After the Future

May 9, 2014

From Humanity 2.0 to Humanity 3.0

This half hour RSA clip about Steve Fuller's book, Humanity 2.0 is worth watching. It establishes the state of the conversation about a transhuman future. Fuller is pushing up…

This half hour RSA clip about Steve Fuller's book, Humanity 2.0 is worth watching. It establishes the state of the conversation about a transhuman future. Fuller is pushing up against the approach that I'm trying to develop here on this blog, but it's not what I'm talking about. I think his thinking, and the thinking of the other panelists, is still circumscribed by materialistic thinking and positivistic assumptions. I'd like to suggest another alternative for Humanity, the one I've been talking about on and off here over the years, the one imagined in somewhat different ways by Owen Barfield and Teilhard de Chardin. More about them below.

Staying within Fuller's cybernetic metaphor, let's call what I hope for Humanity 3.0. Humanity 1.0 is the premodern consciousness shaped by customary culture. Humanity 2.0 is modern secular consciousness that swept most of the customary culture away in rejecting it as superstition. Nevertheless, there have been many people who have shown us what Humanity 3.0 looks like. Kierkegaard, M.L. King, Gandhi, Mandela, Bonhoeffer, Popes John XXIII and Francis, Mother Teresa, Jean Vanier, Teilhard, and Barfield are exemplars who are for me top of mind because of their public profiles, but there are many, many more who whether known or unknown quietly go about their business–knights of faith as Kierkegaard called them. These people are not flawless, but they have something working in them that significantly distinguishes them from Humanity 1.0 or 2.0. They are people in whom the Logos has awakened in ways it has not for people who are still at 1.0 or 2.0.

So to help frame what I'm trying to articulate here about Humanity 3.0, let's first quote from our first text in Barfield's Saving the Appearances:

I believe that the blind spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is, that it had, on the one hand , a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith; that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two. . . .

When the horizon of time expanded suddenly in the nineteenth century, one would have expected those who accepted evolution and remained Christians, to see the incarnation of their Saviour as the culminating point of the history of the earth–a turning point of time to which all at first led down and from which all thereafter was to lead upward. Moreover, having regard to the antiquity now attributed to the earth and man, one would have expected them to feel that we are still very very near to that turning-point, indeed hardly past it; that we hardly know as yet what the Incarnation means; for what is two thousand years in comparison with the ages which preceded it? –Owen Barfield, chapter 24, "The Incarnation of the Word", p. 167-68

Yes. Isn't that what Christians are supposed to believe–that something of world historical importance happened 2000 years ago and everything changed? But has it? I think it has, but we don't have the right lens to see it.

So let's change the metaphor from a cybernetic one to one that's more organic. Think of the earth as a giant egg that was sterile until fertilized by the Incarnation. Cur Deus Homo? Because evolution required it. Humanity 2.0 and 3.0–and perhaps 4.0 and beyond–would not be otherwise possible because this new possibility for the earth was never possible so long as the influence of the Logos was outside in as it has been in 1.0 cultures. So now at the heart of the earth, from the inside out, a new creation is gestating and growing in the belly of the beast, eventually subverting a regime that is otherwise ruled by greed, glory, and will to power.

These instinctual drivers were restrained somewhat by external norms imposed by 1.0 cultures, Christian Europe was never anything more, but nothing changes substantively until it occurs from the inside out. Christendom produced exemplars of Humanity 3.0, but they were few and far between. Most Christians lived at a 1.0 level. But as Barfield points out, we're only at the relative beginning. And I would add, that we are at a critical growth point now in the 21st century.

Second text, from the transcript of Krista Tippet's January 23 show about Teilhard de Chardin. This from the segment in which she's interviewing Ursula King:

Ms. Tippett: Was it also in the context of "The Divine Milieu" that he spoke of the human as "matter at its most incendiary stage"?

Dr. King: Yes, I think you're right. I think you're right. That's a wonderful …

Ms. Tippett: Which is also such a wonderful image.

Dr. King: It's a wonderful phrase. So, you see, I think he has this dynamic awareness from his evolutionary approach, so one could call his spirituality also an evolutionary spirituality, as some people do. And he feels that we are today at a very, very important threshold of emerging into a new phase of humanization, of becoming human, in a different way from the way our forebears were.

Ms. Tippett: Right, right.

Dr. King: They pull from the future and towards the future. And he's less and less interested in the past and more and more interested in where are we going, what are we doing with the potential we have, with the imagination, the creativity, the consciousness, the complexification of people thinking together and acting together. What is all this aiming for?

Teilhard is 'after the future'.

And then later in the show, this interchange with biologist/anthropologist David Sloan Wilson:

Ms. Tippett: Right, and you feel like this may be something that Teilhard got wrong or that his view was too optimistic?

Dr. Wilson: Well, first let me tell you another thing that he got right and then the one thing that he got wrong. Another thing he talked about was that he called them grains of thought. And what he meant by that is that at first, of course, humans existed in tiny groups and they each had their separate symbolic systems, which were disconnected to each other. Then he imagined these grains of thought coalescing and that corresponds to increasing the scale of society. Indeed, that has happened. Then he thought that his would result in a single global consciousness that he called the Omega Point.

Ms. Tippett: Right, the process of evolution reflecting on itself.

Dr. Wilson: [Laugh] Now it is true that we have the increasing scale of society all the way to the mega societies of today, but the idea that this was going to result in a single global brain, and especially that there is some inevitability about this, is what's not quite right. It could happen. It's within the realm of possibilities, but it is by no means certain. There is such a thing as collapse. And I think one of the reasons that his work does have the spiritual quality is because of the idea that there is an Omega Point and we're going towards the Omega Point. I think the real situation is that, yes, there's an Omega Point, but we have to work real hard to get there. And if we don't get there, then woe is us.

Teilhard saw that evolution now is no longer a passive process as it was when most of the action was in the biosphere–and that's really what Darwin's theory is good for explaining–processes in the biosphere, and those explanations are fine so far as they go. But Teilhard was among the first to see that evolution now has shifted from the Biosphere to the Noosphere. (Read the rest of the Tippet/King transcript if you are unfamiliar with this term.) In the Noosphehre, evolution is no longer something that happens to us; it's something that humans enact. So everything depends on the kind of mind that is directing the evolutionary process. If that mind is circumscribed by materialistic and positivistic assumptions, i.e., Humanity 2.0, I don't see a positive outcome. But neither does a reversion to 1.0 lead us to one.

So what reason have I to be optimistic? Well, even if I don't know how this is going to play out, I just choose to be optimistic. My optimism derives from my deep sense (intuition?, hope?) that the human being has the resources, in potentia, to write a comedic rather than a tragic script. I described where I think those resources lie. Central to the idea of Humanity 3.0 is what I describe in the recent post "On the Sensus Communis" as the awakening of the Logos. The Logos works in everyone, but for the most part it sleeps or operates unconsciously in Humanity 1.0 and 2.0. Nevertheless, I believe that there is enough incipient 3.0 wakefulness to give us a chance.

It's interesting that Fuller talks about the Logos, but only in the context of pointing out that nobody believes in it anymore. But here's the point. There is no broad cultural acceptance of the idea of the Logos anymore precisely because the Logos has gone underground. The idea of an all-powerful God or Christus Rex no longer makes because that's not where the Logos is found–out there. He's found instead slumbering in seed form in the human heart waiting to either to germinate, or where it has done so to flower and fruit. The Logos, if it has a shaping influence in our global social life and thinking, will have it only to the degree that it awakens and grows in the souls of fertile men and women.

Something's got to give. There is the materialist 'singularity' that is imagined and longed for by many who are still stuck in 2.0, and there is the kind of spiritual singularity that is imagined and longed for by Teilhard and Barfield, which is 3.0. I think either is a possibility. Indeed, one or the other is inevitable, unless, of course, the whole thing, the entire emerging global Noosphere collapses into a new Dark Age.

Tragedy and disappointment is the movie we've seen time and again, but I think we are mistaken to think that the tragic script is inevitable or even the most likely. There is something in the human being that regroups, that adapts, and keeps the ball moving forward no matter how many or how severe the setbacks he experiences. As bad as things seem, we seem to find a way. As Barfield points out:

. . . we may permit ourselves to ask what would have happened if the incarnation of the Word had been understood at the time when it occurred; if Christ had been acknowledged instead of being crucified. In fact, by the time the Event happened, the pharisaical element in Jewish religion had apparently triumphed, balking the nation of the opportunity of fulfilling its destiny. Instead of realizing the inwardness of the Divine Name–a consummation to which their whole history had been leading–the Children of Israel had turned aside. The Name had ceased to be uttered even by the priests in the temple, and the Creator had been removed to an infinite external distance, as a Being, omnipotent indeed, and infinitely superior, but, in the way He was thought of, existentially parallel with man himself.

Yet–so we may speculate–this need not have happened. On the contrary, precisely the pharisees should hardly have needed even reminding of their nation's destiny by the Saviours' pregnant words; they should have leaped instantly into recognition of man's Creator speaking with the voice and through the throat of a man. Logically there was the possibility of a gentle, untragic transition from original to final participation, the one maturing in proportion as the other faded. Within the limits of this sort of speculation we can even say that it was this which was 'intended'. For the whole tenor of the Old Testament suggests that the imaginal consciousness characteristic of original participation was being destroyed, precisely in order that it might be reborn. 'The rejection of idolatry', writes Dr. Austin Farrer,

"meant not the destruction but the liberation of the images. Nowhere are the images in more vigour than in the Old Testament, where they speak of God, but are not he . . .there is no historical study more significant than the study of their transformation. Such a transformation finds expression in the birth of Christianity; it is visible rebirth of images."

That rebirth, however, did not take place. The crucifixion did.

Original participation fires the heart from a source outside itself; the images enliven the heart. But in final participation–since the death and resurrection–the heart is fired from within by the Christ; and it is for the heart to enliven the images. Saving the Appearances, pp. 171-72

It is that fire, the fire that Moses encountered in the burning bush on Mt. Sinai, the one that announced Himself as 'I am who am', is a fire now that burns in the heart of Humanity 3.0. This is indeed 'matter at its most incendiary stage'. My hope lies in that it even now burns in a greater number of people than is acknowledged in a world that is still dominated by Humanity 2.0 thinking and figuration.

My hope lies in that at some point the fires burning in those hearts, and they are everywhere burning even if still diffidently without awareness about their potential to shape something new, will find a way to join one with the other to set the world ablaze and thus to enliven and reanimate a world disenchanted by 2.0 thinking. That is the only thing that I can imagine will save us from a new dark age or a mechanomorphic singularity that locks in death-saturated 2.0 thinking and its materialistic aspirations.

Comments

4 responses

Jack Whelan

May 10, 2014

I resist writing on the singularity or transhumanism because I realize a lot of people think it’s flaky. But that’s why I put up the RSA clip and the clip by Leonard Shlain a couple of weeks ago. They show some interesting people grappling with the fact that we are sailing in uncharted waters. These people are not flakes.
I think that we have become so accustomed to the ordinariness of our lives that it’s hard to believe that something big might actually be up. And some might reasonably say, even if there is something up, there’s nothing I can do about it, so why waste energy thinking about it? I respect that response. I don’t know that I can make a compelling argument that those people are wrong. In the end, the only thing that matters is what we do in our real lives, and speculations like this seem at best a kind of parlor game, or the kind of thing we b.s.ed about when in college.
Nevertheless, I have a case to make. Precisely because we are in uncharted waters we need an extra degree of vigilance. And if there is one thing that I have learned, it’s that the greatest obstacle to seeing what’s right in front of your nose is the perceptual frame that organizes your world. We each have our own individual perceptual frames, but they are embedded in the larger social imaginary. Together they structure our world of experience–our way of seeing, thinking, and feeling. But they are nothing more than habits, habits that have been and will be changed when the Real forces an adjustment. My argument is that the biggest obstacle to understanding what’s going on is the way the contemporary social imaginary is framed by positivist assumptions.
It’s extremely difficult to talk about anything these days if it defies our common sense understanding of the world. Even if you think of yourself as spiritual or a person of faith, you still experience the world within a positivist/materialist frame. The social imaginary it shapes for us brings certain things into focus and filters other things out–filters an awful lot out. And so religious people who live in positivist social imaginary live in a world where their experience of it is largely the same as their agnostic or atheist neighbors, and so believers are at a disadvantage in any conversation because their neighbors’ worldview may not be better adapted to the Real, but it is better adapted to the social imaginary you both share. So pretty much everything you say sounds flaky to them.
Whoever owns the frame, owns the argument. In such conversations all you can do is point to a few anomalies here and there that don’t quite fit the materialist frame, but cognitive dissonance comes in easily enough to filter out or explain those away, and become even for honest believers a reason to doubt their own sanity. Because all of us, even if we are religious, have a bias against anything that doesn’t fit within the positivist/materialist frame. But this is a frame that is slowly crashing, and it’s important that believers begin thinking about presenting one that can work to replace it when it finally collapses.
So the debate we’ve been having, and it’s been going on since at least Galileo through Darwin, is an argument between what I describe as partisans of 1.0 and 2.0. The most thoughtful among the 1.0s, typically religious conservatives, see the latter as promoting a flattened, barbarically soulless world. And the best among the 2.0s see the 1.0s as rigidly resistant to any change and living in a world that simply doesn’t exist except in their own imaginations. My argument here for years is that both are right, but that the argument between 1.0s and 2.0s is a distraction and keeps us from seeing what is right in front of our nose.
I’ve given more space Teilhard and Barfield or Shlain and McLuhan recently because I believe they are advance scouts reporting back to the rest of us as we collectively move into these uncharted waters. Their reports may prove to be reliable or not, because whatever they see is something new and strange for them, too, and their own perceptions are likely distorted by old habits of mind that bend the Real to fit the familiar.
But I have no doubt that they see something the rest of us are filtering out, and at least they are grappling honestly with the anomalies the Real is currently presenting to us rather than just dismissing them because they don’t fit the positivist frame. They are less alienated from the Real than the rest of us, and they deserve our attention.
The entire Christian story, except as it’s the story of good man with an edifying message who died for no good reason, does not fit in the postiivist/materialist social imaginary. For me it is the central story, and it’s essential that its centrality be represented in a way that makes sense to people living now. It’s important that we have some way of orienting ourselves in time and space, and if you agree with me that neither 1.0 or 2.0 gives us an adequate model, then it’s important that we do the thinking and imaginal work that will contribute to the shaping of a new one.
So for me me the task is to think about the future as a Christian and in doing so to stand as far outside that positivist frame as I’m capable and at the same time to do it in a way that has accepted the 2.0 critique of the obsolescence 1.0 forms.
My critique of 1.0 conservatives is that they hang on to the old forms as a sailor hangs onto the mast during furious storm, when instead they should be looking to reanimate the forms from within. The old forms are dead, but they can be resurrected.
You can’t resurrect anything except through the power of the Logos, and he’s not out there, but is to be found within the darkness of our souls as something like a pinprick of light, that if nurtured will grow into something blindingly bright and reanimate and re-enchant the appearances. This is the alternative frame to the positivist one that I am striving to make my perceptual frame.

Reply
Jonathan

May 10, 2014

“My critique of 1.0 conservatives is that they hang on to the old forms as a sailor hangs onto the mast during furious storm, when instead they should be looking to reanimate the forms from within.”
So, forgive the pedantry, Jack, but what is the sailor in this metaphor supposed to be doing other than clinging for dear life to the mast? What are his real options? In order for the metaphor to work, there has to be an equivalent, for the poor sailor, of “looking to reanimate the forms from within.” Again, sorry for the pedantry. But I do have a point! . . .
As I’ve said before, I find the visionaries among the poets and the singers, the painters and the architects. But the thing is, everybody can’t be a visionary artist or thinker. The guys clinging to the mast definitely aren’t ever going to be those types, and I don’t see why they should be. My vision of a more perfect future, if I have one, is not of a world populated by visionaries. The doomed sailors/1.0 conservatives are looking for a way for mass society to live. They’re looking in the wrong place (or time), I agree with you on that, but the point to bring up is that it’s a question of scale. When we talk about the kind of embeddedness or Kierkegaardian authenticity or whatnot that we see individuals or small groups capable of cultivating, that’s one conversation. But the language, and consequently the possibilities, shift dramatically when it becomes a question of whole societies and civilizations. Maybe it’s time to outgrow the idea of civilization. I certainly don’t see Christ in the Gospels speaking primarily to the “civilized” portion of his disciples’ souls.
The old religious forms and social mores are systems whose purpose is to bring a modicum of revelation into the lives of the most vulgar and ordinary people. I see the 3.0 humanity you look for as containing no vulgar and ordinary people. It would contain no more visionaries, either. Art is precisely the eschaton rendered sub specie temporis, or this world, the saeculum, rendered sub specie aeternitatis. The visionaries to whom I cling, the artists (including some very philosophical ones, like Dante) are by and large not opposed to improving the world, to working on civilization. But what makes them visionaries is their glimpse of something that cannot be realized in this world, not even asymptotically (in the mass and historical, as opposed to the individual and biographic senses). The artists achieve the limit set to human speculation and experience, each according to his own personality and historically contingent life. But maybe, after all, I’m talking about a different kind of prophetic work than the variety that senses the Next Big Thing and presents it in evocative new imagery. That, I think, is what you’re after. In that case, and assuming the Next Big Thing or Humanity 3.0 is a world of maximized potential, then my artists have to be understood as standing in an oppositional or at best awkward relation to it, even if some of them also participate in the heralding, or as you put it, scouting work. Another way of putting it is maybe that the “update” model seems to render predecessor stages irrelevant or inferior in some way to people in the present. One can only read predecessors as valuable insofar as they point forward, rather than as having achieved a unique and unrepeatable insight whose worth is independent of its historical afterlife — even for us, who are part of that afterlife.
I fear I’m not being clear, and I apologize for that. Whenever I try to engage these kinds of problems lately I find myself dividing the indivisible and uniting the essentially distinct. Certainly I’m not trying to refute the evolutionary model you propose; rather trying to articulate an anxiety it seems to raise in me. But maybe the problem I’m pointing to, if it exists, isn’t irreconcilable, but only peripheral to the scouting mission you’re on. I just finished re-reading Barfield’s Poetic Diction and am waiting for it to sink in, for my inner jury’s verdict, so to speak.

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Jack Whelan

May 10, 2014

Yes I thought of that after writing it. My immediate response would be just to let go and see what happens, but perhaps a better metaphor would be to return to the idea of the flood and substitute dock for mast. Survival is perhaps more likely in the flood than in a storm. In the back of my mind is the image of the Irish monks in their coracles letting the currents carry them wherever–that’s radical trust. “Even though he slay me . . .”
The conservative seeks to hold on to the dock when the river rises when it would be better simply to let go and ride it out, all the while doing everything you can to keep your head above water. Holding on to the dock is just going to get your drowned or crushed by the swell when it finally comes. Either way, the point I’m going for here is that holding onto things outside yourself won’t do you any good and possibly a lot of harm. Better to trust your ability to ride the swell.
More later.

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Jack Whelan

May 10, 2014

Jonathan said: “I see the 3.0 humanity you look for as containing no vulgar and ordinary people. It would contain no more visionaries, either.”
If by vulgar you mean people whose lives are governed by greed, glory, and will to power, I agree. My point is that there’s a difference between the people who restrain those impulses because it’s what they were taught was wrong and that they fear punishment when they transgress, and people who restrain those impulses because they have an interior moral compass that guides them away from those impulses, even when they feel the intensity of their demands.
But I don’t think that 3.0 means extraordinary. That’s Kierkegaard’s point about the knights of faith–they are often very ordinary people who live publicly innocuous lives, but they live lives that are conscience driven, i.e., they are driven by an interior sense of what is lawful rather than just living conventionally.
I think these 3.0 people have lived in every epoch in every culture, but have appeared more frequently in the last 2000 years, more frequently yet in the last 500, and are all over the place now, even if they are largely invisible. There is steel in their spine, but it’s not necessarily something that’s prophetic or visionary or even the kind of thing that would register as significant on the culture’s radar. They mostlyknow the right thing to do even when it’s not culturally prescribed or proscribed, and they do it even when it’s transgressive, not because they are looking for trouble, but because it’s what’s called for. And they know the price, and they are willing to pay it. But for most 3.0s most of the time it doesn’t come to that.
Nevetheless, these 3.0s live within the culture’s social imaginary as people who are in it, but not of it. The visionaries–the artists, philosophers and saints–have a different role to play, because they can change the social imaginary. They are a smaller subset of 3.0, not 3.0 in its entirety. Their own mental and imaginal habits are formed by 2.0, but they are aware of the anomalies in 2.0 in a way that most people are not, and the anomalies interest them and draw them out of the ordinary 2.0 social imaginary.
I am not one of the scouts; I’m neither smart enough or perceptive enough; nevertheless, I want to do my part in ushering in the new thing, and for me that means keeping my eyes peeled and my ears pricked to understand what those who I think are the advance scouts have to say. Barfield, Teilhard, McLuhan are those kind of guys, IMO. They’re not the only ones, but they stand out for me, and we’ll see if what they are pointing to has any cash value, to use James’s phrase. I’m betting that it does, but I could be wrong.

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From Humanity 2.0 to Humanity 3.0

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