Legacy of Ozymandias
The evolution has been televised and it is already the END OF THE WORLD as you knew it
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
We’re working on fragments meant to make it through the digital malaise – Read it while you drink your morning coffee or when you find a spare moment at work, read it just before bed and let it bleed into your dreams.
Each article is a little hit of wisdom to keep you awake. Pocket wisdom. Hopefully this works and you’ve found your way here from the Map of Sunday.
Are we the same creatures we were last century?
Something we will come back to often: We’re a quarter of the way into the 21st century but so many people are still talking and acting like it’s still last century. I think that worked for the first little bit of just now to pretend but that ship has sailed. Much of the last century was taken with not talking about difficult truths. Unfortunately those ways of thinking and doing that got us here just won’t work anymore. We will have to absorb and accept some pretty serious stuff, rapidly, to meet the challenges we are facing.
Let’s get started disassembling a particular story: Ideas of human transformation through technology are not impending events. I am here to tell you that we are decades already into this new epoch.
aka ‘The future is now Old Man’
The world is a river of voices we know and one of the big voices in a lot of peoples heads right now speak that things are getting worse and that we are in CRISIS. Great change might be about to happen which will challenge the very nature of being human and humanities survival on the planet. (Remember, the planet will be fine).
Someone who holds a historical position might say the technological evolution of humanity is the fever dream of futurists: A utopian vision of science transforming humans away from their biological origins, perhaps trying to escape reality and it’s challenges in the process.
I want to offer another story in its place because I think it’s missing from many minds.
It’s simple and you probably know it but it’s useful to say it clear and out loud:
Things have already changed so much they can never be the same.
We have experienced a paradigm shift in human reality bigger than the move to agrarian cultures.
We might admit there is a reason the world feels fit to bursting already, that the BAD THINGS are piling up and threatening to destroy us, on purpose or on accident.
I’m sorry to have to say this to our beloved brother Gil Scott-Heron who rightfully taught us the revolution will not be televised. But the revolution was, in fact, televised. Except it wasn’t a revolution – those things, again, are so last century. A record on it’s player revolves. What we have accidentally watched happen without realising on every screen across the planet and even in all the spaces in between is no revolution.
You have been witness to evolution.
A bit of etymology is always useful – We are interested in the prefix ‘Ex’ that gifted the E to Evolution. Exhale. Exorcise. Explode. Exile. Escape. Eject. Evolution. ‘Ex’ tells us something has come out of whatever was before.
I want you to think of a baby born next to a spinning record. See the difference?
Well, the evolution has been televised. And it happened without any one of us doing anything to make it happen or not happen. I think maybe that’s why it happened – because no one that understood that it might could do anything to stop it. Like so much of the history of the universe it was a lucky accident.
And anyone wondering why the old ways aren’t working right anymore maybe hasn’t come around to accepting that the old ways won’t work when things aren’t the same.
If you did not know I am telling you (but you probably know): Things are not the same. Things are not the same at all. This is a strange time to be alive: We are in the hinge moment. The fundamentals of human experience have not really changed since the last big evolution got us to stop hunting and gathering and settle down into place 10,000 odd years ago or so. We know that those people who got lucky and cozy in certain spots around the world began to develop immense oral traditions which would grow the imagination of humanity so much that they had to start writing it all down.
The road of agriculture we have walked the last ten thousand years have led to this moment: For the first time in history most of the nutritional needs of most of the people on the planet can be met1.
So that finally we had enough resources to think about other things and that’s kind of how we ended up where we are. Half-frantic getting ready to face something already remaking everything.
We know that groups of humans who have their resource needs met enduringly create complex oral cultures in turn. Oral cultures (Myths, stories, fairy tales and folklore) record the experiences, histories and wisdom of communities, societies and civilisations of people over time. What I am getting at is that when the needs of nutritional resource are met, humans are able to store knowledge more effectively over time in turn.
Finally we get good enough at looking after ourselves that the complexity of our knowledge nexus increases. With the help of writing, with our ability to record and then exchange ideas over space and time, the apple of human knowledge starts to ripen.
Hopefully you’re getting a sense of the breadth of this journey – We have travelled 10,000 years of human history to get to just this spot.
And then suddenly, really suddenly, like, really, REALLY suddenly, nearly every human on the planet was given the gift of accessing all the knowledge that had come before and the tools for finding and recording new knowledge exploded and SUDDENLY we can all personally access more information than anyone else in the entire of history has ever been able to. And crucially, importantly, species-changingly, so much of this new knowledge followed a mythic pattern of internal self-coherence that was based on observation and measurement of the physical world.
It sort of doesn’t matter what your personal feelings towards the scientific method are because enough people have agreed to interpret the data of the world in the same way. Remember it’s the best imaginal model for sense making of reality since the imagination itself burst out of some protein chains many many many moons ago.
Because our scientific approach – Of observing the phenomena of reality while accepting new information may upend what you think you know – has done a good enough job of describing the world that we have Odysseus landing on the moon while islands of plastic across the pacific trap and transform marine lives.
We’ll talk later about the shift away from monomyths to polyphony. About the old myths that held cultures together being replaced by something new. What we need to know for now is that the broad scientific project of the last centuries and millennia has led to this point and nothing will ever be the same because it has already changed.
This human evolution occurred when the quality, quantity and accessibility of information reached its apex at the end of the last century. Things have never changed so quickly, EVER. What happened, what is happening, beyond that apex is so fundamentally different to everything and anything that has come before. Because unlike the revolutions of the past – spirit and psychology, industry and identity, politics and technology, economic and ecologic - that took time to ripple out through the world and often only reached as far as a cultures borders, this evolution happened on a near instantaneous and global level. It happened so fast people are only just starting to warn of the oncoming storm. Before anyone could lift a finger to stop it, we are now several generations into the next phase of human reality. Ozymandias would be proud.
As Yeats said:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
We are finally learning what Copernicus really taught us. The days of single stories leading our lives are over, whether we wanted it or not.
The evolution has been televised.
We’ll spend a lot of time unpacking the consequences of this moment in human history in future articles. For now I want you to take this into your imagination and weigh the truth of it:
Are we the same creatures we were last century?
I am using nutritional as a lose term to suggest the needs of food, and shelter, and community, and all the rest.