The previous approach of science—which was to isolate the smallest units in any system and then give a complete description of them—has given way to the realization that you can’t compute animals out of atoms, and you can’t compute the dynamics of societies by studying single individuals. The great science of the future is the science of complex systems and processes. And this is a revolutionary refocusing of the explanatory power of science.
When we take a whole-systems view of the universe and look back through time, what we see is what I call the conservation of novelty: that the closer you get to the present moment, the more novelty there is in the world, and the more it tends to preserve itself and pass itself on. So the evolution of life out of non-life, the evolution of culture out of animal existence, the evolution of electronic culture out of previous print culture—these are steps along the path of the generation and conservation of novelty.
If you go to the academies and ask, “What is history?” you’ll be told that it’s a trendless fluctuation. Well, if it’s a trendless fluctuation, it’s the only trendless fluctuation that has ever been identified in nature. And I want to suggest that actually it is not trendless, it is a process of knitting things together, folding one phenomenon into another, bringing distant peoples, languages, and technologies into ever closer association with each other, leading to the idea that history arises out of the natural world and points itself toward a kind of millennial conclusion.
I don’t believe we can look into the future five hundred or a thousand years and imagine human societies as we have known them with our infantile and primate politics and so forth. I think that history is actually an extraordinarily brief and self-transcending state. It only lasts perhaps a thousand generations. Now, of course, to an individual whose life is as ephemeral as that of a mayfly, a thousand generations seems like a long time. But from the point of view of the forces that have built this planet—subduction of tectonic plates, glaciation, and this sort of thing—a thousand generations is the wink of an eye. So part of this spiritual revolution that’s taking place, I think, is the dawning intuition on the part of many people that history is a process with a finite duration, and that actually—perhaps within our lifetimes, certainly within the lifetimes of our children—the human adventure is going to be transformed almost beyond our ability to recognize it.
Our present problems in the world—we have the technologies to solve our problems. We have the financial punch, we have the communication and educational systems necessary to inform people. What we lack is the cohesiveness of mind. It’s that we must change our minds—about racism, about how we relate to feminism, about how we relate to the exotic and the unfamiliar. It’s a mental gymnastic act that must be performed.
The imagination and its products is what really distinguishes us from the rest of animal nature. I mean, we (15,000–20,000 years ago) got the knack of exteriorizing our mental conceptions—first as throwing sticks and chipped flint and crude carvings, but the process is unbroken right up to the NeXT computer, the space shuttle, and what have you. We seem to be the creature that makes its own ideas manifest in matter.
In the sixties psychoactive drugs were called “consciousness-expanding.” Well, if we take that notion seriously for a moment, then I think we’re going to have to ask ourselves some deep questions about these shamanic sacraments. Because it’s the absence of consciousness that is our greatest peril. It’s the absence of our ability to communicate to each other, or to inspire masses of our fellows to embark on a sane political agenda, that is pushing us toward Armageddon. So if we really believe that there is any factor in the environment which expands consciousness, I think it would behoove us to give it a very careful going-over.
Nature is some kind of communicating, language-generating engine. The way plants and animals look, the chemicals they shed into the atmosphere, the way they relate to each other through symbiosis and so forth—nature is some kind of great piece of integrated linguistic machinery. And we have fallen out of that system, and we believe that it is inert—or, even worse, ours to devour and ravage as we see fit. And the consequences of this are fatal; simply fatal. I mean, we have invented a sin for which there isn’t even a word, which is the sin of looting the future so that your children have no future. I mean, no culture on Earth has been so insensitive to its own survival as we have become. And this is because we are completely disconnected from this sense of a living dynamic world in which people have a place, but it is only their place, and it has to then be integrated with the larger systems in which it’s embedded.