Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I want to encourage you to try a little bit of awe for early, microbial life. Try some respect; try seeing yourselves from a position of humility, and extend admiration for the genius that we take for granted, but that is absolutely crucial to being who we are.
Thomas Jefferson died 198 years ago on the 4th of July, but we really shouldn’t wait two more years to notice, and take to heart, an important argument in political/economic philosophy that Jefferson made in a letter to James Madison dated 6 September 1789.
This is the second in the Metastatic Modernity video series of about 17 installments (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous episode afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode provides a cosmological perspective on our insignificance.
If nothing else, I hope these few indulgent personal reflections on communicative resilience and creative resilience will have encouraged you to find and/or express your own voice in this world-in-crisis, and in whatever way(s) you feel most compelled and/or comfortable to do so.
When I describe the schools that barefoot rural children once attended, in the USA of 1900 or the Ireland of the 1950s, everyone assumes their education would be pathetic — the “three Rs,” … This belief … crumbles the instant one reads descriptions of schools from a century ago
This article, the first of two, addresses from a personal perspective some of the difficulties and dilemmas that can be encountered when trying to communicate something of today’s planetary emergency, as well as possible sources of solace and yes, even hope, when doing so.
Our goal is to develop a more complete perspective: to see things through a long lens from a more external point of view. For me, what emerges is a sense that modernity is dangerous and unhinged.
Lack of attention to the psychological and cultural dimension of systems is widespread – but inner factors are fundamental to global crises and the approaches we require.
I don’t want there to be a president… I want to see people doing what is needed. I want there to be orthopraxy. And that isn’t going to happen anywhere in the realm of politics.
At the very moment when our survival demands a deep overturning of what we have long believed to be true and proper, settling for less will look like the crazier option.
Today’s conversation with philosopher and social scientist Jonathan Rowson dives into the emerging ways of being that could serve us as we move toward a post-growth world, including what he has found particularly helpful in his decades of work studying the metacrisis.
Without attending to our own continued transformation, we cannot hope to align with the living world to create a tapestry of a beautiful future
