The Future Belongs to the Creative.
Behind the frantic momentum of this 21st century, I believe, lies a simple, increasingly strained refusal to face the depth of our uncertainty: the total nothingness at the bottom that repels reason. Or, as Joseph Conrad wrote: "that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads." My personal meditation and study convince me that history's craving, hostility, delusion; these are broken attempts to hold together a de-situated self in a de-situated world. We are not evil; we are sick from the hopelessness, and absurdity of our existential predicament. When we harm others, we are like conduits passing on the sickness, and the suffering. It is an ancient, unsatisfying habit—a futile, misdirected craving for permanence in an impermanent world. But what if the final meaning is impermanence itself?
For various good reasons we should abandon neither science nor myth; but, no STEM, or TOE (Theory of Everything), or hopeful fantasy can ultimately save us from this condition. But then, what can?
The temptation for post-industrial societies today, in the face of postmodern fragmentation, is to retreat into a defensive “high ground” of vertical, monolithic hierarchies, which by necessity demand a situated self within a situated context. Yet post-industrial societies are increasingly just the opposite: they are self-organized, horizontal, complex networks. Of course, the teacher’s responsibility is to pass on the community’s collective wisdom and knowledge, but the artist’s responsibility is to face whatever confusion and uncertainty the age offers up and make sense of it for the community at large. The artist in me believes (ironically, I admit), that it now makes sense to suggest that the most appropriate skills for negotiating the demands of post-modernity are not the Master Games of Reason in search of objectivity, but rather the Infinite Games of Creativity in order to reaffirm the innate moral integrity of subjectivity. Modernity is done. And I propose that we now live in The Age of Novelty; an age that demands an on-going mutual negotiation of self and meaning, that demands an unprecedented level of personal freedom, originality, and creativity; that demands the infinite game, in order to expose one's ceaseless growth, of the dynamic self, of the dynamic society, that has yet to be.
Each moment is an infinite game, where external and internal reality flow seamlessly into one another, a de-situated silence that provides an indispensable condition to the mind's, and societies, own originality, a silence that, I believe, can deconstruct craving, hostility, delusion: the broken attempts to situate what is, essentially, a de-situated world. All creative acts, and all products of creative acts, regardless of how bleak, signify a faith in humanity: a faith that by engaging in the infinite game we partake most fully in the world’s purpose; which is not to create final meaning, which is not to arrive at some a final conclusion, but to participate in the novelty engendered by our very de-situatedness, and play for the sake of playing, itself, and for the continued evolution of the process itself.
--- excerpt from my essay “Infinite Games in the Age of Novelty”
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