Statement from Walt Anderson
(Excerpt from work in progress)
The human species is migrating out of a past in which people regarded the conditions of life as ordained by forces beyond them (nature, tradition, gods) into a present in which we actively participate in shaping ecosystems, social institutions, values and customs and beliefs. Those of us alive today are not entirely responsible for this escalation of responsibility; we didn’t choose to live in a time that brings such a proliferation of choices.
This awareness emerges at a time in which we are nervously obsessed with the future, not sure whether it holds an age of wonders or the collapse of civilization — or some inconceivable combination of the two. Toffler’s “future shock†begins to look like a modest prophecy as we contemplate global climate change, mergers of machines with human brains, manipulations of genetic inheritance, and several kinds of horrendous weapons made widely available. Ideas that seemed outrageous only a few years ago – human immortality, multiple universes – now make themselves at home in the conversations of eminent scientists.
Earth is becoming a different kind of planet, and we are becoming a different kind of species — and these changes require commensurate changes in our ways of thinking and communicating. That is the subject of this book — the making of a 21st-century mind. By “mind†I mean roughly the same thing scholars mean when they talk about the primitive mind or the Medieval mind, or what John Herman Randall meant when he wrote The Making of the Modern Mind. I mean our prevailing patterns of feeling and thought – our habits of the heart, and also habits of the head.
The transition is proceeding along two paths – one ecological, the other cultural; change in our relation to Earth’s ecosystems and life forms; and change in our relation to words, symbols, beliefs. Both of these reveal deep truths about what we are: One is that we are animals grown out of Earth and inseparable from it, yet with powers over it unlike any other life form. The other is that we are symbolic animals, who live in a socially-constructed (and ever-changing) world of words and images.
These discoveries take us all to levels of responsibility not known to people in the recent past. Our parents and grandparents did not hold themselves responsible for the future of life on Earth; they might have been conservationists and nature-lovers, but the idea of governing a biosphere was not yet in their conceptual repertoire. They were only dimly aware of their ability to participate in the construction of social reality, and the enormous freedom that confers. So the transition may involve reluctant acceptance of a burden, but it is also an emancipation.
(Although I have been deeply involved with questions about consciousness in this work, I have not explored them in the ways that I expect to hear discussed in this conference. So I have a lot to learn, and am looking forward to the opportunity.)