-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-
I'm reading a science-fiction (or izzat science-future? .. seems like a lot
of the stuff that was science-fiction 30 years ago is commonplace today) ...
book called "Diaspora" that deals with some of the questions below, as
consciousness migrates from flesh to silicon & nanotech.
Dave Hartley
http://www.asheville-computer.com/dave
http://www.ru.org/93inaya.html
New Renaissance Vol. 9, No. 3
New Futures Ahead: Genetics or Microvita?
by Sohail Inayatullah
The future might be just what we think it will be.
The conventional view of the future assumes that life will keep getting
better. Income will go up, houses will increase in value, new technologies
will make life better for all, even if in the short run some of us have to
retrain. To be sure, there will be difficult times, but problems will be
solved, either through government or business. OECD nations will remain fair
societies, which take care of their most vulnerable members.
This incremental view of the future is challenged by some who say we are
coming into a post-industrial post-modern, ‘knowledge economy.’ Indeed, this
is a time of many ‘posts’, meaning that the new era is being created, its
outlines not yet clear, the institutional arrangements (what will government
look like, who will watch over whom) still being sorted out.
Deeper changes
But perhaps the transformation is even deeper, challenging not just
industrialism, but the entire rise of capitalism and of Western
civilization, the Colombian era.
Nano-technologies and artificial intelligence might make production on a
scale never before possible. Of course, these technologies are not yet
on-line but we are seeing hints of a society that challenges the idea that
poverty will always be with us (well at least because of technological
reasons).
Smarter markets will soon be possible. Here all products can be bar-coded
with complete pricing details (how much the Indonesian worker was paid, how
many trees were cut down, how much the middle-man made), allowing consumers
to vote with their dollars. ‘Standards’ will not just be the product’s
physical quality (what it looks like, is it safe and safely made) but also
its functional quality (how well it does what it claims to do) and its
ethical quality.
In this way, the Internet could level the inequalities of capitalism,
creating a giant people’s market. Capitalism could also transform through
another—global—depression, once the speculative bubble of the financial
markets bursts.
Multiculturalism will also play an important role, perhaps shattering any
notion of one culture, one state, one knowledge system, one view of science.
How will nations organize this gaia of civilizations; this ecology of
different world-views?
The nation-state as the sole holder of power has entered a terminal process
(even if the passport office retains its power to deport). Whether it will
take 50 years or a hundred, we know well that revolutions from below
(non-governmental organizations), revolutions from above (international
institutions), revolutions from capital (globalism), revolutions of culture
(new ways of seeing self and other, of boundaries) and revolutions of
technology (air travel, the Net) all make the nation-state deeply
problematic. Of course, the Milosevics, the brahmins and mullahs won’t
disappear. With no place to hold onto, they will fight until the bitter end,
hoping that enough of us will retain our patriotism (and be willing to kill
for it). They will hope to transform the quite legitimate concerns of
individuals fearing change, corporate control, foreigners and loss of jobs
into a politics of exclusion, of attacking the other.
Governance
What world might result from these historical revolutions in governance?
There is a range of possibilities. One alternative is that one religious
system dominates, creating a world church, temple or mosque. A second option
is that one nation dominates, creating a world empire. The former is
unlikely, as reality has become too fragmented. Neither Christians nor
Muslims (or Buddhists) are likely to convert en masse tomorrow, even if
Jesus, the Madhi, or Amida Buddha return. The problem of recognizing God is
not likely to be solved in the year 2000, even if the Redeemer does return.
The second option, world empire, is difficult given the democratic impulse.
The only nation currently vying for the job is caught by its own democratic
language. Disney and Microsoft are more likely victors than the US State
Department, despite what conspiracy theorists in Belgrade, Baghdad, Beijing
and Kuala Lumpur believe.
But can the world capitalist economy—the third alternative—define identity?
It has flourished because the economy has been global, expanding, while
identity has been national, fixed, as has politics. With the nation in deep
trouble, can a world economy with national politics continue? Localist
movements—the fourth alternative—hope to capture the spaces created by the
loss of national identity. However, in their attempts to be authentically
local, to challenge corporatism, they find they must link with other
environmental, spiritual, labor, organizations. Cyber-lobbying, the politics
of the Net, too, forces them into global space. Localism only succeeds when
it becomes global.
Globalisms
While we are halfway through the first phase of globalization, that is, of
capital, phase two is likely to be the globalization of labor, Marx’s dream
all along. If capital can travel freely, why not labor? Already, elite
intellectual labor does, and soon other forms will. At the very least
information the conditions of labor will, via "the smart products method,"
become global. The next wave will be the multicultural. News—not the details
of reporting but what we report about—will begin to flow not just downwards
from Hollywood, New York and London, but upward as well.
Already, the best newspapers are those that include the feeds of many
cultures. The Pakistani paper, The News, for example, far exceeds any
reporting The New York Times might manage. As The News is weaker, it
survives with feeds from Arab, South Asian, East Asian and Western sources.
Not just news, but ideas, language, culture is beginning to filter all
around, and even if Murdock is likely to standardize, still standardization
is being challenged throughout the world. Customization is the likely
future; technology allows it, and postmodernism provides the cultural
legitimacy for it. The search for authenticity, even if largely about style,
questions one’s presumed universal values; especially the male, western,
technocratic, linear, capitalist basis of reality. History books (why are
Muslims seen only as threats, why is the Pacific, the water continent, seen
as irrelevant?) and children’s stories are all being deconstructed (why are
witches constantly portrayed as evil?) and seen as a particular world-view
(Europe defining what is true, good and beautiful), and not as universal
(for more on this, see: http://www.others.com). Facts come to be through
narratives, or at the very least, what meanings we give to the facts change.
The final phase of globalization is likely to be a world security force,
inklings of which we are already seeing.
So, empire, one church, localism and a world capitalist economy built around
nation-states seems nearly impossible to sustain. Thus we will soon move to
a world government system with strong localist tendencies, with thousands of
bio-regions. The guiding ethic will be a move from strategy to health and
healing (of negotiating reality, difference, of reconciliation, and of
having a big stick: the world security force) along with an up-to-date Magna
Carta guaranteeing the right of culture, language and income.
The details are terribly important and burdensome, and how the Chinese will
get along with the Americans is difficult to predict (just as the modern era
was not possible to predict from the feudal). Many hope for a world
government with strong localism. But this is unlikely, as localist systems
alone do not survive because they get taken over. It is not love alone that
will create this new world system.
Genetics or Microvita?
Where then is home? Where is our resting space? And who will create it? Will
it be those who are part of the current system, those in the continued
growth model of the future? Government leaders, corporate CEOs? Or will it
be the "bedouins", those imagining a more organic connected future, those
outside official power? As they challenge the last 500 years of history,
working for new rights (for humans, animals and plants), for gender
partnerships, for spirituality and for social activism (a moral economy and
politics) can they succeed?
The bedouins are steeped in ancient cyclical time. Those whom the bedouins
oppose prefer a future of speed, the teflon self, and genetically recreated
offspring: the double helix generation. They imagine a future with no limits
and seem to have the wealth to create it.
Are there any limits to the technological future? Gordon Moore, founder of
both Intel and Moore’s law (that the number of devices on a piece of silicon
doubles every year or two), when asked about the pace of change says:
"We’re working with sizes so small, they’re hard to imagine; you could say
the features are about the size of a virus… We currently use visible light
to etch components on the semiconductors, but now we’re getting down to
wavelengths for which ... no materials are transparent. You can’t make
lenses any more. We’re looking at three major alternatives to go beyond what
we do now: X-rays, electron beams, and something called extreme
ultraviolet … The next problem we run across is the fact that materials are
made out of atoms. I don’t see a way around that one."
But perhaps the solution to these limits will be from outside the material,
outside our expectations. P.R. Sarkar writes that the very nature of reality
must be ideational and physical at the same time—microvita. At the crudest
form they are viruses, at the deepest, they are pockets of energy that can
be used to direct evolution and can carry information. Like the geneticists,
he believes we are directing evolution; but it is being directed through our
creative collective unconscious, through our aspirations for a different
world. These aspirations become not mere visions of dreamers but the program
for our social, if not biological, evolution.
Which future will it be then? Incremental change? The globalist artificial
society? The organic global community? Or a collapse followed by a strong
moral order?
Will the technocrats or the humanists win this one, or are we creating a
world where neither one has the current metaphorical capacity to recognize
the future?
--------------------------------------------------------
Sohail Inayatullah, Professor with the IMC, Unesco Chair at the University
of Trier and visiting academic at Queensland University of Technology, is
the author of numerous books on the future of knowledge, culture and
technology. Publications in 1999 include, Situating Sarkar: Tantra,
Macrohistory and Alternative Futures; Transcending Boundaries; Transforming
Communication; and Islam, Postmodernism and Futures. He is associate editor
of New Renaissance. © 1999 by the author.
----------------------------------------------------------
see also:
P.R. Sarkar
http://www.prout.org/
and:
Futures Studies: Methods, Emerging Issues and Civilizational Visions is
available from the: &q Pacific Centre for Futures Innovation
and Prosperity Press, Brisbane.
Isbn: 1 875 603 13 1
http://www.legionsoflight.com/12products/12future.html
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Viveka
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 3:26 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [ncndiscuss] Cultural disease
Hello!
I'm interested in this idea of cultural disease in relation to the
theory of microvita (my e-mail address but not yet web site). Microvita are
described (by P.R. Sarkar) as living beings, sub-atomic in size, that cause
and cure illnesses (both physical and mental) in individuals and society
(I have oversimplified this description drastically--see his book
Microvitum in a Nutshell). They are also related to the origin and
evolution of life in the universe, somehow related to DNA and viruses but
more subtle. According to P.R Sarkar (Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) microvita
act on the nerve plexes and endocrine glands of individuals (and also
collectively in the society--a collection of individuals) to balance or
unbalance these centers and glands and cause for example pathological greed
and acquisitiveness which is the basis of exploitation in capitalism,
imperialism, communism, fascism etc., or else for example collective
depression and cynicism is the society.
You can find out a little more about microvita by searching the
internet, and I have several articles as well if anyone is interested.
Their relationship to homeopathic medicine has not been determined, but
Sarkar said that allopathic medicine doesn't cure diseases, which are
caused by a concentration of negative microvita in different places in the
body. Diseases are only cured ultimately be the action of positive
microvita (related to the body's vital energy).
Viveka
Dave wrote:
> some comments from a current thread on the homeopathy discussion list
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