The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [72]
At this pivotal moment in our history, a citizen’s movement for a more conscious democracy could turn humanity’s primary attention machine—television—from the distractions of adolescent entertainment towards a mature reflection on matters of momentous concern. As the world’s systems problems converge into the singularity of a global systems crisis, we could pause in our normal affairs and finally tell ourselves the truth. The business-as-usual focus of global media on commerce and entertainment could be replaced by a critical period of planetary truth telling in which we humans work to heal the wounds of history and then, together, forge a vision of a sustainable and meaningful future.
It was communication that enabled humans to evolve from early hunter-gatherers to the verge of planetary civilization, and it will be communication that enables us to become a bonded human family committed to the well-being of all. At the very time that we need an unprecedented capacity for local-to-global communication, we find we have the necessary tools in abundance. Electronic gatherings will blossom from the local to national to global scale and make the sentiments of the body politic highly visible. When everyone knows the “whole world is watching”—when economic, ethnic, ideological, and religious violence is brought before the court of world public opinion through the Internet and the other media—it will bring a powerful corrective influence into human relations. As groups and nations see their actions scrutinized and judged by the rest of the world community, we will become more inclined to search for ethical and nonviolent approaches.
Because communication is fundamental to our common future, it is critical that the human community work consciously to bridge the digital divide, extend the communications culture to all corners of the globe, and build an effective “social mirror” for the human family—one that authentically reflects both the adversities and the opportunities of our times. All cultures will be naked—their history forever exposed in a world made transparent by the electronic media—and confronted with the need to make amends for wrongs committed in the past if there is to be release into a promising future. A supreme challenge will be to hold a steady and undistorted social mirror as we struggle for collective understanding, respect, and reconciliation. Societies without a tradition of freedom of speech will find this both liberating and extremely demanding as new skills of inclusion and reconciliation are required to participate effectively.
One of the most helpful and powerful actions we can take as we move through this transition as a species is to increase opportunities for conscious reflection from the personal to the planetary scale. Personal reflection refers to seeing ourselves in the mirror of consciousness as individuals and to observe the unfolding of our lives. By analogy, social reflection refers to seeing ourselves in the mirror of collective consciousness by using tools such as the mass media.
The more widely and accurately our time of initiation is witnessed by the people of the Earth through the global media, the more strongly the lessons of this time will be grounded in our collective lives and memory; in turn, the less likely it is that we will have to relearn these lessons in the future. If we can see disasters in our social imagination, we may not need to manifest them in our actual experience. As societies, we can collectively imagine futures that we do not want to enact