image by //amy//

Over the weekend, I attended the Town Hall put on by the folks who run Evolver.net, a site dedicated to conscious collaboration to create the future. Colin Beaven spoke, as did folks from the Transition movement and many other various yogis, authors, and scientists. There was an expansive and kinetic feeling of potential in the room—a hundred people in a church talking about possibility, consciousness, and evolution as colored shards of sunlight filtered in through the stained glass windows.

Within all this energy was also a crackling of tension, a feeling that each of us was here not only to connect, but to evaluate. Was this for real? How much do we agree and disagree? And how much of the each others’ worldviews would we find unacceptable?

This tension is natural and good, I think. This was the first event of its kind, and we were all kind of reading each other, seeing how we and our ideas fit in. Allowing for this natural tension, though, I found myself at odds with the sentiments expressed by some of the speakers, which I perceived as anti-modern, angry, and sometimes even smug.

As I listened to speakers decry corporatism, describe Barack Obama as part of the problem rather than the solution, and speak about the coming transformation in 2012, I started to feel tense in my body. I wanted to stand up for all the good brought about by modernity, to interject some rigorous positivity into the proceedings, and—so much—to share a developmental perspective in which we might be able to lay down our anger at The Man and see the path that’s brought us here with equanimity. For how can we consciously forge a future if we are intent upon ripping down so much of our past?

In one discussion group, on Transition Towns, I voiced my thoughts: “It seems Transition is coming from the idea that the demise of industrial society is a done deal, and that all we can do now is retreat and relocalize and regroup. But is this a foregone conclusion? Is there no hope for transforming industrial society—the process that freed slaves and women and brought unprecedented education and health to millions—so that it can bring all those good things to the developing world in a way that contributes positively to the biosphere?”

We weren’t in a configuration that lent itself to deep discussions, so the answer I received to this question was understandably perfunctory: “No one wants industrial society to fail, but business as usual cannot continue.” Obviously. But this statement—and the Transition movement in general—seems to set up an inaccurate, limited choice. Do we really have no options other than business as usual or going gently into the energy descent? Neither strikes me as particularly positive or evolutionary.

Now, don’t misunderstand me—I’m not saying that Transition technologies (like permaculture, systems thinking, and personal transformation) can’t be used in evolutionary ways. It’s all about context. What is our goal? Mere survival? Or is it to keep growing and evolving? Up till this point, human evolution has been marked by an ever-widening circle of care. From caring mostly for ourselves to mostly for our tribes to mostly for our nations, the circle keeps getting wider. Our next step can’t be to make that circle smaller—we must learn to care for the entire world, and for life itself.

As we work in our local communities, we must keep this in mind. It’s not enough to make a resilient community, or even a hundred of them. We must make the entire world resilient. And this means thinking BIG—much bigger than using the air conditioner less, or shopping at the farmers’ market. Thinking big on this kind of scale isn’t going to come out of angry, self-satisfied, us-versus-them attitudes. Nor is it going to come out of feel-good platitudes about new consciousness magically descending on humankind. It’s going to come from each of us laying aside our biases and allegiances to certain ideas—laying aside our egos—and jumping head-first into discussion and experimentation and collaboration.

This is where it gets tricky, because we are all creatures of ego—and postmodern ego at that. Never has each of us been such an island, trapped in an understanding of the universe in which we each have our own reality. This much was evident at the Evolver event, and I could feel it in myself, too—that tension, the urge to convince everyone I was right, to be heard and understood and accepted and to win the argument.

But, as Colin Beaven pointed out in his keynote talk, winning the argument isn’t what’s important. What’s important is expressing our love for life. This means that we must discuss, discover, and implement the biggest, most evolutionary, and most loving ideas. And this is where it gets even trickier, because postmodernism dislikes hierarchy. The idea that anything is inherently more developed than anything else—that one worldview might be more evolutionary than another—is repugnant to us. And so we burn sage and value everyone’s opinion and try to reach consensus, all out of a desire to protect our own ideas and egos. We value our right to our own subjective viewpoints more than we value the collaborative process that will actually get us to workable solutions.

I’m not immune to this tendency—I see how deeply ingrained it is in me and in all the other smart, dedicated postmodern people like the ones at the Evolver Town Hall, who all want to create a new world. I also recognize that changing this—letting go of our little reality bubbles and leaping out of the flatland that postmodernism makes of human culture and ingenuity—is perhaps the most important work that worldchanging people need to do. Even as I hold the stance that the overall trajectory of evolution goes in a positive direction, and that it’s up to us to take on the responsibility for pushing it further, and that caring for all of life marks a higher level of development than caring for one’s own survival, I must listen—deeply—to my brothers and sisters in the creation of the new. And I must both listen and contribute without limitation, for in applying my own limitations, I limit what is possible for all of us.

In the end, me being right doesn’t matter one bit. What matters is that we do the right thing—that we act out of the highest knowledge we have attained, and that we exercise the powers of reason and intuition that evolution has given us to recognize even higher knowledge when we encounter it. In order to do this, I need to step out of my subjective bubble and leap out of flatland—we all do! Because reality is one contiguous, miraculous, constantly evolving system, and being able to understand this means that we—all of us together—are responsible for the whole.