Becoming - Part III

We are protagonists in the theater of the world. Whether we are a walk-on or the main actor does not matter. Whether we are recognized or not is of secondary importance. Change is what it is, we can participate and act in any way our personhood allows us to participate and act. And in doing so, we can move the world with us and be moved by the world.

We can probe how we are allowed to play in the theater of the world. And we can choose what waves we want to ride. Do we prefer an ascendant to a descendant type of life? Do we prefer a reactive to a proactive type of life? Do we prefer to be thankful or resentful? How we probe the current values and choose when to stand and what to ride counts.

Let me try to be a bit more provocative. The current juncture of issues and power setup directs our attention to one particular event: the formation of a planetary community. Although even in the Bronze Age humans traveled and exchanged goods and culture and illnesses and whatnot, only now we have a truly planetary connectedness brought about by new technologies – in particular solid state and integrated electronics and its impact, still in its infancy, on transportation, communication, genetics, etc. These new technologies are bringing us beyond the Iron Age and its culmination with modernity.

The evolution of transportation technology, traced by archeology as the study of the transferring of objects, made possible the physical coming together of the planet. If writing, and the specificity of meaning-transferring that technology allowed, as traced by history, increased the possibility of influencing and controlling people’s emotions, IT can both increase that influence and control and introduce chance and fluidity – the secondary orality – and deliver leadership within complexity through new ways of synthesizing the flood of information that is constantly created and transferred.

Can the subtlety and pervading character of the new technologies bring humans closer to transitioning from a reality of ‘being’ to a reality of ‘process’? Although that getting closer is made by a microscopic succession of ‘being’, and never a ‘process’, it is possible to accept that approximation if, and only if, the processes are not required to be logically consistent and complete – i.e. automatable and self-contained.

It seems to me that we are at a juncture of needing a redefinition of fundamental concepts like life, death, identity, nature, and reality. It seems to me that we need to be available to go beyond morality (Leiter’s Morality in a Pejorative Sense, or MPS) and strive for greatness in order to achieve this change. It seems to me that we have to redefine how we exchange the results of our activities, how we engage in conflict, how we deploy power. And we need to encourage those technologies, like IT, that can make new values accessible to the larger public so that the political and economic world is pressed for change.