From Apartness to Integrated

I have been working through ideas about “what’s after capitalism,” and think about what’s wrong and what could be right, ,and what could be useful/helpful/sensible visions. I keep coming back to the issue of we sapiens* putting our needs front-and-center at the expense of everything else. Literally, we are “apart” from everything else. The more we develop, the more apart we become, thus “apartness.”

It seems to me that a usefulness vision would need to address this apartness (togetherness?). It seems that if we need to re-integrate with nature, other species, and even new species, i.e. robots. As we futurists now, when you start thinking about something, you become sensitized to signals of it. Here are three within the last week that have hit my radar:

• Environmental futurist Dave Bengston tagged this scan hit on the rights of nature “The Symposium will bring together key leaders in the Rights of Nature movement – from Ecuador, Nepal, the United States, and other countries, as well as from local communities and tribal nations. Today, communities, people, and even governments are recognizing that there is a need to make a fundamental shift in humankind’s relationship with the natural world by placing the highest protections on nature through the recognition of legal rights.”
• While animal rights movements have been active for some time, the development of lab-grown meat offers some hope there. Our friends at the Futures Assessment Divisions of the US Marine Corps reported on Richard Branson explaining his interest in and artificial meat startup: “I believe that in 30 years or so we will no longer need to kill any animals and that all meat will either be clean or plant-based, taste the same and also be much healthier for everyone. One day we will look back and think how archaic our grandparents were in killing animals for food.”
• Saudi Arabia Becomes the First Country to Give Citizenship to a Robot. The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman plans to put Sophia in a forthcoming megacity called Neom—a center for business and tourism. Setting aside the problems it raises given the situation of women there, and that it is a bit of a gimmick, we futurist remember Jim Dator talking about rights of robots decades ago.

So, we have three signals suggesting the notion of expanding the rights of others, and at least in some small way, indicating there is movement away from apartness to integrated — of course, last week in Alternative Perspectives class we did a module on Integral Futures.  – Andy Hines

*See Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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