When you analyze nature as an integrated system of chemical reactions—gene transfer, catalytic self-regulating activities, hypercycles of energy, nutrients, and metabolism—when you analyze nature from that point of view, you see that it seeks to maximize cooperation, connectedness. Mutual interdependability is the thing which holds the whole thing together. And the species that is most successful is not the species that can dominate all others, it’s the species that can make itself indispensable to all others.
Evolution is now understood to be the triumphant march out of chaos into order, connectedness, self-expression, and self-reflection that begins with the first moments following the big bang.
I think what we have to do is begin, then, to design this process. It is now moving fast enough that it is within the ken of each one of us to see progressive consolidation of change taking place in the world around us. We, as human beings, I think, are destined to be the design and control element in this thing; in this global Gaian process. Never mind that we have done it so badly up to now, because now—meaning the twentieth century—is a completely different kind of epistemic world than any world that preceded it. And to the degree that we can shed the inherited behavior patterns of previous centuries, previous cultural styles, and actually take hold of the tools present at hand, we can guide and control this evolutionary process.
We are not scripting ourselves into some kind of machine future, we are designing the future that we want to have rather than allowing the blunders of our grandparents to dictate the kind of future we will have.
We tend to operate along very short-term goals. It’s very hard for us to put in place a project that looks 40 or 50 years ahead. It was interesting—a couple of years ago there was an article in the Whole Earth Review about a chapel at Oxford: that the main beam of this chapel, which was an oak beam about so by so, was rotted through with worms and had to be replaced. And it was no problem because, 800 years ago, an English king planted an oak tree that was to be grown for the specific purpose of replacing this beam when it should need to be replaced. And so this 750-year-old oak tree was cut and the beam hewn and put into place. And it inspired them to plant another oak tree—which is not a bad idea!
Until we get this higher perspective we are going to continue to rattle the bars of our cage. The higher perspective depends on seeing things on a scale of thousands of years and potentially millions of light-years. A cosmic scale—the correct scale; the scale on which we are truly operating.
Life is some kind of opportunity. It’s an opening between unbridgeable chasms of the unknown. And yet, out of chaos—for 20, 40, 70 years—we come into a domain of immense opportunity. It is a conundrum, it is a puzzle, it is something to be figured out. And I have the faith that, if we can figure this out, we can somehow not only make a better world for our children, but in some other profound way we can even undo what has been done. This would be the ultimate dream: that somehow we can discover an elegant escape that will leave us with the clear understanding that the problem was an illusion. It was an illusion. It was the last illusion.
What we have very, very suddenly—almost overnight—put in place is, number one: an entirely global system for collecting information about reality and ourselves. We never had this before. We didn’t even have it thirty years ago. Now you can find out what’s going on. You can go, if necessary, anywhere you need to go: within 72 hours you can be on the ground almost anywhere on Earth, checking out what’s going on. In the meantime, anthropological data, sociological data, climatological data, demographic data, political data, defense strategy data—all of this stuff is available. We now know at least what cards are in play. And this is the first time this has been so. We are now a global culture. You know, from the rainforests of the Amazon to the wastes of the Kalahari, from Nome to Santiago—it’s one family, one people.
Nine million computers a month are being connected together. Now, people think that computers are office machines, but all of our technology is an excretion of the imagination. All of our technology is the condensation of ideological intention. And the fact that we now have turned our attention to information—the true stuff of reality—is a hopeful sign. For three centuries we’ve been obsessed with matter. We thought that was the true stuff of reality. Well, it turns out that’s just nonsense.