I like to believe I play in the middle of one of the more demanding periods of time in history. We are new and poor creatures emerging from the last 150 years of technological innovation.

How this era stacks up in history is not our fate to decide. These facts I can't ignore:

• population growth
• unprecedented amount of capital controlled by intricate relations between political, scientific, and private sectors
• the freedom to see the world anyway one chooses
• where war becomes the unthinkable option rather than the rallying point in culture

Now, is the human being the agent or victim in all of this? What pressures is human nature coming under?

Has it bitten on the Faustian bargain? Where is the recourse to measurements of good and evil? Our personal limitations are conjured up by the "other", by "society", increasing the tensions between people. We are all devils fighting for our space in Hell.

And yet, the human spirit can't afford to shrivel before the facts, however phantasmogorical those facts seem. The spirit can't shrivel before machinery, nuclear arsenals, devastating poverty, terrorism, torture, thug mentalities with power, group think, and a thousand other ills.

Sometimes it appears that the human spirit must become nearly god-like to confront what would destroy it. Our knowledge does not replace God. Our knowledge replaces superstition. God refers to a superior organizing principle that can break into the human being at any time. I would call that grace.

A great deal of effort is made to replicate this organizing principle but it's limitless, infinite, and outside the ability of human beings to fully comprehend.

Fantasies are not grace.

Fantasies are the fastidious hold of a glimpse that rushes away from the victim out of good sense.

Well, aren't we rather sophisticated for God? Or, do we simply fear depth and chaos? Perhaps we fear some insatiable destructiveness in the being that is implicated by a living God.

No God= No Depth.

Without depth there are no constructive dreams to transcend the world. So, we go back to square one. We kill each other and our dreams. This is the world when depth is sucked from its soul.

Perhaps this sort of thinking takes place in the absence of intellectual stimulation. Or, an admission that the one-hundred and one sense stimulation's of youth didn't amount to much, after all.

Aren't believers, today, like a family person that can't stand families?

Two admirable types struggle today. One has tried to make his or her personal life as simple, as uncomplicated as possible. But the simplicity simply forces the person to face the pressures that produce habits rather than extinguish them. The other attempts to sacralize politics and make politics an object of vision. But it begins to look as though the sacral is really disguised fear. Power is distinguished by its ability to impose its fears on the people. These types are in a conflict between material goals and spiritual goals. This is thoroughly understandable in a culture that wants the full development of these goals and doesn't want one to destroy the other. This salutary aspect of the liberal, democratic culture is missed in the spirit that struggles between these forces and they, in fact, split off into amazing manifestations at times.

There's a group of sane thinkers who have tried to define the situation in the past 50 years: Mumford, DuBois, Bateson, Goodman, Wended Berry, Boulding, Vine Deloria, Ellul, Illyich, Krishnamurti, Maslow, Rollo May, Pearce, Rosak, Schumaker, Synder, William Irwin Thompson, Barbara Ward all come to mind. They direct their attention to those who wake one day to find they are captive to machinery, captive to urban areas, captive to organization, captive to function. And the cruelest discovery: They are inured to the inhuman that has conquered them. Enormous sacrifice is made for nothing. These thinkers emphasize the values that should be seed-nature by now but have to be continually re-learned. They talk about alternative technology, de-institutionalizing society, decentralization, among other things.

Perhaps it's all rather tragically small and impotent but my guess is that the future will pick up this line and run with it quite a while. Otherwise the future will put value on scientific arrogance, absolute functionalism, adaptation to the grotesque in urban civilization, sterile relations through the entire spectrum, thralldom to technique and gargantua.

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David Eide
January 24, 2014