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January 2004 * Premier Issue * Updates of the Worldview Change Project
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DEAR READERS: After three years’ developing the Public Use Planning Program, a 1,000-page manual, and programs in Mesoamerica and Indonesia, I realized I could not maintain my sanity without a major project. I just left RARE Center for Tropical Conservation after 6.5 years and my brief period of unemployment (I hope) has turned quickly into the Worldview Change Project. I am very proud to launch both the website and this monthly newsletter. By making this loud public splash, I commit in front of you all to march forward with this wide-ranging project that ventures not just into current American policies, but deep down into the labyrinth of the mind passing underneath the superficial barriers between fields in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The first milestone will be a novel, but don’t expect to find it on amazon.com quite yet.
I thank those of you who have signed up for Cosmopathy and those of you who might yet consider it (if you have not explicitly asked for it, you won’t be receiving another issue; no charge for this one). The objective of this newsletter is to trace both the progress of the Project and the ideas that I encounter along the way. But what in the worldview does cosmopathy mean anyway? A little rudimentary Latin should do the trick here: cosmos + pathos = worldview suffering. That is, those who are suffering a worldview problem have a case of cosmopathy. Either their own worldview has failed them and they have given to depression and worse or they have already decided to push off for another shore but are not sure how to get there. This shoving off to the opposite shore is what this Project is all about. Some will refuse to leave safe ground (or at least they perceive it as safe), others will be lost on the way (to cosmopathetic sharks?), and most of us will end up on different extensions of the shore, but I hope, the same shore. There we look to create a beachhead with due haste and move inland. That’s when our cosmopathy goes away.
Last, feel free to offer suggestions on how to make this newsletter more interesting. I would rather prefer not to talk about myself the whole time and would eagerly welcome letters or other contributions to the newsletter and we’ll see where it goes from there.
1. I launched the website introducing the Worldview Change Project.
2. I launched Cosmopathy, the monthly newsletter.
3. I have begun distributing a fully automated PowerPoint presentation outfit with music and moving parts. It is designed to introduce the Worldview Change Project to those people with whom I cannot be physically present. If you would like a copy of the CD that contains this presentation, let me know.
People
Involved with the WCP: Daniel Quinn
I would like to introduce perhaps the most important inspiration for the project: Daniel Quinn. Author of Ishmael and subsequent books, Quinn pierced ever so deeply into forbidden territory, the worldview underwriting civilization, a cyclical enterprise of rise and fall over the past 10,000 years. As the first oilmen had no idea how deep oil rigs can go nowadays or the atmospheric alterations the activity can provoke, I had no idea just how deep beliefs could go and how they could influence societal behavior. After reading Ishmael at the beginning of last year, I went on a reading spree that prepared me to kick off this project, though I consider myself only 15% the way through background classics I need to begin applying the Project to more specific questions and applications.
Interestingly in 1992, I wrote Quinn after having read his book for the first time (it was published that same year). Although I was not ready for it, I was sufficiently inspired to send off a fan mail. Clearly he hadn’t yet been overwhelmed with such mail as he responded to me in rapid course and enthusiasm. He wrote: “The letters from readers (about ten times more than I expected) have forced me to rethink my plans for the future. When I wrote that ‘perhaps... we can get something started here,’ I wasn’t exactly thinking that people would expect me to get something started, but of course they do.”
A photocopy of this letter crowned a package of materials I just recently sent him, to offer him some backup in this quest to move from the current worldview (though he doesn’t use that term). My hope is that the PowerPoint presentation and cover letter will interest him enough to join the informal band of advisors that have begun forming around the project. Hopefully I can report on that next month.
The most appropriate way to start off talking about notes is one of my research habits. I have full faith that my memory will falter when I call upon it. Thus, for every book I read, I take extensive notes in my computer. I figure it will be impossible to cart around my paper-cursed library with me, but I can take innumerable notes on my computer with quotations, page references, and interpretations. While this slows research considerably, the notes have already proven unremitting friends in my understanding the issues at hand.
Finally I admit to placing myself squarely in a positive feedback loop here. The more notes I take, the more my brain will conclude that memorization is a frivolous waste of energy, and the more I will need my notes. System thinkers sometimes call this situation a death spiral. Maybe I can write my book in time…
This month I finished up taking notes on The Sacred (Peggy V. Beck, Anna Lee Walters, and Nia Francisco), a great book written in the 1970s by Navajo scholars. Using many first-person quotations from Native Americans, they traced out the basics of Indian spirituality, religion if you will. I am now aware of how little I understand a truly different worldview from my own and the great effort it takes to move from one to another. In fact, that is one eternal challenge I confront. How do I write about worldviews without having sampled a few beforehand? Who else would dare such imprudence, such arrogance? Could a chocolatier script sweetness into a book without having thoroughly and enduringly inculcated his palate first?
Another book I am currently reading is Paradigm Wars: Worldviews for a New Age by Mark Woodhouse. Woodhouse explains in a highly readable and well researched book how society is in transition to a new paradigm. It is a bumpy incoherent transition at this stage with many different manifestations looking to coalesce. He focuses very much on the push toward a systemic holism that integrates not just the physical world but also the non-physical world into the same worldview. I had always been agnostic at best and seriously doubtful most of the time of paranormal phenomena, but with a highly critical credibility he approaches these topics with an open mind and shows how other powers (ones denied by science because they are not fully evidenced and reproducible) could tie nicely into a new worldview. I remain open.
Since I mention Daniel Quinn in this issue, I would offer to my readers the premier Ishmael site (of several): www.ishcon.org. This site has high activity all the time about very many interesting topics related closely and distantly to the work of Quinn and other thinkers. Check it out.
Visit the Worldview Change Project Home / Inspirations / Advisory Council / FAQ/
Reading List / Newsletters / Related Articles / Links / Model
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“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 .