Within the larger context of radical evolution there are many local revolutions. One of them is the revolution of expectations that burns in the minds of the new consciousness. Eskimo children who've never seen a wheeled vehicle can identify the types of aircraft flying over the North Pole. Young Dyaks in the longhouses of equatorial Borneo listen to the Beatles on transistor radios. Teenage Bedouins wandering the Sahara hear Nasser's radio telling how Vietnamese children are being slaughtered half the world away.6
Dylan swears he sees his reflection so high above the wall upon which he once drew conclusions. Seeing that reflection is the revolution. It tells us old reasons for doing things that no longer exist. "There's less to do because circumstances do it for us: the earth. Art has obscured the difference between art and life; now life will obscure the difference between life and art."7 We no longer need to prove our right to live. We're struggling in the toil of old realities, stranded from our conscience, doing our best to deny it. We are tragically in need of new vision:is the beginning of that vision. We shall be released. We will bring down the wall. We'll be reunited with our reflection.
I'm writing at the end of the era of cinema as we've known it, the beginning of an era of image-exchange between man and man. The cinema, said Godard, is truth twenty-four times a second. The truth is this: that with the possibility of each man on earth being born a physical success there is no archetypal Man whom one can use in the culturally elitist manner and each man becomes the subject of his own study. The historical preoccupation with finding the one idea that is Man will give way to the idea that earth is, and then to the idea of other earths.
1Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man ( New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 31.
2Plato, The Republic, Book VIII, ca. 390 B.C.
3 Extensive research on physiological conditioning is found in The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception, by Marshall H. Segall, Donald T. Campbell, and Melville J. Herskovits (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
4 F. R. Sias, Jr., "The Eye as a Coding Mechanism," Medical Electronic News, quoted in: Nels Winkless and Paul Honore, "What Good Is a Baby?" Proceedings of the AFIPS 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference.
5 R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth ( Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 82, 95.
6 Ritchie Calder, "The Speed of Change," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (December, 1965).
7 John Cage, A Year from Monday ( Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), pp. 9, 19.
Radical Evolution and Future Shock in the Paleocybernetic Age
It is perhaps not coincidental that Western youth has discovered the I Ching, or Book of Changes, on a somewhat popular level as we move into the final third of the twentieth century. Change is now our only constant, a global institution. The human ecological biosphere is undergoing its second great transition, destined to be even more profound than the invention of agriculture in the Neolithic Age. If we can't see the change, at least we can feel it. Future shock affects our psyche and our economy just as culture shock disorients the Peace Corps worker in Borneo.
It is said that we are living in a period of revolution. But nothing sells like freedom: Revolution is big business. As the physicist P. W. Bridgman once said, the true meaning of a term is found by observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it. Since the phenomenon we call revolution is worldwide, and since it's felt in every human experience, perhaps we might think of it not as revolution but as radical evolution. Revolution is basically the same whether defined by Marx or the I Ching: removal of the antiquated. But revolution replaces one status quo with another. Radical evolution is never static; it's a perpetual state of polarization. We could think of it as involuntary revolution, but whatever terminology we apply that's the condition of the world today, the environment with which the artist must work. Radical evolution would be kinder if it were better understood; but it won't be so long as commercial entertainment cinema continues to represent a "reality" that doesn't exist.
Sociologist Alvin Toffler has stressed ephemerality as a chief aspect of radical evolution: "Smith Brothers Cough Drops, Calumet Baking Soda, Ivory Soap, have become institutions by virtue of their long reign in the marketplace. In the days ahead, few products will enjoy such longevity. Corporations may create new products knowing full well they'll remain on the market for only a matter of a few weeks or months. By extension, the corporations themselves— as well as unions, government agencies and all other organizations— may either have shorter life-spans or be forced to undergo incessant and radical reorganization. Rapid decay and regeneration will be the watchwords of tomorrow."8 Toffler observes that no reasonable man should plan his life beyond ten years; even that, he says, is risky. When parents speak of their sons becoming lawyers they are deceiving themselves and their sons, according to the sociologist, "Because we have no conception of what being a lawyer will mean twenty years hence. Most probably, lawyers will be computers." In fact, we can't be sure that some occupations will even exist when our children come of age. For example, the computer programmer, a job first created in the 1950's, will be as obsolete as the blacksmith within a decade; computers will re-program and even regenerate themselves (IBM recently announced a new computer that repairs itself).
John McHale, coauthor of the World Design Science Decade documents with Buckminster Fuller, emphasizes expendability and impermanence in radical evolution: "Use value is replacing ownership value. For example, the growth of rental and services— not only in automobiles and houses, but from skis to bridal gowns to heirloom silver, castles and works of art... our personal and house-hold objects, when destroyed physically or outmoded symbolically, may be replaced by others exactly similar. A paper napkin, a suit, a chair, an automobile, are items with identical replacement value. Metals in a cigarette lighter today may be, within a month or year, part of an auto, lipstick case or orbiting satellite... the concept of permanence in no way enables one to relate adequately to our present situation."9
McHale has seen the need for a totally new world view as radical evolution speeds farther from our grasp. "There's a mythology abroad which equates the discovery and publication of new facts with new knowledge. Knowledge is not simply accumulated facts but the reduction of unrelated and often apparently irrelevant facts into new conceptual wholes."10 He's talking about completely new ways of looking at the world and everything in it. This is proposition far more profound than mere political revolution, which Krishnamurti has characterized as "The modification of the right according to the ideas of the left."11 The new consciousness transcends both right and left. We must redefine everything.