[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.
A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent. The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale. Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered. But it will depend on “ways.”
Ways are roads. We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time. While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system. Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile. Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern. His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.
In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future. If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens. Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.
