Two epic struggles—both involving science—rage throughout the Western civilized world. In substantial ways, they define our present moment, and their outcomes will certainly shape our future. They both feature in one way or another in “the science wars” that came into focus in the public eye around the turn of the 21st century.1

The first is the ages-old, still evolving, conflict between science and religion. This post has some more reflections on this epic conflict.

The second is less widely recognized as such. It is the conflict that I’ve also mentioned before, between (A) an older scientific ethos that has become entrenched in our familiar everyday social, political, and economic institutions, and (B) a newer consciousness of our universe and our place in it that is grounded in more recent scientific discoveries.  I’ll have some further thoughts on this gap between older and newer science, and its implications for the society we have and the way we live, in the next post.

1 If you want to read further, two edited volumes from this era both titled “The Science Wars” by Keith Parsons [2003]  and Andrew Ross [1996] could be a start.   Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science (2005)  takes a more popular and political tack. There are also plenty of current headlines from the Trump administration to research, just for fun.

Religious Conflict & the Birth of Civilization,

Offering the first real alternative to faith-based religious belief–an alternative that actually provides answers rather than merely expressing skepticism–science opened up a new arena for conflict that has become a defining aspect of the modern world. This ongoing conflict between science and religion has its own historical background.

You might wonder “Why is it so persistently a conflict?” or “Why is it so hard just to have both?” One answer lies in particular social dynamics that go back to birth of civilization (which in the broader scheme of things is not all that long ago either. See post, June 29, 2016, The Rise (And Fall) of Civilization.)

The first civilizations arose only about five thousand years ago. Different authors use different terms for this event: “urbanization,” “the rise of civilization,” or “the rise of the state level of sociocultural integration.” Anthropologists generally mark it by the appearance of urban centers (cities), accompanied by literacy and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force by ruling elites. No more bloody feuds between rival clans, for instance; now the state itself will establish what are to be the “legitimate” (its own) means of resolving disputes by law backed up with overwhelming force if necessary.

From the beginning civilizations exhibited growing hierarchy and inequality internally, and expansionary dynamics in their relations with others—including, notably, in the matter of religion. I would have to do more research to be absolutely sure, but to the best of my knowledge now it is only civilized people who proselytize and launch crusades to entice or force others to profess the same beliefs that they hold.

Tribal peoples may fight over land or other resources, or for honor, but only civilized people fight religious wars or launch bloody campaigns to colonize and convert the heathen. Wherever civilizations arise, it seems, religion gets itself swept up in the expansionary, warring dynamics of empire. Religion then becomes one tool of empire—as we see so clearly in the history of European’s conquest of the New World.

(Incidentally, while some people view science as an alternative to religious orthodoxy, no one (so far) goes to war to impose a scientific, atheistic, world-view on “true believers.” Something to ponder.)

Even the United States—a modern nation in a New World founded on ideals of religious tolerance and religious freedom (for Euroamericans) after centuries of bloody religious warfare and oppression in the Old World—still finds itself wracked with religious conflict. Much in today’s “culture wars,” and “science wars,” revolves around a perceived conflict between science and religion. The arguments focus on such issues as the teaching of evolution, prayer in schools, and the role of religion in the nation’s public life, especially politics. That civilized urge to force others to “convert” to your own way of believing proves hard to outgrow.

Current Trends in the Science v. Religion Wars

Now, back to the present. Since science and religion can be viewed as alternatives, and many people implicitly or explicitly do so, you might wonder which one seems to be winning out—science or religion? I did. Let me briefly summarize here, with only a little analysis or discussion, a few things I have found relating to this question.

Christians Relative to Total Population are in Decline

First, having lived in the U.S., which seems to be experiencing an upsurge of religiosity, I thought that perhaps the tide had turned.   Perhaps as people face ever more difficult problems in the world at large, and for many in their own personal circumstances, more of us turn back to religious faith for meaning in our lives. But according to recent polls this proves not to be so. In fact, all Christian faiths are losing ground. Here’s the story.

In the United States, according to a recent Pew Research poll,  the number of Christians has been declining steadily (although they still claim a majority), while the ranks of the “unaffiliated,” the “nones,” have grown, and are now the second largest “faith.” This is a world-wide trend. The National Geographic reports that “More people than ever before are identifying as atheist, agnostic, or otherwise nonreligious, with potentially world-changing effects.”

When I’m working on some topic or idea, it often happens that I see things around me that relate to it. Some time after I first wrote this, we drove down from Vancouver Island where I live, to Santa Barbara, California, for my Nephew’s wedding. Driving into a town along the way, we noticed, in addition to the usual highway signs announcing familiar civic and church groups, one that proudly announced an organized atheist group. (Atheism is a religion?)

Catholic and Mainline Protestant Populations Declining More Than Evangelical Protestants

As the proportion of Christians within the population as a whole loses ground to the nones,” a significant secondary shift within the ranks of Christians further redraws the religious landscape of North America. In the widely-cited Pew Research poll, evangelical Protestant churches are growing while more liberal or mainline churches experience steady decline.

That shift toward Christian conservatism occurs, however, within the larger context of declining church affiliation in general. Conservative and evangelical church affiliation, while growing relative to mainline church affiliation, still isn’t keeping up with ongoing population growth as shown in the accompanying chart. As a percentage of the total population, even the Evangelical Protestants are losing ground. Nevertheless, their relative growth signals the shift toward the more strident religiosity that has become prominent in American politics and public life generally.

Of course, one cannot say definitely, without further study, that traditional religious affiliation is declining because people are adopting a scientifically-grounded and secular view of things instead. And it probably is not so much that people consciously choose the one rather than the other. Rather, more people simply find themselves looking to science rather than the Bible or some other traditional religious text for explanations of the whys and hows of the world. Or, if they don’t look directly to science itself, as such, they simply have (inhabit) a common world-view that has been shaped by science. Religious tales and allegories—religion generally—becomes less meaningful. However you look at it, the figures cited reflect an ongoing deeper cultural shift from a faith-based world-view to one more grounded in science.

An Upsurge of Religiosity?

So, why did I think that religiosity is increasing in America, when clearly, at least statistically, it is not? The quick answer may be that conservative and Evangelical Christians have been drawn out of the woodwork—drawn out of their previously rather peripheral positions in public life—and into more prominent and more vocal places in American politics. This was, at least in part, engineered as a political strategy.

Republican strategists primarily interested in tax cuts and other benefits for the very wealthy courted largely poor Christian conservatives by grandstanding on “wedge” issues like abortion and gay rights and, in the South, race. They channelled funds to conservative Christian organizations, and opened public channels of communication to their spokespersons. All this politically energized Christian conservatism, while at the same time significantly increasing the ranks of active Republican voters.

Indeed, according to one perceptive commentator, political/economic conservatism itself has taken on the characteristics of a fundamentalist religion at the expense of a more civil, democratic, and rational political culture. Fostered by the very wealthy and anti-government ideologues, free market fundamentalism—this scary faith that the “free market” unhindered by political or social concerns, environmental regulations, or other meddlesome encumbrances will answer every prayer—has become a major force in Washington and around the world.

New Horizons of Possibility

A great deal of modern Western culture—the culture that doubtless has shaped you and me and everyone else who reads this—developed around ideas of human nature rooted in the early sciences of the Enlightenment. Later science subsequently superseded and in some ways outright refutes these ideas based on earlier science; but our culture at large, entrenched and unwieldy, hasn’t caught up.

It’s important that, as a society, we do catch up to what we know, however—at least more than we have to date.  The new understandings of human nature that we have now open up possibilities that we desperately need to explore, and to actualize.

Why do I say that? As I write this in early September, 2017, much of western North America is smothered in smoke from unprecedented wildfires. The worst fires on record in the mainland blanketed even the skies of Vancouver Island, off the southern coast of British Columbia where I live, for the first time anyone remembers. Meanwhile two powerful category 4-5 Hurricanes, Irma and Jose, tear through the Caribbean, with Irma sweeping right toward Florida.  They follow hard on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston just a couple of weeks ago in late August.

The future we’re making now, and for growing number of us already living, is frightening.

As we think, so we act.  We do need new ways of thinking, and wider horizons of human possibility….  

In the Beginning

There are many possible points of beginning. We have a whole world-view, a whole cosmos, to reshape. One big-picture overview might start with how we got here, and what sets us apart from other beings with whom we share the planet.

Archeologists and evolutionary physical anthropologists don’t know—or perhaps I should say don’t always agree—precisely when or where the evolutionary line that led to humans became human. Most of the science focuses of the physical aspects of human evolution. When did the line that led to modern humans diverge from the other great apes? When did our ancestors begin walking upright? When did they begin to develop the large brains that distinguish our species?

The story of human evolution that emerges from paleontological and archeological finds, genetics, molecular biology and other specialties, often focuses on such questions.   The culture we have tends to favour that focus on reductionistic physical traits. Pieced together largely from bones and stones, the story of humankind spans millions of years and is quite complex, with many “ifs,” “buts,” and “maybes,” as you would expect. But we do have other different angles to approach it from as well, and some good answers.

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What Really Makes Humans Human?

What Really Makes Humans Human? The answer depends on what criteria of humanness you emphasise. Humankind, like every other life form, has distinctive physical features: upright posture and gait, relatively large brain, flat face, opposable thumbs, and so on. Similarly, each species has characteristic ways of behaving and communicating.

What I think really sets humans apart from all other Earthly life, however, is not anything on the physical plane. Nor is it anything necessarily numinous or mystical. It rather is how we think. It is how we feel, the depth and range of our emotional lives, our capacity to have and to play with ideas—in short, the whole sphere of human cultural life.

The best and perhaps only way to tell when the evolutionary line that led to humans finally actually became human—that is, developed language, art, reflective self-awareness, in short culture, and many would say soul—is the first appearance in the archeological record of ceremonial burials and art. Of course, the emergence of culture was related—doubtless in quite complex ways—to the evolution of our upright posture, large brain, opposable thumbs, and so on. But regardless, it is still culture itself that marks the truly new beginning.

Those first few scattered material remains of human culture that have been found, that survived the ages, indicate the emergence on the Earth of a fundamentally new phenomenon. Such evidence shows up only about forty or fifty thousand years ago, at the very tip-end of the tens of millions of years of hominid evolution (which itself is only the tip-end of the 3 to possibly 4.3 billion years of life on Earth).

But just what is it that makes human culture so different from anything that came before, in all the billions of years that preceded us and in some (not necessarily teleological) sense led to us?

A new kind of system.

Human culture is a new kind of system that organizes itself on the basis of information carried in symbolic forms like spoken words or marks on clay tablets or paper, rather than on the basis of some material force like gravity, electrical charge, or chemical interactions.  Interactions organized by symbols differ also from the kinds of genetically programmed or instinctual interactions that organize, say, ant societies or wolf packs.  In other words, human culture works on the basis of a fundamentally new principle of organization.

In human cultures symbolic systems organize material things. In this way, in only the relatively short time since its emergence, human culture has changed the dynamics of the Earth as a living system.

This—the power of mind over matter—is not mysterious or mystical. It is possible precisely because the organizing principle of human culture, symbols, goes beyond the organizing principles (what are often called the “laws”) of physical causality. Any symbol can refer to any thing, and we combine symbols in new and creative ways without being bound by the rigid limitations of physical matter and causal laws.

But then, with the creativity, imagination, and ideas our symbolic activity makes possible, we act and interact in material ways with the material world. There are real-world limits, of course; but with symbol use we humans gain many more degrees of freedom than any other known life-form has to move within, manipulate, and use the material world we are in. This is both a blessing and a curse: It gives us greater freedom, but also puts incredible power into our hands and makes us more responsible for what we do with it.

And so, with the late advent of culture only some 50,000 years ago humans began to act on and change the Earth’s living systems. Actually, the story is even more dramatic, because our impact on the Earth as a living system really began to make itself felt not 50,000 years ago after human culture emerged, but only a mere 5,000 years ago with the rise of civilizations.

With civilization, concentrating population as well as wealth and power in cities, came a whole complex of cultural developments. These include literacy, what we know as the state (which concentrates legitimate power within a central governing body), and ever-enlarging expansionary cycles of growth, conquest, and decline.

And even then, the kinds of serious human impact on natural environments that we’re dealing with today occurred in relatively localized or minor ways until the almost simultaneous inventions, only about 500 years ago in the West, of science, capitalism as a way to organize society, machine technology, and the kinds of bureaucratic/governmental forms that made it possible for Euroamerican nation-states to colonize the rest of the world and carry those elements of our culture into the farthest reaches of our planetary home.

A New Perspective, A New Light

Knowing even that much about human evolution can help put things in perspective—can help us see things in a new light. The big problems we’re dealing with today are not the inevitable outcome of human nature—despite what so many of our cultural messages, implicit as well as explicit, tell us. They’re quite recent in the big scheme of things, and particular to our own culture and time. They are not problems of nature but of culture.

Our forebears conceived of society and economics in reductionistic, machine-like terms. They created social, political, and economic institutions that embodied those ideas. We today may feel helplessly caught up in that machinery. But seen more clearly from the outside, in light of the full sweep of human evolution and cultural variability, we’re not so helplessly hopeless after all. Culture is tremendously flexible and variable. Culture is what we humans make, even as it makes us.

Know that—grasp the evolutionary truth that we make the culture that makes us—and the horizons of human possibility become endless.

When I was a young child in Denver, Colorado, my parents took us down-town to the magnificent Gothic Episcopalian cathedral. I still remember its towering presence on the narrow, busy street as we approached. Inside, the immense vaulted ceiling and beautiful stained glass windows gave the solemnity of the service an unforgettable, magical quality. Even as a child I experienced, and now still remember, the contrast between the enchanted mysterious space of the Sunday service and the streets outside with their plain, angular, functional buildings and busy traffic.

We live in a secular age—or so it is often said. Yet the Cathedral maintains its commanding presence, even surrounded as it is by the functional aesthetics of science, technology, and commerce.  On less tangible levels, debates about religion and its relationship to science still rage in our legislatures, school boards, on TV and radio shows, and doubtless in many dinner-table conversations across North America. Even when the topic doesn’t come up explicitly, it certainly remains part of our world.

What Does it Matter?

Everywhere we live with the tangible fruits of science and technology, and the tangible symbols of religious belief.  What are the respective roles of science and religion in our lives?  Are they conflicting, interrelated, or simply unrelated?  Whether quietly or loudly, publicly or privately, consciously or subliminally, these questions persist in our culture, in our communities, and for many of us in our own minds.

That said, I don’t know anyone for whom the science/religion question is truly an “either/or” question. That is, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe in the discoveries of science; nor do I know anyone who truly doesn’t believe or feel that some spirit, intelligence, God, guiding purpose, or ultimate meaning has a hand in the existence of the universe, and of ourselves.

Such people on either far end of the spectrum of belief do exist, I know, but they aren’t many. Both belief systems simply are present in the mental and moral tapestry of our age, and therefore in our own minds—just as cathedrals persist side-by-side with technology-driven commerce in cities across North America.  Anyone who is not wholly of one mind or the other has to find their own ways to accommodate what seem to be two inescapable, yet on the surface mutually contradictory, belief systems or world-views.

As fundamental and inescapable as that question is, however, I also don’t know anyone who agonizes over it. Except for a few philosophers, theologians, and scientists, we don’t even give it much thought as we go about our daily lives. What does it really matter, after all, when I go to work or look for a job, go shopping, have my morning coffee (as I am doing at this moment), or prepare dinner?

Well, I think it does matter. It matters a lot because we’re human, and humans act on what they believe. It’s what we do—the same way that trees grow toward the light or cats stalk birds. Other beings act and react according to their natures; we make choices according to what we believe, or what we know. We can’t help it; to believe (or think we know) things and to act on those beliefs truly is human nature. If our beliefs don’t seem to line up with our actions, then perhaps we don’t really believe what we think (or say) we believe.

What If…..   ?

In retrospect, I think you have to agree, religion has at best a mixed historical record. It may counsel compassion, love, and oneness, but often in practice justifies bloody wars and oppressively intolerant regimes. Even today, as I’ll look at further in my next post, the most highly religious societies tend to be the poorest, the least tolerant, the least humane, and the least supportive of human rights.

On the other hand, science seems to offer no real day-to-day moral guidance at all. And however poorly the faithful live up to them, the great religious traditions do carry forward ancient (and ever more timely) guidelines for living with wisdom and compassion in the real day-to-day world.

Here are some further questions, however, that could only have been raised quite recently, that suggest how the conceptual/moral grounds under our feet may be changing. First, must we assume that the wisdom carried in the great traditions came down to us as decrees uttered by a Creator-God? Could the disconnected and authoritarian assumptions of such notions contradict the very messages, the actual effective wisdom, embodied in the tradition? And, might this contradiction in turn become worked into the foundations of institutionalized religion and help give rise to many of its ambiguities and problems?

But, what is the alternative? What we call religious or spiritual values are universal, and they came from somewhere. A possible answer might only now be coming available—through science. Rather than coming to us as decrees from on high, might instead the wisdom of connection, of oneness, of love, of the Golden Rule, have evolved with our humanness? Could it be something that we humans ourselves own—something, in the known universe, that is uniquely ours—and therefore for which we alone, uniquely, bear responsibility? (We can’t put if off on some higher being; we’re it!) And if so, what might this mean for how we act toward each other, toward other beings with whom we share the planet, and toward the Earth from which we come?

Such notions will be uncomfortable for many people—much as the realization that the Earth, rather than being the center of the universe is but a speck in an unimaginably vast cosmos, was uncomfortable to people when it was first proposed. It’s frightening, lonely, overwhelming given the vastness of the cosmos and the complexities of life, to suppose that we’re truly going it alone.

In another way, however, that thought, that realization, can be quite empowering.  As religious scholar, United Church Pastor, and self-described Christian atheist, Gretta Vosper says, “The way we live is more important than what we believe.”

Moreover, such a notion, while it doesn’t require a Creator God, doesn’t preclude one either. If there is such an omniscient consciousness to which we owe our being, then that entity created the conditions in which we evolved to be conscious ourselves, and in doing so put the responsibility for our existence—for how we live—in our own hands. Such ideas are not far from, can even serve as a bridge to, current religious thought informed by science.

I will continue to explore these questions further in upcoming posts, beginning next time with some relevant background findings and thoughts.

There are a lot of books and articles coming out that foresee the end in one way or another.  The end of what?  Why, the end of the world as we know it.

Doom-Sayers vs. Truth-Tellers

Every generation has its doom-mongers predicting the apocalypse.  But the contemporary worriers I have in mind aren’t that.  They’re concerned; but they aren’t crazy prophets or fundamentalist awaiting “the Rapture.” They’re level-headed scientists, journalists, economists, philosophers, holding responsible positions and backing up what they say with all the research skills, critical thinking, and scholarship that they developed in their professional lives. The crazies who are always with us are more than a joke: They make it too easy for too many people to dismiss the real thing.

At the risk of giving too much information (if you want, feel free to just skip on down the page), let me mention just a sample of some well-informed worriers who come to mind.

Some Truth-Tellers You May Have Heard Of.

On Collapse.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse looks at the failure of past cultures and civilizations with clear implications for ours today. Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, is a little earlier but more scholarly, sounder, and far-ranging exploration along the same lines. More recently, Tainter, an archeologist, joined with T.W. Patzek to write Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma.  It explores the same themes in relation to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, which some call the United States’ worst environmental disaster so far.

On Decline & Crisis.

Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead  underlines the concerning decline of what she calls “five pillars” of modern Western society.  The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon examines a series of different crises and stresses that converge in our present time, making a huge system-wide collapse increasingly likely.  On his “upside,” Homer-Dixon, a Canadian political scientist and author, says we know and understand much more now about history, complex systems, ecology, and the effects we’re having on the Earth’s natural systems that support us.  The World Wildlife Fund’s 2016 Living Planet Report  gives one sobering up-to-date accounting of the declining health of our planet in almost every area, as evidenced by declining trend lines of one crucial resource or species after another.

We know what we’re doing to the living systems of the Earth, in which we live and of which we are part. We know enough to avoid the otherwise inevitable collapse of civilization. (But do we know how to use what we know? Can we in fact turn things around? In time?)

The Environment. Journalist Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, and author Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, among many other books by many other notables, explore the impacts  of climate change on increasingly vulnerable economies and cultures, and on the world system that has become dependent on unending growth.  The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, looks at the on-going human-caused mass extinction of species.  All the authors I’m mentioning remind us that we humans are part of and dependent on the very environment we are disrupting and destroying.

On The Economy.

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism, from a different angle, says that we are on the cusp of the final breakdown of the industrial capitalist model within which the developed countries, and increasingly the world, have functioned over the past centuries. Mason argues convincingly that the capitalist “market” cannot resolve the problems of the globalized, information age that it itself has created.

Finally, I’ll end with mention of David Korten’s The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.  I include this work primarily because it identifies our most fundamental problem—what we really must grapple with and master—as not just capitalism, nor modern technology, but rather the 5,000-year old dynamics of civilization (what he calls “empire”) itself.  This is a central theme in my own work. Both authors, in different ways and with different emphases, see the present global systemic crisis as bringing both the necessity, and opportunity, for something much better to emerge.

The above is just a sampling—there’s no way to catch up or keep up with all the books and articles on those and related topics that are pouring out into the public sphere. I could quibble with aspects of what these authors say or how they say it; but it’s better just to recognize that their core points are sound, beyond important, and point directly to problems that we must attend to.

No Reasonable Doubt

Among all the far-ranging thoughts in such books, two key themes—two aspects of our current reality—stand out. Their authors understand that we have moved beyond reasonable doubt about these two things.

(So do a lot of other people, by the way. We just got back from a concert in which a local youth choir sang to a largely aging audience about the imminent need to “save the planet,” and a young woman from Vancouver Island University presented a song-poem she wrote about climate change and species extinction. Both hopeful and deeply saddening, young people’s awareness of our situation also illustrates the same following two themes.)

First, we (the generations of humans now alive and in the immediate future) face an imminent and unprecedented civilizational collapse—if we keep on as we are now.  Such concerns can be hard to take seriously, partly, as I said, because people have “cried wolf” in the past. But even more, they revolve around things that are very large, and that may seem remote. We’re getting warning signals, but don’t see what they mean, don’t “connect the dots.” Our selective blindness is understandable, but no less dangerous for that.

It’s hard to see or experience such things as the cataclysmic extinction event that is ongoing as you read this, or global climate change. It’s hard to grasp the impending end of cheap oil, on which our civilization currently runs, while there’s still a subsidized glut on the market.  Day-by-day everything on the surface seems normal.  Ordinary citizens later reported much the same thing in Germany leading up to the Holocaust. They didn’t see what was happening under the surface of their day-to-day lives until it was too late.

For us today, all the familiar dynamics of past collapses are present. Basically, we’re overrunning our ecology at the same time as the economy that defines modern civilization becomes ever more volatile and wobbly. Both trends are unsustainable.

The specter of unsustainability already has moved from the realms of speculation, science fiction, or worrying concern, to widely accepted multidimensional fact. We’re on a hurtling train with the end of the tracks in sight.

But if all this has happened before, what’s different now? Well, for starters, it involves us. That’s obvious, you say. Yes. But we still collectively struggle to assimilate the implications of living unsustainably on a finite planet.  Now, it’s our immediate problem, not that of some distant past culture or hypothetical future. We’re still working to fully grasp the reality that we’re the passengers on the hurtling train we’re driving.

Beyond that, the scale, complexity, and global interconnectedness of the cultural/economic and ecological systems that are involved are all unprecedented. We’re not talking here about just one localized culture, nor even an empire, but the whole world.

Even in the rush of economic globalization, the crash of 2008 and other events and trends signal growing instabilities in the increasingly global economy. Similarly, our ecological problems now involve far more than the localized deforestation, soil depletion, salination, or local prolonged drought that brought down past cultures or empires. Today’s problems involve the entire planet. We face catastrophic planetary climate change, species extinction, general environmental degradation, and who knows what total damage to ocean ecologies.

Second, at the same time as we face graver and more complex problems, we also have more knowledge and understanding about ourselves and our environment than any previous generation anywhere, any time—as well as vastly improved means to develop yet more knowledge and to share it more widely. This leads recent writers—especially including, among those I just mentioned, Mason, Homer-Dixon and Korten—to think that we may be on or near the cusp of a momentous paradigm shift.  The Turning Point, by physicist Fritjof Capra (1982), captured the same insight decades earlier.

These authors all see, or realistically hope for, a change of consciousness born out of crisis, nurtured by new knowledge, and embodied in new social and economic forms emerging from possibilities that are inherent in advancing information technology.  The social changes ushered in by crisis, new technologies, and most importantly new understanding, will be, in Mason’s term, “postcapitalist.” Or, as Korten says, they will or can nurture “earth community” rather than “empire.” In a word, they will nurture the good things of human life for everyone rather than the accumulation of wealth for a few. If that seems utopian, well, maybe it is. But read Mason’s book. It’s also doable, grounded in the realities of our time—and necessary.

The fisherman wades upstream. His fly rod—light, willowy, deceptively resilient—arcs under the weight of the line, then straightens. When the timing is right—when the man, rod, and line together find the right harmony of movement—the seemingly delicate wand powers the long line over the water in exquisitely graceful loops and lengths.

At the end of this symphony of movement—legs, pelvis, back, arm, wrist, rod, line, leader—a tiny fly whips through the air. Meticulously crafted of carefully selected feathers, a bit of fur or synthetic fibre, and a strong extra-fine thread wrapping it all onto a minute fishhook, the fly (a #16 parachute Adams) is a miniature work of art in its own right. Cast after cast this tiny durable construction lands upright and floats lightly on the surface of the water just like the adult insect it imitates.

The fly has to float naturally on the water despite being tied onto a long line subject to varying currents. Fish are smart in their own ways. They generally don’t like it if a current pulls the line and drags the fly across the surface. It doesn’t look right. Even seeing that one time, wily fish may refuse subsequent presentations no matter how perfect.

To achieve its natural drift, the man tied the small fly to a foot or so of delicate tippet material only a little larger than a hair, which in turn he had attached to the nine foot leader at the end of the fly line. With each forward cast the loop of the line travels to its end, and the line’s forward trajectory through the air slows and then pauses as the line straightens. From there the movement continues through the leader and tippet which, at the end, turn over and straighten out also. The fly drifts down through the air and settles lightly on the surface of the water. There it floats naturally for a short while according to the vagaries of the currents.

That’s when the fish, if it is there and feeding, will strike. As he wades, the man’s eyes scan the complex waterscapes of the river, finding places where fish hang out—riffles and runs, pools, “feeding lanes” marked by lines of foam, and slower deep waters along undercut banks. Deciding where to place the fly, the fisherman “reads” the currents in relation to the angle of his casts. As needed, he tries to put just the right amount of slack or curve in the line as it settles on the water. When currents do irresistibly pull the line tight, just before it begins to drag the fly through the water, it’s time to lift the line and make another cast.

Just now the fly is in a good, long drift a few feet out from an undercut bank, approaching the end of a log that juts out a bit into the faster current. As the fly begins to swirl around the log, a sudden splash, a flash of yellow-gold. Must be a big brown. He lifts the rod, the line goes tight and starts snaking rapidly down stream. The reel sings. He stumbles down after it, through the resistance of the water, over the slick, round rocks, trying to keep balance and movement going, hoping to keep the right pressure on the line and get to where he can control the fish before it finds a snag or tangle of brush to lose itself in. The big fish takes a sudden turn toward the bank, lifts itself out of the water twisting and lunging. The line goes slack. Gone. Dammit! It’s a visceral feeling—that sudden slackness in the line as a strong fish disconnects and slips free, leaving you to come back to yourself standing there in the river.

Continuing upstream, the next bend angles the river directly into the glowing sun hovering just above the horizon. The long straight run ahead becomes a river of sparkling refracted light lined by the darker firs and shrubs of its shores. Above it the wings of countless insects also catch and reflect the sun’s rays. The evening hatch, visible as myriad points of dancing light, lends depth and motion to the still air. About thirty yards directly ahead a more concentrated towering column of insects undulates. Now coalescing like an amorphous ghostly organism, then almost dispersing like a cloud, it weaves and waves above the river.

This is a magical moment on the river—a gift, a blessing. The fisherman’s intense focus rises from the riffles and ripples and opens to the beauty of creation. To not fish in such moments—that’s one of the reasons we go fishing.