On January 1, John Brockman released his tenth annual World Question with responses from the extraordinary public of "third-culture thinkers" that he has been cultivating and publishing through The Edge Foundation for a decade.
This year's question: What are you optimistic about and why?
According to Brockman, each annual panel consists of scientists "whose work and expository writing is taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives."
In a statement released on his website Monday, Brockman asserts that though things may seem to be getting worse (based solely on scientific and non-scientific assumptions of the physical world and cyclical patterns of human relations on earth), the prodigious community of thinkers who keep us perpetually on the edge of discovery seems to think otherwise.
Responses to this year's World Question run the gamut. From cosmological discovery to increasing personal genome strength and the downfall of Agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance), the one underlying theme of a majority of the responses came in a short piece by Irene Pepperberg, a Harvard Psychology research associate.
Pepperberg quite simply states that she envisions a second (and better) Enlightenment in the not so distant future. The first Enlightenment, of course refers to the historical intellectual movements of the eighteenth century, "which advocated Reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and logic, which would allow human beings to obtain objective truth about the universe" (Wikipedia, Enlightenment).
"Like some other respondents, I'm not particularly optimistic at the moment," Pepperberg begins. "Human civilization, however, seems to proceed in cycles overall, and I believe that we are due - even if not quickly enough for my tastes - for a new positive cycle. Every Golden Age - the flowering of reason and good - has been followed by a withering, a decay, a rotting, a descent into superstition, prejudice, greed; somehow, though, the seeds of the next pinnacle begin their growth and ascent, seemingly finding nourishment in the detritus left by the past ... to a renaissance, a new enlightenment ... a profound, global shift in the world view for the better."
Many times, social, scientific, and cultural changes are the result of or a response to discovery. Pepperberg's statement is echoed throughout this year's responses, and I too see the seeding of such a movement - largely due to the advent and availability of individual democratization through media.
However, I believe this germ is the response to the psychosis of our preceding generation rather than to the invention of a means by which we might all be able to freely disseminate our ideas. Lucky for us, perhaps, evolution is "telescoping" by years instead of eons and our skills are becoming sharper quicker, more defiant.
We are able to detect and are not so readily sold bullshit when we see it. And because human evolution currently reveals itself through the arts and sciences, it is all but sure we will see a major multiplication of our efforts to define and articulate a new humanity through the arts and sciences in the coming decade.
How (or similarly 'if') this Second Enlightenment comes into being will be the direct result of our efforts. Will we allow for a commoditization of health or wealth, sensitivity or aggression, systems of daily creativity or languid doubt in the future? What does any of this have to do with NorthernPros.com, literature, or art? How, you might ask, does this involve you? This is a question you'll have to ask yourself in the coming year.
Me, for one, I am optimistic about a lot of things: my young family for one, and my career(s), my general buoyant human inertia. I am optimistic that I will continue doing everything I can to be as completely human as I am. Hopefully, what I do is understood and reflected and perpetuated. Hopefully, I'm not wasting my time. I am optimistic that I am not.
Happy New Year, happy writing, happy searching. Stay tuned.
- Benjamin Spencer
Senior Editor
