Missing the New Renaissance? No Room at the In?
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 8 Nov 2010
Anthony Judge – TRANSCEND Media Service
Produced on the occasion of a conference of the Scientific and Medical Network to launch a compilation: A New Renaissance: transforming science, spirit and society (2010).
Introduction
This is a reflection on Renaissance, especially on the New Renaissance, long awaited and on which many hopes have been placed. This can only be a continuing exercise, following a trail of previous efforts (Challenges of Renaissance: suggestive pattern of concerns in the light of the birth metaphor, 2003).
The questions asked here are to do with the ways on which one might engage fruitfully with that event, if only as an exercise of imagination — which may well be the key to enabling whatever it constitutes as an archetype cherished by many. Imagination may also be vital to exploring the necessary complexity it must embody to be adequate to the challenges of the present time, as previously suggested (Imagining the Real Challenge and Realizing the Imaginal Pathway of Sustainable Transformation, 2007).
Framed as a “reflection” however, such an exploration is also an exercise in mirroring and self-reflexivity. It is insufficient to any engagement with its potential significance to approach it either purely objectively or purely subjectively, each having its limitations. It might in fact be an integral characteristic of an emergent New Renaissance that it transcends such a polar modality from which discourse and governance suffer so unfruitfully. There are few disciplines which enable such integrative transcendence. Hence the case for aesthetic playfulness, as previously argued (Enacting Transformative Integral Thinking through Playful Elegance, 2010). However in this mode there is also the archetypal challenge of “stepping into” a reflective mirror (Stepping into, or through, the Mirror: embodying alternative scenario patterns, 2008).
Structured as the following exploration is in terms of questions, there is then a case for initially presenting the challenge to comprehension in terms of an adaptation of the classic poem of Edward Lear (The Akond of Swat). This humorous, “nonsense verse” offers an appropriate counterpoint to the “seriousness” upheld as characteristic of a “New Renaissance”. The same poem, adapted otherwise, was used to reframe humorously the desperate trillion dollar quest for the most wanted person on the planet, Osama bin Laden (Engaging with Osama bin Laden in Swat, 2009).
PLEASE CONTINUE READING IN THE ORIGINAL – LAETUS IN PRAESENS
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 8 Nov 2010.
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