This encapsulates a sentiment shared by many of my friends and peers. Dystopian movies and novels are necessary, but so is idealism and being able to hold on to hopes of a better future. Otherwise, if we’re doomed, why should we even try to build a better world? 🔥 Great one — curious to see others think!
I love this! As someone that dislikes dystopian fiction and thought this resonates deeply with me. Call me naive, call me a hopeless optimist but I long for thought and discussion propelled by compassion and empathy.
Elle, This 800 word essay is a contribution to your new "Enlightenment" project to think about how to get to a better future. I hope what I written stimulates your conversation.
First, here's a brief about myself to give my thoughts a helpful context. I'm an old guy, 82, but I think my brain is still working; of course, from the inside who can really tell? Anyway, I had a career in science (my doctoral work was in population biology, which then (the 1960s) was a cross between natural history and mathematics), and I retired in the closing of the last century.
All my life, my habit has been to think about things from a big picture perspective, and since I was 15 or so, I’ve kept journals about my ideas, but not journals about my personal experiences. I started journaling because I discovered it was a way to hold on to and keep working on some idea that was in my head and intrigued me. And, I think, this aspect of my personal history disqualifies me as a writer who wants to express herself to others and to be a herald of her generation, because for seven decades I had no such desire, and I was quite content to develop various big picture ideas merely for my own satisfaction. Early on, my doctoral professor warned me that thinking too much in my own space would isolate me from a secure position among my scientific peers, and that has proved true.
However, in my case, it made me very interested in the ideas in other people’s heads. It was a saving grace, as some say, and kept me in the real, but less contemporary space of the conversation with others' leading ideas. I turned out to be a good manager of research scientists, a branch of cat herding.
The idea of leading ideas is very important in thinking about making the future. Our own leading ideas are difficult to make clear to ourselves, and, adding to the difficulty, we can only comprehend others' leading ideas in the light of our own. And this is one of the things it’s taken me over seventy years to understand: Our behavior and thinking are guided by the leading ideas we harbor, and if we don’t come to know them, they will rule our thinking and doing. And, what we may think of as our ideals are most likely not a very true presentation of our true leading ideas.
So thinking about future making, will have no value if it boils down to projecting our own chauvinistic ideals as guides to shape the space of spaces in which that future will inhabit.
Here's one of my leading ideas: When we talk about your space or my space or our space or their space, we are talking about a quasi ordered system of dynamic spaces. And these spaces are maintained by the continual interactions of creatures, only some of which are humans. And all spaces have modes of life which are different at their boundaries from the mode life in their interiors. Spaces come in many sizes and flavors.
And here's a big abstract idea about spaces: First, think of them all as one very big Venn diagram in which all the spaces are present and all are ovate. That is, the shape of each space is not puckered or gerrymandered. This is possible if the diagram is very highly dimensional. Second, think that there is no space that is isolated; all are connected by some pathway of intersections, but, also, there are sub spaces of spaces which are densely, but not completely overlapping. And think third, that the spaces are dynamic, but there are many ways to think of what dynamic means, so not static in some dimensions is the best general definition.
No one can get this sort of an abstraction completely in their head. It's a model and models need to be simplified to be talked about. There is in this Big Venn model (BVM) many ideas from the scientific subculture, so I want to say that as someone with a career in science, I agree with the deconstructionists that scientific knowledge is not the final authority. Science is only a subculture in the BVM, but so are deconstructionists. So in thinking about the future, the scientific subculture is only one of the voices and modes who need to be part of future making thinking.
Another of my leading ideas of which I'm firmly convinced is that of multiple kinds of intelligences among humans, consequently there are many modes of expressing what is true besides discursive reasoning. And thinking about the nature of what the future may be needs symbolic and analogical thinking and expression.
The future will occupy real spaces, so the first question to be sounded, but never completely resolved or agreed upon, is what are our leading ideas about the rock bottom reality which the future we want to make will inhabit? The tension of this set of leading ideas will frame and maintain the real space of thinking about a better future.
Thanks JBS, I'm struggling to understand this but maybe that's because it feels somewhat abstract. Is there an example you can give to illustrate?? Thanks!
Elle, What was I thinking! I agree; my little essay was too abstract and idiosyncratic. My bad. But then, too, all my life I always though a lot about other person's and my own leading ideas, of which I'll give a couple of examples below. In Jungian terms, I'd say I was an intuitive thinker in that I have intuitions and then have to parse them out for myself in abstract ideas. Since I was 15, I've kept journals but they were never about my experiences, or the tensions of life, or details of a study of politics, history, current affairs or literature. But only about leading ideas of how and what nature was.
I wasn’t going to write anything on your project, because, I thought, what’s the point of utopian thinking, the future's always surprising us anyway. On the other hand, utopian thinking is a way of taking stock of where we’d like to be from where we really are at. So…
From my career in science I know how fuzzy projections of ecological science can be, and by implication how fuzzy economic and sociological models are also. For instance, I recall being sort of surprised when I realized that the official government projections of anchovy abundance, used to set fishing quotas, was on a part with the uncertainty of most short term government economic forecasts, used to help business and industry. Modes of fuzziness constitute a set of leading ideas.
On the other hand, I remember in the late 1960s my biology professor showing to a couple of us graduate students a Note in the scientific journal Ecology: a graph the first five or so years of the Mauna Loa C02 data. We all understood at once what that rising saw-blade graph meant in terms of global warming, because the simple physical model of the earth as one big green house and the necessary tight correlation between C02 concentration and temperature, known as result of physics since the end of the 19th century and it was part of our education. Yet we were more surprised, at the moment, by what a clear signal could be read from nominally fuzzy ecological data, because we population scientists were used to much more uncertain signals in our data and the fuzziness of future projections made from it. The Mauna Loa data illustrates the leading idea of a highly certain projection that is based on a model which skips over tons of detail. The same model applies to your car parked in the sun and the whole earth planetary ecosystem. The fuzziness of detail in models relative to degree of certainty of projected outcome constitutes another set of leading ideas, and a branch of wisdom.
These two examples also can be used to illustrate what I called spaces. The space of ecological scientists has many sub spaces; the space of atmospheric scientists in which which is included those who made the C02 measurements is in a very different subspace than that of population biologists. But these two spaces intersect. Intersection of spaces means that the meaning of activity within one space can pass into another.
Now I want to enlarge the idea of spaces indicated in my examples. As well as recognizable human subcultures which are human spaces, one can think of other spaces in which things live when one is pretty liberal as regards what is alive. When I was a grad student drinking cheap Milwaukee beer with other population biologists, we all concluded that things like atoms, molecules, and electrons were much more like organisms that those in the space of the subculture of physics realized. So it was obvious to us that all science was biology. We all could drink to that! Even if our meaning could not pass into the physicists' space.
This half-abstract (or close to half-ass to some) super liberal notion of spaces means that the present and the future is the dynamic of intersecting spaces of all living things. So, because we utopians can think about the big picture, we have a responsibility to cultivate all spaces in a right way. And now cultivate becomes a vague idea. A clue to be able to work out what cultivate means is the principle that we do not define or decide what is alive. Rather, we only are able recognize what is living, like some musicians can perfectly recognize pitch.
I know that the ability to recognize and the art of recognizing what is living is a spiritual thing. It begins with the primordial human thing to instinctively recognize living personhood in another, like mother and child. And that recognition is rooted in our own personhood. The perfection of living personhood is heart speaking to heart. And, this same speaking is the beginning and the deepest of spiritual things.
Within the boundless mystery of heart speaking to heart is the recognition of living-hood in in the many cases in which the heart of the other is not the heart of a person. In my narrow experience as a biologist, I've known individuals who are very passionate about the living-hood of certain animals or plants (like old trees and desert tortoises) and many other biologists who are not as passionate but steadfast in their mood of appreciation of that other creatures' living-hoods. The reality of living-hoods is a set of leading ideas.
But, in general, science tends to abuse the mystery of such recognition with falsely precise definitions. This abuse of recognition is often accompanied by a belief in strict determinism, and in the early 20th century determinism was the leading idea of physical scientists. So they were scandalized by quantum uncertainty. But, in fact, a certain uncertainty in the activity of honestly recognized things is the hallmark of the living.
Well, I strayed back into my over abstract presentation of things which would take a lot of unpacking, so I'll cut it off here. But I hope this helps a little bit. One has to think big about the future in all spaces to think about it at all. JBSP
I'm officially intrigued (and subscribed!) Sorry to hear about your job, but glad you've found a meaningful purpose to drive you this coming year.
Idealism is indeed sorely lacking online these days, except perhaps in fleeting and shallow ways (short videos).
Speaking as the creator of The Zoo Review here on Substack, I'd be interested to hear what you think our relationship to animals should be in a more ideal future. I'm trying to serve up a literary cocktail of humour mixed with meaningful ideas to help people see animals in a different light. Hopefully as beings rather than things to be used.
Keen to hear what you think about my attempts so far if you have time, but no pressure. Happy writing 🌟
Thanks, Elle. Sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit unwell.
That's a super informative article! I agree with your main points, and I think coming at this topic mostly from a health perspective will resonate with most people.
The other angles (environment and morality) seem to get brushed aside more readily by those who eat lots of meat. Which is strange because most people care about the environment and most people love animals.
There's definitely a disconnect there.
People will champion renewable energy, but balk at the idea of going plant-based (which would have a much greater positive impact for the environment).
I've seen this in people I've talked to, and in street interviews by vegan YouTubers like Earthling Ed and Joey Carbstrong.
I guess this shows we're not just dealing with facts but human psychology...
On a lighter note, if you have a couple of favourite animals let me know. I might write an article from the perspective of one and have it refer people to your Substack 😊
Have you read Half-Earth Socialism? We'll be talking about that book in the discourse in the coming weeks and the idea is that half of the earth is left to be rewilded. I'd be curious to know your thoughts on that from an animal perspective.
My whole life my favorite animal has been a unicorn. So maybe as an adult I'll switch to a narwhal??
Have you read Dawn of Everything? Highly recommended, in general and for your topic. Corrects the record on where the enlightenment came from (many of the socialist and utopian ideas came from conversations with Native Americans) and how societies develop. Social Evolution in regard to first came ag, then came cities, then came dystopia is not supported by the evidence. But the evidence does show myriad creative ways people have organized. Might give you some ideas/inspiration.
I grew up in the 1960s reading the Whole Earth Catalog, so these kinds of discussions are not new. They weren't new then, but they have exploded into a chaos of countercultural social fragmentation and atomization, making most "utopian" thinking irrelevant.
The 1700s/1800s were pivotal in that the idea that "God is dead ... and we killed Him..." was at the core of the social anxiety caused by Enlightenment thinking: loss of mythic social order and romanticist and ILLIBERAL reactionary ideologies (marxism and fascism).
One item of historical accuracy:
"democracy and capitalism were trialed in Europe and North America"
The origins of "democracy and capitalism" go back at least 1,000 years in the case of "capitalism" (classical liberalism) and 2,000 in the case of "democracy".
Under medieval, decentralized politics, classical liberalism was well established, in some cases by elements of the Church (Abbey at Cluny) that promoted peasant's rights, by the1,400s, but then after 1492, power was increasingly re-centralized by rising imperial powers, who crushed medieval liberalism (which was revived in the 1800s by the expanding and rising urban commoner classes, W.E.I.R.D.*).
This is one of the best "scientific" explanations of the genetic and cultural evolution of "classical liberalism" (democracy and capitalism, the modern nation state system, high-social-trust, etc.) I've seen:
By an accident of history, the early Church's ban on cousin marriage (clan inbreeding) resulted in greater genetic diversity in the NW European gene pool, and then "liberal" personality traits (Haidt) were selected for due to increased demand for literacy and numeracy in the expanding urban commoner classes (river and sea traders, shopkeepers, court scribes in Charter towns/Free cities, and so forth).
Yes, I am aware that there are still thinkers out there, and that things have been trialed in different instances several times before (the Roman Empire trialed democracy as well, for example). But that doesn't mean we don't still need more thinkers, or that we're not still experimenting!
Good luck with your business model. There is definitely a great need to make the various, existing thinkers and movements involved in proposing solutions to the crisis of postmodernism more well known.
Here is one of the better collections of ideas about liminal thinking, it tilts a little bit in the direction of Metamodernism/Integral theory (Ken Wilber) and European libertarian-socialism:
Note: Bauwens was viciously attacked several years ago by the cancel culture mobs on the cultural-left (some calling themselves "communists"), so he has been drifting away from "wokeism" for a while.
First, I'm very sorry to hear this news. Earning a living through writing is always so difficult, but this news is never unsurprising and always jarring. I wish you the best as you move forward.
I will disagree with your fundamental premise -- I'd say we need both, but that's a conversation for another day.
Has The Post simply been disappeared? I see that it began in March of this year? Did it just wipe out all of the work you helped to generate?
Thank you Yasmin, it's definitely a thing for writers! And I agree with you, we need thinkers and journalists. The problem is that we have way more of the latter than we do the former, and I'd love to see the scales tipped a bit.
Upgraded to paid and recommended! Totally agree that we need a place where people think deeply about existing socioeconomic and political systems to figure out how they could be better or what else we could do instead. There's too much doom and gloom these days. People want more hope, which I believe is one of the reasons why Becky Chambers's scifi books have done so well; they're quite hopeful about humanity's future.
I upgraded to paid because I am so inspired to see you carving out your own path, at the same time it is encouraging me to stick to the path I've chosen for myself in spite of the fact that there is certainly a few financial challenges waiting for me.
I hope we can think, dream, discuss and eventually create the future in a more harmonious way.
P.S You refer to the age of Enlightenment. I dunno if astrology is your wheelhouse but Pluto has moved into Aquarius for the first time since 1778 which was the same timeline as the French and American revolutions so apparently we're absolutely in line for Enlightenment 2.0!
Thank you so much Nicholas, and I am so here for your mission to "think, dream, discuss and eventually create the future in a more harmonious way." Let's do it!
And you have no idea how much I love the idea of us being ripe for Enlightenment 2.0. It was meant to be!!!!!
May 16, 2023·edited May 17, 2023Liked by Elle Griffin
I'm in Elle! I wish to support your brilliance, your adventure to see if @substack can sustain you as employment, and, boy, do we need--and are ready for--"[a place] where we can think through a more beautiful future using essays and literature and discourse." You can do this!
Cool, I get to comment as a free subscriber! I’ve admired your work for some time, especially the do-it-yourself approach that helped you pivot from traditional publishing to serialized fiction. I aim to do the same.
This post solidified my desire to become a paid subscriber--not sure if I’ll make it by May, tbh the rest of this year is mighty shaky for me in terms of finances. But since I want to make writing my life, in much the same way you’re aiming for, supporting this new journey of yours is an obvious next step.
Thank you so much Peter, that really means a lot. I'm also very interested in the name of your newsletter and I can't wait to see what you wind up writing about. I hope you'll share your work as we start digging into the series!
This encapsulates a sentiment shared by many of my friends and peers. Dystopian movies and novels are necessary, but so is idealism and being able to hold on to hopes of a better future. Otherwise, if we’re doomed, why should we even try to build a better world? 🔥 Great one — curious to see others think!
Yes!!!! Very well said!
Was wondering why the 50 dollar button wasn't working. Realized we're a whole week into June. Clearly I need a newsletter about thinking in my life.
I love this! As someone that dislikes dystopian fiction and thought this resonates deeply with me. Call me naive, call me a hopeless optimist but I long for thought and discussion propelled by compassion and empathy.
I'm a hopeless optimist right along with you!!!!!!!
Elle, This 800 word essay is a contribution to your new "Enlightenment" project to think about how to get to a better future. I hope what I written stimulates your conversation.
First, here's a brief about myself to give my thoughts a helpful context. I'm an old guy, 82, but I think my brain is still working; of course, from the inside who can really tell? Anyway, I had a career in science (my doctoral work was in population biology, which then (the 1960s) was a cross between natural history and mathematics), and I retired in the closing of the last century.
All my life, my habit has been to think about things from a big picture perspective, and since I was 15 or so, I’ve kept journals about my ideas, but not journals about my personal experiences. I started journaling because I discovered it was a way to hold on to and keep working on some idea that was in my head and intrigued me. And, I think, this aspect of my personal history disqualifies me as a writer who wants to express herself to others and to be a herald of her generation, because for seven decades I had no such desire, and I was quite content to develop various big picture ideas merely for my own satisfaction. Early on, my doctoral professor warned me that thinking too much in my own space would isolate me from a secure position among my scientific peers, and that has proved true.
However, in my case, it made me very interested in the ideas in other people’s heads. It was a saving grace, as some say, and kept me in the real, but less contemporary space of the conversation with others' leading ideas. I turned out to be a good manager of research scientists, a branch of cat herding.
The idea of leading ideas is very important in thinking about making the future. Our own leading ideas are difficult to make clear to ourselves, and, adding to the difficulty, we can only comprehend others' leading ideas in the light of our own. And this is one of the things it’s taken me over seventy years to understand: Our behavior and thinking are guided by the leading ideas we harbor, and if we don’t come to know them, they will rule our thinking and doing. And, what we may think of as our ideals are most likely not a very true presentation of our true leading ideas.
So thinking about future making, will have no value if it boils down to projecting our own chauvinistic ideals as guides to shape the space of spaces in which that future will inhabit.
Here's one of my leading ideas: When we talk about your space or my space or our space or their space, we are talking about a quasi ordered system of dynamic spaces. And these spaces are maintained by the continual interactions of creatures, only some of which are humans. And all spaces have modes of life which are different at their boundaries from the mode life in their interiors. Spaces come in many sizes and flavors.
And here's a big abstract idea about spaces: First, think of them all as one very big Venn diagram in which all the spaces are present and all are ovate. That is, the shape of each space is not puckered or gerrymandered. This is possible if the diagram is very highly dimensional. Second, think that there is no space that is isolated; all are connected by some pathway of intersections, but, also, there are sub spaces of spaces which are densely, but not completely overlapping. And think third, that the spaces are dynamic, but there are many ways to think of what dynamic means, so not static in some dimensions is the best general definition.
No one can get this sort of an abstraction completely in their head. It's a model and models need to be simplified to be talked about. There is in this Big Venn model (BVM) many ideas from the scientific subculture, so I want to say that as someone with a career in science, I agree with the deconstructionists that scientific knowledge is not the final authority. Science is only a subculture in the BVM, but so are deconstructionists. So in thinking about the future, the scientific subculture is only one of the voices and modes who need to be part of future making thinking.
Another of my leading ideas of which I'm firmly convinced is that of multiple kinds of intelligences among humans, consequently there are many modes of expressing what is true besides discursive reasoning. And thinking about the nature of what the future may be needs symbolic and analogical thinking and expression.
The future will occupy real spaces, so the first question to be sounded, but never completely resolved or agreed upon, is what are our leading ideas about the rock bottom reality which the future we want to make will inhabit? The tension of this set of leading ideas will frame and maintain the real space of thinking about a better future.
Thanks JBS, I'm struggling to understand this but maybe that's because it feels somewhat abstract. Is there an example you can give to illustrate?? Thanks!
Elle, What was I thinking! I agree; my little essay was too abstract and idiosyncratic. My bad. But then, too, all my life I always though a lot about other person's and my own leading ideas, of which I'll give a couple of examples below. In Jungian terms, I'd say I was an intuitive thinker in that I have intuitions and then have to parse them out for myself in abstract ideas. Since I was 15, I've kept journals but they were never about my experiences, or the tensions of life, or details of a study of politics, history, current affairs or literature. But only about leading ideas of how and what nature was.
I wasn’t going to write anything on your project, because, I thought, what’s the point of utopian thinking, the future's always surprising us anyway. On the other hand, utopian thinking is a way of taking stock of where we’d like to be from where we really are at. So…
From my career in science I know how fuzzy projections of ecological science can be, and by implication how fuzzy economic and sociological models are also. For instance, I recall being sort of surprised when I realized that the official government projections of anchovy abundance, used to set fishing quotas, was on a part with the uncertainty of most short term government economic forecasts, used to help business and industry. Modes of fuzziness constitute a set of leading ideas.
On the other hand, I remember in the late 1960s my biology professor showing to a couple of us graduate students a Note in the scientific journal Ecology: a graph the first five or so years of the Mauna Loa C02 data. We all understood at once what that rising saw-blade graph meant in terms of global warming, because the simple physical model of the earth as one big green house and the necessary tight correlation between C02 concentration and temperature, known as result of physics since the end of the 19th century and it was part of our education. Yet we were more surprised, at the moment, by what a clear signal could be read from nominally fuzzy ecological data, because we population scientists were used to much more uncertain signals in our data and the fuzziness of future projections made from it. The Mauna Loa data illustrates the leading idea of a highly certain projection that is based on a model which skips over tons of detail. The same model applies to your car parked in the sun and the whole earth planetary ecosystem. The fuzziness of detail in models relative to degree of certainty of projected outcome constitutes another set of leading ideas, and a branch of wisdom.
These two examples also can be used to illustrate what I called spaces. The space of ecological scientists has many sub spaces; the space of atmospheric scientists in which which is included those who made the C02 measurements is in a very different subspace than that of population biologists. But these two spaces intersect. Intersection of spaces means that the meaning of activity within one space can pass into another.
Now I want to enlarge the idea of spaces indicated in my examples. As well as recognizable human subcultures which are human spaces, one can think of other spaces in which things live when one is pretty liberal as regards what is alive. When I was a grad student drinking cheap Milwaukee beer with other population biologists, we all concluded that things like atoms, molecules, and electrons were much more like organisms that those in the space of the subculture of physics realized. So it was obvious to us that all science was biology. We all could drink to that! Even if our meaning could not pass into the physicists' space.
This half-abstract (or close to half-ass to some) super liberal notion of spaces means that the present and the future is the dynamic of intersecting spaces of all living things. So, because we utopians can think about the big picture, we have a responsibility to cultivate all spaces in a right way. And now cultivate becomes a vague idea. A clue to be able to work out what cultivate means is the principle that we do not define or decide what is alive. Rather, we only are able recognize what is living, like some musicians can perfectly recognize pitch.
I know that the ability to recognize and the art of recognizing what is living is a spiritual thing. It begins with the primordial human thing to instinctively recognize living personhood in another, like mother and child. And that recognition is rooted in our own personhood. The perfection of living personhood is heart speaking to heart. And, this same speaking is the beginning and the deepest of spiritual things.
Within the boundless mystery of heart speaking to heart is the recognition of living-hood in in the many cases in which the heart of the other is not the heart of a person. In my narrow experience as a biologist, I've known individuals who are very passionate about the living-hood of certain animals or plants (like old trees and desert tortoises) and many other biologists who are not as passionate but steadfast in their mood of appreciation of that other creatures' living-hoods. The reality of living-hoods is a set of leading ideas.
But, in general, science tends to abuse the mystery of such recognition with falsely precise definitions. This abuse of recognition is often accompanied by a belief in strict determinism, and in the early 20th century determinism was the leading idea of physical scientists. So they were scandalized by quantum uncertainty. But, in fact, a certain uncertainty in the activity of honestly recognized things is the hallmark of the living.
Well, I strayed back into my over abstract presentation of things which would take a lot of unpacking, so I'll cut it off here. But I hope this helps a little bit. One has to think big about the future in all spaces to think about it at all. JBSP
I'm officially intrigued (and subscribed!) Sorry to hear about your job, but glad you've found a meaningful purpose to drive you this coming year.
Idealism is indeed sorely lacking online these days, except perhaps in fleeting and shallow ways (short videos).
Speaking as the creator of The Zoo Review here on Substack, I'd be interested to hear what you think our relationship to animals should be in a more ideal future. I'm trying to serve up a literary cocktail of humour mixed with meaningful ideas to help people see animals in a different light. Hopefully as beings rather than things to be used.
Keen to hear what you think about my attempts so far if you have time, but no pressure. Happy writing 🌟
Thanks, Elle. Sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit unwell.
That's a super informative article! I agree with your main points, and I think coming at this topic mostly from a health perspective will resonate with most people.
The other angles (environment and morality) seem to get brushed aside more readily by those who eat lots of meat. Which is strange because most people care about the environment and most people love animals.
There's definitely a disconnect there.
People will champion renewable energy, but balk at the idea of going plant-based (which would have a much greater positive impact for the environment).
I've seen this in people I've talked to, and in street interviews by vegan YouTubers like Earthling Ed and Joey Carbstrong.
I guess this shows we're not just dealing with facts but human psychology...
On a lighter note, if you have a couple of favourite animals let me know. I might write an article from the perspective of one and have it refer people to your Substack 😊
Have you read Half-Earth Socialism? We'll be talking about that book in the discourse in the coming weeks and the idea is that half of the earth is left to be rewilded. I'd be curious to know your thoughts on that from an animal perspective.
My whole life my favorite animal has been a unicorn. So maybe as an adult I'll switch to a narwhal??
I haven't read that, but looking forward to the discussion, it sounds very interesting.
Thanks, I'll see what I can come up with for a narwhal / 🦄
Thank you so much Daniel!!!! I *have* written recently about our food industry recently, which is perhaps animal adjacent? Here it is, I'd love to know your thoughts: https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/we-need-to-disrupt-the-food-industry
Thanks for being here, and excited to join you in discourse!
You've made an excellent pitch. Yours is the first Newsletter I have paid for. I look forward to reading!
WOW!!!! What an honor!!!! Thank you so much for being here!
This is exciting!! Just became a paid subscriber :) Good luck with this endeavor
Thank you so much Mia!!!!!!
Have you read Dawn of Everything? Highly recommended, in general and for your topic. Corrects the record on where the enlightenment came from (many of the socialist and utopian ideas came from conversations with Native Americans) and how societies develop. Social Evolution in regard to first came ag, then came cities, then came dystopia is not supported by the evidence. But the evidence does show myriad creative ways people have organized. Might give you some ideas/inspiration.
Yes! Such a good book. Thanks Cassi!!!!
I grew up in the 1960s reading the Whole Earth Catalog, so these kinds of discussions are not new. They weren't new then, but they have exploded into a chaos of countercultural social fragmentation and atomization, making most "utopian" thinking irrelevant.
The 1700s/1800s were pivotal in that the idea that "God is dead ... and we killed Him..." was at the core of the social anxiety caused by Enlightenment thinking: loss of mythic social order and romanticist and ILLIBERAL reactionary ideologies (marxism and fascism).
One item of historical accuracy:
"democracy and capitalism were trialed in Europe and North America"
The origins of "democracy and capitalism" go back at least 1,000 years in the case of "capitalism" (classical liberalism) and 2,000 in the case of "democracy".
Under medieval, decentralized politics, classical liberalism was well established, in some cases by elements of the Church (Abbey at Cluny) that promoted peasant's rights, by the1,400s, but then after 1492, power was increasingly re-centralized by rising imperial powers, who crushed medieval liberalism (which was revived in the 1800s by the expanding and rising urban commoner classes, W.E.I.R.D.*).
This is one of the best "scientific" explanations of the genetic and cultural evolution of "classical liberalism" (democracy and capitalism, the modern nation state system, high-social-trust, etc.) I've seen:
By an accident of history, the early Church's ban on cousin marriage (clan inbreeding) resulted in greater genetic diversity in the NW European gene pool, and then "liberal" personality traits (Haidt) were selected for due to increased demand for literacy and numeracy in the expanding urban commoner classes (river and sea traders, shopkeepers, court scribes in Charter towns/Free cities, and so forth).
https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/overview
W.E.I.R.D. Minds: How Westerners became psychologically peculiar
- Joseph Henrich, Harvard, Cultural Anthropology/Economics
Yes, I am aware that there are still thinkers out there, and that things have been trialed in different instances several times before (the Roman Empire trialed democracy as well, for example). But that doesn't mean we don't still need more thinkers, or that we're not still experimenting!
Good luck with your business model. There is definitely a great need to make the various, existing thinkers and movements involved in proposing solutions to the crisis of postmodernism more well known.
Here is one of the better collections of ideas about liminal thinking, it tilts a little bit in the direction of Metamodernism/Integral theory (Ken Wilber) and European libertarian-socialism:
P2P Foundation / Michel Bauwens
https://p2pfoundation.net/the-p2p-foundation/about-the-p2p-foundation
Note: Bauwens was viciously attacked several years ago by the cancel culture mobs on the cultural-left (some calling themselves "communists"), so he has been drifting away from "wokeism" for a while.
https://p2pfoundation.net/the-p2p-foundation/about-the-p2p-foundation
First, I'm very sorry to hear this news. Earning a living through writing is always so difficult, but this news is never unsurprising and always jarring. I wish you the best as you move forward.
I will disagree with your fundamental premise -- I'd say we need both, but that's a conversation for another day.
Has The Post simply been disappeared? I see that it began in March of this year? Did it just wipe out all of the work you helped to generate?
Thank you Yasmin, it's definitely a thing for writers! And I agree with you, we need thinkers and journalists. The problem is that we have way more of the latter than we do the former, and I'd love to see the scales tipped a bit.
And yes, The Post was only two months in, and it is gone now. I managed to keep all the essays I wrote, and they can be found here: https://ellegriffin.substack.com/t/work-and-leisure
But the rest is gone!
Eeesh, such a lack of commitment, on their part, to a venture. I'm glad you were able to archive your work. Again, all my best.
Go Elle!!! This is amazing
Thanks Bailey 🤓
Upgraded to paid and recommended! Totally agree that we need a place where people think deeply about existing socioeconomic and political systems to figure out how they could be better or what else we could do instead. There's too much doom and gloom these days. People want more hope, which I believe is one of the reasons why Becky Chambers's scifi books have done so well; they're quite hopeful about humanity's future.
Thank you so much Thomas!!!!!! 😭 And I'll have to check out Becky, thank you so much for the rec!
Hi Elle,
I upgraded to paid because I am so inspired to see you carving out your own path, at the same time it is encouraging me to stick to the path I've chosen for myself in spite of the fact that there is certainly a few financial challenges waiting for me.
I hope we can think, dream, discuss and eventually create the future in a more harmonious way.
P.S You refer to the age of Enlightenment. I dunno if astrology is your wheelhouse but Pluto has moved into Aquarius for the first time since 1778 which was the same timeline as the French and American revolutions so apparently we're absolutely in line for Enlightenment 2.0!
Thank you so much Nicholas, and I am so here for your mission to "think, dream, discuss and eventually create the future in a more harmonious way." Let's do it!
And you have no idea how much I love the idea of us being ripe for Enlightenment 2.0. It was meant to be!!!!!
I'm in Elle! I wish to support your brilliance, your adventure to see if @substack can sustain you as employment, and, boy, do we need--and are ready for--"[a place] where we can think through a more beautiful future using essays and literature and discourse." You can do this!
Thank you so much Mmerikani!!!!!!!! That really means a lot.
Cool, I get to comment as a free subscriber! I’ve admired your work for some time, especially the do-it-yourself approach that helped you pivot from traditional publishing to serialized fiction. I aim to do the same.
This post solidified my desire to become a paid subscriber--not sure if I’ll make it by May, tbh the rest of this year is mighty shaky for me in terms of finances. But since I want to make writing my life, in much the same way you’re aiming for, supporting this new journey of yours is an obvious next step.
Thank you so much Peter, that really means a lot. I'm also very interested in the name of your newsletter and I can't wait to see what you wind up writing about. I hope you'll share your work as we start digging into the series!
Nice