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The New Human:
Stepping Into the Next Evolution of Our Species
By John Renesch
Adapted
from John’s forthcoming book, The New
Human: Consciously Evolving to Civilization
3.0
2010 ©
John Renesch
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke used a phrase I love
when it comes to changing our thinking about how things have to be. In a 2004
interview in Leaders
magazine the experienced diplomat was asked about people in the world he most
admired. He replied, "The greatest person I ever met, bar none, is Nelson Mandela, and I have gotten to
know him very well. No man is perfect, not even Mandela, but he took history by
the throat, seized it, and changed its course through a combination of moral
authority, vision, strategic sense, practical genius, and a remarkable capacity
for forgiveness toward the thugs who ran South Africa under Apartheid."
It is time for us all to “take history by the throat” and change
from a mindset that tells us the best predictor of the future is the past, an
attitude that dooms us to being slaves of our history, to a transformed mindset
that creates a future based upon what we envision for ourselves, our families,
our communities and our world. A powerful vision that can change the course of
history is being called for. We need to assume that “moral authority, vision,
strategic sense, practical genius, and a remarkable capacity for forgiveness”
toward the people running things so far.
Vaclav Havel, the artist who became president of the Czech Republic
after the fall of the Soviet Union, has something powerful to offer us on this
as well. He writes, “Planetary democracy does not yet exist but our global
civilization is already preparing a place for it. It is the very Earth we
inhabit linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and
the commonality of the human race be newly created with reverence and gratitude
for that which transcends each of us and all of us together.” This sounds
incredibly similar to the vision of the framers of the Declaration of
Independence and subsequently the U.S. Constitution which laid the foundation
for the American Dream.
It’s About “Livingry,”
Stupid
Twenty five years ago, American futurist, architect and inventor R.
Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller stated that it was now highly feasible to take
care of everybody on Earth at a “higher standard of living than any have ever
known.” Here we are decades later and we are still struggling with the same
problems. He writes:
It no longer has to be you or
me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by
survival. War is obsolete….It is a matter of converting the high technology
from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human-life advantaging
and environment controlling. With the highest aeronautical and engineering
facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all
humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful.
All previous revolutions have
been political—in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull
down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically
greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented
heights.
Bucky’s term “livingry” signifies a new sort of revolution, not
one steeped in guns and violence but one in which we take responsibility for
the future we are leaving for our children.
Changing the Context
Let me say a few things about context, a subject that plays a key
role in transformational change, the kind of change I’m referring to throughout
this book. It might be useful to define it since it has come to be so widely
misused by so many. Context is the mental framework from which we think.
Because the word “transformation” got popular in the 1970s, many
people have come to think of it as synonymous with change. But transformation
is far more than mere change. It references a shift from one context to
another, from one worldview to another. The shift that physicists went through
when they realized that energy fields and quantum mechanics were more accurate
descriptions of how things worked was a transformation in thinking.
The primary
transformation we’re addressing now is a shift from having our collective thinking
based upon the material domain to one being inspired by the more generative spiritual
domain. This requires us to transform our thinking about reality, cause and
truth.
Shifting the framework from which we think allows all the content
to shift as well. It is not unlike sea birds that get caught up in an oil spill
in the ocean. You can rescue and clean all the gulls and pelicans you want but
if you release them before the spill is cleaned up they will most likely get
covered in sludge again. In this example, the oil polluted ocean represents the
context and the birds the content. You can change the content all day long but if the context
remains unchanged there’s little lasting improvement.
Context is not something widely discussed in the West. We are far
more used to and comfortable talking and living in the domains of form. Since
form is what we are familiar with and comfortable discussing, we tend to
constantly change, improve or expand the form
but rarely examine what the underlying context
may be. Context includes form as well as all the underlying assumptions,
conscious and unconscious, attitudes, perceptions and beliefs. So if we simply
find an oil-soaked pelican and clean it up for release back into the wild
without locating and cleaning up the oil spill in which it got contaminated we
could be wasting lots of work, expectations, and time. And the pelican would
likely die next time!
Form supports context but shouldn’t be confused with it. For
example, the context for democracy is individual liberty and empowerment. A
democracy also requires laws and rules for everyone to get along with one
another. Laws and rules are forms, like elections and the structure of the
government. In a totalitarian state, there are still rules and laws but they
support the context of totalitarianism. They are designed to empower the state,
not the people. Both contexts need form to support their existence.
Some think that purpose is part of the context for things, and
sometimes it can be. If the purpose of a system is to amass wealth, for
instance, the structure of the organization and the rules for operating will be
different than if the purpose is to serve the public welfare. Some forms can be
the same, such as the use of a corporate charter. Again, form supports the
context or purpose so if it works then it can be used. “Context provides the
meaning to content,” writes Mel Toomey who heads the Center for Leadership
Studies.
Context
provides meaning for people in their work and in their personal lives. When one’s life context is love and connection, one has
fewer tendencies to seek refuge in distractions. Trust prevails. People make
conscious choices based on the desire for something positive rather than
avoiding something negative.
What if the grand context of all civilized humanity were to shift
to one of caring and acceptance of everyone, recognizing we are all
interconnected and interdependent? What if we could learn to rely on one
another, like family, instead of building isolated islands of independence?
What if we could see ourselves as one big global family, different in form but
the same in spirit, “all for one and all for one”?
When this happens, there will be great changes in content. Sharing
will replace hoarding. Trust will replace suspicion. Love will take the place
of indifference. Dialogue and conflict resolution will replace war. Heart-felt
ideas will rank equally with rationality. Free choice will replace desperation.
Compassion will replace hatred. Natural knowing will replace fundamentalism. Sufficiency
will replace extravagance. As Toynbee writes, “Compassion is
the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its
self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.”
An Extraordinary
Confluence
I recall the opening line from The Tale of Two Cities -
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…" This is
certainly a time when that line is quite an accurate descriptor, for while we
have plenty of reasons for alarm about our future, there is also a basis for
optimism about a shift in our consciousness - a shift like the one Albert
Einstein referenced half a century ago when he said we'd never solve our
problems from the same thinking that created them.
As Indian businessman once said to me, "It is wonderful to
have a lofty vision that pulls you toward it but it helps if you are being
chased by a tiger." Certain forces in the world, largely our own doing,
represent the tiger - pushing us closer and closer to a society divorced from
its humanness, a future comprised of conditions and circumstances that may have
been unintended and unwanted but nevertheless are appearing in our reality.
Our vision for what we can be, and our continuing evolution toward
a higher destiny, is what pulls us ever closer to the Great Dream. We are
motivated to flee from negative forces while we are attracted to more positive
ones, like a long train with locomotives at either end - one pushing us and
another pulling.
There
was another historic confluence in the mid-1700s – each event a major element
in the confluence became a major influence in the founding of the first modern
democracy. Thomas Paine wrote one of the most influential works on this radical
idea for governance in his 1776 booklet Common
Sense, which remarkably sold 500,000 copies, which would rank it as a
“blockbuster” bestseller nowadays. In 1775, James Watt perfected his steam
engine – an invention that marked the beginning of the Industrial Age. In
the very next year moral philosopher Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations – his famous treatise on free market
economics that has since become the “bible of capitalism.” In the same time
period, the doctrine of the “Divine Right of Kings” – which had legitimized
autocratic dictatorship for much of human history - was coming to an end. All
of these milestones occurred on the coattails of what became known as the Age
of Enlightenment in the 18th Century.
The
age of the machine, modern democracy, free markets, and thinking for ourselves
were all significant milestones in humanity’s evolution – all converging in
historic alignment. We are at another such milestone. Let us not squander the
opportunity.