7) One of the most important questions you ask is “Who gets to decide how society transforms? On what basis?” Well, it shouldn’t be the arrogant idealists who represent what Thomas Sowell called “The Anointed”, because they’re so sure they know what is best for everyone, and all we need to do is put them in charge. And of course we wouldn’t end up with another Soviet Union, would we? Nobody gets to “decide how society transforms” – nobody knows everybody else, or themselves, thoroughly enough. We all decide, collectively, through individual actions in our lives and democratic actions in our societies. Or you promote hell, even if you didn’t intend to. You promote the tyranny of the self-righteous.
8) “Younger generations may in some sense perceive what is happening more clearly (consider Greta Thunberg lambasting global leaders at the UN).” Come on, get real. I like Greta – she is sincere and was, and I hope is still, well-intentioned. But she was a teenage girl when that happened. Teenagers have raging hormones and an operatic level of emotion and idealism – it is an enormously significant time for religious conversion, falling in love, becoming some particular “identity”, and committing suicide. This is not “perceiving what is happening more clearly” – it is just powerful emotional commitment, in the absence of perspective and sufficient life experience. Greta told us over five years ago that we’d all be finished in five years’ time. People are now talking about the “urgency” of the “crisis” and how we have ten or twenty years to sort things out. Well, in thirty years’ time, if we haven’t been wiped out by Artificial Intelligence, I imagine Greta will still be here – and we’ll still have problems – and people with appropriate technical knowledge will be helping us to make more progress in sorting them out – and more teenagers will be telling us we’re doomed, possibly for some completely different reason.
9) So there is “more to that today than just trusting the elders”. What does that mean, that an intelligent and educated person should not listen to someone who is just as intelligent and probably even more educated and certainly more experienced, because none of that has any value? Let’s just throw them all away and let the woke and insufficiently informed take over, shall we? That would hardly be a wise suggestion, would it? (I agree that over-simplified sentence is contradicted by some of your following paragraph – but it still reeks of the idealistic youth rather than the sage.)
10) I agree that our metaphysics is on the verge of a hopefully significant change, supported by interpretations from cognitive neuroscience as well as philosophical approaches.
11) “Hyper-agency”. I understand this concept is pushed as (a) part of resentment about the way philanthropists operate, as if they should give the money to The Anointed who would know how to use it “better”, and (b) as part of the desire for “the transition to socialism”. No kidding. So now the radical left agenda comes more into the open. And “At its most successful, Extinction Rebellion showed signs of hyper-agency.” If you want to make the world better, you recognize that Extinction Rebellion are idealistic fools, and often old enough to know better. You don’t make the environment better by holding up traffic, including ambulances and fire engines and doctors on their way to emergency calls, or by gluing yourself to a road or a window. You get educated, you get qualified, in something relating to how human society obtains and uses energy, and then you work with your knowledge to make things better. If you think you make anything even a tiny bit better by wrecking the innocent enjoyment of a competition for snooker or dancing or horse-racing or whatever, then you need to find a more constructive way of spending your time, instead of just drawing attention to your narcissistic idealistic socially useless self. You take responsibility instead. That’s a lot harder.
12) Those who would be angels can learn from the mafia. Of course this is stated “partly in jest”, except that it isn’t, because it is “totally in earnest”. We need to “improve our relationship to power”. Well, write to your MP. Go into politics, whether locally or nationally. Exercise your vote. We have a relationship to power. But allegedly we need to “cooperate and compete more wisely,” which also means “more shrewdly”. Oh, yes, sure it does. How sneaky does that sound? Does it sound like just using freedom of speech and democratic processes? That means “getting beyond heroic assumptions.” Well, there’s a modernist statement for you. Being heroic means facing challenge and adversity, and overcoming it with ingenuity, courage, and strength (which does not have to mean physical strength). Any society that leaves that behind is lost, it might as well lie down and die. It just happens to sound to the woke like “toxic masculinity”, rather than totally admirable characteristics of any human being.
So your metaphysics are good; your hearts may often be in the right place, although you could have said that about a bunch of Bolsheviks in 1917, before the horrors of the Gulag and a society built on lies and mistrust. Your psychological and political perspectives, however, appear to have been, just like academia, thoroughly corrupted by post-modernist thought processes and politics – and that statement can NOT be made about Iain McGilchrist or John Vervaeke.
Read it once, read it twice, read it out loud to my spouse. "Premise number...." No wonder we can't be nourished by sound bites You are laying out the warp and weft of it. We are breathing/Presencing with the Gestalt of it, the Matter With Things essence of this Now Moment. I am rolling "Democratizing hyperactivity" around on my tongue.
I do not at the moment feel that this can be completely trusted. It is always the case that humans – me as well as the people at Perspectiva - see things through filters of perception, and these result in their own interpretations and agendas; interpretations which may be at best incomplete, or arrived at through political or social biases, and at worst just thoroughly mistaken, even if through naivete and good intentions. Let me be a bit devil’s-advocate and pick some phrases out of this post for comment:
1) “supported by the John Templeton Foundation”. It seems to me they might be in for a bit of a culture shock themselves, as their agenda for blurring divisions between religion and science seems to be fundamentally from a Judeo-Christian perspective – as if “behind the scenes” we’ll surely get to accept the authority of the Bible after all, even if we interpret it symbolically rather than literally. The newer approaches to a new religion/science reconciliation are surely generally from a Taoist-inspired philosophical angle (e.g. Vervaeke and McGilchrist), and are indeed about the reality and significance of consciousness – but not about some benevolent deliberate Father-God in the sky. (Which would appear to be the Templeton preference, from their support for people arguing for intelligent design – as just a disguised “it’s not evolution, God did it on purpose” – and for looking into the efficacy of prayer, which has been repeatedly discredited when properly and objectively tested.)
2) “Collapse is inevitable.” No, it isn’t. Surely that is just a “message”, which is potentially just destructive and nihilistic, not at all helpful. I feel it is the wrong message to promote.
3) I do not believe “nation-states, the rule of law and the so-called free market” are “unable to adapt”. They are adapting all the time. That includes to the changing climate situation, even if that does not seem to be as fast as, or in the ways that, certain people think they ought. These people and organisations are not a God, and not in possession of sufficient or complete information to make better judgements. (They might sometimes alter certain beliefs or attitudes about humans and inevitability and the future, and human priorities, if, say, they read “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles Mann, and “Apocalypse Never” by former climate activist Michael Shellenberger, and spent a couple of hours listening to Bjorn Lomborg on YouTube.) Apart from that, what is the implied advice here? That we start dismantling nation-states? You could do that without massive bloodshed and the takeover by thugs, warlords and totalitarians, could you? Or that we should not hold “the rule of law” as one of the handful of the most important principles that humanity has ever created, because it’s no longer fit for purpose? Seriously? Isn’t it one of our few guarantees against the “increase in authoritarian control” which you say you fear?
4) I am very wary of the expression of confidence in coming collapse, and of the disapproval of the alleged “competition within and between elites”. This sounds like a pseudo-Communist flattening-out preference, firstly sounding a bit resentful of “they’ve got more than I have”, whether power or money or whatever, secondly ignoring the necessity for and long evolutionary history of dominance hierarchies of competence without which we are certainly lost, and thirdly failing to remember how the human attempts to do this have left us with the bloody legacy of the 20th century and the ongoing horror of North Korea. That does not mean there may not be considerable collapse, of course – neither you nor I have the faintest idea what the world could possibly be like in six months’ time, let alone years from now. But we should work for ourselves and the world in the belief that it will go on and on, and that we can improve it even in little ways – not that it’s all going to hell so who cares. I quite agree there are changes which could be in line with the axial revolution, but we could perhaps try and manage these as helpfully and cooperatively as possible, and then the changes in consciousness will inevitably improve the laws and systems we work within – just as Christianity, whatever its illusions, ended up giving us human rights and freedom from slavery. An improvement in spirituality is not equivalent to a world-wide civilizational collapse. They’re two different movies, and only one of them is a disaster movie. So I do approve of your expression of the interest in understanding the relationship between “systems, souls and society”. That’s not the same as maybe supporting people who want to effectively throw away society because they “know better” than all those millions of people who have been building it over hundreds and hundreds of years.
5) You might precede it by “at the risk of generalising”, but I don’t think that even begins to justify the prejudiced radical-left propaganda that follows it – the “capitalist democracies” are “not serving the common good” – this is despite all those statistics, is it, about how they have been responsible for the greatest increases in general wealth, lifespan, healthcare, and decades of peace between just about every single democratic capitalist nation-state? Really?
6) “radically altering society at the whims of a billionaire class”. Oh, honestly. This “billionaire class” is the movie bad guy is it, the evil person in his Frankensteinian Castle, and does not include, say, the charitable and medical successes of the Gates Foundation, or the contributions of Elon Musk, not just towards a possible interplanetary future but towards the environment itself by accelerating the development of electric cars? Is it perhaps meant to be Mark Zuckerberg, who had no idea of the consequences when creating Facebook, who has failed with various spin-offs, or Google, who have also failed with various attempts to “alter society” at their whims (e.g. with virtual reality goggles or whatever) – this “billionaire class” that is in fact constantly under pressure from anti-trust legislation and from governments responding to social pressures resulting from the ill effects of social media – which has altered society at the whims of and because of the weaknesses of the phone users, not the sellers. So yeah, they’re billionaires, having provided services for billions of people – and we are having to adjust to change, which humans happen to be good at, even though they stumble along the way, and guess what? – it is the power of the rule of law, and those nation-states, which is trying where it can to bring things under better control, without trampling all over individual freedoms.
Continued.
7) One of the most important questions you ask is “Who gets to decide how society transforms? On what basis?” Well, it shouldn’t be the arrogant idealists who represent what Thomas Sowell called “The Anointed”, because they’re so sure they know what is best for everyone, and all we need to do is put them in charge. And of course we wouldn’t end up with another Soviet Union, would we? Nobody gets to “decide how society transforms” – nobody knows everybody else, or themselves, thoroughly enough. We all decide, collectively, through individual actions in our lives and democratic actions in our societies. Or you promote hell, even if you didn’t intend to. You promote the tyranny of the self-righteous.
8) “Younger generations may in some sense perceive what is happening more clearly (consider Greta Thunberg lambasting global leaders at the UN).” Come on, get real. I like Greta – she is sincere and was, and I hope is still, well-intentioned. But she was a teenage girl when that happened. Teenagers have raging hormones and an operatic level of emotion and idealism – it is an enormously significant time for religious conversion, falling in love, becoming some particular “identity”, and committing suicide. This is not “perceiving what is happening more clearly” – it is just powerful emotional commitment, in the absence of perspective and sufficient life experience. Greta told us over five years ago that we’d all be finished in five years’ time. People are now talking about the “urgency” of the “crisis” and how we have ten or twenty years to sort things out. Well, in thirty years’ time, if we haven’t been wiped out by Artificial Intelligence, I imagine Greta will still be here – and we’ll still have problems – and people with appropriate technical knowledge will be helping us to make more progress in sorting them out – and more teenagers will be telling us we’re doomed, possibly for some completely different reason.
9) So there is “more to that today than just trusting the elders”. What does that mean, that an intelligent and educated person should not listen to someone who is just as intelligent and probably even more educated and certainly more experienced, because none of that has any value? Let’s just throw them all away and let the woke and insufficiently informed take over, shall we? That would hardly be a wise suggestion, would it? (I agree that over-simplified sentence is contradicted by some of your following paragraph – but it still reeks of the idealistic youth rather than the sage.)
10) I agree that our metaphysics is on the verge of a hopefully significant change, supported by interpretations from cognitive neuroscience as well as philosophical approaches.
11) “Hyper-agency”. I understand this concept is pushed as (a) part of resentment about the way philanthropists operate, as if they should give the money to The Anointed who would know how to use it “better”, and (b) as part of the desire for “the transition to socialism”. No kidding. So now the radical left agenda comes more into the open. And “At its most successful, Extinction Rebellion showed signs of hyper-agency.” If you want to make the world better, you recognize that Extinction Rebellion are idealistic fools, and often old enough to know better. You don’t make the environment better by holding up traffic, including ambulances and fire engines and doctors on their way to emergency calls, or by gluing yourself to a road or a window. You get educated, you get qualified, in something relating to how human society obtains and uses energy, and then you work with your knowledge to make things better. If you think you make anything even a tiny bit better by wrecking the innocent enjoyment of a competition for snooker or dancing or horse-racing or whatever, then you need to find a more constructive way of spending your time, instead of just drawing attention to your narcissistic idealistic socially useless self. You take responsibility instead. That’s a lot harder.
12) Those who would be angels can learn from the mafia. Of course this is stated “partly in jest”, except that it isn’t, because it is “totally in earnest”. We need to “improve our relationship to power”. Well, write to your MP. Go into politics, whether locally or nationally. Exercise your vote. We have a relationship to power. But allegedly we need to “cooperate and compete more wisely,” which also means “more shrewdly”. Oh, yes, sure it does. How sneaky does that sound? Does it sound like just using freedom of speech and democratic processes? That means “getting beyond heroic assumptions.” Well, there’s a modernist statement for you. Being heroic means facing challenge and adversity, and overcoming it with ingenuity, courage, and strength (which does not have to mean physical strength). Any society that leaves that behind is lost, it might as well lie down and die. It just happens to sound to the woke like “toxic masculinity”, rather than totally admirable characteristics of any human being.
So your metaphysics are good; your hearts may often be in the right place, although you could have said that about a bunch of Bolsheviks in 1917, before the horrors of the Gulag and a society built on lies and mistrust. Your psychological and political perspectives, however, appear to have been, just like academia, thoroughly corrupted by post-modernist thought processes and politics – and that statement can NOT be made about Iain McGilchrist or John Vervaeke.
Read it once, read it twice, read it out loud to my spouse. "Premise number...." No wonder we can't be nourished by sound bites You are laying out the warp and weft of it. We are breathing/Presencing with the Gestalt of it, the Matter With Things essence of this Now Moment. I am rolling "Democratizing hyperactivity" around on my tongue.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts - they chime excitingly with our aims at Bore Place (see website boreplace .org)
I do not at the moment feel that this can be completely trusted. It is always the case that humans – me as well as the people at Perspectiva - see things through filters of perception, and these result in their own interpretations and agendas; interpretations which may be at best incomplete, or arrived at through political or social biases, and at worst just thoroughly mistaken, even if through naivete and good intentions. Let me be a bit devil’s-advocate and pick some phrases out of this post for comment:
1) “supported by the John Templeton Foundation”. It seems to me they might be in for a bit of a culture shock themselves, as their agenda for blurring divisions between religion and science seems to be fundamentally from a Judeo-Christian perspective – as if “behind the scenes” we’ll surely get to accept the authority of the Bible after all, even if we interpret it symbolically rather than literally. The newer approaches to a new religion/science reconciliation are surely generally from a Taoist-inspired philosophical angle (e.g. Vervaeke and McGilchrist), and are indeed about the reality and significance of consciousness – but not about some benevolent deliberate Father-God in the sky. (Which would appear to be the Templeton preference, from their support for people arguing for intelligent design – as just a disguised “it’s not evolution, God did it on purpose” – and for looking into the efficacy of prayer, which has been repeatedly discredited when properly and objectively tested.)
2) “Collapse is inevitable.” No, it isn’t. Surely that is just a “message”, which is potentially just destructive and nihilistic, not at all helpful. I feel it is the wrong message to promote.
3) I do not believe “nation-states, the rule of law and the so-called free market” are “unable to adapt”. They are adapting all the time. That includes to the changing climate situation, even if that does not seem to be as fast as, or in the ways that, certain people think they ought. These people and organisations are not a God, and not in possession of sufficient or complete information to make better judgements. (They might sometimes alter certain beliefs or attitudes about humans and inevitability and the future, and human priorities, if, say, they read “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles Mann, and “Apocalypse Never” by former climate activist Michael Shellenberger, and spent a couple of hours listening to Bjorn Lomborg on YouTube.) Apart from that, what is the implied advice here? That we start dismantling nation-states? You could do that without massive bloodshed and the takeover by thugs, warlords and totalitarians, could you? Or that we should not hold “the rule of law” as one of the handful of the most important principles that humanity has ever created, because it’s no longer fit for purpose? Seriously? Isn’t it one of our few guarantees against the “increase in authoritarian control” which you say you fear?
4) I am very wary of the expression of confidence in coming collapse, and of the disapproval of the alleged “competition within and between elites”. This sounds like a pseudo-Communist flattening-out preference, firstly sounding a bit resentful of “they’ve got more than I have”, whether power or money or whatever, secondly ignoring the necessity for and long evolutionary history of dominance hierarchies of competence without which we are certainly lost, and thirdly failing to remember how the human attempts to do this have left us with the bloody legacy of the 20th century and the ongoing horror of North Korea. That does not mean there may not be considerable collapse, of course – neither you nor I have the faintest idea what the world could possibly be like in six months’ time, let alone years from now. But we should work for ourselves and the world in the belief that it will go on and on, and that we can improve it even in little ways – not that it’s all going to hell so who cares. I quite agree there are changes which could be in line with the axial revolution, but we could perhaps try and manage these as helpfully and cooperatively as possible, and then the changes in consciousness will inevitably improve the laws and systems we work within – just as Christianity, whatever its illusions, ended up giving us human rights and freedom from slavery. An improvement in spirituality is not equivalent to a world-wide civilizational collapse. They’re two different movies, and only one of them is a disaster movie. So I do approve of your expression of the interest in understanding the relationship between “systems, souls and society”. That’s not the same as maybe supporting people who want to effectively throw away society because they “know better” than all those millions of people who have been building it over hundreds and hundreds of years.
5) You might precede it by “at the risk of generalising”, but I don’t think that even begins to justify the prejudiced radical-left propaganda that follows it – the “capitalist democracies” are “not serving the common good” – this is despite all those statistics, is it, about how they have been responsible for the greatest increases in general wealth, lifespan, healthcare, and decades of peace between just about every single democratic capitalist nation-state? Really?
6) “radically altering society at the whims of a billionaire class”. Oh, honestly. This “billionaire class” is the movie bad guy is it, the evil person in his Frankensteinian Castle, and does not include, say, the charitable and medical successes of the Gates Foundation, or the contributions of Elon Musk, not just towards a possible interplanetary future but towards the environment itself by accelerating the development of electric cars? Is it perhaps meant to be Mark Zuckerberg, who had no idea of the consequences when creating Facebook, who has failed with various spin-offs, or Google, who have also failed with various attempts to “alter society” at their whims (e.g. with virtual reality goggles or whatever) – this “billionaire class” that is in fact constantly under pressure from anti-trust legislation and from governments responding to social pressures resulting from the ill effects of social media – which has altered society at the whims of and because of the weaknesses of the phone users, not the sellers. So yeah, they’re billionaires, having provided services for billions of people – and we are having to adjust to change, which humans happen to be good at, even though they stumble along the way, and guess what? – it is the power of the rule of law, and those nation-states, which is trying where it can to bring things under better control, without trampling all over individual freedoms.