Dear Doug, I've not followed many recent posts, but reading your post I wanted to chime in.
My chime is dissonant, however. I'm quite taken by the grandeur of your evolutionary vision -- it's really extraordinary, especially the last several paragraphs. Some of the opening assumptions, however, I want to question. Put simply, I don't see many of my friends in a vision of social evolution from tribes to states to international coalitions. I'm afraid this vision can lead to the notion that five thousand contemporary cultures have simply been left behind by the evolutionary sweep of things. In the past, and currently, this perspective has become justification to horrific genocides because if our scientists call it evolution, it's inevitable, just the way things are, manifest destiny. In a similar way, I am greatly concerned by the notion that the multinational corporation is a kind of evolutionary advance. Certainly it's a form of organization that wields immense capacity to transform minerals into technologies and so forth. But the danger of calling it evolution is, again, to deem it scientifically inevitable. Go along or get out of the way. A different perspective on evolution might be like this: We are all evolving together, the humans and the horses and the sea turtles and the redwoods and the bacteria. (Bateson: "the unit of evolution is organism plus environment.") We optimize our capacity for continued life on this planet when we preserve and enhance the biodiversity and cultural diversity which life and humans can draw upon for new solutions to new evolutionary issues. In the human cultural realm, this work requires choices and a wide openness to different voices, unimpeded by power dynamics. Clearly, we are not doing so well. When organisms or social forms arise which threaten such diversity, such as white consciousness or multinational corporations, I feel called to listen to diverse traditions and voices to counter these forms. In the past few decades the voices from those 5000 cultures are breaking through the soundproof barriers constructed around the worldview of social Darwinism and evolutionary inevitability (and cheap oil.) Put another way, until modern societies actually become ecologically sustainable, can we assume we are not evolutionary dead ends? And what can we learn from (how do we listen to) the sustainable cultures in order to dissolve our current trajectory? Doug, I totally agree that the emergence of a complex planetary conversation is a good thing! I simply suggest that a real planetary conversation will ask white people and modern/postmodern institutions to listen and confront the shadows of our worldviews. For me, a real worldwide Open Space will include many more voices (and realms) -- many of whom do not have email -- and I love that Open Space technology is beautifully suited to the task! It's a gorgeous irony that our friend hho gathered a mix of african, hebrew, tibetan, angeles-arrien, stolichnaya, etc and accidentally concocted this modernity-dissolving brew. I'll add a snip by one of my mentors, Jurgen Kremer. You can find his writing at http://www.sonic.net/~riva/ with respect, -- Jeff "History is not a unitary phenomenon, but a weaving of a multiplicity of stories. Concurrent to the historical lines identified in eurocentered academe we find a multiplicity of other histories (oftentimes de-valued as stories or folklore or legends, mere oral history) that enriches and/or questions the dominant story... Denials of genocide, colonial occupations, slavery and other atrocities lead to one-sided supremacist stories. Witnessing the history, the stories of place, whether in the form (here) of Native American or African American (hi)stories, facilitates initiation into a form of collective consciousness that supersedes facile and individualistic interpretations of the term. Self-actualization and altered states now not only include the integration of shamanic or meditative realms, but also the integration of suppressed human storylines." -----Original Message----- From: "Douglas D. Germann, Sr." <[email protected]> Sent: Jul 22, 2004 7:53 PM To: [email protected] Subject: conscious of evolution as it evolves. ??? Koos-- Thanks for jumping in! For me, seeing ahead is becoming clearer. It is also clearer to me what the quality of the direction of evolution is. Of course, predicting the precise results of the future is always impossible, susceptible as it is to initial conditions. But if one looks at the broad outlines, the direction of the tracks seems clear, so it is relatively safe to say in which direction the train will travel. For instance, what I understand of science tells me that things have progressed from atoms to molecules to cells to plants to fishes to amphibians to reptiles to mammals to humans--always on a track of getting more complex, more interdependent. Consciousness--thought--appeared sometime in the human line. The human has developed from families to tribes to nations to united nations and axis and allies and coalitions. Again on the track of becoming more intertwined, more complex. In the last couple hundred years, we have gone from farms to factories to unions to corporations to multinational corporations. Similar track, same direction. The world we used to say is getting smaller. It is at least getting more tightly woven. We in the United States are now counting you in Europe among our friends. We extend our presence actively through e-mail and phones and websites and passively through television and radio and satellite positioning to all around the globe (and beyond it into space) simultaneously--in a network of networks that boggles our minds and would have left forbears as recent as our parents shaking their heads. In short, we are heading toward more and more interplay with one another. This is the direction of the tracks of evolution, and we can see this much, if we look. So where is evolution headed? Toward more complexity, more interplay. We are drawn to each other. The quality of evolution? Since we are drawn to one another, then we serve evolution, the future, life, the good, the right, the beautiful, by doing what enhances life. We speak out against violence and killing. We do what we can to bring about connection and conversation--which says to me that OS practitioners are in the center of the mix, the very best place to be, in order to bring about evolution in a conscious way. Part of the problem of getting conscious about it is, as you point out, Koos, that we are often pretty foggy about what we mean by "evolution." We think, but not too consciously at that, that evolution means that we will end up with a new species of animal popping out onto the horizon. We miss the fact that evolution took a turn when it invented thinking: our evolution for the last thousand or two thousand years has been largely outside the realm of the physical: we have developed nations and societies and cultures and civilizations; we have developed associations and NGOs and unions and movements; we have developed science and laboratories of hundreds of scientists, and libraries and books so that we can store our learning and do our thinking outside our own bodies and communicate with our descendants; we have developed ways to come together. So again, our evolution is apt to be in this area of complex intercourse. This is the evolution I see, and it is more precise to me than the general thought that there will be a new animal to come along who will be higher on the food chain who will want to eat us. So the way to get conscious about evolution, for me at this juncture in my thinking, is to invite more and more conversation. We need not only to be working on getting people conversing, but conversing well. In its essence, this means center to center, cor ad cor. So it is not about an academic discussion of the meaning of terms, to me. It is about getting busy and doing something good for one another. And it is more than that, but that is the start. Where it ends up, I do not know, but the direction it is headed is there for all to see who will look. It says to me that humanity is the stem and latest shoot on life, which is a grand thing, indeed. The flower is in the bud.... :-Doug. Seeking people making change. * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
