THE METAINDUSTRIAL VILLAGE

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The charismatic myth of freedom in industrial society is the myth of "rags to riches". You see it everywhere expressed in the popular mythologies of literature, for it is the basic myth of the expanding middle classes. What it expresses is the tacit formula: "You are what you own." It's your personal patterns of consumption that tell people all about you. And so, it you are what you own, the more you own, the more you are.

If I were forced to make a guess, though, I would say that the next quarter century will see the destructuring of this industrialized civilization, but not its apocalyptic destruction. I believe that many of us will still be around in the year 2000.

But the way in which we will be around, I believe, will be profoundly altered. If in industrial society our identity was based upon our homes, our cars, our appliances, then in the new planetary culture our identity will be based upon a new arrangement of time and space in our very being. You are what you own in industrial society; in planetary culture, your being is what you are.

The postindustrial world we took for granted from 1945 to 1974 is over, and the next thirty years will see a countermovement away from consumption to community.

People are going to have to come together in new communities of caring and sharing; they are going to have to give up many of their energy-intensive ways to return to labor. What will be necessary in the movement away from suburban society will be a rediscovery of the preindustrial village.

I would say that there are four archetypal forces at work today in the transformation of contemporary culture:

[1] The planetization of nations.

[2] The decentralization of cities.

[3] The miniaturization of technology.

[4] The interiorization of consciousness.

Teilhard de Chardin first observed the planetization of nations in the 1940's, in his essay on the atom bomb. He noted that the more the nations built armaments to separate themselves and maintain their sovereign independence, the more the very armaments forced them to come together in a new international system. And so the planetization of nations is the emergence of a new world order.

The second force is the decentralization of cities. The modern flow of information through satellites and electronic media means the end to the kind of cities we have known in the period from Uruk to New York. Like the biosphere, or the oceans, or a superconductor, culture has now become a complex circulating electrical fluid, a liquid crystal. In what Whitehead called the "prehensive unification of space", every point is involved with every other point, and a tiny Findhorn or Auroville can be as important for cultural evolution as a giant London or New York.

The third societal force is the miniaturization of technology. I believe that this overlooked shift in the scale of man to machine has profound implications for cultural evolution. If the machines are small and people can once again hear the trees, then the sensibility goes through a profound revolution and the relationship between culture and nature changes dramatically. The miniaturization of technology enables us to reduce the scale of the impact of industrialization on the biosphere. In a shift from hardware to information, from capital-intensive economies of scale to communal forms of regional production, from consumer values to contemplative values, the industrial maladjustment to nature is corrected and the neurotic compulsions of modern society are alleviated.

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