CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript

[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

In his latest book, The Web of Meaning, author and integrator Jeremy Lent investigates the ways in which seemingly disparate streams of thought are compatible, and when taken together, they are key to facing the existential problems of the 21st century. In this episode, CIIS Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Professor Matthew Segall joins Jeremy for an inspiring conversation exploring a new worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on August 11th, 2021. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Matthew: Hello, Jeremy, great to be ‘here’ with you tonight. And by ‘here’, I mean, because we're virtualized on planet Earth, and people are joining us I'm sure from all around the country and the world and it's a real honor to speak to you. This is your second book, The Web of Meaning, and I'm so excited to ask you some questions about it and engage in some of the most important questions that our species has ever been faced with. So, welcome Jeremy, great to be with you.  

Jeremy: Yeah, well thanks so much Matt. Yeah. I'm so happy to be here with you today. Looking forward to our conversation. Yeah. 

Matthew: Yeah, likewise. So your book is about the stories and on -it's about a lot, but one of the things that it discusses is the stories that we tell ourselves, the world view that has guided our modern civilization, but before we get to that collective story, I want to ask you about your own personal journey and what it is that brought you as what brought you out of the corporate world and a successful career into another successful career as a writer and a thought leader who's engaged with the world crisis. How did that all transpire for you? 

Jeremy: Yeah, you know, and it was an interesting and unexpected kind of veering of my life path if you will. When I was actually like a teenager and in my early twenties, I actually was pretty much in the same place I am now in terms of, really looking for meaning and not accepting where we are, what my society told me about and I actually grew up in England. And but then, when I was actually true- When I just finished with my undergraduate at Cambridge, and I just wanted to leave behind, this place like Thatcher’s England. I wanted to kind of explore the world. And what was so interesting. Is that what drew me to the United States, was actually, all these like videos of Woodstock. Things like that, from the 60s of people actually looking to understand, understand the universe if you will.  

But what happened was, I didn't realize I was landing in Reagan's America, and then I ended up actually marrying somebody who had been a hippie and had traveled all over South America, and which she wanted to, in her words, “go straight”. And, and so, I did that with her. And that's, and she had two kids who she wanted to give a good education to and all this kind of stuff. So, I went and got an MBA of all places at the University of Chicago, the home of Milton Friedman School of Thinking. And, so yeah, that was what led to having this kind of successful business career, but then at a certain point in my life, things crashed around me.  

My wife at the time, she passed away some years back- got very sick. I left the company that I'd started, one of the first internet companies, and taken public. I left that to look after her. And then I really lost my relationship with her if you will, because she went through some cognitive decline. My company that I started collapsed and it's like everything I built around my life collapsed around me and then I really decided whatever I did with my life going forward I wanted to be truly meaningful, but that was my question. Where did meaning actually come from? And that led me on this path of 10 or 15 years or so of actually trying to peel the layers of the onion, if you will, of meaning and trying to understand what was actually meaning for and it was that path that led me to write first The Patterning Instinct. And then this book, and it wasn't initially my plan or my thought. It would look at how the world needs to be transformed. But the actual search for meaning itself brought me to this place of realizing how much we need to do to change our world right now. 

Matthew: Mm..mhm. So, I mean, I think it sounds like you were confronted with, you know, some of the challenges that every human being ultimately has to face, whether it's our own death, or the death of a loved ones, and this really catapulted you into asking these bigger civilization level questions. So, this book is really…The Web of Meaning. I have the US edition and I gotta say, just as an aside that I really loved the British-the UK cover better. [Jeremy laughs] Which ironically has a Joshua Tree on the cover right, which is native to the Southwest United States. So, I feel like the UK version is kind of-kind of stealing our local flora here. [Jeremy laughs] I think both of us are in California.  

So, in any event, let's talk about worldview. And the contemporary modern world view is what your book is really aimed at addressing. And my question to sort of get the ball rolling here is why is that the level at which you have aimed your efforts? I don't think it's the only level that you would think is relevant. But some, for example, Karl Marx, maybe you have heard of this fellow. He often would say that worldview and culture is kind of the superstructure and what's really driving our civilization, what shapes people's lives is the economic and material conditions, right. There's not a total disconnect between the two, but for someone like Marx, he's a historical materialist. It's the-it's the material conditions that are driving things rather than the culture which is sort of the superstructure that rides on top of the gears that are really making things happen. So why is it that you think addressing the crisis at the level of worldview is so important?  

Jeremy: Yeah, well, you know, it's an interesting analogy, that idea of the structure and the superstructure and I personally would view-would see worldview not as the superstructure but as the foundation. And that's why I think it's so fundamental because really a worldview- If we wanted to kind of change metaphors, a little bit is really like the lens through which we see the world, through which we kind of pattern meaning into the world. And as I explored in detail in my earlier book, The Patterning Instinct, which is really a cultural history of humanity, a search for meaning, and looks at the different ways in which different cultural complexes have patterned meaning into the universe and how that led to their values. What came out of that book is this recognition that the values of a culture actually have shaped history. And that by the same token, the values that we hold right now are what will ultimately shape our future, and that's why it's so critical to get that world view correct.  

And you know another way of looking at how to think about a world view is really, it's so powerful because we don't even realize that we have one and just like a fish, might swim in water and its whole life it will never know it's in water because that's all it knows. Most of us just live according to whatever our worldview implicitly tells us is reality and just assume that’s what it is. And that's why it's so critical that once you actually begin to realize you’re patterning meaning into the world around you in a certain way. It frees you to actually begin to look at different ways to pattern meaning into things. So, I very much disagree with that sort of Marx notion of culture as being the superstructure. I think that what it is, it's a little bit- like superficial culture can be a can look a little bit, like the wallpaper. But if you imagine some sort of trompe l‘oeil delay or, you know, where you have some wallpaper that looks like it's the, it's something beneath it, but that's all that is. That's the kind of culture maybe he was talking about. What I'm talking about is the fundamental way in which we make sense of things. 

Matthew: Hmm. And just, to follow up on this question of worldview. You said that often we’re swimming in it, like a like a fish in water. We don't see it. How is it that- I mean that you told us a bit about how you came to recognize that you exist within a worldview and that it needs to change. Are there ways other than how it transpired for you that you think would allow people to become conscious of the worldview that they have inherited and absorbed unconsciously and then step into the work of actively working to revise that worldview if they find it to be faulty?  

Jeremy: Yeah, that's a great question. It seems to me that maybe there's two essential elements that could lead somebody to really changing their world view. One of them is more like this deeply felt element, almost like a spiritual element, and a sense that something isn't quite right. It really is something akin to the Buddhist notion of Dukkha, the sense of recognizing coming into touch with some sense of dissatisfaction. Something's wrong and wanting to actually shift that and that can lead to all kinds of other things. Spiritual growth, but in terms of worldview, I think there's another element that's needed too, which is a cognitive curiosity and the linkage between those two, a sense that something is wrong and a realization that it's got something to do with the reality that we are being told exists out there and a desire to start exploring. And you know for me it took years actually of research. In those earlier years I was talking about- and of looking at other worldviews and to begin to realize that our worldview is not actually just this kind of given reality and then to realize that's not even scientifically true and that's what was to me- one of the biggest kind of shocks, if you will, as it began to unfold and something I really try to focus on take people through in this new book. 

Matthew: So, the worldview that you're critiquing in, this book is the mechanistic reductionistic view of the universe that comes out of Europe in the modern period, [Jeremy: Right.] kind of spreads around the world not peacefully, but through colonization often. And tell us about this, this worldview. Why is it so destructive? And also, as you mentioned in your book, how is it double edged in the sense that it's also brought some- some gifts. I mean, you draw on science a lot in this book to bring forth this new worldview, but it's a different kind of science. So, lead us through that, that historical journey, the rise of science and this mechanistic view and the transition into a more interconnected understanding coming out of a new form of science.  

Jeremy: Right, yes, absolutely. because a key-a key theme in the book and something we can come to in a minute is that science and reductionism are by no means the same thing. And so that's just a sort of keep that up there and kind come back to that. But so really to answer the core of your question. I think the key element of the worldview that I think is so destructive and also actually leads to some of the positive outcomes that it has and is that it's a worldview of separation. And that is as a key element and it's a worldview that basically says and in my view, it came from the ancient Greeks. Even though I know you and I might not see thinking exactly in that lineage or whatever, but there was this this and what got inherited into Christianity in my understanding is the sense of a split universe. Basically, like a sense of a heaven somewhere outside of the world and this kind of world right here and that's split cosmos. Also, was aligned with a sense of a split human being, a sense of a person having a soul separate from the body. And it is kind of this idea that the soul was actually imprisoned in the body. And then in Christianity, this kind of sense that the body was almost like this minefield that was- that could stop your soul getting to heaven.  

So that was this key separation which desacralized the natural world so that the source of divinity, the source of what is sacred and important- what seemed to be outside the living Earth and it was, I mean, what I find so interesting is that it was Christianity that actually incubated the Scientific Revolution. We're so used nowadays, to thinking of this battle between science and Christianity, but it was the very that very sense of separation that led this kind of deification of reason in the early Christian era, and it was, it was that part of it, which led those founders of the Scientific Revolution. People like Galileo and Newton and Descartes to feel they were doing God's work in using their reason to sort of decipher this incredibly complex machine that was nature. And really, I think it was Descartes that probably had the most impact in setting the modern world into the path it was on. What he did is, he basically took the old Christian notion of soul and kind of reformulated it as mind. So, you know, his famous statement, “cogito ergo sum”, “I think therefore I am”. What that led to was this identity of the true human being with just that thinking faculty and with the idea that the rest of nature basically didn't have that sense of true identity. It was just a machine in his, in his view and even our bodies were just this kind of machine, housing our true soul, or our true mind.  

That's led to both to the positive outcome of this notion that when you start to see nature as a machine, well you start to try to break it apart to see how the little parts work, which led to and so much of the positive progress that came with the Scientific Revolution in understanding the world. But it also led to this sense of seeing the rest of nature as a resource for exploitation. And I think it's no coincidence in fact that right in that same period in Europe, right around the 17th century we see not just the Scientific Revolution and the rise in reductionist science, but we also see the very- the beginnings of colonialism. We see the beginnings of whiteness and the and the beginnings of white supremacy. We see the beginnings of capitalism. And the first, the-the very first shareholder owned corporations got that started right around that same time. Because if you look at each of those different things that unfolded, every one of them came around from this place of exploitation. Seeing what was outside your own identity as being like a resource to exploit to extract value from rather than something you're connected with. 

Matthew: And so, you trace this history in your book. But you also, as I mentioned, you draw upon, I guess what, we could call the new paradigm sciences which are attempting to leave the Cartesian and Newtonian origins of European science behind to, I mean, I guess they're still inheriting this mathematical precision and the empirical rigor, and so on. But those very tools after a few hundred years of research have really undermined this mechanistic picture of nature. And so, in your book, you talk about neuroscience systems theory, this understanding of biological evolution that is no longer merely a kind of competitive struggle among individuals, but biologists are beginning to recognize the role of symbiosis Lynn Margulis, the famous biologist talked about symbiogenesis. The way that new species are actually brought forth through a process of sharing genetic material and whole free-living cells, can be merged into other cells to create organisms of greater complexity. And so, can you describe a bit- how science has begun to open up to a different form of worldview, ultimately one that's rooted in this connectivity rather than the sense of separation out of which it initially emerged. 

Jeremy: Yeah, well, perhaps the best way to start looking at that is to look at the actual distinction, between science itself, and this reductionist worldview. Because even though, most people tend to conflate that, it- we sort of think of it just in normal conversation as though they're the same thing. But if we-if we look at what science actually is, it's really like it's a methodology. And, and it's also has its own-it's really a value system of itself. Like, it values things like honesty, transparency, being evidence-based, and empiricism. There's a number of things about science which are, which really has its own values. And when we look at reductionism, that's really one sort of method that is used within science to try to answer a lot of questions about things.  

But what I see happening, what I believe happened with reductionism, is it was so successful at actually answering questions about the universe, whether in physics or chemistry or biology that over time scientists, who followed that path began to think that reductionism could explain not just a lot of stuff about the universe, but everything about the universe. And not just that it could explain everything about the universe, but that any other form of explanation that didn't follow reductionism was necessarily invalid. Now, in the book, I call this an ontological leap, really I call it ontological reductionism, and I believe that it's a leap of faith, pretty much as big as the leap of faith of somebody saying, I believe in God, and God, created the universe and in six days or whatever, because there's no reason why reductionism could be used to explain everything about the universe. And what these other new sciences of connection really, I think like you say systems thinking, the systems biology, also network theory and any science that looks at the connections between things. And what they tend to lead to is this recognition that actually, there are multiple layers of explanation in the real world. So, sciences like these, they don't reject reductionism in the slightest. They build on reductionism. But and so they're not like some sort of spiritual woo-woo of saying, like oh there’s some other reality out there that reductionism isn't looking at. But they say, in addition to the reductionist components of what makes our world happen, there are also components of self-organization. And when you study these components of self-organization, you recognize that often times self-organized systems lead to higher levels of complexity, which can be described as emergence. Where at that new level of complexity you need to come up with new ways of actually understanding how that new extra complex system works than you could have through just looking at the parts alone at the bottom of that system. It's simple. It's like so it's complementary to reductionism. It's not instead of. 

Matthew: Right. So, there's this new recognition that evolution, whether biological or in the broader sense, cosmological, looking at the entire history of the universe is a process whereby more complex wholes are emerging that are not reducible to the behavior of the parts, right?  

Jeremy: Yes 

Matthew: That property is manifested, but at the level of the whole. 

Jeremy: Yes, exactly and I’d add one other really critical part to this, which is that the observation of these elements is not and cannot be essentially separated from me doing the observing. So, this is a key element here because we begin to look at really a sense of things emerging at the level of my perception of something else, causes that new, a new level of understanding or a new system of complexity to emerge. And, in fact, when you look at some of the key concepts in life, which I explore in the book, whether it's life itself, or consciousness, or meaning, or any of these sort of really big concepts. We find that they're actually concepts that get enacted \ through interactions between different components. And it's only the enactment itself that is the reality rather than the actual individual pieces. 

Matthew: Alright. Yes, so whereas the early mechanistic form of science had this God's eye view perspective on nature as if the scientist was outside of the world looking in the new sciences, whether it's complexity theory or quantum theory, of course, is bringing the observer back into the context of the natural world as one of the entities in relationship to what's being studied. So that there's this recognition of a participatory role that the scientist as an observer is playing in, what is being observed, right?  

Jeremy: Exactly, and even a participatory role in and in the very concept of self, things like consciousness, these sciences lead us to recognize that, that in itself is enacted that we participate in consciousness. It's not something that arises somewhere else. 

Matthew: Right. It, I mean, when we do investigate nature scientifically, consciousness, we-I think human beings, including consciousness, we’re part of nature. It becomes very obvious impossible to ignore the participatory dimension of the study of our own consciousness. 

Jeremy: Right 

Matthew: It's a little bit easier to think of the biological world as something out there, but even there, it's already like it's our own bodies we're talking about, to some extent. [Jeremy: Mhm.] Physics, of course, is the paradigm out of which modern science and emerged. I mean, the idea that we could study the inanimate natural world as though it were merely a collection of objects out there that we can carefully measure. I mean, that's what science was born on. This methodology that took the subject out of the picture and just looked at the measurable objects, right? Matter in motion. It can be studied mathematically. And that was really exciting. But as more progress was made in physics in the early 20th century, you know, quantum theory was born, relativity theory was born. Each in their own way was bringing the observer back into the matter and motion that's being studied in a way that forever problematizes any attempt to get a view from nowhere, right?  

Jeremy: Exactly. 

Matthew: So, given this inter-relationality given this, the interconnectivity that science has uncovered, given the participatory dimension of science; it's no surprise that many writers and thinkers have made analogies between these new sciences and various forms of spirituality. Eastern spirituality in particular, whether Buddhism or Taoism, you discuss those as well. As you know, Confucian philosophy in your book. And so, when we do make these sorts of comparisons between new paradigm science and spirituality. Well, first of all, I want you to talk a bit about why those analogies are so tempting, but because the resonances are very striking indeed, but I also want to ask you to reflect on any potential dangers here, because on the one hand, we're talking about timeless spiritual insights, right?  When we draw on the world's wisdom traditions, there's something that is unlikely to change about their value and their truth. Whereas, on the other hand science as a methodology, as you said is constantly, it's not a collection of finished knowledge. It's constantly challenging itself. New paradigms are being born all the time. And so, what happens if we make too close of a link between a particular scientific paradigm and this spiritual insight when science changes its mind?  

Jeremy: Yep, exactly. That's hmm- super important question. And so first, why don't we look at what I explore in the book as the confluences and the value there arises from that. And then look at that second issue, which is what are the dangers involved in going in that direction to be aware of. So, first off, I think, when we look at the relation between these two things, like what-what science tells us, and what spiritual traditions, tell us. I think maybe like to kind of share the sort of discovery that I made as I was in the middle of doing all this kind of research year after year, trying to figure some of these things out. And because I was sort of just beginning to begin to see that like reductionist science was not all that was about science. And going deep into complexity theory and other systems thinking, stuff like that. And one of the great writers in this area is actually, his name is Stuart Kaufman, and he writes books. He's from the Santa Fe Institute. He writes books with titles things like At Home in the Universe like looking at how the new understanding of physics can show how connected we are, things like that. And he writes in his book- something about how we're looking at these new principles of life and new principles of meaning. And he says, we're kind of beginning to explore new territory that has never been explored before and we need to find out the sort of principles around that. Great words. But meanwhile at the same time, I had been reading a lot of or and going quite deep into these East Asian ways of thinking. And I did, I was reading a lot about these Neo-Confucian philosophers and most of us in the West, we know nothing about Neo-Confucian, sounds like some sort of boring academic subject. It's actually this amazing group of sages about a thousand years ago in the Song dynasty in China who basically synthesized some of the threads of the millennia previous in China from Daoism and Buddhism and Confucianism. And-and that's we call them neo-Confucianism, they call them, they call themselves the study of the school of the Dao. But what they when they try to make a systematic understanding of the cosmos, they looked at it as being comprised of chi but also of lie, which they described as the organizing principles, that connected everything around chi. And I began to realize well what Stewart Kaufman feels like we've never been exploring before, that these organizing principles of nature have been explored, not according to our scientific methodology, but according to other ways of human relating to and by all these different traditions. They basically were exploring the lead, these organizing principles.  

And then I began to realize that actually, when science, when reductionist science tells us, that basically, there is no meaning to the universe. There's no value, like that science is basically just looking at the sort of all these billiard balls and hitting each other. That once we start to look at those connecting principles, we see that this split that we have in our Western worldview is no longer valid. There is no longer the split between mind and body. There is no longer the split basically between spiritual understanding and scientific understanding. And so, you know, so many times people in the West go like well, I believe in science, you know, and I have these spiritual ideas, but that's some sort of domain separate from my scientific understanding. And, you know, it's just recognized. Well, we just got to, like not integrate them. But I realized that actually through this other understanding, all of those elements of our human experience, could truly be integrated. And in many ways, that's what this book, The Web of Meaning is about, it's about the process of integrating the different elements of life. Life that we have been accustomed to think of as separate which involves integrating wisdom traditions from the past with that, with modern understanding integrating, spirituality with science and integrating humans with the rest of life. In each of these ways, integrating refers, not just kind of squishing it all together, but looking at how everything is actually unified while differentiated in this kind of complex, essentially, this complex web of meaning.  

So, that- that's kind of my description of what I see is positive but let's get to your point about then negatives added to this. And yeah, I think that there's always a danger of looking at one particular scientific insight and saying okay, this is- now we know that. Now we know what spiritual wisdom is truly about or something like that. And so oftentimes, I get concerned when people look at a sort of deep physics to explain spirituality because that's where I have the same concern that you were just describing. What, what happens, you know, if somebody says, you know what physics tells us is there are no elemental particles, is all just and vibrations of string of strings and string theory? Well, that all sounds great, and that would be a lovely way to say okay, well, this kind of shows that the connections between things more important than the things themselves, but what happens if 10 years from now some new physicist shows string theory is wrong. Actually. There is some fundamental particle of particles that you know, and I think that's what's dangerous. What I'm looking at is something very different. It's looking at more like a way of perceiving reality and it's simply this recognition that modern complexity theory, systems thinking etc. has, is that when we look at the world, oftentimes the relationship between things very often are more important than the things themselves. That's a principle, which applies underlying systems thinking and applies very much to spiritual traditions, like Buddhism, Daoism or neo-Confucianism. 

Matthew: Thank you for that. I study, I have studied the Western tradition primarily, though of course, I've been enriched by my study of Taoism and Buddhism. I have not studied Confucianism as much and so I did learn a lot from your work. And so, I thank you for that. But, you know, a lot of my efforts are to retrieve these aspects of the Greek philosophical, and Christian and Jewish, just because of my own lineage and inheritance…religious, and spiritual and philosophical traditions. And you also mentioned Carl Jung in your book and he's a depth psychologist. His work has been important for me and he's someone that, in working with Freud who was his mentor and teacher for a while, developed this new method of depth psychology to help in a way you could say surface the world iew that Westerners had taken for granted, and Jung did individual therapy, but he also had a lot to tell us about our collective unconscious and the complexes…and the, the psychoses really that affect us at a collective level.  

And one of the things, the Jung warned about was in speaking to Europeans and Americans, but mostly Europeans. He was worried that there was this tendency to look to the most elite, esoteric traditions of the East and to import their views and practices. And what worried Jung was that, you know, we have our own inheritances, our own the archetypal patterns working within our psyche, that might not necessarily be compatible, at least initially. And, you know, this was almost a century ago now that he began warning about this. And so I guess I felt like there were times in your book where in celebrating, the wisdom, and insight of the neo-Confucians that, and kind of looking at Plato's dualism say, or the way that Christianity tends to emphasize the afterlife rather than the earthly plane, all of which is perfectly true valid critique, but there are other lineages in this Western stream that I think mitigate against the dominant string. And I guess following Jung's concerns, the question I want to put to you is, is there any risk in so kind of vilifying our own inheritances as Westerners that we end up disemboweling ourselves? And is there any hope for trying to redeem and revise and build upon resources within our traditions in dialogue with all the world's traditions from Asia, Indigenous traditions, and so on, need to be planetary. So, you know, don't get me wrong. It's not like, I'm trying to say we should just return to the European lineages or anything. But is there any sense in which we can draw upon the wisdom of the West as well in this conversation, as we move into a more interconnected worldview? 

Jeremy: Oh, yes, I think, absolutely. And really, I try to be really clear in the book that in no way am I trying to kind of attack the Western worldview or and say there's something wrong with it. And essentially, and I mean for starters, as we've sort of touched on a little bit, and the- it's a worldview, that’s brought to us science and it's a worldview that has brought to us all this incredible technology. So much of it has been so life-enhancing and so enhancing the quality of human life. It's a worldview that's also brought concepts into the sort of global consciousness. Things like human rights or things like freedom or democracy, many of these big concepts arose out of enlightenment thinking and it's something to be absolutely celebrated. So, it's not like I feel like there's a good bad thing going on like oh we've got to turn to the better East Asian traditions or anything like that. But it's more that to your point. We need to develop a planetary consciousness.  

We're facing really the greatest crisis that humanity has probably ever faced. Maybe there was a time before we left Africa when we may be going down to a few tens of thousands of individuals and maybe there was a crisis going on there. Since any time since then, this is a massive crisis we are facing, and we need all the resources that our human lineage can give us. That means we need the scientific resources. We need the resources of the great wisdom traditions from around the world. We need the resources from Indigenous traditions that have maintained a closer connection with some of the core human like ways of living that got lost as agriculture developed and as science, developed etc. So we need everything we can get, but at the same time we have to avoid this kind of squishing it all together and you know, to the issue, you raised that Jung raised and we can see that in this sort  blind path, if you will of orientalism, there was this, you know, great book obviously written by Edward Said and decades ago, really critiquing just how there's been this whole history in the west of romanticizing the East. And then in creating a new bifurcation like oh, the West is rational the East is spiritual and this kind of claptrap, right, that and people get caught up in. And we see a lot of that still today in New Age thinking, there's so many people who just because somebody puts himself up as a guru and they walk around in saffron. They must have some insight into something and all this other stuff. That is not what I'm suggesting and not where I'm going. But I believe that if we try to take a truly integrative approach and try to look at the best insights we can from these different traditions, we're able to actually really build a worldview, set a platform, if you will, that could lead humanity into a totally different phase of our human existence, one that actually integrates. Well, and the subtitle of my book is Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. And I believe it's possible to integrate science with traditional wisdom to actually not just find humanity’s place but to move humanity as a global and species into a relationship with the Earth. Relationship with ourselves that could truly lead to flourishing. That's the path I think is possible. 

Matthew: Yeah, thank you for that Jeremy. Just to pick on up on this thread of the importance of developing a planetary consciousness, a planetary worldview that doesn't just mush everything together, that respects the diversity of the world's various traditions and peoples, and yet also is at least gesturing towards our common predicament and which is that we are all members of an Earth community that is increasingly imperiled because of particular a worldview, which we've been discussing. I think in our particular moment, we’re I don't even know, almost two years now into this COVID-19 pandemic. And in a way, we're seeing how science really does provide us with a method and a language and a means of connecting across continents. We all recognize the same phenomenon, this virus. We're all trying to mitigate it and yet there's such- at the same time that we have this scientific knowledge that's helping us address the crisis. There's a lot of resistance to the- there are concerns I would say about the imposition of state power and corporate power, big pharma and so on to, to manage the narrative to make sure that everyone is following the science. And I think before we had COVID-19 and the pandemic, there was climate change, which similarly science, no matter what, your what language you speak, what continent you live on. If there are scientists there, they research the climate. They study meteorology, the composition of the atmosphere and they all agree. This is not good. Right? But there's similarly, a lot of resistance to this. Hope we would hope universal scientific understanding. And so, I guess, I think you started writing this before, the Pandemic started- 

Jeremy: Right. 

Matthew: But given the situation that we're in, the role of medical science in addressing the crisis we’re facing and their resistance to that narrative. How do you think your work can help address the situation? I know that's a big ask I mean, but, you know, given our current situation. What is it that addressing this at the level of worldview can bring to the table that maybe isn't part of our regular discussion about it. 

Jeremy: Well, I think that when we look not just at the COVID-19 situation, but fundamentally, it's the climate crisis is just massive. And you know it just this week the IPCC came out with this report saying, yeah, we're probably already, unless we really change so much, we're going to blow that one and a half degrees Celsius number within a decade or more. And we're headed and quite potentially to the real threat of our civilization itself staying around before the century is out. And here's what's so fascinating, and this I think is a way to come at this, realizing how worldview is so important. If you look at those different climate models that the IPCC has put out and they've been studied now for years, you know, aggressive like the best case and the worst case. Everything else. Every one of those climate models assumed a continued increase year by year in gross domestic product around the world. Nobody even took it as a question. That maybe that's a variable that can actually be impacted by actually moving to a de-growth or a post growth situation for the world and that shows how powerful worldviews are. The current worldview takes it as a given that you have to keep growing. And basically, in a like on a finite planet at an exponential rate year after year after year. That's what is underlying the way in which we are destructing. And in which we're destroying ecosystems around the world that even climate breakdown itself is just a symptom of an even larger problem, the sort of ecological devastation that our civilization is causing by looking at the natural world as a resource. So then even the more sort of quote unquote, enlightened people coming from that worldview, will say things like we need to look at a more sustainable path So we can keep exploiting nature, you know, more sustainably basically rather than looking at recognizing our connectedness with all of life which leads to a fundamentally different way of looking at relating to these problems. Rather than saying, oh, let's do geoengineering. Treat the Earth has this kind of machine that went wrong, just so we can keep growing our GDP even more over the next few decades. Start to look at what we are doing in this system of humanity with a living Earth? How can we actually shift our direction to start to regenerate the Earth? Not just keep it sustainable but regenerate it, and how can we actually look at this symbiotic flourishing between humans within our human society and then between humans in the living Earth in a way that we can actually learn from life's own lessons, basically, to find a way, a way forward that is- and that doesn't involve this kind of insanity that we're on right now. So, this is my-my sense of why a worldview is so fundamental. But actually, has very specific outcomes when you actually start looking at things in a different way.  

Matthew: Hmm. Mhm. Do you have a sense for why some pockets of society I mean, it's more close to home for me in America. There are a lot of people who resist this transition to a new worldview. And there's a lot of fear about what it is exactly that these green ecological spiritual people are trying to bring into world. What's this- is this resistance just a matter of fear of the unknown or what is being tapped into here that's causing such resistance? 

Jeremy: Yeah, well you know, when you talk about resistance to this new worldview, I actually think of two different pockets of resistance. If you will, you can’t really call them pockets. They're more like bigger demands of resist- 

Matthew: Well-funded domains of resistance. 

Jeremy: Right. But I mean one, one fascinating one is actually from reductionist thinking people themselves and it's actually quite fascinating. And I've experienced this myself, where I've written articles critiquing Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene theory and looking at that and the sort of notion that the Gordon Gekko greed is a good notion of capitalism, and I found myself bombarded by literally like a thousand or more sort of comments in one or more of these articles. Really ad hominem a little bit like this, you would expect maybe from right-wing fundamentalist or whatever rather than from sort of scientific minded people. So that in itself is quite fascinating. And I think there, you need to look at the sort of Thomas Kuhn understanding of paradigm shift and the realization that when people have dedicated their lives and built that prestige, and reputation on a particular way of thinking, it's very difficult. It takes tremendous courage and incredible open-mindedness for them not to just double down and defend their point of view against what they see as an attack.  

So, that's kind of one domain, but then I think you're probably referring more to what we see in the politics of the United States. And basically, all around the world is groups of people just feeling that their whole, everything is being taken away from them, and by progressive forces and reacting so strongly against it with this rise in right wing extremists and everything that's so damaging right now. But I think that's a very different understanding of this- of that kind of resistance. There I think what you simply need to look at is the rise in the neoliberal ideology of the last few decades, and this incredible rise in inequality where basically the, not just wealth but the very basics for any kind of economic or physical security, have been sucked up from the mass of people towards these elites.  

And it's not just the wealth and the economics itself. But the very sense of meaning, um meaning itself has been sort of under attack. If you will, in the West for over a hundred years with the rise of consumerism, but at least even consumerism gave some level of meaning to people in their communities, or whatever. But when even that has been like blown away by this, by this kind of ravaging from this breakdown in our sort of social contract, what has happened I think is the elites don't want people to all go around saying, oh, this is really unfair. There's something wrong about like a mega billionaire having a hundred billion dollars well and, you know, millions of people are scrambling to even just put a roof over their head or just get enough to eat. They don't want people to think that. So, they simply deflect the attention to threats that seem to be closer at hand like immigrants or these- the snowflakes who are trying to undermine your, you know, and your sense of sort of male your, you know, your place in the patriarchy and all this kind of stuff. So, there we see I believe quite a cynical and conscious approaches by the corporate owned media to actually just make news out of stuff that isn't news in order to deflect people's attention from what's really going on. 

Matthew: Right. Right. Yeah, so we have about 10 minutes remaining. Um, I'm going to go with this question for you, Jeremy. It's not an easy one, but it's a question about morality, and whether or not it is intrinsic to human nature in the sense that it's in some way evolved as we have learned to be more social creatures. This is something you discuss in your book, this notion of group selection, which is an approach that's not the Dawkins selfish gene, every individual for themselves kind of approach, but it recognizes that there are multiple levels of selection, and that one of them has to do with group bonding. And that one idea is that our sense of fairness and justice, and morality comes out of this kind of an evolutionary process, but I wonder if you think the good, which is a term that Plato developed, right, that refers for him to this highest notion. Like he analogizes it to the sun. And it just says, the as the sun provides light that shines that illuminates everything else, the good is the source of our conscience, our sense of what's virtuous to do and how we ought to behave. Do you think that this is something which is a function of sort of the contingencies of group selection in our species’ evolutionary history, or do you, do you find any basis for the notion that somehow the good was like written into the fabric of the cosmos from the get-go? Does this question make sense? Does it- is the good something that emerged during the course of evolution due to natural selection or group selection, or is it something deeper? It's actually guiding our evolution along the way. 

Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, profound question. And, and ultimately, it's like this question about values, right? And I mean, are values ultimately relative or is there some sort of foundation to values and, and if there's a foundation, where do we find it? And well, I think a lot of- and I explore this in the book. In fact, there's a chapter in the book called ‘Cultivating Integrated Values’ where I look at many of these ways in which it's so complex looking at values. Because people come, it's from some, such different places. And I think that the when we like look deeper and deeper at where these layers come from.  

One of the things that I look at, is that, in a way, we can understand value itself as arising with life and that if we just kind of, imagine for a moment of well, a universe where there is no life whatsoever. Then maybe this reductionist, ontology, just ontological reduction is not so wrong. There is just a bunch of lots of billiard balls hitting each other and it doesn't really matter what happens to them. But as soon as life emerged on this planet roughly four billion years ago. When people look at try to understand what life is about, what they have come to recognize is the source of life is this kind of self-organized process of really moving against entropy. So, we know entropy is coming from the second law of Thermodynamics the basically ultimately, the universe will just kind of go through this heat death, you know many billions of years into the future, and entropy is this kind of notion that once things begin to dissipate, you can’t sort of bring them back again. You can't. Once you break an egg, you can’t sort of get the yolk back, etc. And the record, this understanding of life that’s developed now in the last few decades, is that actually life is in a way, like, a local reversal of entropy. That what life actually does is sort of take entropy in and organizes it inside a membrane itself, organizes it and does a reversal of entropy. And what we understood, the reason I think value arose at that point, is that those early protocells it started to do that- it had to make value judgments like is something they're bringing in actually going to help them to maintain this reversal of entropy, or not? And they began to say we don't that's a bad molecule. That's not going to help us. This one will really help us. Of course, they couldn't speak or think about it at the time, but that's what was going on.  

And so, if you look at life in that way, we can get to see life itself is this actually nearly four billion years of this unfolding of increasingly rich diverse form, like of negative entropy locally happening on Earth. And that it you can see they're almost from the point of view of complexity. And it's almost like the ways in which things are organized, being more and more complex in the sense that they reverse entropy even more efficiently and effectively than had been done before. And if we begin to look at values coming from that, well, that leads very much to this kind of life affirming set of values. We get to realize that each of us ourselves with our 40 trillion cells are just one part of this amazing story of life unfolding in its richness over these billions of years. We're all part of life. We are all life as part of this unfolding.  

So, and to me that that leads to this the sense that I think was best actually described by Albert Schweitzer, 20th century humanitarian. Who said, “I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live” and he himself said, like, you know, from that having reverence for life is the foundation point of morality, and that's pretty much where I come from. Or at least where I come to in my own exploration, and in the book itself, is that- and values, if we see values has fundamentally starting from life itself, that's values that can celebrate the integration and the diversity of life. Celebrate all the different ways in which humans can do what we do. But fundamentally, celebrate that within the context of life, and it begins to lean towards saying things that destroy the richness of life are inherently wrong.  

Matthew: Hm. It’s so profoundly important I think to be able to expand the circle of value out beyond just the human sphere. I mean, under neoliberal capitalism, it's not just, it's even narrower than that. I mean, a lot of human values, the value of human flourishing is not really considered essential to GDP. [Jeremy: Right.] And so, this expansion of value beyond, just let's say, shareholder’s value, [Jeremy: Right.] Beyond, you know, just what's going to make a profit, but a conception of value that includes the whole biosphere and the, the preciousness and the fragility of life on this planet, where we can begin to acknowledge that even if there's no use for it in human economy, this species, this individual, you know, ecosystem has a value intrinsic to itself [Jeremy: Exactly.] just by virtue of its existence as a living being, or community of human beings. I think that's- it's a profound expansion of our conception, our modern Western conception of value. It’s so important. So, I really am grateful to you for articulating it in such a clear, accessible, and powerful and exciting way in your book. If we had more time, I'd want to ask more cosmological questions about the place of life in the evolution of the whole universe and the complexification of matter for billions of years before the Earth solidified, and the complex chemistry that gave rise to biological life forms as possible. [Jeremy: Mm.] I think there's an interesting story to be told about the potential for value to proceed, even the emergence of life, but we'll have to save that for a different time. 

Jeremy: Absolutely. Look forward to it. 

Matthew: And as we bring this conversation to a close, I want to thank you, Jeremy for what you shared with us tonight. And also, for this book, and your first book, you're making a contribution to what Thomas Berry called “the great work”, which is trying to transform our modern consciousness into something more life-affirming, recognizing its place within this gaian life that we call planet Earth, and so just I have deep gratitude and respect for the work that you're doing, and I want to thank you for that. And unless you have any final words… 

Jeremy: Well just to thank you Matt, for coming up with such profound and interesting questions. That was really enjoyable to explore, thank you. 

Matt: Definitely. 

[Uplifting theme music begins] 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

[Theme music concludes]