Work in Progress - Call to Action

General
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I’m working on a position paper - looking more and more like a book draft - quite a bit of which circling around themes of what exactly a “Second Renaissance” might entail. Here is a bit I wrote just now. Love to get comments, feedback, stones thrown, whatever you’ve got!

In Havoc, Thy Name is Twenty-first Century, Peter Pogany leaps from geopolitical analysis to the need for a Gebsarian mutation of consciousness. Currently prevalent linear thinking - Gebser’s mental - can scarcely follow such an argument. (Perhaps Pogany tasted the integral in advocating for the integral!) However - apologies to Iain McGilchrist and his many fans and followers - turning the intuitive-leaping right-brain back into “Master” does not mean the plodding-logical left-brain (“Emissary”) has no meaningful work to do. McGlichrist himself understands this quite well. The point is not to be all intuitive all the time. It’s to get the two brain hemispheres coordinated and collaborating and pulling in the same direction. On an intuitive level, all sorts of people have imagined that some kind of spiritual or cultural transformation lies in humanity’s collective future. Gebser certainly had such intuitions. Pogany came to share them. I’m not opposed - consciousness up-leveling sounds quite nice, thank you. But in the pragmatic world, most of us have a lot of getting and spending to do and other more nitty-gritty chore lists, so it’s hard to see how mutations of consciousness can find their way out of alternative bookstores and mediation circles into wider fields of mass cultural transformation. As a secondary echo of Pogany’s Gebserian intuition, reading Havoc triggered a few ideas in my own imagination - ideas that might potentially bring the entire discussion quite a bit closer to ground level. My task here therefore is to paint a more step-by-step picture of how Gebser’s mutation to integral consciousness might become a mass phenomenon, a transformation that would promote a new common sense and redefine what humans, in general, consider normal.

This would all be crazy, were it not for the fact that transformations like that have happened multiple times, on multiple continents, in historical times, well-documented, and continuing to exercise cultural influence today. I’m speaking of course of the Axial Age breakthroughs of religion and philosophy that occurred throughout the ancient world in an arc spanning from Greece to China. Everything we think of as primordial traditional religion, on the grand scale of human cultural evolution, is really a fairly recent outburst. Likewise, our scientific culture embeds categories derived from the likes of Plato and Aristotle to such an extent that we imagine any sensible observer of nature would have to see the world that way. As it happens, prior to Plato and Aristotle, no one saw the world that way. We speak an invented language. We ourselves also are capable of invention. Indeed, faced with current challenges that make ancient apocalypse seem tame, cultural invention really ought to become our prime directive.

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I recently watched this (three and half hour long!) discussion between Ian McGilchrist, John Vervaeke and Daniel Schmachtenberger, and one of the key points I took away from the discussion was this: that a reason for hope in the face of the otherwise completely dispiriting game-theoretical nightmare described by Schmachtenberger, of global perverse incentives in an age of exponential technologies, is that we have actual precedents of the massive takeoff of new spirituality, such as the spread of Christianity amid a similarly ossified late Roman Empire.

So: Yes! More please.

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Be careful what you wish for!

In adding a TOC this morning, I tipped my hand a bit in the direction of “book”. But it sort of wants to be series of collected essays also. Anyway, I find that in writing, what matters is the moment. Editing and arranging are down the road … The TOC is helpful for selecting any specific bit that may be of immediate interest.

Finally, below is a paragraph I drafted this morning, very much with this particular forum in mind.

" To really put a point on it, I see Second Renaissance as an unpacking of Gebser (and others) consistent with the emergence of a new structure of consciousness. Moreover, I see this unpacking as affording the development of thought forms required for a future world order (along the lines of Pogany’s GS3). I see the practices associated with Second Renaissance as affording the paradigmatic freedom associated by Donella Meadows with the highest degree of leverage. Run a razor blade through all that and tell where the vision ends and the logic begins. To me, it’s an organic fusion. If it’s teachable, it can be disseminated. I do believe it’s teachable."

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Excellent! I’d be happy to contribute thinking and/or structuring as learning resource.

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Great! The reason I’m writing that over-stuffed book is to theoretically ground action planning - but then to get the long-winded theory off the table and onto the shelf, because action plans need to be direct and simple.

Based on the book (and on the dozens of scholars summarized there), to me the action plan for teaching and learning really boils down to McGilchrist’s preferred right-brain/left-brain balance. Also, the general direction of learning needs to be up the Donella Meadows leverage scale from simple/concrete towards mindset change/transparadigmatic. Just telling people “change your mindset!” or “free yourself from paradigms!” is generally useless. Such perspectives to be earned through practices.

Where I think 2R can really shine is in the domain of practices. For the overly left-brained (a lot of us), emotional, artistic, intuitive work is most helpful. Also, doing such practices in community is most powerful. For those by contrast already open to intuition, or more prone to feeling than thinking, all that massive left-brained structure in my book is designed as scaffolding. Why have a cognitive theory of the need to transcend cognitive theory? Because like I said above, action plans need to be direct and simple. Direct and simple is what the left brain does. Give it a shopping list, it can bring home supper.

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Hey Robert,

I really appreciate how your piece weaves together Pogany, Gebser, McGilchrist, and the Axial Age — it feels like a constellation of big, resonant ideas. I’m especially grateful for your raising awareness of Pogany; I’ve not yet read Havoc, and your framing piques real curiosity. I found myself wondering whether you see your piece more as constellation or arc — either could work powerfully, but signaling that might help the reader stay oriented in the unfolding.

The section on grounding the Gebserian mutation really stuck with me. I’d love to glimpse what integral consciousness might look or feel like in everyday life — not just as an idea, but as a sensed mode of perception or interaction. Few people have actually made it through Gebser’s text, and if this mutation is to be species-wide, it won’t be achieved by reading alone. So the question becomes: how do we facilitate it?

Not just talk or write about it — but embody it, taste it, even briefly. That’s where I felt your piece could be inviting something exciting.

With the Axial Age — are you invoking it as historical parallel, mythic echo, or pattern attractor? Clarifying that might let the image land with more force. And what made those ancient shifts possible? Was it collapse, invention, hunger? I feel that teasing out those conditions could anchor your exploration and our understanding of the process we are in.

That said, I’m not sure this is quite a new Axial age. What’s coming feels of a different order — not just a re-run, but something more metamorphic. The rearview mirror might help, or it might distort. Personally, I feel a little friction with the phrase “Second Renaissance.” (Though I love “Life Itself.”) Renaissance suggests rebirth, and a re-run — but maybe we’re in death throes. It feels truly apocalyptic. A dissolution that must precede a new being.

Just wanted to offer a few reflections from where the signal felt strongest for me.

I sense — as perhaps you do — that we are already in the mutation. And it won’t be achieved, or even fully recognized, by intellect alone. It’s emergent, integrated — like a dancer poised just before the first step.

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I feel a deep resonance with the idea that real shift — especially the kind you’re gesturing toward — arises not just from language, but from practice. And not just any practice, but ones that integrate body, spirit, and intellect.

I’m drawn to explore what kind of cultural “knitting” might bring right and left, inner and outer, mythic and mundane into coherence. What are the practices that let us metabolize paradigm, not just think it? And what does it look like to do that in community — where the feedback loops are alive, where cognition meets care?

Your point about scaffolding is spot-on, same as signposting, it’s just the arrangement and direction before change. It makes me wonder: how might we design practices that don’t just model integral awareness, but entrain it? Not just exercises, but rituals of becoming. I don’t mean ritual in a traditional sense (though that might help), but in the sense of patterned coherence — repeated, relational, sensorial gestures that let a new structure of consciousness take root through the body.

If “shopping list” is what the left brain wants, maybe we offer not just lists, but recipes — participatory, improvisable, delicious. This is where I found emergent and Bohmian dialogues, circling practices, Argentinian tango, bodywork and Glass Bead Games so enlightening.

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Blockquote we have actual precedents of the massive takeoff of new spirituality, such as the spread of Christianity amid a similarly ossified late Roman Empire.

…and maybe not, maybe the guys are completely wrong. Perhaps the long arc of change from hunter-gatherer through agricultural revolution to today, is the long, long story of separation from life itself, that has always born the seeds of its own destruction? It is and always was going to collapse, and all the ages are part of that pulse. Former collapses are mere forerunners of this great collapse. It is inevitable, and necessary.

We are told by many of our indigenous brothers and sisters that they rejected that type of progress, and mankind entered dual paths of development. They would never have designed microscopes and vaccines, jelly flip flops or computers and radio telescopes. Now the time is up, we have to discard all of modernity which leads to destruction. We gained great things along the way, so it’s time to distil that which is of value, compost the rest and re-integrate with our humanity and the earth. Its a synthesis on a species-wide scale. It’s likely going to be a super rough ride, but for our species a win-win possibility.

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Good question! Love to hear what anyone else thinks! I’m just blasting this text out at approximately my typing rate then cleaning up stuff later.

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If I read McGilchrist correctly, the left-brain is like a small child dying to feel important. So give it important jobs to do and tell it how wonderful it is. Then get back to Argentinian tango and the other cool stuff, because … the cool stuff!

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The theory of this I’m lifting from Vervaeke - you just now there described what he calls “participatory knowing”. The practice is where it gets interesting. My thing is a) load up on lots of books - preferably contradicting each other in important ways, b) go out in the woods or on the water for long stretches, c) listening carefully to wind, birds, seals, squirrels (yesterday it was clams spouting 6 feet from beneath the beach) and allow all elements to directly caress the skin c) work up a major sweat, d) some “ah ha” insight inevitably manifests. Pieces get written my head. Typing them comes after returning home and (usually) a good shower.

Is that process going to work for everyone? Probably not. But smoke’em if you got’em!

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More like a star chart. Developed from my POV of course, but pulled back to such a wide angle that the major constellations should be visible to those coming and going in different directions.

Traps to avoid:

  • Writing a narrative “history of the world” with a unified beginning, middle, and proposed end from a single POV and just expecting everyone to line up with that interpretation.

  • Trying to settle all controversial questions.

  • Closing the door on better theories or information showing up as early as tomorrow.

  • Demanding that everyone agree with me.

Desired outcome from the document: ripping good discussions! This is bascially an adaptation of classroom lesson content that supported - ripping good discussions!

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Robert, I sense we may be both touching the same field, you are using different terms, but I’m starting to see we are sensing a similar constellatory field out of which things are appearing. I don’t think I could be doing the work I’m doing right now, if I had stayed in a “normal” lifestyle. Here in the hills, on an off grid permaculture smallholding, with outside compost toilets under the stars, soil under my fingernails, and my youngest daughter’s life in danger from cancer, things are very different from four years ago. I am in contact with the real, I can’t hide anymore. Life speaks.

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Gen, I love all of that except for the part about your daughter. I’m not sure any form of typing on social media like this can convey the proper emotion, but please do know my heart is with both her and you.

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@Gen this is exactly what I’m interested in! The Red World Tent is intended to explore right-brained approaches to bring that “knitting” to people stuck in left-brained thinking. As you mentioned so beautifully, a big part of this will be practices/rituals. I am working on following Bob’s lead to develop a similar manifesto/guide to the Red World. I would love your input either on a Tuesday meeting or as I share more on this forum.

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So to clarify - the story you tell about all the collapses leading to the great collapses, and the need to compost the destructive parts of modernity, i think is one ‘the guys’ would agree with - and the story of how early christians succeeded in creating a new culture amid a collapsing empire is supposed to be a source of hope in precisely that context, in transforming (presercing/discarding) the culture - despite eventually becoming ossified in turn.

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I love all these points and think its very important to be aware of these traps - and i also thinks its important to acknowledge that consistent with this, there is still value in writing big narrative histories of the world! (It’s just that you shouldn’t expect people to agree with you - it’s part of a dialogical process) We also need to avoid the opposite (postmodern?) trap of thinking that all such grand narratives are pointless, which deprives us of opportunities for insight and effective world-modelling.

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That’s my current view. My narrative history of the world is a commentary on “the Rise of West” I grew up with, and the postmodern critique of that narrative, and quite a bit of what I consider relatively current “best of breed” sources from all over the world. That pretty much circles the globe. But someone starting from a Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, Nigerian, or Peruvian vantage point (to name but a few of the many possibilities), would likely have different narrative priorities, and quite likely, a contrasting narrative structure.

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I think we dance intellectually on the knife’s edge of paradoxes. This is the key issue of the modern/postmodern dialogue, which many hope resolve into Metamodernism or some other stage theory higher form. It’s all a rather intellectual game.

On one hand I understand (and support) the 2R name as working at one level, raising hope and pointing to an historical model of success for a Western audience. It’s similar in flavour to the pomo /MM debate… a sort of unrooted industrial world intellectual sparring.

We are collectively trying to extricate ourselves from whatever diverse abstracted corners we have painted ourselves into. It’s what the film Leviathan points to.

I can’t imagine, as the modern branch of the species, we will have much success if we cannot reintegrate with embodied, indigenous ways of being, connected with life itself.

We need to recognise our sad isolation, our WEIRD separation, the deep unfulfilled need for tribal belonging, and to walk under the starry skies of mythological time.

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McGilchrist writes a lot about how the left-hemisphere either cannot or will not break out of its abstracted systems. “Metamodernism” can certainly get played as a game on that level. (Which is why I’m much less interested in the topic than I was a couple years ago - lots of linguistic tail chasing, at least in some circles).

In defense of at least several of the metamodern thinkers, however, they all point to embodiment. The challenge is to follow the pointers in such theory to practices that themselves engage the body with nature, human community, art, physical work, ancient ritual - whatever it takes to get meat on the bones of theory.

Looking at it that way, I’m comfortable with the name “Second Renaissance” if we construe “Renaissance” as “return to sources” and if we understand those sources to be embodied experience all the way back to our ape-like ancestors. (I love to mediate on the complete lineage of my grandmothers going all the way back to unicellular creatures, supernovae, and the Big Bang itself!)

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