Introduction to Pluralism
More information is being produced, shared and stored than ever before. Information is rising up, lifting out of direct experience, rising from every area of human activity, every person, every place. The means of producing creative expression are rapidly becoming accessible to ever more of the global population. We are now sharing information locally and spreading it translocally through a multitude of means. The internet has created a globally accessible container, allowing for informational representations to extend beyond former parameters of space and time, beyond the realm of direct experience to interact and relate in their own transcendent ecosystem. This is old news.
Every object, every observed phenomenon, now carries along with it its historic inheritance of every way that humans have sought to understand it, all the ways we have interacted with it. As such, it horizontalizes all branches of study, all creative interactions, all personal experience- pooling the entire legacy of all cultural objects, information and its representation into a wide and vast ocean of all that is.
Language, sensory input, information- these are dimension-exploring devices. They construct and compose our very idea of what the world is, how it works, what is possible. At this historical moment we stand confronted with the sheer volume of this information, its diversity and complexity. It encompasses the globe.
Some are trying to manage the enormity of this planetary coalescence by working towards a totalizing system of order- communism, a global government, international law. Some are turning toward the local, focusing on community resilience, working in collective farms, trying to live in self-sustaining communes. Some are addressing mid-range structures of power, lobbying governments to improve and continue social programs, give teeth to human rights law, organizing against transnational corporations and their many ploys to desecrate the environment, poison our food, profit from war, avoid all accountability and generally continue functioning within the internal logic of a shamefully myopic profit-driven industrial growth model.
We can stand from a vantage point that allows for us to see how all of these types of human activity and more are happening at once. All of these responses to our idea of what the world is, what is possible and how we can participate; they are all occurring simultaneously. And when we expand our scope, stretching our capacity to include all that is, our lens necessarily becomes Pluralist. Precisely because it is inclusive of all observable activity. Instead of actively attempting to impose one system or ideology onto what we observe, we can be receptive. Receptive enough to see the multiplicity of systems that come from people believing and working to bring to bear their interpretations of diverse ideologies which interact- weaving and relating, forming the texture, the topography of what is. Pluralism is a container for this process, enabling us to see how this great multiplicity can co-exist, and how it does so in a way that is continuously evolving through time. Pluralism is a dynamic framework capable of holding and allowing for the pace of change while encouraging the possibility for novel developments.
No comments:
Post a Comment