On the face of it, the sign attached to a Princes Street pedestrian crossing seems to make rather a bold claim: ‘press the button to access a glimpse of planetary consciousness’.
I tried it, and pressing the button resulted only in a yellow ‘Wait’ sign lighting up, and a short pause before the usual little green man and an urgent peeping.
It all seems a far cry from James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis of an evolving, self-regulating integration of Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and pedosphere.
And an even further cry from Pierre de Chardin’s speculation that the Earth is a coherent and purposive entity in the process of evolving a new higher form of consciousness.
Leaning towards an explanation
It makes more sense, perhaps, if we lean towards another definition which, broadly speaking, states that individuals have more in common with each other and the Earth – a planetary society – than they do with each other as arbitrarily divided into classes, tribes, nations and states.
We can glimpse part of this commonality in the shopping hordes waiting to cross Hanover and Frederick Streets at weekends. United in pursuit of retail gratification, pausing at the kerb, our numbers swelling, our expectation growing, the physical tension palpable, we are no longer isolated individuals but a combined force of nature. And then that moment of release when we cross together – usually but not always at the prompting of a little green man.
In that irresistible, half-conscious attraction to the void or the wheel arches of buses, we are momentarily at one with each other and migrating lemmings, bursting clouds, penguins launching themselves en masse into the Southern Ocean, earthquakes, starlings murmuring without a single thought but for the elasticity of light and air.
At least, I think that’s what this sign is talking about.
Personally, Saturday mornings on Princes Street, I’m with Groucho Marx: ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member’.—AM
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