CosmoErotic Humanism
Zak Stein is an educator and futurist interested in how our understanding of value and our collective abilities for sensemaking and storytelling are essential for navigating this period of heightened global risk, his “time between worlds.” By a stroke of luck I had the chance to grab coffee with Dr. Stein during grad. school and was able to learn about his Civilization Research Institute (developing the wisdom to avoid the “twin failure modes of catastrophes and dystopias”), Consilience Project (sensemaking and epistemology among the disciplines), and his vision for a modern version of Ivan Illich’s de-schooling that relies on networked, community-integrated hubs of purposeful learning. He was kind, wise, and down-to-earth and approachable despite the heady and often quite frightening nature of his research. His essays in Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society has heavily influenced my writing over the past year on this blog, so I am excited to turn to some reflection on his latest project.
Zak is co-founding the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, an organization with the mission of “Articulating a new worldview in response to existential risk.” They advance in particular a philosophy called CosmoErotic Humanism, which is “aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture.” Under the pseudonym David J. Temple, Zak and his collaborators Marc Gafni and Ken Wilbur recently published *First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come to sketch the core of this philosophy and establish the research and writing agenda for their Center.
Much of my openness to their work — which pushes forcefully back against many frameworks and mindsets that make up the waters in which I and we have long been swimming — results from their clear diagnosis at the outset of: increasing potential for global catastrophic and existential risk, the fragility of our institutions, the instability of exponential technology curves, the failure of neoliberal and postmodern epistemologies, widespread crises of intimacy disorder, and the centrality of education as a way forward. And yet they work from these assumptions in a different — and I think much deeper and more ambitious — direction than some of the other communities and intellectual movements about which I wrote in Sensemaking, community, and purpose: Two frameworks, and many more. They articulate a view of the world that I find at once accurate, confusing, terrifying, and transformative. Their invocation of and call for new understandings of religion, cosmic story, value, and metaphysics are challenging to understand, process, and integrate, but full of provocations and wisdom that I have found very useful so far.
I have felt a bit while reading this work like the proverbial blind men arguing over the elephant as they each feel different parts of its body. I sense that these authors are in fact sketching a coherent whole, but must slowly work their readers to a holistic appreciation by first guiding them to get to know components and relationships between them progressively. I hope that in time a more complete view of their philosophy indeed emerges for me, but in the meantime many of the sub-themes that comprise it have been quite valuable and interesting in their own right. Here I pick two key themes to share and reflect upon, and will in my next post explore in more detail a specific example of these core claims.
Story
One of the primary claims the authors make is that there are ontologically real, universally fundamental “storylines” of which we are an essential part. From simplicity and separation to complexity and interconnection, towards more and more consciousness, and the arrow of evolution towards value (more on that next) are real plotlines in which we can increasingly self-consciously play our part. They write, “The human being is a storytelling animal not as a meaning-making aberration in an otherwise pointless Cosmos, but because the human being is an evolved, self-reflective expression of a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos: the ontological structure of story” (58).
On this point and related others the authors push back against the dominant worldviews of modernism and postmodernism — and schools of philosophical thought like existentialism, materialism, subjectivism, nihilism — by suggesting that meaning and evolutionary purpose are neither nonexistent, purely mechanical, nor simply socially constructed, but as real as other fundamental features of the universe as we understand it. They assert: “Reality has a narrative arc, an inherent telos, and a direction. There are inherent plotlines, strange attractors, or what we refer to in CosmoErotic Humanism as the lure of value” (8).
Knowing how woo-woo this sounds given the waters of dominant thought we’ve all been swimming in for the past couple centuries, they both provide specific examples and claims using the language and epistemology of scientific disciplines (see intimacy section below) and also remind us that this understanding of the universe as purposeful has been the dominant view by almost all humans until recently. The Universe has almost always been self-evidently a “value-driven process” (112). They question whether we have cast aside deep wisdom about reality while pursuing the legitimate projects of rationality and science.
Superstructure
Even if you reject some of the claims about the fundamental nature of story, the authors provide much you may still endorse in terms of the power of story. For them this power comes from the synchronicity with the underlying features of the Cosmos, but that is not the only possible source.
They argue that, “Superstructure — the story we tell about the universe, how we make our identities and communities meaningful — must be understood as the root cause of society’s formation.” How we understand ourselves, our interconnections, and our purpose are stories that we collectively tell, and the rest of what we know as human society follows from these assumptions and axioms. This, they conclude, “means that if one desires to change the trajectory of society to avoid suffering and to realize the greater good, the most effective way to achieve that goal must be to evolve the story that animates society.” The wise Richard Powers has argued similarly: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” (His case made, fittingly, in novel form.)
CosmoErotic Humanism is a direct response to a time period in which our collective superstructures are crumbling and reforming. This is a “time between worlds,” and not the first. Consider the rise of the Renaissance from the Dark Ages:
“Da Vinci and his collaborators understood that they were in a time between worlds and a time between stories. They understood that the most powerful moral act they could perform was to tell a new story — a new story of value, a story of the new human and the new humanity, a new universe story, a new narrative of identity, a new story of the divine, a new story of power, a new story of desire, a new story of Eros.” (97)
The authors aim to cultivate a coalition of thinkers, philosophers, religious leaders, and others to usher in the next era of superstructure, one that addresses the existential risks our species faces.
A new story of value
One of the primary superstructures that the authors suggest must be reimagined to help humanity survive this period of acute existential risk is our understanding of value. They claim that the critiques offered by modernism and postmodernism “wisely undermined and deconstructed old and outdated notions of value” but “the originally valid critique overreached itself and claimed to deconstruct the very reality of intrinsic value itself” (119). They urgently call for humanity to partake in its reconstruction.
They argue that value is a fundamental, intrinsic feature of the universe, not a contingent, ephemeral construct in an otherwise cold and meaningless world. They admit that the cosmic field of value is “difficult-to-describe” (55), but suggest that many humans before expressed similar ideas, such as the Chinese notion of Tao. They argue that perennial philosophy, the idea that “a common core of truths can be found within all the best works of humanity’s religious imagination and interior sciences of contemplation” (5–6), is no coincidence, but rather the result of legitimate discoveries of something that exists prior to our noticing it. There is something we can call value out there, and in fact in us, that is as real as gravity, light, or time (which is to say quite real, though perhaps still beyond our complete comprehension).
I have written before of valueception — the ability to recognize that which is good, beautiful, and true — and the work of Iain McGilchrist proposing a similar understanding of value as intrinsic. One contribution CosmoErotic Humanisms adds to this conversation for me is more specificity about the importance of cultivating a shared understanding of value as a relevant superstructure if not always an agreement on the actual nature of the field of value. They refer to this as a “grammar” of value and argue that, as with language, these contexts and parameters facilitate diverse expressions and the evolution of language itself. Their case is not that we need to seek a totalizing understanding and characterization of the field of value, but that we need to agree on the importance of exploring and striving to align with this field in the first place.
The authors make much more specific what they are describing when they talk about an intrinsic, cosmic field of value. The first example they describe in detail is what they call intimacy, the “sharing of identity in the context of relative otherness, in which there is a mutuality of recognition, feeling, value, and purpose” (11). They paint a compelling picture of intimacy’s role at micro and macro scales, through evolutionary time, and deep at the core of all major fields of human knowledge and life.
I will explore this first principle in more detail next week.
