In reading this and then Jim Palmer's The Religion of the Future, here is what stood out for me. These are companion pieces in many ways. Jim quotes Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger, who said: "The most important thing about us is that we are not fully determined by the worlds we inhabit.” This sounds very much like your focus on the founder's statement of "a more perfect union." Jim goes on: "Human beings are not simply products of the worlds they inherit. They remain capable of transcending, revising, and remaking the structures that shape them." Both you and Jim orient us to the truth of human possibility, both for creation and destruction.
Yes we live in a world made of polarity. Without bad their is no good. We cannot experience happiness without sadness to compare it to. Our suffering is exacerbated when we ignore this reality.
Reaching for meaning can only be done within the "now" moment and then the next one. Reaching meaning would mean yuv probably gone down a bad alley way.
Hi Mike Can you help me understandwhat is the message of this piece? Acceptance? Embrace uncertainty? Why is free will necessary for this? Is causality relevant here?
Good questions. The message isn't acceptance or embracing uncertainty — both are postures. The piece is making a structural claim: the conditions which make love, freedom, and meaning possible are the same conditions which make loss possible, and you cannot abolish one without abolishing the other. Free will is necessary because the goods are constituted by choice — love that isn't freely given isn't love, citizenship that isn't freely undertaken is subjection. Without freedom, what looks like a good is just a process happening to a person. On causality: the piece doesn't deny causation. It denies a closure of causation so tight that our choices become epiphenomenal. We are causally responsible for what we do. That responsibility is what kind of creature we are. The piece is asking the reader to refuse the trade that every contemporary political utopianism — left, right, and center — offers: the elimination of contingency at the cost of the human.
I sincerely thank you for help. Can you help me another step further as I work to understand, Can you provide a current example framework for a left, right center utopia? I think you are saying similar or same as Alan Watts maintained that love and loss, dark and light, heads and tails go together. But I think he was saying this was fundamental. There was no way to choose something different. And as I think about personal responsibility, does your piece say anything about how we as individuals and systems may address outsized suffering (hunger, ill health, violence, poverty) that inevitably visits some of us people and animals?
These are exactly the right questions to press on. Let me try to answer each.
On current examples of the three utopias: the right utopia I have in mind is the techno-accelerationist project of Silicon Valley — Andreessen's manifesto, the Network State movement, the Thiel-Musk-Founders-Fund orbit — which promises that sufficiently advanced technology can engineer away the conditions of human finitude. The left utopia is the fully-automated-luxury-communism strand and its rigorous cousins — the conviction that the right reconfiguration of political economy plus automation can produce a world without scarcity and the conflicts scarcity produces. The center utopia is the quieter one — the technocratic-managerialist Davos worldview that promises ideology has been superseded by competent expert administration, that the end of history has arrived and only optimization remains. All three share the structural feature: the demand to abolish the conditions of contingency. The piece's claim is that the demand always costs the human in exchange.
On Watts. Yes, you have identified the family resemblance accurately, and you have also identified the precise difference. Watts held that the polarities are fundamental and that the wisdom lies in seeing through the wish to escape them — a contemplative and largely individual project. The piece adds a political claim Watts does not make. The pairing is fundamental, yes, and we can also choose how to respond to it. The utopian response — the engineering-away response — is the deepest political pathology available to human beings, and we are obligated to refuse it. The piece is, in a sense, Watts plus Madison. Eastern ontology with an American constitutional application.
On personal responsibility and outsized suffering. This is the right question to press on, and the answer is the most important thing the piece implies but does not say explicitly. The piece distinguishes between the conditions of finitude — that we age, lose people, fall, are vulnerable to chance — which are constitutive and cannot be abolished without abolishing us, and the particular distributions of suffering, which are political facts and which we are responsible for. Hunger in a world with enough food is a political fact. Preventable illness in a society with the resources is a political fact. Violence we choose not to constrain is a political fact. Poverty in a wealthy society is a political fact. The recognition that we cannot make the world perfect does not relieve us of the obligation to make it more perfect — that is what the title is doing. "More" is the word of a creature in time obligated to keep improving the conditions around it, knowing the work will never be done. The animals matter too; the same logic extends. The piece is a philosophical essay, not a policy document, but the foundation it lays is not a foundation for resignation. It is a foundation for the steady imperfect never-completed work.
Ok. Very helpful thank you Mike. Choices, agency, consent all matter and we should want that. So press on with founding principles of democratic processes with full participation even knowing (and these last 10 years are an example) that dark and light go together and trajectory is not a straight line and how it all unfolds is also a mystery. But, Stay with it. No engineered top down shortcuts. Yes?
In reading this and then Jim Palmer's The Religion of the Future, here is what stood out for me. These are companion pieces in many ways. Jim quotes Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger, who said: "The most important thing about us is that we are not fully determined by the worlds we inhabit.” This sounds very much like your focus on the founder's statement of "a more perfect union." Jim goes on: "Human beings are not simply products of the worlds they inherit. They remain capable of transcending, revising, and remaking the structures that shape them." Both you and Jim orient us to the truth of human possibility, both for creation and destruction.
Yes we live in a world made of polarity. Without bad their is no good. We cannot experience happiness without sadness to compare it to. Our suffering is exacerbated when we ignore this reality.
☯️
living love
Reaching for meaning can only be done within the "now" moment and then the next one. Reaching meaning would mean yuv probably gone down a bad alley way.
Hi Mike Can you help me understandwhat is the message of this piece? Acceptance? Embrace uncertainty? Why is free will necessary for this? Is causality relevant here?
Good questions. The message isn't acceptance or embracing uncertainty — both are postures. The piece is making a structural claim: the conditions which make love, freedom, and meaning possible are the same conditions which make loss possible, and you cannot abolish one without abolishing the other. Free will is necessary because the goods are constituted by choice — love that isn't freely given isn't love, citizenship that isn't freely undertaken is subjection. Without freedom, what looks like a good is just a process happening to a person. On causality: the piece doesn't deny causation. It denies a closure of causation so tight that our choices become epiphenomenal. We are causally responsible for what we do. That responsibility is what kind of creature we are. The piece is asking the reader to refuse the trade that every contemporary political utopianism — left, right, and center — offers: the elimination of contingency at the cost of the human.
I sincerely thank you for help. Can you help me another step further as I work to understand, Can you provide a current example framework for a left, right center utopia? I think you are saying similar or same as Alan Watts maintained that love and loss, dark and light, heads and tails go together. But I think he was saying this was fundamental. There was no way to choose something different. And as I think about personal responsibility, does your piece say anything about how we as individuals and systems may address outsized suffering (hunger, ill health, violence, poverty) that inevitably visits some of us people and animals?
These are exactly the right questions to press on. Let me try to answer each.
On current examples of the three utopias: the right utopia I have in mind is the techno-accelerationist project of Silicon Valley — Andreessen's manifesto, the Network State movement, the Thiel-Musk-Founders-Fund orbit — which promises that sufficiently advanced technology can engineer away the conditions of human finitude. The left utopia is the fully-automated-luxury-communism strand and its rigorous cousins — the conviction that the right reconfiguration of political economy plus automation can produce a world without scarcity and the conflicts scarcity produces. The center utopia is the quieter one — the technocratic-managerialist Davos worldview that promises ideology has been superseded by competent expert administration, that the end of history has arrived and only optimization remains. All three share the structural feature: the demand to abolish the conditions of contingency. The piece's claim is that the demand always costs the human in exchange.
On Watts. Yes, you have identified the family resemblance accurately, and you have also identified the precise difference. Watts held that the polarities are fundamental and that the wisdom lies in seeing through the wish to escape them — a contemplative and largely individual project. The piece adds a political claim Watts does not make. The pairing is fundamental, yes, and we can also choose how to respond to it. The utopian response — the engineering-away response — is the deepest political pathology available to human beings, and we are obligated to refuse it. The piece is, in a sense, Watts plus Madison. Eastern ontology with an American constitutional application.
On personal responsibility and outsized suffering. This is the right question to press on, and the answer is the most important thing the piece implies but does not say explicitly. The piece distinguishes between the conditions of finitude — that we age, lose people, fall, are vulnerable to chance — which are constitutive and cannot be abolished without abolishing us, and the particular distributions of suffering, which are political facts and which we are responsible for. Hunger in a world with enough food is a political fact. Preventable illness in a society with the resources is a political fact. Violence we choose not to constrain is a political fact. Poverty in a wealthy society is a political fact. The recognition that we cannot make the world perfect does not relieve us of the obligation to make it more perfect — that is what the title is doing. "More" is the word of a creature in time obligated to keep improving the conditions around it, knowing the work will never be done. The animals matter too; the same logic extends. The piece is a philosophical essay, not a policy document, but the foundation it lays is not a foundation for resignation. It is a foundation for the steady imperfect never-completed work.
Ok. Very helpful thank you Mike. Choices, agency, consent all matter and we should want that. So press on with founding principles of democratic processes with full participation even knowing (and these last 10 years are an example) that dark and light go together and trajectory is not a straight line and how it all unfolds is also a mystery. But, Stay with it. No engineered top down shortcuts. Yes?
As I said on another piece you wrote on a similar theme, life is meaningful because we can make mistakes.