January 1, 2050: Dialogue at the Still Point of the Turning World
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.-T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
As the new year dawns midway through this 21st century, we return to gathering ourselves together again. Soon the sun will rise against the far horizon, and young mountains will radiate the ancient light. Few today will doubt the truth of this beauty, or the eternal meaning expressed therein. But there was a time, not more than thirty years gone, when beautiful truths passed away unrecognized; and history seemed a meaningless causal chain, emptied of purpose and untethered at every end. So truth itself became a distortion, and the world of humanity drifted into an age of self-destruction, which today we call the Great Perversion.
But now the story of our redemption unfolds across the stillness of time. The story of this great turning is what I want to recount. As the new year dawns, I want to recall how just one or two generations ago, a new cosmology dawned like a faint star, before bursting across the sky; and how beneath that light, humanity discovered something of what it means to heal.
To trace this transformation, I would like to begin with my own. But I cannot tell my story without first sketching the perilous condition of truth in that earlier time. Over the preceding century and into the present one, “truth” had become synonymous with the so-called “facts of science,” and scientific assertions commanded far greater authority than non-scientific ones. That such an evaluation was itself non-scientific bothered hardly anyone. The domain of truth had been conquered by science, and the unmistakable good that science had achieved for humanity made its supremacy legitimate.
The improvement of the human condition was the central aim of the First Enlightenment—the 18th century revolution of ideas, which elevated human life and dignity, and taught us to cherish equality and freedom. With the marriage of science and this humanistic agenda, the world became an inventory of physical objects, against which humanity partitioned itself and achieved great mastery. The alluring image of ourselves as invulnerable and set apart from Nature became a defining feature of modernity.
But soon Nature convulsed against the unrestrained self-indulgence of humanity. Destructive technologies proliferated and economies of consumption devoured the planet. Catastrophic warfare, plague, and ecologic collapse ravaged the world of humanity, and soon threatened even the wealthiest societies. Civil discourse deteriorated and moral confusion spread, until the deepening sense of emptiness and alienation finally conquered the human mind. During the years of the Great Perversion, humanity’s illusions of invulnerability became untenable, and the scientistic image of ourselves, prevailing over a meaningless world of objects, began to decay. Truth was no longer the undisputed domain of science and reason, but an instrument of political expedience. We found ourselves spiraling into the future, unmoored from any stable purpose.
This is where I will pick up my own story. For my life, like others during that time, was a manner of responding to this dim invitation—the ghostly call that beckoned from the horizon, to grasp a brighter meaning, to make a better life. I was raising two young boys, and working as a physician. As all parents do, I loved my children fiercely and wanted to embody for them the deepest truths. But what were these now? Though I never dreamed of undoing the triumphs of liberalism and science, I had nevertheless recoiled from the consciousness of modernity.
The hospital of my daily rounds resembled an industrial refinery flaming against the wilderness. With a decade of medical training, one could tame the wilderness and reduce its wild essence to an easily marketable commodity. For terminal illness had become a trial by ordeal, in which the accused willfully petitioned for time and control by means of their own anguish. An essentially human experience, which once inspired solemnity and grace, had been reduced to stains on the bedsheets. Some took this dehumanizing reduction to be natural, or preferable to any alternative; others found the whole display repugnant and humiliating. But everyone trembled in the face of illness and death; and when these frailties threatened, they lurched toward the shimmering mirage of invulnerability.
It was there, at the tortured intersection of these opposing pressures, that a new question formed like a diamond in my mind: What is the meaning of health for beings like us, whose death draws nearer each day? What is the meaning of health when the veil between living and dying is withdrawn? This is how the Great Work, which the world would soon labor forth, presented itself to me. This was the light that dawned on countless other horizons, too: an image of the whole that transcends our individual lives.
This bright image, which now glows in the background of our minds, was a cosmology of dialogue: a renewed understanding of ourselves as engaged participants in an unfurling universe; as agents of reciprocity, who always receive by intimation, and express by imagination, the meaning of existence; as willful phenomena of this universe, whose interactions with other phenomena are themselves expressions of purpose.
That the cosmology of dialogue dawned amid the upheavals of the Great Perversion seems unsurprising now, for this vision seized the modern conscience wherever it encountered vulnerability. Human fragility lurked everywhere then; but its paradigm instance, which hovered like a phantom over every anxiety, was the ordinary experience of dying. When terminal illness summoned the dehumanizing machinations of 21st century medicine, the choice between the un-being of death and the un-becoming of medicalized dying was a paralyzing one.
Day after day, in my encounters with this predicament, the diamond in my mind sharpened. The criterion of health for the person dying—as we all are—could only manifest through a new kind of dialogue, which we were ill-prepared to embrace. We could only stumble toward new ways of asking: What is the meaning of health for beings like us, whose death draws nearer each day? What is the meaning of health for us, when the veil between living and dying is withdrawn?
For those who live dyingly, for whom the vanishing distance between being and un-being channels their becoming, the essential truths appear as visions of fullness, wholeness, belonging. Such are the essential values that determine our ways of living. For dying patients, these were the truths that illuminated the way beyond paralysis. These were visions of health.
Now, if this talk of “visions” no longer seems especially arcane, or “merely subjective,” we should recall that, prior to the great transformation I am recounting, such language could easily raise suspicions of credulity. While “visions of fullness” could always find expression in linguistic form (as images, stories, symbols, metaphors, etc.), they were inaccessible to the descriptive language that ruled modernity. What these visions defied, in other words, was the reductive, calculative language of science and the First Enlightenment, which aimed to designate objects with mathematical precision. On the other hand, for qualitative truths (which we are calling “visions”) to become active in the world—to find resonance and take shape, as the values that determine our actions—a more generative, constitutive, poetic mode of language had always been necessary. But preceding centuries had illegitimately devalued linguistic modes of this kind, which constitute truth by the very act of expression—that is, within the space of dialogue.
Still, if the Great Perversion proved that our strong allegiance to descriptive language could be self-destructive, this did not mean that a more generative, poetic language could simply replace the descriptive in the moment of crisis (nor would such a starry-eyed substitution have been tolerated). At the boundaries of medicine’s death-delaying powers, one could not just abandon outright the usual language of medical discourse; rather, that discourse had to be repurposed, reoriented toward a fuller vision of health. What was needed was a constructive integration of linguistic modes: a new descriptive-poetic language.
With the gradual development of this linguistic innovation in our encounters with dying, in our dialogues of shared vulnerability and interwoven meanings, the once incomprehensible notion of dying healthy became conceivable. Soon the new dialogue metastasized throughout our health care, until the meaning of health itself was transformed. Visions of fullness appeared as common truths: once constituted in dialogue, they transcended individual lives. The new image of health became an aspect of the Good for humanity, and then for the greater world.
Today, of course, we easily recognize this same developmental pattern in other aspects of the Good; the sum of these is what has redeemed humanity. We recognize the dialogic pattern, for instance, in the image of ourselves as integral participants in ecosystems; in the evolution of our economies, from self-interested transactions of endless growth, toward the collective purpose of sustainability; in the decentralization of our governments, toward today’s smaller bioregional communities of face-to-face democracy.
Life’s most essential truths are those that emerge in dialogues like these, when we embrace our mutual precarity, our inescapable need for one another, our yearning to love and be loved. Essential truths are always inter-subjective, always constituted in dialogue. They are the co-determined meanings and values we discover in the common space between us—between ourselves and one another, ourselves and the wild Earth of which we are born, ourselves and our histories, countries, and Gods. In dialogue, we become living expressions of each of these; and in reciprocal fashion, each expresses us.
In the third decade of this century, we discovered what science had already shown; what the axial religions of the East and West had long insisted; and what the whole of human experience since the First Enlightenment had declared. If we are conscious beings, for whom values, meanings, and purpose are essential; and if we are born of this world, as phenomena of this living universe; then we must conclude that the universe—the totality of phenomena in time and space—is somehow conscious, and compelled by values, meanings, and purpose, which we always discover between us. Whatever will be its fate, will be our fate—and we will have participated in its becoming.
So from here, at the still point of this turning world, we look eternally toward the far horizon. For that is where the original light is always rising, and gathering us together.