CHAPTER TWO

A Technological State of Mind

I can imagine the world being held together and kept at peace in the year 2000 by an atrociously tyrannical dictatorship which would not hesitate to kill or torture anyone who, in its eyes, was a menace to the unquestioning acceptance of its absolute authority …

Arnold Toynbee, historian

To be absolutely modern means to be the ally of one’s gravediggers.

Milan Kundera, novelist

Modernity … to involve a degree of alienation or homelessness, a sense we have become strangers to ourselves and to others.

John Jervis, sociologist

Science explores: Technology executes: Man conforms

(motto of 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago)

It is difficult to say definitively what it means to be modern, or a part of modernity. Nor do I wish to attempt a categorical definition. Rather, it is enough to recognize some of the shapes, flows and traits that characterize this formative epoch that emerged within Western civilization. What I wish to discuss in this chapter is how the modernizing process came to construct the social and technological framework that now constitutes many of our developed societies. Also, how this socio-technical structure is responsible for modulating a specific mentality. It is this mentality, I argue, that is prone to rationalism, is possessed of a disenchantment from a creative cosmos, and in many respects detaches the ‘modern person’ from relating to the deep crises (social, environmental, political and economic) that we are collectively facing. From the Renaissance to Modernity the human being has gone through various adaptations, influences and impacts. The question is: has the most recent adaptation towards a ‘modern life’ been a successful one?

The physical restructuring towards a ‘modern life’ came about through what is known as the Industrial Revolution. This industrializing shift instigated a move away from geographically dispersed, mixed cottage-style and agrarian lifestyles into the urbanized, mechanically driven workspaces most of us are so familiar with today. This movement occurred in a series of developmental waves, beginning in late 18th-century England. The first of these waves introduced early mechanical devices that made a dramatic impact upon cottage industries such as textiles; upon hard manual-labour industries such as mining (with the introduction of steam pumps); and upon animal-driven agrarian work. The technology of steam pumps made mining more efficient and thus expanded the extraction and use of coal. This development was instrumental in the early establishment of factories, factory towns, institutionalized urban labour, and early forms of transporting goods.

This was followed by a second wave of advancement that expanded the technological and economic base, opened up extensive transport routes (shipping, railways) and further centralized the workforce. The expansion of international travel developed in tandem with the Morse code, the telegraph – referred to as the ‘Victorian Internet’ – tourism and standardized time. Extensive communication routes were also opened up through the sending of mail. The establishment of the postal system was very much a precursor to today’s modern telecommunication systems. As nation-states emerged they established ‘national mail systems as government monopolies or near-monopolies’ with the result that the postal global network was ‘the first of many such large-scale information distribution systems that were to follow’.¹

This early telecommunication network was followed by the invention of the telephone and the wireless, which further succeeded in reducing the size of the globe for the industrializing world. The patenting of the telephone in 1876 began not with the apocalyptic tone of Morse’s ‘What hath God wrought?’ but, on 10 March 1876, with the more playful ‘Mr Watson – come here – I want to see you!’ as Alexander Graham Bell spoke to his assistant in the next room. By 1880 a concert in Zurich was broadcast over the telephone wires to the town of Basel 50 miles away; and in 1880 the London Times installed a direct telephone line to the House of Commons.² Yet it wasn’t long after such physical communication networks had been established that the 19th century went wireless.

The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sent and received his first radio signal in Italy in 1895 (although Nikola Tesla is now credited with having invented the modern radio as in 1943 the Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s patent in favour of Tesla’s). The first wireless signal was broadcast across the English Channel in 1899, and the first successful transatlantic wireless radiotelegraph message – between England and Newfoundland – was sent in 1902. This proved especially important for maritime use and soon oceanic vessels were equipped with wireless receiving and sending equipment. By 1912 the wireless had become central to international communication, traversing land and sea in the first instantaneous, worldwide network. Just how important ‘always on’ connectivity was to become was revealed in the early hours of 15 April 1912. It was the wireless station in Newfoundland that informed the world, at 01.20 hours, of the sinking of the Titanic. The distress call, first put out by the captain of Titanic at 12.15am, was picked up immediately by those ships within relatively close range. However, the ship closest to Titanic, the Californian, which was approximately 19 miles away and thus near enough to have saved a majority of the stricken passengers, was not in wireless contact and had gone ‘off line’ about 10 minutes before Titanic’s first wireless distress signal.³ The rest, as we say, is history. This incident, amongst others at the time, emphasized to the rapidly modernizing world that it was important not only to be in contact but to be connected; in other words, to be networked.

Yet to be efficiently networked also gave rise to the issues of management, time, conduct and regulation. Such an emerging modern environment, with its increasingly urbanized workforce and automated machinery, required that efficiency and regulation become central to notions of progress. It was said that a person could not hope to know the world if they could not know what time was. Further, the rhythm of social life, it was noted, was becoming increasingly faster. In 1881 the psychiatrist George Beard (who introduced the concept of ‘nervous exhaustion’ into psychiatric parlance) published a report titled ‘American Nervousness’, which blamed the invention, use and increasing reliance upon clocks and watches for causing general social nervousness. According to Beard’s report: ‘a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime’.⁴

This type of conduct went hand in hand with the new form of workforce behaviour that was being implemented as a means of developing mass production: namely, Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management’. In brief, scientific management introduced empirical, statistical analysis into work methods, including time ratio and division of labour, in order to calculate the most efficient means of completing a particular job function. Such methods were not popular amongst the workers and generally led to feelings of alienation and lack of satisfaction with work.

Also of importance, the second wave of the Industrial Revolution can be said to have ended with the beginning of commercial oil drilling and the subsequent explosion of the oil age. It was this newly discovered form of energy that not only brought the world closer together in terms of transport, but also accelerated technological developments towards a more energy-intensive industrialized landscape.

Finally, the third wave of the Industrial Revolution ushered in the electronic revolution of the early 20th century. This, as we know, has led to an unbelievable acceleration in our technologies, to a point where we are symbiotically bound to and dependent upon our exterior electronic nervous system. Energy was thus transformed from ‘heavy’ sources such as fossil fuels (coal, oil), to the ‘soft’ sources of electronics. Each industrializing phase of the Western modernization project has correlated with a simultaneous transition in energy. The increasing complexity of our societies has been tightly bound with a trajectory of increasing energy-intensive dependency. This, as I shall discuss in later chapters, is part of the predicament of our global future(s).

To summarize, then, the three waves of industrialization that formed the backbone to the current epoch of modernity called for a standardization of behaviour through new conduct, codes and a work mentality; increased urbanization and labour-intensive communities; and a top-down structure of bureaucratization and rationalization. We may also speculate that it contributed greatly to the disenchantment of a person’s work life (leading to almost forced slavery), alienation and loss of community. In the rush to modernize our minds, our practices, our very selves, we ended up constricting our interior life in sacrifice to ever-greater forms of mechanized labour. However, somewhat paradoxically, our physical constraints of time and space were simultaneously being expanded through successive communications revolutions. Within a short span of time the industrialized nations went from domestic canals and railroads, to global shipping, telegraph, telephone and wireless; and eventually to an electronics explosion that has brought the world into a virtual communications embrace. This radical restructuring of human society has utilized what historian Lewis Mumford referred to as the human ‘mega-machine’ – the ordered management of human labour. Being modern entails being a part of this ‘mega-machine’ within the increasing complexity of everyday life.

What it Means to be Modern

The complexity of modern life has necessitated its own efficiency. Obviously, you cannot have stability, order and control over millions of people, operations, transactions, etc., if there is no effective management. The history of our known civilizations has, in general, been the history of increasing social complexity (it has also been the downfall of our civilizations!).⁵ This in turn has required an increase in rationalization and bureaucracy. Rationalization, in general terms, refers to those processes that subject almost all areas of human life (personal, political, religious, economic, etc.) to calculated, logical and administrative regulation. These various socio-cultural institutions are rational because they are structured according to rules that determine the most efficient means for achieving any given goal. In order to achieve these goals a relative degree of bureaucracy is required; the two seem to go hand in hand. And bureaucracy is the means whereby a structured, administrative hierarchy puts into operation increasing specialization or division of function; structures of authority; governing/legal bodies; and formalized procedures. In this way social bureaucracy is further enhanced and strengthened by the expansion of administrative functioning.

Once fully established, bureaucracy becomes a dominant, almost indestructible, often faceless, force of social power and domination. The dominant forces of these bureaucratic structures are further empowered because they have a technical superiority over other forms of management and control. And, as you may have already surmised, these structures are then further enhanced through the increasingly technological means with which to enforce and implement them. Rationalization, then, is upheld and empowered by a technological logic to supply greater capacity to order and manage.

It is, in all its lucidity, a maddening logical relationship and one which we can all perhaps understand whilst despising. This frustrating relationship between a person and their increasingly bureaucratic environs has been well presented in such works as Kafka’s The Trial and Gilliam’s Brazil. Max Weber, the sociologist who researched in depth and published on rationality and bureaucracy, himself stated that ‘the individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed’. Weber also commented that ‘the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”’.

And here Weber was accurate, and acute, to realize not only that such socializing structures were resulting in dehumanizing the individual but that such dehumanization was feeding back into the system to further empower it. Like a positive feedback loop, the bureaucratic system was becoming strengthened the more it tightened its calculating, rational and regulating structures. This, Weber referred to as the ‘iron cage’ in which individuals were being trapped by the increasingly logical, rational structures of efficiency, management, regulation and control. We might say that in today’s modern world we have shifted towards a ‘technological iron cage’.⁶

This dehumanizing bureaucracy has resulted in what many people feel to be disenchantment with the world. Perhaps it is partly out of this disenchantment that a certain affinity with fragmentation, abstraction and incompleteness has arisen in Western socio-cultural life that has been referred to as Postmodernism. This term refers to what some commentators have seen as a disbelief in grand truths,⁷ a deconstruction of language, the growth of indeterminacy, experimentation, hyperreality,⁸ denial of reality and meaninglessness. This incredulity towards truth, reality and meaning was controversially explored and popularized when Jean Baudrillard published, in 1991, his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. However, despite these academic and popular debates, the hard reality was that colonial expansion continued to be exercised under the guise of globalization, and market economic forces have strengthened into the 21st century. Whatever the debates over modern social trends, movements, or tendencies, the reality of physical life is that global technologies have ushered into being a high technical level of management and regulation that is now evolving as part of our way of life.

Technology as Technique

It is hard to deny that technology has proven useful to us; nor would I wish to pretend it has not enabled great advancements within human civilization. We can see the effects around us: medical knowledge and tools; international travel; instant global telecommunications; better quality of life; scientific understanding; space travel etc. These are just some of the technological accomplishments that have come as a result of an increasingly complex and technologically evolving culture. Many worthy books have been written on the subject of our technological benefits (as well as some dubious books having speculated upon our technological futures). Yet we can’t say that we didn’t see this coming, since the logical end of a developing (or evolving) technology is an increase in a given society’s capacity for forming and maintaining complex arrangements and thus, by default, regulating their management and control. Technology, in whatever form, is a means of effectively dealing with energy – the source behind all physical and non-physical existence.

In the case of the general evolution of human societies it has been argued that the factor that has enabled societies to access and consume ever more available energy can be identified as ‘technology’.⁹ In other words, technology is the means of exploiting available energies from the environment, which then transforms human societies, leading to the ever-increasing complexity of social arrangements. What this implies is that the more energy that is available for exploitation (physical use) the greater the organizational complexity that may result from this. Taking these issues in mind, it is now possible to see how technology can be viewed as a vast organizing principle that either directly or indirectly functions to manage and regulate increasing socio-cultural complexity.

As a consequence, human societies are able to develop more intricate relations amongst their diverse components and to create more intensive, flexible and regulated modes of interaction. In this manner, socio-cultural evolution has passed through many stages of growth as technologies have harnessed physical energy (and energy-storage) mechanisms. However, the latter half of the 20th century – as the third wave of the Industrial Revolution moved into the Technological Age – saw the shift away from high material energy inputs towards the more subtle energy input of information. The dramatically increasing sophistication of information communication technologies has enabled modern societies to be ordered within ever more complex patterns of relationships and interconnectedness. The central component here is how information is handled.

It is possible to see how information has become the new primary mode of energy after the earlier coarser energy of steam, electricity and raw materials that were catalysts behind the preceding waves of the Industrial Revolution. Information technologies are a transformation from earlier technologies in that they allow a further, i.e. more profound, enmeshment between technology and the environment. In other words, an embedded experience is being established that has begun to erode the parameters between ‘outside/inside’. Our modern technologically developing societies have become more information-intensive. Media analyst Nicholas Negroponte has referred to this as the shift ‘from atoms to bits’.¹⁰ As such, the time intervals between the emergence, integration and development of technology within a socio-cultural environment are decreasing. This pattern is set to speed up even further – perhaps exponentially so – as information catalyses new and emerging technological paradigms.

With this in mind, we can think of our present technologies not only as tools but also (perhaps increasingly more so) as immersive, pervasive and digital processes. In this respect, these processes are catalysing the shift towards the convergence of more highly integrated systems. This in turn remodels social, cultural, economic and political structures into more managed, regulated and – dare we say it – rationally organized processes. This, I argue, outlines in brief some of the processes of how a Western modernity project has enabled a rapid expansion towards an increasingly interconnected world. This ‘Modernity Project’, however, has proven itself to be one based on establishing a global ‘technical’ civilization, constructed on techniques of power and control, rather than a truly human liberating paradigm.

The ‘logical’ and rational extreme of this mindset is towards increasing reliance on scientific methods for dealing with human nature. The temptation to use rational logic to solve social/civil issues can be too great to deny. As the old joke goes – someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world. Yet ironically, the Western mind that is the conditioned product of a technological modernity is re-making the ‘real world’ in the image of logic; or at least attempting to. The corollary is that the same way of thinking will not be useful to us for solving our current global problems; as Einstein famously remarked – ‘You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it.’ The technological frame of mind, now widespread amongst the governing bodies of our ‘modern’ societies, is a combination of scientific analysis, experimentation and organization; rationalization and bureaucracy; and technological logic. The result is what the well-known philosopher Bertrand Russell explains as scientific technique:

Scientific technique is much more than just the impact of new technology on the machinations of society. It is the use of science, in its most calculating and inhumane ways, to analyse, control and guide societies in a desired direction.¹¹

As Russell suggests, modern scientific enquiry, coupled with technical capacity, provides the capability, techniques and know-how for the better analysis, management and control of modern societies. Yet this form of scientific technique, rather than being a diabolical plot for world domination (as is often depicted in film) is, instead, the inevitable outcome of increasingly mechanized and rational societies. In other words, with improved methods for the organization and management of social practices, more highly concentrated forms of power and control are made possible.

A recent 20th-century illustration of the extremes of this rational use of technological organization was demonstrated during Nazi Germany’s ‘Final Solution’ programme, with the orchestrated use of the IBM Hollerith punched card to cross-tabulate and organize the prisoners. According to investigative journalist Edwin Black, the punched card technology was used to gather identity information about European Jewry by collating censuses, registrations and ancestral tracing programs; this led to the classification of concentration camp slave labour and associated work projects.¹² Other examples of the use of scientific technique in modern society include the various eugenic programs, the Human Genome Project, and national criminal DNA databases. (The UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database is currently the world’s biggest DNA database with several million profiles, adding tens of thousands each month.) Films that explore the ‘logical’ extensions of such issues for future scenarios include Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom) and Gattaca (Andrew Niccol). The modern technologies of humankind can be both frivolous and destructive: tools for pleasure or for annihilation in the hands of infants.

This same type of thinking has also been responsible in recent years for the vast machinery of agricultural farming and global food distribution; energy monopolization and distribution; the medical establishment; and global trade, etc. These almost universal institutions have served to push modern societies further towards a modernity that is increasingly faceless and untouchable, where the individual is left without any ‘person’ to blame or hold accountable. How many times have we rung a service for enquiry or help only to be answered by an endless rotating series of voice programs? In such a complex, computerized labyrinth everything is well until something goes wrong: convenience is then replaced by frustration and surrealism. As one 20th-century critic once said about modern society, it is ‘not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests’.¹³

For many of us, our daily lives resemble a technical embrace where technological infrastructures become an extension of ourselves. We could say, as did media guru Marshall McLuhan nearly half a century ago, that our technological extensions have become our externalized nervous systems. According to McLuhan:

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace … when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action …¹⁴

Yet in terms of our present stage, metaphorically we are like an infant with their rattle – in the early stages of using a new tool. This is why, as I suggest in the following chapters, humanity needs (or will be forced through) an initiation, a growing up, from childhood to adolescence. We need to reach childhood’s end and, just as in Arthur C Clarke’s novel of the same name, merge towards a new collective evolved mind.

* * *

What I have attempted to describe in these few pages is that the accelerated development of modern cultural life from the Renaissance, the Enlightenment period, and the Industrial Revolution, was followed by an even more rapid period of technological growth. Within the last half-century alone we have witnessed a tremendous increase in urban growth, paralleled by the spread of organized economic markets and cultural conditions (and conditioning) that are receptive to the rise of technical structures. The result of this is that our modern societies are exhibiting a ‘technical consciousness’ that operates through regulation, rationality and calculated efficiency – the very opposite of the natural, the organic and the spiritual. These traits mark a further shift, or decline, away from an enchanted, vibrant and dynamic universe towards a disenchanted, mechanical, rational and clockwork universe. It is these traits, this mode of thinking, that are central to the state we now find ourselves in concerning our global affairs.

As modern, complex, developed (and developing) societies move ever further towards a convergence and centralization of power and control, there is increasing need to fuel this complex expansion through more advanced networks of supply. The obvious primary necessity here is energy requirement – oil and natural gas supplies; electricity production/distribution; nuclear power; and all alternative forms. The technological mindset that is most predominant is still that of an old technological mind – one that requires expansion, organization, power and control. As will be discussed in later chapters, this old mindset is attempting, as the world goes through tremendous shifts, to hold onto power through centralizing control over the production, supply and distribution of such vital commodities as energy and food. This is the top-down approach to technology. Yet the next two decades – in fact the next decade – will see radical changes in the world simply because these technological structures and systems are not compatible with dwindling resources, contracting economies and overall shortages. What some of the later chapters will also explore is the notion that technology might be enabling, or giving birth to, a new form of technological mind that is better equipped to understand the global predicament – an empathic mind. This empathic mind, which is born out of better physical and emotional connectivity, may then be the forerunner to new generations being born with heightened intuitive minds.

However, as the social scientist Michael Harrington commented back in 1962: ‘If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.’ This was followed only seven years later, in 1969, by Harvard psychologist B F Skinner’s remark that ‘the real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do’. What we are facing now is the prospect that as our technological civilization evolves, it does so without an accompanying evolution of the human mind towards an enchanted, empathic and entangled creative cosmos.

Disenchantment of the Technological Mind

Increasingly, many of us are now living everyday lives in an environment that is ever more unreal and disembodied. By just taking a look at our worldwide, digitalized financial markets we can see how the peak of unreality and the digital operate. Now this illusory environment is becoming stretched to exhaustion: credit-debt economies; consumerism; media and entertainment; even warfare. There is a danger that the illusion will overtake the actual, pushing real human experience and values into the background. The cultural critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard often expressed how he felt that many societies were becoming so reliant upon the simulation that they were losing contact with the physical ‘real’ world.¹⁵

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote of a great Empire that created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire finally crumbled, all that remained was the map. This ‘imaginary map’ finally became the only remaining reality of the great Empire: a virtual simulation of the physical reality that now encompasses everyone. In some sense we can say that the modern technological world is moving further towards existing within its own simulation.

This is further exemplified by numerous news stories about people ‘losing the plot’ and disappearing into virtual environments. In February 2010, a 22-year-old South Korean man was charged with murdering his mother after she nagged him for spending too much time playing online games. After murdering his mother the young killer then went to a nearby Internet café to continue playing his games. Another recent example is that of a young couple, again in South Korea, who in September 2009 returned home from an all-night 12-hour gaming binge to find their three-month-old daughter dead. The couple were later arrested and charged for starving their daughter to death, after it emerged that they were more interested in raising an online baby (called Anima) in a popular role-playing game called Prius Online. A recent UK example is a news story, published 12 September 2010 in the Daily Mail, that tells of a young mother who, after the untimely death of her husband, retreated into an online fantasy game to the extent that her three children were badly neglected for six months. Her children were forced to feed themselves from cans of cold beans whilst her two dogs were left in a room to starve to death. Research published by Leeds University in the UK, earlier in the year in February 2010, also showed evidence of a link between excessive Internet use and depression.

The modern global economy has brought new levels of the consumerist mass-production of objects and desirables. Whilst this has contributed to the rising economies and living standards of newly industrializing nations, it has also resulted in people’s attention and focus being increasingly driven towards superficial attainments and false values. Further, the global media, through movies, television and printed material, shoulders a high responsibility for blurring the sense of meaning and values between the superficial and the real; and, of course, for the incredible amount of propaganda and mental/emotional manipulation that lies at its heart. When there is intent to flood people’s consciousness with images that are often more real than the real, this sense of hyperreality is in danger of eroding the presence of meaning and significance.

The landscape of modernity gives us a rich tapestry of transient impressions, bright lights and advertising slogans, mixed with the temptations and pleasures of urban convenience and instant excess. Within such a highly distracting environment the lines between fulfilment/emptiness; pleasure/saturation; and magical/monotonous begin to blur into subjective unknowns, unease, disquiet and general malaise. All these contribute to increased disenchantment with the world, with people’s lives, and an encroaching sense of emptiness, grief, stress, boredom and anxiety may creep in.

The danger is that as people become accustomed to being immersed in highly techno-mechanized systems, they then become mentally attuned and influenced psychologically by the traits of extreme logic. This type of environmental influence may already have succeeded, to some degree, in making the rational appear irrational, and the irrational as rational. Or, as some mystics like to assert, we live in an upside-down, topsy-turvy world. The result is that we have learned to accept the ‘efficient’ and the ‘functional’ as inevitable and agreeable aspects of the progress of civilization. This step-by-step drive towards what may be considered as a form of technological determinism also, by its intrinsic nature, contributes to disenchantment through forces that standardize and normalize rather than inspire and empower.

It is well to remember that having more will never compensate us for being less. As the thinker Idries Shah put it:

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.¹⁶

The flood of information that now characterizes our technological frame of mind can lead to cultural amnesia through overload. This can also be seen in the ever-widening consumer choices that flood the shelves. Yet, instead of having extended choices between products, we are facing a monopoly that actually shrinks consumer choice by making us select between competing brands of the same products. Therefore the politics of commodity provides the illusion that we have greater choice whilst, in effect, diminishing the range of options by flooding the market with more of the same. As the old teaching adage goes – real freedom is having no choice at all. One effect of this perceived increase in choice and availability is that it has served to disempower us; as Richard Heinberg notes:

As civilization has provided more and more for us, it’s made us more and more infantile, so that we are less and less able to think for ourselves, less and less able to provide for ourselves, and this makes us more like a herd – we develop more of a herd mentality – where we take our cues from the people around us, the authority figures around us.¹⁷

More than ever we are becoming less able to provide essential resources for ourselves. Complex societies move towards specialization, resulting in a majority of people being dependent upon those who possess the relevant skills. The ability to work with natural materials and resources (wood and soil) has been shifting away from the hands of most people. How many of us have the aptitude to repair, build, or invent with solid materials? Most likely we ring for voicemail services. Soon we will lose the ability to read maps because we are so accustomed to the sweet or husky voice of the in-built satellite navigation. Such an increased reliance on technology, without a corresponding development of human skills, may in fact be working against our natural human traits of adaptability, resourcefulness and inner authority. Our dependency upon technological infrastructures is, I argue, part of the old technological mind whereby we expect technology to work for us instead of alongside us. This relationship will require a fundamental re-balance if humanity wishes to evolve harmoniously into adolescence as a participating force upon planet Earth. As I argue in later chapters, this transition is in the works, albeit at a critical, vulnerable and unstable stage.

A planetary consciousness, in the sense of a shared collective mindfulness towards harmonious and balanced development, is not yet formed. It has been in gestation for the past century, as I discuss in a later chapter. Yet the old technological mind that still persists from the Industrial Revolution is having a continued influence upon the human psyche. The shift from a divinely inspired universe to a mechanical, rational one has reverberated until the present where it is manifest in a general state of frustration and disappointment. I argue that collective human existence, as an imperative to evolution, requires nourishment from a sense of organic unity and involvement within a larger universal scheme. Reckless resource exploitation, the inhumanity of humans against themselves, and the exploitation of power are signs of spiritual estrangement; they are the nervous impulses of a modern psyche thrashing about in a disenchanted world. As Richard Tarnas notes:

And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.¹⁸

This period of critical vulnerability and transition upon our planet and within our global societies is part of a transformation that, I contend, will see a shift in our shared mindset, out of its shell of separatism and towards a unifying integral consciousness and vision. Should this not happen, as the above quote reveals, a great impoverishment of our civilization and a disappointing legacy of our species would result.

Thus, there follows a period of initiation – a dark night of the soul – whereby a crisis of global proportions may signal the descent, struggle, and final emergence of a sentient species prepared for adolescent responsibility. Yet such an initiation suggests first a near-death experience of planetary proportions. Such signs have been noted for some time, as the following chapter explains.