Has God abandoned us? Left us on our own now that we've reached up and grasped the secrets of creation—cracked the genetic code, split the atom, invented new forms of intelligence and life, woven neural-like networks to connect us across the globe? I really wonder. We're constantly pushing the boundaries of the miraculous, expanding the limits of the possible. Did you hear about the paralyzed man who has his brain wired directly to a computer and can now move the cursor with his thoughts? That's a miracle. But then, so many things we now take for granted—like flying, or moving pictures coming through the air into your living room, or heart attack victims being brought back to life—were once miracles reserved for God alone. That's one of the thrilling and chilling things about being human: we're always pushing the edge, daring to know, tempting fate—and testing any limits that have been imposed upon us.

But can we go too far? Recently, I read an article that matter-of-factly noted that fairly soon, the wealthy will be able to genetically engineer their own children. The author wasn't even questioning this; he was simply wondering about its potential impact on the educational system! It really made me wonder: What will happen if we end up with two different human species—one that is enhanced by genetic engineering and nanotech robotics, and another that becomes increasingly obsolete or even disposable? And that's not even the least of the frightening futures that may be on the horizon. A friend shocked me the other day by pointing out that very soon we may have to make moral choices that, in the last century, would have been considered unfathomable crimes. What if we realize that the earth cannot support us all, and we have to choose who has to go? No one's talking about these kinds of things, he said. No one's looking at the real moral issues facing us.

It's true, isn't it? There are so many things in our rapidly changing, out-of-control world that make me uncomfortable, that I don't know what to do with, and that raise profound moral questions. Even in seemingly small day-to-day encounters with the fact of our global interconnectedness, I don't feel confident that I am alert to the implications that spin out from my actions. Do I take thirty seconds to respond to an email petition about the woman being stoned in Afghanistan? Do I stop long enough to think about what it means that the new sheets I just bought with the tag, “Made in Pakistan,” were so unbelievably cheap? I often guiltily wonder: Does being concerned about these things really make a difference—or is this an avoidance of the deeper moral implications of being a privileged Westerner in a globalizing world?

I see how easy it is to skim the surfaces of the many fleeting images that surround us. Clicking from one thing to another on the internet, the bizarre and the poignant and the horrible create one smooth, nearly impenetrable veneer. Today's top story concerns the sensational rape trial of a popular athlete; tomorrow it's Iraqi retaliation against U.S. troops; the next day it's J.Lo's breakup with her latest. Everything is equivalent, equally important or unimportant—what matters depends on what you want. Something difficult or unpleasant pops up on the screen in front of me—one click and it's gone. Why not just go shop on eBay? So I become the center of it all, picking and choosing what is significant and what is not. It's so easy for the human power of choice, the ground for moral action, to become worn out by its constant use as a mechanism to fulfill desire. What happens to us when everything that gives meaning and significance—our principles, our purpose, our relationships—becomes one more set of choices that we make? Gradually what is true and right gets reduced to our own subjective preferences, a hall of mirrors where everything reflects back on us and exists for us.

But this is a lie, a strangely lulling and narcissistically numbing lie. And no matter how lost I may become in that world of my own creation, there is always a nagging sense that can never be quelled by shopping or the next new experience, a sense that knows that how we all are living is not right, that it is urgent that something changes—and changes fast. Because beneath or behind these self-reflective surfaces, something really big is happening. We're reaching a critical choice point. Indeed, humanity may only have a fifty-fifty chance of making it through this next century, according to one of England's most distinguished scientists, the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, in his most recent book, Our Final Hour. Many of the new technologies that scientists are experimenting with not only have extraordinary potential to improve human life, but they also might cause devastation to a degree that we have never seen before. Rees feels we are too often cavalier about the power we have and ethically unprepared to use it responsibly. We have no ethical framework to prevent new forms of increasingly destructive terrorism, to stop environmental devastation, or to restrain the hubris of a scientific culture willing to take unbelievable risks with life itself.

We're at an impasse. Our moral frameworks, which are our guidelines for distinguishing right from wrong, are woefully inadequate for a world that is becoming more technologically sophisticated and more globally interdependent. The effect of these technological, economic, social, and political changes has been completely unpredictable and unprecedented—bringing us face-to-face with different life circumstances and conflicting worldviews around the globe. In the process, almost without being aware of it, we've come to the point where the moral teachings of the great religious traditions, which have guided humanity for centuries, no longer seem to have the scope to help us cope with these global complexities. Most of us also recognize that an unquestioned belief in the promise of modernity—the belief that science and technology will fix everything—is not really going to resolve the moral dilemmas we now face. It should be no surprise, then, to realize that the vast majority of us spiritually-minded persons in this postmodern age don't have an ethic to tell us how to do right by an ever-accelerating world in conflict. How could we? Humanity has never been at this point before where we have the power to determine the fate of life itself. The context in which we make choices has become so much bigger, so much more complex; it demands that we develop some new way of determining right from wrong that takes us beyond the safety of tradition, beyond the promise of modernity, and even beyond the hard-won freedoms of our postmodern culture.

OUTGROWING THE PAST
How would one even begin to think about creating a new morality? It's not a question that has ever concerned many people. Historically, one's views were either handed down from God (or someone like the Buddha) or were developed through philosophical debate in the dusty halls of the academy. One's moral perspective didn't really exist separately from one's religious, spiritual, or grand philosophical worldview, because they were seen as two sides of the same coin. The sense of what is right or wrong—Is it okay to marry more than one person? Is it ever justified to lie?—came from how God's word or the great philosophy of the time was interpreted and translated into guidelines for daily life. One's moral code was grounded in the belief system of one's culture, cementing the bond of shared understanding within a particular community or group. As a result, moral frameworks both shaped the contours of personal relationship and marked the boundary around a group of people. But in our increasingly secular postmodern age, the spiritual has become divided from the moral. We've pulled the two apart as more and more of us create our own personalized forms of spiritual pursuit.

Where does that leave us with morality? These days, the very word seems outdated, a leftover from a more rigid and uptight time. Probably for most of us, morality still means nuns with rulers—all of those “shoulds” and “shouldn'ts” about our personal lives, particularly our sex lives, that we have struggled to free ourselves from. Our first moral lessons most likely came from memorizing and internalizing sets of rules like the Ten Commandments. And that can certainly conjure up some rather unpleasant memories—the “time out” corner, priests and confession, all of the ways that adult society tried to get us to conform when we were children. The point was to bring us into alignment with something larger than our childish impulses. We were being taught to distinguish between right and wrong so that we could live with other people and be part of our family and community.

But we've outgrown the morality of childhood. Just as each of us has grown up and gone out beyond the snug boundaries of family and schoolyard to a wilder and woollier world, for us collectively, the moral teachings of yesteryear are at least two sizes too small. While they were radically new when Moses first brought those two stone tablets down the mountain, the Ten Commandments' guidelines for human relationship are now as familiar to us as our mothers' faces. Who could really argue with the basic principles of honoring one's parents, being truthful, taking care of one's neighbor, not stealing or killing? The moral codes of the great religious traditions provided a blueprint to guide the development of family and community life, articulating the premises for creating a peaceful, homogeneous enclave. Over time, they became the basis for the legal and social infrastructure of the modern nation by creating a shared morality that made possible a national identity beyond one's religious affiliation.

But we have moved on. The reality of diversity—that one nation needed to be home to many different identity groups—meant that we grew beyond a one-size-fits-all set of values. The experiment in liberation that started in the sixties and launched a new postmodern era has taken us beyond the buttoned-up ethos of traditional morality. This shift into postmodernism woke us from the dream that the ideal was to conform, to create a homogeneous culture. This new view valued the fact that our world is pluralistic, filled with persons who think and act differently than we do. And now, as the boundaries of community and country are disappearing into a larger and more complex global whole, we need a new way to determine right and wrong that can take into account that we live in a world that is a welter of differences and that is in danger of extinction by our own hands.

A SHIFT IN MORAL GROUND
It's often difficult to see the ground on which we're standing. For many of us interested in spirituality today, the postmodern ground that we tread on is so familiar that we can barely distinguish the salient features of the terrain. But if we take a closer look at how we got here, at the transition from modernity to postmodernity, the ground of our current morality becomes easier to see.

What was it like before the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, women's and gay liberation, and environmental and animal rights activism? Perhaps you remember, or you grew up as the transition was happening, as I did, or you have just wondered if the glimpses that you've caught in the weird light of black-and-white television reruns could possibly have any relation to reality. No matter what your vantage point, it doesn't take much to recognize that the first half of the twentieth century was a different world. Think about it: Did you know that television shows only allowed married couples to be seen sleeping in twin beds? Or that a “divorcée” was a woman of very questionable virtue? Not long ago, homosexuality was considered a disease as well as a public menace. Negroes sat at the back of the bus; Chinamen owned hand laundries. This was just how things were—no harm intended. A man's home was his castle. Men wore hats and women wore gloves, girdles, garters, and hose. Trying to buy or sell a condom could get you arrested. And a woman needed her husband's permission to get her own credit. Everyone knew that science was producing wonder drugs that would cure cancer and the common cold, and that it was developing ways to feed the world by getting rid of pests and improving the soil—“better living through chemicals” was the slogan of DuPont, the company that produced DDT. It seemed so obvious that life was getting better and better every day. Science had even improved on mother's milk by inventing infant formula! If you did your fair share, worked hard, and raised your family to reach the promised “good life,” then you were a good and moral person.

How far away now is that trusting moral universe in which policemen and politicians were considered public servants and everyone had his or her place? The liberation movements of the late twentieth century dramatically changed the ground beneath our feet. We really have been freed from those limiting notions of what it meant to be a good man or a good woman. In the process, we assumed the autonomy to create our individualized versions of the “good life.” To steal a line from a seventies children's song, we became free to be you and me—not only psychologically or socially, but also morally.

And yet, strangely, this greater freedom that granted us greater autonomy and self-determination hasn't provided us with a way to discriminate between right and wrong in relationship to each other and to all that is happening around us. Why? Because postmodernity's moral ground is limited to the individual self. You see, the struggle for emancipation and equality in the sixties was inspired by a profound concern that the egalitarian ideals of democracy were being betrayed, denying the vast majority of people the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Postmodernity upholds a radical egalitarianism that values a plurality of views, where no one view is better than the rest. And so, our moral ground shifted from a shared belief that doing the right thing would bring about the “good life” to a shared belief in the sanctity of the individual to do and develop as he or she pleases. How, then, do we answer that all-important moral question: What is the right thing to do? The answer used to be simple: Whatever is right for your family, community, or country. Today the answer is: It's up to you because no one can tell anyone else what's right for them. What's right for me may not be right for you. Rather than holding some higher shared value, right and wrong become shape shifters as we each respond to the endless play of choices and perspectives that make up postmodern life. Our moral evaluations then too easily become dependent on our often changing personal preferences, on what we want and how we feel.

Morality thereby became relative, no longer resting on universal principles or on some higher value, such as the good of the community. And without being grounded in some vision or value that brings us together for the sake of something larger than ourselves, our moral sense can be co-opted by narcissism. Ethics get confused with personal fulfillment: What's right is what's good for me. When preferences rather than principles guide our behavior and judgments, we find ourselves standing at the center of our own individual moral universe. The phrase “postmodern morality,” then, is almost an oxymoron—because morality is not about the self in isolation but only about the self in relationship to others and the larger world. When care for the self is our most fundamental operating principle, then it is very hard to see clearly and respond to what is around us. The world in all of its glory and complexity becomes merely a reflection of what we're attracted to and repulsed by. And on this slippery slope of moral relativism, there is no way to make sense of the bewildering complexity facing us, which makes it more and more difficult to determine the right course of action.

Postmodernity attempted to solve the problem of inequality and injustice by creating a level playing field for all of us—and at the same time, it flattened any moral value higher than the desires of the self for us to be beholden to. No longer do most of us at the cutting edge of culture have the promise of God's salvation or the nation's “good life” as the frame for our choices and relationships. Fear of punitive fundamentalisms, the horror of ultranationalism, and a general mistrust of any ideology or theory that claims that it works for everyone have led us to value difference for its own sake, without having any way to unite in a common sense of purpose that would create a new ethic for action. Yet, as a result, “the most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence,” writes Andrew Delbanco in The Real American Dream. In other words, we are desperate for a vision that would connect us to some value beyond ourselves. But the Catch-22 is that it is exactly this larger purpose that has been rendered suspect by the postmodern mindset.

Longing for something bigger to give life purpose and yet suspicious of the very thing we long for, we find ourselves caught in a pervasive sense of irony that is the hallmark of postmodern culture. And by irony, I'm not simply referring to a sarcastic tone of voice or a particular kind of humor. More than just an individual attitude, it is a culture-wide expression of this literally self-centered moral relativism. “For most people most of the time, including intellectuals,” philosophy teacher and Harper's magazine contributing editor Thomas de Zengotita told me, “the absence of credible universal principles or apprehensions leads to irony and apathy.” In fact, he noted, “This is a deep cultural manifestation of profound vacuum.” The individual experience of that vacuum is the ironic stance. Being gun-shy about any larger meaning makes having an investment in any meaning suspect: “You have quotes around everything you say to distance yourself from everything you mean.” The painful irony, though, is that even in seeking individual fulfillment, which is the only purpose that moral relativism legitimizes, we never reach anything that is truly fulfilling. Because we each know that our small-minded desires are too flimsy to engage us deeply in life, we find ourselves being ironic about ourselves, too wise to take ourselves seriously and yet not wise enough to risk taking life seriously.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
Where do we go from here? In the tension and tumult of our globalizing world, finding a higher perspective from which we can make sense of differences is key to discovering how to do the right thing. Living with a pluralism of perspectives and views, we have developed an expertise at taking different positions, understanding their relative value. But we rarely go deeply into anything—the restless seeking of experience doesn't let us linger long—so we stop at a superficial understanding, thinking that we get all there is to know. The fact that our facile postmodern minds can understand and appreciate so many different views makes it difficult to distinguish between a passing familiarity and a real understanding that translates into a new way of thinking and acting. “That's a difficult thing to do, you know, to distinguish between what you know and what you don't,” Yasuhiko Kimura, evolutionary philosopher and chairman/president of Vision-in-Action, told me. “But that is what is necessary. The most difficult transition in consciousness, I think, is from this pluralist, egalitarian perspective to a more integrative one because those of us who have reached this pluralistic consciousness are so intelligent, so well-educated, and so clever.” And he concluded that we “actually are so clever that we outsmart ourselves,” assuming we have already attained the higher perspective that we so desperately need to develop.

Hyper-aware of the irony of our own condition and readily believing that we're more developed than we are, we're too smart by half. Postmodernity has brought us to a kind of cultural adolescence: self-involved, sure of ourselves, ironic, and thinking that we know a lot more than we do. We need to reach a real moral maturity—to discover a way of determining what is right and wrong that is not based in our small-minded needs and desires. That takes being honest about where we are and what we're doing. So, first, can we stop, temporarily put aside our overactive minds that grasp everything too quickly, and pause long enough to realize that we may not be quite as evolved as we'd like to be? Slowing down, there's often the strange recognition that holding ourselves at the center of our own moral universe creates a seamless and impenetrable film between ourselves and the rushing reality around us, making everything seem at a slight distance, not quite real. By giving so much weight to our personal experience, we alienate ourselves from the larger whole that we are a part of. But maybe a new morality can start with this, grappling with the ironic unreality that we've imposed on a very real and increasingly dangerous situation. “Irony is not really an attitude,” said Zengotita. “Irony's a kind of cultural condition. If you want to get past postmodernism, you have to go through the irony.” What does that entail? Perhaps it starts by being willing to engage with the actuality of the enormous changes that are happening in the careening, chaotic world beyond the small sphere of our personal concerns.

“All the religions and all the peoples of the world are undergoing the most radical, far-reaching, and challenging transformation in history,” writes Ewert Cousins, Fordham Professor of Theology, Emeritus. “The stakes are high: the very survival of life on our planet; either chaos and destruction, or creative transformation and the birth of a new consciousness. Forces, which have been at work for centuries, have in our day reached a crescendo that has the power to draw the human race into a global network. . . .” We are at the edge of peril, but the same dynamics that have brought us too close for comfort also offer the potential for a moral vision that's based on our interconnectedness and that gives us a way to make sense of the significant differences among us. Riane Eisler, author of the classic The Chalice and the Blade, spoke of this potential transformation as the fulfillment of the “human yearning for caring connection, for freedom. By freedom I don't mean the freedom to do whatever you damn please. I'm talking about freedom to flourish, freedom to develop, freedom to have mutually caring and satisfying relations.” And, she emphasized, “If it isn't global, it isn't going to work.”

Two enormous forces are at work: an evolutionary movement toward a freely developing global humanity and the continued momentum of destruction, isolation, and narcissism. But this isn't only a problem that exists out there in the world—it's also a dilemma that we each carry within us. Those of us living in such privileged circumstances in this care-torn world have been brought to this crux: Do we choose to continue setting our moral gauge according to our own desires, or do we look outward and struggle with the enormity of the situation we are facing? The karmic weight of human history bears down on each of us now as we postmoderns, with our extraordinary capacity for thought and reflection, have to make a choice to take us beyond the selfishness and conflict that has been so much the story of human history. But how do we choose? What do we do? We have to use all of the capacities that we uniquely possess as human beings: our power to think, to care, and to choose—to reach for a mature moral perspective.

AN EVOLUTIONARY ETHIC
Reaching for a higher moral vision, striving to take more into our view and to become more conscious, implies a recognition of our evolutionary potential. “The evolution of the universe produced what we call life,” Kimura said. “The evolution of life produced conscious beings like humans; the evolution of conscious beings is by nature the evolution of consciousness.” As he observed, “Thinking is the prime mover of the evolution of consciousness” because it literally transforms our understanding of reality. And to create a new moral vision, we privileged postmoderns need to develop a new way of thinking to meet our changing reality because we are now left with a moral view that idealizes diversity but has no way to take action and discriminate within that diversity. The conflicts unleashed by a changing and globalizing world are demanding that we stretch to think in new ways and that we embrace a larger, global context for our actions. Such a global moral context would involve the fullest recognition of our profound unity in the most extraordinary project there is—the evolution of consciousness through the continued development of all human beings.

In this Kimura finds the ground for a new morality, for what he calls an “evolutionary ethics” that gives us a new capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. “What is good is a way of living, of thinking and acting, that is conducive to evolution,” he said. “And what is bad is counter-evolutionary—that way of living, thinking, and acting that causes evolutionary stagnation, truncation, or devolutionary reversal.” This critical distinction is not based upon individual preferences; in other words, it is not morally relative. Instead, the idea is to root the ethic in an empirical reality that comes from “scientific research into human development and the spiritual traditions.” This research shows “an unmistakable pattern of evolution in psychology, behavior, value systems, and what we call consciousness.” As Kimura explained, this pattern reveals that “'more evolved' means that your consciousness, your recognition and awareness, includes more of the universe than others' do. The more evolved you are, the more of the universe is in your view.” In other words, the more encompassing one's worldview, the higher one's level of development. And for a world at the edge of crisis, this is critically important. Perhaps an evolutionary perspective gives us a ground for making moral choices because it can help us to distinguish right action from wrong by determining what best supports individual and collective development.

Kimura stressed the importance of bringing this evolutionary view into a “mainstream conversation.” The more of us who appreciate how this perspective can bring order to the plurality of views that are so much a part of our lives, the more we can use evolution/development as an overarching framework to determine the right course of action when faced with competing interests and possibilities. “Humanity at large does not know how to dialogue together, how to work together, or how to develop together in the face of disagreement,” he said. “This is one of the major problems of the world. The dynamics of an evolutionary co-development requires a sufficient degree of disagreement, of diversity, as well as an alignment in the quest for coherent, continued development.”

What might such a developmental perspective look like in practice? How does it help us to evolve beyond our postmodern view? “The cure for postmodern narcissism is activism,” Darcy Riddell, an environmental activist with ForestEthics and leadership trainer at the Hollyhock Leadership Institute in British Columbia, told me unequivocally. I spoke with Riddell to get a sense of how an evolutionary ethic enables us to confront the complexity we face in the world. Riddell and her colleagues worked for years to bring about a miracle in the Great Bear Rainforest—preventing logging in some of the last pristine rainforest in North America. Grappling with the competing interests of corporations, loggers, union representatives, local government officials, and other ecologists demanded that the environmentalists change from being “bellringers of doom to architects of transformation.” So, rather than simply taking a morally superior position about the dire necessity to protect the environment, they recognized the need for each party—including their traditional adversaries, the logging concerns—to be able to develop and transform. Riddell insisted that “saving the planet was the priority and that everyone's real needs be met. So, for example, we would not allow the loggers to cut the first-growth forests, but they had to have a way to live, so we negotiated for them to have access to second-growth forests.” Riddell explained that she brings an evolutionary ethic “undercover, in a covert way” to her work, recognizing that there are differences in the values held by individuals and groups, characterized by varying degrees of inclusiveness of perspective. The point, she said, is “not to use this knowledge to pigeonhole people but to be able to truly stand in their shoes and understand their needs.” As a practicing Buddhist, Riddell noted that “a strong spiritual ground is a necessity for real transformation to be part of the process.” She called her integral evolutionary perspective “heart-centered with strategy” because it brings together the deepest spiritual recognition of Oneness with a knowledge of development to create the potential for trust and understanding between the environmentalists and their opponents. While this was far from easy or quick—often requiring governmental and market pressures to force movement—the results were surprising. Not only were eighty-eight valleys of pristine rainforest in B.C. not logged, but a senior vice president of a logging company quit his job to join a wildlife organization. A higher moral outcome was the result: the rainforest was saved, and a context was created within which all of the parties had the opportunity to evolve.

Recognizing the desperate urgency of our global situation can move us out of the ironic world of self-centered isolation—“taking the mind out of the head and literally investing it in the world,” as Zengotita sees it. Whether or not we are activists, we can still grapple with the crisis that we collectively face. To do this only depends on our capacity to care, to look beyond the small enclosed space of the separate self, and to engage intellectually and emotionally with the full complexity of our current situation—its potential for doom or deliverance. “You know, it's a blast furnace of complexity,” Robert Richards, former Vice President of the Integral Institute, declared. “And I'm not talking about my little life. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about rain forest disuse, or AIDS in Africa—when I zoom out to there, I go, 'Holy God! This is almost unthinkable!'” But the fact that it is literally unthinkable and ungraspable opens the potential for something new, something evolutionary that is beyond what we can know or imagine. Richards heard an insistent call from the depth of himself, from his conscience—“mutate or die”—which very well could be a motto for our times. “I don't know who's doing the urging,” said Richards, “but I feel the insistence of it. Viscerally, there's nothing quite so insistent as this impulse to evolve.”

What is this impulse to evolve? What is this that awakens in the heart a concern for the unthinkably tragic and glorious whole that we are a part of? Sri Aurobindo, the twentieth-century philosopher and sage, had an intuition of this when he wrote: “There is in the cosmos, in the collectivity, in the individual, a rooted instinct or belief in its own perfectibility, a constant drive towards an ever-increasing and more adequate and more harmonious self-development nearer to the secret truth of things.” This is what we each have to find—the drive of the truth within us, an inner imperative that calls us to act for the sake of something far larger than ourselves. The power of our postmodern moment is that, despite the fact that we have been squandering our extraordinary capacity to think and to reflect by being so self-focused, we are beginning to glimpse the tremendous evolutionary potential of human consciousness. Even just in that dawning recognition, a new moral view can be awakened. A world at the breaking point calls on each of us to stretch, to reach for the mind-boggling possibility that human consciousness could give birth to a new morality that will show us the way to literally transform the world. And facing the enormity of the task—the sheer impossibility of it, the absolute necessity that it happen, the cry from the heart that says it is, in fact, so very real—brings us to the edge of that new morality itself. While as yet this is a morality we do not know, it can be kindled within us to continually evolve to meet the transcendent demand of the human spirit for greater freedom and higher unity, realized on this earth in our bodies and through our souls.