CYCLES OF POWER: Cultural Stories of the Future
Sohail Inayatullah
“Cycles of Power,” first published in Edges (March 1990)
I left work early last Friday, largely to go home and watch an amazing
event. No it was not star American basketball player Michael Jordan soaring
through the sky, rather I went home to watch the Chinese revolution. Like
many other developments in telecommunications technology, I was suddenly
made part of this awesome event, but the space that I was watching had now
been transformed from entertainment space to juridical space, meaning that
this age of video had now included me in judging the goodness or the
rightness of the events. My eyes could then decide whether the official
words of the Chinese government or the American government were true, I
could judge myself. I could, for example, compare this revolution with the
earlier Aquino People's power. And as the Chinese bureaucrats tried to force
Cable News Network (CNN) to leave, I again could decide who was correct. Was
Chinese national territory and culture being violated by this foreign
presence or did CNN have a larger global right to provide information.
In the end CNN did not try to evoke a universal right to telecommunicate,
rather they avoided the philosophical issue and settled for the bureaucratic
discourse. They agreed to pull the plug only when a letter signed by the
Chinese government was given to them. The Chinese were of course puzzled by
this. The official tried to explain to the newsperson that these were
obviously extraordinary times, why the evocation of official stationary? But
with CNN unwilling to evoke rights, all that was left for them to buy time
was procedure, due process, and when the letter--written in Chinese--was
produced, the live revolution was over. The basketball game too was over and
as there appeared to be no revolutions in the offing : Aquino was already
stable and Marcos appeared to not want to die Friday evening; Zia had died
last year and Noriega has his own timeline, I turned the age of video off,
walked onto the street and pondered the fantastic nature of the real world
we live in.
THE ANCIENTS SPEAK
Ssu-Ma Chien ancient Chinese historian had written--without access to live
real-time revolutions--how new dynasties are born from the actions of the
sage-king and how they rise in virtue, but eventually over time there comes
squandering, laziness and pride and then the tyrants step in; virtue is gone
and the dynasty ends. This cycle is repeated over and over. The Tao is
present; it then disappears. In virtue all gain; in decline all lose.
Ibn Khaldun, the 13th century founder of sociology and modern history, too
outlined this cyclical view of history. But to him it was not the rise and
fall of virtue, it was the rise and fall of asabiya or unity. He studied the
Bedouins and saw that their success was a result of their solidarity; a
closeness derived from their struggle against the elements. In the desert,
they had a remarkable level of communications among themselves and a low
degree of noise, of disunity. But with power, over generations, usually
four, unity disappeared and people's mind turned to wealth and to
expectations without hard work. Each succeeding rulership did not have to
work for leadership, it was routinized. Thus, the empire fell and asabiya
passed on to some other group; usually someone from the provinces, from the
desert who still had unity and a collective vision of the future--he would
then on a camel ride into power.
For these two historians and others like Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar all
things rise and fall. Leaders come into power, they exaggerate their power
and in this exaggeration their is exploitation and there is thus a
circulation of elites as Italian macrohistorian Pareto would say. And as
Sarkar would say, power always centralizes to some group on the wheel: it
goes to the warriors (the military or those who try to deal with the real
world through physical domination), to the intellectuals (the priests and
technocrats who deal with the real through theories, myths and ideologies)
and the acquisitors who deal with the real world through accumulating
wealth, through making greed into a social good. And of course, in this
cycle there is the group who causes revolutions but rarely gets to enjoy
them--this is the people, the students, the workers, the women, the groups
who do the work. They bring about a new world, but power quickly centralizes
to other groups and although each new era brings about increased rights for
the previously rightless, power quickly congeals and the cycle of power
continues. The wheel is eternal.
From this macrohistorical perspective, even if the Chinese students succeed,
there is larger deeper structure which will reemerge. It is the cycle. The
ancients noticed this cycle everywhere: in nature, in our breathing, in the
moon; it was this cycle that led women to create mathematics (mother-wisdom
according to writer Barbara Walker ); it was this cycle that reminded the
great that one day they would fall and it reminded the impoverished that
they would one day rise--everyone knew they would have their turn. It is
this cycle that gives hope to the third world, to the Pacific Islanders, to
women and to the environment itself--to Gaia. And to use another sports
metaphor, mother earth always has the last bat. Nature always wins. This is
then the world of the rise and fall. Here, there is no linear progress,
rather there are fits and starts, moments of glory and episodes of betrayal.
And as I walked outside seeing the sea and looked above at the near full
moon of May, the self-evident truth of the cycle seemed utterly obvious. For
when Michael Jordan rises he falls. When great teams win, eventually they
lose. People are born and then they die. They cycle speaks to that which is
irreversible; that which is ancient; it is the story of creation; the story
of who we are.
THE CHALLENGE
But all stories are challenged and the European Enlightenment was precisely
a radical challenge to the ancients. The enlightenment brought forth reason
and made it natural. It brought forth the linear arrow of time and made it a
necessity. It brought forth greed and made it divine. And finally it brought
forth nature and made it human. This was the end of the cycle; with reason
and industrial technology, God and the cycle of nature could forever be
vanquished and in its place would emerge the city of heaven on Earth. A city
where power was curbed through the written word, where despots could not
claim the divine mandate instead they were forced to exist in a mutual
contract with the people. The world was now not god-centered or nature
centered or myth centered, rather it was man centered. In fact as Michel
Foucault brilliantly argues humans have only epistemologically existed for a
few hundred years, knowledge was ordered differently in feudal and religious
eras. Man is thus a recent category and soon as we enter a postmodern world,
whether the spiritual recovery of enchantment or a technological creation of
the evernew, man will once again disappear to the sidelines--the gods of
magic or the robots of the future will become the focus of thought.
Now when the enlightenment faltered, when the cry of equality, liberty and
fraternity only ended the reign of the clergy and the aristocrats (the
british and french revolutions), but not the bourgeois technocrats, there
came another challenge--that of Marxism, but it too continued the project of
rationalism, after all historically speaking liberalism and Marxism are
minor deviations from each other: they both believe in empiricism,
materialism, prediction, domination and separation from nature, and
technological progress. Marx however saw the cycle but believed that if
ownership could pass to the people, then new technological developments
would not create contradictions, rather they would generate greater levels
of wealth. The wheel of history would end and the heaven promised by the
people of the book--the jews, muslims and christians--would descend. The
secret of knowledge would be forever gained.
But, we all know where that project ended. Power centralized, new wealth
went to the Party and instead of the priests of religion, the ideologues of
the Party watched over the braindeath of creativity. Just as the priests
took away all spiritual insight, the partycrats took away all individual
initiative. The grid of partocracy succeeded but at a cost that led to its
own demise. The cycle of history was not so easily defeated.
But the liberals put something else at center stage that could once and for
all solve the problem of poverty: this was technology. Tools removed us from
the monkey and they would provide the next jump in human history; one where
the myths of the past, the myths of scarcity, of the rise and fall, of the
stranglehold of irreplaceable, nonrenewable commodities such as oil, would
keep us from realizing the good society that was possible.
But the technology of the industrial revolution did not do this, although
incredible wealth was created; it destroyed the family, raped the
environment, impoverished the colonies, and denigrated women.
THE NEXT REVOLUTION
But there is a new revolution that will culminate the project that was begun
a few hundred years ago. For this revolution has as its base something that
when used becomes better and when shared increases. It promises to bridge
the distances between individuals, cultures and nations. It promises to join
the isolated into a community and to take the best from the historical and
the modern world: to create a global village and an electronic cottage. This
world will have highways but not polluted ones, rather they will be of
light; instead of seaports or airports there will be teleports. We will have
resolved the historical contradictions of the urban and the rural; between
self and community; between worker and manager.
This will have been resolved not by the Pacific Shift, not in the Japanese
method of miniaturizing nature and including it in the city (the Bonsai
tree, for example); making meditation as a corporate activity; or giving
lifetime employment, but it will be resolved by creating a postscarcity
society. The up and downs of history, the rise and falls will then disappear
once basic needs such as food, health, shelter, medicine and
education-information are plentiful and natural, not for the few, but for
all.
Through these new technologies poor countries will be able to jump past the
industrial era and quickly and painlessly enter the Age of Video. Villagers
won't need to go to cities as the Mango (the Pakistani clone of the Apple
computer) will allow them to stay at home and work from there. Families will
remain united and the rumor that in the big city streets are made of gold
will forever be gone from history. Population will stay evenly distributed
and with increased wealth, population rates will continue to decline.
Businesses will no longer be site specific; they can move here and there,
and even labor will be free to move from region to region and both business
and labor will be able move through history, from one culture to another,
then and now, for the cycle of time will have been vanquished.
And to those critics who argue that these new technologies are prohibitively
expensive, can anyone not afford to invest in them comes the reply.
Moreover, perhaps it is too late anyway.
Among other technologies, the VCR is already a global phenomenon. Within
minutes of a release of any movies, pirated copies are available throughout
the world. In Pakistan, for example, any movie from any country is
available. And those that try and remove this new technology from the home
are quickly rebuked. While there a few years back, I saw an amazing
television show. A village family found there fortunes changed by the
addition of a tv and a vcr from a brother who had made it as an engineer in
Saudi Arabia. These new technologies attracted more and more people to the
house of the family. Every day, all the neighbors would gather to watch. And
of course, the host family would have to provide food and drinks. The father
would complain that he missed the old peaceful days, but others in the
family loved their new centrality. One night the tv/vcr was stolen. The man
saw it happening but kept his eyes closed. His nemesis and the villagers'
prized possession was gone. The police quickly captured the thieves. But the
man would not admit that the new technology was his. His meal were prepared
on time, his house was quieter; he had never liked his relatives anyway. But
finally the chief of police begged the man to claim the tv and vcr, his
family would stay home and make life hell for him; his wife refused to cook
for him. The technology was back in the man's house and all was normal
again. All was natural again. In this story there are numerous codes; the
extended family finds unity not through the fireplace but through the
electric; the search for individuality and community, all are there, but the
key is in the nature of the normal. For suddenly these new technologies have
become the natural, it is not the flicker of wood that evokes images of the
mystical, but the flicker of the screen that leads us into other worlds. In
my parent's village which became wired for electricity in the early 70's and
still has no toilets, they have these new video technologies. Soon they will
have satellite dishes and will have access to more information in a few
years then in the last hundred thousand or so, it seems. And even while the
streets are still made of mud, they have access to texts and images from
everywhere and everytime.
Thus these new information technologies, according to many, do not have the
contradictions of previous industrial technologies, for they allow one to
live at a ancient stone age level. They do not open and close, nor expand
and limit at the same time; rather they allow the past, present and future,
real and unreal, to exist simultaneously.
Thus what the best minds of Europe failed to do in the enlightenment, what
the Marxists failed to do this century, is about to be accomplished by the
technological revolutions--the cycle is about to end.
Will this mean that the moon will no longer shine above us at night. That
crickets will no longer sing at night. Yes! For this era of information is
also about other related technologies. According to Eric Drexler --not
Portland basketball player Clyde "the Glide" Drexler who too defies
gravity--the most significant breakthrough in history is about to become
real. It is the molecular assembler or nano-technology. Combined with
artificial intelligence, we will soon be able to rearrange the molecules of
what ever and create food, materials and what have you. The capital base of
the world will continue to double in minutes; it will truly be the end of
work. Coupled with this will be the flight into space, but this flight will
not be through conventional materials, through genetic engineering,
according to Freeman Dyson , respected professor of physics at Princeton,
these new spacecrafts will weigh a kilogram instead of the present Voyager's
ton. They would be grown and integrate animal and electronic components. He
calls this the Astro-Chicken and if truly the next century is the Pacific
Era, then it will certainly be the Chinese Astro-chicken.
Thus genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, telecommunications are in
the process of creating a new world, a faster more intimate world, a good
world. In the meantime, instead of Hot Dog stands there will be Hot Doc
stands (not meals on wheels but documents, information on wheels); instead
of one way novels and information we will have hyper text where the mind of
the universe will be available to us. We can move from article to article,
past to future, language to language; it will be the final unity of man with
machine, the spiritual liberation that the ancients really meant to tell us
about. The ancients of course did not understand that light meant fiber
optics, that the word of God meant hyper text, and that ascension to heaven
was space travel.
Thus, the age of video of information of the post industrial society is
about the end of myth, about the end of the cycle of misery and injustice
that has plagued humanity, and it is about the reconstruction of the world
in any shape and form that humans want, not just in terms of the way they
see the world--that is, philosophically--but also the reconstruction of the
material world. It is also about the end of humans, for we will soon exist
along with robots, clones, cyborgs and not only will we sue other humans,
once robots have rights, we will sue them as well, and of course we will do
this through video arraignment and of course trials will be available for
all to see and just as there will be direct electronic democracy, there will
be direct electronic judging, but instead of the upward or downward thumb of
the Roman trials, there will be the touch or the voice of the electronic
key.
THE RESPONSE
But there remains a fear among us all. What if we have gone too far. What if
the new technologies are not creating a new world, but simply reproducing
old inequalities. What if there are limits; what if there really is a
natural state of things that we humans in our desire for control and power
are upsetting. Have we have gone too far? The myth of the cycle thus lurks
underneath all who claim to have defied the laws of nature. In this fear,
what lies ahead is a catastrophic depression. This depression will result in
the end the era of liberalism and capitalism; it will be the reclaiming of
earth; it will be the conclusion of greed; the revenge of Kali or Pele--Mother
Earth as destroyer. Those individuals and nations who are linked with the
present whether intellectually, materially or spiritually will be devastated
by the massive depression. Those islands that depend on tourism or on
economic aid from the Core powers will see their existence ravaged. Those
places that remain self-reliant, that still have traditional ohana (extended
family) structures will survive; that is, the high will fall and those that
have bought into the liberal/capitalist or technological worldview will pay
for it. The dream of the last few hundred years of progress will vanish
before their eyes as the Tokyo, New York, and London markets begin their
slide. We gave ourselves a warning in 1987 but did not listen. And in a
matter of years, just as communism is ending before us, capitalism too, will
disappear. However, there will be many that will have their life meanings
decimated such that they will be caught between a future that has
disappeared and a past that no longer exists. But how can that happen, every
thing seems to be going so well, even the feared recession might be merely a
soft landing. There is more wealth then ever before; peace and democracy are
breaking out every where. Six hundred years ago, Ibn Khaldun said it best:
"At the end of an era, dynasty, there often appears a show of power that
gives the impression that the senility of the era has been made to
disappear. It lights up brilliantly just before it is extinguished, like a
burning wick the flame of which leaps up phenomenally a moment before it
goes out, giving the impression it is just starting to burn, when in fact it
is going out."
The 1990's will bring in an end of an era, but it will be a difficult end;
capitalism has not survived five hundred years by accident. It will take the
collapse of the speculative bubble that has fueled the markets; it will take
the realization that the debt game is really a pyramid scheme, and it will
take, say, a minor earthquake in Tokyo, a flood here, sealevel rise
elsewhere, a nuclear explosion or two, and soon the project will be over.
And within moments the rational world of liberalism and Marxism will have
met its end.
THE OTHER MYTH
But there are others who have been described by the Enlightenment project as
people outside of history and thus outside of the future, who view things
quite differently. To them they have been in a depression for centuries;
they have lived without a self, without a home. These were the people in the
colonies who provided the labor, these were the regions from which the raw
materialism emerged from. These were the people who lived and rejoiced in
the cycle. And it was only brutal force and the promise of joining the world
of progress that convinced them to join forces with the liberals and the
Marxists. But this joining did not make things better for them. Each time
the flame of power passed, from riverene to Mediterranean to Atlantic and
now to the Pacific Rim, they were left behind, for the system of
expansionist power always needs something and someone to be the resource, to
be the difference, the inequality, from where wealth can emerge.
Thus again as we look all around the world at the feminist movements, at
third world efforts to renegotiate the terms of technological trade, at the
spiritual movements, at the peace and green movements, we see a
counterproject that is emerging. While many of these groups are
anti-technological, others have become more sophisticated and want to create
conditions where they can create their own technologies based on their local
histories and conditions. From this view, the world has been created by the
West and all of us see ourselves through this Western view: the culture of
the self itself has been conquered. What then is needed are ways to recover
the self that existed before the modern world. This is the view of the
recovery of the past. The recovery of historical ways of seeing the world
before Contact with the expansionist West. It is for example the effort to
keep alive the language of the oral traditions presently being done in
Vanuatu by the Vanuatu culture center. And it is not letting Western
cultural institutions have copies so that oral history can be economized and
transformed into the additive intellectual knowledge of the West. It is also
the Prime Minister of Papua and New Guinea, Paias Wingti attempting to stop
the Australian dreams of a Pacific tv empire. In his words, "we are being
asked to sacrifice our cultural heritage for passing material gain. No money
can buy back our languages once they are lost."
It is also groups like PROUT (Progressive Utilization Theory) who are
attempting to create a new cycle. Sarkar the founder of this movement is
among the few spiritual activists and mystics who is basing his vision on a
merger of spiritual and physical technologies. Although he believes the
cycle of rise and fall will continue forever, through spiritual wisdom and
intellectual information, it is possible to keep the cycle moving, to
through evolutionary intervention significantly reduce the phases of misery.
And unlike humanists who still believe that there is dignity to work, he
looks forward to the day when we will not have to work. For him, to bring
about this new world, we must think beyond left and right. There must, for
example, be ceilings and floors on wealth, and there must be ways to reward
excellence. Instead of bureaucrats, technocrats or partycrats, there must be
people's organizations, that of course could work best with the new
telecommunications technologies. Instead of corporations, there should be
local and eventual global cooperatives. In addition, even while new cultures
are constantly being created, he has started cultural, linguistic,
bioregional, local self-reliance movements to counter the liberal/Marxist
paradigm. Yet at the center of this counter movement is a spiritual
universalism, lest the movements become particularistic.
This universal, he hopes, will come about largely from spiritual practices,
but also from the fall of the national community, the nation-state--brought
about by travel, videos, and of course, pollution and the fear of nuclear
destruction for they do not respect boundaries of nation or body. For
indeed, we are forced outside of ourself not only by awe but by pain and
fear. In our agony, the agonies of the Other becomes real. Universal
cultures and individuals who partake in this worldview do not arise
painlessly, it is a life task for an individual and a civilizational task
for a culture. Becoming cross-cultural, as everyone here must know, arises
through the force of confrontation, not the banality of liking Thai or
Chinese, or Indian food.
This spiritual view is also expressed by the Greens who claim they are
neither left nor right, but in front. Central to them is the natural world.
This world must be given rights not for our sake, but for its sake. They are
not interested in information, nor knowledge, but in that which comes from
understanding the cycle of life--wisdom. For wisdom cannot be commodified;
the power of the king or the market cannot control it. This the yogis and
the martial artists of past knew well--thus, they learned to fast, to think,
to live with few clothes, to master the elements, and to live outside of
wealth, such that the soldiers and the priests could not control them. They
lived with the natural world. In this view, the real communications is not
among humans, but in the planet itself, and the messages she receives about
us, are no longer positive. We are perhaps incidental to the needs of the
global project, that is the survival of the planet, the recovery of the
garden before God and humans.
The Feminist movement too is reminding us who has done the real work for the
last thousand years and that new technologies must be developed that lead to
cooperation not dominance among groups. Otherwise, although men prefer the
image of the virgin and the mother, creation and preservation, there is also
the Crone--the image of power and destruction that descends upon all, and
forces us to remember the temporality of that which we thought was eternal.
But while Sarkar's PROUT and to some extent the Green and the Feminist focus
on ownership of technology as central to the social good, they also speak
about other technologies. For Sarkar, the future is not about molecular
assemblage or genetically engineered chickens, but it is about the Age of
Microvita. He posits that the smallest building blocks of life are
emanations from Pure Consciousness. These emanations however can be
understood not by more refined microscope, but by refined minds, for they
exist outside our sensate world, yet provide the bridge between the mind and
the brain. They are the silver lining between perception and conception.
They can be used to spread ideas throughout the world, they can be used to
heal bodies, and they can be used to spread information throughout the
stars. According to him, the rediscovery of these "mind waves" will soon
radically change physics and chemistry and biology, for these microvita
impact our thoughts, our food, and our social movements. One goal, then is
to find ways to refine the mind so that it can perceive these seeds of life
and use them to increase economic productivity, intellectual awareness and
spiritual well being.
There is also the theory of Rupert Sheldrake articulated in his A New
Science of Life . For him too, this is the end of the materialistic age
of science. The new telecommunications technology are not physical but
fields of awareness that are invisible but organize behavior. Some of these
fields over time have become almost eternal, others are more malleable. They
explain how once one group of humans learn a behavior or receive an insight,
this spreads to others. His institute has conducted numerous experiments
which show partial validity. Among other experiments, they have found
children in England could more easily memorize an ancient rhyme in a foreign
language instead of a recent one or a gibberish one since the ancient rhyme
has a stronger field as it has existed longer. The point is that there
exists fields of awareness that explain how ideas are unconsciously
transmitted; how ideas become powerful and resonate among us. He provides a
scientific reading of myth and of social change. Thus, this means that
humans can learn from the past, and they can learn at quicker and quicker
rates. The exact conclusion that telecommunications experts believe that
telematics will lead to. More information means more learning, means a
better world, eventually. The wheel then is just a reflection of everything
we have seen for the last thousand of years, but this structure with
learning and new ways of thinking can be overcome. New structures can gain
force.
Of course, the movements mentioned above would focus on access to these new
technologies, while the liberals the growth of them, and the Marxists would
argue that through a central authority, they can better distribute the
benefits of them.
THE END OF THE REALLY REAL
But the theories of Sarkar, Sheldrake, and others who write of a postmodern
era, where the materialistic rationality has been made contentious, are
being attacked by another group as well. For them, the liberal/Marxist
project believes that there is a real world that can be managed, controlled
and predicted. In the liberal view, through science and the discovery of
laws, the world can be made more rational and understandable; tomorrow can
be in fact known; uncertainty can be reduced and better policy decisions
thus made. Eventually, all will be able to join in this project--even the
colonies. Most of the work by futurists falls into this realm--to them the
goal is the prediction of the empirical world, the search for the elusive
truth of tomorrow.
The challenge so far has been by those who seek to recover the best of the
world prior to rationality of the science and technology revolution. It is
about capturing meanings, economic systems, polities that existed before
capitalism destroyed time and culture. It is about recovering the
natural--the spiritual and the cultural.
But this third group believes nothing is natural--everything is human
creation, whatever we know is perceived. We cannot know anything as it
really is. And every theory whether Platonic or Aristotelian, earth centric
or sun centric puts at center one way of knowing over another way. In this
view, there is nothing to predict; there is nothing to recover or remember;
there is no self to prop up, to save from technology--the self is created by
society. For when we perceive we must describe in language and in this
representation the world is created. Thus the Rushdie/Khomeni affair. For
Rushdie nothing is really real, there is no truth that appeared in the
middle east and all words, texts, must be made relative. For Khomeni, there
is a text, a piece of information that is more real; it cannot be attacked
for it is the direct word of the Real. To attack the text is to attack God,
thus the only appropriate punishment is death to Rushdie.
For this group, we must look at our language and our categories of thought
and see who gains from them, what is lost, what is silenced. We must look at
the cycle and see what this construct does--does it liberate or oppress. For
them, nothing is really real, everything is description--power is that of
making one description seem more real or natural than others. Thus time is a
category, not a reality. The purpose of talking about the future or the past
is not to predict or to recover, but to make the present remarkable; to thus
make the status quo contentious and thereby create the possibility for
change, for creation.
In this view we must also live on the edges of reality, always testing to
see if have made a representation really real--ontologically real--always
seeing the power of our descriptions of the world. In this view, the new
technologies will create more and varied texts and the present notion of the
separation of the empirical-physical world and the world of text or video
will forever be gone. Television creation Star Trek will really be more
interesting and thus real than the landing of humans on the Moon. Fiction
and non-fiction will become one and focus of the text or the video will not
be the writer, the producer, the manufacturer, but the reader, the
interpreter, the consumer, or in the world of the telecommunications
discourse, the user. There will then really be as Roland Barthes argues an
infinite number of interpretations to everything.
And what exists beyond language, perception, interpretation? from the
cultural and spiritual view, a world of mystery and bliss, of the divine.
For the empiricist, the material physical world--tables and chairs but no
inherent meanings. And from the third view, beyond interpretation are other
interpretations waiting to describe what is, for both the divine and the
physical are simply imposed meaning structures, we cannot really know if
anything really exists--the key question is who gains and who loses by every
description of the world.
In the meantime, I look forward to being ever at home and seeing the myriad
of worldviews that exist past, present and future. I look forward to
watching the live revolution continue, to watching the Chinese students
create a new world, and attempt to recover that which they believed was true
in the past and as these images enter my eyes, I have no idea what appears
to be real and what is really real: are the Chinese restructuring their
world because positive microvita has entered them, or because they have more
knowledge of things, more information, or because new fields of awareness
have been created by the Filipino non-violent demonstrations. I do not know,
but will more information, microvita energy waves, or fields of awareness
help me slam dunk a basketball after watching Michael Jordan this week?
Perhaps there are limits!
As it turned out, the Chinese student's hope for celebration that could
transform the bureaucratic party structure of the past fifty years did not
turn out to be. Perhaps it was that Deng did not wish to be humiliated again
in Tiananmen square, or perhaps their turn will come another day, perhaps a
video image of crumbling of the Berlin Wall will be catalytic leading to a
transformation in the Great Wall.
But more central than video images themselves, however, are individuals who
can transform these images into myths and visions. These larger stories of
who we are provide the link between the routine day to day activities of the
present and the personal sacrifice, the episodes of bravery, needed to
create a new tomorrow.
To create this new future, these stories will, I believe, have to speak to
the cycle and speak to a notion of progress. Effective leadership will have
to do more than simply deconstruct the epistemological basis of history or
merely provide a blueprint of technological change. While deconstructing
history is important since leadership casts the new vision in stone
forgetting that "yesterday dissent is often today's establishment and,
unless resisted, becomes tomorrow's terror" and while technological
development is essential, the former does not speak to the "where to now"
question and the latter forgets that it exists in a cultural historical
framework--mythology.
To meet the challenges ahead, leadership will have to speak to and balance
humanity's spiritual, knowledge and material dimensions. Here Sarkar reminds
us that while the cycle will continue, through spiritual--intellectual,
servant, protective, and entrepreneurial--leadership the phases of
exploitation and human misery can be reduced thus creating a vision that
dialectically embraces the ancient, enlightenment and postmodern.
SELECTED REFERENCES
Roland Barthes, Critical Essays trans. Richard Howard. Evanston,
Ill.,Northwestern University Press, 1972.
James Dator, "The Futures of Cultures and Cultures of the Future," in
Marsella et al (eds.) Perspectives on CrossCultural Psychology. New
York, Academic Press, 1979.
Eric Drexler, Engines of Change. New York, Anchor Press, 1986.
Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions. New York, Harper and Row,
1988.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. New York, Random House, 1973.
Liz Fell, "Poor Reception for TV Moguls," Pacific Island Monthly (May
1988).
Chris Jones, The Politics and Futures of Gaia. Doctoral dissertation.
University of Hawaii, 1989.
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History trans. Franz
Rosenthal (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967).
Ashis Nandy, Tradition, Tyranny, and Utopias, Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 1987.
Ed Rampell, "Hi-Tech on the High Seas," Pacific Island Monthly (May
1988).
Avadhuta Rudreshananda, Microvita: Cosmic Seeds of life. Berlin, Ananda
Marga Publications, 1989.
Nicolas Rothwell, "Keeping the Language Alive," Pacific Islands Monthly
(May 1988).
P.R. Sarkar, PROUT in a Nutshell, Vols. 1-22. Calcutta, Ananda Marga
Publications, 1988.
Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation. Madison, University
of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life. London, Blong and
Briggs,1981.
William Irwin Thompson, Pacific Shift. San Francisco, Sierra Club
1985.
Barbar Walker, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power. San
Francisco, Harper and Row, 1985.