August 2006
I found the thirty-year-old manuscript of this book in one of my overlooked files in 2005. Somehow it had survived my move from Princeton, New Jersey, in the late 1970s to Gainesville, Florida, home of the University of Florida, and finally to St. Augustine, where I have lived for the past twenty years.
As I reread the manuscript, masterfully edited by Barbara DeLaney and based on hours of audiotapes recorded during a marathon meeting of minds over two weekends in 1977 and 1978, I was struck with how the many topics and issues covered in these conversations seemed timeless, even current.
Human life spans are almost irrelevant to many of the topics I and my dear friends Jean Houston and Barbara Marx Hubbard addressed in the wide-ranging conversations reproduced in this book, and continue to address in our work. We don’t look for short-term outcomes or surface ripples on the mighty river of human history. We are concerned with deep currents below the surface, processes of social change that are beyond the span of one or several lifetimes.
Mahatma Gandhi was once asked about the effects of the French Revolution. His answer: “It’s too early to tell.”
In this age of instant gratification, 24/7 electronic news—all in soundbites—we miss both the slow-motion good news and bad news. Slow-motion good news I have been tracking all my adult life is the great transition from fossil-fueled industrialism to the cleaner, greener renewable energy and resources of what I call the Solar Age. Barely visible in the 1970s, these new technologies designed with Nature in mind: organic agriculture, preventive health care, and solar, wind, and ocean power are now growing at double-digit rates worldwide.
By 2005, it was possible for me to create a TV series, Ethical Markets, to document this growing “green” economy worldwide and see it aired by PBS stations covering 45 million households.
Some of the slow-motion bad news that worried me in the 1970s, when I was serving on the Advisory Council to the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, was global warming, evident even back then. This issue has also emerged into the mainstream—along with global concerns about clean drinking water, rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity, and desertification—none too soon.
The issues that are still on the human agenda that threaten our survival concern our own cognitive, emotional, and spiritual evolution. Our technological prowess has now created human interdependence and the globalization out of our formerly disparate futures. Yet the historical mind-sets that ensured us survival to this point—territoriality, competition for resources, self-interest separateness, materialism, fears of scarcity and each other, and our vulnerability to the forces of nature—will surely destroy us. All these ancient mind-sets still form the core theories about human nature in our prevailing economic models.
Thus, a large part of my writing and speaking over the past thirty years has been to expose the economics of our reptilian brains: a malfunctioning economic source code deep in the hard drives of all our institutions and cultural belief systems.
Thus, the next chapter of the human agendas requires nothing less than the evolution of our own awareness and consciousness. Only in this way can we overcome violence and conflict and reintegrate human knowledge and the explosion of brilliance during our period of Cartesian exploration and experimentation. Slow-motion good news on this emerging new human is hard to find in our mass media, with its commercial formulas of covering rape, riot, and ruin: “if it bleeds it leads.”
Likewise, mainstream financial media has managed to overlook or ridicule ethical investing, corporate social responsibility, and the growing “green” sectors of the global economy.
I have been committed to the processes of human evolution and social development, and it is these passionate pursuits that brought me into continuous closeness and deep companionship with my beloved sisters, Jean Houston and Barbara Marx Hubbard. They, too, have their own thoughts on the changes wrought by the thirty years since our intellectual summit meeting, and the human family’s prospects for a common planetary future.