After the Future
The Modal Mania of Thomas Stanley
I don't own a crystal ball, but I do know the future. I was raised on it, as were many of you. This is the future. This is the future? The future has been hijacked to serve as a nifty marketing slogan under which an endless stream of new products and services can be sold and resold to us, until we run out of money or time. This ad campaign called The Future was paid for with a check drawn on insufficient funs and signed by George Jetson, George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry. The future I was raised on promised a near-utopia of equanimity and universal prosperity. With our lives made simple by the conveniences of modernity, the human spirit would be left to focus on its most essential pursuits of meaning and truth. So here we are in a collapsing consumer culture of remixes and sequels, reality TV and preemptive war. Go to your local multiplex and count the films that have a number behind their title or that are cinematic reruns of a comic book or cartoon from the baby boomer memory pool. They're all connected and symptomatic of something like fatigue (although at times it appears to be sloth). This exhaustion, I argue, is not moral, spiritual or ideological, it is in fact temporal.
"Money won't change you, but time will take you out." That's the way James Brown put it. We're done. The way of war and wages is, thankfully, at its end. They will never be able to right again this ship of sin and profit. So let's ditch the sinking vessel. Let's begin the exfiltration. Infiltration is when you sneak in. Exfiltration describes a process of transformation and redemption in which you (just as furtively) sneak out. Only this is a spiritual or inner exodus in which we barbecue the sacred cows of dogma under which we have been socialized into most of what we assume to be our human nature. Of course, by now you've also noticed that whenever the shibboleth of human nature is invoked, it is usually to explain the commission of some heinous deed. Did you hear about that guy that killed all those people? Well you know that's just human nature. Do you think there'll ever be peace in the middle east? Oh well, you know those people been killing each other forever; it's in their nature.
But what if we have been destined all along to exceed the dimensions of human nature. What if our long term developmental plan, our ontological evolution called for a transcendence, a surpassing of human nature, wouldn't that be the end of our world in some very real sense? Why do so many religious traditions and mythologies include world-ending scenarios. And almost always as a prelude to a global rebirth of the species? Maybe these mytho-religious engrams and western secularism's own growing awareness (global warming, global jihad, global depression, etc.) that the end might well be nigh are converging in ways that will force the most essential aspect of these myths into reality.
Barring death or impeachment, Barack Obama will be commander-in-chief of the largest destructive force in the history of the known universe in the year 2012. I don't have the eschatological chops to endorse or debate all that has been said and written about December 21, 2012 as the end date of the Mayan calendar and what that might portend for the rest of us. Ever since Sun Ra declared "it's after the end of the world", I have, however, been intrigued by the possibility that apocalypse might actually be survivable and whatever follows might actually be tolerable, maybe even enjoyable. Perhaps Armageddon and all the related end time myths are evidence of a reset button that came along with the idea of civilization. Maybe we knew from the beginning that once we had finally run the fatuous idea of civilization around the track a couple of times, we would be ready to move on, to reboot the species into a new ontological configuration. So, I'll send out the e-vites -- "join us for the end of the world: December 21, 2012". Sure, why not? It's close enough to seem damned urgent and far enough away (4 years and 16 days as of this revision) to feel like we can still do something about it. Not to prevent it necessarily, but to survive it and possibly thrive on the other side, not as what we have been, but what we are becoming.
The most important thing about music is its ability to prepare us to be something that we have never been. History is a chyrsallis that we are about to shed and leave behind so that we can see what has been growing under this unsightly shell of a worm. I would welcome an opportunity to talk with your school or organization about the growing allure of what jazz metaphysician Sun Ra called our alter destiny (i.e., the after-future) and the pressing necessity of its serious consideration.