Exploring Systems Thinking and Meaningfulness

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✨ About This Episode

The world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do any of us feel inspired to do about it? Why has humankind thus far failed to wield its religions as an instrument for biospheric action? Reading the above probably generated more distress than motivation. Might Western civilization actually be better off reclaiming what the modern world felt it didn’t need — namely, the sacred? What if Christianity has ALWAYS at its core held teachings meant to stir up riotous love — the kind that gets us off our asses striving joyously to serve the living world we are?

Endlessly subversive author and Rice University Professor Timothy Morton (Twitter | Substack | Patreon | YouTube | Instagram) thinks so — and their new book Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology argues eloquently for a weird and wonderful postmodern nondual Christianity in which we give up trying to run the place and realign ourselves with Life. Hell is a rousing and reviving work I underlined extensively, and our discussion traces and retraces Tim’s characteristically good-lurid and good-florid, stark-but-dreamy, mystically mundane, paradox-rich writing. We soar into romantic numinosity and dwell in body horrors, throw curtains open to pure light and celebrate the stains we can’t erase. Trigger warnings plenty, here — but one of them is that in the high-brow, low-brow oscillations you might find yourself awakened to the nature of your being-as-the-God-shaped-hole-in-everything.

I’ll let them introduce what is easily one of the most potent episodes this show has ever published:

“A wonderful three-dimensional podcast. Like, I can't thank you enough for wanting to go all the way around the mulberry bush and then into the mulberry bush and then outside the mulberry bush, then pulverize the mulberry bush into powder, send it around a particle accelerator, and watch the diffusion cloud chamber patterns as you compose another symphony using fractal geometry. I just love this.”

If that’s the kind of conversation you enjoy, then buckle up. Tim knows precisely the poetic mind-keys with which we can find The Garden in the flames of Hell itself, and Heaven in the sinful body of the Technocene.

Over the next two hours, we round the bases on a Greatest Hits of all my favorite topics, all of which appear in some sublime form in Tim’s wonderful new book. And we perform embroidery and exegesis of this anthem to raves and William Blake and AI and facing childhood trauma on the way to saving the biosphere from one of its own most deliciously sinful experiments (namely, civilization), we cover a kaleidoscopic swirl of topics such as:

• Making climate action (and America) cool again• Nonduality, convergent evolution, and the sacred as the feeling of biology• When teleology goes bad, then redeems itself through pluralism• Flipped gnosticism and dispensing with master/slave thinking• What deals with the devil teach us about how to wisely wield AI• “The Black Goo” as a science fiction trope and how it relates to…• How to make the best of living in Hell, aka social media• The Peacock Angel Melek Taus and having sympathy for the devil• Failure as comedy, sin as a blessing, thinking as a kind of failure mode• Evolution as a Christic promise of possibility better futures, and yet…• Why we shouldn’t use “emergentism” to solve “the meaning crisis”

We also pay dues to a totally prodigious list of inspirations.

As per our custom, those of you supporting the show have subsidized the extra time it takes for me to organize a thorough bibliography with links to the books, papers, films, TV shows, podcast episodes, and historical figures mentioned therein.

Thank you for listening and for your contributions!

✨ Support This Work

• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Books & Articles

Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecologyby Timothy Morton

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after The End of The Worldby Timothy Morton

Subscendenceby Timothy Morton

Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphereby Richard Doyle

A Beginner’s Guide To Constructing The Universeby Michael S. Schneider

The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selectionby Charles Darwin

Liquid Modernityby Zygmunt Bauman

Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Modelsby Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli

Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and The Appetite for Wonderby Richard Dawkins

Simplification, Innateness, and the Absorption of Meaning from Context: How Novelty Arises from Gradual Network Evolutionby Adi Livnat

The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous

The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Usby Nicholas Carr

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Nowby Doug Rushkoff

At Home In The Universe: The Search for The Laws of Self-Organization and Complexityby Stuart Kauffman

Complexity and The Emergence of Physical Propertiesby Miguel Fuentes

The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Centuryby Matthew Fox

The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissanceby Matthew Fox

Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Actionby J.F. Martel

✨ Podcast Episodes

SolPurpose Conversations 2 - Richard Doyle on The Cloud of Unknowing75 - David Krakauer on Thinking Interplanetary with The Santa Fe Institute132 - Erik Davis on Perturbations in the Reality Field174 - Evan Snyder on Sound Design for A Robotic Built Wilderness186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The TechnosphereWeird Studies 101 - Our Fear of the Dark: On Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows'

✨ Movies & TV Shows

AlienWestworldBlade RunnerHellraiserFriendsCurb Your EnthusiasmThe SimpsonsPrometheusThe ShiningAlien ResurrectionInterstellarThe Wizard of Oz

✨ Other People

William BlakeCarl Hayden Smith Jeffrey KripalKurt GödelGeorg CantorAlfred North WhiteheadBertrand RussellGerald Manley HopkinsKarl MarxSlavoj ŽižekGregory BatesonGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelPhilip K. DickE.F. SchumacherAnna HollandPhoebe PlummerFrancisco VarelaHumberto MaturanaJacques DerridaJohn MiltonJulian of NorwichDilgo Khyentse RinpocheJón GnarrChögyam Trungpa RinpocheMurray Gell-Mann

✨ Objects Of Note

QAnonGoogle GlassThe Sex PistolsCambridge Analytica

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