We so often create a list of what needs to be done to have a perfect world and then become discouraged because the list seems so long. The press grabs on to dramatized evidence of what's not working and thrashes it about like a pitbull. Our engineering based technological culture forever sees the world in terms of problems yet to be overcome. Over time, the process is numbing.
But what if the conditions for change NOW are not only way more promising than ever, but more promising at a level never before imagined? It could be that these promising conditions of our evolutionary capability to manifest a new society worldwide are way more significant than all the fuss we have created keeping up with the massive change that occurs all around us. Again there is more noise about the changing than the change itself.
Some believe we have actually begun a second renaissance and we're so awed by the opportunity that it is easier to focus on the size of the task that relish the work already accomplished. Most don't notice,the myriad tools we have constructed to move there even faster. The tools are mental, conceptual, technological, and spiritual. They all have new dimension because the globe is connected at an unprecendented level.
If you look at the situation as if we were natures largest helpers....would you notice that the infrastructure of roads and waterways is alot like the root structure of a great garden. Would you notice that the cars and trucks streaming in and out of our cities are just like the food that streams up the roots of giants trees. Would you suspect that the tall buildings themselves are giant plants and they are now beginning to show buds at the top.
Have you noticed the tops of buildings lately...especially at night? If you can imagine that the tall buildings are flower stalks, can you imagine that the electrical signals carrying music and news from the building tops are the same as fragrance that issues from plants coming into bloom. You realize, of course, that from another planet our cities look as if there simply the larger part of natures plan....they look like giant plants or stands of trees being fed by highways of big enzymes. Of course at night they create yet another magic pattern and would appear from space as the real evidence of life never mind the little ant like people who made them. Because of the recent collective connection of almost all of the planets most significant human and technical resources a new world intelligence is now available to us. If you ask are we using it...the answer is yes. If you ask why don't we know about it..the answer is that the press by and large doesn't have big enough lenses to notice.
Here is a short list the dimensions where we are functioning with our global brain:
FOOD, FASHION, AND FINERY
If you really want to know what people care about its wise to be reminded that the very first items to zoom about the planet were by most accounts purely cultural. It was true ten years ago that if a western town had an asian restaurant well, that was unusual. Now, if every entree' on the menu doesn't represent at least four countries, a restaurant just isn't considered "with it." This represents a lightning assemblage of data passing mostly between the city of people that are off the planet in airplanes at any moment. Coffee has become the drug of choice overnight, to say nothing of the cafe' cultures that have spawned with it. Some say the pace of change has provoked the talking and the talking has demanded the social graces like sipping and puffing. .
Style, color and real estate fashions also are a matter of planetary record. People aspire good living as a priority. This cultural intelligence network is at work as we speak...seeking...selecting and assembling new fare. That process is intelligent by any account. Prudent...well not always.
MUSIC, MOVIES, AND IDOLS
Hard on the trail of pure culture is pop-culture. A song by the right popular culture idol can zoom the planet in a matter of weeks. The right rock concert could be a matter of note to teenagers on every continent at any time. When Princess Diana died, the news was available to every planetary citizen the next day. The block-buster movies are known planet-wide within the season. Disneyland is a planetary resort. Sports figures, whether announced at the olympics or not, command the box office when recognition is a question. Interestingly enough, it's the physically adept intelligences that seem to be recognized most often...singer-dancers or athletes.
COMMERCE, MARKETS, AND TECHNOLOGY
Planetary goods stream about in great variety. People in Hawaii drink water bottled in France. A new camcorder from Japan released in the fall is on Christmas lists everywhere. Christmas itself is no longer just a nordic tradition. Stock markets fall in Korea and wall street shivers. The news claims this is bad but, the international interdependence must be seen as vital to world peace. We want our music and we want it clear, so a new invention in portable pocket sized sound with hours of replay time, is an almost seasonal rite of purchase.
GLOBAL PEACEKEEPING
Never has there been so much international teamwork in policing the unrest that pops up in distressed countries. Yes, some of the exported force is used for national interests, but more and more it's common or regional interest that is the motivation. Armies have retooled distinctly for peace-keeping duties. The American army has engaged in six overseas conflicts in the last decade. Four have been purely peace-keeping and peace-building efforts. This is a reflection of a global perspective on stability.
CYBERSPACE, CD'S AND INTERACTIVE GAMES
A powerful and still fuzzy new world is growing on the internet and its related communications cousins. Twenty-five million people world-wide are hooking in to an entirely new way to learn and meet others while doing so. Once, you've played an interactive video game or walked around in a 3D virtual community using an avatar body while speaking to others you choose, then you will realize that only testosterone will keep colleges alive in the future.
Cyberspace with all of its websites is already the largest and warmest library on the planet. Cruise the net...find out whatever you need and talk to interesting people along the way. There are one hundred thousand people that are part of a virtual community in Alpha world. They have actually constructed homes, centers and amusements that you can wander about in. The rules are the same as in real life ....walk and talk...don't run into things...access what is available. Borders are blurred; here we see people working together across the planet.
Our real capacity to evolve intelligently If we strategically bundled our latest capacities to reinvent the world the bundle might contain:
- Our increased degree of mobility and interconnectedness.
- Our new familiarity with the change process.
- A dramatically more peaceful environment.
- Fifty million people on-line.
- An emerging systems intelligence and universal spirituality.
- An emerging class of co-creative planetary citizens.
Mobility and interconnectedness It is easy to say that the industrial tool-makers have gotten us into the mess we're in to day. We could say that the industrial process and the transportation systems like the automobile have rearranged our planetary home in dysfunctional ways. We could lament the death of nature and the village and the hearth and all of that talk would have some validity.
But, the very same people that may have contributed to the modern urban glut have also allowed nearly every human very real contact with nearly every other human because of their ability to manufacture a family of communications tools that fills the biosphere with billions of signal streams everyday. We can send a thirty-three volume set of encyclopedia from one side of the United States to the other in .2 seconds. During the trip it passes through routers, amplifiers and switches. Its not a straight shot.
Yes you could say that the passenger aircraft that relentlessly spew out of terminals these days are polluting the atmosphere. The upside of that is that there is a phenomenon occurring whereby the frequent flyers are becoming a planetary citizenry that no longer considers themselves as purely national entities. Perhaps a quarter of a million people are physically off-the-planet in jet airliners at any moment in our world. They are meeting each other and assimilating the planetary culture at a fantastic rate. These are the leaders of the next wave. Their involved in the transnational construction of a planetary civilization. The garden is hard to see when the soil is still being tilled.
If a concept of major importance breaks, the worldwide news system, as marginal as we may believe it to be, can herald the event and within hours the planet has a new idea about itself and it's history. The brain connections for this entire world are in place. Granted, at this phase, action is triggered better if triggered by catastrophe. As a planet collectively we are still in survival mode. But, the leadership is functioning closer to self-actualization.
So, collectively we have been changed by the scientific and technical revolution in the last century. Yes, it has some troubling by-products, but on the whole it leaves us a planetary culture that is mobile and connected beyond the wildest imaginings of a century ago. Mobile and connected are essential elements for making change. These qualities describe the agility and speed of the new culture to act. The motivation to act would be greater if we could actually recognize the renaissance that we're in and take pleasure in the emerging frontier.
Our familiarity with the process of change Recently, especially in the corporate circles of the world there has been a trend of "reinvention". The phenomenon began in the eighties and probably peaked in the mid-nineties. It took popular forms like re-visioning the companies "purpose" in the workplace and less popular forms like restructuring the workforce itself. The phenomenon introduced by business spurred similar efforts in governments and non-governmental agencies. Fundamentally, what occurred was a scrimmage with the future. People were asking questions about the most sacred elements of their work and being willing to reinvent the new processes to reach a moving target...the consumer...with better products and services.
The commercial world and the corporate tribes that constitute it are considered by most experts to be the moving force that will now have the primary role in the redefinition of our new civilization. They are the cultural buildings blocks of a new mobile society that has its roots in commerce but it's manners in transnational connectivity.
The military has simulated the battlefield, the scientists have simulated travel, and the world of home games have simulated cities and made it possible for people to operate in virtual worlds of the future. There are over a hundred thousand people who have wandered around on their computer screens in 3D worlds created by little sentences of code. The entertainment business has trained us to "play" in imaginary worlds at amusement parks and visit them thousands of times in the movies. We even have little robot pets to care for. There is a very blurred viel between the simulation of reality and reality itself. Even reality itself gets a marginal nod from eastern religion.
We are practicing change everywhere....the move to a new civilization with more conscious outcomes will not be a traumatic shift for most of the planet. However, the number of avenues it is moving along will produce a changed world night after night. We will get used to the ride. Our children already have. So, the task is not awesome and we're accustomed to and active in the game now.
Quest: Engage in the quest to discover why else it is the perfect time to launch a new renaissance. A dramatically more peaceful environment With the advent of peace between the super-powers the major threats facing governments world-wide have nearly disappeared. It is no longer possible to strike terror into a governments defenses and cause them to redirect the entire industrial base with threats of monolithic proportion. Yes, there are threats but they fall into specialized categories and are best dealt with specialized forces of a limited size.
One exciting new possibility is that rather than demobilize the military forces of the planet, we can use their capabilities intact and merely direct their energies to the planetary commons. Much of what we fear is not working in the world can be described as the depleted condition of the biosphere, the oceans, and the soil. When you think of these areas they do not come under the direct jurisdiction of governments or the corporate world, They are the planetary commons.
It is a delightful coincidence that the armed forces have chosen to organize themselves in clear divisions of land, sea and air. The air forces can take responsibility for the biosphere. The ground forces can take responsibility for the land assets like the soil and fresh water reserves. And the navies of the world can begin monitoring and preserving our most unknown resource the oceans. The technology possessed by these armed forces is ninety percent organizational and only ten percent pure weaponry. Their tradition and organizational capabilities to handle change and a large volume of simultaneous chores is unparalleled. Their values of service would allow a smooth shift in responsibilities in most global services. You might be happy to know they have even spoken about this possibility and feel predisposed to the work.
So, not only can we stop being sidetracked by military expenditures that rob us of the resources to work on our planetary host...but we can actually redirect their efforts in an elegant way and get the work done without having to invent new bureaucracies to do it. One move captures the key territory.
Fifty million people on-line It has been known for centuries that a highly purposed though small group of people can change everything. Now we have them on-line. The distinctions exaggerated by national entities and traditions like religions are blurred beyond recognition. The tools on-line are collaborative. Partnerships and even marriage have occurred. The connectivity is ubiquitous and the cooperation is casual, unpretentious and unprecedented.
Just on the horizon are a flurry of think-tanks and database resources just waiting to assemble cooperative designs at a more global level. Since we have become accustomed to working cooperatively on-line at the global level, we can consider the transformation seriously underway.
An emerging systems intelligence We have only recently and partially rejected the linear scientific and industrial models in favor of whole systems thinking. Without this shift anything we might consider doing at an evolutionary level might just be more of the same. We now are vaccinated as a community of evolutionary designers with the notions that all production must be rationalized with the by-products it generates. We know that restoration is more solvent than new construction. We look at waste as the catalyst for yet another use. We now see the loops of consequence and understand our limits to growth for growths sake.
Evidence is available from early more systematized approaches that verifies the magic that is already afoot with the new social inventions generated by holistic modeling. Yes; we have the tool kit and the language to proceed with a new level of social invention.
The new class of co-creative citizens We know there is a huge class of planetary citizens already in the mix. Of that group a large portion are what are called "cultural creatives" by polsters. There are 40 million of them.
So, what can you imagine is presently underway when you combine these archetypes with a planetary communications web, no fear of change, the tools of reinvention on hand and a garden of global proportions to plant in? Ladies and Gentlemen...welcome to the second renaissance !
...and may I hasten to add ...those who are already deeply inside the uprising are living in a great deal of joy ! That's the clincher.
