Coming Home: The Birth & Transformation of the Planetary Era

by Kelly Sean M.

Our ecologically mediated interdependence is mirrored at the level of geopolitics.

We can at least say this much: Our aspiration toward a planetary wisdom must involve the renunciation of certainty—or at least of that kind of certainty that cannot countenance contradiction and knows truth only by exclusion. “Contemporary reflection,” writes Morin, “must begin with the consciousness of the limits of knowledge, not so as to enclose itself within these limits, but in order to become a sentinel of the unknown and a satellite of the inconceivable.”181 It is a question, as Cusa saw so well half-a-millennium ago now, of a learnèd ignorance, of including the unknown within our knowing. This wise ignorance is not only learned—informed as it is by the many and complex insights we have had occasion to consider throughout these pages—but must be learned.

It is a coming to know that we don’t know, yet also a growing knowledge-as-intimacy with the unknown, an encountering of what ever overflows the grasp of the certainty-seeking ego. Such a wisdom, while it relativizes the ego, does not simply negate or obliterate it! —since it is only from the perspective of the finite ego that knowledge of ignorance, or consciousness of the unconscious, can arise in the first place. The vision of such a wisdom is keenest in the chiaroscuro between night and day.

Still, from the simultaneously open and bounded perspective of that learned ignorance by which the new spirit must be guided, we must face the possibility that the Planetary Era “may ... come to naught before it has even begun to bloom. Perhaps humankind’s struggles may lead only to death and ruin.” Morin adds, “However, the worst is not yet certain, and the game is not yet over. In the absence of any certainty or even probability, there is the possibility of a better world.”188

In the second diagram, titled “The Principal Arc as Middle Term between Origin and Goal” (page 163) we see the previous arc, dominated by the rise of the Solar principle, as the middle term or threshold between the Lunar arc: from (the unknown) Origin to the First Axial Period, and the arc of the marriage of the Solar and Lunar: from the Second Axial Period to (equally unknown) Goal. As per Korotayev, prior to the first Axial Period, objective factors (geography, ecology) predominate over subjective (culture), whereas the reverse is true during the Solar arc (where in our own day, most notably, the fate of the biosphere itself will largely be determined by human choices). In a manner already anticipated by the countercultural inflections of the previous cycles, the Second Axial Period points to a transcendence and transformation of the relation between the objective and the subjective, to a trans jective state (for lack of a better word) that mirrors the sacred marriage of the Lunar and Solar. 1. The Principal Arc with Spiral 2. The Principal Arc as Middle Term between Origin and Goal