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by Duane Elgin William Morrow, New York, 2000, $23.00 hardcover. 224 pages, illustrated. Reviewed by David Loye Promise Ahead is also one of few books of its kind that mainstream publishers have had the courage to publish during this strange, ironic, and disturbing time. We limp through a time when our species, at least in America, seems bent on turning its back on the future-a time characterized by the mediocre, the trivial, the obscene, by escapism and the race for the bottom as well as the bottom line. Honing the ability to monitor social trends and project their likely paths led Elgin to his first major venture into social activism with Voluntary Simplicity. He was involved in the pioneering development of the electronic town meeting as a way of using television to strengthen democracy and hopefully hasten pro-social human evolution. With Awakening Earth, he tackled the puzzle of evolution from its beginning and how to accelerate human evolution from an ecological and increasingly spiritual perspective. Promise Ahead is the practical visionary advancement of this earlier work. How promising is our future? Calculating the life spans of earlier species, Elgin ventures the guess that if we can make it successfully past the time of the big crunch, our species can look forward to no less than 25,000 times the span of recorded human history with the increasing benefits of maturity he outlines later in the book. So much for the good news. In chapter two, he turns to the “adversity trends” we face. Here the reader is likely to steel themself against the numbing encounter with the overwhelming factual reality of all that confronts us. Elgin, however, knows the material so well he can bring it to life through economy of selection and his considerable art of presentation. “We have a tendency to compartmentalize these powerful trends and think that we can deal with them one by one when, in reality, they are increasingly interacting and amplifying each other’s impact,” Elgin notes of the five adversity trends. He deftly shows how they will interact to become the “waves of famine” and “resource wars” that lead to our pivotal “make or break” evolutionary challenge by the year 2020. Now shifting from the motivational stick to the carrot of promise ahead, Elgin looks at the “opportunity trends” of a positive future. First is a shift in “our shared view of the universe-from thinking of it as dead to experiencing it as alive.” Such a shift may seem too subtle to be consequential. “Yet all of the deep and lasting revolutions in human development have been generated from just such shifts”- e.g., the prehistoric awakening 35,000 years ago recorded in cave art, the shift from a nomadic to agricultural life 10,000 years ago, and the shift to the scientific-industrial era 300 years ago. Six characteristics of this Mother Universe as seen by both East and West, Elgin says, are that it is present everywhere, is non-obstructing, utterly impartial, ultimately ungraspable, compassionate, and profoundly creative. In chapter four Elgin develops his idea of voluntary simplicity from his earlier book, first quoting the unique wisdom/humor of Will Rogers. The problem, says Rogers, is that “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” Elgin spells out these implications in terms of a people driven by advertising and a dead universe ethos to try to gobble up the planet heedless of others at present or in the future. Particularly impressive are the number of surveys that repeatedly find that “a lifeway of soulful simplicity, with its new pattern of values, is emerging as a significant trend in the world.” Among the new value patterns, Elgin says, are the ideas of sustainable economic development, with recycling as a notable marker; economic justice, with a new sense of kinship with the world’s poor among those shifting to a life of voluntary simplicity; new forms of community, for example, “eco-villages”; and greater participation in politics. Far from being a visionary pie in the sky, the picture that Elgin develops here is of major importance. One may propose everything from mass meditation to a new “anti-violence” pill to get us past the nearing crunch, but I would urge that Elgin’s perceptions and proposals in this section be carefully read, taken to heart, and put into action. The book’s final four chapters are so packed with insights and information, and emerge out of such a passion for the saving of our species, I am tempted to characterize them as an electronic “sermon on the mount.” Quoting Teilhard de Chardin, Elgin explores the “power of love.” The universal emergence and power of the Golden Rule are explored. He tells of the inspirational reign of Ashoka, the warrior king in India who, repenting of his previous life of slaughter, became an enlightened embodiment of “compassionate love” and one of the most impactful political leaders in history. He writes with insight of all the major conflicts now dividing humanity and of the process of reconciliation, ending with the statistical punch of how far the money we waste in trivia could go toward solving the world’s problems. Later Elgin develops the case that the purpose of evolution, “humanity’s central project,” is to become “doubly wise.” By this he means our unique human capacity to be self-reflective as well as self-organizing. That is, our species not only knows what is going on around us, as with all sentient organisms, but “knows that we know,” which gives us the capacity for an expanding consciousness of who we are and the potential for life. He then suggests what study circles, churches, classrooms, community and professional groups, and corporate boardrooms can do. This is all sensible and true but mighty thin stuff in relation to the challenge. He then returns to what may seem too grubby and materialistic for readers looking for more easy soulful salvation: how the exponentially increasing power of the Internet and television can be used to save rather than destroy us.
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