Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:14
thank you so much Maynard and it feels really good to be collaborating with you once again welcome to all of you who are members of the Institute of religion in an age of science or iris or perhaps filly ated
00:00:27
with the organization that I'm connected with the International Society for science and religion or perhaps you've just heard about this and decided to join us we're dealing with a really difficult and challenging topic last
00:00:41
night and again tonight well modern civilization be the death of us and we have tonight Rubin Nelson to speak on this theme and particularly to lead us
00:00:54
in the task of envisioning tomorrow's earth now Rubin is the executive director of foresight Canada he has argued for several decades now that
00:01:07
modern technological civilization techno industrial cultures that seemed to be so much at the forefront of driving social and political change and economic change
00:01:19
these days they have in enormous blind spots that leave us unaware of the risks that we are running just by feeding the
00:01:32
Machine of modern technological culture and in place of that he's going to invite us tonight to seriously consider what he calls a kind of transcendence to another stage of human existence one
00:01:46
that he labels as consciously co-creative so just in a moment Rubin is going to begin his talk with us tonight and at the very end of the talk we hope
00:01:58
there'll be enough time for your questions and so let me and invite you to take a look down to the bottom of your screen you'll need to move your cursor into that bottom bar and when you
00:02:11
do that you will see that a little link opens up Q&A open that link and type in your question make it succinct make it right to the point and
00:02:23
make it brilliant and I'll be sifting through those questions and queuing them up for Reuben but thank you again for joining us it's wonderful to have you with us
00:02:34
and now Reuben thank you Ron I want the first thing that I want to say is thank
00:02:52
you to Iris for inviting me to put together the program in Seattle last February and also for putting together this session I particularly want to thank Bill Reese for being so willing to
00:03:06
work with me he accepted my invitation in February sight unseen having no idea what he was getting into and it turned out - we had rollicking good fun together I also want to thank
00:03:18
all the people who've put this session together or the Seattle session because of course speakers can't do these things by themselves and finally I want to thank all of you who are participating
00:03:30
whether by zoom live today or by video later it is no small thing in a world that is pressed for time to take hours of your time to be willing to sit back
00:03:44
and actually think about where are we in history now what is it that's happening to us and what does the world require of us and so I will think with you about
00:03:59
these things this is the this is the I'm going to have to do this this way there we go this is the second part of a
00:04:24
two-part series you heard many of you would have heard bill last night and you know that he's brilliant and you'll know that Bill's bias is sense of by the time you add everything
00:04:35
up and sift through it that in fact it may well be that modern civilization is the death of us and I agree with him in that but both bill and I agree that it's not required it's not necessary that
00:04:49
that happens there is a path forward if we're willing to take it part of our problem is that the path forward is not well established on our agendas yet so think with me for just a minute about
00:05:03
Bill's message because it pushes the conversation in the sustainability field further than it normally is taken that people understand that we are destroying
00:05:16
the biosphere on which we depend for life and it tends to be that in much of the sustainability movement and the environmental movement that we get stuck there focusing merely on that and while
00:05:28
bill doesn't want to don't play that he understands it profoundly he wants to go on and think about why is that the case and he argues that we're doing that unwittingly now when you have large numbers of people doing something
00:05:41
unwittingly then it means you're dealing with the culture and that means it's not just the individuals who are blind to the issue but the culture is blind to it and so bill then picks up a
00:05:54
constructivist understanding of human culture and talks about the particular way that we in the modern world construe reality the stories that we tell ourselves and there's becoming
00:06:06
increasingly clear in the 21st century that much of that story is an illusion and so he ends by saying and the words under 0.5 are his words of the last
00:06:17
words on his last slide that we must transcend modern techno marine ism and catalyze a personal to civilizational change transition transformation to a
00:06:31
way of being on earth in which humans live spiritually satisfying lives more equitably within the means of nature and then in Seattle he turned it over to me and said and of
00:06:44
course Ruben will tell you how we'll do that of course for the twinkle in his eye but bill is talking about a double overshoot and that language isn't well established in the literature yet that
00:06:58
folks get the overshoot that is ecological that we're in ecological overshoot but they don't understand that we're also in cultural and even civilizational overshoot and those are
00:07:10
new concepts that are just emerging they're not well established in the literature but because we're in a double overshoot we cannot use modernity in a
00:07:22
non violence way to deal with our overshoot we have to transcend our modern civilization and so we're into civilizational transcendence and
00:07:34
transcendence of course means to build on but also to move beyond and so the task we face in the 21st century is to not improve modernity but in fact move
00:07:47
beyond it and of course we who are modern technical in dust really don't see this yet we're blind to it and as Louise penny a lovely Canadian author if you don't know her wrote in her second
00:08:01
last books the kingdom of the blind nothing good ever came out of a blind spot and we all know that we all know that we are surprised more and even
00:08:12
traumatized by things that blindside us now I live in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and there are grizzly bears around and I know that if you startle grizzly bears human beings or
00:08:26
rattlesnakes you get into trouble and so we get into trauma when we're blindsided by things that we don't see coming so the whole point of this is to open
00:08:39
our eyes to understand what's actually happening to us now this is not about what might happen to us in some in every future this is to understand our recent history and our actual
00:08:50
present now there are some key terms I'm going to use some language that in one sense will be familiar to you but I'm going to use it in a particular way so I'll specify elate those terms and then
00:09:04
I want to share two models with you one is a model of the depth of human existence and I'll explain why that's important when I get there and the other is a model of what I've come to call forms of civilization or types of
00:09:18
civilization or if you like archetypes of civilization so the first concept is overshoot bill used it of course because he's an environmental scientist it it emerged out of
00:09:32
ecological and work and you can see it there in the coyote and rabbit cycle on the bottom you can also see it in the work bill and his students have done looking at the global footprint and earth overshoot day which last year was
00:09:46
July 29th but it's also the case that overshoot is a perfectly normal that is it's a familiar human experience and if you think of your life or part of our
00:09:58
life as that green arrow that at a given time a time T the culture is in a particular way we're young we get formed we behave in particular ways and it works for us and so we get reinforcement
00:10:11
and we continue to use it and it's important to understand that overshoot is not about being bad overshoot is about being context insensitive that we
00:10:25
use behaviors that have been successful and that's important we use them because they work but we use them after the conditions have changed enough that in fact we should be adapting new behaviors
00:10:38
and so what you see is that when that purple line emerges we just ignore the the gentle signals that the world may be changing enough think of Harvey
00:10:51
Weinstein who finally was caught by the me2 movement but for 40 years had lived in Hollywood paying no attention at all to the emergence of the modern women's movement think of all the signals sent
00:11:04
in his life that he would ignore until finally he's brought down by the me2 movement and is in jail and so what happens to us if we continue in mr.
00:11:18
signals of our context we end up in that light green space where you find financial words like regret capital and stranded assets and you see a picture there of the oil sands of Alberta and we
00:11:31
in Alberta are increasingly anxious and becoming neurotic about the fact that we bet our whole future on an economy that was based on high carbon energy coal oil
00:11:43
and gas and the world is increasingly turning its back on us and we feel that the world is doing us in and we're becoming neurotic about it so if you
00:11:55
want if you're an American and you're tired of some of the neuroses in the US and you want to have a holiday once the border opens again come to Alberta and you can watch people who are not yours
00:12:07
so you can kind of breathe deeply and just sit in the stands and watch other people become neurotic when they're under stress and they don't know how to make sense of their world because they have missed all the signals that they
00:12:20
should actually change so that's overshoot a form of civilization is a shared way of knowing experiencing being in and responding to
00:12:33
reality and being human the core paradigm of which is fundamentally different from the core paradigm of a different form of civilization so what I'm suggesting here is if you look on
00:12:45
the left-hand side you see a blank image of a form of civilization the important thing about it is that big thick grey line around it which provides a frame of reference so a form of civilization is a
00:12:59
way of framing human experience and our experience of reality and the middle picture suggests that you can have quite different cultures that exemplify a
00:13:10
given form of civilization they don't have to be much like each other the only thing that the way they're like each other is the deep paradigm at the deepest level of
00:13:23
their life is similar but other than that they can express their that paradigm in a whole variety of ways so that living in an indigenous way as the story Nakota do just down the road from
00:13:37
me or as people up the Amazon do the story Nakota and the people of the Amazon are dramatically different cultures what they share is that they're both a form of indigenous way of living
00:13:52
and they're more like each other than either of them are like the friends that I know in the cellar of Canmore and on the right hand side you simply see a different form of civilization it's not
00:14:06
totally different it's blue green as opposed to blue yellow and so forms of civilization can be fundamentally the same in some ways but again it means that the cultures that exemplify them
00:14:17
can be very very different and that's important so I'm suggesting here that in order to understand the situation we're in we need to think at two different levels we need to think at both a form
00:14:30
of civilization and at the level of the cultures that exemplify it in the same way that we think of fruit which is a genus level and we think of grapes and oranges and apples which are exemplars
00:14:42
of fruit but oranges and apples are more like each other than either of them are like potatoes because potatoes are an exemplar of vegetables and so it's that kind of thinking that we're engaged in
00:14:54
now the core paradigm of any form of civilization defines the way that those who exemplify that form no imagine think things through and conduct themselves
00:15:07
now just stop for a minute and look at that color coding of that you're going to hear that phrase again and again as I taught no imagine think things through and conduct themselves regarding so the
00:15:21
cognitive content of a core paradigm of a form of civilization is the way that people under stand the nature of reality the nature and power of human persons and the relationship of persons to reality and
00:15:35
what I'm suggesting that that those things can be understood in fundamentally different ways and that if the differences are great enough you get a different form of civilization so that
00:15:47
every form of civilization holds the possibility of doing the human of being human and living in profoundly different ways on this planet so it's not enough
00:15:58
just to contrast cultures in the normal way we do cultural analysis phenomenologically we need to understand which form of civilization is the culture that we're dealing with
00:16:12
exemplifying but it also means that when a new form of civilization emerges in history and that has already happened so the rule is if something has happened it can happen again so that when a new form
00:16:25
of civilization emerges the trajectory of history changes because we have new possibilities of how even to be human and how to relate to reality and live accordingly and so the forums that we
00:16:38
live with I've colored them here you can see that they're red green and yellow there's just three forms of civilization have been exemplified so far in human history and as bill pointed out
00:16:51
yesterday in his talk we who are Homo sapiens emerge from our homonym ancestors two to three hundred thousand years ago and until virtually yesterday in geological terms we lived in only one
00:17:03
form of civilization namely the yellow one the small group nomadic cultures so if you were dropped into time fifteen thousand years ago you might be able to choose where you were dropped on the
00:17:15
planet but the fact is the cultures might be very different but they're all manifestations of an indigenous way of living and then with the Holocene as the Earth's climate changed the possibility
00:17:29
of small group settled agriculture based cultures emerges and these emerge optionally they're not required not everybody made that move there it's an unconscious process
00:17:41
it happened over very long time for not just generations but centuries and millennia and it happened regionally and locally and then about 6,000 years ago
00:17:52
some regional agriculture based empires emerged you think of Babylonia or Egypt or Rome or China or the Incas and then over the last thousand years we starting
00:18:05
in the northwest of Europe have been developing a modern technology alert and in the last couple of hundred years have even tried our hand at empires several folks tried it the only people who were
00:18:18
really good at it were the British and of course their empire has dissolved into the Commonwealth and the Americans and strangely the president of the United States is trying to dissolve the
00:18:29
American Empire so that's what I mean by a form of civilization and a culture subscript I is the waybill and I use it is culture understood not in the sense that it's used in the triple bottom line
00:18:43
where you have the economy in one box and the environment and other and Social Affairs our culture in another but culture understood an integral way is everything that if people do inside and
00:18:55
out how they imagine what they dream what metaphors they use with the but the structure of their language is how they make war how they make peace alone and
00:19:05
so a culture is includes everything that we do so that in this picture you can see that we've captured the image that many environmental issues to show that
00:19:19
in their view the environment is bats last it's the final word and the society and its economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment but the point bill and I are making is even to
00:19:33
say that much that the economy bats last is a statement you can only make and be understood in a modern techno industrial world remember when I was a child there was no environment we hadn't invented it
00:19:45
yet there was indoors and it was out of doors mother never asked me to play are you going into the environment today she simply say are you going out and so it's all socially in a socially
00:19:58
constructed world the culture it's all culture that culture is itself an exemplar of a form of civilization so civilizational overshoot means that
00:20:12
when a form of civilization is in overshoot it means that no there is no way of living in a culture that exemplifies that form of civilization that can survive it means that all
00:20:27
cultures that exemplify that form civilization are on the downslope and are in the process of disintegrating towards death and that's the place that
00:20:39
Bill and I argued that we are today that's where we are in human history and of course we don't know that there isn't a political party in the world that argues elect us because we understand the long decline in disintegration of
00:20:53
modernity better than anybody else and we'll manage that better now that may come if you're young enough that may come in your lifetime but we're not there yet there's no university president who will give a talk about that in public
00:21:05
some of them will talk about it in private but in public this is not yet an acceptable conversation but it also means that if we're an overshoot we have missed the signals that we should adapt and therefore we're about for that
00:21:18
purple dot is headed towards civilizational collapse now we need some models that lots of people stop there and then go into a quite legitimate
00:21:30
heartfelt and emotional appeal that we need to change I don't disagree with that but if we're actually going to do this work and do it in a sound way we need to have some mental models that let us make sense of things and one of those
00:21:44
is a model that lets us connect human consciousness and the deepest things that we know with physical stuff and one of the characteristics of the modern world is that consciousness and stuff
00:21:55
are totally different realms they don't connect which is why consciousness is the hard problem in physics so here is a model that's a causal layered synthetic
00:22:07
model that means you can see four layers and they're color-coded they're connected with each other causally because the way we do things can affect how we think about them the reverse is also true how we think
00:22:19
about things can affect what we do about them and the same is true all the way up and it's synthetic in the sense that you have to hold things together you can see
00:22:31
the double ended arrow that says a coherent sign of late is line of sight is required that any culture can withstand a certain amount of incoherence but if life becomes too
00:22:43
incoherent it begins to disintegrate and sadly there are places on the planet that are pushing the limits of that today and may well slip over into chaos
00:22:55
so what this is saying is that of course we do things with our hands that's the brown stuff that's dirt that's literally moving things it's doing things in the literal sense and so you see a picture on the left of building a building but
00:23:09
we don't just do things we think about things and so you see a picture on the left or Rodin's the thinker and in doing terms the thinker isn't doing anything physically although those of you who've
00:23:21
actually engaged in serious thought know that it's hard bloody work but it's not just that we do things we actually imagine things and so there's the image there of the young girl in her imaginary
00:23:33
world and the interesting thing is that the logic works that we can only think about things we can imagine things that don't have enough prior plausibility we can even imagine it we tend to refuse to
00:23:44
even think about and beyond our imagination is the way we know reality and encounter it and allow it to encounter us
00:23:56
and this model then we'll come back to it when we come to the model that we can differentiate one form of civilization to another but it also means that we can
00:24:10
learn to read physical things as manifestations as arrangement of consciousness and we can see that consciousness matters there's a pun there it's a triple pun if you want to play with it and we can also say that
00:24:23
matter consciousness is now there's not a verb yet in English of consciousness is so we'll just ignore that for now but consciousness matters is simply saying we can look at the physical things in
00:24:35
any culture and infer a good deal about it about the people who made it the world that they see themselves to be in and how they both imagined that world
00:24:47
and think it through and so you can see two classrooms here and if you ask the question which of these classrooms might my grandmother bore in about 1880 be familiar with it's clear to the one
00:24:58
on the left and if we ask the question in the imagination of either of these classrooms how many people need to be involved in the learning of just one
00:25:10
pupil well on the left the answer is to one pupil and one teacher because the ethic on the left is that once the teacher is at the front of the room and instructing you you don't talk across
00:25:25
the aisle you don't help each other to do that is cheating and so you pretend that you're the only person in the room with the teacher and the only reason there aren't teachers for everybody is there aren't enough teachers to go
00:25:37
around whereas it's a very different imagination of what learning is for human beings in the other classroom that learning here is seen to be a social activity that you need even other
00:25:49
students let alone other people and so teachers in the classroom on the right are not just instructors they are mediators and designers of learning experiences
00:26:01
in a way that the teachers are not on the left here we can make the same point about the way that human consciousness is manifest in physical stuff but also the way that physical stuff reflects
00:26:15
human consciousness so here you see four different buildings on landscapes different times in history and different consciousnesses so we start in the upper
00:26:28
left for the stony Nakota they're my neighbors I literally live if you take that mountain on the left-hand side of that picture and just go over that mountain about another three miles you find my home so where I live about
00:26:40
seven miles or eleven kilometers from where these teepees are and that mountain on the right hand side is the first one I climbed is a ten year old it's young nasca which is stony for a
00:26:53
wall of rock and you can actually just walk up the back is just as a long steep walk but here in the imagination of these people they know that reality sets
00:27:08
the rules for them or what's more they know that they are part of that reality so it's not that they're on reality they're in it and so when they talk of
00:27:19
all my relations they're not just talking about their auntie's and uncles in the nation they're talking about the grass that they're on and the trees that are on the Hogs back in front of the Nazca and the mountains and the clouds
00:27:31
in the sky and so for them reality sets the terms by which we live and therefore you live humbly and low to the ground and you get some of that even many years
00:27:45
later because the stormy Nakota have been there for thousands of years living this way so even by the time you get to Aristotle's Greece with the Parthenon they're late comers to the picture we
00:27:57
think it's an ancient long time ago twenty-five hundred years but in fact to the Stoney Nakota we're later rivals even in ancient Greece but you see that Aristotle understood that reality was fixed and
00:28:10
given and perfect reality in itself did not change and because reality did not change and it was perfect you did not challenge reality that he would agree broadly with
00:28:25
the stony Nakota that reality sets the terms of the relationship and so you see here a building far more permanent than the teepees of the Stony Dakota but it's still relatively speaking low to the
00:28:39
ground it's wider than it is high and as you may know there's books and movies and theses been written on the shape the ratio of height to width of that front
00:28:50
porch of the Parthenon and so it maps on Aristotle's politics and science the science of Aristotle is to understand reality but you never mess with it Aristotle science is not a science so
00:29:05
that you learn things so you can change anything you learn it so you can honor what reality is and his politics are the same way and as ethics are the same way now by the time you get to Exeter
00:29:16
Cathedral in southwest Europe southwest England and you're in the 12th 13th and 14th centuries it took a while to build it what you have here is you're beginning to see a break this is early
00:29:29
modern stuff know many people don't think that in fact that period in Europe is the beginning of modernity but in fact it is because you can see here that even in the size and scale of it that we
00:29:43
as human beings are beginning to say maybe reality doesn't set all the terms and conditions maybe we can make a difference maybe the sky's the limit who knows let's at least try and so this
00:29:56
building with tower over the path of the Parthenon and it's not an accident that only two hundred years later that Michelangelo drew that extraordinary picture of man the measure of all things
00:30:09
man astride the world so that here you have a fully modern sense that we will be the measure that reality is no longer what sets the standard and of course by
00:30:23
the time you get to the lower right hand picture we have no idea what town our city that skyscraper is in we don't even know how tall it is but you know it's many times taller than the picture
00:30:34
that we can see and the sky is literally the limit and interestingly if you look at the height of each of these buildings and how far it is from the ground what
00:30:46
you see is what we think of as civilization evolving what you see is that we get further and further from being grounded and if you ask in which
00:30:58
form of consciousness in which culture are you most likely to find an environmental crisis the answer is easy it's the lower right because it's the
00:31:12
one that is farthest from the land and the one in which we've asserted ourselves is being independent from it and so now I want to turn to the model
00:31:24
for why we need and I'll just go back a slide to say why we need a model that differentiates one form of civilization from another and the reason is if you're at all reading in this area you know
00:31:37
that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of articles being written every year that say here is a transformative view of the justice system or here's the transformative view of healthcare here's the transformative view of education or
00:31:50
of parenting or being a manager or whatever and the interesting thing is that in virtually none of those articles is there actually any standard of what
00:32:02
today is of what defines and it was what the boundary is around modernity so that you know when you're out and if you read those articles what you find is often that what is being touted as a new and
00:32:17
transformative thing is simply a modern idea that's been repaid and repainted and offered as a new and transformative idea my point is we need a way to know when we've actually transcended
00:32:29
modernity because if our work now is to transcend the inherited way we have learned to be on this planet then we have to know when we're past its boundaries and so we have to be able
00:32:42
differentiate modernity and other forms of civilization and we do that with a 2x2 matrix and that may suggest that at some point in my life I've been a consultant which I have and to be
00:32:55
certified as a consultant you have to be able to draw 2x2 matrix on the back of a number 10 envelope and then talk about it for 10 minutes off the cuff and if you do that you get certified as a
00:33:06
consultant and here the x-axis is about ontology it's about the nature of reality itself and at the left-hand end we're with Aristotle that reality itself is static it is unchanging they're
00:33:21
really real they're things may appear to change but that's why you need the difference between essence and appearance in essence reality does not change there are only appearances that change and so you make that distinction
00:33:34
and if it is the case that you actually know something that is true it is truly true about the really real then your truth is universal it applies to all people in all time in all languages
00:33:47
anywhere on the planet which means that you can express that same thing and you have to say well this sentence that I've just said the essential proposition if
00:34:00
you say it in French the proposition is the same even though the wording in French and if you say it in Hebrew it's different again if you say it in Chinese it's different again but it gets you into a propositional truth which is the
00:34:13
form of truth that in fact was developing in ancient Greece as we began to think rationally and was developed far more adequately by the Catholic Church and is still the basis of the
00:34:27
Catholic Church's understanding of truth and revelation where is it at the right hand and reality itself is dynamic that is you can't have universal and timeless
00:34:39
truths because within limits reality itself may have changed no rally doesn't change all at once the mountains in my earlier picture were there 200 million years ago it should go much earlier than
00:34:53
200 million years worked there my house would be in the bottom of what we think of as the western shores of what today we call the Pacific Ocean so that if the time frame is long enough it all changes on the
00:35:06
right hand side and some of it changes in nanoseconds and so on the right hand side you have to keep checking you have to keep looking you have to keep asking other people is it still the same has it
00:35:18
changed so that a dynamic reality forces you into a culture of ongoing conversation where in the right hand side once something is known to be true you know it's going to be that way not
00:35:31
just for you but for ever and ever all man and that in that sense you can ignore it you can tuck it away because you don't have to look at it again and so that even the cultural dynamics of human attention are different at either
00:35:44
side of this and if you get the y-axis this is an axis about ontology about the nature of reality but also epistemology that is how we as human beings know reality and at the ontological level at
00:35:59
the left-hand side reality is atomized that is you can take something that appears to be a whole but you can break it that down into its constituent parts and you can break those constituent
00:36:11
parts into the more constituent parts and its constituent parts all the way down until you reach primordial X's that is some kind of primordial feature that does not change it's the basic stuff of
00:36:23
the universe and then you can build up different things like a giant Lego set and epistemologically at the left-hand-side individual persons are
00:36:37
primordial so as Margaret Thatcher said she's at this left hand in when she said there's no such thing as society there's only individuals and lots of people agree with that they're at that
00:36:48
left-hand end that individuated that reality itself is individuated and what's more individuals can know and therefore you can know something all by yourself where is it the right hand in
00:37:02
if you were Leroy a little bear who's a an elder in Blackfoot nation in southern Alberta he would say no I disagree with Margaret Thatcher and for him it's not a matter
00:37:15
of taste it's not a matter of ethics it's an empirical issue he would argue that empirically reality is relational and that human beings are relational and
00:37:26
that that's an empirical statement as he understands empirical now empirical it may be understood in a slightly different way at the other end so the point I'm making is that depending where
00:37:38
you are in either of these spectrums is you've got a different grasp on reality and a different grasp of reality on you and at the right hand end persons are seen to be inherently
00:37:49
relational and knowing is relational so at the left-hand end an individual could know something objectively all by themselves or is it the right hand end objectivity is sustained inter
00:38:02
subjective reliability that is those things are deemed to be objective which large numbers of people having tested it over long periods of time have come to the same agreement and if you think
00:38:16
about it you can actually explain the philosophy of science on either end of that when I went to university we were still teaching the philosophy of science at the left hand end now the philosophy
00:38:28
of science by and large is at the right hand end that doesn't mean it's right but it does mean that we've been changing our mind and so if you put these two things together what you get is for possible spaces for forums of
00:38:42
civilization and so you get that big thick grey boundary around a form of civilization and other than the ones that are type opposite two of them are like each other so the top two are both
00:38:56
blue or the ones green ones yellow the two on the right are both yellow all the ones blue and ones red and so you get that and what I'm saying is that in these phases these are fundamentally
00:39:10
different spaces for knowing reality and responding to it and you get cultures that fit but it also means for example that we can't just talk about what's the nature
00:39:24
of authority because you get a different answer to that in each one of those phases or what's the nature of religion what's the real essence of religion that
00:39:35
question in light of this is a silly question there is no essence of religion you can only define religion within a frame of reference of a form of civilization and if you don't understand that you'll do
00:39:50
bad anthropology as well as bad history of religion and I could ask you to think about in which one of these spaces would aerosol will be in which one of these spaces would Leroy little bear be as an
00:40:03
indigenous person and which one of these spaces are we as modern industrial people in which one of these spaces do you find post modernity and because there isn't time I will just take you
00:40:15
through Rubin sense of the evolution of human cultures that as we emerge from a homonym ancestors we emerged as indigenous people to use today's
00:40:28
language that is we lived in small groups but we were a group of people who knew we were the people and it's one of the things that is characteristic of indigenous people no matter where they are they know in their group that they
00:40:42
are the people and other folks are not the people and so they live in small groups but it's also that they are living people in a living universe and
00:40:54
so if you think about it this is the same logic of complexity which is why the word complex is there they didn't have complexity theory as we've developed it over the last 40 years but if you look at the psychology and the
00:41:06
language and the patterns and the habits of indigenous people diverse though they are you find that they all know that there are living people who belong
00:41:16
together who have to stay together and who are in a living universe and that it isn't entirely clear where they stop and the universe starts so there's lots of
00:41:31
over laughs of that again back to all my relations it's a sense that includes all of it whereas by the time we get into
00:41:42
the Holocene and we get settled agriculture and this model gets established enough the core paradigm is fundamentally different but it's only different in one dimension in other words these people still think
00:41:56
in relational terms in one of the ways we could talk about that is in systems terms that is they still think relationally and hold things together they still know that groups of people
00:42:09
and common knowing Trump's individual knowing but now relation reality is static as opposed to dynamic so they're living people in a static universe and
00:42:21
what you get into here if you think it through is that you're into hierarchy whether you like it or not because in fact authority you have to have some form of authority no matter what space you're in if somebody says
00:42:34
well why do we do something that way there has to be an answer that's better than well it's just what we do and so on the right hand side that answer would be because that's what reality requires of
00:42:47
us here what reality requires of us is we organized hierarchically because at the top of a hierarchy is a person who almost always is a spiritual person it may also be king but as spiritual
00:43:01
authority the final authority because that person has access to the transcendent to God to the source of sacred and therefore you have to do so
00:43:12
as Ken bolding said in a piece of Dogville he wrote years ago in every organization from root to crown ideas full up and vetoes flow down and that's true on the left-hand side of the sheet it's not
00:43:25
true on the right-hand side and so that's a complicated world it can be hugely complicated it can be like a Byzantine world as we would say it is so complicated but it's not complex it is
00:43:39
merely complicated in principle it can be understood and what we've done years innocence is simply work our way down the left-hand side of the sheet we've held to the static sense of
00:43:52
reality remember that's the way philosophy of science was being taught even in the 1950s and including in many places much later than that but what we've done is say instead of
00:44:06
seeing the world as one large organic unit let's think of it as bits and pieces that we can put together and manipulate in different ways so that even as you move down it you get new
00:44:20
possibilities in the bottom left-hand corner for missing with the structure of reality so it's not an accident that Aristotle science in the top left corner is quite different from modern empirical science in the bottom left corner and
00:44:33
what you get here is a bias in modernity for hard data over soft data which is why the word obvious is there so I've captured a word in yellow in each place that captures a critical dimension that
00:44:48
gives us clues about how you would be organized inside and out and since hard data Trump's off data that's not true above the line above the x-axis hard and
00:45:00
soft data on both sides top left and top right are honored broadly equally but in the modern world hard data will beat soft data scientists delight in saying that anecdotes is not the plural of data
00:45:14
and they think they have absolutely squashed people like Leroy a little bear who want to tell stories to reveal reality rather than do scientific
00:45:26
experiments oh you're a little bear understands both modern and Blackfoot metaphysics and so I wouldn't take him on my point is that modernity can be
00:45:41
inferred from though two ends of that spectrum but at the heart of it is the proposition that we can deal with extra bout why whatever x and y are we can deal with husband's without wives we can
00:45:53
deal with children without parents we can deal with boys without girls and have entrances for both in schools we can deal with physics without chemistry we can do physics and chemistry without the history of physics and chemistry and on and on we can
00:46:06
divide the world up and that works forever and given the bias to hard data you get empirical analysis and everlasting truth remember Newton that's he thought that both in his new
00:46:18
testament research and his scientific research that the things that were truly true were true forever and ever all men and freedom here for individual persons means an unconstrained freedom it means
00:46:30
you're unfettered there's absolutely no pressure you're totally alone can make all your own decisions which means in that space there is no basis for an ethic that is self sacrificial that is
00:46:43
self limiting that is to limit your own freedom you see that being acted out in the people who say the government has no right to tell me to wear a mask and so that's an unconstrained freedom and if
00:46:56
you listen carefully to Bill what he's saying is that species that have an opportunity to gorge themselves to death will do so because they have no basis to
00:47:08
a self-limiting ethic whether what you're talking about is fruit flies or modern human beings and that's the critical issue about why modernity cannot be made to be sustainable you are
00:47:22
the stick with it and die or move on and in the right hand side you get the postmodern world and you'll notice that the heavy framing around it is broken and that's done deliberately because if
00:47:35
you think about it in a world in which reality is dynamic and thoroughly individuated you can't have an example our culture you can't create a culture a culture assumes that there's enough
00:47:47
tradition over several generations as to how you do things that's what this culture is about but in a genuinely postmodern culture you don't even have enough authority to tell your kids what to do let alone your grandchildren or
00:48:00
their grandchildren and so this is a chaotic world and it's quite understandable that scientists or a modern scientists are quite often quite appalled most of them quite appalled by any people
00:48:13
who mess with a postmodern way of thinking let me put in a good word for post modernity to say that it may not be a space you can build a house in and live in but it may be a kind of
00:48:27
wilderness it may be a space you can escape to for a while from modernity to get a different perspective on modernity and one of the things postmodern thinking has done for us is give us perspectives on modernity we hadn't seen
00:48:39
within modernity and so now let's use these models of civilization it does change everything as I have suggested we have to stop asked we have to stop talking about say for religion and
00:48:54
science as if there's actually a single thing called science and a single thing called religion and we can work out the relationship but you've got our different ways of being religious
00:49:06
depending which quadrant you're in and even then depending which culture you're in within the quadrant and different ways of being scientific and if you don't understand that you just end up talking nonsense although you think
00:49:20
you're doing serious work and so we have to stop talking about science and religion as if they have some kind of eternal essence and understand that what human beings have from a meta
00:49:33
perspective there's not even such a thing as human nature other than our capacity to be plastic enough in our brain structure as well as in other ways that we can in fact fit ourselves into
00:49:45
each of these spaces and have cultures exist and live over quite long periods of time much much longer in the upper right and even upper left than in the bottom left but a thousand years is not bad in terms
00:50:00
of just getting started and so this then means that we need to rethink our history as well as rethink where we're going because bill and I want to be heard as saying we have to transcend
00:50:14
modernity which means we've got to leave the bottom left-hand corner and that only gives you three other spaces to go to and I've already noted that one of those spaces may be a place that has a certain utility short-run
00:50:27
but don't try to build your culture there because you can't do it it's a place that you want to be in for a while but then you wanna leave so it really only gives you two places and I'll come back to that and so here is the human
00:50:39
journey the big arrows indicate the way that it in fact developed in history the small errors indicate that of the seven point seven billion of us on the planet people are moving in every direction
00:50:52
from each of those phases and some in each of those phases want to hang on to those phases are not move that's what those great black circles are the little black circles our people who want to
00:51:04
just hang on to what they've got and not move but others are on the move and what's more they're on the move in every possible direction and you see that in literature in movies in every possible
00:51:17
way and if you want to think about the relevant population on power of the seven point seven billion of us this is just to think about that the world we live in in that sense as a moving target
00:51:29
is genuinely complex and beyond our Ken what you've got are here in these numbers are not numbers from a serious piece of research they're they come from
00:51:42
research but they're better than a wild ass guess but they're not from a focused piece of research because no foundation on the world knows how yet to fund this kind of research not even shirk the
00:51:55
social science humanities Research Council knows how to fund this kind of thinking and so the numbers are approximate if you want to change them within three or four percent I have no quarrel with that but broadly what you
00:52:09
find is that the folks above the line are have more population than they have influence on the planet and the population above the line on the top
00:52:20
left is that large because iCLASS both China and Russia as regional empires rather than as modern empires I won't bother you with why I do that but I put them there and what you find
00:52:35
is below the line there is a smaller population and there is influence because serious money on this planet I mean serious money on this planet and serious power on this planet exists in the bottom left-hand
00:52:48
corner that if you ask me I was one of the leaders of the Canadian student movement in the 60s and if you're asking me what did we not understand as student leaders what's the most important thing we didn't get and it's the power of
00:53:02
power and the power of money and the way that they're in bed together and so the official fantasy of the 20th century after the war but now also the 21st century is this that of course they will
00:53:15
all become like us and after the war we called it development and they were then third world countries would become first world some second world countries as well and the interesting thing is is
00:53:30
that fundamentally that really hasn't changed if you scratch under the paint of the UN's sustainable development goals what you find is they want to take the very best fruits of modernity and
00:53:42
make them in a fair way distribute them more evenly across the planet so that everybody has the advantages of a modern life and as billa suggested that's a
00:53:56
fantasy that isn't going to happen there isn't enough planet for that to happen but nevertheless this is the official fantasy it drives the OECD and the folks at Davos and the UN and most
00:54:08
universities now it's true they're in some university small programs that are counter to this but trust me if you look at the University budget and where most of the money is going it is being spent
00:54:19
to maintain and expand that bottom left-hand culture and if we ask the question which of these spaces is most sustainable the answer is obvious it's
00:54:32
the top right hand corner because in a dynamic and changing world to live in a way that you know you're a living people in a dynamic world and that therefore your job is to learn to dance in an
00:54:45
ongoing cosmic dance then that's what you do and it's quite clear that a postmodern world cannot be sustainable it's also increasingly clear as bill and
00:54:58
I would argue that a modern technology stria world is not sustainable although we're still in the process of having that thought dawn on us although it is dawning with greater awareness you see
00:55:11
it in the extinction rebellion you see it in the deep adaptation work of Jim Bendel and a whole variety of others which gives us basically only two spaces to flee to and it's exactly what's
00:55:24
happening on the planet that what's happening is that there are people who in fear and anxiety are willing to let strongmen and it's almost always men
00:55:36
established at the top of a hierarchy in the top left hand side and hope that they can make that kind of Empire survive again and it will last longer than the bottom two but I think there
00:55:50
are good reasons for arguing that it is not in fact sustainable that what we need to do is set our sights on becoming and here's a term you may not have heard before because it's not in the literature as far as I know but what
00:56:04
we're aiming for is a neo indigenous way of living it's new indigenous because we will go back to that space acknowledging it's not that we were wrong over the last fifteen thousand years to make the
00:56:17
journey remade we've learned extraordinary things how to put stents in heart for which I'm thankful I have five in my heart how to do genomics and we will go back to that space knowing
00:56:29
these things but we will go back with a greater humility knowing that we are living people in an integral way having to live in integral cultures living
00:56:42
within the limits that the earth sets but also the limits and the style that allows us to be fully human and it's absolutely clear that modernity is not
00:56:53
doing that so what are we not yet see we don't see yet in our culture in spite of the global credit crisis and skite of coal we as a culture as modern cultures we do
00:57:09
not yet take seriously the thought that we are past peak modernity and already into a long and inexorable slide towards civilizational collapse that that collapse will be long and slow it's not
00:57:22
all of a sudden and that we're already into it and that we need to come to terms with it and give up our illusion that we can make modernity sustainable Charlie Hall and John Daly wrote this 11
00:57:34
years ago and no government in the world has come to terms of the yet but it's worse than that this is a an image from a report done by horizons Canada horizons Canada is the
00:57:47
internal think-tank of the Government of Canada that does strategic foresight it's the largest strategic foresight group in Canada and they were asked by shirk which is the social science and Humanities Research Council
00:57:59
that's the folks who fund the Academy to do humanities and social science work and they've learned that they need to encourage these people to think about the future because things are changing
00:58:10
and so they said two horizons Canada about three years ago would you engage in an 18-month study and tell us what the big critical issues of the 21st century will be at least get them all up
00:58:23
to 2050 and preferably out to 20 up to 2100 and the report is on the horizons Canada website you can download it it's public document this image is in the
00:58:35
report it's in the public domain and if the idea is that all of the issues including kovat and all its implications should be found in one of these spaces or some combination of them and if we
00:58:49
look at it and say well I I think you've missed something they might point us to the blank box in the bottom left-hand corner and say what if there's a seventeenth they'll tell us and we'll
00:59:00
add it and if we say no no no it's not that's not not what you missed what you've missed is that this way of parsing reality this way of assuming this way of thinking about reality this
00:59:14
way of grasping reality to think that you can divided up into different buckets and yes there may be some overlap but divided up essentially into different buckets and different issues is a
00:59:26
remarkably modern way of dealing with reality if it asked Leroy a little bear the same question he wouldn't have done this kind of thing at all because he doesn't think this way so the
00:59:40
implication is that you and/or aizen's Canada are confident that a modern way of understanding reality is good for the next hundred years because you have not warned shirk that the modern way of
00:59:53
thinking should be on that list which is to say the need to transcend modernity and mature into the next form of civilization is not on your list horizons Canada but smarts not on any
01:00:05
list of Grand Challenges for the 21st century and Grand Challenges as you may know as a way is a language that developed in the European Commission about 15 years ago it's now common around the world lots of people do it
01:00:17
including some national churches and there are increasing number of bodies like this this is the one at Cambridge I don't use it to embarrass Cambridge but it was just handy the Center for the
01:00:29
Study of existential risk dedicated the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilizational collapse and the interesting thing is that modernity is
01:00:41
not on their list either in fact it's not on the list of any of the agencies that now are dedicated to do this work and that's not merely ironic it's expected if you understand the way we
01:00:53
moderns think about things it would be extraordinary if they had stumbled on the importance of modernity but the fact is it's also dangerous because the drift in the 21st century
01:01:07
already is as I've suggested from left to right and bottom to top it's not a full March it's an incoherent stumbling it's often in the dark but if you don't have to read a whole lot of
01:01:19
literature or see movies or read poetry or even look at scientific research to realize that we're slowly and incoherently realizing that the reality of which we're a part if you've got a long enough time frame it all moves and
01:01:33
whether you like it or not if you want to understand something you have to put it in context historical and otherwise and so I want to just offer you quickly before I close three bits of data that
01:01:46
our data in that sense but they're they're somewhat random and they're quite different but they all make the point that that's the journey we need to be on and so here's Brian Goodwin and many of you will know his work he's one
01:02:00
of the people deeply respected in the field of complexity theory and he's reflecting on the fact in an article a few years ago of the fact there's 40 years now of complexity theory and what's the significance of that and he's
01:02:14
saying scientific knowledge originally seemed to make possible the prediction and manipulation of nature and let's just stop there for a minute he's absolutely right he knows what's at the heart of first enlightenment science
01:02:26
that that is part of the agenda of the Royal Society in 1660 when it was formed but this is in the bottom left-hand corner enough that we can understand reality
01:02:38
and unlike Aristotle we're not understanding it so we can honor it and respect it we're understanding it so we can mess with it and what he's saying is that if you look at the edges of scientific knowledge it appears now to
01:02:50
be pointing us towards a new relationship with the natural world based on sensitive observation and participation rather than control in one language we're being invited to know
01:03:03
reality in a different way and to be known by it in a different way and Leroy little bear if you looked at this would say well it took you long enough welcome home
01:03:15
or this it's almost a random sentence and I look for them in various places just to make the point that bit by bit we're stumbling in this direction this is a review done in The Globe and Mail
01:03:28
over a year ago and I can't remember it's a book or a play but what the reviewer is saying is if you engage this work it will help you become more reflexive and you'll begin to raise
01:03:41
questions such as this one is as I fight the system in which I live and think of all the people out marching for black lives matter and good on them for doing it but am i ignoring the system that lives
01:03:54
in me that is am i pretending that that system is out there and is evil and I'm pure or am i recognizing even as I proclaimed that black lives matter and
01:04:07
the system must change that I and those who march with me are part of that system and participate in it far more than we are there acknowledge or no or
01:04:19
that we're even proud of and in that case it brings a kind of determined humility but it keeps us from Manatee ism of seeing them as evil and we are good which gives us the right to kill
01:04:33
them which of course if you reverse it gives them the right to kill us which is of course why we're marching here Wilfred Cantwell Smith I think the
01:04:45
world's greatest historian of religion to date wrote to me in a private letter he became a mend mentor and then a friend in the late 20th century and said
01:04:59
to me in a letter I've spent much of the last 40 years endeavoring to understand world views other than those that we in the West have been harrogate and in the last several years I've been particularly concerned with the question of what's involved in the endeavor to
01:05:11
understand and help others understand and I look different from the one one already has and you see that issue is at the heart of civilizational transcendence if we can't learn to
01:05:24
understand how we got this way then we have no chance of transcending the way that has now got us and as he says one of the conclusions to which I
01:05:37
have come is that in order to understand a different view especially if it's radically different profound comprehensive humane one must oneself become a different sort of person which
01:05:51
is why bill and I both talked of a personal - - - civilizational journey this is at every scale from the deepest levels within us to our form of
01:06:03
civilization and that's not understood yet we're still in the 21st century trying to extend modernity by making it sustainable and livable rather what we
01:06:16
need to do is to learn to know imagine think through and respond to the actual situation that we're in and that's the situation that we're slowly coming to terms with the fact that our modern
01:06:28
technology us triol way of living has no long-term future which means we have to let go of it and outgrow it my 12 year old son said to me many years ago dad I
01:06:41
don't always understand what you're talking about normal for a 12 year old but I think what you're saying is that the only way to grow is up not extraordinary
01:06:53
that's the lesson the only way to grow is up we need to outgrow modernity in into a deeper maturity so we commit to the utterly new work of consciously co-creating the next form of human
01:07:06
civilization by nurturing into being a meta reflexive and co-creative persons and cultures and I'll stop there as we
01:07:18
need some time for Q of a it's a lot to digest I've talked for an hour but both bill and I are saying that the situation that we're in is not the way that we imagined
01:07:32
it even officially imagined and that therefore most of the work that we're doing in our 200 trillion dollar globally me is actually work that is pointing us
01:07:45
in the wrong direction we're trying to enlarge and sustain modernity rather than transcend it and if we wait too long to learn that lesson we will be locked into disintegration and
01:07:59
civilizational collapse that needn't happen but it is going to cost us as persons and as cultures to do something that no one in human history has ever
01:08:11
had to do before and that is to literally change their form of civilization not just adapt their culture but adapt their culture to a new form of civilization and one that in our
01:08:24
case doesn't even exist yet as a fully blown paradigm and one that is required that we have to do it consciously fast by any historical standard and it has to
01:08:35
be scalable so let me end with a quote from John McMurray who's also a philosopher who said in lectures he gave in Canada that to be rid of illusions
01:08:48
which is what bill and I have been encouraging us who are modern to do if it does not break our courage McMurray understood that to give up our
01:08:59
illusions can break us but he said to be rid of illusions if it does not break our courage is a liberating experience and it's that liberation that bill and I
01:09:12
are trying to offer for a modern world and to you thank you thank you much Ruben we've been listening to Ruben
01:09:25
Nelson executive director of foresight Canada speaking eloquently and passionately about the need for a transcendence of modernity
01:09:39
I was particularly struck by the part of the quote on one of the slides have I have you have we been ignoring the system that lives in us well we have
01:09:54
time for just a few quick so I want to begin with one from Jane Ben strim thanks to them I should say well known to number of you are familiar
01:10:06
with iris she writes seeing the wide range of responses by individuals communities and governments to the coven I team pandemic
01:10:18
what can be learned what can we learn that could be applied to addressing the climate change crisis wonderful question
01:10:31
Thank You Jane wherever you are probably in Seattle well one of the things we can learn for example is that in our modern way of thinking the dominant metaphors
01:10:43
are mechanical and in mechanical system is literally the case if you can make the system more efficient you get rid of waste so if you have parts that duplicate each other they're not needed you can get rid of one of them and
01:10:57
that's true for mechanical systems so that waste and mechanical systems can is something you can get rid of and decrease efficiency but in living human
01:11:08
and even biological systems duplication is not waste its resilience and what covert is teaching us one little virus that we hadn't known before took down
01:11:22
supply chains on which trillions of dollars of trade depend and it took them down because we built those supply chains according to mechanical images we have invested literally billions of
01:11:36
dollars in building supply chains that are so efficient there is no waste but we were not bright enough to understand that we were thinking mechanically and we didn't understand that biologically
01:11:49
duplication is not waste it's called resilience and so we can learn from the covert experience if we want to but the fundamental metaphors on
01:12:00
which we who are modern depend on to organize our selves and our world are faulty and more humbly ask well how would we do it if our the point of life is the whole
01:12:13
point of modern economics is efficiency it is the only God they honor and if you can increase efficiency in economic terms you won and we're so good at it
01:12:25
that in fact it's killing us and now we need to understand that our metaphors and a whole images and the logic of them has been inappropriate persons are not machines they're not even just organisms
01:12:39
like worms we're persons and we need to honor that and if we do that kovat can help teach us another question I find this was very
01:12:54
interesting this comes from Roger your process roben he says is very rational and that's wonderful but many people react at an emotional level so let me
01:13:09
just elaborate on that a little bit um how do we motivate people do we scare them do we embarrass them with the idea
01:13:22
that maybe their thinking is out-of-date do we model a new form of thinking and make it so enticing that they want to
01:13:33
move into this kind of a transcendence of modernity how do you motivate people now one of it it's not just how do you motivate people how do you motivate people who have inherited a modern
01:13:47
culture and are so deeply modern and they of course don't know this and so you would answer the question in different ways in different quadrants one of the things that is true of us I
01:13:59
dare say it is true of all of us in our own ways who are listening to this at whatever time we're listening to it and that is there are voices within as we know when we've been dismissed as a person we know when other people have
01:14:13
seen us merely as a function or have taken a quick glance of us and see nothing there a value and they just and we know how much that shrivels us up you know as we know as persons rather
01:14:26
than as functions we're taught in the modern world to take ourselves as functions to work but not your whole person and so one of the things we know as persons is that we light up like
01:14:38
lightbulbs when other persons recognize us as whole persons as a value as a person so if you're in a wheelchair people in wheelchairs continuously say for God's sake ignore the wheelchair
01:14:51
people are even gay who say for God's sake ignore my sexual orientation it's not the most important thing about me I'm a person and that itself is
01:15:04
intellectual and spiritual and emotional and physical it's all of those things all wrapped up and so we get motivated most when in fact we are allowed not merely to be rational with the facts but
01:15:18
we're allowed to be passionate we're allowed to fall in love bill said explicitly we will only defend that which we love and the tragedy of modernity is we do not love this planet
01:15:32
we want to use it which is the same thing that happens in prostitution that you want to use the woman and not love her and the difference the act appears
01:15:45
to be the same but it's very different and we know that so that you motivate modern people by giving them permission to bring their whole self which you see
01:15:59
in the marches people are out there and they're angry and they're passionate and they're emotional and they're also rational you see in some of the distances they take the mass should they wear the signs that they in other words
01:16:11
that's not a choice in other words it is the modern response of will just teach them better facts is a failed strategy facts you don't fall in love with facts
01:16:25
none of us do and so it's a wonderful question in order to help people move then it's ourselves that's back to Will Smith we
01:16:38
have to present ourselves to people as people who are on that journey and as bill and I have talked privately and many people say in other languages the journey of life is a journey of the walking wounded supporting each other
01:16:51
that you both know that neither one of you are God's answer to this world but you've both learned a lot of stuff you've got scars to show it you're you're absolutely willing to share that
01:17:04
with other people and therefore walk with them and in my experience if you do that and show up that way people themselves show up they crawl out of their shells and just hug you out of
01:17:16
thankfulness if they're neither as alone or as crazy as they feared they were thank you question about the e perm that you use neo indigenous and a good
01:17:36
preface this by saying I suspect that struck some people as well is it really and are we going to be able to market that idea promote that idea in a way
01:17:49
that is winsome so Abdul Aziz writes this how can we move from our current form of civilization to the indigenous form and by that I assume he means the
01:18:02
neo indigenous how can that be seen as truly a livable sustainable new
01:18:16
civilization well you can come at that from several different directions which is my inclination part of it is to do what bill does and that simply run the numbers given the limits of the physical
01:18:32
limits of this planet how many people can be supported at what we think of as a modern way of life and the answer is way less than seven point seven billion and if you think about it you don't even
01:18:46
want to be a survivor if let's assume that there's we can even support two billion at that level you don't want to have to tell your grandchildren that there used to be seven point seven billion of us and through our
01:18:58
mismanagement five billion died off so that we could live the survivor's guilt would be such that most people would commit suicide just from what we know about survivor's guilt in far less scale
01:19:12
than that so part of it is to run the numbers and really get serious about the fact that we just got to do this folks in some way or other but part of it is also to understand that we're already on
01:19:25
this journey neither bill nor I want to be heard is saying we have to start something that is that is totally new it's rather saying we have to open our eyes to the fact that over the last 200
01:19:36
years there have been clues of this in what we think of as modern culture there have been voices pushing us in these directions so that evolution for example which is now absolutely at the heart of
01:19:49
science but evolution can't happen mechanically in the bottom left-hand corner if you take it seriously particularly the way particularly with the kind of genomics we're now doing but
01:20:03
that you could you have to actually move to the right-hand side of the sheet and what's more you have to move your relational so it's literally learning that we're on this journey there's a sense in which what we're saying is keep
01:20:15
stumbling in the directions we're stumbling just do it better open your eyes tell the story learn to actually do it better pack a lunch for it rather than falling down on your ass so often
01:20:26
so get better at stumbling in the directions we're already moving in would also be part of what I would say and I would be really careful about the language of neo indigenous because that
01:20:39
can be heard by indigenous people as offensive and I absolutely honor that and if Leroy a little child tells me that I must not use it I will not use it again I've not tried it out on him but I
01:20:52
will and but what I'm saying is it's in that upper quadrant where we know we are living persons with other living persons in a living universe and that we have to figure but we on our journey of the last
01:21:06
15 thousand years we have learned some extraordinary things I for me parallels to some extent the human journey of growing up that unless you're willing to give up childhood and become an
01:21:18
adolescent you'll never grow up because adolescence is a necessary stage of human maturity now happily a lot of adolescence is actually hardwired into us hormonal E and in terms of brain
01:21:31
structure and other things the job we're now facing is the thing that isn't hardwired into us it's optional and that is to grow beyond being a forty
01:21:42
seven-year-old male adolescent and I kind of look at modernity as our adolescence at the time we were full of ourselves and individuated but we also are learning the limits of it and so
01:21:56
we're willing with the deeper maturity to embrace relatedness again and to do it with more grace that's the fantasy Allah we all need stories to let us sleep at night and that's part of my
01:22:08
story but we have time I think for one very brief question and from an anonymous attendee and Ruben let me ask you for a
01:22:19
very brief answer but let me just read the question don't we need to create in a new illusion of a new inclusive and
01:22:31
universal religious and philosophical Center to achieve a new inclusive and universal ethic and ethos and I would
01:22:42
say yes and in other words a lot of that is going on there are I could won't take time but I know of a dozen such places around the world now I'm sure there are people planning while we're doing this are planning to form yet another one and
01:22:56
so there's a lot of that going on they have a certain utility and so I want to say blessings on you all and it's not enough it's insufficient in part because
01:23:08
the very model of doesn't quite get where we're headed and that's alright that's true of me I'm 81 now if I had given this talk even 20 years ago it would have been noticeably
01:23:21
different 20 years before that it would again be profoundly different even though I've been stumbling on it for most of my professional life and so I want to say yes and yeah and if that's your passion if you find that passion
01:23:34
and that's what you want to do do it as authentically as you can and I would say it is a contribution to the human journey well thank you so much Ruben I wish you could hear the virtual applause
01:23:46
from our audience thank you ladies and gentlemen for joining us tonight
End of transcript