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It’s been a double dose of disaster the last few days, watching events unfold from Boston to Washington. First the horror at the Boston marathon, and then the decision by the highest deliberative body in the land to shuck all reason and abandon responsibility for curbing gun violence while doubling down on our existing gun laws, or lack of them. The first is horribly incomprehensible. Unfortunately, the second is all too comprehensible, given the state of our Congress. Could there be a more dramatic example of the dysfunction at the heart of our national political system? How does what seems like such a reasonable no-brainer not even garner 60 votes. My city is awash in guns (Oakland) only because people can drive up to the Nevada gun show and buy any firearm they want sans background check. How is it that 90% of the public support a critical bill, and not even 55% of the Senate? For those of us who feel that as we should not simply allow our society to be shaped by unmitigated brute forces of nature of culture, but that we must make some effort to shape them toward more productive and positive ends, this was not a good day. For those hoping that amidst the haze of money and power, Congress was still capable of being accountable to something other than the fat contributions and the next election, this was not an encouraging outcome.

The questions come fast and furious. Are politicians running that scared? Does the NRA have that much power? Is the fear of getting “primaried” so intense as to commit what so many have to know is a vote against good conscience, basic safety and decent governance? And honestly, if that is what it requires these days to stay in power, why do they care about keeping their job!? If you have to destroy reason and good conscience to do your job, maybe you shouldn’t have that job. I don’t want to impugn people’s motive too strongly, and I’m sure some voted their conscience, if we can call it that. But if most accounts are to be believed, this was not an issue of deep division. Most supported the bill. This was a straightforward survival vote.  Our elected representatives made a simple bet. “The people will forget. The NRA will not.” I feel insulted, and you may too. But somewhere, our senators are simply surrendering to a painful truth—that on some issues, the voice of money and power speaks a thousand decibels louder than the voice of the quiet multitudes. Where have we gone wrong when the outsized voice of a few hundred thousand matters so much more than the justified outrage of a few hundred million? The tyranny of the majority is one thing, but this is tyranny of a backward minority. This isn’t your democracy, this vote is quietly telling us. Underneath the rhetoric, outrage and justification, we the people are being mocked.

Still, what they don’t realize is that they are making a larger gamble. They are playing with the future of the Republican Party. Yes, while some democrats are to be blamed, this is overwhelmingly a GOP issue. The Republicans are not getting closer to the mainstream, they are not getting closer to responsible governance, they are not getting nearer to making pragmatic steps toward more centrist policies. And with each step they take further down that road, especially at this point, after this last election, the alienation factor only grows that much stronger. And so while they may win individual battles, and retain their individual seats, they are losing the collective war. They are ignoring so much of what America is today, shredding their national contract with so many in this nation, and climbing that much more deeply into the bed with a few. And I sit back and watch this unfold, and I think: Don’t they know this is killing their party? I know I spend more time in progressive circles, and that colors perception, but as Dylan said, you don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing. The social conservative wing of the Republican Party is riding the momentum of past culture war victories but that momentum is fading fast. And however much that may not seem true in the backstreets of Bozeman, or the deserts of Arizona or the Bible Belt sensibilities of my own home state of Oklahoman, it is true. The generations are a’ changin.  The baby boomers are moving on. The country is evolving. These may be real victories for the NRA and real victories for the Senators who will keep their seats, but for the Republican party as a whole this is a pyrrhic victory, and one drenched in the worst kind of compromise, survival for nothing but its own sake. We need a healthy Republican party, one that champions meritocracy and individual achievement, our religious heritage and civic duty, genuinely free markets and open societies, freedom and restrained, accountable government. But that seems more of a fantasy than ever. The people who voted against what seemed to be such a reasonable, sensible bill are doubling down on the past. And doubling down on death.

Below are five questions and answers with philosopher, author, and the co-founder of the Institute of Cultural Evolution, Steve McIntosh.

Why did you write Evolution’s Purpose? 

After my first book, Integral Consciousness, came out in 2007 I spent much of my time writing articles and giving interviews. But eventually I realized that the best way to continue my work in integral philosophy was to write another book.  So I went on kind of vision quest to decide what the focus of the next book should be and I came to the realization that the most basic truth about integral philosophy is that consciousness evolves. And as I contemplated this foundational truth I came to see more clearly how the scientific and historical story of our evolutionary origins is actually a profound spiritual teaching.

This lead to a significant period of research which helped me appreciate that from the beginning the core of integral philosophy has been about discerning the spiritual significance of evolution—this is what Whitehead and Teilhard and Wilber all have in common.  And I realized that there was more to discover in this quest to learn evolution’s spiritual teaching. Thus, I decided that the best way to contribute to the emergence of the evolutionary worldview was to work to further develop the core of integral philosophy by focusing on the meaning and value of evolution itself, which is why I wrote Evolution’s Purpose.

Why do you feel evolution is a subject for philosophy to address as well as a science? What can philosophy add to our growing scientific knowledge of our origins?

The empirical facts of evolution inevitably connect with one kind of philosophy or another, they cannot stand alone without a reality frame. And at this point in history our evolutionary creation story is too significant to be left to the impoverished philosophy of scientism.  Because of its immense symbolic significance, the enlarged understanding of evolution that is now before us deserves a philosophy that can come to terms with the value that evolution generates.

Further, if we can effectively communicate the deeper truths of evolution’s value generation and its spiritual significance, this can provide a kind of spiritual leadership for our culture that we currently lack. Properly understood, the spiritual teachings of evolution can help us move beyond the shortcomings of the current culture of progressive spirituality by giving us a standard of comparative excellence.  That is, the spiritual lessons of evolution will thus serve as a “true tone” or “concert pitch” that can help “tune up” all the spiritual lines of development that will come to “play in the orchestra” of emerging evolutionary spiritual culture.

What should the average person know about evolution that they don’t usually hear from today’s experts?

That we are agents of evolution. That we embody the all levels of emergence within us—we know what it feels like to be evolution happening.  So again I think the average person should know that the scientific and historical story of our evolutionary origins is actually a profound spiritual teaching.

Who would you say are the three most important but under-appreciated thinkers when it comes to understanding the nature of evolution? Why are each important?

Well, I can start by mentioning Andrew Cohen and yourself (Carter Phipps), who are both doing important work in the unfolding emergence of the evolutionary worldview.  Beyond that I can cite Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who is very under appreciated in our culture.  Perhaps more than any other writer, Teilhard really showed the confluence of the truths revealed by science and spirituality.

The last chapter of the book is called “The Promise of a New Evolutionary Worldview”. What do you feel is the single most significant and/or exciting promise of an evolutionary orientation to the world around us?

The emergence of the evolutionary worldview could well turn out to be a kind of “second enlightenment;” a new way of seeing and knowing the world that can give us new powers to evolve consciousness and improve the human condition by healing the wounds of history.

I came of age in the early 1980s, so for me, like many in my generation, the Star Wars trilogy represented something more than a great series of movies. It was an archetypal drama, a modern mythology, as Joseph Campbell famously suggested, brought to life on the Big Screen. As Luke, Hans, and Leia battled evil in a galaxy far, far away, there were more than a few young boys and girls who felt their own impressionable souls embracing not only the drama but also the myth and even the mysticism.

My own mystical sensibilities have taken many twists and turns since those youthful days, but there is little doubt that the ideas contained in those movies still carry with them a lot of cultural currency. For example, the notion of a living energy field; a mystical, immanent “force” that connects everything, binds us all together and even offers us super-human capacities, may seem like a nice science fiction fantasy for twelve years olds, but it also calls to mind contemporary visions of spiritual realities. This is no accident.  Lucas was influenced by Eastern mysticism, and has called himself a “Buddhist Methodist.” We might say that even in its pop culture form, Lucas’s vision has been very influential in how we as a society think about spiritual and metaphysical realities, and at the same time, Star Wars was itself a pop-culture expression of the changing perception of those same realities. And here’s the kicker. At least some of this can be traced to comic books.

Lucas was a comic book reader in his childhood, and it has often been suggested that his remarkable imagination and storytelling capacity was forged in contemplation of those brightly colored pages of far-flung heroism. Indeed, there is more than a passing connection between the mysticism of the Obi Wan Kenobi, the changing face of Western culture in the 20^th century, and the visions of generations of comic book creators who first impressed themselves on Lucas’s young mind. This nexus between comic books, science fiction, pop culture, mysticism, and how all of them influence each other and work together to create emerging cultural myths is the subject of Jeffrey Kripal’s fascinating new book, Mutants and Mystics.

Kripal is one of the more prolific and respected scholars of mysticism in the U.S. He began his publishing career in 1995 with a controversial first book, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995). In Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, he tracks the history of that great cradle of the human potential movement and how it rose from family vacation spot for Michael Murphy and family to enormously influential purveyor of East-meets-West visions of human transformation. In his latest work, Mutants and Mystics, Kripal returns to the territory of human transformation and it’s evolutionary significance, though this time following less-traveled paths. In fact, Kripal may be the first scholar to connect the dots between Eastern mysticism, evolutionary spirituality, pulp fiction, the paranormal, the modern obsession with UFOs and aliens, science fiction, and the whole genre of superhero comic books. To a skeptical mind, that list might sound unlikely—a strained and superficial linking of areas of study that are already strange enough when tackled on their own. But one doesn’t have to get too far into Kripal’s book to see not only that he is quite serious but that the connection is more profound than casual comic book readers would ever guess. In fact, one starts to see the whole superhero comic book, pulp fiction, and science fiction genres as both vehicles and repositories for a whole subterranean mystical/paranormal message. This set of “mythical themes,” as Kripal puts it, were deliberately injected into the bloodstream of American culture through this most unlikely conduit, embraced explicitly by many of the creators and woven deeply into the texts of their creations.

For Kripal, these pop-cultural literary creations and the stories they convey, when taken as a whole, constitute a broad narrative, a super-story fusion that is telling us something about where we are and where we are going as a human race, and is also secretly shaping much of pop culture. “These modern mythologies,” he writes, “can be fruitfully read as cultural transformations of real paranormal experiences.” They have two distinct components: a public mythical level and a personal paranormal level. They are attempts, in other words, to come to terms with real individual experiences, and they also represent a sort of collective desire to understand something deeper and subtler about the nature and destiny of human society. Like an impressionist painting they are capturing some essence, some truth about private and public cultural realities—not always literal truths, but real and significant nonetheless.

By the term “paranormal” Kripal is talking about ESP, clairvoyance, and so forth, but he also includes a whole range of esoteric, mystical, spiritual, trans-rational and otherwise supra-normal experiences and synchronicities that are actually quite common, but simply fall outside the range of conventional discourse on what it means to be human. Whatever we think about the particular legitimacy of these sometimes hard-to-believe experiences, Kripal’s goal is not simply to prove them true or affirm them as real. He seeks to place them in a larger cultural narrative of great symbolic and mythical, if not literal, significance.

So is Kripal himself a believer in the paranormal? Well, yes and no. For him, the question itself is flawed. In an important paragraph at the beginning of the book, Kripal states clearly where he stands (even if the result is necessarily ambiguous)  “I want to suggest that the psyche and our social consensus of what reality is somehow ‘make each other up’ within a constant loop of Consciousness and Culture and that the Culture through which Consciousness often manifests itself most dramatically as the paranormal is that form in which the imagination (and so the image) are given freest and boldest reign: popular culture. You will find here, then, no proofs or debunkings of this or that extraordinary experience. . . . I am neither a denying debunker nor a true believer, and anyone who reads me as either is misreading me.”

Kripal organizes the book around seven orienting “Mythemes,” or general narrative areas that make up this super-story informing our collective culture. Each mytheme comprises a chapter, and in each chapter, Kripal examines the writers, thinkers, and historical figures that best represent that dimension of the over-arching narrative. For example, in the mytheme of “Orientation”, Kripal examines the nature of place and perspective in these works and the tendency to see knowledge coming from afar, from the Orient, or from a long time ago, or a secret society (Rosicrucians) or a secret lost civilization (like Atlantis). In the mytheme of “Radiation”, he looks at the new scientific understanding, so often highlighted in the pages of these works, that at the heart of matter are powerful, immaterial forces that affect us in unpredictable ways. Such subtle but powerful forces are all over the comic book and science fiction landscape, and several super heroes are well known for getting their power from radiation, like Spider-Man. Or the Fantastic Four.

As he works his way through these mythemes one by one he take us through an impressive and often surprising journey into the heart of sci-fi and comic book history and mythology. On that level alone, the book is something of a scholarly breakthrough. Along the way, he encounters some of the pioneers of these many overlapping fields, individuals like Frederic Myers, Michael Murphy, John Keel, Charles Fort, Ray Palmer, Phillip K. Dick, Sri Aurobindo, and Carl Jung. And we also encounter a whole host of extraordinary and sometimes strange purveyors of these mythemes, some who deserve to be better known and respected by history, some who simply leave us shaking our heads at the brilliant and bizarre personalities that have had such an outsized influence on pop culture. Kripal has done a simply outstanding job of uncovering the incredible connections, surprising histories, and remarkable paranormal experiences that were the actual background of so many of the superheroes and science fiction fantasies that many of us were raised on.

Both mutants and mystics abound in these pages, and their outlandish and unexpected stories keep the narrative engaging throughout. Indeed, Mutants and Mystics is easy to read and Kripal’s knowledge of the field vast. One can’t help but be impressed by a scholar who can make an extensive analysis of Whitley Strieber’s Communion on one page, X-Men on the next, and the mystical experiences of Ray Palmer and Gopi Krishna on yet another. In that sheer breadth, quality, and volume of history lies the book’s most powerful and convincing argument. But it is also the source of what is perhaps its most questionable characteristic. Amidst the raucous and enjoyable cacophony of characters crisscrossing the pages, the book can feel a bit like a mass of compelling but untamed information, a wide-angle shot that needs to be brought into focus—so much raw data, more explanation and context needed. Compounding this issue is the fact that Kripal makes little effort to distinguish between the less credible and more credible individuals inhabiting his super-story. Clearly there is a world of difference between the integrity of a Frederic Myers and the patently paranoid ramblings of a schizophrenic who thought he’d uncovered the key to the language of Atlantis. This will understandably frustrate the discerning reader. I certainly felt this way, wanting him to more directly acknowledge that person A is probably trustworthy, while this other person B…well, not so much.

Yet I suspect that ranking his sources on some kind of scale of credibility would have distracted attention from Kripal’s primary purpose—demonstrating the sheer pervasiveness of this mythical, paranormal super-story underlying our society and ultimately the human experience. His purpose is not to separate legitimate experience from delusional, but to see how they all arise from and operate within a larger narrative. Indeed, the book functions primarily as an eye-opening guide to an important evolutionary subtext hiding beneath pop culture and hidden in the biographies of the people who created it. Amidst these outcasts and underground travelers; these esoteric rebels and artistic misfits; these pioneers of the strange, the unseen, and the impossible; are secrets and mysteries galore. And even as we have loved and embraced their creations—such vision, such imagination! —we have failed to see the depth behind the painted smile, the mystic and the madness behind the entertaining mask. Kripal tears the mask away. He attempts to shows us that we may are all part of an extraordinary story, much grander, much greater than any one of his mutants or mystics could alone grasp. It is a story not yet fully understood, much less written, but influential, fundamental, and somehow informing much more of our reality then we yet realize. If only we could put aside being either dismissive skeptics or uncritical believers long enough to notice.

It has been almost two weeks since an important US presidential election, and there is a lot to reflect on. Some are talking about an historic change in the American electorate. Some are speaking of demographics. Some are telling us that America is still a polarized nation, and that change will be hard.

I share many of those thoughts and reflections, but have another important observation to add to the mix as well. What struck me about the election can be captured in a simple phrase.

Worldviews matter.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people, including political pundits, talk about worldviews as I have in the last two weeks. I live in a country that is divided not just by left and right, liberal and conservative, but by multiple, distinct worldviews that inform people’s thinking about everything and which frame reality in different ways. In the election, some of those worldviews were rejected by the majority of Americans, especially those that involve pre-rational, anti-science attitudes, and views of women’s issues that involve too much of both.

Worldviews are the critical tectonic plates that underlie so much of what we see in our political and social lives. In my recent book, Evolutionaries, I spent several chapters exploring worldviews, what they are, how they are created, how they evolve and how understanding them is a key to global politics. Understanding the evolution of worldviews helps us understand not just surface issues, but the deeper dynamics of how things are changing, or staying the same, in the subterranean corridors of our collective psyche. So worldviews matter, both nationally and globally. Indeed, how we negotiate the multiple worldviews of our global political landscape matters a great deal.

One conclusion I think we can draw from the election is that the socially conservative, traditional worldview that we have all come to know and love over the last 30 years is beginning its long, slow march toward decline and irrelevance in the U.S. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that the Republican Party is in decline. That would be a rash conclusion, and one I would certainly doubt. But it will be going through a period of transition. For the last few decades, the socially conservative, often religious worldview embodied in the Ralph Reed’s, Pat Robertson’s and Jerry Falwell’s of the world has been a kingmaker, capable of swinging elections, capable of striking real fear into politicians on both sides of the aisle.  It has been a national force, not a majority, but a force nonetheless. I’m sure it will continue to be powerful and relevant, but its national power is waning. And its days as full blown Kingmaker in the presidential election may well be over.

Let’s remember how this wing of the Republican Party began. It important to see that it emerged, in its contemporary form, in the 70’s as a reaction to the socially liberal, “postmodern” worldview that burst onto the scene in the 60’s and 70’s. Civil rights, women’s rights, environmental justice, the peace movement — remember the moral currency they had in those heady days of protest and newfound progressive power. The that power was temporary, and by the end of the 70’s, that movement, what I am broadly calling postmodernism had created it’s own counter-reaction in the culture, and the powerful new, united, socially conservative, reactionary wing of the Republican Party was born. Energized and optimized for elections, and outraged by the what it saw as the excesses of the progressive currents of the 60’s and 70’s that were undermining the country’s “moral” majority”, it helped carry Reagan to victory and begin to inform the agenda of the party for years to come.  And just as most movements are largely defined by their birth story, this one was defined by its reactionary nature, by what it was against, by what it wanted to stay the same, by where it didn’t want the country to go, by what it didn’t want the government to do. The way you won national elections was to play to that base, to energize it, and to pick the issues that highlighted the excesses of the 60’s and 70’s and pin those on your opponent. Carter was a weak peacenik. Dukakis lacked any sense of law and order. Clinton was an indulgent boomer with no morals who probably inhaled. Hillary was a radical, militant feminist.  Gore was an anti-capitalist environmentalist. Kerry was a flip flopping relativist. The point wasn’t to be perfectly (or even partially) true. It was to conflate your opponent with those scary postmodernists and their anti-American, dangerous progressive agenda.

By the 1980’s the progressive agenda that had enjoyed some real political weight during the 70′s was fading as an effective rallying force, even as the country itself continued to shift and change beneath the surface. In fact, just about all of the major social and environmental legislation so dear to postmodern progressives was either passed before 1980 or ended lost and forgotten in the heyday of Reagan’s revolution. Simultaneously, the generation of conservative politicians that came of age during that time were weaned on that reactionary cocktail of militant anti-liberalism and triumphalist conservatism. And every social or political position that was dear to postmodern preogressives by default became loathed by this new incarnation of a very traditional worldview. It’s no accident that when Rick Santorum uses the word ‘Satan” you could replace it with postmodernism and it would mostly make sense. Try it; it’s fascinating.

Republicans when I came of age politically were still considered to be the grown up political party, the party of the intellectual realists, the economic stewards, the bottom-line businessmen, the party of self-reliance, independence and free markets, country club conservatives who sought to preserve the status quo and shape a relatively high-minded, business oriented agenda. Bush 41 was the last president of that breed. Romney styled himself that way at the end (and arguably governed that way in Massachusetts) but it was a hard sell. Somehow he always felt slightly tangential even to his own party, whose strongest voices no longer live by that creed. Indeed, by the time Reagan came around, that wing of the party was under attack. The once democratic South and the fiercely independent West begin to exert more influence and the party began to change. Here we stand over thirty years later, and I watch commentator after commentator proclaim that the Republican Party needs to get back to its centrist (modernist) base. And they’ve been saying this for years as if there is this silent majority that will now re-assert itself and I wonder: who is left to hear that message? After thirty years of relying on that traditional, conservative base, are the core elements of that old order still coherent enough to lead the way? I doubt it. They won elections over the last twelve years by doubling down on a shrinking but highly motivated base. But like an economic system propped up by debt, depending more and more on less and less only makes the reckoning, when it comes, that much harder. They are in for a rough ride, as they struggle to find a way forward more rooted in what America is becoming, not what it was. It will be an interesting time, and a healthy re-assessment of exactly what worldview, or mix of worldviews, the Republican Party should embody in the 21^st century.

Since my blog is in the midst of a science theme right now, particularly with the posting of a review of Rupert Sheldrake’s new book recently, this week I decided to keep on the same subject. So here is a review of Martin Rees, From Here to Infinity. Rees is a world-renowned astrophysicist and former President of the Royal Society, a prestigious post in the world of science, and even more so in England. He is a distinguished scientist as well as an articulate public spokesperson for the relationship between science and society.  In his new book, based on a series of lectures, given in 2011, all of those qualities shine through, even though the book itself adds little new to conversation about the role science should play in our world.

The book is based on four lectures, each one addressing a slightly different theme in relationship to science and society. Overall, Rees is a reasonable, gentlemanly writer, presenting a thorough and responsible, if relatively unremarkable and conventional, vision of science’s role today and in the future. Rees is perhaps best known in popular press for his 2003 book, Our Final Century (Our Final Hour in the U.S) in which he estimated that Humanity had about a 50% chance of surviving the challenges of the coming century.  The advent of ever-more powerful and dangerous technology was high on his list of concerns as well as concerns about Climate Change. When someone is in a position once held by Isaac Newton and Samuel Pepys, they tend to get taken seriously by the public. So Rees proclamation of the significant dangers facing our species in the coming century received some prominent reception and media attention. Rees has also been one of the more prominent scientists to wade deep into the territory of the anthropic principle, exploring how finely “tuned” the universe seems to be for the emergence of life and complex chemistry. His book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe, was one of the more prominent and popular books pursuing that subject.

From Here to Infinity is organized in four chapters, each representing one of the lectures given as part of the Reith Lecture series in 2009.  In the first chapter, The Scientific Citizen, Reed addresses the role science plays in our society. In this somewhat bland opening chapter, Rees calls on scientists to improve their communication methods to the public and calls on the general public to appreciate the importance of data from science without inappropriately revering it. In perhaps the most interesting passage, he insightfully points out that in the 21^st century, with so mnay powerful new technologies coming down the road, the gap between what can be done and what should be done in science is growing larger. Only an informed public can negotiate that emerging truth.

In the second chapter, Surviving the Century, the narrative picks up a notch, with his analysis of where things stand with some of the major problems that confront science and all of us in the next century. He expresses his concerns about population, suggesting that, while some of the more dire predictions of the last decades have proved vastly overstated, there is still a chance that dangerous trends like the rate of the population growth could come back to haunt us. Energy security, Climate Change, and genetic modifications, are also high on the list of Rees’s potential threats and he gives a smart, well-informed, concerned but hopeful view of the coming decades.

From there, Rees moves on to the edges of science in the chapter, What We’ll Never Know. “If I were to conjecture where the scientific cutting edge were to advance fastest,” he writes, “I’d plump for the interface between biology and engineering.” Rees also point out that there are likely many limits to our knowledge of the natural world, but gives a good overview of some of the more fascinating areas that science will venture into in the years ahead. And true to his astrophysicist roots, he spends some extra time on exo-planetary possibilities, speculating on the possibilities of life in other solar systems, even intelligent life. And he reminds us that evolution itself likely has some post-human breakthroughs up its sleeve that we can hardly conceive of today.

In the final chapter, Rees leaves aside his speculative, cosmic side, returning to Earth, where he addresses science education in a rapidly globalizing world. Here he is the scientific elder, trying to look after the future of his chosen field, arguing for a robust approach to scientific education while maintaining a respect for other fields and disciplines. In this chapter, he directly addresses the ongoing struggles between science and religion, objecting to the resurgent atheism so popular today, invoking a more humble approach to deeper, metaphysical questions. “My personal view, a boring one, for those who wish to promote constructive dialogue between science and religion—is that even something as basic as an atom is quite hard to understand.”

For those like myself us who love science, but feel that much dialogue and discussion is needed about its place in culture and its role in making meaning in the now an future world, this book is a bit of a disappointment. Rees is a true elder in the scientific community with a long and distinguished career both as scientist and as a public representative of science. His thoughts are reasonable and respectable, hard to argue with. But there is little here that ignites interest, stirs the heart or makes any deep, important statement about the role of science in the contemporary world. The book is at it’s best when he is talking about science itself, technology and Climate Change change, and population growth and science of the future. But his analysis of science in society fails to cut very deep. And in a time when science is resurgent and triumphal, when religion is defensive and reactionary, when technology is rushing forward so extraordinarily fast, and the explosive collisions of all of these trends seems far ahead of our capacity to keep pace, Rees’s thoughts, however reasonable, just don’t seem adequate to the moment.

What would you conclude about a book named “The Science Delusion”? I suspect most would assume it was 1) a response to Richard Dawkins’ book, “The God Delusion” and 2) a religious attack on science. Rupert Sheldrake’s impressive new book is neither, (though he certainly takes some good shots at Dawkins). That is why I’m glad the American edition of the book has a different name than the UK version. “Science Set Free” is its moniker, which expresses more accurately the spirit of this important new work by the English biologist who is perhaps science’s most controversial and credentialed gadfly. As Sheldrake explained the name change in a recent Guardian interview, “[The American publishers] were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a right-wing tract that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that.” In fact, the book is a significant summation of his novel approach to science, theories of nature, and concerns about the state of whole enterprise of scientific inquiry. Well-argued and well-written, Sheldrake’s new work is a sure-to-be-controversial critique of some of the pillars of science as we know it today.

I prefer the title “Science Set Free,” not just because it is provocative, but because there is something genuinely liberating about Sheldrake’s work. He is working to decouple science itself from a particular restrictive brand of science—a largely unquestioned reductionist, mechanistic, materialistic belief system that he feels has become almost synonymous with science. He suggests that even the data coming from science itself strains against these often unseen conclusions. “Contemporary science is being held back, he writes, by the claim that “there is no reality but material reality.” Sheldrake feels that this conclusion naturally gives rise to a whole series of assumptions about the nature of life and the universe that too often go unquestioned.” These beliefs are powerful”, he explains, “not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t.”

The impetus for this scientific worldview is as much in history as a whole as it is in science. One might even argue its tenets provided an important bulwark in the scientific struggle to establish a protected secular space in society, walled off against the encroachment of traditional religious authorities. But what was once a set of assumptions designed to keep at bay certain superstitions and religious orthodoxies, has now, Sheldrake writes, hardened into an ideology. And like any strongly felt belief system, it rushes to discredit activity seen as outside the in-group fold. Sheldrake is one of those targets and he has certainly felt the wrath of the protectors of establishment science. A highly trained Cambridge biochemist, he was labeled as an enemy of reason by Dawkins, and his book A New Science of Life, was castigated, by reviews in the magazine Nature, that suggested the book might be best fit for burning (as if to underline the point about ideology).

But such polemics seem absurdly overwrought, especially when one reads Sheldrake’s book itself and encounters the way he thinks about the world. Granted, he is an out-of-the box thinker, interested in questioning some fundamental assumptions, and he liberally intersperses his science with insights from philosophy, Eastern and Western (not unlike many of science’s brightest lights past and present). But he is first and foremost a scientist, one who has the spirit of an innovator and experimenter, passionately curious and unwilling to simply take the conventional consensus as unabridged fact. In the first chapter, he lists 10 core beliefs that he feels science would be better served by questioning rather than assuming. An inquiry into each of these ten subjects forms the better part of the book. They include the ideas “everything is essentially mechanical,” “the total amount of matter and energy is always the same,” “the laws of nature are fixed,” “memories are stored as material traces in the brain and wiped out at death,” “minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activity of the brain,” and “Nature is purposeless and evolution has no goal or direction.”

Sheldrake doesn’t have replacements for each of these assumptions, but he marshals interesting evidence and arguments against each position that will make you think in new ways about both large-scale realities like the nature of the universe, and everyday realities like the way in which vision works. Indeed, the book is first and foremost a scientific exploration and I often found myself deep in thought while reading, provoked by his words to question my own assumptions and think in new ways about the world I live in. Sheldrake draws on a great number of thinkers to make his point, including several of the great evolutionary philosophers, in particular, Henri Bergson’s ideas on memory and Alfred North Whitehead’s perspective on subjectivity. His discussion of Whitehead in the chapter, “Is Matter Unconscious” was particular enlightening, as he explored Whitehead’s thoughts on time and causality, suggesting an alternate explanation for some very influential experiments in neuroscience.

It was also interesting to me that Sheldrake really sees Darwin as one of his heroes, not just for his theory of natural selection, but for his reliance on data from the everyday world around him, and as someone who did “provocatively original work” with simple tools, without relying on grants and the largess of big science institutions that have come to so dominate the 21^st century landscape. That spirit has informed Sheldrake’s own work in all kinds of unconventional areas, from his ideas about developmental biology to his thoughts about homing pigeons, to his research on animals who express an uncanny ability to know when their owners are coming home. Sheldrake certainly has his own conclusions to add to the mix and his ideas about “morphic resonance,” a theory about the way in which habits, such as developmental patterns in biology or crystal formation in chemistry, can be transferred over time play a role in the book. But his primary point is to pry open the scientific door to fresh, new thinking, not to insert his own.

By the end of the book, I found myself thinking that science needs people like Rupert Sheldrake. Not because his theories are all correct or his critiques are perfectly spot on. In fact, there were certainly parts of his books that I disagreed with, areas where I felt his questioning of convention strayed into areas that strained my own sense of credibility.  But the overall open spirit of his inquiry shines through, and I hope that it will help inspire the right kind of questioning, and encourage more open forms of science.  And Sheldrake’s message is not just for scientists; it is for all of us. He cautions that we should be careful about investing the institution of science with too much authority. It provides a powerful perspective, but it is shaped by human beings. We must be responsible for it, not the other way around. And therefore, we cannot uncritically hand it the keys to our minds. If there are false assumptions and conclusions embedded in the enterprise, we should be willing to ask questions. To do so is not to question science itself or to inevitably fall back into some pre-rational, superstitious state of being. Yes, we must always guard against tendencies to irresponsibly undermine the great positives of the scientific age, but the best way to do that is to improve science itself. In the right hands, these kinds of questions open up potential new frontiers and move the whole project of human knowledge forward in history. “I’m in favor of science and reason,” Sheldrake declares at the end of the book, but then adds an important caveat, “if they are scientific and reasonable…I’m against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and skeptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.”

EVOLUTIONARIES went on sale this week! You can order it here. We launched the book with a wonderful party Tuesday night in New York City—great to share this moment with so many good friends and like-minded colleagues. Here’s a picture from my first book signing:

I also gave an “old-school” reading which people seemed to enjoy—see the video below!

Other developments—the book has been #1 in Science & Religion on Amazon.com since it launched! And it got a rave review from leading industry journal Publishers Weekly, who called it “a masterful survey of the diverse ideas that make up the emerging field of Integral thought.” Read the full review here.

I’m working hard to make this book a bestseller! If you’d like to help spread the word, I would very much appreciate it. I’ve created a page with info on how you can help, including ready-to-post tweets, Facebook updates, etc. And above all, please recommend the book to all your friends!

My tour and media promotion plans throughout the summer and fall are taking shape. Upcoming events are listed here. Any suggestions for venues or media outlets are very welcome – please post in comments or contact me.

Here’s the video from my reading:

One of the most interesting thinkers today regarding the nature of the self in relationship to our heavily mediated world is Thomas de Zengotita. He is a fascinating observer of how the evolution of media and the evolution of self are intrinsically connected. Here is a video I happened across online containing his thoughts on authenticity.

Does neuroscience prove that there is no free will? This is one of the biggest questions on the lips of the intelligentsia these days. Do we have influence over the events of our lives? Can we direct the unfolding future of the culture we live in?  What makes us choose, not just which kind of cereal to buy but the major decisions that impact the direction of our own lives, not to mention the future of our social structures that we inhabit? This is, of course, a perennial question, but it has taken on a greater urgency in today’s intellectual climate today—thanks in large part to breakthroughs in the field of neuroscience. So I was excited last Sunday to have the opportunity to sit down with one of the most interesting figures in the contemporary free-will conversation, neuroscientist David Eagleman, at an intimate salon in New York City sponsored by Gerard Senehi’s Open Future Institute.

David Eagleman is a major player in this blossoming field, with his recently published bestseller Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain leading the way. It provides a highly readable, popular representation of the emerging scientific insights that we are discovering as we get “under the hood” and more closely examine the “three pounds of alien computational material between our ears,” as Eagleman likes to describe it. Incognito, along with his other recent works, not only helped establish Eagleman as a major public figure in the field (his academic credentials were already impressive) but also distinguished him as an open-minded intellectual unwilling to draw hasty conclusions or take extreme sides in the culture wars. When it comes to polarizing issues like the nature of

consciousness and the existence of freewill, he is careful not to make premature assumptions about the very exciting but preliminary data coming out of fMRI labs and academic research institutes. In fact, his declaration of independence from both religious certainty and the certainty of the New Atheists came with a new self-created label: a “possibilian.” His TEDx talk announcing this new category went wildly viral.

It was with all of this in mind that I joined David for our dialogue Sunday night. We spent the better part of the evening discussing the issue of choice with a small, sophisticated audience from across a spectrum of fields. Eagleman spoke passionately and powerfully about influence of brain functions and decision making all happening beneath the awareness of our conscious minds. He questioned our usual conclusions about identity, challenged our sense of authorship over our decision-making and issued examples after example of research which illustrates just how much of human will is a questionable construct. Our stories about our choices often have little to do with our brains’ actual reasons for making decisions. Gracious, brilliant, and broadly knowledgeable, he made a good dialogue partner and he entertained the audience with the kind of research that makes one’s head spin. Did you know that people are statistically more likely to marry a person whose name begins with the same first letter as their own? (As he put it, “It’s not the best reason to choose a life partner”) Did you know that people named Dennis and Denise are statistically more likely to be dentists?

I responded by suggesting that the latest data from neuroscience research, as I understand it, is certainly intriguing, and in at least one respect is consistent with data reported by meditation practitioners. Indeed, it doesn’t take long for most sincere meditators to discover that the contents of a large part of their own consciousness is way outside the control and awareness of the normal conscious mind. Granted, neuroscience is taking this insight further and offering evidence that cannot be found merely through introspection, but there are interesting parallels. And I appreciate the efforts of science to counteract the tendency toward hubris that we fall prey to when unaware of the depth and momentum of the unconscious or subconscious dimensions. There is no doubt that we are deeply and irrevocably conditioned by the past and by our culture, which imprint themselves in the very pathways of our brains. However, suggesting that such research disproves the existence of free choice is a philosophical (and perhaps even metaphysical) leap, not a scientific conclusion. I, for one, am convinced that choice, in its many forms, remains critical to any deep appreciation of the human condition and its significance—even more so today.

Eagleman openly played Devil’s advocate for a time, provoking a healthy debate, but when it finally came down to it, he more or less agreed that the evidence does not support the extreme conclusion that many of his scientific colleagues leap to embrace. True to his “possibillian” identity, he suggested that we know too little to jump to conclusions about the question of free will and choice. Clearly, we are not in control of our own decision making to the degree we once thought. Undoubtedly, the Western Enlightenment’s picture of a free-thinking human being, fully in control of his or her rational faculties and decision-making, is under assault on many fronts. Much of this is simply part of the natural advance of human knowledge, and Eagleman is alive with an explorer’s sense of possibility. Over time, understanding these new truths surely will help us build institutional structures that better respond to the human nature. Eagleman himself has a passion for law and is working to update our legal code to better reflect the insights of science. He advocates shifting the focus of our courts from the traditional concern with blameworthiness to a more “forward-looking” legal system that supports rehabilitation. But there is a veritable chasm between all of that good work and the rash eradication of free choice from the human milieu. Determinism, including whatever new form it has taken in the 21^st century, is an extraordinary claim in any age. And there is insufficiently extraordinary evidence to make that leap.

There was much more to the dialogue than I can capture on this page, but I’ll end with some thoughts about one of the great Evolutionaries of the early twentieth century whose work I explore in my forthcoming book. To my mind, Whitehead offers us one of the most elegant and illuminating ways to look at this question of the relationship between the influence of conditioning and the power of choice. The following excerpt from my book captures (perhaps a little more eloquently) the essence of what I shared with David and the audience on Sunday night:

My Thoughts on Whitehead, Choice and Free Will

Whitehead’s view, each moment of experience, or “occasion” as he referred to it, is being created by the converging moments or occasions that have come before. He writes that the “whole universe is an advancing assemblage of these processes [of experience].” All of the preceding moments of experience cascade into the present and are integrated. Whitehead described this process with the enigmatic phrase “the many become one and are increased by one.” That means that the many events of the past cascade into the present and converge, creating a new moment, and thereby increase their number by one. According to this perspective, the present and future are constantly being created anew as the “whole antecedent world conspires to produce a new occasion.”

So without question, the present and future are heavily influenced by the past. But for Whitehead, there is another key factor. At every moment, creativity is possible; the potential for novelty exists. In every cascading occasion of experience, there is the opportunity for something new to exert its influence. “The antecedent environment is not wholly efficacious in determining the initial phase of the occasion which springs from it,” writes Whitehead. Believe it or not, that’s actually one of his simpler sentences. Basically, it’s a way of saying that the future is not entirely determined by the past. We don’t live in a deterministic universe. At every moment, potential novelty is present in the struggle to form the future out of the events of history. But notice the dynamic tension between freedom and historical determinism in Whitehead’s view—the unformed potential for novelty is in a constant, active relationship with the weighty influence of what’s come before. It is a dynamic we can easily see in our own lives as the power of our free will interacts with the influential tendencies of our own established psychological, social, and cultural predilections—the result of which shapes our destiny.

What does it mean to be human? That was the theme of San Francisco’s aptly named “Being Human” conference, held at the Palace of Fine Arts the last weekend in March. Convened by the Baumann Foundation, whose mission is to foster greater clarity about the human condition through dialogue between contemplatives and scientists, the conference was also influenced by the California Institute of Integral Studies (the country’s foremost alternative academic university) and the Mind & Life institute (a research institute investigating the human mind through both science and contemplation). For those who are interested in the deeper dimensions of the human experiment and curious what the expansion of scientific knowledge tells us about how we might help move human culture forward, Being Human was definitely the place to be in late March.

Overall, the conference was an impressive success. Kudos to Baumann, Jeff Klein from Conscious Capitalism and the other organizers of Being Human for creating such a quality experience. There was a genuine buzz around the event, and almost a thousand people filled the seats, creating a nice atmosphere of excitement and engagement. It was a sort of a who’s who gathering of the Bay Area’s formidable selection of people who are working at the nexus of consciousness, meditation, science, and technology.

The basic structure of the day was simple. Peter Baumann opened the conference with a good introduction to the inquiry. Then, the morning sessions consisted of two panels of scientists giving TED-length presentations (18 minutes), each followed by a group discussion with Mind & Life scientist/meditator Richie Davidson.

In the first afternoon session, we moved into cultural exploration, with researchers and psychologists detailing new research into cultural influences on our character. Then in the final session of the day we moved into more spiritual reflections on self, though the term “spiritual” was replaced with the more science-friendly “conscious experience.”

There is certainly much to say about the specific merits of each presentation. There was fascinating research presented, especially in the field of neuroscience, which seems to be undergoing a sort of Golden Age of research right now. David Eagleman is one of the rock stars of this blossoming scientific field and his presentation lived up to the billing, informative and wonderfully engaging. Beau Lotto and V.S. Ramachandran also contributed a great deal to the day, documenting breakthrough after breakthrough in our understanding of perception, pain, phantom limbs, and mirror neurons.  But before I go to far into analyzing and documenting the many presentations of the day, let me pause and say that I don’t want to duplicate efforts of others, especially when all the video from the entire event can be seen online here. I certainly recommend readers to check it out. And for those wishing to read a bit more of a blow by blow analysis, I would suggest the excellent description and discussion of the event presented by a friend of mine, Jeff Bellsey, over on Beams and Struts.

I also agree with Bellsey’s observation that the third panel of the day, the panel covering culture, while full of interesting insights, lacked the overall power and impact that the scientific panels delivered. It was a shame, because the conference could’ve used more of the rich insights and perspectives that sophisticated cultural inquiry can provide particularly when approached through an evolutionary frame.  I would single out Anne Harrington as giving an excellent and provocative presentation on illness and the affects of culture on disease. I also concur with Bellsey that the last panel, with several Buddhist-oriented practitioners, including Gelek Rinpoche, Tami Simon (owner of Sounds True Publishing), and Jon Kabat-Zinn was something of a “missed opportunity” as he puts it. Nothing against the individuals on the panel, each of whom came across as serious contemplatives who have done extraordinary work in their own right. But in terms of the critical task at hand, which, as the final panel, should have been to give context, meaning, and powerful interpretation of the day’s events, it just didn’t happen. There was very little added, which was a shame, give that we would all like our contemplatives to be, well, profoundly contemplative, especially when presented with so much rich fodder for contemplation!

For my money, the most interesting aspect of the Being Human conference was the way it inspired me to reflect on the role of science in our the exploration of human being.  Presentations like those at this event demonstrate the explosive expansion of new knowledge, and much of this knowledge is not, as in the days of yore, about the world out there. It is about the world in here, about the proclivities and tendencies that make us tick. It is about the life of homo sapiens from the inside out (or, if you want to get technical with integral theory, from the inside of the outside, so to speak). What Baumann, to his credit, has recognized is that all of this new knowledge and raw data needs explaining and contextualizing. It needs thoughtful people to help us all understand what it means. It needs examination, exploration, contemplation, introspection, and rational speculation.

Sometimes the questions science confronts us with aren’t scientific. And the answer isn’t always more science. It’s about making sense of what we already know. It’s about putting context around data, meaning around knowledge, frames around pictures. Without those frames, knowledge is sort of like unstructured data.

So whose job is it to do that? Well, sometimes scientists do it themselves. But science by itself isn’t really built to do that. It’s an inherently conservative institution, dealing in the concrete realities of observable truths and dependable, repeatable analysis. That’s not a criticism; it’s science’s strength—not a bug but a feature, as they say in Silicon Valley.  Science doesn’t traffic in speculation, meta-layers of exploration and explanation. Indeed, when it comes to making meaning science has a very honest position—uncertainty. And what it doesn’t know, it doesn’t try to know (at least ideally). It waits until it can safely move something from that vast field of uncertainty into the much smaller field of relatively certain knowledge.

So there is an important role for gatherings like this, simply in helping us to stand back from the relentless pursuit of scientific knowledge and try to bring light to what it all means about the human endeavor. That’s critical, and I look forward to many more such gatherings over the next years as we all try to better understand what it means to exist on this pale blue third rock from the sun, given that we were all born, as Baumann put it in his opening remarks, without an owner’s manual.

But there is another issue that this conference raised for me. And it has to do with uncertainty itself and the role it plays in the unfolding of knowledge. There was a sort of fascination with uncertainty at the conference. In fact, neuroscientist Beau Lotto started off by telling the audience his goal was to help the audience achieve a state where we knew less than we did before he began (his presentation was on perception and he was, in a sense, arguing that many things we assume we know about perception simply are not true). In fact, neuroscientists these days are particularly keen to point out the human conceit that we are the masters of our own house, when in fact, they explain, there is a lot more going on below stairs in the servant’s quarters then we have ever understood. In fact, they tell us, we are wired for precisely the sort of self-deception that makes us believe we are independent agents in possession of free will (this is a subject I hope to pursue in later posts). They tell us that we have a lot less control over our minds and brains and even our choices than we might suppose (Eagleman pointed out, as a humorous example of our unconscious predilections, that people called Dennis or Denise are statistically much more likely to be dentists than the rest of the population. I kid you not).

Eagleman, who is particularly adept at powerful metaphors, suggests that our conscious mental agency is analogous to a CEO of a corporation—we have some control over the general direction of the organization, but plenty happens of which we are entirely ignorant. In some sense, neuroscience’s insistence that we these vast mechanisms of mostly unconscious processes reminds me of psychology’s similar realization almost a century ago. Of course, any spiritual practitioner who has meditated sincerely has also come upon many of these same truths. But it’s interesting to see neuroscience coming to the same conclusions, and certainly adding some critical new information to the table as well. Some of it is unsettling and does remind us that our knowledge of what the self is and how it works is still in its infancy. There are so many assumptions, and some of even our most accepted convictions about ourselves need to be seriously questioned. Things just aren’t so certain.

But just as there is danger in certainty, there is also danger in uncertainty.

Indeed, perhaps the uncertainty coup de grace came on the last panel of the day when Kabat-Zinn was asked the question “what do you think it means to be human”? And he answered, “I don’t know.” Now, I suppose that might be a good answer if and only if it was followed up by some interesting thoughts and analysis. But it wasn’t. We were just left with that. Not knowing. We were left with uncertainty, pure uncertainty. And while that may be a worthy position to take on the meditation cushion, where the whole point is to let go of the mind, it’s not so useful in just about every other dimension of human life, where we have to engage in the real world of human experiment and try as best we can to make sense of this world around us. There is no meaning in pure uncertainty, no capacity to interpret the world.

I would like to propose that while we all are familiar with the tyranny of hyper-certainty, the antidote to certainty is not really uncertainty; it is the right kind of thoughtfulness, interest, and curiosity. It is not less thinking; it is better thinking.  It exists in that middle space somewhere between “I know” and “I don’t know”.

I say this only because I think that the non-scientific people on the panels, the mystics, spiritual practitioners and philosophers, are not the ones who need to be falling back on uncertainty, especially in a context like that. They need to be reaching further, beyond the boundaries that science has set for itself, trying to help us understand the meaning of all of this research. They are the ones who need to be doing the extra work to put frames around data, precisely because they are not held back by the careful conservatism of science. Otherwise, we leave it to the scientists to not only gather all the data and new knowledge, but also tell us what it means. And while I love science and respect scientists, especially some of the ones who were on stage in San Francisco, that is an unwise proposition.  It’s just too important a task to leave up to science alone. Or religion. Or philosophy. Or any other discipline for that matter. This is inherently a cross-disciplinary project. And all of us who care about where our culture is headed in the next century need to be engaged. And for that reason, I hope more gatherings take it upon themselves to feature the kind of eclectic mix of perspectives that was on stage in San Francisco.

So let’s beware of the arrogance of certainty, and embrace the humility of uncertainty, but only as we also embrace curiosity, thoughtfulness, and a passionate interest that can help us reach higher and go deeper into this rich and beautiful mystery of being human that is lighting up the best minds of our generation.