There for the looking.


One of the problems with ideologies is that they color whatever you see in such a way that everything makes too much sense. I'm in such a danger on this page, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to take my chances.

The Gaia Principle sought to show an interconnectedness of all life on earth. This and similar ideas have been around from well before the early 1970s, but it was then that James Lovelock first expressed the principle and gave it a name. There really was (is) science behind the idea, though it seemed to generate more interest among the lay public that found a scientific suggestion of wholeness reassuring in what seemed more and more to be a random world, that it did among scientists. It was apparently the view from space of the living earth that gave rise to the principle, and posters of that "whole earth" became icons for meditation on that wholeness.

Closer to home is a more literary form of inter-relatedness. In his book Interface Culture, Steven Johnson refers to the Victorian world of Charles Dickens, and the interconnectedness of the plots of his novels which seemed to touch a chord for his readers. Johnson suggests that the recurring Dickensian theme of regaining a lost family spoke to the Victorians whose world was in a constant state of instability because of the industrial revolution. He sees a parallel in today's attempts at hypertext - pointing to, and solidifying a sort of digital Gaia principle. Perhaps as we click we move from the atomization of information to an inclusiveness which soothes our fear that there is no reason in the world.



Go to: The Church of the Eternal Click.