Monday, June 13, 2011

OS Homo Sapien 2.0

"Both of these authors assert that the root cause of our difficulties lies in our view of reality. They contend that our shared worldview — based upon principals such as atomistic or mechanical materialism, duality, anthropocentrism, separateness and reductionism — has been heavily shaped by outdated scientific insights that formed the catalyst for the Scientific Revolution approximately 300 years ago. In other words, our crisis is one of software and not hardware."

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/os-homo-sapiens-2-0-new-human-software-coming-soon/

This post on the UN blog speaks to something that I have been talking about, in one way or another, for the past several years. There is essentially a convergence occurring in our environment where we will be forced into a new set of revolutions on the level of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution combined. This shift is fundamental because it not only requires a shift in our material experience of life - how we organize our economies - but also in our social philosophies - our consciousness needs to shift - in order for us to survive the current multiple crises.

I have tried to articulate this in my writings around an idea of a Somatic Future - a future in which our humanness is valued because we have "sense" of our environment. This means that we have to increasingly perceive our physical world, understand, relate and emphatically experience our interconnectedness in a way that we have never really imagined. I have struggled with this articulation in much of my research over the past 15 years. These issues of interconnectedness and the failings of a Newtonian and atomistic understanding of the world drove me to engage with questions of global corporations, and ultimately to study international political economics. The work of my academic mentor, Gillian Hart, greatly inspired me (and the work of Critical Human Geographers) who engaged the failings of an atomistic view of the world and of the economy. I worked in my MA research on trying to understand money not as a technology, or something that appears from the outside, but as something deeply intertwined and socially constructed.

All of this creates great complications but also the potential for empowerment but it must be based on some configuration of collaboration, new forms of social and organizational structures, and a view of the future that clearly realizes the future as a time of deep interconnectedness. We are approaching a fourth dimension of reality, one that will give us insight into the relationships between everything and one in which we may struggle to ever see apartness as something given and unbridgeable. In fact the idea of "individual" may come to be viewed as a total fallacy and a false god!