2. Where do we go from here? 2a. A change of vision: returning to the Garden "Before our era, the chorus of distress that had assembled over the ten thousand years of our cultural life consisted of nine voices: war, crime, corruption, rebellion, famine, plague, slavery, genocide, and economic collapse. Beginning in 1960, our own era found a tenth voice to add to the chorus, a voice never heard before, and this is the voice of cultural catastrophe - a voice that wails of loss of vision, failure of purpose, and the collapse of values." - The Story of B, p. 276 The uprisings of the 1960s did indeed amount to a broad rejection of the dominant culture. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" was not a call to retreat from life - it was an invitation to enter a new cultural space. This yearning for a more meaningful culture was widespread, and it went deep, but the yearning was just being born, and it had no direction. It defined itself largely by an ostentatious negation of the previous generations values, together with a vague attempt to embrace a kind of neo-tribalism, and a "go with your feelings" ethic. We wanted to escape from the asylum, but we didn't have any real vision of where else we wanted to be. A movement based on negation could not be sustained, and the rebellious generation resumed its roles in the mainstream - pursuing educations, families, and careers. But the generation had been 'radicalized', and the cultural malaise which had given rise to their movement continued to simmer. Some three decades later, at the end of 1990s, the malaise had again reached the boiling point. The excesses of neoliberalism, corporate power, and globalization pushed a new generation onto the streets of Geneva, Seattle, London, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Prague, Devos, Mexico City - and the list is still growing. This time around, the prospects for the movement are entirely more favorable than they were in the 1960s. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the movement is not plagued by a 'generation gap'. In the 1960s, the older generation had lived through a Great Depression and a World War, and they did not appreciate their finally-secure world being shaken up by a rebellion of over-privileged youth. With society split in this way, the potential for significant social change was substantially curtailed. Today, there is no 'silent majority' with an unshakable attachment to the established order. Cultural malaise now affects young and old, conservative as well as progressive, South as well as North. For another thing, neoliberal globalization is not going away, and it is showing no signs of bending to pressure or compromising its aggressive agenda. It is 'in our face' and it is going be more-and-more in our face - and in everyone's face - as the global regime consolidates its power and continues to accelerate the pace of global exploitation. The regime is trapped in this strategy by its Tak ethos and by its deep commitment to capitalist economics. The heavy-handed police response to anti-globalization protests around the world makes it clear that denial and suppression are the only responses that can be expected from the regime at this time. Worsening conditions, combined with mindless suppression, will only serve to embolden the movement, and provide it with a clear 'enemy' to unite against. There is one more reason why the prospects for the movement are promising at this time - our cultural 'vision bag' is no longer empty. The sixties' generation smuggled their radicalism into their mainstream lives in a thousand ways - and the past three decades have brought us a renaissance of new visions and new understandings. Whole new disciplines, such as environmental studies, have been introduced into our universities. Writers like Noam Chomsky, David Korten, Vandana Shiva, Martin Kohr, Richard Douthwaite - and many others - have been developing radical critiques, and have been systematically investigating visions for more livable, sustainable societies. Concepts like sustainability, environmental integrity, and whole-systems analysis have begun to permeate the general culture, and are becoming the nucleus of an emerging alternative cultural vision. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come, and Quinn's Story of B might be just the cultural meme that is needed to consolidate our emerging vision and link it to roots deep within our ourselves and the history of our species. Our common sense has been alienating us from the mainstream cultural mythology, and has been leading us toward a vision of harmonization with the world around us. Quinn helps us understand that such harmonization has always been central to being human - except within the deviant Tak cultural branch. The time has come for 'The Great Remembering'. With a firm primordial basis for its new cultural vision, the movement has the potential to be unstoppable. Humanity, at last, may be on the verge of recognizing that we've been on a wrong cul-de-sac for 10,000 years - and that it is now time to return to sanity and to humanity's true cultural mainstream. rkm http://cyberjournal.org wexford, ireland