CONTENTS

Issue 5
July-August 04

My View of the World

Master’s Program in Worldview Change
Since prestige in our society emanates from association with establishment institutions, my notion of an autodidactic Master’s program might be regarded by many with little more than a batting eye. But having graduated from Dartmouth and Yale, the last thing I need is another establishment degree. Thus I have been, de facto, constructing a Master’s degree in Worldview Change. Consider the elements:

I am putting together a syllabus of the most important worldview change works in human history. Of course, this is a neverending process, but I have finally reached a point where I have a list of those works that I want to read by the time I finish my novel. This list is a continuation of those works already mentioned on my web site:

• Presence (continuation of Senge’s theory)
• Diffusion of Innovations (how do ideas diffuse exponentially?)
• Aquarian Conspiracy (application of Kuhn’s theory to social change)
• Turning Point (the transition of society to a new paradigm)
• Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
• Limits to Growth: 30-Year Global Update (system dynamics of state of world)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (forces that have shaped human history)
• The Dream of Earth (classic new vision of Earth and people)
• Paradigms: Business of Discovering the Future (new book on how paradigms change)
• Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political, and Environmental Crises Facing Our World (important work on evolution of consciousness)
• Ken Wilbur’s most relevant book (not yet selected)

And for purposes of writing my novel:

• Sophie’s World (learning novel)
• Celestine Prophecy (learning novel)

By the end of the year, I will create my first full draft of a syllabus.

I am taking notes and writing papers as any Master’s student does. I have several advisors, all of which receive this newsletter. I go to conferences (at least one, see below), and I have a master’s thesis, the ultimate project which is to write a novel, more the work of a PhD, but I won’t nitpick. Perhaps in the future, I can offer an on-line Master’s course in Worldview Change, but let me get my novel done first.

Washington, D.C.
Marisol and I just arrived a week ago to the Washington, D.C. area. After having entered and later rejected an initial apartment, we just discovered that we were accepted to join Elevation 314, the most green architecture building in the D.C. area, right by the Takoma Metro Station for those familiar with the public transport geography. It will be a thematically appropriate place from which to craft my novel and the advances of the Project. For the moment, though, we are house-, dog-, and cat-sitting in Arlington, VA.

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Notes in July-August

Novelette
With respect to the novel, I have been gearing up for fiction. I wrote several novelettes when I was in high school, back before I even used a typewriter. I was enthralled by fiction, having started out my writing career in fiction. When I was in fifth grade, I scored the highest on a town-wide test that asked to write about where I would go in a time machine. I don’t know what it was testing, but when my teacher told me how well I had done, my ego and writing career had been launched. I left fiction writing aside though after high school in pursuit of somewhat better paying and easier publishing in non-fiction. Now I am back and have just completed a later draft of a novelette that I will continue improving over the next month.

Putting the plot and characters together with an underlying theme has reinvigorated my confidence that I can take on and win my novel challenge. If anyone would like to review the work, please let me know and I’ll gladly share it. I hope it’s now fit for public consumption. In the next issue, I’ll talk about a fiction critique group that I will be joining.

World Future Society
Now if you are a master’s candidate in worldview change, there may be several kinds of conferences that would be of interest but the clearest and most basic of all should be the World Future Society. I attended the conference in Washington, D.C. 31 July – 2 August and it was more and less than I expected it to be.

Because Futurism hardly seems a coherent field, the conference attracts people from a wide variety of fields, consulting, education, management, spiritual development, etc. This richness of participation ensures that the conference itself does not slip into a disciplinary mental box that many disciplines have when they convene many like-minded individuals. The conference is so open in this respect that it doesn't even tie thought to formal theme. Despite this, themes did emerge, or at least along the lines that I attended.

March of Technology
Technology, for one, is advancing so rapidly that major alterations in the way humanity exists will be upon us in short order. For example biotechnology is already rapidly modifying crops and animals and meat has been grown in a factory — without an animal. Human organs are soon to come. Nanotechnology uses microscopic robots, if you will, that can enter my body and fight bacteria or increase the density of brain cells in my brain, or extend my life. Each nanobot has no effect, but when they self-replicate into millions and billions, pooling their intelligence, interacting with each other, the Internet, and our own body, they become powerful enhancers pushing us toward a more cyborg like state. As leading technologist Ray Kurzweil (see below) said in the opening plenary, “Biology is sub-optimal.” When one considers that nanotechnology will be able to enhance the human brain millions of times, we begin to understand what he means.

Perhaps most debatable and provocative of all is the advance of artificial intelligence. Kurzweil and another robot builder that attended a workshop on evolution of humanity strongly believe it is just a matter of time before robots pass the Turing Test. That is, place a robot and a human side-by-side, a human observer unaware of which is which, and the observer will not be able to distinguish among them, both in appearance and in discussion with them. In 30 years, the robot builder attested, robots will take over. They will demand rights and want all the privileges of being alive. The robot builder seems hopeful it will be a peaceful transition but if humans want to retain power (which he asserts that they do), then the transition might not be so pretty.

Had I not heard Kurzweil speak (who has invented optical character recognition, speech recognition, the first flatbed scanner, first text synthesizer, first music synthesizer, and print-to-speech reading machine; he also runs a science trends consulting firm) on the exponential advancement of technology (power of computers is doubling every year) that kind of claim might be relegated to science fiction (which is a valid form of futurism in itself).

Then there were many discussions on human evolution into a higher consciousness, a collective consciousness. Some argue this participation in consciousness will be the one aspect of the human being that cannot be downloaded into a robot (if you agree with the assumption that we will be able to understand the human brain and then reverse engineer it, which is the current artificial intelligence paradigm). I attended sessions on collective intelligence, evolution into universal consciousness, and a merging of humans and robots into cyborgs. Interestingly, no one talked about human participation in a galactic community as ETs still seemed a topic just a little bit out-of-bounds to discuss.

So these ideas and others I will have to consider in my novel’s conclusion.

Worldview as High Leverage Point
I did come away with one idea while listening to the policy and environmental expert Jeremy Rifkin talk about our inevitable transition to the hydrogen economy and Kurzweil (both the opening plenary speakers). Both are geniuses in their field and indeed every field has its leader-geniuses, but what they are not geniuses in is how the fields interact. While humanity and futurists break the world up in dozens of fields, the real world combines all into one. No one can be expert enough to understand these interactions. So the search for leverage points to move society toward sustainability would not be based in particular fields. Rather there must be higher levels of abstraction of the global system to find those leverage points, places in the system that do not require understanding of all the component fields. One such place is the worldview, that driftnet of ideas that together drives all the other fields and ties them together in motive and form. As Donella Meadows wrote in a famous essay on leverage points, the paradigm is one of the highest leverage points in the system, and that's where the Worldview Change Project works.

What About Implementation?
One last thought I had at the WFS conference: there are many visions on where to go, what the world might look like, but no discussion on how to get there on a global scale. It's daunting the implementation and steps needed. Again, though, this is what makes the Worldview Change Project particularly unique in its outlook.

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People Involved with the WCP: Ray Kurzweil, Technologist

Ray Kurzweil is a vicarious participant in the Worldview Change Project. He neither knows about it or about me, but his technological contribution helps to bound my view of the future. While I already knew that technology was advancing exponentially, I had little idea how advanced researchers were (or so says he) in the radical extension of human life, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.
Kurzweil has had six major technological breakthroughs (mentioned above) and spun off 9 companies. His web site is the leading source on artificial intelligence, www.raykurzweilai.net. He is his own publishing house having recently published Age of Spiritual Machines and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. See his biography.

For me though, I found his brilliance and his technological optimism scary. Perhaps I am fearful of the messenger rather than the message, but only time will tell. I suspect he is both messenger and message. He argues that we cannot relinquish or avoid the technologies that are coming. If we try to do so, they will simply go underground and modern society will lose control of them. Yet the power they bring to humanity is way beyond anything we know before. There are plenty of science fiction scenarios that speculate the possible consequences. Many fears are already common in normal discourse such as designer viruses, nanotechnologies turning us into goo, robots taking over (Terminator, Matrix), etc.

Since biotechnology is already enjoying a Wall Street investment, it is most consequential today. Ray says that nanotechnology will protect us from the effects of biotechnology. So what will protect us from nanotechnology? Ray says that artificial intelligence will protect us from nanotechnology? So, Ray, what will protect us from AI? He didn't have much of an answer for that, except that we will merge with it, rather than need protection from it.

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What I’m Reading: The Primitive World and Its Transformations

Famed anthropologist Robert Redfield published in 1953 one of the most classic of modern worldview change books, The Primitive World and Its Transformations. This small tome recounts how civilizations have arisen from primitive people (a term he does not use with any disrespect) and how civilization converts them into peasantries as urban areas move outward and draw both people, culture, and materials inward. The major theme revolves around the relationship between the evolution of the moral and technical order of people.

Moral order “refers to the organization of human sentiments into judgments as to what is right.” It's about the nature of bonds between people. “The technical order [on the other hand] is that order which results from mutual usefulness, from deliberate coercion, or from the mere utilization of the same means. In the technical order men are bound by things, or are themselves things. They are organized by necessity or expediency.”

As a culture begins to tip the scale from pre-civilized to civilized, the technical order increases dramatically, though the moral order does not necessarily decrease. The following are the principal characteristics of growth in the technical order.

1. The great increase in the size of the settlement (the material equipment for human association becomes far larger)
2. The institution of tribute or taxation with resulting central accumulation of capital
3. Monumental public works
4. The art of writing
5. The beginnings of such exact and predictive sciences as arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy
6. Developed economic institutions making possible a greatly expanded foreign trade.

“The moral order begins as something pre-eminent but incapable of changing itself, and becomes perhaps less eminent but more independent. In folk society the moral rules bend, but men cannot make them afresh. In civilization the old moral orders suffer, but new states of mind are developed by which the moral order is, to some significant degree, taken in charge.”

As the technical order advances, it outstrips the moral order, creating a cultural lag. The technical order can force the moral order to change. He cites how the ancient Egyptians after the Hyksos conquest developed a ‘psychosis for security’ which later expressed itself in a sense of a ‘manifest destiny’ to extend one culture in domination over another. The god-king and the other gods supported the extension of the frontiers of the land. This same phenomenon happened in Hellenic and Roman times and throughout civilization's history.

The subordination of the moral order to a rapidly advancing technical order characterizes our own society today (go no further than the techo-discussion above). Redfield traces how civilization stripped apart the natural, human, and sacred qualities of reality where today humans are not part of nature and sacredness is also not part of nature, making it an easy task to do with material nature as we wish.

Last, he makes a nice distinction between worldview and culture which I have found useful in my work. “The ‘world view’ of a people, yet another of this group of conceptions, is the way a people characteristically look outward upon the universe… If culture suggests the way a people look to an anthropologist, 'world view' suggests how everything looks to a people…”

Next issue: Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and Presence, how collective intelligence and organizational learning offer a possible vision to worldview change.

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Links

I have just recently become involved with discussions with the Great Transitions Initiative, a new project housed at the Tellus Institute in Boston, that seems to have a remarkable overlap of interest with the Worldview Change Project. For this issue, I only present their web site, but in the next issue, I will go more into their approach.

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Jeremy Rifkin

Ray Kurzweil

Robert Redfield

“Cosmopathy” is the pathology of worldviews, whereby a person suffers from competing worldviews or the need to change worldviews because the gap between the worldview’s beliefs and perceived reality cause a breakdown, a condition which the Worldview Change Project aims to help.  Cosmopathy is distributed to those interested in the progress of the WCP.  Your name can be added or deleted by submitting a request to the author.