Our world is burning, breaking, turning on us. The natural and techno-environments we inhabit are errupting, fracturing, damaging our health and well-being; endangering generations to come.
Many of us who feel compelled to DO SOMETHING about these dire straits are asking what kind of humanity we must be to survive... idealistic vs relativistic, agrarian vs technochratic, liberal vs conser- vative, pragmatic vs spiritual, and so on. Or perhaps we believe a middle ground can be found between these oppositions.
But for those disillusioned by the limitations of binary activism, the choice is not between the light and shadow of our humanity but between the world we have known and the world beyond human.
What that might be is still a very open question but among many thought leaders today we can see several nascent pathways exiting the Anthropocene--the human dominated era. Three of these are:
Transrational — augmenting reason; evolving intellect by integrating unconventional forms of imagining, thinking and new ways of knowing.
Transpiritual — prioritizing the immediate reality of being over traditions and disciplines; without abandoning or negating them.
Transhistorical — there is only the present. The past and the future exist only in their relevance to this moment.
(The prefix trans here signifies both transcending and transforming.)
Do not pray exclusively to the ancestors of the land; make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through cracks with the first musical notes of worlds to come. In the mispronunciation of your bodies by the displacements of the moment, unspeakable worlds glisten.
Bayo Akomolafe