Hi,
I have reflected on why we don’t get the change we need, and offer the following essays for discussion.
A Constellation Of Readiness.pdf (175.8 KB)
Hi @Roy . Glad to see you sharing your work here. Quite a bit of this resonates with my thinking as well. I’d be curious - what sort of application of your work or response to your work are you seeking?
Hello Robert,
Thanks for the question.
I have been seeking European Citizens to support an Intiative I have drafted. While I have had more than enough people say they will support it, when it comes to supplying the documentation so we can register it, the exchange stops. I am not sure if they think it is a scam or something, but it just stops.
If someting more comes of it, that is great. The UK Report, Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, suggests we are out of time. But we do what we can do. Who can ask for more?
Thanks, @Roy . It’s good to hear about your specific project. As US-based, I can’t do much about signing or signature gathering. Perhaps I may be of assistance in other ways.
My recent work focuses, among other things, on this: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project
Let’s play that game for a moment. Given the recent UK biodiversity report, what are the potential high-leverage actions available?
To me, the 2R forum seems largely focused on Meadows 1. and 2. - transcending paradigms and mindsets of the system. I would venture to guess, however, that most readers of this thread will already embrace paradigms and mindsets that acknowledge the validity of the biodiversity report. The question then arises - how to walk down the Meadows leverage scale until we gain on-the-ground traction on the problem at hand?
As non-UK resident, it’s not really my place to determine 3. “goals of the system” for the UK. I would suggest that is a point of attack any UK resident wishing to advance the biodiversity report should consider focusing on however. What exactly is the UK all about in the coming world? Any political program that runs afoul of that is bound to be overturned in the next election.
Reaching into the trans-paradigmatic tool bag once again, one might wonder why I am focusing on nation-state at the Meadows 3. level of analysis? That would be a good question. The proposed action program of petition signing assumes a nation-state political framing. As an alternative, one might step away from the specific element of petitions and consider if there is some effective form of trans-national political action capable of walking down the Meadows scale to effective ground level actions in a wider range of localities?
I’d venture to say 2R in general has more work to do on Meadows 3. “Goals of the system”. Namely, we could be more precise in characterizing “the system” (in this case, the system that supports biodiversity) and exploring the general nature and mechanisms of goal setting in that system. There is a lot of anti-modernity in these spaces. But how exactly that translates into constructive action going forward is less clear. My take is that modernity is very much part of “the system”, but is not the entire system. To find best leverage, I would advise beginning with the largest possible full systemic view.
Robert,
I appreciate the way you’re framing this through Meadows. I also think that’s the right way to look at the problem.
Where I think I may differ is in where the real bottleneck sits. We’ve spent decades acting at Meadows 4 and 5 by changing rules, incentives, and information flows through COP meetings, biodiversity frameworks, and national reforms. Yet emissions continue to rise, biodiversity declines, and even previously secured reforms are being rolled back.
To me, that suggests the system’s effective goal (Meadows 3) isn’t quite what we say it is. Political survival, economic continuity, and energy availability tend to override stated ecological goals whenever they come into conflict. I wonder if the issue isn’t that systems chose the “wrong” goals, but that they were optimised for a world that no longer exists.
Modern governance was remarkably effective at its core task: maintaining stability through growth under conditions of expanding energy and ecological capacity. Those conditions are now reversing.
The result doesn’t look like a failure of intent so much as a mismatch between goals and the mechanisms used to achieve them. The system keeps pulling the levers that once ensured continuity, and in doing so, now accelerates instability.
If that’s right, our challenge may be less about better execution and more about re-articulating goals for a new era, one in which endurance can no longer be secured through expansion alone. We can explore that re-articulation at a global, philosophical level, and perhaps gain insight into what it might mean for our own governments.
In that sense, it feels like we’ve looped back to where we started, from a wide lens, into Europe, and back out again.
It appears you have replicated an insight that Meadows attributes to Jay Forester for the original Club of Rome meetings:
““The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.” ( Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project )
On a Meadows 3 level, nation-states in general need GDP growth to legitimate themselves and secure themselves from international competition. Could any UK government survive on a platform of “reduce GDP in the UK to save planetary biodiversity?” Likely not! The goal at level 3 is locked in by mindsets and paradigms at levels 1 and 2. For that reason, parameter tweaking for biodiversity at levels 4 and lower will surely get pushed back at some point.
To me, the inescapable conclusion is the current Post-Westphalian nation-state system is mismatched to the purpose of nurturing life on Earth. The system itself was built to settle wars, not to regenerate ecosystems. Securing biodiversity is a subset of the problem of realigning global security in general.
From that POV, my own Meadows 3. goal is to aim strategically at a post-Westphalian world. Clearly, I have no direct personal leverage to just implement such a system straight away. But any of us do participate in what Benedict Andersen calls the “collective imaginal” - the communities and groupings we claim by way of cultural affiliation. To offer a small practical example, although I am a US citizen, I support the political program of Canadian PM Mark Carney quite a bit more than I support the program of Donald Trump. My loyalties are to the future of the world, not to power hierarchs. Carney’s world model strikes me as promising for transitioning to something like a network model of connected nations, which seems like a constructive goal capable of being addressed. In any case, without global political reform, it’s doubtful biodiversity programs are going to get much traction beyond purely local scales.
Thanks, Robert,
Yes, I think we’re very much in agreement here. I agree that Meadows already named this tension decades ago, and that GDP-legitimated nation-states are structurally locked into growth in a way that makes biodiversity a secondary objective at best. (Though I had not heard of Jay Forrester before.)
Where I was trying to start the conversation, though, was one level earlier — with how we interpret our circumstances before we even get to institutional redesign. The post-Westphalian system didn’t just emerge as a political structure; it’s embedded in a set of assumptions about progress, security, expertise, and control that still shape what feels thinkable or realistic.
From that angle, the challenge isn’t only that the nation-state is mismatched to nurturing life, but that many of us are still seeing the world through lenses optimised for an earlier era. Those lenses quietly set the boundaries for what kinds of futures we can imagine, whether technocratic, networked, or otherwise.
I’m very sympathetic to your point about the collective imaginal. My interest is in how we expand that imaginal, without simply swapping one optimisation logic for another. Before we decide what should replace the current system, I think there’s value in slowing down and noticing how deeply our inherited worldviews are still framing the problem and the solutions we reach for.
In that sense, my hope with this thread was less to advocate a particular institutional end-state and more to open space for re-examining the assumptions we’re carrying as we enter a genuinely new era, something that transcends national borders.
That’s generally what Second Renaissance does. By way of metaphor, in a recent textbook project for beginners, I needed to distinguish high-level and low-level programming languages. The gist of it is, no matter how high-level the language is (like voice prompts to an AI), it’s all going to need translated down to the bit level to have any impact on the machine. It struck me recently that the Meadows scale is rather like that - hanging out at level 1 and sorting through paradigms on its own does not accomplish much. My preferred process lately is to get up to level 1, take a stab at it, then start heading back down to ground level to see what happens. If what happens on the way down is not good, head back up and try again.
OK, so your concern is that culture in general is historically conditioned and not fit for current purposes. I’ll generally grant that. However, in considering the historical (and biological evolutionary record) of change processes, it appears that which emerges, emerges from what is already in place. The term “exaptation” summarizes this process. The new hatches out of the prior. From that POV, I’m less concerned to bury all current structures and far more interested in seeing what current structures might be bent to better purpose.
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Roy, thank you for these essays. I’ve been working on very similar ground from a different starting point — 45 years of facilitation across three continents, a PhD in project management, and a long engagement with complexity science and contemplative traditions — and was struck by how much our diagnostics overlap. Your identification of the gap between knowing and living as the central problem, and your framing of belief as boundary rather than opinion, land particularly well.
What I’ve found, after watching that gap operate in practice across dozens of organisations and several hundred historical cases, is that there’s a specific reason “readiness” is so reliably deferred — and it’s structural, not temperamental. I’ve come to call it the consciousness trap: the mechanism by which our symbolic intelligence substitutes the idea of change for the embodied capacity to enact it, faster than awareness can catch the switch. It’s why your four shifts can be read, agreed with, and never lived — not through any failure of the reader, but because the very faculty processing the invitation is the one generating the override.
I’ve set this out in a briefing published by The Schumacher Institute, which I’ve linked. It may speak to what you’re reaching toward — particularly the question of what’s inside the black box you’ve rightly identified as “readiness.”
I’d welcome a conversation if it resonates.
Terry Cooke-Davies
Distinguished Fellow, The Schumacher Institute
@terrycd , thanks for sharing you fine paper on Recognition Theory. My thinking runs generally parallel on quite a few of the points and citations contained within. What I would like to do here is to extend a bit your single paragraph summary of Kemp and Turchin, Civilizational dynamics (p. 20), That body of literature is foundational to my own thinking. I tend to work from there back in the direction of psychology and philosophy, asking mostly, why have societies over long history worked like that?
On the point that Kemp’s 324 collapsed civilizations were founded on what he calls “Goliath fuel” (storable surplus, monopolisable force, and barriers to exit), I’d say Kemp’s key point is all of that is why social hierarchy arose in the first place. Absent those forces, we would all still be hunting and gathering (quite a few billions fewer of us, with much shorter lifespans, in far less technically sophisticated cultures). The collapse of so many past civilizations suggests built-in instability to the Goliath mechanism. Here, Kemp’s reasoning directly follows Turchin, who I believe does indeed identify a vary salient pattern. Namely, concentration of wealth via exploitation is almost a reflex action across numerous centuries and cultures. Remarkably, Turchin does identify a handful of examples in which elites intentionally dispersed wealth rather than clinging to it to the bitter end of social collapse, but such exceptions are mostly of the sort that generally prove the rule. Our ancient ancestors did not need Milton Friedman (or the Gordon Gecko character in Wall Street) to tell them that “greed is good”. Greed, glory, conquest, status seeking … it’s all been part of the standard human package for quite a few millennia now.
Do we need a model of cognitive distortion to account for that behavior? I’m not sure we do. It all seems like a very natural exaptation of behaviors we came by honestly through our genetic affinity to great apes. Granted, humans across the globe were quite a bit more collaborative than chimps and bonobos prior to the Holocene, but the environment was very different before the weather turned fair 12,000 years ago. Goliath needed sunny weather. That where the surplus came from, and with the surplus came all the battles for control of the surplus. If we need a natural philosophy analog to original sin to explain why people exploit each other, as far as I can tell it’s bound into a causal chain traceable ultimately to the Big Bang. People optimize energy. So does every other entity in the universe. Goliath was an energy optimization mechanism, and it did its job it its day. The salient question for us now is, is the Goliath model still efficient now, as the Holocene gives way to the Anthropocene?
On balance, I’d say ‘no”. We’re in a new world now, and we need a new approach. Kemp’s concluding chapter argues similarly. I’m not entirely convinced by Kemp’s proposed solutions, though. Here I think Kemp’s argument would benefit from the psychological depth you are bringing with Recognition Theory (relying as it does on McGilchrist and similarly minded theorists). I very much doubt we will all be persuaded by rational arguments, take a vote through procedures involving discussion and decorum, and legislate in a generally high-minded way. The historical precedent for that sort of thing is next to non-existent. Fantasies about it have been very prevalent in the modern West for several centuries now, but forget the talk and attend to the practices. Everything Donald Trump is doing has always been done. Trump simply dispenses with the pretenses.
My short answer to all this is I am not at all horrified that people use mental models, theoretical simplifications, grand narratives, and so forth to make sense of the world. I just want people to take a good hard look at all those inherited stories and models and start sorting out which of them are most fit for current purposes. Some will stay, some will go. The process of modeling the world one way or the other will now doubt remain, because that’s how humans are built.
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@Robert, thank you for this — it’s a generous and careful reading, and your extension of the Kemp and Turchin material sharpens something I’ve been sitting with.
I want to pick up two threads from your response, not because I think I have answers but because your reading opened questions I hadn’t quite formulated before.
The first comes from your point about great apes and energy optimisation. I’m largely persuaded by the continuity you trace — duality, aggression, competition for surplus are part of the biological inheritance, no question. But I keep running into something the continuity frame doesn’t quite reach. Chimps compete. They can be brutal. But they don’t do it at a distance, abstractly, against categories of other chimps they’ve never met. They don’t build systems that degrade the conditions for their own survival while documenting the degradation in real time. If we’re looking at energy optimisation all the way down, what is it about the human case that produces this specific signature — gratuitous harm, self-undermining at civilisational scale, destruction that proceeds in full knowledge of itself? I’m not sure “cognitive distortion” is the right frame for that (I wouldn’t use the term myself), but I’m also not sure that continuity with primate behaviour fully accounts for it. Something became possible in the human case that wasn’t possible before. I’m curious where you’d locate that threshold — or whether you’d say there isn’t one.
The second comes from your observation about Trump, which I think is sharper than it might appear. You say he simply dispenses with the pretences — and that everything he’s doing has always been done. I find that persuasive. But it opens a question I genuinely don’t know the answer to. If the pretences were always partly decoupled from the behaviour — if democratic norms, Enlightenment rhetoric, rational discourse were a symbolic layer that the operating pattern ran beneath — then what was the pretence doing? Was it exercising some constraining function, even as pretence? Or was it purely decorative? Because if it was doing some work, then losing it matters in ways we may not yet understand. And if it was purely decorative, then your prescription — sorting models for fitness — faces a harder question than it might seem. If the best models humanity ever produced (and the Enlightenment was a serious attempt) couldn’t reach the level at which the pattern actually operates, what would “fitness” even mean for a model? Fit for what, exactly, if the relationship between our models and our behaviour is as loose as the Trump observation suggests?
I don’t raise this to be difficult. I raise it because I think your Trump point may be doing more work than the rest of your argument quite accounts for, and I’d like to understand it better.
Terry
I’d be delighted to explore such questions in any depth this forum has appetite for, because I believe it all speaks quite directly to the greatest challenges of the global moment. In my comments below, I’m going to be summarizing Kemp/Turchin in just a few lines. I heartily recommend consulting the original authors along with any number of alternate commentaries about their works.
In Ultrasociety, Turchin traces a basic rhythm in long-historical trends in the ratio of dominance hierarchy to peer collaboration. Pre-Holocene, that ratio for humans was quite low. That genius for collaboration allowed us to out-compete great apes, not to mention all the other macro-fauna. With the dawn of the Holocene, we got what Kemp calls Goliath fuel. Turchin documents how the dominance-to-collaboration hierarchy spiked to all time highs in figures like Ashurbanipal or the first Chinese emperor. Such figures made a spectacle of their body counts and made elaborate torture into an emblem of political superiority. After that, Turchin traces a long, slow decline in dominance-to-collaboration, but not nearly all the way back to pre-Holocene levels.
To get to your questions about ideology, to me the weakest part of Turchin’s analysis is how he elides over the cultural shifts of the Axial Age. I believe that Jürgen Habermas’s, Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1 fills that gap quite nicely. At their cores, I would argue all the Axial religions and philosophies harken back the genetic memory of more collaborative eras, and set new cultural expectations around mercy, love, and collaborative ethics in general. That said, as Kojin Karatani demonstrates (to my satisfaction, at least) in The Structure of World History, the State as such was born as no more than an amoral protection racket. And it never has ceased to be that at its core. I would argue that from Constantine the Great up through Biden the Decrepit, Western empire has preferred to clothe its ambitions in Axial high-mindedness. But good Lord, how many people of color was the West willing to enslave, exterminate, press into service, or otherwise expropriate in the name of “enlightened” Western values? Most of Turchin’s social historical analyses are about greedy elites pure and simple, without their ever-shifting philosophical fig leaves getting much of a mention.
Did the Axial age breakthroughs have an impact and a point? Or course they did. Why Cyrus the Great and why not just another Ashurbanipal? It turns out the Persian model - informed by Zoroaster - scales better than wanton thuggishness. To govern wide-ranging multi-ethnic empires, it helps to have a modicum of voluntary compliance. Roman Christianity learned that lesson well, as did Islam. The medieval and early modern West took notes from those two. How else was a Bartolomé de las Casas even possible? But for all of Western “progress” around science, Enlightenment, industry and democracy, please note that in colonial realms, the historical West made Trump look like a noob or a slacker. Trump just pardons drug dealers who flatter him. The British East India Company WERE the drug dealers!
Does Trump’s naked power turn thus suggest we are circling some sort of cultural drain hole and that Ashurbanipal with nukes is the best sort of governance the future world can hope for? I’m more optimistic than that. To me, Trump is a creature of the post-modern, social constructionist, post-narrative moment. He’s like the guy who blasts the old paint off the wall, which needs to happen before the new paint job. Trump outmaneuvered “woke” because “woke” is structurally spun from straw. MAGA, however, is scarcely any more substantial. Feet of clay. If even.
IMO, the future of global culture lies in a revivification of Axial traditions, rinsed clean from all the imperial detritus gathered over the centuries. I’m not sure if democracy in the post-WWII mold is seriously in the offing, but I do dare to hope for leadership more like Marcus Aurelius and less like Caligula, at the very least.
Thank you Terry.
I agree with much of what the briefing sets out, particularly its diagnosis of the gap between knowing and transformation. The metaphor of the King and the Gardener is especially helpful in naming the shift from command to participation.
I wonder, though, whether there is a further movement implied beyond becoming gardeners.
If we move too quickly from King to Gardener, we may unintentionally recreate hierarchy in subtler form, designing a “garden” that still requires rent, oversight, or control. The form changes, but the underlying structure of management remains.
This is where the work of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Hospicing Modernity feels particularly valuable. Rather than rushing to construct the next system, she invites us to stay with the discomfort of endings, to metabolise the limits of modernity before attempting replacement. That gentle, relational unwinding may be essential if we are to avoid reproducing the same pattern under a different name.
Perhaps the benefit of this slower approach is that it protects us from repeating the consciousness trap at a new level. Instead of designing the future in advance, we allow new forms to emerge through maturation. Something different may need to evolve, but we probably don’t yet have the capacity to imagine it clearly.
In that sense, it may be useful to consider that the gardener is not a final identity but a transitional one. The deeper work may be learning how to remain present while the old system falls away, without grasping too quickly for the next design. And yet we are running out of time. It is indeed a difficult balance we need to strike.
Robert, this is a rich synthesis, and your identification of the Axial gap in Turchin is exactly right. Habermas as the supplement is a suggestion I’ll be sitting with for some time.
I want to bring Recognition Theory to bear on two points, not as critique but as a parallel angle that may either confirm or complicate what you’ve offered.
The first concerns the Axial traditions themselves. Work I’ve been developing in an extended manuscript has led me to a position that resonates with your reading but takes it somewhere different. The Axial traditions did emerge as responses to the trap closing — not from cosmic awakening but from predictable necessity: when symbolic complexity reaches certain thresholds, practices arise to address the pathologies that complexity creates. Turchin’s Seshat data bears this out, showing that what Jaspers treated as mysterious synchronicity was a recurring pattern correlated with social complexity levels. So the traditions were real, and they worked.
But here is the structural problem they never escaped. They were expressed through the very mechanisms that generated the trap in the first place. The Dharma became a text. The Sermon on the Mount became a catechism. The Logos became a creed. This is not betrayal by corrupt institutions — it is the trap’s characteristic operation: symbolic intelligence reliably converts practice into doctrine, lived orientation into propositions, compass into map. The revivification of Axial traditions — which I hope for no less than you do — faces exactly this recursive risk. If that revivification is accomplished primarily through further texts, scholarship, and argument, it arrives at its destination as more map rather than as compass.
I notice this risk in my own work every day. The more precisely I articulate Recognition Theory, the more I produce something that symbolic intelligence can process without any somatic reorganisation occurring. Which is why I’ve come to think the question is not primarily about which ideas we revivify but about which practices restore the body’s regulatory voice.
The second point concerns what Karatani gives us. The State as amoral protection racket — yes. But the deeper issue may be that the State is a pure symbolic construct: commanding loyalty through flags, anthems, and constitutions entirely decoupled from the bodies bearing the consequences of its decisions. Marcus Aurelius was a better human being than Caligula. But the structure within which he governed remained an abstraction commanding material reality, insulated from the regulatory feedback of those it governed. The question of what might tether governance to embodied accountability seems to me as important as which philosopher-king occupies the position.
None of this diminishes your synthesis. But it does make me wonder: what would revivification look like if it had to be primarily practice rather than primarily argument? If the Axial traditions point back towards something real, perhaps what they point towards is not their texts but their disciplines — meditation, ethical formation, community accountability, embodied liturgy. The texts were always the membrane, not the territory.
Roy, I want to stay with your concern about re-hierarchisation, because it is pointing at something real. But I think the briefing may already address it — and that your reading of it has, quite understandably, done something the briefing itself was trying to prevent.
The text describes king and gardener as postures, not positions: “above or within, command or tending, override or recognition.” It explicitly says this is not a moral distinction — kings are not villains, gardeners are not saints. The difference lies entirely in the relationship between the knower and the known. A posture cannot be institutionalised in the way a role can. The moment a gardener steps outside the living system to design or manage it from above, she has already shifted posture — she is in king mode, regardless of what she calls herself. The risk you name — the commune becomes a steering group becomes the new oversight — is precisely this shift, the posture converting into a position. But that is an argument for attending more carefully to the posture, not for treating the gardener as a transitional role to be superseded.
What I notice is that your response has, in following a very natural reading, converted the posture into a role — and then found the role hierarchically problematic. Which is exactly what symbolic intelligence reliably does with living distinctions. I don’t say this as a correction; I say it as testimony to how persistent the mechanism is, and how little immunity any of us has to it, including in the very act of trying to think clearly about it.
But I want to push back harder than Vanessa does on the framing of “rushing to construct the next system.” The caution is sound, but rushing implies the problem is pace. My difficulty is more structural: I don’t think “the next system” is what is needed, slowly or quickly. And I locate the point of divergence considerably earlier than Vanessa does. She works largely within a critique of Western colonialism and Enlightenment modernity — the last five hundred years or so. Recognition Theory places the structural hinge much further back, with surplus agriculture and the administrative apparatus it required in Mesopotamia, five to six thousand years ago. Writing and arithmetic together enabled the decompressor of a decision to become permanently separated from its compressor — the body bearing the consequences was no longer in the loop. By the time we reach Columbus, we are well downstream of the original mechanism. This matters because it shifts the question from “how do we undo modernity?” to “how do we recover a quality of participation that was compromised long before any of us were born?” That is not a system to construct. It is a mode to inhabit.
On the time pressure you name: I hold this, and I don’t want to dissolve it. But I notice that genuine urgency is one of the most reliable activators of the king mode. When things are running out, command feels rational — triage, priority, decisive action. And yet what the emergency actually calls for, from within the gardener mode, is this: present-tense attention to what is actually in front of us, without a destination fixed in advance. Not passivity, but a different quality of action — one that knows it is participating in something larger than any plan, and that the wholeness of what we are participating in is not itself at risk, even when what we are doing to it is.
That last sentence deserves to be held carefully. I am not offering it as consolation. I am offering it as the most honest account I can give of what the cosmos appears actually to be: simultaneously complete and in flux, held in dynamic stability by the relationship between every element within it. The emergency is real. What is at stake in it is not the cosmos but the quality of our participation in the dance it already is.
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Could scarcely agree more! With your entire response, really.
My local spiritual practice group is facilitated by the Bahá’í community. Current expressions of Bahá’í teachings seem quite secular and even metamodern. For example: https://www.upliftingwords.org/post/basic-principles-of-the-bahai-faith Would anyone here seriously argue against these 13 points? But in its origins, the Bahá’í movement began as a schismatic movement within Iranian twelver Shiism. Bahá’í source texts are dripping with Quranic references (Persian and Arabic) that I don’t understand in the slightest. Against the background of current global events, the layers of irony about all this are more than fingers can enumerate. Somehow, early 19th century Persian theological arguments about the nature and identity of the Mahdi yielded a universalizing view. That view emerged over a few generations, however. It is not present in any obvious way in the movement’s initial prophetic outbursts.
Bahá’í theology is intriguing to me, because it acknowledges the validity of ALL the Axial traditions. As a practical matter, monothesism still has pride of place in Bahá’í teachings and the devotional approach is more bhakti than dhyana. (On a scale of karma, dhyana, bhakti, my style is 1) karma, 2) dhyana, 3) bhakti a distant third. Which is why although I hang out with the Bahá’í community, I am not rushing to adopt all of their particular practices). To situate all this in our prior discussion of theoretical matters, I landed in this community because I was looking for local “communicative action” in a Habermasian vein and the Bahá’í have figured out how to pull it off. I will make bold and imagine that would not shock Habermas. In his most recent work, Habermas is at pains to ground the public sphere in something more like communitarian religion. Habermas lately is seeing faith-reason in generally symbiotic terms.
On a practice level, it’s a weird sort of synthesis. (I take weirdness as a divine attribute, so if it were any less weird, I could not really respect it as a spiritual practice!) Remaining my usual cognitive self, I do things like celebrate Naw-Ruz with a community containing numerous Iranian exiles, in the shadow of multiple US military bases, in the company of both veteran and active duty US soldiers. My own Axial cultural roots are of course mostly Christian, but to me this current practice milieu is like riding a time transporter back to the atmosphere around the living ministry of Jesus. It’s all very fresh and raw. That’s generally what I’m pointing to with the phrase “revivification”.