|
THE WHOLE ELEPHANT
There
is no way to understand what is happening in the world today without reading
The
Spiritual Imperative. Why? Because it is the only book that sees history
and the future as the elephant it really is.
You
know the elephant I mean -- the one in the old Indian fable. Once upon a
time there were six blind male intellectuals who went to see an elephant
to satisfy their minds about what it might be. Naturally, each had to give
his own theory about what the elephant could be likened to.
The
first blind intellectual touched the elephants side and firmly asserted
the elephant to be like a wall. The second felt its sharp tusk and just
as firmly argued that the elephant was like a big spear. The third, nudged
by the elephants trunk, retorted, with grand authority, that the elephant
resembled a snake. The fourth, impressed by the elephants broad knee,
described the animal as like a tree. The fifth blind man, cooled by the
elephants waving ear, preached the animals likeness to a fan. And the
sixth, wrestling with the elephants hither-and-thither flopping tail,
never doubted that the animal was like a rope.
Conclusion:
To quote John Godfrey Saxe, the US American poet who set this tale to verse,
"Though each was partly in the right, all were in the wrong." In other
words, each blind man saw only one part of the "big picture," and lacked
the holistic macro-elephantine vision of the entire "system." Todays
historians and futurists -- and so we, the public -- tend to share the same
blinders, the same non-holistic view of history and the future. History
scholars relentlessly chop history up into its parts, with each scholar
specializing in his or her own particular area: US history, Japanese history,
art history, science history, etc. This usually means learning more and
more about less and less. Historians complain that somebody should tie
these loose parts of history into a big picture, take a macrohistorical
view. But when a Marx, Spengler, or Toynbee comes along and does that,
the others, jealously guarding their bits of historical turf from these
"interlopers," dismiss them as "grand theory generalizers." Futurists
work in a field theoretically more open and holistically oriented. But
they still tend to avidly specialize in their own area of expertise: environment,
education, business, culture, science and technology, women, and others. While
history scholars and futurists fail to give the public big pictures, influential
opinion-makers and the popular media fill the vacuum with fragmented and
reductionist views, by presenting every new idea as if it were the "real
key" to understanding history and predicting the future. In
the late 1980s, Prof. Paul Kennedy of Yale University wrote the exciting
book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In it he showed how
the great powers of the past had lost their power because they stressed
military over economic strength. In time their weakened economies could
no longer support the ever-mounting costs of military power, and bloop!,
they lost that as well -- and down they went. Opinion-makers
had an easy time sensationalizing this idea as the key to understanding
the future because of what the idea hinted to the large US reading public
about Americas future: If the US does not shape up economically, it will
lose its superpower status, just as Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great
Britain, and the USSR had done before it, to rising economic stars like
China and Japan. Prof. Kennedys thesis was brilliant and true, but certainly
not the entire key to history and the future. At
around the same time, high-profile opinion-makers also gave attention to
Francis Fukuyamas idea about the "end of history" as the key to history
and the future. In his 1989 essay, Fukuyama argued that, with the collapse
of communism, history has ended: sooner or later every country would have
to adopt US-style liberal democratic capitalism. For it is the only system
that works. The fact that opinion-makers could get the public stirred up
about both ideas -- Kennedys and Fukuyamas -- at once shows how easily
they can confuse us. For the two ideas sort of contradict each other: Kennedys
hints at a poor economy and loss of power for the US, while Fukuyamas
hints at the opposite. Then
opinion leaders focused on a third idea: Professor Samuel P. Huntingtons
"clash of cultures." In his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, Prof.
Huntington argued that, with the Cold War over, conflicts between ideologies,
such as liberal democracy vs. fascism vs. communism, were being replaced
by clashes between cultures: the West vs. Islam, Muslim vs. Hindu, the
West vs. China, etc. Since the terrorist attack on New Yorks World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001, Huntingtons idea has captured even more
attention. These
ideas circulated at the more intellectual levels of our culture. The popular
media, meanwhile, fill the vacuum resulting from the lack of a holistic
approach to history and the future with "popular futurism." This sees the
future mainly as a cornucopia of technological wonders, such as artificially
intelligent robots, buildings, and vehicles; medical breakthroughs; space
exploration and colonization; superweapons and superfood; multimedia information
networks; and perfect, ageless bodies through gene technology. Popular
futurism focuses on the future as mainly technology because we live today
in a high-tech oriented age. But this view of the future as simply more
and better technology and information is defective in the same way as that
of the futurist who, living in preindustrial times, when everything was
based on agricultural production, would have predicted the future (the
last 400 years) purely in terms of more and better food production. True,
the future will be chock full of new technological wonders in all fields.
But, looked at holistically, that is not what the future will be about.
Kennedys, Fukuyamas, Huntingtons, and the techno-visionaries' ideas
clarify part of the story of what is happening on the world scene. But
overstressing single ideas or technological progress as the key to history
and the future is the blind-men-and-the-elephant approach. To paraphrase
Saxes poem, though each of these is partly in the right, all are in the
wrong. Though all the above views are only partial, fragmented, reductionist
explanations of the history-future process, each has been touted as "the
whole elephant." The
Spiritual Imperative attempts
to present the needed holistic view, the whole elephant, so that we can
truly understand historys meaning and direction, completely change our
view of the world, and foresee what lies ahead. Actually,
it presents three holistic views. If youve managed to read this far without
feeling the itch or unbridled lust to surf elsewhere, and are interested
in reading about these views, click here or
on Interview. The
Interview gives a rough sketch of the three holistic views. The Introduction to
The
Spiritual Imperative explains the books contents chapter by chapter,
but, more importantly, gives more detail about the three views. It also
explains why discovering and having holistic views of history are urgent
for human survival and for understanding the meaning of our own individual
lives -- who we are. Thats partly because they help us avoid the doom-and-gloom,
Orwellian, techno-hell prognoses some futurists and science fiction writers
enjoy making. Theres
more in the Introduction that will interest you. It explains what the three
holistic views have foreseen that have already come true, what they foresee
still to come, and how one of these three holistic views, the Caste Model,
corrects the mistakes in Marx and Engels' analysis of class struggle, which
eventually led to the political failures of Marxist movements. (The Caste
Model is based on the Hindu-Indian philosophy of history.) Please stop
for a second and ponder the implications of this last point. It means that the Caste Model serves as a replacement for Marxist theory as a way
of explaining why and how revolutions occur and develop, why we can expect
more revolutions still to come. So please click on Introduction.
|
|