conscious evolution

It has taken billions of years for life on this planet to evolve. First there was organic matter in the primordial soup, then came the first self-replicating single-cell organisms, and so forth, eventually leading to to us, here, now. But anyone who has half a brain can see that we have clearly not "arrived" at the end of history. We, just like every generation that has ever lived, are mid-way between the past and the future.

The circumstances our generation has been presented with, however, are vastly different. We are living in a time of quantum leaps in communication. In the twentieth century, we gave birth to the noosphere, the earth's electronic brain and sensory network. Made up of computers, wires, satellites, telephones, pagers, fax machines and other such devices, the noosphere is the pulse of the planet.

From this exponential growth in communications has come a global realization of potential. By keeping our eyes, ears and minds open, we have come to understand that while evolution is inevitable, we have now been handed a steering wheel to direct our course. It is becoming ever more apparent that this is a time of sink or swim decision-making for the human race. We can choose to live by the golden rule and direct our evolution toward co-creating a magnificent world for the generations to come, or we can choose to continue to be ignorant of our options and learn new ways to destroy ourselves and our planet. As always, the future is unwritten. Choose wisely.

There is a book called "Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of our Social Potential", by Democratic Vice Presidential nominee (1984) Barbara Marx Hubbard. It contains contact information for co-creative agents, as well as a brilliant explanation of why ethical or conscious evolution is a necessity.

The home of conscious evolution and co-creation on the web is at http://www.peaceroom.org

While this is certainly an interesting idea, it subscribes to certain assumptions that adherents of so-called progress ideology maintain; that there is a sense of progress towards some goal or even goaless momentum (as with increasing levels of technology), and that this is an inherently good thing. Many people notably anarcho-primitivists and one Teddy "The Unabomber" Kaczynski object to this deeply culturally-ingrained concept, noting that conception of "progress" as an abstract idea is a fairly recent development (ie within last 500 years.)

Granted, the first impulse of anyone in my culture (ie American) is that this is crazy; after all, progress gives us cars and medicine and all sorts of other neat stuff. Well, antelopes could give a shit about medicine, and the squoooshed possum I saw this morning more'n likely has the possum equivalent of some seriously negative emotions towards cars (not even mentioning the fact that technically, humanity is an extinction event in geological time due to the number of species we've gotten rid of); perhaps we aren't asking the right set of entities about the benefits of progress.

Even more interesting is the concept of whether these advances (well, changes at least) have actually improved man's condition within the world, and thus the question regarding whether this sort of directed evolution would actually improve mankind's ability to extract meaning and such from their own lives. I'd argue that they do in certain ways, notably because it means that I get to know all sorts of physics and, well, that's how I get my rocks off. However, the fact that people would argue the other way indicate that it isn't a closed case.