Futurology Breaking Out of a Black-and-White World (with Brook Ziporyn and Bing Song)
We live in a culture that flattens the world into yes or no. Hot takes and hard binaries promise simplicity. But complexity is leaking through the cracks. Opposites depend on each other. If you try to tease out the uncertain from the certain, you destroy the reality of the thing itself.
In this episode, Taoist scholar Brook Ziporyn makes the case that Taoism and Buddhism aren’t puzzles to solve but tools for living. Reckoning with Eastern paradoxes can help us navigate the desire to end desire. Modern science has unlocked humanity's potential to see the emptiness of both the far-away universe and the vast space within the building blocks of matter. Buddhism and Taoism give us the capacity to reckon with the fact that there is "no there there."
Resources
Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) — Laozi; translated/edited by Brook Ziporyn (Book, 2023)
Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings — translated by Brook Ziporyn (Book, 2020)
Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism — Brook Ziporyn (Book, 2016)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas R. Hofstadter (Book, 1979)
Find Professor Brook Ziporyn here: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/directory/brook-ziporyn
https://voices.uchicago.edu/ziporyn/
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Credits
Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, and Jason Hoch.
Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, and Nathalia Ramos.
Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney
Theme Music: Marcus Bagala
Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson
Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.