Second Renaissance Research Subgroup: What is the Second Renaissance

Research and Sense-Making
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Lately, the subcircle process has been circling around the idea of “throughput”. That was all feeling a bit on the industrial side for me, so I did a little exercise to explore on a more primary process level what “throughput” feels like to me. Sharing that below, for what it’s worth!

Here are some musings on 2R “throughput” through my personal “process”.

Starts from situation … perception … cognition … orientation …

Maps the moment to the memories … feels the self in the world …

Troubles? Tensions? Things to do? What is pulling-pushing-coaxing-forcing?

Coming into focus now …

What people do now cannot continue. Changes witnessed over the time of a life cannot be extended to infinity. This, now, cannot persist.

Deep intuitions of a time before time. Time of rock. Time of ice. Time of fire. Time of trees and birds and fish in endless flow.

I see the people coming from everywhere. I see the buildings going up. I see the people on the streets. How will these people find the trees and the birds and the fish? When will they fall to the rock and the ice and the fire?

Throughput. Passing through. Passing through this life. Passing through this world. Passing through this moment. Passing off and passing on.

Waking up now … become lucid … growing into words …

The “research” 2R must conduct is how to live in this world and how to pass this world forward to those who will live in it next. Implicit in that mission is that current social practices on global scales are profoundly sustainable. We can resist change with all our might, but change is coming anyway. Serious questions simply ask if we can guide this change somehow and make the future world better than it otherwise might be. If not the entire world all at once, then perhaps some local part of it. Perhaps in a way that inspires others in other local parts. Perhaps in a way that allows us to bind together over great distance to encircle the world entire with our caring.

2R research is the scientific side of the intuitions above. It frames the problems. It hypothesizes solutions. It devises tests and promising approaches. It studies globally and acts locally. Every place is a case. Every action is a candidate theory of change being put to the test. We don’t know anything for sure, but we surely know we have to try something! Through 2R research, that trying is with eyes wide open, in the company of others also with opening eyes. Our throughput is seeing through.

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To come full circle on the question of What is Second Renaissance?, this podcast dropped yesterday - featuring @rufuspollock and John Vervaeke - seems on point.

For those not already familiar with Vervaeke’s work, I ran a couple AI summarizes below to suggest how Vervaeke may provide a different point of entry to Second Renaissance thinking.

Prompt: "Compare John Vervaeke’s views with the views expressed in the Second Renaissance white papers. "

Prompt: “Summarize the podcast”.

Based on the provided transcript, here is a summary of the podcast episode “A New Pilgrimage: John Vervaeke on Finding Practices that Build Meaning.”

Overview

In this episode of Over the Mountains, host Rufus Pollock speaks with cognitive scientist and professor John Vervaeke about the “Meaning Crisis.” Vervaeke explains how modern society has lost its connection to the sacred and genuine meaning, and outlines how we can recover it through an “ecology of practices” that integrates ancient wisdom traditions with modern cognitive science.

Key Themes & Discussion Points

Vervaeke’s Personal Journey

  • Early Life & Crisis: Vervaeke grew up in a strict, punitive Christian fundamentalist environment. Breaking away from it in his teens plunged him into a profound, lonely personal meaning crisis and a period of nihilism.

  • Discovering Philosophy & Practice: He found a role model in Socrates, who integrated deep reason with spirituality. Disillusioned by modern academic philosophy’s lack of practical application, he turned to Eastern traditions (Tai Chi, Vipassana meditation) and eventually cognitive science to find actionable practices for cultivating wisdom.

Defining the Meaning Crisis

  • The Need for Connectedness: Vervaeke distinguishes between the metaphysical “meaning of life” and “meaning in life.” He defines the latter as a vital need for a deep sense of connectedness to reality.

  • Three Levels of Being: Humans need to integrate and connect three aspects of themselves to reality:

    1. Biological Agents: Connecting with our physical environment.

    2. Selves: Connecting with our inner identity and perspective.

    3. Persons: Connecting with the normative world (truth, goodness, beauty, and commitments to each other).

Symptoms of the Crisis

  • Historically, religion provided the “ecology of practices” that integrated these levels and fostered communal connectedness.

  • With the West’s abandonment of a sacred framework, society is experiencing severe symptoms: soaring loneliness, an “apocalypse of trust” in institutions, and rising mental health issues.

  • Conversely, there are positive reactions to this void, such as the mindfulness revolution, the revival of Stoicism, and the psychedelic renaissance.

The Historical Roots (Genealogy)

Vervaeke traces the meaning crisis back through several historical shifts that severed our connection to the world:

  • Changes in Reading: A shift from reading aloud communally for transformation to reading silently alone for information.

  • Loss of Participatory Knowing: Society began to value only “propositional knowing” (collecting facts and beliefs) while losing touch with skills, perspectives, and “participatory knowing” (being actively coupled with reality).

  • Historical Movements: The Protestant Reformation individualized spirituality (removing communal traditions and role models), while the Scientific Revolution (figures like Copernicus and Descartes) alienated humans from their sensory experience of the world, leaving abstract math as the only perceived connection to reality.

The Story of Predictive History
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This is interesting, @RobertBunge but I don’t see where it is going. If we are still taking the “second renaissance” framing seriously, I still don’t see clear answers to two key questions: (1) renaissance = rebirth of what, exactly? and (2) what was the first one … assuming it is what is generally referred to as “the renaissance”, then just what is the analogy? Yes, I’ve seen and noted the simple answer, but then (a) what about a critical appraisal of that simple answer and (b) is there a deeper answer that actually supports the framing as 2R?

We all respond to nice, clear stories, and the original 2R framing serves this purpose well. Stories have limited lifetimes, though, particularly in terms of developmental modelling: what is a good story at one time may not be a story that carries through as valuable later. What are the stories that take us further? How do we frame these stories, ontologically? Does the 2R framing actually work for these further, perhaps deeper, stories? If it does, great, but I haven’t seen it yet. What is the range of convenience of the 2R framing?

Or, taking a closer ontological commoning (meta-)frame: (i) what is the best, deepest version of the 2R story? (ii) What is the belief system underlying that story? (iii) what is the ontology in which the belief system is framed? And we can rinse and repeat for framings such as Vervaeke’s, of course. Does there emerge a common ontological framework, not to unify 2R and (e.g.) Vervaeke, but to serve as a common language in which both can be expressed and compared between adherents?

These are the kinds of questions that would interest me.

And then there’s the other side of this that interests me more of late: which of the ontologies and belief systems and stories serve belongingness (with connections to meaning that are clear to me) and which serve multi-perspectival co-creative work?

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Are you suggesting a change of “brand” for this Forum and related initiatives? Personally, I really don’t care if we call it “Second Renaissance” or something else. What does anyone else think about these matters? Do we need to rectify the name of Second Renaissance?