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my now-slightly-outdated map of worldviews about collapse; right-click and open in a new tab to see it full-sized

It’s interesting to listen to social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger try to reconcile his assessment of the state of the world with his vehement insistence that we have to try as hard we possibly can to avert the ‘metacrisis’ that threatens to bring about the collapse of human civilization and the extinction of most or all life on earth, including humans.

In a recent video, he said:

How can evolutionarily nasty chimpanzees with a high orientation for conflict and irrationality, with nuclear weapons and AI and synthetic biology, with a history of using technology in conflict-oriented and harm-externalizing ways, how can 8 billion of us with exponential tech [increasingly available to all] do a good job of governing that much power? It doesn’t actually look that promising.

Yet he insists that “we cannot know for certain” that we are fucked (or that we are not), so we each have a responsibility to do what we can, working with others, to pull us back from the brink.

His argument reveals a curious quirk about humans and our relationship to complexity, uncertainty, and hope. We seem completely preoccupied with what John Gray calls “the needs of the moment”, and it is clear that this preoccupation has directly produced the metacrisis (a combination of many, unintended, crises and system collapses — economic, ecological, political, social, health, educational, resource, technological, and, for some, spiritual/religious) in which we find ourselves. Yet we continue to cling to hope for our future when all logic says it’s unfounded.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Introduction to The Web of Meaning

June 16, 2021

Introduction to The Web of Meaning

Ed. note: This excerpt from the Web of Meaning is published with the permission of the author.

As our civilization careens toward a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. Our dominant worldview has passed its expiration date: it’s based on a series of flawed assumptions that have been superseded by modern scientific findings.

The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe (published this week in the UK, next month in the US), offers a coherent and intellectually solid foundation for an alternative worldview based on deep interconnectedness, showing how modern scientific knowledge echoes the ancient wisdom of earlier cultures.

Here is the Introduction.

Tea with Uncle Bob

We could call it The Speech. You’ve probably heard it many times. Maybe you’ve even given it. Every day around the world, innumerable versions of it are delivered by Someone Who Seems to Know what they’re talking about.

It doesn’t seem like much. Just another part of life’s daily conversations. But every Speech, linked together, helps to lock our entire society up in a mental cage. It might occur anywhere in the world, from a construction site in Kansas to a market stall in Delhi. It can be given by anyone old enough to have learned a thing or two about how it all works. But it’s usually delivered by someone who feels they’ve been around the block a few times and they want to give you the benefit of their wisdom.

Because I grew up in London, I’ll zoom in there to a particular version of The Speech that reverberates with me. It’s an occasional family gathering—one of those events where toddlers take center stage and aunties serve second helpings of cake…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Prepare To Have Your Worldview Obliterated

April 7, 2020

Prepare To Have Your Worldview Obliterated

The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’

Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.

“Civil libertarians were opposed to it,” Biden said in 2002 of his bill. “Right after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, ‘Joe, I’m introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.’”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog, 03.26.2020

March 27, 2020

The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog, 03.26.2020

It may sound paradoxical, but philosophers have proved useful in times of collapse and rebuilding. Some of the greatest works in philosophy–at least in terms of their longevity and influence–were written in and during such times.1 (More on this below.) Alfred North Whitehead, one of those philosophers writing in the early 20th century, put it this way:

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance. The transitions to new fruitfulness of understanding are achieved by recurrence to the utmost depths of intuition for the refreshment of imagination. In the end–though there is no end–what is being achieved, is width of view, issuing in greater opportunities. (Adventures in Ideas, 1933, pg. 159)

The creation of this “width of view”–thanks to our Homo sapiens hardware–is open to most of us. The paragraphs below were written in response to a colleague’s question about how the COVID-19 pandemic helps us better understand climate change and the many other ongoing, cascading, planet-sized crises. I offer them, in part, because I don’t know what else to do in this Moment (as opposed to this moment), and because I wrote them while sitting in a chair. More importantly, they issue mostly from my experiences and observations, not from a particular method of analysis or formal system of logic. And it is my hope that they will inspire others with Whitehead’s optimism that the work of the imagination can issue-in greater opportunities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The changing narrative – A new ontology for the progressive movement?

September 13, 2018

The changing narrative – A new ontology for the progressive movement?

Have you ever wondered why the world works like it does? Why things seem skewed in favour of the rich and the powerful and why our so called ‘democratic’ systems seem so inherently unjust? Why we have rampant inequality, poverty, hunger and accelerating species extinctions and runaway global warming?

The answers are not simple because these problems are systemic.

The system within which we operate gives rise to the terrible outcomes listed above. But the outcomes are the expected, emergent behaviour of ‘managing’ our planetary affairs in the ways we do. They are the direct results of the way humanity has chosen to handle concepts like ownership, governance and economics.

We can sit around asking “why aren’t things getting better?” and protesting against the status quo but, ultimately, mitigating the outcomes and effects of a system which works in a certain way is like sticking plasters on a severed limb. It will never help. It might make the patient, and the helper, feel good in the short term but it will never address the underlying issues.

As Buckminster Fuller so eloquently proposed: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

So, in an attempt to address the problems with the present system by ‘building a new model’, a few years ago some brave colleagues and I embarked on a systemic mission:

Our aim was to co-create an increasingly democratic, equitable and sustainable society. Our mission was to normalize a worldview that was conducive to achieving our aim.

There are some important specifics in that mission. We took our anger at the present system and identified that “a new model” would not work without a compatible “world view” or “ontology”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Culture shift: redirecting humanity’s path to a flourishing future

March 25, 2018

Culture shift: redirecting humanity’s path to a flourishing future

It’s time to build a new worldview around a deeper sense of connectedness.

Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in Yunnan Province, China.. Credit: By Jialiang Gao, www.peace-on-earth.org – Original Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big investments in renewable energy, a livable minimum wage, and freely accessible healthcare? The answer is that we need all of them, but even taken together they’re utterly insufficient to redirect humanity away from impending catastrophe and toward a truly flourishing future.

That’s because the problems these ideas are designed to solve, critical as they are, are symptoms of an even more profound problem: the implicit values of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice.

Even with the best of intentions, those actively working to reform the current system are a bit like software engineers valiantly trying to fix multiple bugs in a faulty software program: each fix complicates the code, leading inevitably to a new set of bugs that require even more heroic workarounds. Ultimately, it becomes clear that the problem isn’t just the software: an entirely new operating system is required to get where we need to go.

This realization dawned on me gradually over the years I spent researching my book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. My research began as a personal search for meaning. I’d been through a personal crisis when the certainties on which I’d built my early life came crashing down around me. I wanted my life going forward to be truly meaningful—but based on what foundation? I was determined to sort through the received narratives of meaning until I came across a foundation I could really believe in.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Closing the Gap between the Science and Politics of Progress

February 13, 2018

Closing the Gap between the Science and Politics of Progress

Ed.note: This article draws on a paper published this month in the international journal, Social Indicators Research. The paper is available on Richard’s website, www.richardeckersley.com.au

Global politics is based on an outmoded and increasingly destructive model of human progress and development. Can science change a dire situation?

‘My view of human progress has stayed surprisingly constant throughout my presidency. The world today, with all its pain and all its sorrow, is more just, more democratic, more free, more tolerant, healthier, wealthier, better educated, more connected, more empathetic than ever before. If you didn’t know ahead of time what your social status would be, what your race was, what your gender was, or your sexual orientation was, what country you were living in, and you asked what moment in human history you would like to be born, you’d choose right now.’ Barack Obama, President of the United States 2009-2017

It is unusual for a national leader to articulate his worldview in this way. Nonetheless, Obama’s view of progress is one that is, broadly speaking, shared by politicians and governments throughout the developed world and beyond (partly framed here by the ‘identity politics’ that characterises political debate today). The view reflects the dominant or orthodox model of development.

However, this model is increasingly at odds with what science tells us about the world. It is not that the specific achievements are wrong, but that they are incomplete, and so present a false picture of progress. The growing gap between the conventional view and the realities of people’s lives helps to explain the widespread public disquiet in many countries and its political consequences, evident in growing political volatility and extremism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Be kind, it’s all connected

November 27, 2017

Be kind, it’s all connected

In a conversation over the holiday I posited to a friend that the modern worldview which guides human action practically worldwide has all the hallmarks of a religion. I contended that this “religion” is at the root of our ecological predicament and that changing the current perilous trajectory of humankind would entail the adoption of an ecologically sound religion to replace it.

When I say religion, I mean “worldview,” and I believe the two are synonymous. Even if one has a supposedly secular worldview that relies on economics, psychology, biology or any other field for an explanation of how the world works, it will inevitably look like a religion since such worldviews have unquestioned (and often unquestionable!) premises and may make claims to explain all the social and/or physical phenomena we experience. These secular worldviews tend to be reductionist, describing the interactions of humans with one another and the physical world as nothing but a product of economic laws, human psychology or biological imperatives.

One cannot invent a religion. Religions either grow out of an accretion of spiritual and philosophical traditions over time or they start with a charismatic figure who brings a new set of ideas and standards into a society and is later labelled a divine prophet or the originator of a new philosophy or discipline.

I’ve tried to imagine what the shape of an ecologically sound religion/worldview might be. My friend wisely offered the following humble beginning: “Be kind. It’s all connected.”

The first two words are familiar to anyone affiliated with a religion. It is the equivalent of “Love thy neighbor.” But the second phrase creates an altogether more expansive meaning for the first, implying that we should not only be kind to our fellow humans, but to all nonhuman entities, animate and inanimate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why you can’t argue with a “modern”

May 2, 2016

Why you can’t argue with a “modern”

The modern world is filled with things many of us regard as antiquated and old-fashioned. Modern people often say that ancient rituals are mere superstition, that science tells us what is real and what is not, and that we are now free from ideas including untestable ideas from religion that have slowed continual improvement in the lot of average humans.

That the modern outlook has all the hallmarks of a religion never occurs to a thoroughly modern person (whom I’ll refer to merely as a “modern”). A modern believes that the modern outlook is above and outside all superstition and groundless belief. In effect, the modern outlook is a myth that does not believe it is a myth.

In using the word “myth,” I do not mean to label the modern outlook false. In this context myth is simply a narrative that outlines a worldview. It turns out that a myth of any vintage, ancient or modern, can be a powerful tool in motivating behavior, in explaining and manipulating the world, and in assigning meaning to human existence. And any myth of any vintage can turn out simply to be mistaken in some or all of its details.

The modern myth has some unique characteristics that make it particularly powerful and particularly dangerous at the same time. The modern myth tells us the following about the world and our place in it:

Humans are in one category and nature is in another.

Scale doesn’t matter.

History can be safely ignored since modern society has seen through the delusions of the past.

Science is a unified, coherent field that explains the rational principles by which we can manage the physical world.

Let me take these claims one at a time.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mid-Sized Meditations #11: Thoughts on Localism and Resilience

February 17, 2016

Mid-Sized Meditations #11: Thoughts on Localism and Resilience

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak to the “Resilience Group,” an informal gathering of environmentalists, activists, and interested others that meet regularly at the home of Wes Jackson, in Salina, KS. My short remarks–which were mostly inspired by the material in this post–gave rise to a robust and enlightening discussion, or so I thought. Here are a few take-aways, for whatever they’re worth.

1) The growth-centric paradigm which dominates so much economic activity around the world isn’t really the result of politically powerful actors; it’s the consequence of a worldview. Thus fulminating against the defenders of–in some ways undeniably beneficial, but also socially and culturally harmful, not to mention ecologically unsustainable–globalism, whether their motivations are libertarian like the Koch brothers (whose influence is omnipresent in Kansas) or statist like the Davos bunch(whose influence around here doesn’t really exist beyond the paranoid fears of a few black-helicopter-watching Tea Party types in our legislature), is to mistake symptoms for the disease. That’s not to say particular actions by particular actors shouldn’t be organized against; they should be. But we need to recognize that, as important as, say, an overturning of Citizens United might be to getting the message for local and economic democracy out there, simply accomplishing that, without a paradigm-changing language to explain why it’s important to do so, probably won’t change much.

2) The language that defenders of steady-state economies and local democracy need probably won’t be political in nature, and probably won’t emerge from the major cities or the state-based political entities of the world, despite those locations and polities being the site of so many productive nodes of intellectual input.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dream of the Machine

July 2, 2015

The Dream of the Machine

As I type these words, it looks as though the wheels are coming off the global economy. Greece and Puerto Rico have both suspended payments on their debts, and China’s stock market, which spent the last year in a classic speculative bubble, is now in the middle of a classic speculative bust. Those of my readers who’ve read John Kenneth Galbraith’s lively history The Great Crash 1929 already know all about the Chinese situation, including the outcome—and since vast amounts of money from all over the world went into Chinese stocks, and most of that money is in the process of turning into twinkle dust, the impact of the crash will inevitably proliferate through the global economy.

So, in all probability, will the Greek and Puerto Rican defaults. In today’s bizarre financial world, the kind of bad debts that used to send investors backing away in a hurry attract speculators in droves, and so it turns out that some big New York hedge funds are in trouble as a result of the Greek default, and some of the same firms that got into trouble with mortgage-backed securities in the recent housing bubble are in the same kind of trouble over Puerto Rico’s unpayable debts. How far will the contagion spread? It’s anybody’s guess.

Oh, and on another front, nearly half a million acres of Alaska burned up in a single day last week—yes, the fires are still going—while ice sheets in Greenland are collapsing so frequently and forcefully that the resulting earthquakes are rattling seismographs thousands of miles away. These and other signals of a biosphere in crisis make good reminders of the fact that the current economic mess isn’t happening in a vacuum.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stephen Toulmin welcomes you to the end of modernity

May 18, 2015

Stephen Toulmin welcomes you to the end of modernity

Historian and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin welcomes you to the end of modernity, at least modernity as we’ve imagined it. By modernity, he does not mean modern gadgets. By end he does not mean an end to progress in the natural sciences, nor in human affairs in general. Instead, he is talking about a way of thinking which has held us in thrall since the 17th century, for good and for ill, and is now giving way fitfully to a new (he would say “old”), more flexible worldview.

Toulmin’s book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity is not new. It was published in 1990. Its argument will be of interest to anyone concerned with issues of sustainability including climate change and resource depletion.

Toulmin offers an historical account of how this view we call modern arose, and he catalogues its tenets. The ones that are of particular interest to me are as follows:

Nature is governed by fixed laws set up at the Creation.
The material substance of physical nature is essentially inert.
Physical objects and processes cannot think.
At the Creation, God combined natural objects into stable systems.
The essence of humanity is rational thought and action.

Even casual readers will notice the theological content in these statements. But, we must remember that Sir Issac Newton and René Descartes–who are credited with creating most of the intellectual scaffolding of modern thought–were deeply religious men. The theological references may have been stripped away in our own age. But the tenets remain.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Do We Live on a One Party Planet? | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

November 19, 2014

Do We Live on a One Party Planet? | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.

The truth can be a slippery thing. We each have a version but it slips and slides about in our minds as we deal with the constant flood of information coming at us from all sides, not to mention trying to balance this expert view against that, between what we know, what we think we know, and what we suspect. We are all at the mercy of cognitive biases and layers of assumptions and associations built up over our lifetimes. And so we need reference points to help mark the key geographical features of our worldview. And, sometimes, we need some of those reference points visible in our world, amongst our tribes of friends, colleagues, allies and families. It’s very difficult for most of us to make our way in the world and act with the determination we often crave without some acknowledgement that we’re not the only ones seeing the world as we do. The bigger the thought, the less pleasant it is to assimilate, and the further out from the mainstream it lives, the more important that acknowledgment can be.

The 1%-99% Occupy meme was one of those markers. The reason it travelled so far and fast wasn’t because it told people something altogether new, but rather that it capped off and gave voice to thoughts they already had. It didn’t teach as much as it validated and articulated.

At /The Rules, we think its time for a new marker; one that grows very much from the 1%-99% meme, and, hopefully, adds something important. And it’s that we now all live on a One Party Planet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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Tea with Uncle Bob

Our aim was to co-create an increasingly democratic, equitable and sustainable society. Our mission was to normalize a worldview that was conducive to achieving our aim.

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