POST Postmodern Manifesto

Bright, passionate people the world over have lost many of the ideals passionate people used to have to believe in, and/or have lost patience with establishment dogma (whether secular or religious). Folks are looking for causes to dedicate their lives to, truths they'd be willing to die for, principles to guide them, proper and righteous goals to aim for in aiming to make sense of the world run amok.

At the same time, artists are strewn across the globe, laboring on their own, with few, if any, "schools of thought" to be used in the 21st century, to guide them with support and principles. Scientists and journalists alike are used as political punching bags, their dedication to uncovering the Truths of here and now invalidated and ignored. People of color still struggle to discover their heritage, still strive for "ways of knowing" which are not appropriated from the Christian, white-supremacist dominant culture.

At the same time, the curves of population growth and available resources go in opposite directions.

Here is a short list of principles and priorities for the 21st century:

1. All political, economic, and social efforts must aim at building power at the bottom while ignoring any desire to affect power at the top (the latter amounts to a cataclysmic waste of energy, which will do nothing but impinge on folks' abilities to work on the former). With efforts aimed in this way, and a strong separation of church and state, people of color might reclaim their own ways of knowing and being.

2. The separation of church and state must stand strong; part of its aim is to ensure populations of independent thinkers who can accurately assess what choices are best for their own families, communities, and localities (especially as related to #1). That the separation grow even more secure is one of very few things that can, without question, ensure the liberties which Americans are so quick to assume are really theirs.

3. The facts that a) clean water is the most critical element of life, and b) human communities have always revolved and will always revolve around food to a great extent (food production, preparation, consumption) must guide our way to a reformulation of priorities and ethics.

4. Wise people will operate under two fundamental and related rules, 1) decisions which favor conservation, whenever possible, over immediate gratification and consumption are invariably sound decisions, and 2) decisions which favor caution and inaction in the face of uncertain, unknown, and/or unknowable ramifications are, very generally, wise decisions. These rules are now violated regularly, with unknowable results, when it comes to issues like species extinction, agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, among many other areas.

5. Traditional liberal-arts curricula, their obstacles and goals, have existed with great merit for centuries, and have helped to bring out real, transcendent discipline in people. Such educations must be _provided_ everywhere possible, rather than merely made potentially accessible.

6. Strict attention must be paid to the practical differences between education and instruction. The former is all about guiding a person outwards from themselves, with wisdom into the world; the latter is about inserting facts and information into a person's head. Both have their places.

7. Higher art must be intensely personal while being universal and universally accessible. It must show refined knowledge of, understanding of, and respect for, in one form or another, the art which has come before.

8. Our duty as creators is to help the world become richer for those around us; therefore, we have obligations to make our creations as high-caliber as possible (with the help of higher education, private training, apprenticeship, self study, discipline, and exhaustive investigations into the workings of the world). In addition, we have an obligation to attempt to understand what people want, what they love, what they need, what, in fact, makes their lives richer. We must learn carefully to balance our "own voices" and our own dreams with the very real needs people have for high-caliber art in their lives, art they can love, art which might even guide them righteously.

9. All design, from graphic design to furniture design to the design of public spaces, must be aesthetically pleasing, user friendly, universally accessible (and, therefore, affordable and easy to understand), and make for an enhancement of life.

10. The fact that all areas of knowledge and wisdom show the same, or, at the very least, very similar, patterns means that the more areas of knowledge a person is familiar with, the wiser and more intelligent their creations will be, from paintings, to plays, to urban designs. The wisdom which might arise from whole-hearted and determined inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches, from the creation of an entirely new epistemology based on such approaches, might be called "meta disciplinary."

11. Anyone with a more-than-sufficient standard of living is morally obligated to send as much money as possible to the right places in order to help those around the world who know, on a day-in-and-day-out basis, the misery of constant hunger, lack of clean water, rampant disease epidemics, and other nastiness. One of the reasons for this obligation is that overly consumptive lifestyles in the first world, and all efforts (in recent history) to make those lifestyles preeminent and keep them unchanged, are, today, the primary reasons for poverty and misery in the third world. (Really, it's a matter of simple physics: matter and energy are conserved, and so, when one person's slice of pie grows, another's necessarily shrinks; moreover, the pie as a whole _cannot_ grow, as there is a fixed amount of matter on earth, and the chronic under-use of the sun's rays, our only real income, will come to be seen as one of the biggest scandals of the next hundred years.) Another reason for the obligation is that obstacles to overseas aid are simply non-existent these days; saving a village of children from blindness is as simple as making a phone call, and so much less expensive than one might think, helping the impoverished overseas should become an integral part of all our lives.

12. Cultures, races, national and ethnic backgrounds are _different_. The differences must not be ignored, downplayed, or glossed over. Rather, they must be highlighted, praised, revered, and, possibly most importantly of all, remembered.

13. Much difficult work must be done to come to understand where all the bits and pieces are coming down in the wake of the detonation of The Great Gender Shakeup.

14. Ghosts exist; so do people who can see them and communicate with them. Extra-sensory perceptions of all kinds are real and must be reckoned with. We can learn from them. Accepting the truths of psychic abilities and the truths of "worlds unseen" can help free us from the shackles of reductionist, scientistic thinking.

15. Miracles and the facts of our extremely limited scientific knowledge are not incompatible. Miracles are those events which science has not yet been able (and in many cases, never will be able) to explain. To deny the existence of miracles simply because one is an atheist or a scientist, for example, is misguided. The word "miracle" indeed has "religious" implications, but it need not be so. One can choose to be, as I am, an atheist who believes that what we call "miracles" are not, in fact, "gifts from God;" again, they're simply events which science can't explain. As with the point above, accepting the realities of miracles can be liberating and inspire much critical outside-the-box thinking and acting.