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I can do without
answers to all my questions except the one question, What
questions should we be asking in a world that is burning?
—Anon.
At the turn of the millennium the world is burning.
Transformation is occurring in every sector, at every scale, in
every dimension. Nothing we have inherited from the past is able
to withstand the accelerated pace of change; everything from the
future remains a perpetual possibility. Society has become
completely malleable to the power of science and technology; our
mind, continually susceptible to novelty; our relationships,
opened to new configurations and meanings.
It is almost unbelievable that 90 percent of everything that has
been discovered or invented in the entire history of civilization
has been invented or discovered in the past seventy-five years.
Explosions in science and technology are creating opportunities
that stagger the imagination. Revolutions in biotechnology,
nanotechnology, digital technology, and information technology
are reshaping human society and offering us essentially unlimited
power over ourselves, over nature, over life itself.
Yet all these achievements have not made us more ethically
balanced or more wise. Upwards of two hundred million persons
have been killed in this century alone for reasons of war and
ideology, more than have been killed in all of recorded history
combined. The advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 made possible for
the first time the annihilation of all life. Chemical and
biological weapons, other products of this century, could also do
irreparable harm on a scale heretofore unknown.
Ironically, the incidences of natural
disasters—earthquakes, floods, famines, tornadoes,
hurricanes, and drought—are occurring with a frequency
without modern historical parallel.
In social terms we are witnessing an equally powerful force.
After millennia of male domination, women are rising to positions
of leadership in virtually every sphere of endeavor. In the
process we are completely reforming gender relationships and our
inherited beliefs concerning governance, community, family,
hierarchy, and spirituality. This is giving rise to extraordinary
possibilities in our appreciation of human potential and societal
values.
Equally fundamental, a global consciousness, spawned by economic
globalization and mass communication, is for the first time
uniting all of humanity into a single unit, bringing the six
thousand discrete cultures and societies now existing around the
world into sustained interaction. Nation-states, the mainstay of
commerce, government, and culture for centuries, are rapidly
giving way to networks empowered by information and communication
technologies. Human civilization is being reborn on a global
scale.
Such are the transformations occurring in the world that
President and poet Vaclav Havel suggests that "There are good
reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Many things
indicate that we are going through a transitional period when it
seems that something is on the way out and something else is
painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling,
decaying and exhausting itself, while something else, still
indistinct, were arising from the rubble."
At the onset of a new century and the third millennium,
propelled forward by change, we find ourselves in the space
between epochs. We are being torn from the past and yet the
future is indistinct. With unimaginable power at our disposal,
with transformations occurring in every sphere, we are strangely
unsure of where we now want to go. To use a Biblical image, it is
as if we were delivered from the bondage of Egypt but have not
yet entered the Promised Land. We are thus wandering lost in the
wilderness of Sinai, full of potential but without clear
direction.
Sinai bespeaks a time when the old is gone, but the new is not
yet fully discerned. It is a time of transition, a time of hope
and preparation in anticipation of the new, as well as a time of
disorientation and confusion, emanating out of the passing of the
old. All our inventions and discoveries, even our deliverance
from the grip of the Cold War, have brought not utopia but
turbulence, not a new world-order but uncertainty and chaos.
Being lost in Sinai, the world around us burning in
transformation, compels us to ask whether we are caught up in a
random accumulation of events that are sweeping the world into an
unknown reality beyond anyone’s control, or are deep
patterns of history operating that can be discerned in our
present moment? Are we in a time of unprecedented newness in
which everything is being reinvented, or are we in the grip of
deja vu in which the past is mysteriously present and framing our
future?
May I suggest that the answer to both alternatives is yes? We
are in a time of novelty, and we are experiencing the repetition
of very deep historical patterns. Everything is completely new,
and we have all been here before. We are marching relentlessly
into the unknown, and, if we look deeply enough, we can discern
that this unknown is undergirded by the knowable. To be able to
discern both alternatives, separately and together, is to be able
to come to terms with the paradox of power, which characterizes
our age.
I use the term "paradox of power" very advisedly. Things seem as
confusing as they are because everything seems paradoxical. New
inventions and discoveries abound to raise standards of living,
eliminate certain diseases, and make life more comfortable
worldwide; and thousands of plant and animal species are made
extinct every year as a result of this technological progress.
Multinational corporations sell their products in every corner of
an increasingly prosperous world, and new diseases and refugee
migrations sweep the earth. We are comforted with myriad
accouterments of technological progress, and we are confronted by
multiple crises in human relations. We continue to foul our nest,
even as we build better ones.
At a time of unparalleled expansion at the scientific and
technological levels, we participate in and give witness to
unimaginable destructiveness. The generation of humanity that put
a man on the moon and developed a cure for polio produced the
Stalinist dictatorship and shoved millions of Jews into gas
chambers. The companies that manufacture the consumer goods we
all enjoy slash rain forests to the ground and adhere to minimal
environmental standards only by force of law. In the name of
progress we destroy; through destruction we "progress." The more
we know, the more destructive we seem to become. The more power
we exercise, the more power we seek.
This is a universal phenomenon, affecting the entire human race.
Whether from the Japanese, European, or American corporations,
technological developments are generated to satisfy consumers
while their ethical, social, and environmental implications are
left essentially unexplored; and whether in the Balkans, Africa,
or Tibet, peace is discussed while violence abounds. Human
technology and human relations everywhere reflect this paradox of
progress and destructiveness, altruism and greed. Human life is
played out on the anvil of tragedy and hope.
This paradox undergirds human historical, psychological, and
spiritual life. The polarity of opposites within the context of
life, death, and renewal constitutes a basic matrix of human
existence itself. Carl Jung called this the cruciform nature of
reality: Everything in our experience is comprised of opposites,
and all things evolve through time within a pattern of life,
death, and renewal. Moreover, these opposites are not simply neat
pairs of polarities, such as light and dark, male and female,
which are easily identifiable and understood. Rather, the
cruciform nature of reality describes existence as comprised of
antinomies: internally consistent, mutually exclusive truths,
which to our conscious mind seem totally disconnected but which
are inseparably interconnected within our psyche and in the realm
of Spirit.
It is almost impossible to grasp an antinomy intellectually
because an antinomy cannot be explained rationally. That not
withstanding, the subject of this book is the antinomies that
make up human history, that shape and, paradoxically, redeem our
life.
Copyright © 2000 Jim
Garrison
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