daniel
11-26-2002, 05:14 AM
Thompson, from Imaginary Worlds:
"What we can learn from the Gaian evolutionary theory, or from Steiner’s total indentification with the planetary dynamics of life, is that this human level is itself unstable, limited, and transitional. There is no way to fix things up culturally or politically as long as you are going to have human beings in the solution. … This hominid moment is not a state that can be perfected; it is a process, and to arrest that process is probably not possible, even if we tried to stop time and make the planet eternally comfortable for human life. Once we were prokaryotic bacteria, then we were dinosaurs, and now we are humans about to become, through a catastrophic bifurcation, subhuman and posthuman, or God only know what else. What is creating this something else is a complex phenomenology in which both the human good and the human evil are tearing human culture apart. From the greenhouse effect to the ozone hole, or from sex, drugs, and rock and roll to fundamentalist purifications, or from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence, everything we like to call human and home, even the planet as we have known it, is being taken away from us by our own actions, conscious and unconscious. From this posthuman point of view, "the new planetary culture"… should be seen more tragically as the period of disintegration of all traditional human cultures, tribal, religious, national, and racial. Just as cyanobacteria created a "polluted" atmosphere, or cattle overgraze to create deserts, so humans seem intent on overdeveloping their niche so that it can explode into the bifurcation that produces the novel and the unthinkable."
"Evil" in this perspective is symbiotic/synergistic with "Good." The cataclysm that Bush and his minions are rushing us toward, is also, theoretically, the event which forces an evolution of consciousness - even a biological evolution/mutation of the species.
"What we can learn from the Gaian evolutionary theory, or from Steiner’s total indentification with the planetary dynamics of life, is that this human level is itself unstable, limited, and transitional. There is no way to fix things up culturally or politically as long as you are going to have human beings in the solution. … This hominid moment is not a state that can be perfected; it is a process, and to arrest that process is probably not possible, even if we tried to stop time and make the planet eternally comfortable for human life. Once we were prokaryotic bacteria, then we were dinosaurs, and now we are humans about to become, through a catastrophic bifurcation, subhuman and posthuman, or God only know what else. What is creating this something else is a complex phenomenology in which both the human good and the human evil are tearing human culture apart. From the greenhouse effect to the ozone hole, or from sex, drugs, and rock and roll to fundamentalist purifications, or from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence, everything we like to call human and home, even the planet as we have known it, is being taken away from us by our own actions, conscious and unconscious. From this posthuman point of view, "the new planetary culture"… should be seen more tragically as the period of disintegration of all traditional human cultures, tribal, religious, national, and racial. Just as cyanobacteria created a "polluted" atmosphere, or cattle overgraze to create deserts, so humans seem intent on overdeveloping their niche so that it can explode into the bifurcation that produces the novel and the unthinkable."
"Evil" in this perspective is symbiotic/synergistic with "Good." The cataclysm that Bush and his minions are rushing us toward, is also, theoretically, the event which forces an evolution of consciousness - even a biological evolution/mutation of the species.