are still working
through systems of representation by strangers when direct, instantaneous
input from the entire population is quite possible. Representation, due
to antiquated polling and analytical methods, therefore produces mediocre
politicians from the middle of the demographic bell curve where the
most votes lie. Domestically we are a dead poet's society paralyzed
and waiting perennially for the futant we have probably already terminated
at the stake, in the courtroom, the boardroom, the lab, the dean's office,
the classroom for violating a taboo....
Ideologically, philosophically, the four criterion bases which
we generally use to determine the truth or falsity, beneficence or harmfulness,
morality or immorality of information, theology, philosophy, science
and “new age” values, rattle around in a criteria vacuum with little
overlap and major conflicts because each tends to define a human being
and the meaning of human existence in a quite different way. Among
some humans, there is a slinking cynicism, an often unspoken, viral attitude
in human society that holds the view that it is impossible to get out of
the criteria vacuum, to initialize a common ground; impossible to get past
the communicatory barriers of turf and custom, belief and taboo. When talking
about the human we are largely ineffectual because we are Babel-factored,
literally talking at each other about a different entity.
Technologically, we are eager and close to being able to create
artificial intelligence and consciousness, when we cannot agree on
the nature of our own consciousness.
“A people
without history is not redeemed from time”
T. S. Eliot
How primitively adolescent
are we? Most fundamentally and amazingly, we do not have a consensual,
planetary, generic definition of what a human being is. We disagree
about how we really came into existence, and what the nature of our developmental
process is. We disagree as to the facts and interpretation and understanding
of our species’ history. We have treated the sociobiological event
of our beginning as a species as if we could never be sure if it ever
really occurred. We have not resolved nor integrated our genesis and
our history as a species and, therefore, are at a loss to understood
our real nature and future trajectory. That we do not see this as a profound
puzzle is further proof of our species primitive naiveté.
These problems translate to the problems that are related
to our children and their education. Currently, we matriculate our
young, these amazing, parallel- processing, relativistic, quantum jumping,
multi-dimensional consciousnesses, semi-illiterate and naive for fear
of them questioning our shambling senilities. In a time when we need
to stretch our historical sense to allow for the visitation of our planet
by alien species from before our origins, we teach them drum and trumpet
mammalian history fleshed out with desiccated, parochial, political platitudes.
We teach our own children, privately, generally the same platitudes and
clichés we were taught and brand them with the same religious,
scientific, and intellectual taboos we were tattooed with as children and
expect that they will somehow be ready to do better than we and perhaps
even step into stellar society. Whether we deny it our not, our children
show all the signs of being ready; they are underwhelmed and overqualified.
We feel it. Nevertheless, we do not teach our minors philosophy although
they are capable of calculus. We do not allow a teacher in the public school
system to teach our children anything important about anything important
because we do not agree about what to teach them, because we do not agree
about who and what we are. We do not educate our children in the management
and refinement and evolution of their personal spectrums of consciousness
because we do not agree on what that spectrum includes. And the children
are literally our future, we in the future.
The current status quo is revealed, therefore, at its most
fundamental strata, to be, simply a continuation of the primitive theo-political
conflicts that we have known for the past three thousand years. The
major obstacles that are most fundamentally influencing and hindering
our planetary understanding and progress are cultural legacies, cultural
lock-ins that are with us as the deepest dyes in the tapestries of our
cultures, locked in legacies that influence our thinking, our science,
our logic, and our concepts of ourselves. We are too close to them,
or think that they do not influence us, or that they have been dealt
with in the scientific or academic world long ago, or that we can just
ignore them. We deal, furthermore, with all these problems in a Paleolithic,
turfish manner from the isolated towers of Cartesian-Newtonian oligarchies.
It has been said that the world’s most complex mechanism comes
without an owner’s manual. We have many different and conflicting definitions
of what a human is and a number of conflicting “owner’s manuals” by
which a human is supposed to operate. The word “owner” is the key:
there are two major “owner’s manuals” in the form of Bible and Koran,
two in the form of The Book of Changes (The I Ching) and the Book of the
Tao. The I Ching and the Book of the Tao are instruction manuals in
which the “owner” is understood as the human consulting them. In the case
of the Bible and the Koran the “owners” are not the humans but the deities
associated with the manuals. This relationship of “owner” to subject, deity
to servant or slave, is understood by the vast majority as “religion”.
We hardly question this concept. Those who do question it have often been
killed by those who do not. Those of one slave-code religion have often
killed those of another slave-code religion over whose owner is the only
real Owner or which code is the correct one. Ultimately, these slave-code
definitions determine our cultures and their legacies and traditions and
are the most basic cause of the separations, divisions, conflicts and wars
between humans.
A Self-Indictment
Part 1, obviously,
constitutes a very broad, serious and daunting self-indictment.
I posit a caveat: When I name names and institutions, critically or
otherwise, I intend them as part of us, as a self-indictment: it is simply
we doing these things to ourselves. Let us be easy on ourselves, however,
since we are the only game like us on the planet, the only example we can
work with, the inadequate conceptual boxes we inhabit are of our making
but also ours out of which to break. If these negatives were all there
were, then the fears of those in future shock would be vindicated. If
I had no suggestions, solutions, answers or resolutions to offer I would
not have written this paper. So the second half of this paper respectfully
offers an overview and paradigm that can take us, in the perspective of
a deepened knowledge of our species and ourselves, to a new level of racial
maturity and a degree of freedom previously unavailable. The new synthesis
subsumes partial glimpses of a new politic, humanistic new world order,
enlightened eco-economics, re-hashed Eastern or Western mysticism, a third
culture, spiritualized psychology, all knowledge united in a grand consilience,
or cerebral turning points. We now have the keys to integrate our past with
our present and future in the concept of generic humanity, the critical factor
for achieving planetary unity.
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