This piece expresses ideas that have been central to my life and work for decades.
I think it is central to our ongoing conversation.
Would like to hear your unvarnished responses. Mine is below.
https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world?r=kk33
Ruben
A breath of fresh air, thank you. You clarify the core work of the 21st Century — becoming the first people to consciously learn to know, see, explore, understand, confront, be confronted by and respond to a meta-crisis of a whole form of civilization, i.e. our Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) form of civilization. Up to now, meta-crises have been seen as deeply personal, which they are, but not as entailing our whole way of knowing and responding to reality as whole cultures, indeed our whole form of civilization. Given this novelty, it is not surprising that we are having trouble wrapping our heads, hearts, bodies and souls around what we are into, up against being asked to do/become. By the way two other persons who developed non-trivial understandings of this are both Canadians, now deceased: Northrop Frye (literary critic) and Wilfred Cantwell Smith (historian of religion).
Ruben F.W. Nelson
“Poly gives us a lot, but it does not give us Meta’s interiority or relationality, which is where all hope engendered by meaningful action at the level of civil society lies (action gives rise to hope, not vice versa). Poly might help us to stand back and see what is ‘out there’ in perspective, but that is not enough. Just standing back to see the big picture risks delusion, because it is a partial view pretending to be whole. Meta highlights that we also need to look within ourselves to psyche and soul, and also beyond, for a renewal in our worldview or cosmovision which has a direct bearing on prevailing ideologies and social imaginaries. (Paul Marshall’s work on New Axial Vision details this idea well.)”