the BIG question

Facing - and defining - change in our world

Mac Love

It seems everyone is clamoring for change. Change is already a buzzword for the fledgling 2008 campaign. But just saying the word, well, that doesn’t accomplish much. So what shape might real change take? Our William L. Love explores this question in the first of a series of essays on the feasibility of “change” in an entrenched society.

For all of the talk of change in the world today there is a striking absence of a working model for the future. What is the vision? Will we ever live in peace and harmony with each other or our planet? When did our ideals become rhetorical? Why must we be fated?

We arrived in the 21st Century facing global considerations with no unifying theory to govern our progress. It is ironic that a country shaped by the people and for the people could take so many for granted and now barely suffers them. Our revolution has become an institution and “the ceremony of our innocence is drowned.”

Now is the stage and time for our conviction.

The 21st Century has been an unacknowledged renaissance until now. The failure to recognize this dynamic hints of the narrow provincialism that typifies our crony nationalism, giving rise to legitimate concerns for the future.

I have always taken comfort in the notion that certain truths are self-evident, unmoving, and constant in spite of us. The fact that we all have a sense for where the middle of something is speaks volumes about our capacity to find a common ground.

In my youth I was a part of a multi-cultural environment. My friends peacefully enjoyed each other’s company, input, and diversity. We found a common ground in youth, enriching our world and our lives through our cultural exchanges. Is it really so hard to fathom that the same could be possible on a larger scale? Wasn’t America once proof of that?

The early Renaissance of the 14th-17th Centuries gave birth to the idea of America which continues in the 21st Century. Innovations like moveable type and the printing press were precursors for modern communication technology like the cellphone and the internet. The scientific revolution of Copernicus, Galileo, Huygens, and Newton begat the genetic revolution and the discovery of DNA by Franklin, Watson, and Crick. The industrial revolution spurned the emergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and hybridization. Even now, the Renaissance is still marked by the exploitation of material resources and imperialist expansion. The major difference is that today we face the finiteness of space and better understand our role in the environment.

Innovation, discovery, and revolution suggest new answers to old questions, but where the early Renaissance was marked by a return to antiquity, the Renaissance of today seems determined to escape from it. Global communication, cultural awareness, and environmental responsibility have provoked a moral crisis. This bodes well for the future. It took a while, but we are slowly learning to care more about our environment and the world around us. A new moral renaissance could be just over the horizon, but where is the vision and model to govern that morality?

Jules Michellet described the early Renaissance as “the discovery of the world and of man.” If we are to make the necessary strides that we face here in the 21st century we will need to develop humility and harness our fundamental relationship to the world as a whole, recognizing that our fates are intertwined.

Not so long ago, people worked towards goals that they knew they would never live to see. This was not considered a sacrifice, but merely a step towards the completion of a larger aim. Shouldn’t life be preserved for life’s sake? Shouldn’t we develop the capacity to give life a safe and sustainable world in which to take root?

Our revolution will grow from the inside out and it will be an individual progression at first. We will obviously stumble along the way. Those that defend the antiquated systems that led to this moral crisis will be overthrown, if not by force then by the sheer conscience of new habits.

The 21st Century Renaissance will purge the old world model for a new one with the expanding role of the individual. As the chorus of opinion reaches further with communication technology, the working class will have more information at its disposal that it has ever had before and will thrust us towards a new balance and equality. It is already happening.

To me, Truth is constant, immutable, and ever-present. My hope is for a future based on those truths. Gestalt theory always struck me as a wonderful working model for the global dynamic. The operating principle of Gestalt theory is holistic, parallel, analog and given to self-organizing tendencies, which is very much how I see the world itself. The 21st Century is truly greater than the sum of its parts, but we need not be overwhelmed. The principles that govern us and this world are strangely concordant and intuitively accessible. Nevertheless, Gestalt theory has been criticized and abandoned in popular western discourse for being a descriptive tool without an empirical plan for perceptual processing.

During the early Renaissance artists evolved from technicians to creators as the role of the individual expanded. Today’s artists are the individuals themselves, freely thinking/sharing/expressing/creating people, existing beyond the power structures and in the common realm. “Outsider Art” acknowledged this before it too became an institution. Now, as Arthur Rimbaud once said, “the artist’s first creation is himself”, and so we are found.

The 21st Century’s Renaissance is now. The great vision and model for our future is alive in you, where all hope is constant.

Please feel free to share your thoughts with me at justlove[at]mac[dot]com

NEXT: A Working Perceptual Model for Gestalt Theory.