Section
3: MAPS FOR THE JOURNEY
Economic historian Karl Polanyi titled one of the best books on the emergence
of the modern, urbanized, industrialized world The Great Transformation.
It's is a good name for our time as well. The evidence says that we are
entering a period that will require transformation Ñ fundamental structural
changes in how we live and work, how we think about ourselves, and how we
conduct our politics, economics, and technologies. If we can go through
those changes well, or well enough, humanity will be able live on this planet
without destroying the environment, and our children's children will have
a future worth living.
Achieving this end will mean not just traveling in the great transition
period, but negotiating our way through it. This is the focus of Part III
of this book: the maps and models and metaphors we'll need to travel through
the Between to a new and sustaining integration. In James Cowan's contemplation
of maps, A Mapmaker's Dream, Fra Mauro, sixteenth-century cartographer to
the Court of Venice, describes the role of the mapmaker and the merchants,
travelers, scholars, missionaries, and ambassadors who informed him of the
larger world beyond his experience. "We sit on stools opposite one another,"
he writes, "a breeze from the Adriatic cooling our faces on hot summer days.
We gaze at maps that our eyes chart in each other's hearts. Together cartographer
and adventurer argue over distances and routes while silently acknowledging
that these are really only diversions, since we are struggling to make sense
of disparate knowledge. We are like oar and rowlock, trying to exact a measure
of leverage from one another, even as we acknowledge that we are probably
traveling toward the same destination."
This is how it will be for us, too, as we contemplate the routes before
us now. The Cultural Creatives sit across from us, twenty-first-century
adventurers who have already departed from Modernism. But we will also call
in other informants from near and far: historians and scientists, artists
and merchants, and travellers who made a passage across the Between before
any of us were born. We will not, of course, be uncritical of their opinions,
and we'll analyze their observations with care. But because all of us now
are "people of the parenthesis," as Jean Houston calls us, we must break
free of our restricted worldview and make our way into the new territory.
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