The Spirit of Future Present

As New Yorkers sweltered in unseasonable heat, and the Times forsook all journalistic sangfroid to declare global warming realer than real (yes, Virginia, the North Pole is melting), an unprecedented gathering of 150 heads of state hunkered down at the U.N. to try to fix the mess they (and we) have made of a fragile planet. The meeting has spawned a variety of collateral gatherings, each trying to craft a more hopeful blueprint for the next hundred years. Whether it was last week's astonishing colloquy of 2,000 leaders from every world religion (minus the Dalai Lama, stiff-armed by China's Security Council clout) convening to try to iron out their differences, or this week's bustling State of the World Forum, the consensus was near-identical: If the last century was one of dazzling (if often blind) technological innovation, pitched (if often bloody) competition between political systems, and heroic (if too often tyrannical) manipulation of Nature, the 21st century will have to tame the genie of scientific progress, create a global culture of conflict resolution, and lurch toward some planet-wide coping mechanism in the face of spiraling environmental and social ills.

Nestled within the State of the World's packed schedule, little noticed amid the media fanfare and dark-suited security details of political superstars like Mikhail Gorbachev and Jordan's Queen Noor, a working group of theologians, biologists, physicists and fellow travelers under the rubric of "Future Visions" set out on a quiet quest they believe trumps politics and economics in its implications for the future: the search for a common ground between science and spirit.

One of the meeting's sponsors is the Templeton Foundation, established by octogenarian billionaire British financier and philanthropist Sir John Templeton to support research into human potential. The other—the one which had people buzzing with curiosity—was the International Space Sciences Organization (ISSO), founded in 1998 by a brash young tech mogul named Joe Firmage.

Three years ago, on the verge of launching an IPO for his multibillion-dollar company, USWeb—then the world's largest Internet consultancy—Firmage at age 26 had an epiphany. In fact, a bona fide visionary experience, one which led him to step down as CEO to pursue projects with a distinctly save-the-world flavor. The bemused press, which often regards young, impossibly rich dot-commers as a species apart, treated the affair like an X-Files outtake. But Firmage proceeded to spin out a whirlwind of large-scale ventures intended to, as he says in his Silicon Valley-tinged syntax, push "the programming evolution of the massive machinery of globalization and capitalism" toward more humane ends. One new company was ISSO, whose mission statement calls for not only "opening the frontier of Space" (including developing "fundamentally new propulsion and energy technologies"), but propagating "new visions of a human society capable of using them wisely." Another stated interest is research into the nature of consciousness—lately a hot pursuit for everyone from cognitive biologists to quantum physicists to new-age "seat of the soul" mystics.

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These are, after all, days of miracles and wonders; days we feel we're living in a world once confined to the fevered imagination of sci-fi writers. One day, NASA casually announces it is hot on the trail of "unconventional propulsion systems" like antigravity, and the military hints it is developing quantum communications devices based on the "super-positioning" of electrons (where the same particle can be in two different locations simultaneously). Nanotechnology's latest prototype "tool" is a micro-tweezers constructed entirely of DNA. We're on the trembling lip of a Brave New World, with its cloned embryos and its pharmaceutical mood-tweaks. Will genetically engineered seeds feed the world, or fill it with Frankenfoods and haywire "Terminator" seeds? Do we have any say about any of it? The technologists' refrain, "Because we can," is an increasingly unsavory answer to a headlong rush into an unrecognizable future.

As the Future Visions conferees would have it, the countervailing force must be the world's deeprock well of spiritual values. The ISSO's "Director for Theological Studies," Bruce Curtis, opened the proceedings with a shibboleth-cum-applause line that galvanized the invitees-only crowd: "There is no nuclear and environmental crisis—there is just a spiritual crisis with nuclear and environmental symptoms."

Whereas the gala opening dinner for the larger State of the World Forum featured a stirring performance by the cast of Les Miserables, reflecting that event's political slant, Curtis suggested his conferees decamp on their night off for the hit Broadway braintwister Copenhagen, a drama about quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg's famed Uncertainty Principle.

The only thing that wasn't uncertain in the day's proceedings was the certainty of impending, mind-boggling change. The kick-off speaker, theoretical physicist Paul Davies (author of the best-selling The Mind of God) lost no time pointing out that the sequencing of the three billion base-pairs of the human genome will make possible altering human nature itself. "The religious viewpoint, of humans caught in the crossfire between good and evil," might be replaced by the paradigm of an interplay of altruistic and selfish genes. If we can sort out which are which, should we, he asked slyly, simply amp up "our nice guy genes" (the ones that drive not only love for our offspring but perhaps the "Good Samaritan genes of reciprocal altruism") and snip out the ones associated with what we regard as rotten? "We could create a species of post-human for which evil is eliminated," he declared, his clipped British diction and brushy moustache suggesting both Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness in The Bridge On the River Kwai. "But is the capacity to do evil what makes us human?"

If we proceed with technology for manipulation of the human genome, he continued, any newly inserted genetic traits would be transmissible to the next generation. Life prolongation, predicted Davies, will come relatively soon—most likely, a doubled lifespan of 150 years. Would we just be "more of the same," or will longevity produce new qualities that make us a different sort of creature altogether? He recalled a colleague's recent insistence that "we could engineer a post-human, as different from us as we are from apes, within a dozen generations."

Davies segued to the implications of our growing ability to manipulate matter at the molecular level: "Within two decades biotechnology and nanotechnology will merge. A cell already contains the equivalent of pumps, levers, chains and pulleys. These can be plucked out and fused with manufactured devices." Conversely, implants ("bits of living organisms combined with electronic components") could be inserted into the human body. As artificial intelligence and robotics "proceed from strength to strength," sentient machines might throw a monkeywrench into the whole notion of human nature.

Following Davies was scholar Huston Smith, whose classic work The Religions of Man still stands, 43 years after its publication, as the best introduction to what Smith calls the world's "wisdom traditions." Courtly, his skin like fine parchment through which some hidden light-source glowed, the eminence gris of religious studies challenged any notions of an easy rapprochement between science and spirituality. "I want to ruffle some feathers," he stated genially, citing Jewish theologian Martin Buber's assertion that he had never had a discussion worth having "that wasn't ruthless." The paths are diverging, Smith proclaimed, their different directions no less than "a battle for the mind of our times."

In spiritual traditions, he pointed out, everything "is suffused with awareness. The world is an ice cube melting in a sea of spirit; humans are considered the Less who have derived from the More. But in the scientific worldview, we are the More which emerged from the Less—from meaningless matter. When science decides we alone are the measure of everything," he concluded, "it actually diminishes us."

He recounted times he had shared the stage with various greats of science: cosmologist Carl Sagan, quantum physicist David Bohm, chemist Ilya Prigogine, neuroscientist Karl Pribram, all renowned humanists in their fields. "But none of them would grant me that the scientific method had any limit! But it does, it does." Those limits, he said, blinkered our apprehension of the unseen world described by all spiritual traditions. "Has any scientific fact been discovered which counts against the existence of that otherworld, or have we so poured our confidence into a specific way of knowing that we have simply lost sight of it?" He compared our scientifically delimited range of perception to a person in a bungalow overlooking the Himalayas lowering the blinds until only a slit of panorama remains.

One participant cited physicist Max Planck, who once commented succinctly on the limits of science: "Mankind cannot solve all the mysteries of Nature, because we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve."

At Future Visions this week, the mystery will be pondered by presenters from a patchwork of disciplines.

Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal and NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny, will jumpstart a discussion on "Evolution, Altruism, and Purpose"; psychologist Martin Seligman, famed in psychological circles for his theory of "learned optimism," will discourse on "Love and the Nature of Ultimate Reality." Spiritual leaders like Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement, and Pir Vilayat Khan, head of the Sufi Order International, will rub shoulders with quantum physicists, biologists, and cosmologists. One presentation is titled "Re-imagining Human Nature: Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, and Spiritual Anthropology."

If the titles do not trip lightly from the tongue, or the concepts flutter gently into pigeonholes, it may be apropos. The conference organizers believe that given the scope of our challenges, and our dawning realization of their boggling complexity, an interdisciplinary approach spanning every known field of inquiry is mandated. "Many of these debates may seem abstract and remote," admitted Joe Firmage (who calls his own approach "ideotechnomics"), "but they will determine what our lives will be like in the year 2050."

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