We are
living in unprecedented times, both for the extraordinary new possibilities
offered by the advancement of technology as well as by the challenges that this
technology is creating for traditional societal structures, self-identity,
national identity and what it means to be a citizen of the planet earth at the
start of the second decade of the second millennium AD. There is a sensation that events are speeding
up, whether this is resulting from an actual increase in extraordinary events,
or a perceived acceleration due to the ability of such events to be immediately
reported to a global audience via information technology, the result remains
the same from the human perspective.
The last 20 years gave us a remarkable
and diverse number of human achievements which often carried with them an equal
if not greater number of challenges confronting both the global society at
large and the average citizen of every nation. At the start of the 90’s we witnessed the dissolution
of the former communist block, the hegemony of the United
States over the world, and the rapidly-rising economic
power of south-east Asia . We saw the spread of
the internet, and then the advent of wireless technologies which placed the
power of the internet (including the ability for video, text, photo and voice),
directly into the hands of an average citizen. The last ten years witnessed an
increase in fanatical belief systems, both political and religious, the worst a
combination of the two; terrorist attacks were broadcast live to the world
while we grew exhausted by continuous war in the Middle
East . The last years saw the divide between the rich and poor
increase, the rich never having been richer and the poor never so poor, all the
while this phenomenon reached an apex in the years of the global economic
crisis. The same ten years gave us an increasingly anxious sensation about the
health of our planet and the sense that our species was facing an increasing
risk of self-annihilation as a result of the exact same technological
development that seemed to offer so many new possibilities for our evolution. The
period also gave us the most extreme weather patterns seen since humanity began
keeping weather records, every year new records were broken for flooding,
hurricanes, tornados, droughts, snow storms, and wild fires; simultaneously the
polar ice noticeably melted and the oceans began to rise. The last four years saw
the advent of the mega social-networking sites, the largest of which was
Facebook, for the first time in history over 500 million people came together
in a manner that allowed them to disseminate information instantly to a mass
audience directly from their mobile phones, laptops, or home computers; in
effect each Facebook user became his or her own broadcasting entity with the
possibility to be heard by an audience which was for the most part unrestricted
by borders, politics, or traditional social structures. This new technology
also empowered the youth of the world, making them the prime force for world
change, a first true glimpse of which was seen in the series of street
revolutions that occurred at the start of the new year in 2011: revolutions
primarily driven by the youth, supported and organized through information
technology, and moving faster than the governmental structures of the nations effected
could act to suppress them using traditional methods.
Everything
elaborated above is virtually unique to the developing epoch in which we now
live, a moment of moments where an individual‘s ability to accommodate these
rapid changes in his or her mind is being pushed to a limit. All of this is
creating a psychological and spiritual stress that an individual may find hard
to cope with. Some are turning to traditional religions, seeing in these times
the signs of the end of the world and the God-sent demand for man to return to
traditional belief systems, while others are looking to un-orthodox forms of
spirituality that they feel will resolve their anxieties in ways more in-tune
with the contemporary world; some are resorting to science and logic believing
that the way out of the problems being created by technology is to gain an even
greater understanding of the fundamental laws governing the physical universe;
others are preferring to immerse themselves in the world, concentrating on the
physical reality of the moment, burying their anxiety in the action of life.
In this moment, beyond speculation, we
do not know with certainty exactly what specific outcomes will arise from these
times or how mankind as a species will choose to respond to the challenges now
confronting him, the individual responses of the average man likewise remain
uncertain . What is certain is that mankind as a species and each man singularly
are now confronted with a unique moment in history that questions traditional
and contemporary assumptions regarding both mankind’s place in the world as
well as the individual’s place in society, irresistibly these challenges demand
a response both from the global society at large and from each individual member
of society in particular.
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