Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“No matter how politically successful either the left or the right becomes, our democracy will always have some version of the other side.” –Steve McIntosh I’ve been reading a lot of lengthy, in-depth write-ups lately claiming to have diagnosed the Trump phenomenon. Two of the better ones I’ve read were written by Amanda Taub, at Vox,…
“One reason that a profound moral improvement of humankind is hard to envision is that it seems difficult to pull ourselves up morally by our own bootstraps; our attempts at improvement are going to be made by the unimproved. The people who implement the singularity, mess about with the genome, prescribe the medication, preach the…
“Well first of all, there is present in the structural pattern in the development of human consciousness and culture what we might describe as the dialectic of “progress and pathology”…for every new set of advances, for every new worldview stage that emerges beyond what came before, we find that there is pathology, or problems, or …
While there are many ways that the growing ideology of radical Islamism can be countered and resisted, my focus here is on the cultural dimension of the problem. Although Muslims have been keen to adopt the technologies of modernity, they have yet to adopt the cultural values of modernity. However, it is the liberal values…
Every problem in the world can be understood, at least partially, as a problem of consciousness. So it follows that the solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as environmental degradation and climate change, nuclear proliferation and terrorism, hunger and overpopulation, unregulated globalization and gross inequality, can all be effectively ameliorated by raising or changing the…
It is a basic tenet of systems theory that for a system to be optimized, its subsystems must be sub-optimized (their agency must be brought within the communal embrace of the higher holonic level of the system as a whole). When we look at the evolutionary system that is the spiral of development in consciousness…
While our gridlocked government may be partially “representative” of our polarized culture, there are few who are happy about the situation. And it seems like the default assumption, and the position often repeated in the mainstream media, is that both sides are responsible, which leads to the conclusion that the appropriate remedy is for politicians…
In other words, for a system or structure to maintain its integrity as it becomes more complex, it must become more unified — each part of the system must work together with a large number of other parts, and together with the system as a whole. But it is, perhaps, predictable that scientists have tried…
Jesus was one of a long line of people who submitted to God. So did Adam, so did Abraham, so did Moses, so did David. They each demonstrated submission to God in their own context. What follows is an excerpt from an online correspondence I had with a friend–who is a member of the Eastern…
I enjoy responding to Tony Jones’ blog series “Questions That Haunt Christianity.” Recently he posted a question from a reader named Jesse. Below is Jesse’s question and my response. Jesse asks: Is the trajectory of our human culture/world/society positive or negative? In other words, are we fighting the long defeat until Christ returns to set…