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We cannot continue to evolve if we don’t know who we are, and that includes knowing who we are politically. We are not the clichés of state. We are not its lies and atrocities.
Can politics be equal to the deepest of who we are? Can humanity evolve beyond war?
Such questions — I know, I know — are never officially asked during a presidential campaign. That’s not the point of the election: to plunge philosophically and spiritually into who we are. And thus, as the Trump-Harris race proceeds, not too many people (besides me) will be bringing up Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — Jesuit priest, theologian, scientist, best known as the author of The Phenomenon of Man — who died seventy years ago.
But I can’t tolerate the clichés of state! So let me sneak a dozen or so of Teilhard’s words into the present moment: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.”
Love? To those who are beginning to feel their cynicism percolate, I ask you to bear with me, at least for a moment. We’re stuck with that word, “love,” to describe humanity’s sane and positive reach; its understanding that we’re connected to the whole planet, as well as to each other, and a social structure that blows off this truth is certain to bring about its own collapse. Doesn’t it make sense to talk about this, right now, as we’re forging tomorrow politically?
Here’s another Teilhard quote. This one is pretty well known: “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Harness the energies of love? What in God’s name could this mean, especially in Teilhard’s context: that doing so would have evolutionary significance? I fear we don’t have a word that gives adequate impact to his words.
OK, in her acceptance speech as presidential nominee, Kamala Harris did toss in some love:
“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”
Basically, she’s saying that she feels love for an abstraction, defined by random border lines on a map, created via several centuries of land and people theft and is now, wow, richer and more powerful than any other abstract political entity on the planet. To “love America” requires, I fear, instantly creating an us-vs.-them world.
Yes, she adds, this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”
OK, wonderful, but all this empathy stops at the border, right?
“And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
America’s president can’t just be lovey-dovey. But what if Teilhard is right: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.” This is where I fall off the edge of American politics. We have, in essence, a trillion-dollar annual military budget. We’ve played war or proxy war all over the planet throughout my lifetime, including right this moment, as we give Israel the means and freedom to wipe Gaza off the map (otherwise known as “defend itself”). This is not questioned in the halls of power. This is not questioned in the American electoral system.
What if, as a nation — as residents of Planet Earth, as caring participants in humanity’s creation of tomorrow — we . . . uh, meditated? What if we dug, collectively, deep into the human soul? Not possible, the cynics cry, the snarks hiss! But I refuse to believe them. We cannot continue to evolve if we don’t know who we are, and that includes knowing who we are politically. We are not the clichés of state. We are not its lies and atrocities. We — all of us — are participants in deep, profound change.
So let me take a moment to offer, to candidate Harris and even that other guy, this tiny treasure I came upon in the wake of my wife’s death from cancer twenty-six years ago and my brief foray into Eastern religion: the blue pearl, a term I came across in a book by Swami Muktananda. Basically, it’s your innermost reality. While practicing meditation in my own so-so way, I was certain this was something I’d never find. But after my wife’s cancer diagnosis, it suddenly seemed as though it had found me. Some years ago I wrote in a column:
“The blue pearl is mortality’s unit of currency. It’s passed between the wounded like a secret handshake — secret only because the polite constructs of everyday life require discretion, averted eyes and an allegiance to the fiction that we’re strangers. The blue pearl has no tolerance for this, because the truth is, we’re ‘strange’ to each other only on the surface.
“Thus, when my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I noticed a charged change in conversations. For instance, here was my friend Herb, constructor of crossword puzzles, divulging that he’d lost his son in an accident some years earlier. I was his editor; we talked routinely on a weekly basis, but not till now had there been room for such a disclosure in our amiable chats. His telling me this was like a warm hand on my shoulder — ‘Yes, I too am mortal’ — and gave me courage. This is the blue pearl.”
I’m certain the blue pearl is more than just a personal discovery. As Swami Muktananda has put it: “After the Blue Pearl stands steady for a while, it explodes. Then its light spreads throughout the universe and you can see it everywhere.”
This is the tomorrow that’s at stake today.
If we cannot control the effects of our own technological invention then in what sense can those creations be said to serve human interests and needs in this already overly complex global environment?
July 18, 2024 will go down in history books as an event that shook up the world in a unique way. It gave the mass of humanity a pointed wake-up call about the inherent fragility of the technological systems we’ve created and the societal complexities they’ve engendered. Critical services at hospitals, airports, banks, and government facilities around the world were all suddenly unavailable. We can only imagine what it must have been like to be undergoing treatment in an emergency room at the time with a serious or life-threatening illness.
So, what are we to make of this event and how can we rationally get our collective arms around its meaning and significance? As a journalist who specializes in writing about the impacts of technology on politics and culture, I would like to share a few initial thoughts.
Given AI’s now critical role in shaping key aspects of our lives and given its very real and fully acknowledged downsides and risks, why was it not even being discussed in the presidential debate?
For some of us who have worked in the tech field for many years, such an event was entirely predictable. This is simply because of three factors: 1) the inherent fragility of computer code, 2) the always present possibility of human error, and 3) the fact that when you build interconnected systems, a vulnerability in one part of the system can easily spread like a contagion to other parts. We see this kind of vulnerability in play daily in terms of a constant outpouring of news stories about hacking, identity theft, and security breaches involving all sorts of companies and institutions. However, none of these isolated events had sufficient scale to engender greater public awareness and alarm until The Great Global Computer Outage of July 18.
As impressive as our new digital technologies are, our technocrats and policymakers often seem to lose sight of an important reality. These now massively deployed systems are also quite fragile in the larger scheme of things. Computers and the communications systems that support them—so called virtual systems—can concentrate huge amounts of informational power and control by wielding it like an Archimedean lever to manage the physical world. A cynic could probably argue that we’re now building our civilizational infrastructures on a foundation of sand.
At the recently held Aspen Security Forum, Anne Neuberger—a senior White House cybersecurity expert—noted, “We need to really think about our digital resilience not just in the systems we run but in the globally connected security systems, the risks of consolidation, how we deal with that consolidation and how we ensure that if an incident does occur it can be contained and we can recover quickly.” With all due respect, Ms. Neuberger was simply stating the obvious and not digging deep enough.
Most technocrats don’t have the policy expertise needed to guide critical decision-making at a societal level while, at the same time, our politicians (and yes, sadly, most of our presidential candidates) don’t have the necessary technology expertise.
The problem runs much deeper. Our government and that of other advanced Western nations is now running on two separate but equal tracks: technology and governance. The technology track is being overseen by Big Tech entities with little accountability or oversight concerning the normative functions of government. In other words, they’re more or less given a free hand to operate according to the dictates of the free market economy.
Further, consider this thought experiment: Given AI’s now critical role in shaping key aspects of our lives and given its very real and fully acknowledged downsides and risks, why was it not even being discussed in the presidential debate? The answer is simple: These issues are often being left to unelected technocrats or corporate power brokers to contend with. But here’s the catch: Most technocrats don’t have the policy expertise needed to guide critical decision-making at a societal level while, at the same time, our politicians (and yes, sadly, most of our presidential candidates) don’t have the necessary technology expertise.
Shifting to a more holistic perspective, humanity’s ability to continue to build these kinds of systems runs into the limitations of our conceptual ability to embrace their vastness and complexity. So, the question becomes: Is there a limit in the natural order of things to the amount of technological complexity that’s sustainable? If so, it seems reasonable to assume that this limit is determined by the ability of human intelligence to encompass and manage that complexity.
To put it more simply: At what point in pushing the envelope of technology advancement do we get in over our heads and to what degree is a kind of Promethean hubris involved?
Runaway technological advancement is now being fueled by corporate imperatives and a “growth at any cost” mentality that offers little time for reflection.
As someone who has written extensively about the dangers of AI, I would argue that we’re now at a tipping point whereby it’s worth asking if we can even control what we’ve created and whether the “harmful side effects” of seeming constant chaos is now militating against the quality of life. Further, we can only speculate as to whether we should consider if the CrowdStrike event was somehow associated with some sort of still poorly understood or recognized AI hacking or error. The bottom line is: If we cannot control the effects of our own technological invention then in what sense can those creations be said to serve human interests and needs in this already overly complex global environment?
Finally, the advent of under-the-radar hyper-technologies such as nanotechnology and genetic engineering also need to be considered in this context. These are also technologies that can only be understood in the conceptual realm and not in any concrete and more immediate way because (I would argue) their primary and secondary effects on society, culture, and politics can no longer be successfully envisioned. Decisively moving into these realms, therefore, is like ad hoc experimentation with nature itself. But as many environmentalists have pointed out, “Nature bats last.” Runaway technological advancement is now being fueled by corporate imperatives and a “growth at any cost” mentality that offers little time for reflection. New and seemingly exciting prospects for advanced hyper-technology may dazzle us, but if in the process they also blind us, how can we guide the progress of technology with wisdom?
I invite you to join me as I reach for a larger context in which to put this flickering moment.
As hard as I try, in the privacy of my own being, not to get caught up in the scathing absurdities of the moment — e.g., the presidential election, America’ looming fascism, our love of money and war (to name a few) — yikes, here I am, caught up in it all.
And all I can do is reach for a larger truth . . . peace will prevail, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And it so quickly feels like a cliché. Welcome to cynicism!
I swat at it, push it away, but it’s always there. So calm down, I tell myself. I’m doing so right now. In the context of a Biden blank stare and a looming Trump presidency, here I am, reaching for a sense of hope and transcendence — a sense of belief, a sense of joy, that humanity is evolving, that the present is just a necessary flicker in our becoming.
I invite you to join me as I reach for a larger context in which to put this flickering moment. I begin by quoting Peter Bloom, 's latest essay in Common Dreams, addressing the looming presidential farce:
Increasingly, elections have become competitions between the ambitions and personalities of individual ‘great men’ rather than contests of ideas or visions for society.
This phenomenon reflects a contemporary belief in the outsized power of elite individuals—whether CEOs, celebrities, or political leaders—to drive change and shape the world around them. [...]
This personalization of politics serves to obscure the deeper structural issues facing American democracy and society. By focusing on the qualities of individual leaders, we lose sight of the systemic problems that no single person, no matter how talented or well-intentioned, can solve alone.
Hmmm . . . This opens up a line of thought oh so easily disparaged and dismissed, at least by the corporate media (“the bouncers,” as I call them), whose job is to keep complexity out of our collective national consciousness and reduce politics — national and even global — to a simplistic, win-lose game. This, of course, maintains the present two-party system: evil vs. lesser evil. And those who challenge it, attempting to transcend spectator democracy by participating directly and complexly in the process, are nothing but “spoilers.”
What a joke, eh? Thinking we can build a political system based on the concept that we’re all in this together.
In contrast, let me snatch a quote from Rupert Ross’s great book on Restorative Justice, Returning to the Teachings. Ross quotes Anne Fausto-Sterling: “Modern textbooks still like to talk of cutthroat competition, of the survival of the fittest, as the overriding force that drives evolution. . . . Yet research in the past two decades shows that cooperation among species plays at least as big a role as violent struggle. … And suddenly, it seems, you can find cooperation in plants and animals wherever you look — suggesting a whole new view of evolution and interdependence among all forms of life.”
Working together? Building society as a collaborative effort? Yeah, it’s nice-sounding claptrap and a necessary part of human existence — families have to get along, drivers have to stop at stop signs, etc., etc. — but, come on! America is about winning and losing. The Super Bowl isn’t a focus on politeness. We have a trillion-dollar annual “defense” budget and several thousand nuclear weapons, not just stockpiled but “actively deployed.” So does Russia! What kind of idiot sings “kumbaya” and says we all just need to get along?
This is the noose of cynicism from which we need both personal and collective escape. And the escape isn’t a kick in the bad guy’s kneecaps (whoever the bad guy is). The escape from cynicism is, ahem, loving.
Here’s another quote from Ross’s book, which he calls the first of the Twelve Teachings of the Sacred Tree, that is to say, an expression of indigenous awareness of the nature of the universe: “All things are interrelated. Everything in the universe is part of a single whole. Everything is connected in some way to everything else. It is therefore possible to understand something only if we can understand how it is connected to everything else.”
The world is not simply ours to extract and exploit, to divide into categories, to dump into the trash bin? Bad guys and good guys both matter, even in a presidential race? All I can do is quote a poem I wrote a few years ago. It’s called “The Cardinal”:
I thank you God
if that’s your name
for the beauty and the trash,
the spill, the vomit, the love and
exhaust smoke of
this new most
amazing day.
Outside my window
a cardinal shocking
as a nosebleed
pecks the raw winter
ground beneath its feet.
I thank you for its
food and mine,
for my coffee and for these
words, these malleable
playthings of awareness,
which still birth
all I think and know.
Let them stroke
the trembling potential
of what I see and what’s
to come.
The cardinal lifts.
I salute it with
my cup
and swallow.
I know, I know. This solves nothing. This answers nothing. The presidential race and raw hell are still looming and human-created climate change has ahold of the planet. I’m lost. Perhaps we all are, as we stare wide-eyed at the cynical noose dangling from the headlines. Oh Lord, kumbaya.
But look! The cardinal’s coming back.