Introduction

Abstract

We find ourselves poised at the outer edge of the modern age, glimpsing its limits and sensing the unknown beyond it. Life in our times is often puzzling, sometimes astonishing, and frequently overwhelming. We experience a dizzying pace daily. What we do to save time seems, paradoxically, to create even more accelerating demands on us. Electronic communication enables us to get our messages to others instantly, but it also rapidly loads our “inboxes” with demands for our attention. Communication technologies combine with rapid global transit to expose us to diverging worldviews of people around the globe—whether we leave home or not. The same sciences that have amplified our ability to describe and measure the vast expanses of space and the infinitesimal elements of the material world have vanquished our expectations of predictability. Control eludes us like never before. The more social and medical knowledge we generate, the more poverty and illness abound.² Not only are our ways of doing things coming up short, but the rate at which we face paradoxes and conundrums suggests that our current perspective is inadequate to describe our world. Nearly 15 years ago, Imparato and Harari (1994) observed that we are in “a moment of epochal transformation,” like the Enlightenment and the fall of the Roman Empire, in which change “goes to the core of what our lives and institutions are about” requiring us “to rethink … core assumptions” (p. 4).

What was scattered gathers.

What was gathered blows apart.

Heraclitus, in Haxton (2001, p. 27)

Heraclitus, you’re okay!

dian marino¹