Critical Spirituality: Towards a Revitalised Humanity

Journal of Futures Studies, May 2006, 10(4): 39 44 The human dynamism implied by the concept of Thrival is of particular concern to futurists engaged in exploring our human potential. This potential is not simply a matter of being able to chart a course and realise it; it is the ability to engage the multidimensional facets of out humanness in order to create maps to preferable futures that retain their promise and their openness. Such futures resist definition, challenging us as both individuals and societies to be our best, do our best and dream our best. The utopian nature of any such future cannot be denied, it is a future in potential only. Much critical humanism has focussed on our current world with its structures and illusions, its iniquities and inequities, its promises and false prophets and developed thorough critiques of the social order. Critical futures is rooted in this tradition, it is a rebellious humanism, which at its best offers a host of heterodox and paradoxical visions rooted in the critique of those forces that seek the closure of human potential. Ziauddin Sardar sums this position up when he says of futures studies: "It must work in opposition to the dominant politics and culture of our time, resist and critique science and technology (the most powerful agents of change and thought), globalisation (the most powerful process of homogenisation) and linear, deterministic projections (the official orthodoxy of the future) of the future itself." (Sardar 1999: 16) To challenge the hegemonic is one thing, to build an alternative future is another. Noted critical theorist Henry Giroux, in surveying the effects of critical theory, has observed that little has changed as a direct result of critique. The problem he asserts, is that critical theorists of all complexions have concentrated too much on developing a grammar of resistance and not enough on a grammar of the possible (Giroux 1986). In this too, little has changed. The disjunction between theory and practice gapes like a chasm at us over the centuries. Desiderius Erasmus made a similar observation over four hundred and fifty years ago: "If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen." (Erasmus 2005) Clearly we need something more if we are to create the conditions for Thrival in our world. Critique, as it is currently defined, is not enough. The problem, as I see it, is that the human has been left out of humanism. Humanism has been too narrowly defined as an intellectual movement (which of course it originally was) with no sense either of the somatic condition of ideology nor of its liminal nature as an expression not just of the head but also of the heart and spirit. We need to reconfigure humanism to account for these essentially human qualities if we wish to engage neohumanistically with change.