Joel Garreau believes that the eruption of new religions shaped by upheaval will change everything:
We are turning environmentalism into an elaborate moral narrative. We are doing the same for neurology. And possibly globalism. This makes me wonder whether we are creating the greatest eruption of religion in centuries, if not millennia — an epoch comparable to the Great Awakening, if not the Axial Age. If so, this will change everything.Financially, politically, climatically and technologically, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts. Yet humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation. We will always fill such a vacuum with meaning.
Think of the constellations in the night sky. Humans eagerly connect dots and come up with the most elaborate — even poetic — tales, adorning them with heroes and myths, rather than tolerate randomness. The desire to believe goes way back in evolutionary history.
I was not expecting this kind of conclusion:
If we came to believe deeply that there is a value somehow in the way things are connected — the web of life, perhaps — is that the next Enlightenment?The importance of creating such a commonly held framework is that without it, we have no way to move forward together. How can we agree on what must be done if we do not have in common an agreement on what constitutes the profoundly important?