From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Chance McDermott
Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2021 11:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK Approaches to Addressing the Meta-Crisis

Brandon,

 

Thank you for organizing this chart and sharing. 

 

-Chance

 

 

On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 10:49 AM lee simplyquality.org <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Brandon,

Thanks for this. 

I adapted your table and created a Wikiversity page at: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Level_5_Research_Center/Escaping_Discontent

I hope it is useful.

I transformed the table format into paragraphs because it seems to be more flexible and a better use of space.

I took the liberty of adding “Living Wisely” to the list.

I added an assignment (students respond to direction).

 

Please let me know your comments.

 

I recommend we focus our continuing work on this topic by updating this Wikiversity page.

Any of us can do that directly, or let me know if you want my help improving the page.

 

Thanks,

 

Lee Beaumont 

 

 

On Nov 29, 2021, at 10:35 PM, Brandon Norgaard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

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Thanks to everyone who gave input on this.  I added in some additional details as requested. 

 

Jonathan: I suppose that’s the cartographer in me, always feeling the need to make these maps to categorize things.  It was the table you included in your 10 Flavors essay that inspired me to create this table, since I was figuring that there is a lot of agreement on these crises, but significant divergence on what we ought to going forward.  I acknowledge that people will rank these crises differently in terms of severity and in terms of root cause, and that is partially what creates this divergence.  I fully accept that the purpose of your essay was to encourage us to really taste the various flavors of this pickle that we’re in.  I read your essay shortly after it was published and I’ve had some time to reflect on it along with the others in the Dispatches anthology.  Having tasted it for a few months now, I’m willing to at least engage in categorizing the various approaches to addressing these great challenges.

 

Lene: I’ve added Folk-Bildung 3.0 and I’m sorry I forgot to add that in the first place.

 

Andrew: I am unsure how the LLP would contribute to this, except perhaps to add some details to the Peer to Peer entry?

 

Nick: I’ve added an entry for The Regenerative Renaissance as well.  I had to edit down your description a bit to fit into the table.  I figure what you’re describing is a combination of Enlightenment 2.0 and Holistic Back-to-Nature and Ecology of Mind.  If there are elements in what you’re describing that are not really captured elsewhere, then whatever that might happen to be should be foregrounded within the description of this particular entry.  Also this makes me realize that some approaches are going to be combinations of 2 or more of these.  The leading members of the Game B community, for example, seem to go with a combination of Enlightenment 2.0 and techno-optimism.  But Game B is intellectually heterogenous, so I left it off the list.

 

Gregg: Thanks for the complements.  I wasn’t sure if the Hanzi Freinacht approach essentially is based on Enlightenment 2.0 and thus would not need to be mentioned in its own entry.  Hanzi emphasizes psychological and socio-cultural development and also institutions.  I figure the Hanzi approach makes better sense if you start with the assumption of something close to the UTOK framework.  Would you agree?  Thoughts from others?

 

Leland: Indeed, this would be a great start for a Wikiversity course.  Feel free to copy this into a new page and some of us can then work on adding additional columns and details as necessary.  Some of these seem to partially overlap, whereas others have important points of disagreement.  I don’t have enough time to think about how best to group together and/or subcategorize these entries and right now I can’t think of what additional columns we might add, but that information will come if we publish it, either from myself or from others.

 

 

	Approach to Addressing the Meta-Crisis	Proponents	Notes
Rational Optimistic Enlightenment	We need a more full embrace and more widespread adoption throughout the world of what already has been shown to work, which are the values and psycho-technologies of the Age of Enlightenment, such as rationality, science, progress, skepticism, liberty, fraternity, equality, and getting away from ignorance, dogmatism, authority, tradition, superstition, and prejudice.  Postmodernism and critical theory have little or nothing of value to offer and are only diversions and roadblocks.	Steven Pinker	This is probably just a newer version of Enlightenment 1.0, so we might call it Enlightenment 1.5 or something
Enlightenment 2.0	We need to address the "Enlightenment Gap", which the first enlightenment never solved and which Enlightenment 1.5 doesn’t solve either.  This involves embracing enlightenment rationalism and postmodern critique, coming up with a coherent naturalistic ontology and more clear definitions for scientific terms that are taken for granted. This also involves new paradigms and new methodologies that embrace inner development integrated with science.	Gregg Henriques, Hanzi Freinacht
Conscious Evolution	We can become mindful of the dynamics of the fundamental force of evolution and the relation to consciousness and this will awaken our collective capacity to overcome our challenges and create a better future.  In socio-political terms, this hasn't been fully developed, despite Wilber claiming to have a "theory of everything" 20 years ago, since some of this is the subject of his forthcoming 3rd book in the Kosmos Trilogy.	Ken Wilber
Dark Renaissance	Things will go dark almost inevitably, meaning that society will break down and a new dark age will result.  But some of us will be able to create new aesthetic movements to get things through in order to plant the seeds for an eventual rebirth, and some people are already working on this.	Alexander Bard
Techno-Optimistic	Technological advancements will save humanity and will save our planet.  Next-generation innovations will heroically avert any and all calamities.  Humanity's best days are ahead because of the power of technology and innovation.	Elon Musk
Folk-Bildung 3.0	This involves empowering everybody through bildung to act and take sustainable action where they are.  The formal political systems also ought to be there; they may not live up to our expectations, but if we want clean water in the pipes, modern medicine, food for 8 billion people, safe transportation, and solid science to back decisions, there also needs to be institutions and political with which to collaborate.	Lene Rachel Andersen
Peer to Peer	This involves people cooperatively pooling their resources through commons in a way that is complementary to business and government with the idea that this can create prosperity for all.	Michel Bauwens
The Regenerative Renaissance / Bio-Transformation / “MettaModernism"	This involves harnessing nature-based and biological insights and explicitly more feminine embodied intuitions and felt senses to paradigm-shift modernity, and its discontents, into regenerative business models and systems that temper and transform abstraction, extraction, accumulation, exploitation, and mechanistic thinking with lived experiences, expressions, and practices of interdependence, reciprocity, reverence, caring wholeness/healing. It means engaging in purpose-led systemic transformation and institutional innovation and entrepreneurial processes, where purpose is explicitly a felt experience of love/caring—free from personality patterns and cognitive distortions from developmental challenges—moving into action through constellations of people, data, and things (that have a business model attached).	Nick Jankel
Meta-Sensemaking	We really need to greatly improve our sensemaking amid the panoptic bombardment of information and ever-shifting technology.	Mark Stahlman via Marshall McLuhan
Ecology of Mind	We can use our understanding of ecology in conjunction with warm data and the nuances and complexities of various aspects of life to help us intuitively make better choices.	Nora Bateson
Revolutionary Anti-Capitalistic	We need to overthrow the capitalist bourgoisie before they destroy the world with their unquenchable greed.	Doctrinaire Marxists
Holistic Back-to-Nature	We need to re-discover our indigenous roots and live in harmony with nature, which will involve much less consumption and a dramatic decrease in industrialization.	Greta Thunberg
Doomer Defeatist	There is no way to head off disaster so the best you can do is to save yourself and your family and maybe the members of the ethnic group that you identify with.	Steve Bannon

 

 

Brandon Norgaard

Founder, The Enlightened Worldview Project

 

From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Jonathan Rowson
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2021 12:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK Approaches to Addressing the Meta-Crisis

 

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Hi Brandon, 

 

Thanks for sharing this initiative. 

The cartological hedonist in me is always happy to see conceptual classifications mapped out in tabular form, and I look forward to seeing the table populated.

 

My slightly heretical view on this matter (which doesn't undermine the value of what you are doing at all) is that you are likely to find quite quickly that these approaches are actually responding to different things. I believe that's because it doesn't really make sense to think of the meta-crisis as singular (even as a singular higher order representation of multiple phenomena) because meta means so many things (alas, one more now due to Facebook becoming Meta, which risks supplanting the meaning of the others). This is not merely a pedantic point, but directly shapes our perception of how we should act and what a good vision(s) of the future might look like. 

 

It is true that all the problems are really one underlying problem, but it's *also* at least equally true that the one underlying problem is many problems.

 

I am a pragmatist on such matters, so I'm arguing here not about underlying (ontological) reality but the efficacy of our epistemic tools to grapple with it and act with optimal discernment. In this respect, I came to the view that it's useful to distinguish between the reckoning(pandemic), the emergency (ecological), the crisis (governance) and to recognise that they have their own kind of problem, prior to invoking anything meta. Only then, and depending on your patience and appetite, I think we can make sense of around ten distinct meta-crises or, perhaps wiser, we can cluster them into four clusters with distinct punctuation as a way of showing their same-but-different nature. It's another conversation entirely, but for those who are interested, there is a glimpse in the table here, and the full story is outlined in the attached essay. I believe grasping that range of perspectives and experiencing them in your own life is what it means to 'taste the pickle'.

 

All the best, 

 

Jonathan.

 

 

On Mon, 29 Nov 2021 at 07:52, Lene Rachel Andersen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Hi Brandon,

Excellent!

How about folk-bildung 3.0 as we are working on it in the Global Bildung Network & Nordic Bildung: empowering everybody through bildung to act and take sustainable action where they are?

The formal political systems also ought to be there; they may not live up to our expectations, but if we want clean water in the pipes, modern medicine, food for 8 billion people, safe transportation, and solid science to back decisions, there also needs to be institutions and political fora with which to collaborate.

/ Lene

On 29-11-2021 08:13, Brandon Norgaard wrote:

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Hello everyone, I sent a message to this list a few days ago about how we might create a table comparing the different approaches to addressing the meta-crisis.  I figure that a lot of people and organizations agree that there are these several crises that are interdependent and interrelated (ecological, political, socio-cultural, economic, educational, meaning, etc.) but there are divergent opinions about what to do.  I still haven’t heard anyone clearly define this “dark renaissance” notion, but I took a stab at defining it here based on what I remember Bard saying a few months ago.  I’m intending this to be a conversation starter.  I figure several of you guys could improve upon what I have here.  Some of this might even be just plainly wrong.  Let me know what you think:

 

	Approach to Addressing the Meta-Crisis	Proponents	Notes
Rational Optimistic Enlightenment	We need a more full embrace and more widespread adoption throughout the world of what already has been shown to work, which are the values and psycho-technologies of the Age of Enlightenment, such as rationality, science, progress, skepticism, liberty, fraternity, equality, and progress and getting away from ignorance, dogmatism, authority, tradition, superstition, and prejudice.  Postmodernism and critical theory have little or nothing of value to offer and are only diversions and roadblocks.	Steven Pinker	This is probably just a newer version of Enlightenment 1.0, so we might call it Enlightenment 1.5 or something
Enlightenment 2.0	We need to address the "Enlightenment Gap", which the first enlightenment never solved and which Enlightenment 1.5 doesn’t solve either.  This involves embracing enlightenment rationalism and postmodern critique, coming up with a coherent naturalistic ontology and more clear definitions for scientific terms that are taken for granted. This also involves new paradigms and new methodologies that embrace inner development integrated with science.	Gregg Henriques
Conscious Evolution	We can become mindful of the dynamics of the fundamental force of evolution and the relation to consciousness and this will awaken our collective capacity to overcome our challenges and create a better future.  In socio-political terms, this hasn't been fully developed, despite Wilber claiming to have a "theory of everything" 20 years ago, since some of this is the subject of his forthcoming 3rd book in the Kosmos Trilogy.	Ken Wilber
Dark Renaissance	Things will go dark almost inevitably, meaning that society will break down and a new dark age will result.  But some of us will be able to create new aesthetic movements to get things through in order to plant the seeds for an eventual rebirth, and some people are already working on this.	Alexander Bard
Techno-Optimistic	Technological advancements will save humanity and will save our planet.  Next-generation innovations will heroically avert any and all calamities.  Humanity's best days are ahead because of the power of technology and innovation.	Elon Musk
Meta-Sensemaking	We really need to greatly improve our sensemaking amid the panoptic bombardment of information and ever-shifting technology.	Mark Stahlman via Marshall McLuhan
Ecology of Mind	We can use our understanding of ecology in conjunction with warm data and the nuances and complexities of various aspects of life to help us intuitively make better choices.	Nora Bateson
Revolutionary Anti-Capitalistic	We need to overthrow the capitalist bourgeoisie before they destroy the world with their unquenchable greed.	Doctrinaire Marxists
Holistic Back-to-Nature	We need to re-discover our indigenous roots and live in harmony with nature, which will involve much less consumption and a dramatic decrease in industrialization.
Doomer Defeatist	There is no way to head off disaster so the best you can do is to save yourself and your family and maybe the members of the ethnic group that you identify with.

 

 

Brandon Norgaard

Founder, The Enlightened Worldview Project

 

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-- 
Lene Rachel Andersen
Futurist, economist, author & keynote speaker
President of Nordic Bildung and co-founder of the European Bildung Network
Full member of the Club of Rome
Nordic Bildung
Vermlandsgade 51, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
www.nordicbildung.org
+45 28 96 42 40

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-- 

Dr. Jonathan Rowson

Founding Director, Perspectiva

Research Fellow, CUSP

Open Society Fellow

Website

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The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life is published by Bloomsbury.

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