Scenes from the Great Transition

Published on Tuesday, August 14, 2012 by Solutions
Scenes from the Great Transition

by Paul Raskin

I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.
—Bob Dylan

Mandela City, 2084

The world today, a century after George Orwell’s nightmare year, stands as living refutation of the apocalyptic premonitions that once haunted dreams of the future. This dispatch from our awakened future surveys the contemporary moment, scenes in the unfolding drama we call the Great Transition.

What Matters

The whole edifice of contemporary civilization rises on a foundation of compelling human values. The prevailing pretransition ethos—consumerism, individualism, and anthropocentrism—has given way to another triad: quality of life, human solidarity, and ecocentrism. These values spring from a sense of, a yearning for, wholeness at all levels: self, species, and biosphere. They are manifestations in the human heart of the interdependence of the world, the defining feature of the present historical era, the Planetary Phase of Civilization.

It has become clear that enhancing the quality of people’s lives, not expanding the quantity of their possessions, is the only valid goal of development. The principle of material sufficiency, now widely held, has roots in the early decades of the transition, a time of turbulence and conflict that spawned a search for more meaningful and satisfying ways of living than the work-and-buy treadmill offered. Today, people may be as ambitious as ever, but fulfillment has displaced wealth as the primary measure of success and source of well-being.

The second pillar of the contemporary Zeitgeist—human solidarity—affirms a strong connection felt for strangers in distant places and descendants in a distant future. This capacious camaraderie draws on wellsprings of empathy in the human psyche, the Golden Rule that threads through the great religious traditions. By mingling the destinies of all, the Planetary Phase has stretched esprit de corps across space and time to embrace the whole human family of today and tomorrow. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/14-2