by Joel Garreau
Everybody knows the best kind of birthday present. It’s the one that shows how well you understand the other person. “It’s the stuff you secretly care about—that honors your spirit,” says Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, the modern classic on the subject. “There’s a sign of connection in the way the gift is given.” It’s this creation of a human bond.
What’s new is the notion that you can build an economy around gifts.
“What we idealists often like to call a gift economy—the selfless offering of value without expectations of direct returns—is a rather modern concept,” says Jim Mason, a cultural anthropologist from Stanford who has conducted extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. “It is an open engagement with a community. The question of how this interacts with a market economy is one we clearly have no answer to.”
“It’s work-as-gift rather than work-as-commodity,” says Richard Barbrook, of the Hypermedia Research Center at the University of Westminster in England. “At no time since the invention of money have gifts ruled like they do now,” Hyde says. A gift economy is indeed an economy—you can rationally expect that if you tender a gift, sooner or later you will receive some kind of return. But the return is indirect. The Bible is full of examples. “Cast thy bread upon the waters,” the Book of Ecclesiastes commands. Not only do five loaves and two fishes offered freely by Jesus and his disciples feed the multitude, according to the book of Matthew, but the leftovers fill 12 baskets.
The deep structure of the Internet has an undeniably utopian cast. “E-mail is the oddest thing,” says Hyde, a 1991 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. “All the computers and servers and connections—it has a gift economy feel to it. Unlike the telephone, there’s not somebody there charging me when I’m using it. And I don’t know the anonymous benefactors who have made it work.”
“The Net is haunted by the disappointed hopes of the sixties,” says Barbrook. From the earliest days, with the battle cry “Information wants to be free,” the Internet was seen as a space where people could find ways to collaborate without the need for either governments or markets to mediate social bonds. And indeed, it has worked out that way. To this day, it is notoriously difficult to charge for anything on the Net, because there is so much of value there for free. Look at the endless self-help sites, such as those for widows and widowers. They aren’t “run” by anybody. People there cluster spontaneously around their needs and desires. Untold numbers of doctors who specialize in exotic diseases participate as volunteers in support groups. Many are the grief groups that sport their own psychologists. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave away his discovery. “One thing that was clear to him was that if it was going to be successful, he would have to give it away,” Hyde says. “The irony is that to become a commercially viable medium, it had to begin with a public domain action.”
Is this co-evolution? In just the first 2,000 days after the Web was born, the world built some 3 billion Web pages readily available to the public. That’s 1.5 million a day, one for every two humans on Earth, and the total is growing exponentially. This is a construction feat that would impress the pharaohs. If some government had tried to order this vast project into existence, what would it have cost? asks Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy.
“There is not enough money in the world to do this,” Kelly says. “This is an impossible thing we’ve done. It’s a remarkable human achievement of Renaissance proportions in 2,000 days. It’s unbelievable. Americans already send 600 billion e-mails a year. This is transformative, the scale and speed with which we have made this. That is the gift economy. It’s an act of faith. A holy act. This gift exchange is socializing us to a degree not seen before. The typical person today is engaged in more relationships with more people in more dimensions than ever before. It’s amazing given the number of people involved. I’m not so naïve as to think the gift economy is going to replace the market economy. But I do think the gift economy is an essential underpinning of the market economy.”
The most influential thinker of the 20th century seeking to unify the truths of science and religion was the French Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his 1940 magnum opus The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard argued that someday our technology would allow us to create a web of thought and action that would make the world more complex, diverse and alive, moving humankind toward an ultimate evolution. He called it The Omega Point. He propounded the notion that the earth might be one big single living organism, with all the elements of it—from the people to the birds—connected like cells in a body. The goal of evolution, he suggested, is to link up individual human minds, bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to this mammoth being. The attention this notion received, especially in the sixties, was of an airy, hand-waving, late-night-dorm-session sort. It was hard for serious people to imagine how such a global consciousness would ever be wired up in any practical way, and even harder to observe any concrete evidence of its existence. With the rise of the World Wide Web, however, some scientists, such as Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel prize in physics and a pioneer in the study of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute, began to think they might be looking at the first evidence that maybe Teilhard was right. “The Internet has accelerated a phenomenon of people finding one another with all sorts of consequences, some wonderful and some terrifying,” Gell-Mann said.
“What we’re hoping for is a global increase in the collective intelligence of the human species, without which we cannot survive on this planet,” says Ralph H. Abraham, one of the progenitors of complex systems theory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
“The Web is mediating a collective thought process that has feedback effects,” says Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which argues that evolution is aimed in a positive direction—perhaps toward a Heaven Scenario. It is reminiscent, Wright says, of Teilhard’s idea that technology would connect minds into a “brain for the biosphere as the human species consciously assumes stewardship of the planet.” It explains “why serious people take Teilhard seriously,” he says.
Is this evidence of co-evolution continuing? Do “the use of new tools enable more specialized and capable human understanding?” asks William Calvin, the neurobiologist. “Will we in turn fundamentally change some of our premises about technology as we continue to evolve? Are humans already changing as a result of the Information Age? Yes, and I suspect computer use in preschool years will eventually create some softwiring that will make for more capable adults in other areas than just mousing and typing.”
Look at the open-source movement, which allows thousands of people collaboratively to find solutions to difficult problems over the Net, without any of them claiming ownership of the result. Look at eBay, which brings individuals together to trade in the planet’s largest flea market. Look at the way wireless computers allow people to bring cities to life as they sit out on benches or inside coffeehouses, speeding up the pace of response of the metropolis—which has always been what cities have been about. Look at how all of these create new kinds of work. The central question of co-evolution is not what the computer will become but what kind of people we are becoming. Can human understanding about human understanding increase? Can we learn what actually makes teams work? Can we truly understand cognition? Do we have a moral obligation to use enhancement technology to make ourselves beings who are more compassionate, moral and wise? Is it our only chance for survival? The planet comes with an expiration date. If a mutated virus doesn’t get us, there’s a stray asteroid out there with our planet’s name on it, and if we dodge that rock, sooner or later, the sun is scheduled to explode. Is our only way out to continue the march from prehuman to early human to human to transhuman to posthuman, in order to tame the forces of the universe?
The significance of these questions is encapsulated in the words of the scenarist Arie de Geus: “The ability to le
arn faster than your competition may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
“Adaptation means you’re making quick adjustments until you can formulate some kind of grand theory down the line,” Kash says. “I wish that were not the case.” He would prefer that leaders expounding high-minded principles rule society. But Kash is forced to recognize that the great doctrines of our old stories very well may no longer remotely fit the facts. So the only available answer is to adjust as necessary. Quickly. Until you can come up with a new and grand story that can hold society together.
HUMANS FIND AN ABSENCE of explanations for how the world works profoundly unsettling. That’s why the search for this new grand story becomes important. Yet when you start talking to professionals who are thinking about what this narrative might be like, you find it to be an almost entirely secular group—the subject of God rarely comes up. I am not particularly religious myself, but the American people overwhelmingly are. So it occurred to me to wonder what transcendence might have meant historically to the worldwide range of the devout. You’d think over the last three thousand years or so, we might find a few hints in their work as to how to think about this fix.
Karen Armstrong is a witty, self-deprecating pixie of a woman with a quality British accent. Among the most eminent authors about God and religion writing in English today, she has produced refreshing, lucid and compelling biographies of Muhammad and Buddha and books relating their beliefs to Christianity and Judaism, including her best-selling and fearlessly titled A History of God. In 1969, at the age of 24, she left the Roman Catholic convent she had entered as a teenager. She returned to an unrecognizable world—Vietnam, the Beatles, Vatican II, feminism, the sexual revolution. But she did not abandon her search for meaning. She is now resolutely secular—her tailored suits are accented by the subtly cheerful geometric colors of designer Missoni scarves. But she remains fascinated by what the German philosopher of history Karl Jaspers referred to as the Axial Age—a period of unique and fundamental focus on transcendence that is “the beginning of humanity as we now know it,” she says. All over the world, humans simultaneously began to wake up to a burning need to grapple with deep and cosmic questions. All the major religious beliefs are rooted in this period. “The search for spiritual breakthrough was no less intense and urgent than the pursuit of technological advance is in our own,” she says. “That’s quite endorsing, actually. Instead of seeing your own tradition as an idiosyncratic, lonely quest, it becomes part of what human beings do, part of a universal search for meaning and value. This is the kind of scenario that the human mind goes through in its search for ultimate meaning.”
“If there is an axis in history, we must find it empirically,” Jaspers wrote.
The spiritual process which took place between 800 and 200 B.C. seems to constitute such an axis. It was then that the man with whom we live today came into being. Let us designate this period as the “axial age.” Extraordinary events are crowded into this period. In China lived Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in Chinese philosophy arose, it was the era of Mo Tse, Chuang Tse and countless others. In India it was the age of the Upanishads and of Buddha; as in China, all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism, were developed. In Iran Zarathustra put forward his challenging conception of the cosmic process as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine prophets arose: Elijah, Isiah, Jeremiah, Deutero-Isaiah; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the tragic poets, Thucydides, Archimedes. All the vast development of which these names are a mere intimation took place in these few centuries, independently and almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West.
The new element in this age is that man everywhere became aware of being as a whole, of himself and his limits. He experienced the horror of the world and his own helplessness. He raised radical questions, approached the abyss in his drive for liberation and redemption. And in consciously apprehending his limits he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.
Armstrong is fascinated by the human universals operating amid the tumultuous upheaval of that cultural revolution. What caused dispersed civilizations simultaneously to develop these broad, transcendent ideas? There is no human culture that does not incorporate some notion of religion. Even nonbelievers develop systems such as Marxism that sport all the trappings of religion. This evidence causes Armstrong to believe that religion is an essential human need, as unlikely to be outgrown as our need for art. She sees religion as a universal search for meaning and values. She believes it is hardwired.
“Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation,” Armstrong writes. “They will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning.” Think of the constellations in the night sky. Humans eagerly connect dots and come up with the most elaborate—even poetic—tales, adorning them with heroes and myths, rather than tolerate randomness. The desire to believe goes way back in evolutionary history. “At the start of the 20th century, sociologists said religiosity would decline because of public education and rise of science; instead, it got bigger,” notes Michael Shermer, a leading scourge of superstition and bad science who is editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine and author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. “All of this stuff is linked to the desire for there to be Something else with a capital S. A force or a power. It’s the basis of mythology—all that Joseph Campbell Power of Myth stuff. We love all that. That’s why Star Wars and the Force were so popular.” After all, rationality is hardly a secret. “It’s pretty widely publicized,” says Shermer. “There’s a lot of popular science writing and TV shows. It’s not a mystery.”
Maybe this tells us something about human nature. That we are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. If one sees belief as reflecting a hardwired need for meaning and values, then perhaps in the Axial Age we filled the emptiness of our emerging consciousness with the highest aspirations for human nature we could possibly imagine.
This raises the interesting question of whether we are due for a new Axial Age. If our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts, are we seeking a new era of sense, intelligibility, clarity, continuity and unity? If profound restatements of how the world works arose all over the planet the last time we had a transition on the scale of that from biological evolution to cultural evolution, will it happen again as we move from cultural evolution to technological evolution?
Betty Sue Flowers, of the University of Texas at Austin, notes it’s been a while since “the Enlightenment and the Renaissance gave us a sense of coherence. There was a benevolent God that invented the universe, even if it were a clockwork frame. That framework has been up for grabs—it has fallen away. For a long time it didn’t bother us. But now we are facing strong questions. Should we indeed ban the cloning of humans? For that you need a larger frame. We do not have that agreed-upon larger frame. This is a spiritual crisis. It’s not about science.”
Flowers was the editor of The Power of Myth, the book by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers that accompanied the hugely popular and honored PBS series of the same name. A poet, editor, educator and scenarist, she was the Kelleher Professor of English and director of creative writing at UT before becoming director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.
Flowers sees coming a cultural revolution that seeks to address today’s confusions about how things really do fit together. She says: “What’s emerging is an interesting amalgam. It comes from our economic myths of globalization, that everything fits together. And that overlays our environmental work about the way things fit together. Even if it’s a remote snail, it has intrinsic value. There is an interconnectedness of things. There is a value somehow in the way things are connected—the web of life. That’s the next Enlightenment.”
The importance of creating such a commonly held framework, Flowers believes, is “i
t synchronizes human activity. It distinguishes what ‘outside the box’ is. It gives you a way to move forward together.”
If we’re talking about managing transcendence—of coming up with specific ways to Prevail—how would we measure success? How would we know whether or not we were progressing in the program to shape our next humans? When asked what we want for our children, we usually say “happiness.” So one of the more obvious places to start might be whether or not we were seeing an increase in happiness.
There are three levels of happiness, Martin E. P. Seligman points out. They involve the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life. Seligman is president of the American Psychological Association, Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Authentic Happiness. Each of these levels of happiness could be influenced by a transformation of human nature, and each might be a good measure of whether we are managing transcendence effectively.
The pleasant life is the easy one. It consists of having as many positive emotions as you can. “That’s the Hollywood view of happiness, the Debbie Reynolds, smiley giggly view of happiness,” Seligman says. It’s about base pleasures, raw feelings, thrills, orgasms. That one’s going to be a snap to enhance—the drugs alone.
More interesting is the good life. It means the fulfillment of potential. That is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he talked about the pursuit of happiness. He was picking up on Aristotle’s idea of eudaemonia, defined as “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.” Seligman says, “Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You’re one with the music. There are six virtues we find endorsed across cultures. They are nonarbitrary—first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance and moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality and transcendence cluster. We sent people up to northern Greenland, and down to the Masai, and are involved in a 70-nation study in which we look at the ubiquity of these. Indeed, we’re beginning to have the view that those six virtues are just as much a part of human nature as walking on two feet is.”