World Trends Research

Flat World? Globalization? It's Far More than That!

2008-12-03T23:00:02Z

Everyone’s talking about “Globalization.” It’s a “flat world,” we’re told, a level playing field. “Outsourcing” of jobs is the big worry. Why pay an American $150 an hour for work that can be done in India for $25 an hour? So we end up phoning customer service about a computer problem, and the techies we’re talking with are in the Philippines or India.

What’s happening, and what does it mean?

What’s happening is that for the first time in human history, the world is forging an awareness of our existence as a single entity. Nations are incorporating the planetary dimensions of life into the fabric of our economics, politics, culture and international relations. Due to our electronic global information system, peoples of totally different psychological and cultural expressions—whether Silicon Valley computer programmer, Bolivian tin miner or Russian worker on the Siberian oil rigs—are being forced into a single, globalized technological context. Globalization is only the shorthand for this.

Globalization is generally thought of as the worldwide integration of economic, financial and political factors. When we think globalization, we think of the IMF, the World Bank or the United Nations. For the first time in history, nations can no longer develop economically and technically on their own. A nation has to be part of the global development system if it wants to prosper.

Part of globalization is the increasing adoption of some form of free market economic system, as well as a democratic political system, as these are the systems that have proven to work best in enabling easy transfer of goods, money and jobs around the world. But these systems cannot be put on like a new suit of clothes. To work well, an economic or political system must be rooted in the culture and psychology of the nation that uses them. And that takes time.

At its deepest level, globalization is the gradual process of the world shrinking as people of different nations, cultures and religions come to know more about each other. Part of this process is that many Western ideas and modes of living are gradually seeping into the fabric of the world.

At the same time, everyone on earth has to adjust to Western information technology, for no nation can globalize without becoming part of the electronic global information system. As this happens, existing cultures, traditions, institutions and historic relationships are threatened, and in some cases, even disappearing. In essence, globalization is about identity. It goes to the very psychological foundations of a people.   Globalization is the expansion of a people’s worldview. It is the process of coming to realize that wherever we come from, we are now one people with a common destiny.

If pursued wisely and cooperatively, globalization represents the world’s best chance to enrich the lives of the greatest number of people. One need only look at India to see a prime example of how globalization can benefit a nation.

How long has globalization been going on?

Globalization—in terms of elemental merging of economies—started in the 15th century when the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch began developing settlements in Asia, South America and Africa. It wasn’t called globalization then. It was first called exploration, and then colonialization. That was when the natural resources from other parts of the world began to be important to the economies of Europe. Before that, there was such a small degree of trade between Europe and other parts of the world that it was not a major part of Europe’s economy. But after the 16th century, other parts of the world became vital to economic development in Europe. At the same time, European ideas— especially civil administration, science and Christianity—began to penetrate Asia, Africa and South America.

Thus the different parts of the world that had been relatively ignorant of each other began a process of communication and integration that would increase over the next five centuries. The world began to shrink, and peoples of different cultures began to know more about each other.

This process proceeded relatively slowly until the 18th and 19th centuries when new technologies were developed. It was just after the French Revolution that the first telegraph message was sent. Thus the birth of the first electronic information technology. The first practical steam locomotive was invented in 1814, which meant that a train could carry people and goods across a continent faster than the speed of a horse (35 mph) for the first time in history. The first steamship crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1818, vastly reducing the time from London to New York.

As new technologies came along, economies became increasingly integrated. In 1848 Karl Marx observed, “modern industry has established the world market, which has given immense development to commerce, to navigation and to communication by land.”

An accelerated pace

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the pace of globalization was speeding up. The first transatlantic radio transmission was sent in 1901; the first TV transmission in 1925; the first commercial airline (KLM) in 1929. So the centuries-old communication and information systems were being totally transformed.

And we know the story of the explosion of technology during the second half of the 20th century. Three technologies are worth particular mention.

First, television. The explosion of global TV in the 1950s gave the world a new way of thinking about life. In 1948, 172,000 American homes had TV. Four years later, that had jumped to 15.3 million homes. TV drew everyone into the same global living room. We began seeing the same events together. In 1969, the whole world watched as the first humans set foot on the Moon. TV changed the character of politics. Image became more important than substance. “Spin” became king.

With the arrival of television, parents began to lose control of the information environment within which their children grew up, a loss that was finalized with the arrival of the Internet. Loss of that control is a major factor contributing to what Neil Postman calls “the end of childhood” as a distinct category of growth to adulthood. Finally, TV advertising began developing a worldwide consumer appetite. Gradually, TV became a de facto global branch of the advertising industry.

Second, the space program—more particularly, the arrival of humans on the moon. The TV picture we saw of Earth from the Moon is one of the most significant events in history. It is as the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle predicted in the 1940s: “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea, as powerful as any in history, will be let loose.” All of a sudden, what the poets and philosophers had talked about for centuries—that we are one species, one human family—was right there for everyone to see on their TV screen. Suddenly we saw that the boundaries we draw between people—boundaries of nation, race, class or religion—are all in our minds. Seeing Earth from the Moon probably has been the greatest single psychological impetus for globalization.

Third, the Internet. Dr. Philip Tobias, the world-famous anthropologist, has described the Internet as “the most significant social development since the advent of language.” Two results are especially important. First, instant communication with anyone anywhere in the world. As far as communication goes, time has been virtually eliminated. We now have what some people call “world time.” This elimination of time has vastly accelerated the pace of life. Second, everyone now has access to all information, all social and political theories, all daily news, and all religious and philosophical beliefs. Thus, all knowledge becomes democratized, enabling people to form opinions on subjects they never could have considered in earlier times.

I was once at a dinner given for Alvin Toffler, the man who coined the term “future shock,” and one of the world’s foremost “futurists.” I asked him what he sees as the consequences of all knowledge and viewpoints being available at the mere press of a computer button. He replied simply, “It’s the end of truth.”

What Toffler was talking about is the fragmenting effect of information technology. He wasn’t saying truth doesn’t exist, but that fragmentation of massive amounts of information makes it ever more difficult to have some central operating set of convictions around which nations can cohere. Fragmentation raises the question of whose truth are we talking about? Are we talking about the truth of the forty-six million American fundamentalists who, according to Time magazine believe the world will literally come to an end in their lifetime? Or the postmodernists who believe there’s no realty; that life is but a social construct? Or those scientists who assert we’ve reached the end of the Homo sapiens epoch and are entering the “Post-human” era?

One problem becomes clear. The founders of the U.S. held certain truths to be “self-evident.” But the overload of information, the inundation of countless different points of view, means it’s far harder to know exactly what truths are self-evident, or at least accepted as self-evident by the body politic. It makes achieving a governing consensus much more difficult.

But another effect of globalization—especially as a result of global TV, the Internet and massive migration—is the crisis of identity the world is facing. All of a sudden we see the earth from the Moon, and, in reality, there are no “national borders.” Such borders are, we discover, simply human unconscious projections, and these projections are rapidly eroding. Increasingly, we see the world as a whole, and our consciousness is gradually being forced to absorb this reality.

The spiritual dimension

Equally important as the integration of economies that was taking place over the centuries was the effect of globalization on religion.

For the first several thousand years of what we might call the human journey, peoples, cultures and religions developed in isolation and at their own pace. The world population today is just over six billion. But the world’s religions evolved when the world population was estimated to be around 300 million..

People of different cultures and religions were spread across the globe, and there was relatively little contact between them. So religions developed in isolation according to different environments, experiences and cultures. Eventually, Christians and Muslims learned more about each other when the Muslims invaded Spain and, later, the Europeans invaded what is now Israel and Palestine. But on the whole, the average person was totally ignorant of other religions until the Europeans took Christianity to various parts of the world after the 16th century.

Then in 1801, the Upanishads, the mystical scriptures of India, first reached Europe and were translated into Latin. This opened up the first study in the West of the Hindu religion. In 1929, the Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes, was translated into German, and it soon made its way into English. During the 1930s and ‘40s, many Americans began reading Lao Tzu’s Tao de Ching, as well as books on Buddhism.

This has been a significant part of globalization. What it has done is to cause people in all parts of the world to realize there are different interpretations of spiritual truth; that my particular belief is not the only understanding of spiritual reality. This realization is at the very core of a spiritual and psychological search taking place in most nations today.

Challenges and contradictions everywhere

But we know globalization is not without its difficulties. On the one hand, it represents a shrinking of the globe that requires us to expand our worldview and sense of identity.

In the United States, such an expansion of outlook happened once before. At the time of the American Revolution, most people found their identity in relation to the state they lived in—Georgia, Virginia or Massachusetts, but not with something called the United States (there was no United States). Even after independence, it wasn’t until after the Civil War that a distinctly American identity emerged. In terms of our culture, it was fifty years after the Revolution before a uniquely American culture—starting with James Fenimore Cooper— became apparent. So we’ve experienced this expanding process before.

The world is going through a similar process today. Easy travel, television, the computer and Internet—and especially seeing our globe from the perspective of the moon—have taken this expansion of awareness to a wholly new dimension. We’re being forced to identify not simply with our nation, but also with other races, cultures and nations. We could be experiencing the fledgling beginnings of what might be called a global awareness or identity.

And of course, there’s a reaction. That’s to be expected. Such an epochal change doesn’t come easily. We feel a threat to an older and more normal identity. This threat tends to force us backward to more familiar patterns of the past. It’s uncomfortable to move forward into unknown territory. In a time of upheaval and reorientation, we reach inward for the security of past certainties, both spiritually and politically. In the process, life-giving themes that once resonated in the souls of our ancestors become hollow clichés. Yes, we know it’s all “true,” but it doesn’t really excite us. We hear the old jargon from our politicians all the time. But somehow it doesn’t have the ring of a compelling truth, a truth for a totally fresh period of history. It’s not like it must have been in hearing Jefferson read the Declaration of Independence for the first time. It’s happening across the world as exponential change overwhelms all tradition and belief. This reaction—this reaching back for thought-patterns of an earlier period—undergirds the fundamentalist sentiment, whether in America, India, or the Middle East. From a psychological viewpoint, it’s regressive.

So we’re confronted not only with a crisis between civilizations, but also a crisis within civilizations. It’s a monumental crisis of identity and worldview. None of the categories of the past—social status, religion, ethnicity, culture, heritage, region, nation—in and of themselves alone—is an adequate context of thought and action in an era that is rapidly becoming global.

Every nation on earth faces this challenge. This challenge within nations is part of what’s been going on in the Middle East for decades. Everything about an emerging global civilization appears to threaten the identity, social fabric, and even the existence of Islam, which comprises a billion people. So some people lash out at what they see as the generator of globalization. And while we must deal forcefully with threats to life and safety, we must do it with the realization that, in the broader context, and in our different ways, America and the peoples of the Arab world face the same challenge. That challenge is how to adapt past traditions and institutions to radically new conditions; in essence, how to adjust our worldview for a new period of world development. Maintaining world order and stability under such uncertain conditions is the critical test confronting all nations, especially America and Europe.

In the end, the test of globalization is not simply a mechanical—an economic and financial—process. Is must also be a human process, a psychological process, a spiritual process, a broadening of our consciousness, a greater sensitivity to other people and cultures, and a deepening sense of wholeness. For common sense suggests that a unified world, which is the next stage of human history and is the unarticulated objective of globalization, must be built on a unified self in each of us.

Globalization is a challenge to every one of us—to move past the limiting parameters of past categories as the primary form of identity, and assume a new worldwide perspective. Our historic sense of family, class, race, religion and nation will always be a part of who we are, part of our roots and identity. But we’re now at a point in world development—due to our own inventiveness—where our sense of identity is being forced to widen and include aspects of life that are unfamiliar to us. It’s not easy, and it’s not something we can leave up to our so-called “leaders.” This is a challenge every human being faces in one way or the other.

As the historian Arnold Toynbee suggested long ago, “Technology can bring strangers physically face-to-face with one another in an instant, but it may take generations for their minds, and centuries for their hearts, to grow together. Physical proximity,” he concluded, “not accompanied by simultaneous mutual understanding and sympathy, is apt to produce antipathy, not affection, and consequently discord, not harmony.” Therein lies the human challenge of globalization. To be legitimate, globalization must validate itself in terms of equitable benefits for all nations, and sensitivity to other nations’ need for social and political stability.

Meeting this human challenge is critical, for we do not have generations, much less centuries, in which to adjust.

Education & the Shifting Global Context

2008-12-03T21:44:03Z

In the midst of the turbulent global financial and economic crisis, one question predominates: is the world simply passing through what appears to be an extremely dangerous and difficult decade of multiple crises, after which life will return to a more familiar normalcy? Or do these converging crises signal the end of the world, as we’ve known it, and the emergence of a totally new context of human existence? Is the economic/financial crisis a symptom of a deeper change taking place?

The more we look at events in a long term perspective, the more it appears clear that we’re living through the most significant shift of orientation, of worldview, to take place at least since the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance. One might even say that the world has moved into a new zone of history.

Such thoughts have long been suggested by thoughtful observers. In 1952, seven years after the greatest triumph in military history, Rollo May, one of America’s leading psychologists, wrote, “The chief problem of people in the middle decade of the 20th century is emptiness. Our middle of the twentieth century is more anxiety-ridden than any period since the breakdown of the Middle Ages. We live at one of those points in history when one way of living is in its death throes, and another is being born.” Management guru Peter Drucker’s view at mid-century was that “no one born after the turn of the [20th] century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols.”

Thus what is suggested here is not an original thought. We stand on the shoulders of giants who understood that the Western orientation has been changing at a foundational level.

And so in the following comments, we shall consider some of the core elements of this shift, and what they may suggest for education.

Globalization

When we think of globalization, we think certainly of the current crisis, but also of the longer term worldwide integration of economic and financial factors—the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, as well as jobs moving from one country to another.

But what is the essence of globalization? Simply put, it is the shrinkage of the world. Think YouTube. Think Internet and websites. For the first time in history, one person can write or film something that everyone in the world can see, if they have access to a computer. One person reaching millions, even billions. World-famous anthropologist Philip Tobias says this capacity—the computer and Internet—is the most significant social development since the invention of writing over five thousand years ago. It’s a totally new form of communication. Throughout history, radically new forms of communication have created foundational changes within the societies in which they occurred. The well-known example of the Reformation following the Western emergence of the printing press comes to mind.

As the world shrinks, everything is becoming more intermeshed—economics, politics, culture, traditions and religion. Regional concerns become world issues. Thus, age-old perspectives and worldviews no longer anchor us. For the first time in history, we humans are forging an awareness of our existence as a single entity. And it’s happening faster than permits many people to adjust.

Globalization is changing the distribution of geopolitical power. Since the end of World War II, the U. S. has been the dominant world power and the guarantor of a certain degree of stability and security. The major world institutions—the IMF, World Bank, U.N., NATO—were conceived and primarily controlled by the U.S. But as we’re all experiencing, globalization has been creating other centers of economic and political power—Brazil, Russia, India, China. Thus Europe and the U. S. are increasingly only two of several centers of geopolitical influence.

Perhaps the most acute effect of globalization is the global crisis of identity taking place. It has taken a series of crises in France, Holland, Britain, Germany, and increasingly the U.S., for the issue of identity finally to be recognized as central to the contemporary global crisis. As immigration increases, the stories and myths that form the basis of national identities tend to wane. One result is a form of national angst. As The Times quotes one British historian, “A white majority that invented the national mythologies underpinning modern European culture lives in an almost perpetual state of fear that it and its way of life are about to disappear.” The Catholic Church in Europe is facing the distinct probability of Islam eventually becoming the largest European religion. The fear of such demographic and cultural shifts and their potential consequence is part of the subtext for everything else happening in Europe.

This issue of identity is an underlying dynamic between the Muslim world and the West. Muslims are asking themselves, “Will globalization, based on the Western, rationalistic, consumerist, postmodern ethos, ultimately mean the end of Islam?” Such unknowns form a significant part of the psychological dynamic fueling terrorism.

Profound questions arise for all people as globalization collapses the national, racial and religious boundaries that heretofore protected—and even defined—identity. “Who am I? Who is my group? Do I even have a group any more? What does ‘national allegiance’ mean in a global era? What does ‘race’ mean in a world where people of all ethnicities are increasingly inter-marrying?”

The whole human race—whether pre-modern, modern, or postmodern—is involved in a vast process of redefining identity. Some move forward into the future, some cling to the past, both of which create new social tensions.

And the pace of globalization accelerates. Thus educators might do well to consider whether the phenomenon of globalization should be defined as a distinct academic subject which could be included in social studies.

Technology

We all know that the explosion of new technologies is a primary force driving global change. While elementary forms of technology are older than Homo sapiens, the first systematic approach to science and technology was expressed by Francis Bacon in the17th century. Wrote Bacon, the “true and lawful end of science is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers.” Four centuries later, Einstein echoed Bacon, and emphasized that “concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest of all technical endeavors.”

But questions arise as to whether we really know what we are doing. Is Einstein’s dictum—concern for man himself and his fate—is this what propels scientific research today?

Doubts are being expressed. The Economist asks, “Is the speed of technology development exceeding humanity’s moral and mental capacities to control it?” Newsweek magazine says flat out that "information overload is outstripping our capacity to cope, antiquating our laws, transforming our mores, reshuffling our economy, reordering our priorities and putting our Constitution to the fire."

Why do they make such statements? For one thing, the experts tell us that the pace of technological change doubles every decade; that because technological change is growing at an exponential rate, the 21st century will see one thousand times more technological change than did the last century.

What does such rapid change do to us as individuals? Psychologists have long known that subjecting people to more change than they can fit into their mental picture of life causes serious psychological problems. Thus the U.S. government estimates that half of all Americans will require some form of psychological counseling at some point in their lives. Some experts even say that by generating such rapid change, we are tampering with the preconditions of rationality.

And what about our children? What are we doing to them? Clearly, parents no longer control the “information environment” in which their children grow up; and such control has been a prime function of parenthood ever since Rousseau proposed childhood as a special category of life with its unique needs. Indeed, many researchers of the effects of technology on children say we have now come to the “end of childhood” as a special category of growth.

As we look to the future of technology, what is our responsibility to coming generations? Some scientists are seeking to create certain technologies for purposes that appear to be to replace human meaning and significance altogether. Some of the world’s most brilliant scientists are seeking to create what they call the Post-Human Age, create something they think is superior to the human being.

Thus, it becomes clear that in some realms of scientific research, we are no longer concerned with meeting any human need, nor is there any defined ethical framework within which R&D takes place. Thus Marvin Minsky, co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, says, “Suppose that the robot had all the virtues of people and was smarter and understood things better. Then why would we prefer those grubby old people? I don’t see anything wrong with human life being devalued if we have something better.”

Or consider Jaron Lanier’s comments. Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” and founded the world’s first virtual reality company. Writes Lanier, “Medical science, neuroscience, computer science, genetics, biology—separately and together, seem to be on the verge of abandoning the human realm altogether…it grows harder to imagine human beings remaining at the center of the process of science. Instead, science appears to be in charge of its own process, probing and changing people in order to further its own course, independent of human agency.”

Lanier raises the basic question of our future. Throughout history, the pursuit of knowledge has primarily been for the sake of knowledge itself. Today, whether we like it or not, science—and the technology it creates—is increasingly the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of power. Man has achieved the knowledge and power to destroy himself both physically and morally. Thus, as Peter Drucker observed half a century ago, “a new dimension has been added to human evolution.”

The question of knowledge and power has been problematic throughout history. But our technological ability now makes that question stand as the defining issue at the center of existence. As Drucker notes, if we do not know what power is for, we cannot say what its limits are. If we do not specify its proper use, we will not be able to stop its abuse.

And so we return to Bacon and Einstein: “Concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest of all technical endeavors.” The decision of whether a particular line of research and development is in the best interests of “man himself and his fate” may best be determined not so much by scientists, but by a body of “elders” which has the larger and longer lasting interests of humanity at heart.

Underlying any such efforts might be the observations of Rene Dubos and Barbara Ward in their 1972 book, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet: “Civilizations commonly die from the excessive development of certain characteristics which had at first contributed to their success,” they suggest. “Our form of industrial civilization suffers from having allowed experts to make growth and efficiency, rather than the quality of life, the main criterion of success. . . if things are in the saddle, it is because we have put them there. . . the demonic force in our life is not technology per se, but our propensity to consider means as ends.” [Emphasis added]

The elemental effects of technology on cognition and the future of our species, force us to consider the value of quasi-mandatory academic courses in “the relationship between technology and humans” being offered to students of the appropriate age. There is ample research on this issue, foremost of which is the work of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman and Lewis Mumford.

Some Implications for Education

Against this background, it would seem the questions to be answered are immense: In an age when globalization is erasing all the old boundaries that provided identity, when young people get more information from watching TV than they do from all their years of classroom instruction, when all knowledge is available by the press of a computer button, when commercial advertising has become the primary source of value formation, then the basic question becomes, “What is education? What is the product education seeks to produce?”

To address this question, it would seem that education needs to enable young people to grapple with questions far beyond the conventional concerns of traditional education. Questions such as: In an age of global impressions and easy mobility, how does education foster a sense of rootedness in time and place? In a technology-driven age, how does education strengthen the enduring human values that give meaning and fulfillment to the individual? In an age where everything is in flux—national purpose, collective values, institutional integrity—how does education help the individual find stability and anchorage? In an age when, as Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly writes, “truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link,” how is a young person to find those deeper human truths that have been transmitted over centuries through culture, and are valid for all time?

Even more, how does education help answer the crisis of identity that is engulfing our young people? All the traditional sources of identity are in upheaval—family, ethnic group, nation, culture and religion. Thus we see students increasingly turning to technology to seek some source of identity. Young children once found early identity in relationship to animals—the family dog or a pet gerbil. Now they turn to computerized toys or computer games—in essence, a shift from living animals to dead matter.

Adolescents increasingly seek identity through various websites on the Internet. As they jump from “Facebook” to other websites, they sometimes display differing aspects of their personalities, depending on with whom they are talking and how they want to appear. The result is that many young people are not remaining true to their deepest inner selves, and they are developing what psychologists call “multiple personalities.” Many are finding it easier to cope with the “pseudo-reality” on the Internet rather than with life’s authentic reality off the Internet. This is the antithesis of the purpose of human growth and maturation—indeed, of education—which in all cultures and ages has been to develop a whole and unified personality in young people. Helping students understand and come to terms with such issues is one of education’s greatest challenges.

Obviously, children must be educated in the traditional academic subjects so they are at least equal to the best in the world. But if the world is moving into a new period of its development—which is what globalization represents—education must equip children to grapple with life’s fundamental questions, especially as the changing character of the family often prevents the family from fulfilling that function. Such questions would include:

What is at the core of liberty and how is it sustained? In a society where the primary value source (TV) is collective, how does a child develop his or her individual sense of being, yet relate that being to some sense of larger responsibility to the community? In an age of mobility and global TV impressions, what can help a child realize a sense of rootedness in both time and place? What does a student need to know when there’s so much that can be known? How does one gain self-understanding, self-control and self-direction? What gives life its highest significance, and what saves it from meaninglessness?

If these questions seem remote or abstract, consider one student commencement speaker at one of the most prestigious universities in the U.S. He described his class as “not knowing how it relates to the past or the future, having little sense of the present, no life-sustaining beliefs, secular or religious, and consequently no goal and no path to effective action.”

Such issues as discussed here are not easily or readily answered. But a people who cannot answer them cannot sustain a civilized life of liberty. Thus it would seem that conveying to young people an elemental sense of how to create and sustain a civilized life of liberty ought to be one of the aims of education.

However, educators are not necessarily an amalgam of political scientist, psychologist, futurist, philosopher or clairvoyant, which is what the times seem to demand. Nevertheless, it may be that the training of educators needs to be deepened and widened to better equip them to address some of the issues that are profoundly influencing the substance of the subjects they teach. It may be that teacher training programs should include courses that better enable educators to address some of the transformative issues discussed above.

It is not a question of burdening educators with more material to convey to their students. It is more a question of educators’ own worldview. Do educators adequately comprehend, at the deepest level possible, the dramatic developments that are restructuring our concepts and institutions? If so, then that understanding will infuse their teaching of their traditional subjects. In a sense, it is not primarily a question of teaching “more;” it is a question of relating what is taught to the insights and developments that are reshaping the global landscape.

Conclusion

We are living through a new period of human history that is of a different magnitude and depth from anything experienced in the past few centuries, and there is need to comprehend this change in its psychological dimension. Globalization is more than a technological and geopolitical shift. At root, it is a cultural and psychological change. Ever since 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, the primary Western perspective for organizing our affairs has been the nation-state. But that framework is in the midst of changing to a global perception. Such a change is not something that takes place in outer space somewhere. It takes place in the collective psyche of humanity. It is a change in us that is taking place. This is part of the genesis of the global crisis of identity that is manifest from France to China. This challenge is the defining issue of our time, and resolution of all other issues may in some measure depend on our success in meeting that test.

With every new era comes the necessity to redefine and reshape the foundational institutions—including education—of collective existence. Such a necessity is only part of the challenge confronting all of us as we move into a new phase of human experience.
A new orientation, a new worldview, is attempting to unfold itself for the world. It has happened before in history, and now it is our turn to deal with the challenges that arise when a fresh point of reference emerges for the world.

Understanding our Moment in History

2008-12-03T19:09:35Z

A presentation to the Kendal Forum, Kennett Square, PA --

Tonight I want to step back from the immediate issues that dominate the news, and consider two basic topics: First, understanding our moment in history, and second, the relation of today's events to that moment. For it's increasingly clear that we're not just facing a few critical problems here and there. We appear to be at some major junction in human affairs. I suggest part of understanding how best to go forward lies in comprehending the significance of our particular historic moment.

So I want to begin by quoting three people who provide helpful perspective.

In 1952, seven years after the greatest military victory in human history, Rollo May, one of America's leading psychologists wrote, "[T]he chief problem of people in the middle decade of the 20th century is emptiness." In May's view, "our middle of the twentieth century is more anxiety-ridden than any period since the breakdown of the Middle Ages." Concluded May, "we live at one of those points in history when one way of living is in its death throes, and another is being born."

Two years later in a speech at Columbia University, Adlai Stevenson asked, "Are America's problems but surface symptoms of something even deeper, of a moral and human crisis in the Western world which might even be compared to the fourth, fifth and sixty-century crisis where the Roman Empire was transformed into feudalism and primitive Christianity? Are Americans," Stevenson queried, "passing through one of the great crises of history when man must make another mighty choice?"

Finally, in 1957, Peter Drucker noted, "No one born after the turn of the century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols."

America didn't evaluate these assessments when they were offered. But it daily becomes clearer that it's only within the context provided by such reflections that we can fully comprehend what's happening to America and the world.

So tonight I would like to comment on three trends at the heart of the transformation suggested by these three Americans.

First trend at the heart of the transformation: For the first time in human history, the world is forging an awareness of our existence as a single entity. Nations are incorporating the planetary dimensions of life into the fabric of our economics, politics, culture and international relations. The shorthand for this is "globalization."

We generally think of globalization as the worldwide integration of economic, financial and political factors. But it's far more than that; far more than non-western nations adopting free markets and democratic political systems. At its core, globalization means that the full scope of western ideas and modes of living are gradually seeping into the fabric of the world. At the same time, everyone on earth is having to adjust to Western technology. As this happens, existing cultures, traditions, institutions and historic relationships are threatened. In some cases they're even disappearing. In essence, globalization is about identity. It goes to the very psychological foundations of a people.

In my opinion, if pursued wisely and cooperatively, globalization represents the world's best chance to enrich the lives of the greatest number of people. One need only look at India to see a prime example of how globalization can benefit a nation.

But we must recognize the contradictions inherent in globalization. On the one hand, it represents a shrinking of the globe that requires us to expand our worldview and sense of identity. Such an expansion of outlook happened before to America. At the time of the American Revolution, most people found their identity in relation to the state they lived in-Georgia, Virginia or Massachusetts, but not with something called the United States. Even after independence, it wasn't until after the Civil War that a distinctly American identity emerged. In terms of our culture, it was fifty years after the Revolution before a uniquely American culture-starting with James Fenimore Cooper- became apparent.

We're going through a similar process today, only on a worldwide scale. Easy travel, television, the computer and Internet-and especially seeing our globe from the perspective of the moon-have taken this expansion of awareness to a wholly new dimension. We're being forced to identify not simply with our nation, but also with other peoples, cultures and nations. We could be experiencing the fledgling beginnings of what might be called a global awareness or identity.

But there's a reaction. We feel a threat to an older and more habitual identity. This threat tends to force us backward to the familiar patterns of the past. In a time of upheaval and reorientation, we reach inward for the security of past certainties, both politically and spiritually. In the process, life-giving themes that once resonated in the soul of our ancestors get reduced to hollow clichés. That's a natural reaction. It's happening across the world as exponential change overwhelms traditions and beliefs. This reaction undergirds the fundamentalist sentiment, whether in America, India, or the Middle East.

So in my view, we're confronted not so much with a crisis between civilizations, as some have suggested, but a crisis within civilizations. It's a monumental crisis of identity and worldview. None of the categories of the past-social status, religion, ethnicity, culture, heritage, region, nation-in and of themselves alone-is an adequate context of thought and action in an era that is rapidly becoming global.

This is not simply an American challenge. To varying degrees, every nation on earth faces this test. In my judgment, while Iraq is a unique situation, this crisis within nations is part of what's been going on in the Middle East for decades. Everything about an emerging global civilization appears to threaten the identity, social fabric, and even the existence of Islam, which, we must remember, comprises a billion people. So some people lash out at what they see as the generator of globalization. And while we must deal forcefully with threats to our life and safety, we must do it with the realization that, in the broader context, and in our different ways, America and the peoples of the Middle East face the same challenge. That challenge is how to adapt past traditions and institutions to radically new conditions; in essence, how to adjust our worldview. Maintaining world order and stability under such uncertain conditions is the critical test confronting all nations, especially America and Europe. We are going to need what analyst Robert Kaplan calls a "global constabulary force" simply to maintain a modicum of order.

In the end, however, the test of globalization is a profoundly human, not technical, challenge. As Arnold Toynbee suggested long ago, "Technology can bring strangers physically face-to-face with one another in an instant, but it may take generations for their minds, and centuries for their hearts, to grow together. Physical proximity," he concluded, "not accompanied by simultaneous mutual understanding and sympathy, is apt to produce antipathy, not affection, and consequently discord, not harmony." Therein lies the human challenge of globalization. And meeting this human challenge is critical, for we do not have generations, much less centuries, in which to adjust.

Second trend at the heart of the transformation: We've entered a new stage of technology development that is without precedent in the history of science and technology.

And indeed it has. Take America. During the last century, the real GDP, in constant dollars, increased by $48 trillion, much of this wealth built on the marvels of technology.

But along with technological wonders, uncertainties arise. Let me interject here that five years ago I had a quadruple heart bypass using the most sophisticated medical technology. So I'm a believer. Nonetheless, the question today is whether we're creating certain technologies not to improve the human condition, but for purposes that appear to be to replace human meaning and significance altogether. As the Economist magazine asks, "Is the speed of technology development exceeding humanity's moral and mental capacities to control it?"

The experts tell us that by 2035, artificial robotic intelligence will surpass human intelligence. (Let's leave aside for a moment the question of what constitutes "intelligence.") And a decade after that, we shall have a robot with all the emotional and spiritual sensitivities of a human being. By 2050, for $1,000, you'll be able to buy a computer with the intelligence equivalent to the combined intelligence of everyone on earth-ten billion people. By that time, we're told, supercomputers will go so fast that all life will be transformed beyond anything we can even begin to imagine today.

Thus arrives what some scientific intellectuals call the "Post-human Age." This concept of a "post-human future" is not science fiction. It's the projection of some of our foremost scientists.

Consider a remark by the cofounder of MIT's artificial intelligence lab and one of the world's leading authorities on artificial intelligence: "Suppose that the robot had all of the virtues of people and was smarter and understood things better. Then why would we want to prefer those grubby, old people? I don't see anything wrong with human life being devalued if we have something better." One of the world's leading scientists ready to "devalue human life" if we can create something he thinks is better.

One well-known molecular biologist writes of "a time when humans no longer exist . . . Progressive self-transformation could change our descendents into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now."

Writes a famous computer scientist, "When machines are derived from human intelligence but are a million times more capable, there won't be a clear distinction between human and machine intelligence - there's going to be a merger."

Yet another writes, "I find it impossible to believe it makes sense to continue, as human beings, in our exact same form . . . The immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with very unhuman disembodied superminds, engaged in affairs of the future that are to human concerns as ours are to bacteria."

In my judgment, what's being proposed here is nothing less than the cancellation of the five thousand-year quest to create a moral order for human existence; and the self-destruction of humanity under the guise of something some people say is "evolution." It won't materialize in our lifetime. But as we speak, this is what's being developed for our grandchildren. The scientists tell us that because their technical creations are produced by humans, and humans are the product of natural evolution, their intelligent machines will also be the product of evolution. Natural evolution over the eons, however, was not underwritten by the prospect of commercial profit or military application, as is the research of those now suggesting the merger of man and machine.

I would emphasize that such views are not held simply by some fringe group of scientists. Those expressing such views are at the cutting edge of today's computer, artificial intelligence and biological sciences.

Now, how are we to think about such a prospect? Personally, I believe these scientists mistaken in their belief that what they're predicting is part of natural evolution. Just because humans create some technology doesn't mean its part of evolution. Humans have created technology that could destroy planet earth, which is hardly evolution. What these scientists seem to leave out is the entire range of human emotions and motivations. They appear oblivious to their own potential for hubris and ego-inflation. Let me offer an example. The Washington Post reported that a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University was hired as a researcher at Microsoft. Said the good professor, "To me, this corporation is my power tool. It's the tool I wield to allow my ideas to shape the world." This is a classic example of the inflated power drive, or what the great theoretical physicist, Freeman Dyson, described as the "technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

What we appear to see here is Lord Acton's well-known political maxim applied to the scientific world: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." And when we're talking about redesigning human beings, we're clearly talking about absolute power.

The scientists talk of progress. But their progress is totally in terms of more powerful technology. There is no discussion of progress in terms of human purpose and needs, or of the meaning of being a human being in an age of total technological capability. And certainly no talk of the seventy percent of humanity who don't have enough electricity to turn on a light, let alone run a computer. Indeed, progress for some is to augment human attributes and transfer them to silicon or its successor. We appear to have ignored Einstein's warning: "Concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest of all technical endeavors."

It seems to me, we've created a scientific culture that is an immense complex of technique and specialization without any guiding moral framework. The highest standard is efficiency. The defining ethic is, "If it can be done, it will be done."

We have not yet come to grips with the question Peter Drucker raised a half century ago: "The problem created by the breakthrough of scientific knowledge to the core of human existence is not political. It is spiritual and metaphysical. It poses the question: What is the meaning of knowledge and power? What is the meaning of human existence and of human spirit . . . Both knowledge and power, traditionally ends in themselves, must now become means to a higher end of man. Both knowledge and power must be grounded in purpose-a purpose beyond the truth of knowledge and the glory of power."

Future generations depend on whether we understand the significance of Drucker's questions, and seek answers to them.

Will such a scenario as the high-tech experts project come to pass? My guess is probably not.

What these scientists appear to ignore is the whole realm of the unconscious domain. In recent decades, psychology has made great gains in understanding the conscious functioning of the brain. Less attention, however, has been given to the dynamics of the unconscious. While certain groundbreaking work has been done, no one of the stature of Jung or Freud has been able to take their investigation of the unconscious to a significantly new level. Indeed, with notable exceptions, the implications of Jung's exploration into the collective unconscious-that basic layer of unconsciousness common to all humanity-are generally ignored by the scientific community. By definition we know far more about our conscious life than the unconscious. Yet the unconscious may well determine far more of our collective activity than does the conscious. One result is that as scientists and technologists pursue their vision of technological transcendence, unconscious factors are ignored. It's just these unconscious factors that will eventually disrupt the developmental path so confidently predicted by technologists.

Some of these unconscious factors are already manifesting themselves. It was in the '50s that Jung first diagnosed the "pathological" character of our art and culture. The Hannibal Lecter series is only the latest of this genre. Thirty years ago, major corporations didn't have to think much about mental health. Now, mental health is the fastest growing component of corporate health insurance programs. Corporations are providing employees with special rooms for relaxing, meditation, prayer, taking naps or listening to music.

Other indicators tell of further disturbances. The suicide rate among women has increased 200% in the past two decades. Teen suicide jumped 300% between 1960-90. Books are now written for eight and nine year-old children advising them how to recognize the symptoms of stress, and to deal with it in their own lives. Character controlling drugs are taken like aspirin. Rage has assumed a culture-like place in the national fabric. The hard truth is, our very mode of life has now become our principle cause of emotional and mental disorder.

Why is this happening? One clear reason is the overload of accelerated change that is swamping people. What we're experiencing is not simply the acceleration of the pace of change, but the acceleration of acceleration itself. In other words, change growing at an exponential rate. The experts tell us that the rate of change doubles every decade; that at today's rate of change, we'll experience one hundred calendar years of change in the next twenty-five years; and that due to the nature of exponential growth, the 21st century as a whole will experience almost one thousand times more technological change than did the 20th century.

Now, project forward the predicted increased speed of computers and the resulting ratcheting up of the pace of life over the next two or three decades, and you end up asking, "How much more of this can the human metabolism take before social breakdown occurs?" Actually, it's not the case that sooner or later something will give way. Multiplying social pathologies indicate that individually and collectively, psychological integrity is already giving way.

It's not as if we haven't been warned about the consequences of overreaching. From earliest times, everything in human myth and religion warns us about trying to become as the gods. These myths and stories warn that there are limits to both human knowledge and endeavor; that to go beyond those limits is self-destructive. No one knows exactly where such limits might be. But if they don't include the effort to create some technical/human life form supposedly superior to human beings, if they don't include the capacity to genetically reconfigure human nature, if they don't include the attempt to introduce a "post-human" civilization, then it's hard to imagine where such limits would be drawn.

We must remember that myths are more than fanciful stories left over from the childhood of man. They emanate from the unconscious level of the psyche, that level which connects us to whatever transcendent wisdom may exist. It's a level at which, as quantum physics suggests, there may exist some relationship between the human psyche and external matter. Mind and matter may be but two dimensions of some larger reality, some fundamental pattern of life common to both that is operating outside the understanding of contemporary science. In other words, we may be fooling around with phenomena that are, in fact, beyond human awareness; possibly even beyond the ability of humans to grasp. For at the heart of life is a great mystery which does not yield to rational interpretation. This eternal mystery induces a sense of wonder out of which all that humanity has of religion, art and science is born. The mystery is the giver of these gifts, and we only lose the gifts when we grasp at the mystery itself. In my view, Nature will not permit arrogant man to defy that mystery, that transcendent wisdom. In the end, Nature's going to win out.

Some people are already searching for the wisest way to approach such potential challenges as the new technologies present. Bill Joy, cofounder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems and described by the Economist magazine as "the Edison of the Internet," suggests we've reached the point where we must "limit development of technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." His concerns are based on the unknown potential of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, driven by computers capable of infinite speeds, and the possible uncontrollable self-replication of these technologies. Joy acknowledges the pursuit of knowledge as one of the primary human goals since earliest times. But, he says, "If open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs."

Third trend at the heart of the transformation: I suggested earlier that what we are facing is not a crisis between civilizations, but within civilizations. I believe this is true for all civilizations today-for what once was called Western Civilization, for Islam, as well as for the Chinese and Hindu civilizations, albeit this crisis moves at a different pace in different parts of the world. In fact, I'd even suggest that what once was called a "civilization" is increasingly a less apt description of any particular peoples. For a civilization presumes a shared worldview, commonly accepted standards of conduct, a shared perception of values, and above all, a collective spiritual expression that represents life's highest meaning.

Such a condition certainly no longer exists in America. When we talk of an "American worldview," whose worldview are we talking about? Are we talking of the worldview of some forty-eight million fundamentalists who, according to Time magazine, believe the world will come to an end in their lifetime? Are we talking about the worldview of the high-tech visionaries who believe that when computers go millions of times faster than today, the world will reach an "Omega Point" and all life will be transformed beyond anything we can conceive of today? Or the postmodernists who believe there is no reality; that life is but a social construct? Or the computer scientists who see everyone eventually linked to an electronic consciousness and "Global Brain" via the Internet? Or the intellectual who believes rational intelligence is life's highest authority? Or those molecular biologists who assert we've reached the end of the Homo sapiens epoch, and that our descendents will not be human as we now use the term. Or the traditional Christian who believes the chief end of man is to "Glorify God and enjoy Him forever"?

I could go on, but I think the point is clear. The crisis within civilizations is a spiritual and psychological crisis that, in America, has been building for at least the past century. We're now reaching some sort of critical moment.

Historically, all religions have been a collective, not an individual phenomenon. The psychological function of religion has been at least threefold: to validate a certain moral order within a given civilization; to offer myths that connect a civilization to life's transcendent dimension; and to link the individual's conscious life with its unconscious grounding.

How do we best gauge the spiritual and psychological life of today's America? By public opinion polls that tell us well over ninety percent of the American people say they believe in God? By how many people attend a place of worship? By the proliferation of over 1500 so-called religions in America, including some anomaly called "Catholic-Buddhists"? By our bookstores' bulging sections on religion and spirituality? That's one way to look at America's spiritual condition.

Another way is to examine our culture and what it's telling us. And here we find a different story. This is important, because culture is to a nation what dreams are to an individual-an indication of what's going on in the inner life, in the unconscious realm, which is the crucible of consciousness. In this sense, the unconscious is the crucible of civilization.

I think it's fair to say a crucial theme of American culture since the First World War has been the supposed "meaninglessness of life," a thought antithetical to any authentic religion. We see it in The Great Gatsby as Daisy says, "I'm pretty cynical about everything. I think everything's terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so-the most advanced people." This was written in 1925 as new technologies were creating new industries, and the stock market was booming. Daisy's lament was followed in the '50s by Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye, and later by Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike's novels. Indeed, nothing could denote the alienation of twentieth-century American literature better than the name of Updike's main character, "Angstrom." As the poet Archibald MacLeish, a former Librarian of Congress and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, described Western post-war art and philosophy, "life had been found out at last-life was absurd."

We need to evaluate what the creation and marketing of such cultural artifacts represents. For the fact is, there wouldn't be a market for the alienated and psychotic themes of our movies, TV and literature if such themes weren't resonating with something going on in us as a people. Culture is simply a mirror held up to a people's psychic life. Taken as a whole, Western art, literature and cinema have long revealed a profound reorientation taking place in the depths of the Western psyche. As F. Scott Fitzgerald's biographer, Andrew Le Vot, wrote about the meaning of The Great Gatsby, it is "not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabitable, absurd material universe." In one sense, The Great Gatsby represents a turning point for America. It's publication and subsequent resonance in the American psyche signaled that while there are still millions of Christians in America, the historic religion of America and the West was no longer the informing dynamic in the soul of America's "creative minority" who give us our literature, theater, cinema and music. At the same time, in Europe T.S. Eliot, Wassily Kandinski, W.B. Yeats and others were signaling the same message. The "falcon cannot not hear the falconer," with the result that we are "hollow men."

We might digress for a moment and consider that when thoughtful Muslims view the West, they see the de-Christianization that has taken place. They see the social and psychological crises that have accompanied secularization and modernization. And while we may say-as some do in Washington-that we must "change the psychology of the Middle East and bring them into the modern world," thoughtful Muslims are concerned that the Western model of modernization may ultimately mean the very extinction of Islam.

This contributes to what is a particularly relevant aspect of this worldwide spiritual/psychological reorientation-the increasing presence of fundamentalism, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Shinto. It's worth considering this phenomenon, as it's a growing force in national politics and world affairs.

At least 60% of Americans believe the prophecies of the Book of Revelation will come true. Opinion polls tell us that thirty-six percent of the American fundamentalists who support Israel do so because they believe Israel must control all of Palestine before Christ will return. A well-known senator argued on the floor of the senate that Israel should maintain control of all of the Palestinian territories "because God said so. Look it up in the book of Genesis." The "Left Behind" series of books is a publishing phenomenon, having sold some forty million copies.

For Christian fundamentalists, the Book of Revelation is a focal point of reference. It spells out the "end times," the Apocalypse, and it is taken literally by millions of people. And herein lies perhaps the basic difference between fundamentalists and what might be termed traditional Christians. The latter take Revelation symbolically, as did St. Augustine, not literally. This difference between literalism and symbolism is at the core of the difference between fundamentalists and traditionalists, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu. All fundamentalisms tend to divide the world between insiders and outsiders, between true believers and unbelievers, the saved and the sinners, "us" and "them."

The implicit question raised by Revelation is, what is meant by "end times"? Those who interpret Revelation literally believe it means the end of the world. As I mentioned earlier, at least forty-eight million Americans believe it will happen in their lifetime. But another interpretation might be that it means the end of the Christian eon. The Church fathers long ago prophesied the end of the Christian epoch, but no date was given as to when it would happen. The meaning of the Apocalypse may not be the end of the world, but the end of a particular way of interpreting transcendent reality, while a new spiritual dispensation emerges. It's happened several times before in history.

The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek meaning "revelation, an uncovering of what has been hidden." According to the late depth psychologist Edward Edinger who wrote a book on the psychological meaning of Revelation, there are four features of the image of the Apocalypse: revelation, judgment, destruction and renewal. Revelation discloses new truth about life. Judgment assesses the state of contemporary conditions in light of this new truth. Destruction is the collapse of old forms that are no longer effective within the context of the new truth. Renewal is the recreation of civilization according to the requirements of the new truth. The Western psyche has focused on the destruction aspect of the Apocalypse, virtually ignoring the renewal that is to follow.

Against this background, from a psychological point of view, the story of the 20th century might be seen as the working out of these four features of the meaning of the Apocalypse. In all areas of life, humanity has gained more new truth about nature and the workings of the universe in the 20th century than in all previous history combined. Against the background of this new understanding of nature and the universe, we have judged the effectiveness of former beliefs, relationships and institutions. This assessment is at the heart of the spiritual search taking place in America today. It's the cause of our redefining the status of social relationships, or the role and authority of the nation-state. Then has come the destruction or collapse of old forms of how we have organized our affairs, forms that are no longer effective in light of the implementation of our new discoveries. This collapse is seen in our need to reinvent all our institutions, from education to new modes of self-government. And finally comes the birth of some new pattern of civilization based on the new truth or understanding. A harbinger of this new birth is seen in a greater openness and opportunity for the individual, whatever his or her background or social status. It's also seen our expanding sense of identity as we learn more about other cultures and peoples.

Given this interpretation, it appears the Apocalypse doesn't mean the physical end of the world. Rather, it suggests the end of a particular view of the meaning of human existence, while some new dispensation comes into fulfillment. For those with a literal rather than symbolic interpretation of Revelation, it is literally world shattering. As Edinger wrote, however, "Revelation lays out the final scenario of the end of the Christian eon, and describes symbolically the concluding events of the Judeo-Christian myth, the myth that has been the womb and metaphysical container of Western civilization."

This same process took place as the ancient gods of Rome gave way to Christianity. This is what Adlai Stevenson was referring to in the earlier comment I quoted. During the shift in the Roman world, the poet Lucretius wrote of the "aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage." Sounds pretty much like today. This process took several centuries to work itself out after the Roman period. As Toynbee noted, the contemporary process has been under way at least since the eighteenth century. With the advent of instantaneous global information technologies, it has been vastly accelerated, for information technologies transmit not only information, but psychic states of mind as well.

Let me briefly summarize what we've been discussing. (1) Globalization-possibly the most ambitious collective experiment in history; (2) a new stage of technology, the objective of which is to supplant human meaning and significance; and (3) a long-term psychological and spiritual reorientation. These are only three of the basic trends moving us between two historic epochs. And it's because of the magnitude and significance of such trends that I suggest the crisis is not between civilizations, but within civilized life itself. Thus the next three decades may be the most decisive thirty-year period in human history.

How do we respond to such a situation? We're already responding in the most sweeping redefinition of life America has ever known. We're redefining and restructuring all our institutions. Corporations are redefining their mission, structure and modus operandi. In education, we're trying countless new experiments, from vouchers to charter schools to home schooling. Alternative dispute resolution is helping lift the burden off the back of our legal system. Civic and charitable organizations are assuming functions formerly undertaken by local governments. There are countless efforts underway to redress the severe environmental imbalance we've created. More people are involved in efforts to help the elderly and those in poverty. In fact, it's estimated that well over fifty percent of all adult Americans donate a portion of their time to non-profit social efforts. In the Kennett Square area alone, there are some 40 citizen volunteer programs involving over 2,000 people.

Against the background of the three trends I mentioned, perhaps this is a modest start, but at least it's a start. Clearly, there's another level of effort to move to. As Bill Joy suggests, such efforts must include a decision whether or not to continue research and development of technologies that could, in Joy's words, "bring the world to the edge of extinction." Obviously, such an examination must be done in a global context if it's to be valid.

But another question is, how are you and I to live in a world that's changing faster than individuals and institutions can assimilate? How do we maintain anchorage and balance when we're in between two historic ages?

I believe the starting point is understanding, simply to understand the underlying changes taking place in the world and in us as individuals. As it says in Proverbs, "With all thy getting, get understanding." This may sound a bit too simplistic, but there's a psychological reason the scriptures say this. The great scriptures of the world are not the expression of the rational intellect as it has evolved over the past five hundred years. Rather, they're the expression of the unconscious, more particularly the collective unconscious. So it's our link with the source of transcendent wisdom that's telling us to "get understanding." And we must get it not simply on the intellectual level. We must assimilate it so it becomes a part of us.

I think the reason for this is that there seems to be a transformative effect about absorbing understanding. Intellectual understanding doesn't change us deep inside. Assimilated understanding does. And unless our understanding aligns our approach to life with the needs of the times, it's of minimal ultimate value.

Possibly one place to start is with the some of the subjects we've considered tonight-globalization, where technology is taking us, what's our culture telling us, and what's the meaning of the spiritual/psychological reorientation taking place. I would add a further category, which there hasn't been time to discuss tonight. That's the increasing separation of human life from most other manifestations of life, and the virtual war we have waged against non-human life, be it the sea, the soil, the sky or other species. I've offered my views on these topics, but you may come to different interpretations.

In summary, we live between two ages. There's a new epoch of human meaning struggling to take shape for all humankind. Through the chaos and the killing, through the heartache and inner emptiness, the birth of a heightened consciousness is fighting its way out of the womb into the light.

The womb that nurtures this New Time is nothing less than the human unconscious, especially the deepest strata that is the source of humanity's greatest potential. The key to unlocking this deeper realm is to know ourselves in a new and deeper way; to become aware of life's opposites-the persona and the shadow, the good and evil, the loves and hatreds-that dwell within each of us, all of which constitute the totality of who we really are. The task is to strengthen the dialogue between consciousness and the limitless creative powers of the collective unconscious, wherein resides life's highest meaning.

Some eternal, infinite power is at work in each of us, as well as in the universe. This power is the source of renewal of all man's most vital and creative energies. With all our problems and possibilities, the future depends on how we-each in his or her own unique way-tap into that eternal renewing dynamic that dwells in the deepest reaches of the human soul.

What we've considered tonight are only some of the challenges at the heart of our moment in history.

Thank you.

Towards a New Worldview, A More Complete Orientation

2008-10-30T21:30:15Z

One of the most difficult changes to understand in life is a change in a people’s worldview or basic orientation. Throughout history worldviews have changed and, over time, evolved. This process results both from outward developments such as availability of new knowledge and inventions, as well as from an inward process, a psychological and spiritual maturation.

Two familiar examples of such changes are, first, ancient Greece: the difference between eighth century BCE Greece and the mythological gods of the Iliad on the one hand, and, on the other hand, fourth century BCE Greece of Plato and the birth of philosophy. A more familiar change of orientation was the psychological shift from the Middle Ages of Dante and the building of Chartres and the great cathedrals of Europe, to the worldview of Petrarch and the Renaissance. It was a monumental shift of emphasis: from the vertical perspective—man’s relation to a God in heaven—to a horizontal perspective—man’s relationship to the natural phenomena of Earth. The historian Will Durant summarized this shift saying, the Renaissance “replaced the supernatural with the natural as the focus of human concern…”

Such changes evolve over centuries. When a people is in the midst of such a change, it is rare that what is happening is generally perceived or evaluated, as people are primarily occupied with simply coping with life’s daily demands, even as they agonize over spoken and unspoken questions.

However, it’s clear what used to comprise Western Civilization has been passing through just such a developing “civilizational change” for at least the past three centuries. More to the point, this change is not confined to just one country as described in the above example of Greece. Today’s “civilizational change” engulfs the entire globe. Thus what we are facing is not so much a crisis between civilizations as a crisis within civilizations. This is true for all civilizations today—for what once was called Western Civilization, for Islam, as well as for the Hindu and Chinese civilizations, albeit this crisis moves at a different pace in different parts of the world.

It may even be that what once was called a “civilization” has become an anachronism. For a civilization presumes a shared worldview, commonly accepted standards of conduct, a shared perception of values, and above all, a collective spiritual expression that represents life’s highest meaning.

Such a condition certainly no longer exists in America. When we talk of an “American worldview,” whose worldview are we talking about? Are we talking of the worldview of some forty-eight million Christian fundamentalists who, according to Time magazine, believe the world will literally come to an end in their lifetime? Or the worldview of the high-tech visionaries who believe that when computers go millions of times faster, the world will reach an “Omega Point” and all life will be transformed beyond anything we can imagine today? Or the postmodernists who believe there is no reality; that life is but a social construct? Or the computer scientists who see everyone eventually linked to an electronic consciousness and “Global Brain” via the Internet? Or the intellectual who believes rational intelligence is life’s highest authority? Or those molecular biologists who assert we’ve reached the end of the Homo sapiens epoch, and that our descendents will not be human as we now use the term.

One could go on, but the point is clear. The crisis within civilizations is a spiritual and psychological crisis that, in America, has been increasingly evident over the past century. We’re now reaching some sort of critical moment. The psychological function of religion has been at least threefold: to validate a certain moral order within a given civilization; to offer myths that connect a civilization to life’s transcendent dimension; and to link the individual’s conscious life with its unconscious grounding. These essential psychological functions are relevant for all time; and we shall not long endure solely on the basis of humanistic scientific materialism. The question for America, and for Europe as well, is whether we’re losing that essential psychological function religion has played, and if so, what are the potential consequences.

A global crisis

We see this same type of crisis happening around the world. In what once was called “Christendom,” the Catholic Church has become concerned that Islam will eventually become the largest religion in Europe, as most Europeans themselves are now secularist. In America, despite the rise of Evangelical Fundamentalism (which is actually a symptom of the crisis) people are turning to Buddhism, Eastern philosophy, all sorts of “New Age” spirituality, multiplying schools of psychology, while at the same time, America’s “creative minority” (scientists, educators, artists, writers, etc.) is predominantly secularist. In China, while the Communist leadership now openly preaches Confucianism, Christianity is becoming a sub-culture, as a “crisis of belief” wracks the country. In sub-Sahara Africa, which historically has had its tribal gods and spiritualistic rituals, Christianity is exploding. In historically Catholic South America, Evangelical belief is spreading. Increasingly, people are becoming detached from their society’s founding orientation, and are searching for some new belief, some new point of reference in life.

So how’s the U.S. doing?

How do we best gauge the spiritual and psychological life of today’s America? By public opinion polls that tell us well over ninety percent of the American people say they believe in God? By how many people attend a place of worship? By the proliferation of over 1500 so-called religions in America, including some anomaly called “Catholic-Buddhists”? By our bookstores’ bulging sections on religion, spirituality and finding meaning in life? That’s one way to look at America’s spiritual condition.

Another way is to examine the content of our culture and what it’s telling us. And here we find a different story. America has had nearly a century of literature, art, cinema and higher education expressing first, the supremacy and then the negation of reason; the denial of any God; freedom as unfettered ego desires; the impossibility of absolute truth; nihilism at the core of existence; the absence of any transcendent reality; unlimited material consumption and the irrationality of any degree of self-restraint; and now the arrival of the multiple de-centered self.   Evaluating this is important, because culture is to a nation what dreams are to an individual—an indication of what’s going on in the inner life, in the unconscious realm, which is the crucible of consciousness. In this sense, the unconscious is the crucible of civilization.

When one looks at American culture over the past century, it’s clear that a predominant theme, at least since World War I, has been the supposed “meaninglessness of life,” a thought antithetical to any authentic religion. We see it in The Great Gatsby as Daisy says, “I’m pretty cynical about everything. I think everything’s terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people.” This was written in 1925 as new technologies were creating new industries, and the stock market was booming. Daisy’s lament was followed in the ‘50s by Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, and later by Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike’s novels. Indeed, nothing could denote the alienation of twentieth-century American literature better than the name of Updike’s main character, “Angstrom.” In the elite universities, Camus, Sartre and Beckett were all the rage. Closer to our own time, Walker Percy, one of the giants of late 20th century literature, decried, “You live in a deranged age…more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological achievement, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” And Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, lamented a culture “that has been emptied of meaning and feeling…signs of a sort of nihilism.”

It helps to evaluate what the creation and marketing of such cultural artifacts represents. For the fact is, there wouldn’t be a market for the alienated and psychotic themes of our movies, TV and literature if such themes weren’t resonating with something going on in us as a people. Culture is simply a mirror held up to a people’s psychic life. Taken as a whole, Western art, literature and cinema have long revealed a profound reorientation taking place in the depths of the Western psyche. As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biographer, Andrew Le Vot, wrote about the meaning of The Great Gatsby, it is “not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabitable, absurd material universe.”

In one sense, The Great Gatsby represents a turning point for America. It’s publication and subsequent resonance in the American psyche signaled that while there are still millions of Christians in America, the historic religion of America and the West was no longer the informing dynamic in the soul of America’s “creative minority” who give us our literature, theater, cinema, music, science and education.

At the same time, in Europe T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy and others were signaling the same message. The “falcon cannot hear the falconer,” with the result that we are “hollow men,” wondering “who or what shall fill his place?”

Rise of Fundamentalism

One aspect of this worldwide spiritual/psychological reorientation is the increasing presence of fundamentalism, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Shinto. It’s worth considering this phenomenon, as it’s a dominant force in national and world affairs.

At least 60% of Americans believe the prophecies of the Book of Revelation will come true. Opinion polls tell us that a large percentage of the American fundamentalists who support Israel do so because they believe Israel must control all of Palestine before Christ will return. A well-known senator argued on the floor of the senate that Israel should maintain control of all of the Palestinian territories “because God said so. Look it up in the book of Genesis.” The “Left Behind” series of books is a publishing phenomenon, having sold some sixty million copies.

For Christian fundamentalists, the Book of Revelation is a focal point of reference. It spells out the “end times,” the Apocalypse, and it is taken literally by millions of people. Herein lies perhaps the basic difference between fundamentalists and what might be termed “traditional” Christians. The traditionalists take Revelation symbolically, as did St. Augustine, not literally. This difference between literalism and symbolism is at the core of the difference between fundamentalists and traditionalists, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu. All fundamentalisms tend to divide the world between insiders and outsiders, between true believers and unbelievers, the saved and the sinners, “us” and “them.”

The implicit question raised by the Book of Revelation is, what is meant by “end times”? Those who interpret Revelation literally believe it means the end of the world. As mentioned earlier, at least forty-eight million Americans believe it will happen in their lifetime. But another interpretation is that “end times” means the end of the Christian eon. The Church fathers long ago prophesied the end of the Christian epoch, but no date was given as to when it would happen. In fact, the death of the Church is actually built into Christian dogma. So the meaning of the Apocalypse may not be the end of the world, but the end of a particular way of interpreting transcendent reality, while some new spiritual dispensation emerges. It’s happened several times before in history.

The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek meaning “revelation, an uncovering of what has been hidden.” According to the late depth psychologist Edward Edinger who wrote a book on the psychological meaning of Revelation, there are four features of the image of the Apocalypse: revelation, judgment, destruction and renewal. Revelation discloses new truth about life. Judgment assesses the state of contemporary conditions in light of this new truth. Destruction is the collapse of old forms that are no longer effective within the context of the new truth. Renewal is the recreation of civilization according to the requirements of the new truth. The Western psyche has focused on the destruction aspect of the Apocalypse, virtually ignoring the renewal that is to follow.

Against this background, from a psychological point of view, the story of the 20th century might be seen as the working out of these four features of the meaning of the Apocalypse. In all areas of life, humanity has gained more new truth about nature and the workings of the universe in the 20th century than in all previous history combined. This new understanding of nature and the universe has only accelerated the psychological and spiritual reorientation that had been underway for well over a century, and thus we have increasingly judged the effectiveness of former beliefs, relationships and institutions. Such assessments are at the heart of the spiritual search taking place in America today, such as our redefining the status of social relationships, or the role and authority of the nation-state. Then has come the destruction or collapse of old forms of how we have organized our affairs, forms that are no longer effective in light of the implementation of our new discoveries. This collapse is seen in our need to reinvent all our institutions, from education to new modes of self-government. And finally comes the birth of some new pattern of civilization based on a new expression of truth, or on our understanding of it. A harbinger of this new birth is seen in a greater openness and opportunity for the individual, whatever his or her background or social status. It’s also seen in our expanding sense of identity as we learn more about other cultures and peoples.

This would be the symbolic interpretation of the Book of Revelation and the Apocalypse. But for those with a literal interpretation of Revelation, it is literally world shattering. As Edinger wrote, “Revelation lays out the final scenario of the end of the Christian eon, and describes symbolically the concluding events of the Judeo-Christian myth, the myth that has been the womb and metaphysical container of Western civilization.”

The Roman experience

This same process took place as the ancient gods of the Greco-Roman era gave way to Christianity. During the shift in the Roman world, the poet Lucretius wrote of the “aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage.” There was a loss of collective meaning; a disappearance of what had represented life's highest value. The old gods no longer resonated in the depths of the soul, especially of the leadership class. Belief atrophied. The cry "Great Pan is dead!" was heard throughout the empire. The God-image that had informed the inner life and the culture of the Greco-Roman world for a thousand years lost its compelling force. There was a breakdown of the historic psychic structures that had been the source and container of Greco-Roman morals and beliefs. This issued into the collapse of the ethical and social guidelines underlying civilized order. New religions and sects arose and vied for popular allegiance.

At its heart, the emergence of Christianity in the Roman world was a long-term psychological shift of the prevailing God-image from the multiple gods of the Greco-Roman period, to the monotheistic God of Christianity. A new God-image emerged for a new phase of psychological maturation and human experience. It was every bit as much a psychological development as it was a spiritual maturation. From Ireland to Italy, Europe went through a period of the transformation of underlying principles and symbols. This process took several centuries to work itself out.

Our turn now

A similar, yet different, process is transforming Europe and America today. Europe and America have developed in the context of a religious expression that is two thousand years old. That is a psychological fact as much as it is a spiritual fact. Christianity, which emerged over time from the Western collective psyche, is our tradition, our roots. It is inbred in the deepest reaches of our unconscious, and even though it may be submerged or sometimes expressed in psychologically regressive terms, it is a part of us.

And yet, it is not the truth of Christianity that is surfacing from the depths of our collective unconscious. Rather, in broad general terms, what we see emerging is a general “sickness of the soul.” Our “entertainment society” has become the “bread and circuses” of Roman times, while the founding truth of Western Civilization no longer speaks to us.

Historically, this is part of a normal process of decay and rebirth, and we must understand it. The American poet, James Russell Lowell, once wrote: “Truth is eternal, but her effluence, with endless change, is fitted to the hour; her mirror turned forward to reflect the promise of the future, not the past.” We are in the midst of moving out of the spiritual and psychological context of the past, and reaching for the promise of the future.

To appreciate this change of context, look at the difference between the life of a person living in Christ’s time and the average person’s life today. Then, few traveled more than thirty miles from their home in their lifetime. There was no news of the world; indeed, they didn’t even know there was a “rest of the world,” and what world they did know, they thought was flat. The local priest was the only source of news or intellectual stimulation for the average person. Life was a subsistence struggle.

Compare that with the life of the average space-age, globalized, digitalized person today. No need to elaborate. But the point here is what Lowell says above: Eternal truth is fitted to the hour, to the psychological maturation of the contemporary generation. In other words, the manner in which transcendent reality was expressed two thousand years ago is completely inadequate for the contemporary psyche, as it has developed over the past five hundred years.

This fact began to be understood by the West’s more sensitive spirits over two hundred years ago, shortly after the French Revolution. In 1805 Matthew Arnold wrote “Dover Beach” lamenting the “retreat of faith.” In 1850, Lord Tennyson, England’s Poet Laureate, warned of “the secular abyss that is to come.” In “Les Miserables, Victor Hugo announced that the phrase “God is dead” is the fashionable intellectual wisdom of Paris. Elsewhere in France, Baudelaire urged his readers to study “the rhetorical methods of Satan,” proclaiming, “The true saint is the person who whips and kills the people for the good of the people”—an attitude that later was given concrete expression in fascism and communism. In Russia, Dostoyevsky’s Ivan concluded that if there were no God, then “Everything is permitted.” Then in 1883, Nietzsche confirmed the prevailing European cultural attitude; “God is dead,” a thought which merely described the contemporary spiritual and psychological condition of Europe’s “creative minority.”

I don’t know what the psychological and cultural lag time is between Europe and America, but we Americans definitely inherit whatever cultural tradition has been expressed in Europe. The exuberant public response to the 1913 New York Armory modern art show foreshadowed a certain psychological break with the American and classical past. Gone were the expressions of harmony and the monumental interpretation of a Raphael, the richness and humanity of Rembrandt, or the transcendent themes of a Cole, Bierstadt or Church. In their place were more than thirteen hundred paintings of Matisse, Picasso and many other European artists who fought to free art from the world of human affairs and, eventually, from visual reality itself.

Yet it wasn’t until “The Great Gatsby” that the American literary elite displayed a definite attitude quite different from traditional nineteenth century American expressions.

I’ve already commented on twentieth century American culture, so there’s no need to comment further. The previous paragraphs have only illustrated Arnold Toynbee’s observation that the contemporary spiritual and psychological transition has been under way at least since the late eighteenth century. With the advent of instantaneous global information technologies, it has been vastly accelerated, for information technologies transmit not only information, but psychic states of mind as well.

It’s because of the magnitude and significance of such developments that, as I suggested earlier, the crisis is not so much between civilizations, but within so-called “civilized life” itself. Thus the next three decades may be the most decisive thirty-year period in human history.

So what do we do?

How do we respond to such a situation? We're already responding in the most sweeping redefinition of life America has ever known. We're redefining and restructuring all our institutions. Corporations are redefining their mission, structure and modus operandi. In education, we’re trying countless new experiments, from vouchers to charter schools to home schooling. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is helping lift the burden off the back of our legal system. Civic and charitable organizations are assuming functions formerly undertaken by local governments. There are countless efforts underway to redress the severe environmental imbalance we’ve created.   More people are involved in efforts to help the elderly and those in poverty. In fact, it’s estimated that well over fifty percent of all adult Americans donate a portion of their time to non-profit social efforts. Clearly we have been developing a more conscious relationship with nature and the cosmos.

Perhaps this is a modest start, but at least it's a start. Plainly, there's another level of effort to move to. Bill Joy, described by the Economist as “the Edison of the Internet,” suggests such efforts must include a decision whether or not to continue research and development of technologies that could, in Joy's words, “bring the world to the edge of extinction.” Obviously, such an examination must be done in a global context if it's to be valid.

But another question is, how are you and I to live in a world that's changing faster than individuals and institutions can assimilate? How do we maintain anchorage and balance when we’re in between two historic ages?

I believe the starting point is understanding; simply to understand the underlying changes taking place in the world, and understanding ourselves as individuals. As it says in Proverbs, “With all thy getting, get understanding.” This may sound a bit too simplistic, but there’s a psychological reason the scriptures say this. The great scriptures of the world are not the expression of the rational intellect as it has evolved over the past five hundred years. Rather, to a large degree, they’re the expression of the unconscious, more particularly the collective unconscious, that deepest level of the psyche that is common to all humanity. So it’s our link with the source of transcendent wisdom that’s telling us to “get understanding.” And we must get it not simply on the intellectual level. We must assimilate it so it becomes a part of us.

I think the reason for this is that there seems to be a transformative effect about absorbing understanding. Intellectual understanding doesn’t change us deep inside. Assimilated understanding does. And unless our understanding aligns our approach to life with the needs of the times, it’s of minimal ultimate value. Granted, the act of assimilating understanding takes time and work. It means living with and pondering a truth long enough so that it gradually seeps into my being. Assimilation is not a rational process; it’s a soul process.

How do I understand myself? One way is to examine my reaction to people. There are two parts of reactions. First, the objective analysis of what I’m reacting to in the other person. And second, the emotional energy behind the reaction. It’s by examining that emotional energy that a deeper understanding of myself can be gained.

Edward Edinger has suggested three other ways to understand oneself. First, to examine what I love and what I hate. For love and hate go to the very core of the human personality. We must ask ourselves: Whom do I hate? Which faction or nation do I fight against? Whoever and whatever they are, they are a part of me, for I am bound to that which I hate as surely as I’m bound to that which I love. From the psychological standpoint, the important thing is where my psychic energy is lodged, not whether I am for or against something. Thus the more we look at our loves and hates, the more we understand ourselves.

Edinger’s second suggestion is to examine my projections. A projection is simply an automatic process whereby I perceive images or contents of my own unconscious to be in the other person or nation. Projection is a completely unconscious process, which makes it more difficult to recognize it in myself. Other people can easily see my projections, just as other nations can easily see America’s collective projections. (The evil is “out there” in the “other,” not in me or my nation.)

C.G. Jung, one of the world’s most perceptive psychologists of the past century, said that the effect of projection is to isolate a person from other people, since instead of a real relation to them there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into “the replica of one’s own unknown face.” In other words, I accuse other people of characteristics or motives that are actually hidden in my own unconscious. Thus we all need the help of family or friends in order to see our projections, which, if we keep working on it, will eventually reduce them.

Finally, it’s essential to realize that my psyche is made up of “opposites”—love and hate, good and evil, generosity and selfishness, belief and doubt, etc. Such opposites are indispensable preconditions of all psychological life. No one escapes them. If I do not see these opposites clearly within myself, I tend to project them onto others, especially the negative ones. All conflict—social, ethnic, political, international—stems from projection of one or more of the opposites. The international situation today is a horrific example of the warring opposites within us as individuals (leaders and led), which evolve into crises. Understanding that these opposites dwell within each of us is the sine qua non of psychological maturity. If I emotionally identify with either one of the opposites, that prevents me from being a “carrier of wholeness.” (That doesn’t mean that I don’t hold a balance between the opposites, or objectively evaluate one opposite as being more beneficial than the other.) If enough individuals consciously see our opposites and hold them in such a balance, then we become a carrier of wholeness, and we contribute to a world that is crying out to be made whole.

Intimations of some new expression

Some new spiritual orientation may gradually assimilate into its own forms of understanding the spiritual and cultural expressions that have preceded it, much as Christianity was influenced by Greek, Jewish and Persian thought. Jung suggests that the God-image of a completely benevolent God of love may eventually evolve into a God-image in which there’s a union of opposites, which, from a psychological standpoint, would represent a greater wholeness of personality. Thus a new God-image would include male and female, spirit and earth, good and evil. The Christian God-image seeks perfection—“Be ye perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect.”—which implies separation of the shadow. A new God-image may seek completeness—which, from a psychological standpoint, would mean assimilation of the individual shadow so that one becomes a broader and more complete personality. (And lest we are tempted to think we’ve become too sophisticated, and have grown beyond the need for a God-image, it’s well to remember that every civilization that lost it’s God-image, it’s collective sense of highest transcendent meaning, eventually disintegrated from internal psychic disorientation and loss of an informing meaning and cohesion.)

Thus given every individual’s basic requirement for psychological continuity and connection to our roots, we’re faced with the need for a psychological reinterpretation of the scriptures that have been the psychic foundation of Western civilization.   Such a psychological reinterpretation could break the expressions of two thousand years ago out of their archaic thought-forms, and convey them in thought-patterns that resonate with the contemporary psyche.2 Psychologically, we carry all the past with us; thus outdated expressions need to be reinterpreted so they are accessible to the modern psyche, as the psychological and symbolic truth embedded in scriptural expressions represents the only solid basis for any civilized Western order.

The challenge is that we now feel no connection with what has been the psychological foundation of Western civilization. We need to reconnect not with the dogma of the past, but with the living experience, the psychological reality, that has been the underpinning of our culture for the last two millennia, and take it forward for the unfolding global epoch. That Infinite Ineffable Unknowable, which is at the heart of all of the world’s scripture, needs to be rearticulated so that the truth embedded in it resonates with people of whatever background or belief.   To some degree or other, all cultures are faced with this same challenge over the coming decades.

Conclusion

In summary, we live between two ages. There’s a new epoch of human meaning struggling to take shape for all humankind. Through the chaos and the killing, through the heartache and inner emptiness, the birth of a heightened consciousness is fighting its way out of the womb into the light.

The womb that nurtures this New Time is nothing less than the human unconscious, especially the deepest strata that is the source of humanity’s greatest potential. The key to unlocking this deeper realm is to know ourselves in a new and deeper way; to become aware of life’s opposites—the façade I present to the world, and my unrecognized shadow; the good and evil; the loves and hatreds—that dwell within each of us, all of which constitute the totality of who we really are. The task is to strengthen the dialogue between consciousness and the limitless creative powers of the collective unconscious, wherein resides life’s highest meaning.

Some boundless, inexplicable power is at work in each of us, as well as in the universe. This power is the source of renewal of all man’s most vital and creative energies. With all our problems and possibilities, the future depends on how we—each in his or her own unique way—tap into that eternal renewing dynamic that dwells in the deepest reaches of the human soul.

Helpful Hints for Living Between Two Ages

2008-10-30T18:58:53Z

Here are some helpful hints for living between the two ages:

- For most people, simply living life at a slower, more measured pace may help. Admittedly, this involves some hard choices.

- Studying the high points of the past two centuries so that today's events are understood within the context of the cultural, technological and psychological trends shaping contemporary life.

- Studying the psychology of information technologies and their generally unrecognized fragmenting effects. One place to start is with the study of "Media Ecology" (read Neil Postman). Also, minimizing exposure to "information overload."

- Some regular form of quiet reflection alone; possibly some meditation.

- Regular sustained walking in the woods, in the mountains or on the beach in a manner that reconnects us to nature and offers time for relaxed reflection.

- Understanding the 19th-20th century shift of Western culture from a Christian-based culture, to modernism, to postmodernism, and how this shift has been reflected in the collective Western psyche, as well as in our values and culture.

- Reviewing the literature of the giants of earlier times such as Melville, Goethe and Dante, as well as Greek drama, which is a treasure trove of archetypal images.

- Reading something of the world's great spiritual literature such as St. Paul's Epistles, Proverbs, the Pentateuch, the Koran, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching or the Veda.

- Exploring indigenous cultures and how they have understood the relationship between the inner spiritual and the outer material worlds.

- Awareness of the "shadow" side of my personality, that part of the personality containing undesirable characteristics which we prefer not to consciously admit to, and which we thus tend to project onto others (we do this as individuals, as races, and as a nation).

- Being actively involved in "building the future" whether in efforts to preserve the environment, mentor our youth, or other volunteer social programs.

- Finally, pursue those activities that deepen your inner life. Contemporary life tends to be very shallow, and if we feed off of it, we become shallow people. Seek depth in your life in whatever way is natural for you. Maybe its reconnecting yourself to nature by taking more time at the beach or in the mountains. Maybe it's reading some of the world's scriptures. Maybe it's listening to the music of the world's greatest composers. However you do it, build depth and greatness into your life.

What are the Two Ages?

2008-10-30T18:56:54Z

Historians frequently divide the past into different periods or "ages." Thus in Western history we speak of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance or the Industrial Age. Each era is defined by certain characteristics. The time between one phase and the next can be both disruptive as well as full of the promise of new possibilities. Today, we are living in just such an "in-between" period, between two ages. The following outline suggests the characteristics of the age we are leaving, as well as the distinctiveness of the age that is emerging.

Some Characteristics of the Two Ages

From		To
Dominance of print communication		Emergence of electronic communication
American immigration coming primarily from Europe		Immigration coming primarily from Asia and Latin America
The nation state as outer limits of political identification		Emergence of a global awareness
A relatively slow pace of change		Change at an exponential rate
An age whose myths, religion and culture were formed within a limited awareness of time and space		An epoch whose myths, religion and culture will be shaped by the apparent infinity of time and space
Concepts such as civil society, legal safeguards governing business, due process, and equality of women are primarily Western beliefs		Western concepts are adopted by the rest of the world
Majority of world’s population lives in rural areas (natural environment)		Majority of world’s population lives in urban areas (artificial environment)
Ultimate destructive power held only by states		Ultimate destructive power held by individuals
Epoch of being Earth-bound		Exploration of other bodies in Space
Atlantic-based economic, political, military world dominance		Global age of shared power
Economic development a national endeavor		Economic development part of a global system
Land, labor and capital as major basis of economic growth		Information and knowledge as engines of economic growth
Parents control information environment in which children are raised		From earliest age, children have access to all information and cultural expressions
Continual numerical expansion of the Caucasian race		Barring a reversal of trends, the shrinkage of the Caucasian race
Traditional world cultures as stabilizing social force		Homogenized world tastes and attitudes lacking historic meaning, depth and cultural function
Birth as a result of natural means of conception		Human manipulation as artificial means of conception
Nature as isolated phenomena		Nature as an integrated system
Absorbing information in small amounts, thus allowing it to be integrated into a larger schema of understanding		Information overload that prevents formation of cohesive worldview
Sustainable population growth		Population pressures threatening capacity for civil society and viability of our natural habitat
The natural environment as the context of life		Technical environment as the context of life
The masculine/patriarchal epoch		Feminine instincts play major role in shaping events
Manipulation and dominance of external nature		Manipulation and dominance of human nature
Human beings as Earth’s supreme intelligence		Artificial-computational-intelligence greater than that of humans
Psychological projections seen as independent realities		Psychological projections seen as workings of the psyche
Traditional religions express shared sense of life’s meaning		“Meaninglessness” becomes primary cultural/philosophical theme, triggering search for new expression of individual and collective meaning

Global Changes Reshaping the Corporate Environment

2008-10-30T18:45:10Z

A Presentation for the Public Affairs Council, Washington, D.C. --

I see you've had an advanced tutorial this morning on the basic building blocks of Issue Management. You certainly started with one of the masters. Chris Nelson is the best. If your company ever wants an up-to-the second intelligence source on trade, monetary issues, inside Washington, or global flash points, they could do no better than to subscribe to the daily on-line "Nelson Report."

My own work is not so much Issue Management as it is trend analysis. I'm sure you know many trend analysts, as tracking social attitudes and trends and how they affect consumer tastes is big business. My particular focus is somewhat different. It's looking at the dimension of global change taking place, and attempting to place that in some context of understanding.

We all know something immense is taking place worldwide today. It's not just Iraq, or even terrorism. For some time now, it's been obvious the tectonic plates of life are shifting. How do we put these mega-changes in some understandable framework for decision-makers? In a sense, if my particular work has any single product, it's perspective. Perspective on the full dimension of global change, and what it might mean for the next decade or so.

And that's what I've been asked to talk about today.

How are we to make sense of how the world is changing? Jihad vs. McWorld. Nukes in North Korea. A potential India-Pakistan nuclear shoot-out. The merger of human and artificial intelligence creating what the scientists call the "post-human" era. We seem to have come to the end of the world, as we've known it. The next three decades increasingly loom as the most decisive 30-year period in history.

To consider how the global context in which your companies operate is changing, I want to offer the view of one of the world's most experienced observers of global events. In 1957 Peter Drucker wrote, "No one born after the turn of the 20th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols." What Drucker is suggesting is that the fundamentals of life that have anchored nations for centuries are forming some new configuration. This is the context in which every company in the world has to plan, produce and be profitable.

With Drucker's comment in mind, I want to be more specific, and briefly offer five trends that are helping shape the next two decades. After that, I'll focus more tightly on three particular trends.

First, due to accelerating technology development, so much is happening so fast in every part of the world, leaders no longer have any familiar frame of reference within which to understand contemporary events. Life has become a passing blur. Yesterday's crisis has not been resolved, but we can't think about it any more because we've got to confront today's crisis. It's an ad hoc world. One result is that political leaders lack any larger order of purpose and significance, any pattern of meaning that could give collective human existence coherence and lasting relevance. In a sense, we have more information than ever before, but less context of meaning within which to make decisions.

Second, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as "nature," "human," and "life." Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology. Within the next three decades we may have reached the point where the dominant question will be, "What are humans for in a world of completely independent, self-replicating technological capability that can perform most human activities better than humans?"

Third, for the first time in history, what constitutes a family is being redefined. This has disruptive implications for government, education, social cohesion and what we broadly term "civil society". You possibly saw Business Week's article on how the redefinition of the family affects corporate benefits, pensions, compensation and much more. If not, it's worth reading.

Fourth, also for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. This has enormous consequences for management, and most particularly, hiring and training policies.

Fifth, the ability to create change, as well as the attitude that change is desirable, is now an accepted policy of all nations. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than change has been the normal state of affairs. No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. Every nation is, concurrently with all other nations, in a state of crisis as we try to adjust to an ever-accelerating pace of change. Thus there is no global center of stability and order such as Britain provided during the nineteenth century, and America supplied the second half of the twentieth century. And so the international climate is likely to continue to be characterized by conflict and instability.

These are only some of the trends shaping the coming decades. It's going to be a period of mounting complexity, dislocation and uncertainty. At the same time we shall realize new possibilities beyond anything we've yet experienced.

Now, let's focus in more tightly on three other trends.

Globalization. We all have some idea of what globalization means. Most of the discussion about globalization focuses on trade, currency relationships, and the need for non-western nations to adopt free markets and democratic political systems.

But I suggest the essence of globalization is the human instinct for greater communication between peoples and cultures, and the subsequent merging of modes of life-including economics-as well as beliefs. This process began very slowly in the 16th century with European exploration and colonialization of Africa, South America and Asia. It picked up speed in the 1840s with the invention of the telegraph, the first component of what has become the world's electronic information communication system. Clearly, in the 20th century globalization moved at an exponential pace. In its present phase, it means that western social, cultural and philosophical ideas are gradually seeping into the fabric of the rest of the world, and a reciprocal transfer of culture and lifestyles from non-western nations to the west.

Look at what's happening. Nations are adopting such ideas as the sanctity of the individual, due process of law, universal education, the equality of women, human rights, private property, legal safeguards governing business and finance, concepts of civil society, and perhaps most importantly, the ability of people to take charge of their destiny and not simply accept the hand dealt them in life.

We take these ideas for granted, but for millions of people such concepts are completely new modes of thought and behavior. While we Americans believe what works for America will work for others, we're sometimes unaware that the cultural differences between the U.S. and the rest of the world represent significant psychological differences. Take some contrasts between America and Asia. America prizes individuality, while Asia emphasizes relationships and community. Americans see humans dominating nature, while Asians see humans as part of nature. In the U.S. there is a division between mind and heart, while in Asia mind and heart are unified.

I mention this to illustrate the deep psychological trauma nations are experiencing as they confront the effects of globalization. We Americans, raised on the instinct of change, say, "Great. Let tradition go. Embrace the new." But much of the world says, "Wait a minute. Traditions are our connection to the past. If we jettison them, we'll endanger our social cohesion and psychic stability." Many thoughtful Muslims clearly fear that the western model of globalization, based on secular, scientific rationalism, will eventually bring about the destruction of Islam.

What we Americans fail to appreciate is that the pace of globalization is driven by the increase in the pace of technology development in America. The faster computers we produce, the faster other nations must change their established patterns of living. No nation today can develop without adjusting to the global economic system anchored in American information technology. Just look at global financial flows and how they operate. Thus all nations struggle as they try to adjust to the new global system. It's a psychological as well as structural crisis.

One aspect of globalization is the onslaught of the largest migration in world history. For those of you whose companies have plants in China, your companies may be facing an enormous social upheaval in the coming years. For in China alone, there are one hundred million people on the move from the countryside to the cities. This is causing urban problems of a magnitude never before experienced.

In the West, migration is changing the face of Europe. The European Union needs 180 million immigrants in the next three decades simply to keep its population at 1995 levels, as well as to keep the current ratio of retirees to workers. In Brussels, over fifty percent of the babies born are Muslim. In Germany, the death rate has exceeded the birth rate for decades, so they now have to fly in planeloads of technicians from India just to maintain their high tech structure. In England, there are now more practicing Muslims than Anglicans. In Russia, the population has dropped three million in the past decade. In general, demographers suggest that present patterns point to a decline of the western European population of 20 million in the next two decades.

As migration increases, the historic legends that are the basis of national identities tend to wane. As one British historian put it, "A white majority that invented the national mythologies underpinning modern European culture lives in an almost perpetual state of fear that it and its way of life are about to disappear." In Italy, the Archbishop of Bologna recently warned that Italy is in danger of "losing its identity" due to the immigration from North Africa and central Europe. The Catholic Church is facing the distinct probability of Islam becoming the largest European religion. The fear of such demographic shifts and their potential consequences is the subtext for everything else happening in Europe today. It's far more traumatic than adjusting to increased economic integration or to the euro.

In the coming years, the face of nations will be very different from today. Traditional images of what it means to be French, German, Italian or English are going to change just as radically as the image of what it means to be American has changed in recent decades.

At the end of the day, for globalization to succeed, if we're going to build a global age, it's got to be built on more than free markets and the Internet. It's got to be built on some common view of life far more inclusive than "my nation," "my race" or "my religion". The challenge both for corporations and for nations in the next decades is to see the world whole, and act in accord with that awareness. Frankly, I think corporate leadership is doing a much better job of understanding that than is political leadership. But to be legitimate, globalization must validate itself in terms of equitable benefits for all nations, and sensitivity to other nations' need for social and political stability.

The second trend shaping the coming decades is a new stage of technology development that is without precedent in the history of science and technology.

Indeed it has. Take America. During the last century, the real GDP, in constant dollars, increased by $48 trillion, much of this wealth built on the marvels of technology. A few years ago, I had a quadruple heart by-pass performed with the most modern medical technology. So believe me, I'm a fan of what technology can do.

But along with technological wonders, uncertainties arise. The question today is whether we're creating certain technologies not to improve the human condition, but for purposes that appear to be to replace human meaning and significance altogether. Let me explain.

For at least the past thirty years, psychologists have known that overwhelming people with more technological change than they can process clearly leads to various forms of emotional and mental instability. But what we're confronted with now is not simply acceleration in the pace of change; it's the acceleration of acceleration itself. In other words, technological change growing not at a constant rate, but an exponential rate.

It's estimated that the rate of technological change doubles every decade-20% one decade, 40% the next decade, 80% the third decade, and so on; that at today's rate of change, we'll experience one hundred calendar years of technological change in the next twenty-five years; and that due to the nature of exponential growth, the 21st century as a whole will experience nearly one thousand times more technological change than did the 20th century.

But it's not only the rate of change that challenges us; it's also the character of change. British Telecom's futures research unit predicts that eventually "a combination of man and computer search will be able to identify the genes needed to produce a people of any chosen characteristics." Someone, somewhere, they say, "will produce an elite race of people, smart, agile and disease resistant." Ray Kurzweil, one of the world's foremost authorities on artificial intelligence, predicts, "When machines are derived from human intelligence but are a million times more capable, there won't be a clear distinction between human and machine intelligence-there's going to be a merger." Another tech visionary tells us that the wiring of human and artificial minds into one planetary soul will ultimately mean "the disappearance of the self altogether, right into the collective organism of the mind." No socialist or communist could have had a greater vision of the collectivized society. Thus arrives what some scientific intellectuals call the "post-human" or "post-species" age. For the tech visionaries, it's the next step in evolution.

If this sounds like science fiction, it's not. It's what some of America's most accomplished scientists are working to achieve.

And so we've come to dismiss the counsel of the scientific father of our age. Said Einstein in a speech at Cal Tech, "Concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest of all technical endeavors."

Will all these technological visions come to pass? One wonders. Project forward the predicted million-fold increase in the speed of computers and the resulting ratcheting up of the pace of life over the next couple of decades, and one ends up asking, "how much more of this can the human metabolism take?" As it is, multiplying social pathologies already indicate human resistance to such change. While stress is still a major issue, the deeper issue your companies now face is individual psychological integrity. Thirty years ago, major corporations didn't have to think much about the mental health of their employees. Now, I suspect, mental and emotional health is the fastest growing component of health insurance for many of your companies. To help relieve the mounting pressures, some of your companies provide employees with special rooms for relaxing, meditation, prayer, taking naps or simply listening to music.

Other indicators tell of further psychic disturbances caused by too rapid a pace of change. Loneliness has reached epidemic proportions. ADD-attention deficit disorder-is skyrocketing for adults. The suicide rate among women has increased 200% in the past two decades. Books are now written for eight year-old children advising them how to recognize the symptoms of stress, and how to deal with it in their own lives. Character controlling drugs are now given to three year-olds. Thus the University of Louisville concludes in a study on health that our very mode of life has now become our principle cause of emotional and mental instability.

Some people are already searching for the wisest way to approach such potential challenges as the new technologies present. I'm sure you know of Bill Joy, cofounder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, and described by the Economist magazine as "the Edison of the Internet." He suggests that we've reached the point where we must "limit development of technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." His concerns are based on the unknown potential of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, driven by computers capable of infinite speeds, and the possible uncontrollable self-replication of these technologies. Joy acknowledges the pursuit of knowledge as one of the primary human goals since earliest times. But, he says, "If open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs." Joy well knows he's pushing against the wind, but he clearly thinks it's worth it.

But there's a deeper question.

Ultimately, technology deals with extension of human capability. It does not address the question of the meaning and purpose of human society. Thus, in my view, the great need in the coming two decades is not so much for more mind-blowing technology, as it is to explore the depths of the human personality; to discover what deeper meaning can be given to human existence as we enter a radically changed environment of technological possibility.

To consider the third trend, I want to quote Adlai Stevenson, who had the unfortunate luck of twice being the democratic presidential candidate chosen to oppose Dwight Eisenhower. In a 1954 speech at Columbia University, Stevenson asked, "Are America's problems but surface symptoms of something even deeper, of a moral and human crisis in the western world which might even be compared to the fourth, fifth and sixth-century crisis where the Roman Empire was transformed into feudalism and primitive Christianity? Are Americans," Stevenson queried, "passing through one of the great crises of history when man must make another mighty choice?"

A decade later, Joseph Campbell, perhaps the world's foremost authority on the symbolic and psychological meaning of myths, noted in a New York speech, "The world is passing through perhaps the greatest spiritual metamorphosis in the history of the human race."

Stevenson and Campbell-two of the most thoughtful Americans of the mid-20th century-comparing the condition of America and the western world to that of Rome during the end of the ancient world and the emergence of Christianity and feudal Europe. I want to explore the ramifications of their remarks a bit, for this issue has become a dominant driving force not only in America's spiritual life, but also in our culture, our politics, and international affairs.

What actually happened when the Greco-Roman world was transformed into early Christianity? The history books tell a certain amount-the corruption of Rome, the severe decline in population, the neglect and even collapse of the Roman aqueducts, roads and farms.

Those were the outer manifestations, but what happened to the inner life of the people? We get some sense from the Roman poet Lucretius who summed up the temper of the times when he wrote of "aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage." There was a loss of collective meaning; a disappearance of what had represented life's highest value. The God-image that had informed the inner life and culture of the Greco-Roman world for a thousand years lost its compelling force, especially for the leadership class. This led to a breakdown of the historic psychic structures that had been the source and container of Greco-Roman morals and beliefs. A collapse of the ethical and social guidelines underlying civilized order took place.

The history books speak of the "decline" of Rome. But at its heart, it was a long-term-at least four or five centuries-psychological shift of the prevailing God-image of the Greco-Roman period, to a new spiritual dispensation. A new God-image emerged for a new phase of psychological maturity and human experience. From Ireland to Italy, Europe went through a prolonged period of the transformation of underlying principles and symbols.

What Stevenson and Campbell-and others-have suggested is that America and the West have been experiencing a similar long-term spiritual and psychological reorientation. This is what Drucker was referring to when he talked about a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols. What they are suggesting is that America and Europe have come to the end of the Christian era, and the beginning of some new spiritual expression.

When we speak of the end of the Christian eon, what we're suggesting is that, while there are millions of Christians in America, the spiritual impulse that gave highest value and meaning to Western civilization is no longer the inner dynamic of the collective western psyche. It's no longer the informing force in the soul of America and Europe's "creative minority" who give us our literature, theater, science, technology, education, cinema and music. In this sense, the character of our culture is the best indication of what is bubbling up from the depths of the western soul. For culture is to a nation what dreams are to an individual-an indication of what's going on in the depths of the inner life.

Thus America is in the midst of the greatest spiritual change and search in our history. To get an idea of this search, walk into any bookstore and look at the section on religion, spirituality, Buddhism, Nostradamus, yoga, channeling, angels, miracles, Eastern philosophy, addiction, psychic health, mysticism, or finding meaning in life. I suggest that understanding this search is essential for issue management, for the spiritual search has, in its fundamentalist expression, become one of the most potent forces in domestic politics, as well as in international affairs. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that over 50% of the fundamentalists supporting the administration's position on Israel believes Israel must control all of Palestine in order to fulfill the Biblical conditions for Christ's return to earth.

The question remains, given all we've discussed thus far, how do we respond to such a historic moment? In my view, we must respond on at least two levels. The first is the level of our collective life, and here we're already undertaking the most sweeping redefinition of life in our history. All our institutions are being redefined and restructured. Corporations are redefining their mission, structure and modus operandi. In education, countless new experiments are underway, from vouchers to charter schools to home schooling. The legal system is assisted by the increasing use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Functions formerly executed by local governments are now undertaken by civic and charitable organizations. Numerous steps have been taken to redress the severe environmental imbalance we've created. It's estimated that well over fifty percent of all adult Americans donate a portion of their time to non-profit social efforts. Perhaps most importantly, we're gradually integrating a global perspective into the fabric of our education, culture, and international relations. Take West Point, for example. All the cadets at West Point learn a foreign language such as Chinese, Arabic or Russian, and they take a year's course in a foreign culture. So on one level, we're already at grips with some of the manifestations of the reorientation that engulfs us.

Against the background of the three trends I mentioned, perhaps this is a modest start, but at least it's a start. Clearly, there's another level of effort to move to. As Bill Joy suggests, such efforts must include a decision whether or not to continue research and development of technologies that could, in Joy's words, "bring the world to the edge of extinction." Obviously, such an examination must be done in a global context if it's to be valid.

But there's another question of how we respond. The psychological and spiritual change taking place in America and the world is not taking place out in the ether somewhere. It's taking place in all of us-in the depths of our collective soul, whether we're aware of it or not. So I suggest that understanding how these changes affect us both collectively and individually is essential for Issue Management, as well as for each of us personally.

For example, it's becoming clear that the more information a person or company amasses, the more important context and meaning become. We live in two worlds-the world of abstract data and the world of human meaning. Meaning requires reflection and time-consuming thought. Thus numerous companies are training managers in the exercise of reflection or various forms of inner awareness. Managers need an inward center of reflection from which to make considered decisions.

For a deeper understanding of the human-technical relationship, I suggest considering the whole discipline of Media Ecology. In recent years, Media Ecology has grown into a wide-ranging consideration how rapid change and technology affect both our social arrangements and us as individuals. "Google" Media Ecology and you'll gain indispensable insights for Issue Management.

Critical to the question of how we respond is the need to ask ourselves, "What is my highest value in life?" Each of us must know the answer to that question, and for a vital reason. As a result of this transition, Europe and America no longer have the original collective myth that provided Western civilization with its highest significance. Once such conviction has eroded, culture becomes degraded and a nation's youth lack any sense of meaning to life beyond entertainment and the consumer ethic. For one of the functions of a true culture is to transmit to each new generation the collective wisdom and highest meaning life and experience have provided. At this point, I think for America, perhaps technology has become the new American myth. We talk about the high virtues of life, but we live by the power of technology and its possibilities. But technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Technology alone cannot create the greatness of character and meaning needed for a new phase of a nation's journey.

To sum up, as we look towards the coming decades, we cannot escape the fact that some great phase of the human experience is dying, while some new stage seeks to take shape. We daily watch and experience the trauma of this historic shift in world events, in our institutions, in our mounting emotional health issues, and in the ethos of destruction that has become such a cultural motif. At the deepest level, what we're experiencing is a sign of the collective soul passing through the throes of a reorientation, a death and rebirth. We shouldn't be surprised, as it's happened before in history, and now it's our turn to be part of such a critical moment. It's a process of disintegration of old beliefs and structures, and the birth of some fresh understanding and perspective struggling to come into existence. Like all births, it's painful. But the great challenge to each of us and to America is to find our unique way to be a creative part of this new integration seeking to shape a new time of human history.

These, I suggest, are some of the broader currents that will carry us through the next two decades, and will form the inner substance of the daily challenges Issue Management will confront.

Sometimes when I give a talk such as this, I'm asked what I expect people to do with such information. My response is simply: reflect, understand, assimilate and apply.

Thank you.

Toward A Defining Context For Our Times

2008-10-30T18:38:58Z

A Presentation for the Congressional Institute
Washington, D.C.

Good evening. I'm going to ask your indulgence as I forego customary introductory remarks, and jump to the essence of what I've been invited to discuss.

The question I have been wrestling with for some time now is this: Do we comprehend-at a foundational level-what is happening to America and the world? Are we simply passing through what appears to be an extremely dangerous and difficult period of multiple crises, after which life will return to a more familiar normalcy? Or do these converging crises signal the end of the world, as we've known it? Is it reasonable to suggest that the next three decades will be the most decisive 30-year period in history?

As Americans, we've increasingly struggled to understand this question ever since 1991. The end of the Cold War deprived us of a somewhat simplistic catch phrase for defining the world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the search was on for new definitions, and we've gone through a series of slogans such as New World Order, The End of History, The Clash of Civilizations, Globalization, and now the latest vogue, The American Empire. All these phrases contain an element of truth. In my view, however, none encapsulates the totality of what's happening to America and the world. And I suggest-at a minimum-such an understanding is relevant in order to establish the broadest possible context within which to understand and prosecute the war on terrorism.

So I would begin by offering the view of one of the world's most experienced observers of world events. For over sixty years, Peter Drucker has studied how the world has been changing. And this is what he sees: "No one born after the turn of the 20th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols." If Drucker is accurate, what we're in the midst of is a world where, yes, there's been enormous economic, technical and social gains in the past century. But at the same time, the societal arrangements, the philosophical and cultural underpinnings, and the spiritual moorings that had anchored nations for centuries, have been in a transition of epochal proportions. The tectonic plates undergirding civilized life as we've known it are shifting, and it's affecting everything-politics, family life, education, economics and finance, international relations, our culture, as well as the very basis of psychological stability.

Within this context, I want to comment on three trends that, in my view, are part of the driving force of this shift.

First, globalization. Mention the word, and we think of the WTO, the IMF, multinational corporations, NGOs and all the other elements of global economics and finance. But globalization is far more than the emergence of a world economic system, or the adoption of free markets and less authoritarian political structures.

In my view, the essence of globalization is the shrinking of the globe through technology, and the subsequent merging of modes of life-including economics-as well as beliefs. Just think of various aspects of American life being adopted by other nations, which, in a country such as India, are profoundly affecting the foundations of Hinduism. This basic process has been under way for at least the past two centuries, and both Adam Smith and Karl Marx commented on it.

Another feature of globalization is the expansion of our worldview and, ultimately, a widening of individual identity. This widening of identity is a process America has experienced once before-two centuries ago when peoples' sense of identity could no longer be limited to the specific state in which they lived, but was forced to expand to a wider area called America. Daniel Boorstin suggests this process of widening identity took ninety years, and it wasn't until after the Civil War that a distinctly American personality emerged. Obviously, the expansion of identity taking place today is on a wider basis, and the factors involved are far more complicated.

One final word about globalization and identity. In my view, one of the psychological factors behind the fanaticism of a small minority of the Muslim world is the belief that globalization ultimately means the end of Islam. That is a challenge to the very core of individual identity. And we must recognize that this view is not limited to the fanatics; it's widely shared by moderate Muslims who realize the benefits of globalization. In this sense, the central challenge for all nations is how to expand identity to include the globe as a whole, yet stay rooted in the uniqueness of their own history and culture.

A second trend shifting the tectonic plates of life is the radically changed global information environment. Historians often note how the printing press changed the information environment of 16th century Europe. That was nothing compared to what's happening today. Philip Tobias, the world-famous anthropologist, suggests the Internet is "the most significant social development since the invention of language."

Much has been written on this, but I would offer two observations. First, the electronic information system-TV, Internet, and now cell phones that connect to the Internet-this system doesn't simply transmit information. It also transmits psychic states of mind. It's an emotional transmission belt. Nothing quite illustrates this as does the visceral rage that characterized the worldwide 2003 anti-U.S. demonstrations over Iraq. Whatever the legitimate conviction involved, to a major extent those protests were an outbreak of a psychic contagion. The fury of a few immediately becomes globalized, and reaction to Abu Ghraib is but another example

A second effect of our electronic information system is that parents have lost control of the information environment in which their children are raised. Control of that environment has been a prime responsibility of parenthood. Loss of that control is a major factor contributing to what Neil Postman calls "the end of childhood" as a distinct category of growth to adulthood. The concept of childhood as a separate period of life, with its unique problems and needs, is an 18th century development, first fully articulated by Rousseau. Prior to that, children were treated simply as small adults. Postman suggests that the availability of all images-good or bad-through TV, that access to all information through the computer and Internet, and that a subsequent blurring of a clear sense of time and place, are ending childhood as a distinctive period of growth. Postman's views are worth study, as he was possibly America's foremost authority on the human and social effects of technology.

I was once at a dinner given for Alvin Toffler, and I asked him about this. I asked what he sees as the consequences of all knowledge, philosophies, ideologies, religions, and all political and social viewpoints being available at the mere press of a computer button. He replied simply, "It's the end of truth."

What Toffler was talking about is the fragmenting effect of information technology. He wasn't saying truth doesn't exist, but that fragmentation makes it ever more difficult to have some central operating set of convictions around which nations can cohere. Fragmentation raises the question of whose truth are we talking about? Are we talking about the truth of some forty-six million American fundamentalists who, according to Time magazine believe the world will literally come to an end in their lifetime? Or the postmodernists who believe there's no realty; that life is but a social construct? Or those scientists who assert we've reached the end of the Homo sapiens epoch and are entering the "Post-human" era?

The problem becomes clear. The Founders held certain truths to be "self-evident." But the fragmenting effect of information technology means it's less and less clear exactly what truths are self-evident, or at least accepted as self-evident by the body politic.

Such a situation could become a serious threat to U.S. security, a subject addressed in the 1999 Hart-Rudman commission's report on national security in the 21st century. (See the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century.) After discussion of conventional security threats, the report turns to threats posed by accelerating technology. Due to rapid technological change, the report says, "Americans are now, and increasingly will become, less secure than they believe themselves to be." The reason, the report suggests, is that "we may not recognize many of the threats in our future…they may consist of the unraveling of the fabric of national identity itself…democracy may be hollowed out from the inside."

The third trend I see shifting the tectonic plates of life is a long-term spiritual and psychological reorientation. Such a subject is so vast that it's only possible to offer one thought.

In 1954, Adlai Stevenson asked in a speech at Columbia University, "Are America's problems but surface symptoms of something even deeper, of a moral and human crisis in the Western world which might even be compared to the fourth, fifth and sixth-century crisis where the Roman Empire was transformed into feudalism and primitive Christianity? Are Americans," Stevenson queried, "passing through one of the great crises of history when man must make another mighty choice?" President Eisenhower, who shared Stevenson's view, put it more succinctly. I visited Ike in 1962 in Palm Springs. As we talked about the changes reshaping America, he said-and with considerable conviction, "We're living through the final stages of the Roman Empire." He said it twice.

Two years later, Joseph Campbell, possibly the world's foremost authority on the symbolic and psychological meaning of myths, noted in a New York speech that every one of the world's "great spiritual traditions is in profound disorder." The world, he concluded, "is passing through perhaps the greatest spiritual metamorphosis in the history of the human race."

In my opinion, the evidence illustrating Stevenson, Eisenhower and Campbell's views is everywhere. Walk into any bookstore and look at the section on religion. Books on "End Times," Buddhism, Nostradamus, yoga, New Age spirituality, mysticism, Eastern philosophy, crystals, psychological health, finding the meaning in life, addiction, miracles, self-help cures, and much more. I believe the global phenomenon of fundamentalism-whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist or Shinto-is another sign of the spiritual transition taking place.

This reorientation has long been evident in the fact that, while there are millions of Christians in America, the spiritual impulse that gave highest value and meaning to Western civilization is no longer the inner dynamic of the collective western psyche. It's no longer the informing force in the soul of America and Europe's "creative minority" who give us our education, science, technology, literature, cinema, theater and music. In this sense, the character of our culture is the best indication of what is bubbling up from the depths of the western soul. For culture is to a nation what dreams are to an individual-an indication of what's going on in the depths of the inner life.

Finally, it's extremely difficult to assess the spiritual upheaval taking place today without including a look at the psychological dimension of spiritual experience. And I say that because the spiritual reorientation isn't taking place out in the ether somewhere. It's taking place in the depths of each of us as individuals.

Some Americans sensed the beginnings of this spiritual shift over a century ago. Wrote James Russell Lowell in 1870: "Truth is eternal, but her effluence, with endless change, is fitted to the hour; her mirror is turned forward to reflect the promise of the future, not the past." Lowell then noted, "He who would win the name of truly great must understand his own age, and the next, and make the present ready to fulfill its prophecy, and with the future merge gently and peacefully as wave with wave."

Unfortunately, merging with the future seems neither gentle nor peaceful at this point. Nonetheless, merge with the future we shall, for it's hurtling toward us at mach speed.

Thank you.

Sleepwalking through the Apocalypse

2008-09-04T18:10:37Z

The "9/11 Memorial Address", Santa Fe, NM

It is a humbling honor to be invited to give the 9/11 Memorial Address. What can possibly be said that even begins to approach the horror and the grandeur of that day? The horror of the act, and the grandeur of the response of the American spirit.

We all have our particular memories of that moment in history. For me, the images of people leaping from the top of the World Trade Center are forever embedded in my memory. It was a scene from Dante's "Inferno." Equally stamped in my memory-perhaps from Dante's "Paradiso"-are pictures of firemen climbing the steps inside the World Trade Center-climbing to what they must have known could be certain death-in order to rescue those they could, as hundreds of people were frantically rushing down the stairs to safety.

They, and the men who brought down American flight 93 over Pennsylvania, are forever memorialized by the words in the scriptures that tell us, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

And so 9/11 takes its place alongside the defining moments of the American experience. Bunker Hill. Gettysburg. Pearl Harbor.

But for us, the question remains, what is the significance of 9/11 for America and the world? My own view is that 9/11 is but part of a far larger process that even now needs greater understanding and evaluation.

For some time now we appear to have come to the end of the world, as we have known it. Nukes in North Korea. Jihad vs. McWorld. A potential India-Pakistan nuclear shoot-out. The merger of human and artificial intelligence scientists say will create the "post-human" epoch. Increasingly, the next three decades loom as the most decisive 30-year period in history.

Within this context, I want to offer some thoughts on what some of the larger implications of 9/11 may be, and what it may mean for us.

I would start by offering the view of one of the world's most experienced observers of global events. In 1957 Peter Drucker wrote, "No one born after the turn of the 20th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols." If Drucker's right, and I personally think he is, despite all the political, social and technical advances of the past century, the underlying story of the 20th century was about a world where the historic social arrangements, spiritual underpinnings and psychological moorings that had anchored nations for centuries, have been in a transition of epochal proportions. The tectonic plates of life as we've known it are shifting.

To illustrate Drucker's comments, I briefly offer six trends that suggest how the entire context of human existence is changing. Then I'll focus more in depth on what I see as the underlying dynamic of our particular moment in history.

First, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as "nature," "human," and "life." Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology. The faster computers go, the faster our whole tempo of life goes just to keep up. In essence, we may be abdicating our own psychological center of being and handing it over to the computer. Within the next three decades we'll have reached the point where the question will be, "What are humans for in a world of completely independent, self-replicating technological capability?"

Second, for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. The implications of this are so far-reaching that it's difficult even to speculate what they might be.

Third, future ages may view man's seeing the Earth from the Moon as the defining event of all subsequent history. Joseph Campbell clearly considered it the most significant psychological event of the past several thousand years. Seeing Earth from the Moon vastly accelerated the collapse of all the boundaries that provide identity-boundaries of nation, race, religion, class and gender. Thus everyone, to some degree or other, faces a crisis of identity. This also profoundly affects the underpinnings of all religions, as every religion includes some cosmological concept of how the universe was first created. But space exploration has given us new and different information and perspective.

Fourth, for the first time in history, what constitutes a family is being redefined. This has acute implications for government, education, social cohesion and what we broadly term "civil society".

Fifth, the ability to create change, as well as the attitude that change is desirable, is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than abrupt change has been the normal state of affairs. No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all other nations, in a state of profound crisis as we try to adjust to an ever-accelerating pace of change. Thus there is no global center of stability and order such as Britain provided in the nineteenth century, and America supplied the second half of the twentieth century.

Sixth, our whole symbolic language has been devalued. For example, "Heaven" used to carry a sacred meaning. It was the dwelling place of the gods; a place people hoped to go when they died, our link with eternity. Now we speak simply of "space," an endless void. Similarly, we used to speak of "Mother Earth," which gives the earth a creative, nurturing implication. Now we speak only of "matter," an abstract, lifeless substance. In this way, our symbolic language has been diminished. The function of symbolic language is to infuse into our conscious life some of the transcendent meaning that emanates from the unconscious realm, from the depths of our inner being. That connection has been weakened, so there's far less transcendent vitality brought into our conscious life.

These trends-and many others-will be shaping the global context for the rest of our lives. What these trends portend is one reason I suggest we've come to the end of the world, as we've known it.

Let's focus now on what I suggest is the underlying dynamic of our time. For perspective, I want to offer the insights of three well-known Americans. Adlai Stevenson had the unfortunate luck of twice being the Democratic presidential candidate chosen to oppose Dwight Eisenhower. In 1954, Stevenson asked in a speech at Columbia University, "Are America's problems but surface symptoms of something even deeper, of a moral and human crisis in the Western world which might even be compared to the fourth, fifth and sixth-century crisis where the Roman Empire was transformed into feudalism and primitive Christianity? Are Americans," Stevenson queried, "passing through one of the great crises of history when man must make another mighty choice?"

In 1961, Dr. Edward Edinger, until his death in 1998 considered by many to be the dean of Jungian analysts, began a talk in New York on symbols and the meaning of life, with these words: "Modern man is passing through a major psychological reorientation equivalent in magnitude to the emergence of Christianity from the ruins of the Roman Empire. Accompanying the decline of traditional religion, there is increasing evidence of a general psychic disorientation. We have lost our bearings. Our relation to life has become ambiguous. The great symbol system which is organized Christianity seems no longer able to command the full commitment of men or to fulfill their ultimate needs. The result is a pervasive feeling of meaninglessness and alienation from life."

Five years later, Joseph Campbell, possibly the world's foremost authority on the symbolic and psychological meaning of myths, noted that every one of the world's "great spiritual traditions is in profound disorder. What has been taught as their basic truths seem no longer to hold." The world, he concluded, "is passing through perhaps the greatest spiritual metamorphosis in the history of the human race."

Stevenson, Edinger and Campbell-three of the most thoughtful Americans of the mid-20th century, comparing the condition of America and the Western world to that of Rome during the end of the ancient world and the emergence of Christianity. I want to explore the ramifications of their remarks a bit, for this issue has become a dominant driving force not only in America's spiritual and psychological life, but also in our culture, our politics, and international affairs. This represents the most fundamental change a people can experience

What actually happened when the Greco-Roman world was transformed into early Christianity? The history books tell only part of the story. We know of the corruption of Rome; the severe decline of population; the neglect and even abandonment of farms; the collapse of the Roman system of aqueducts and roads; the high taxes and the trade imbalance; and, perhaps most importantly, the rise of what Arnold Toynbee termed the "internal proletariat"-those who no longer shared the traditional ethical and spiritual belief in the ancient religion that had provided inner cohesion and meaning to Rome's outward achievements. All of this set the stage for invasion by the "barbarians"-the "external proletariat"-that overran Rome from the north. That's all on record.

Those were the outer manifestations, but what happened to the inner life of the people? We get some sense from the Roman poet Lucretius who summed up the temper of his times when he wrote of "aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage." There was a loss of collective meaning; a disappearance of what had represented life's highest value. The old gods no longer resonated in the depths of the soul, especially of the leadership class. Belief atrophied. The cry "Great Pan is dead!" was heard throughout the empire. The God-image that had informed the inner life and the culture of the Greco-Roman world for a thousand years lost its compelling force. There was a breakdown of the historic psychic structures that had been the source and container of Greco-Roman morals and beliefs. This issued into the collapse of the ethical and social guidelines underlying civilized order. New religions and sects arose and vied for popular allegiance. All in all, it was an extended, earth-shattering social and psychic upheaval.

The history books speak of the "decline" of Rome. But at its heart, it was a long-term-at least four or five centuries-psychological shift of the prevailing God-image from the multiple gods of the Greco-Roman period, to a new spiritual dispensation. A new God-image emerged for a new phase of psychological maturation and human experience. From Ireland to Italy, Europe went through a prolonged period of the transformation of underlying principles and symbols. What emerged we know as Christendom.

What Stevenson, Edinger and Campbell-and others-have suggested is that America and the West are experiencing a similar-and perhaps even greater-long-term reorientation today. This is what Drucker was referring to when he talked about a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols. If this is so, what, in fact, this would mean is that for some time now we have been living through the Apocalypse. Let me emphasize that in talking about the Apocalypse, I'm not making any metaphysical statements about God or the Unknown Immensity that created the universe. This is strictly commentary on the psychological significance of the Apocalypse on us as human beings.

Generally speaking, the Apocalypse as presented in the Book of Revelation is misunderstood, a misunderstanding arising from two different ways of interpretation. One is the literal interpretation, which is the fundamentalist view. The other is a symbolic interpretation, which was St. Augustine's belief. Thus the fundamentalists see the Apocalypse as the literal end of the world. Some forty-eight million Americans believe this will happen in their lifetime. The symbolic interpretation sees the Apocalypse as the end of the Christian eon, and a protracted time of some new spiritual dispensation coming into being.

When we speak of the end of the Christian eon, what we're suggesting is that the spiritual impulse that gave highest value and meaning to Western civilization is no longer the inner dynamic of the collective Western psyche. It is no longer the informing force in the soul of America and Europe's "creative minority" who give us our literature, theater, science, technology, education, cinema and music. In this sense, the character of our culture is the best indication of what is emanating from the depths of the Western soul. For culture is to a nation what dreams are to the individual-an indication of what's going on in the depths of the inner life.

When a shift takes place on the scale we're suggesting, when the God-image changes, that is an epochal experience. For what is happening is that part of the unconscious within us is seeking to become conscious. Such a process has happened before. It's clearly seen in the differences between the rather imprecise polytheism of the Iliad and the purposeful and morally inclined monotheism of Exodus. Indeed, the differences between the Old and New Testaments suggest another such change in the God-image. Such developments represent a significant evolution of consciousness. The underlying continuity of that process must be taken into account as we evaluate our own era.

If we are in the midst of such a reorientation, when did it start, and how has it been expressing itself? Part of the answer lies in the 16th century when the earliest harbinger of this reorientation emerged. That omen was the appearance of the Faust legend around the 1540s.

As we know, Faust made a pact with the devil in order to gain knowledge, power and pleasure. During the second half of the 16th century, over fifty versions of the Faust myth spread across Europe. This in an age when there was no Internet, TV or even newspapers. So the European collective psyche was beginning to express something that was clearly the antithesis of Christianity. The Antichrist was manifesting itself. The reorientation had begun.

By the time of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, reason had replaced Christian belief as life's highest authority, at least for the "creative minority." And so Notre Dame, one of Christendom's most hallowed cathedrals, was turned into a temple honoring the Goddess of Reason.

In the 19th century, the reorientation-the Apocalypse-gained momentum-despite the Romantic Movement's reaction to reason. The great German philosopher Hegel wrote in 1827, "God has died-God is dead-this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God." Hegel voiced a theme that was to grip the souls of many of Europe's finest spirits for the rest of the century. In 1850 in England, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach," lamenting the "retreating sea of faith." At the same time, Lord Tennyson, England's Poet Laureate, warned of "the secular abyss that is to come." In France, Baudelaire urged his readers to study "the rhetorical methods of Satan," proclaiming, "The true saint is the person who whips and kills the people for the good of the people"-an attitude that later was given concrete expression in fascism and communism. In Russia, Dostoyevsky's Ivan announced that if God is dead, then "Everything is permitted."

So when Nietzsche proclaimed in 1883 that "God is dead", he was not announcing a new thought; he was expressing a psychological reality for most of Europe's "creative minority." Thus it was not at all surprising that as the 20th century opened, Thomas Hardy should write "God's Funeral," a poem noting "our myth's oblivion," and asking "who or what shall fill his place?" W.B. Yeats echoed Hardy in his 1920 poem, "The Second Coming": "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

America was not immune to these influences working on the European soul, although there was a certain "lag time." But in 1925-when America was creating the "consumer society" with new technologies and a booming stock market-F. Scott Fitzgerald published America's first celebrated expression of the loss of transcendent meaning. Said Daisy in The Great Gatsby, "I'm pretty cynical about everything. I think everything's terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so-the most sophisticated people." Fitzgerald's biographer, Andrew Le Vot, later wrote about the meaning of The Great Gatsby, saying, it is "not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabitable, absurd material universe." This theme of the supposed absurdity and meaninglessness of life became a core premise of American culture. From Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman", to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, to James Dean and the movie "Rebel Without a Cause" to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series, all were reflective of Camus, Beckett, Sartre and the "school of the absurd."

Similar disquiet showed itself throughout other areas of society. Paul Samuelson, America's first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote in the mid-70s, "More isn't enough. People are better housed, fed and educated than twenty-five years ago, but that isn't producing satisfaction. There's a spiritual element missing." The Wall Street Journal echoed Samuelson. The Journal noted that it is "not only religious belief that has declined; so has the powerful secular faith that sprang from the Enlightenment. The power of reason, the power of science, the belief in progress-all are coming under increasing doubt."

What this darker side of two centuries of Western culture represents is an erosion of the structures and values that historically have been the architecture of the collective Western psyche, and which are no longer expressed by an operative religious myth. This breakdown of collective psychic structures has led to the increasing dysfunction of our social arrangements such as family, education, culture, government, and, inevitably, the church. This was noted in 1980 in a remarkable assessment by Robert Nisbet, one of Ameirca's foremost historians and social theorists. Wrote Nisbet in The History of Progress:

What was present in very substantial measure of the basic works of the founders of political democracy was a respect for such social institutions as property, family, local community, religion, and voluntary association, and for such cultural and social values as objective reason, the discipline of language, self-restraint, the work ethic, and, far from the least, the culture that had taken root in classical civilization and grown, with rare interruptions, ever since . . . the architects of Western democracy were all students of history, and they had every intellectual right to suppose that moral values and social structures which had survived as many vicissitudes and environmental changes as these had over two and a half millennia of their existence in Western society would go on for at least a few more centuries . . .

Then in a stark conclusion, Nisbet wrote, "But in fact they have not [gone on]."

Similar expressions of the Apocalypse-or loss of life's highest meaning-have continued on into the present day.

Walter Russell Mead is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In February he wrote an article for The Washington Post that carried the headline, "It's the Dawning Age of the Apocalypse." After surveying what he considers to be the retreat of progress, Mead noted that "apocalypse anxiety has moved into the mainstream of American politics and culture . . . a line has been crossed. This is Oppenheimer country. The Age of Progress is in the past and this is the era of Shiva, destroyer of worlds." The Council on Foreign Relations and The Washington Post-you don't get more Establishment than that.

We see expressions of this loss of collective meaning in the regression to earlier forms of political, ethnic, nationalistic and religious ways of thinking. All nations seem to be in the midst of some form of crisis of identity. None of the categories of the past-social status, religion, ethnicity, culture, heritage, region, nation-in and of themselves alone-is an adequate context of thought and action in an era seeking some new spiritual and psychological foundation for a global period.

A further sign of the reorientation taking place is the massive spiritual search under way. Look in any bookstore and you'll see hundreds of books on religion, spirituality, mysticism, addiction of all kinds, finding meaning in life, psychic health, and much more. Forty years ago, no major bookstore would have carried such a huge category of books. Today, new religions and sects are emerging literally every day. There are over 1500 so-called religions in America, including some anomaly called "Catholic-Buddhists." Look at the popularity of TV shows such as "Touched by an Angel," or books such as the "Chicken Soup" series, with sales of over ninety million books. The Internet assumes a spiritual dimension with its endless virtual prayer chapels and prayer meetings. We're even told people see the Internet as a new metaphor for God.

One way in which the reorientation is expressing itself has to do with power. It's a psychological fact that when the psychic energy expressing life's highest value is no longer projected into a God-image, it doesn't simply evaporate. That psychic energy is often projected into some other value-frequently power or pleasure.

Thus power becomes life's highest value for many people. Power is simply psychic energy, and it's essential for life. But it needs to be held in creative tension with its opposite-restraint. Colin Powell has a plaque on his desk that reads, "Of all the manifestation of power, restraint impresses men the most." Powell understands power, as well as himself.

Many other powerful people lack Powell's understanding. Think of the countless corporate mergers that have taken place over the past decades, most of which haven't met economic or financial expectations. Many of these mergers resulted from the power complex of CEOs who didn't have power in a creative tension with restraint. Psychologically, power served as their god, their supreme value. So stockholders, employees and even communities have lost trillions of dollars simply because of individual CEO's ego-inflation. That's not an argument against mergers. It's an observation about why some mergers have taken place.

There is another example of ego-inflation that is even more serious. It comes from certain areas of the scientific community. The Washington Post offers an example. The Post quotes Microsoft researcher Steven Shafer, formerly a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Shafer said that while at Carnegie Mellon, he always felt "teaching steals from research time." At Microsoft, however, Shafer seems happier. "To me," he confides, "this corporation is my power tool. It's the tool I wield to allow my ideas to shape the world." My power tool-a classic expression of what appears to be the inflated power drive, or what the great theoretical physicist, Freeman Dyson, described as the "technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

Most of America is totally unaware of the extent to which fascination with what scientists can do with their minds has gripped many in the scientific community, and is driving our scientific research and the constantly accelerating pace of technology development. Indeed, the scientists themselves are unaware of it, which is a prime reason it's potentially so dangerous. We're all so mesmerized by our own sense of power-the power of the technology we use daily-that we simply don't realize what's happening.

At least since Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century we have viewed the purpose of science and technology as being to improve the human condition. As Bacon put it, the "true and lawful end of the sciences is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers." The question today is whether we're creating certain technologies not to improve the human condition, but for purposes that appear to be to replace human meaning and significance altogether.

British Telecom's futures research staff predicts that with the human genome project, "a combination of man and computer search will be able to identify the genes needed to produce a people of any chosen characteristics." Someone, somewhere, we're told, "will produce an elite race of people, smart, agile and disease resistant." MIT's Sherry Turkel sees the "reconfiguration of machines as psychological objects and the reconfiguration of people as living machines."

Suggests Ray Kurzweil, "When machines are derived from human intelligence but are a million times more capable, there won't be a clear distinction between human and machine intelligence-there's going to be a merger." Another tech visionary tells us that the wiring of human and artificial minds into one planetary soul will ultimately mean "the disappearance of the self altogether, right into the collective organism of the mind." No socialist or communist could have had a more stark vision of the collectivized society.

Perhaps Jaron Lanier, who coined the term "virtual reality" and started the world's first virtual reality company, best assesses what's happening. Writes Lanier, "Medical science, neuroscience, computer science, genetics, biology-separately and together, seem to be on the verge of abandoning the human realm altogether . . . it grows harder to imagine human beings remaining at the center of the process of science. Instead, science appears to be in charge of its own process, probing and changing people in order to further its own course, independent of human agency."

Gregory Stock carries Lanier's thought to its ultimate conclusion. Stock sees a time soon emerging "when humans no longer exist . . . Progressive self-transformation could change our descendents into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now." Thus arrives what some scientific intellectuals herald as the "Post-human" or the "Post species" age

Albert Einstein was concerned about just such possibilities. Warned Einstein in a speech at Cal Tech, "Concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest of all technical endeavors."

Ignoring Einstein's warning, some scientists are, in effect, proposing the cancellation of the five thousand year quest to create a moral order for human existence, and the potential self-destruction of humanity as we've known it-all under the guise of something some scientists say is "evolution." In a very real sense, many scientists have abdicated responsibility for the possible consequences of their research and invention.

What's the likely outcome? No one really knows. But England's Martin Rees, possibly the finest theoretical physicist today, looks at current scientific and technological experiments and estimates there's "a 50% chance of a catastrophic setback to civilization." He maps out numerous ways new technologies could destroy our species by the end of the century, and concludes that this is simply something we have to risk "as the downside for our intellectual exhilaration." Rees's use of the words "intellectual exhilaration" is a telling expression. It would appear to represent the enthrallment that grips some scientists when they see what they can do with the raw power of mind. The power of mind becomes life's ultimate principle. It becomes a god.

And so scientific power, not held in a creative tension with restraint, potentially becomes suicidal in a world of planet-destroying technologies.

This is all part of the end of the world as we've known it-the end of the Christian eon-the Apocalypse.

What is the meaning for us as individuals of all we've been discussing? Many unanswered questions abound. Do we understand the irrational side that was part of what drove Mohammed Hatta and others to fly into the World Trade Center? Why do we Americans tend to see ourselves as primarily good, and many other people as largely bad, whether we're talking about Muslims, Russians, Chinese, or French? What does it signify that both sides in the so-called war on terrorism are driven by archetypal images of "good vs. evil?" Are we aware of how much we project our shadow side to the rest of the world? Do we understand the Muslim fear that the secular Western model of globalization could mean the eventual end of Islam? What does our blithe dismissal of other nations views of us indicate? What does any possible astrological dimension to 9/11 represent?

More immediately, how do we respond in practical terms to the reorientation shaping the totality of our lives? To some extent America is already responding with the most sweeping redefinition of life in our history. All our institutions are being redefined and restructured. Corporations are redefining their mission, structure and modus operandi. In education, countless new experiments are underway, from vouchers to charter schools to home schooling. The legal system is assisted by the increasing use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Functions formerly executed by local governments are now undertaken by civic and charitable organizations. Numerous steps have been taken to redress the severe environmental imbalance we've created. More citizens are involved in efforts to help the elderly and those in poverty. In fact, it's estimated that well over fifty percent of all adult Americans donate a portion of their time to non-profit social efforts. Perhaps most importantly, we're integrating a global perspective into the fabric of our education, culture, and international relations. Take West Point, for example. All the cadets at West Point learn a foreign language such as Chinese, Russian or Arabic, and they take a year's course in some foreign culture. So on one level, we're already at grips with some of the manifestations of the reorientation that engulfs us.

On the personal level, I offer what I see as the heart of the matter. To consider this, I draw on the work of C.G. Jung and Edward Edinger, who have informed so much of whatever understanding I may have of this subject.

I want to say a brief word about Jung, especially as a historical figure. Trained as a psychiatrist, psychiatry was the instrument of his work, but not the main work itself. In my view, the work he will be remembered for in centuries to come is the introduction of a new worldview, the initiation of a new cultural epoch. This worldview enables contemporary man to develop a consciousness that can give each person a metaphysical and cosmic significance. There is a sacred continuity to life that has been disrupted in our scientific age. As Edinger said in 1961, our relation to life has become confusing. Future generations may see Jung as having discovered the key to reestablishing that relationship to life. In this sense, I see Jung as one of those historical figures who only comes along every five hundred years or so. If such an assessment is valid, it is not too surprising he is so misunderstood in contemporary America.

For the layperson such as myself, Jung's work is not easy to grasp, for he dealt in immaterial realities. You can feel a heart or lung, but not an archetype or complex, although you can certainly see their manifestations. But I believe what Jung explored represents the most basic dynamic at work in the world today. It affects every one of us, and it influences everything taking place. If we don't comprehend what's happening on the level of the soul, at the level of the psyche, we won't have a basic understanding of what's happening to our world. For in the end, it's the individual that makes history; it's the individual psyche that produces all our philosophies, art, economic and educational theories, as well as our psychological assumptions, our technology and all else. The psyche is the engine of history, and right now the greatest change in the world is taking place in our collective psyche. Thus it's necessary to offer a brief look at some of Jung's discoveries that relate to the reorientation we're discussing.

Jung explored the deepest realm of the psyche, both in his own life and in his patients. In so doing, he discovered the foundational layer of the unconscious that is common to all humankind. He also discovered the psychological dynamics of spiritual experience. As Edinger notes, as a result of Jung's work, we are now able scientifically to understand the psychological processes that create religions. Prior to Jung, there was no scientific data or language enabling people to understand this, so people just generally referred to "spiritual experience." But what happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus? Thanks to Jung's discoveries, we now have some general ideas.

In the course of his work, Jung explored the psychological meaning of the Apocalypse. The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek, meaning "revelation, an uncovering of what has been hidden." There are four features of the image of the Apocalypse: revelation, judgment, destruction and renewal. Revelation discloses new truth about how life and the universe function. Judgment assesses the state of contemporary conditions in light of this new truth. Destruction is the collapse of old institutions and relationships that are no longer effective within the context of the new truth. Renewal is the recreation of civilization according to the requirements of the new truth. If one carefully considers the 20th century, all four of these trends operating simultaneously are visible.

Such epochal changes as the Apocalypse don't take place out in the cosmos somewhere. They take place in the collective psyche of us as human beings. As the collective psyche is by definition unconscious, we're usually unaware of the inner psychological dynamics of this change, even though we see its outward manifestations in both culture and contemporary events.

One of Jung's discoveries was that an archetype is not an intert psychic pattern as Plato thought, but a dynamic agency with autonomy, spontaneity and intention. An archetype is a spontaneous phenomenon, completely independent of our will. In this sense, it's a living pattern of behavior common to all humanity. Jung once described an archetype as "an overwhelming force comparable to nothing I know." Taken as a whole, archetypes determine our every-day activity at least as much, if not more, than does ego-consciousness. We have only begun to understand archetypes and their relevance to the totality of all life forms-including their potential cosmic significance.

One of the countless archetypes is the archetype of the Apocalypse, which becomes activated at certain points in a culture's history. When set in motion, its function is to bring about a transition from one spiritual dispensation, to a new one. That's what happened 2,000 years ago in the Greco-Roman world, which was rife with Jewish apocalyptic writing, much of which was included in the Book of Revelation.

Psychologically, every worldview or spiritual dispensation revolves around the Self. Jung's experience of the Self (large "S") is quite different from the usual reference to the self (small "s"), which generally means the ego's awareness of itself and its surroundings. Jung's Self is the central archetype of order, and the unifying center of the psyche. As such, the Self functions as the God-image. The Self expresses psychic wholeness or totality. Like all archetypes, the Self is composed of opposites-spirit-matter, love-hate, good-evil. The Self appears to contain the psyche's transpersonal capacity.

During an apocalyptic time such as the shift from the Greco-Roman world to Christianity, the Self becomes highly activated. It then manifests the four apocalyptic features of revelation, judgment, destruction and rebirth.

Thus the Apocalypse not only means the end of an old worldview; but it's also the emergence of a new spiritual expression, a new God-image that historically is part of an evolutionary process. The new manifestation will gradually assimilate into its own forms of understanding the spiritual and cultural expressions that have preceded it. It could be that the Christian God-image of a completely benevolent God of love eventually evolves into a God-image in which there's a union of opposites. Thus the new God-image would include male and female, spirit and earth, good and evil. The Christian God-image seeks perfection-"Be ye perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect."-which is separation of the shadow. The new God-image may seek completeness-which would be assimilation of the shadow.

Such completeness-or wholeness of personality-is, in the words of Lewis Mumford, "the destiny of mankind." This wholeness, Mumford wrote, requires "the creation of unified personalities, at home with every part of themselves, and so equally at home with the whole family of man, in all its magnificent diversity." For Mumford, nothing less than "a concept of the whole man-and of man achieving a consciousness of the cosmic and historic whole-is capable of doing justice to every type of personality, every mode of culture, every human potential."

Completeness on this order would be a manifestation, in Jung's words, of the "original oneness of the unconscious," but this time on the level of consciousness. Such a new spiritual dispensation would be in keeping with the psychological reality of the Self. It goes without saying a development of this magnitude is a prolonged process. What I'm suggesting is a not a metaphysical statement. We're talking strictly in terms of the psyche.

Because the activation of the Self takes place in our unconscious, one of two outcomes is possible. One is that activation of the Self be experienced consciously, and integrated into the totality of our lives by us as individuals. This is the preferable outcome. If that's not done, then the activated Self is manifested collectively in external events. We already see countless examples of this external manifestation in terrorism, in the Arab-Israeli madness, in the apocalyptic or degraded themes of our culture, and in the growing dysfunction of many of our social structures.

So, much of the future depends on how each of us studies the archetype of the Apocalypse, what it is, and what it's meaning for us and our era represents. This takes time and work, for it's not an intellectual exercise. It's something to be assimilated at the soul level over time. If enough people internalize the psychological meaning of the Apocalypse, then the destructive phase might be minimized, and rebirth will be encouraged.

Thus individual awareness of what we're talking about is critically important as all of this unfolds in our collective psyche. The more conscious we are of what's happening, the greater our chance to make a positive contribution by integrating the activated Self internally into a greater wholeness. One way to help do this is by becoming conscious of my shadow side, the rougher elements of my character social convention causes me to reject and submerge in my unconscious. A British psychologist suggests that if you want to know what your shadow looks like, just draw up a list of characteristics that you most dislike in other people, and there you will see your shadow.

The shadow is the source of evil in life, as well as the source of many creative but undeveloped qualities. Other people are aware of my shadow, as it daily expresses itself. Certainly other nations are keenly aware of America's collective shadow. The potential danger of the scientists we mentioned earlier is that they are not aware of their own shadow, of their unconscious motivation. Most of us don't seriously confront our shadow. We knowingly talk about it. It's common jargon. But resolute confrontation with our shadow takes concentrated and continued focus. It's not a short-term effort; it's a life's journey. The shadow represents my most available entry into the unconscious. The act of seeing elements of my shadow helps transform it. Jung once remarked, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness [the shadow] conscious."

Once part of my unconscious shadow has been recognized for what it is, that triggers a need for it to change and become conscious. In this manner, I create greater consciousness, which, as Jung suggests, is the purpose of life. If we do this, we then become not only a more unified personality, but we also leave a creative deposit in the collective soul of humanity. We help create the new era that is to come. As Edinger wrote, then we "become seeds sown in the collective psyche which can promote the unification of the collective psyche as a whole."

This is how we achieve the higher level of consciousness that's so urgently needed. What we're discussing is, in my view, the most vital challenge facing any individual, for it's our personal contribution to the future of humanity.

But then there's the question of how we as a nation see our collective shadow. As suggested earlier, we worship power, whether military, technological, corporate, political or personal. Yet one of Jung's most profound insights was that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. "Where love stops," he wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1957, "power begins, and violence and horror." What are the implications of that both for us as a nation and as individuals?

Part of the answer lies in another question, "What is my highest value in life?" Each of us must know the answer to that question. Historically for the Western world, "God" would have been the answer for most people. For millions, that's still true. For others, they would like it to be true, but it doesn't quite have the ring of authenticity about it. It's more in the nature of reaching back for a lost emotional feeling. For still others, it's a meaningless salute to the past.

For myself, because I believe Jung discovered the key to interpreting the deepest truth of our spiritual and psychological life in terms of the needs of contemporary man, I would say my highest value is "the fullest possible degree of individual psychological maturity and completeness." This is said keeping in mind the older meaning of the world psychology-"the study of the soul." So my highest value would be "the greatest possible maturity and wholeness of the soul." Two crucial features of this would be first, a relationship with that transpersonal dimension of life that's beyond all human comprehension, and second, continuing awareness and integration of my shadow.

Psychological wholeness and wisdom is a condition I will never reach, but always seek. One sign of psychological wholeness might be, "To be able to hold two diametrically opposite views in balance without becoming emotionally attached to either view." In my opinion, such a condition of completeness includes sensitivity to the sacred mystery of all life, and, above all, that quality of compassion and love best described in St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians.

In psychological terms, what we're talking about is seeking a complementary relationship between the ego and the Self, developing a dialogue between the two. Such a relationship has historically been one of the functions of all religions. For example, speaking of the psychological implications of the biblical passage we know of as the Lord's Prayer, Edinger notes that it is "a formula for maintaining a connection between the ego and the Self." He suggests that the phrase "Hallowed be thy name," means I must remember the transpersonal sacred dimension of life. "That is what the ego is reminding itself-to remember that life is not just secular, it has a transpersonal dimension." The phrase, "Thy kingdom come," suggests that the ego is "announcing that it recognizes that the rule of the Self should prevail."

In this sense, Christianity provided the essential psychological superstructure of the Western psyche, and it's that psychological architecture that's been changing over the past generations. In my view, that's what's at the heart of our times being the end of the world, as we've known it.

So for me, the term "psychological completeness" includes the ethical grounding and symbolic significance of our spiritual heritage, but interprets and advances it in a fresh manner so as to account for the advance of contemporary consciousness. That's my personal experience. Others may find different understandings.

To sum up, I quote Richard Tarnas, professor of psychology and author of the forthcoming book, Cosmos and Psyche: "As we look at the world today, we cannot escape the fact that something epochal is dying. We daily watch and experience it in our institutions, in world events and in the ethos of destruction that has become such a cultural and social motif. What we're experiencing is a sign of the unconscious collective psyche passing through the throes of a reorientation, a death and rebirth. The great challenge is, can each of us-on an individual level-go through the reorientation that's being experienced collectively by our civilization? Can we individually recognize the great spiritual, archetypal nature of that reorientation, and engage it on that level so that civilized life finds rebirth? Or, will we be unconscious of it, blind to the deeper reality and personal implications, and consequently collectively act out the reorientation self-destructively as contemporary history?"

What we're talking about involves a degree of awareness of the unconscious impulses that are inside each of us, and thus in our civilization as well. Part of the unconscious person inside our collective soul is seeking fresh expression in a greater consciousness. That's the meaning of an apocalyptic age. It's more than intellectual. It's a psychological and spiritual maturation that is seeking new form. As Jung wrote in 1957, "We must now climb to a higher moral level; to a higher plane of consciousness in order to be equal to the superhuman powers science and technology have placed in our hands. In reality, nothing else matters at this point."

If we Americans could engage this task, we would not only recreate a new foundation for liberty at home, but we would offer the world a fresh hope that might help ensure the world's children no longer have to experience the various forms of 9/11 so many children across the globe have had to endure.

The Global Crisis of Identity

2008-09-04T18:07:34Z

It has taken a series of crises in France, Holland, Britain, Germany and other European countries for the issue of identity finally to be recognized as central to the contemporary global crisis. President Chirac admits on national TV that his country faces “an identity crisis,” a crisis that swells as increasing numbers of immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East crowd into Europe and North America. The editor-in-chief of the Dutch daily, Handelsblad, sums up Holland’s dilemma: “We now want to teach immigrants more about our identity, and we discover that we’re not sure what’s left of it!”

Underlying this crisis are three world-spanning pressures that are ripping up old forms of uniqueness and organization.

First, due to electronic global communication, as well as massive worldwide migration, peoples of totally different psychological and cultural expressions are being forced into a single, globalized technological context. Yet as individuals, not all people have the same psychology. The indigenous Indian people in the heart of the Amazon, for example, or the Bushman in Africa express a different psychology than the Parisian intellectual or the computer programmer in Silicon Valley. This is not a value judgment; it’s not to say one is better than the other. They’re just different.

The psychiatrist C.G. Jung first noticed the psychological difference between Arabs and Europeans in the 1920s during a trip through North Africa. Wrote Jung: The “Arab is closer to life than we are,” and their struggle to become aware of their own political existence is, in part, “self-defense against the forces threatening them” from Europe and the “European’s accelerated tempo.” The Arabs, Jung wrote, “live in their affects, are moved and have their being in emotions,” while the European [and Americans] lives with the “illusion of his triumphs, such as steamships, railroads, airplanes, and rockets that rob him of his duration and transport him into another reality of speeds and explosive accelerations.

Eighty-five years later, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-born former member of the Dutch Parliament, echoes Jung’s assessment. Interviewed by Roger Cohn for the International Herald Tribune, Hirsi Ali says, “I think the immigrants from rural areas, most of them, are at a certain phase of civilization that is far behind that of the host countries, like the Netherlands, and because of that, these terrible events [the murder of Dutch film maker van Gogh] can occur.” She speaks of “immigrants who have not thought about individual freedom” suddenly being plunged into the “anything goes” atmosphere of Holland. Cohn expands Hirsi Ali’s thought and writes, “Pour Islamic immigrants from remote villages into Europe’s most liberal culture, replete with sex palaces, drugs and ever more explicit Dutch-invented TV ‘reality-shows’ – and the chances something might go haywire were real, especially once the boom times passed.”

Akbar Ahmed, the former Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain, puts it more bluntly when he asks in his book Postmodernism and Islam, what is the devout young Muslim supposed to think when he sees Britain's most popular TV sitcom portray a fictional Margaret Thatcher masturbating a fictional Ronald Reagan?

Culture and custom reflect underlying psychological realities. Throughout history, peoples have been relatively separated, thus allowing them to develop culturally and socially in their own manner and at their own pace. Now, due to our global electronic information system, everyone is jammed into one cultural context—that of postmodern Europe and America. It’s creating personal, spiritual and cultural havoc that threatens the cohesion and social stability on which civilized life depends.

The second world-spanning pressure was expressed in the 1940s by the eminent British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. Wrote Hoyle, "When a photograph of earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose." Think of the most powerful ideas in history—nationalism, capitalism, socialism, rationalism, modernism, etc. Hoyle suggested that an idea at least as powerful as these—possibly more so—would be let loose by the many pictures of earth we've seen from the space program.

Hoyle’s “new idea” was seeing the human species as a single entity. For the first time since human life appeared on Earth, all tribes, nations and religions are beginning to share a common history and destiny. We have understood this fact as a scientific/physical reality, but we have not yet absorbed it as the decisive psychological watershed it represents. Hoyle was suggesting that all forms of identity are primarily projections that will be transcended by seeing earth from space, and which will offer each of us a larger sense of who we are. This will equally affect our Muslim immigrant as our Parisian sophisticate. It is part of the process mentioned above, of forcing everyone into the same technological context.

Nature drew no lines in the sand or mountains distinguishing one "nation" from another. No one has met God in space who has designated one religion to be the only “true” belief. While people may be ethnically different, there’s no “arbiter of all wisdom” that proclaims the attributes of one ethnic group superior to all others. Most of the dividing lines that have formed “identity” are projections of our subconscious. That’s not to say they’re irrelevant. They have been, and still are, a vital part of who we are. But we have now surpassed those dividing lines as the primary category of identity needed for what appears to be a global era.

Hoyle’s suggestion of a widening expression of the self is not new to Americans. Before 1776, the inhabitants of the Colonies didn’t think of themselves in relationship to the United States (there was no United States), but in relationship to the particular state in which they lived. After the establishment of the United States, people slowly thought of their lives in a wider context, a new entity called the United States of America. This widening process took time. Indeed, the historian Daniel Borstin tells us it wasn’t until nearly ninety years later, at the end of the Civil War that a distinctly American identity emerged.

A similar process is happening today on a global scale, involving many more people, cultures and religions—not to mention it being far more difficult and dangerous.

The third world-spanning pressure ripping up old ways of identity is a fresh spiritual dispensation struggling to come into existence. Why is Europe secular? The heart of what once was Christendom is now characterized by what used to be considered the “Anti-Christ.” And why is America’s popular culture typified by doubt, gratuitous violence, cynicism, superfluous sex, irony and ridicule? Jon Stewart has become the national guru.

I would suggest a major reason: We are living through the Apocalypse. Don't blanch. The Apocalypse is totally misunderstood. It is not the literal end of the world, as so many believe. Rather, the psychology of the Apocalypse suggests the end of the Christian eon as the dominant spiritual expression emanating from the depths of the Western soul, and the eventual emergence of some new spiritual dispensation expressed in symbols relevant to our space-age context. Such seminal changes of spiritual expression have happened several times before in history.

The word “apocalypse” is from the Greek, meaning, “uncovering what has been hidden.” In other words, apocalypse is the revelation of new truth. The Catholic Church has long predicted this would come, although it declined to specify a date. Before he was Pope, John Paul II warned the Church about what he saw happening: “We find ourselves in the presence of the greatest confrontation in history, the greatest mankind has ever had to confront. We are facing the final confrontation between the Church and the Anti-Church, between the Gospel and the Anti-Gospel.”

A secular view of the Apocalypse was offered by Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Writing in The Washington Post, Mead noted that “apocalypse anxiety has moved into the mainstream of American politics and culture…a line has been crossed. This is Oppenheimer country. The Age of Progress is in the past and this is the era of Shiva, destroyer of worlds.”

It all sounds ominous, despite the evangelical explosion throughout America. So how do we gauge the spiritual and psychological life of today’s America? By public opinion polls that tell us well over ninety percent of the American people say they believe in God? By “mega-churches” that have ten to fifteen thousand members? That’s one way, and it’s perhaps no accident that this fundamentalist spiritual explosion has coincided with a similar explosion of technology—especially information technology—that has engulfed America the past three decades.

Another way to gauge our spiritual and psychological life is to examine our culture and intellectual life, and what they are telling us. Here we find a radically different story. In this realm, the determinants of philosophical-historical postmodernism are dominant—especially with the “creative minority” who give us our science, technology, literature, education, cinema and other cultural art forms. This is important, because culture is to a nation what dreams are to an individual—an indication of what’s going on in the inner life, in the unconscious realm, which is the crucible of consciousness.

These three issues—different cultures suddenly jammed into the same mental space, technology downgrading historic boundaries and enabling us to see the human species as a single entity, and the gradual shift from one spiritual dispensation to a new expression, are affecting every aspect of identity. There is no simple formula to solve this global crisis of identity; nor is it going to be resolved quickly.

In sum, we're living through the effects of realizing that all forms of past identity are no longer the prime forms relevant for a new epoch that encompasses the world as a whole. We're living through the agonizing shift from one orientation to a new worldview, and that involves all our categories of identity. Each person has to ask what all this means for them, for their own perspective and sense of identity.

The great challenge of the coming years is to prevent these explosive identity crises from killing hundreds of thousands of people. All of us—leaders as well as led—have got to work through these issues both individually and collectively. If we continue as we are, with the usual political agendas, outmoded expressions of identity, and parochial worldviews predominating, it is almost a guarantee that the worst scenario possible will be realized. But if we can rise above these very genuine, but limiting perspectives, if we can see the world from the “outside” as Sir Fred Hoyle suggested, then totally new possibilities open up for the future.