Gosh! I hope to connect people in all walks of life to this
extraordinarily lively, creative, full of surprises universe that we find
ourselves in and which, frankly, we do not ponder in its fullness often enough.
Life has demands. Life has distractions. And it requires stretching of the mind
to get into all the levels to at least the degree of detail that I think is
useful for expanding our minds and such exercise can lead to exhilaration.
I also would like to say in these concluding moments that
some of the families of patterns within the 12 fundamental levels can be useful
as templates for thinking about the organization of systems that anyone might
want to use.
For example, I noted earlier the part three of the book. In
that part, I discover, shall we say, or make a case for, three families of
adjacent levels that I am calling the dynamical realms: physical laws,
biological evolution, and cultural evolution. I will leave it to readers to get
into that part, and in particular to see how I justify using the word evolution
to refer to certain dynamics within cultural systems, from the upper Paleolithic
to the geopolitical state. But the implications of the logic indicate that a
next level would be some sort of merger of nations into a planetary scale.
I have an epilogue exploring what this might mean, which I
will not go into here. But let me say I believe that new perspectives on the
emerging planetary scale can be gained by studying these templates just
referred to. You can think of these templates as ways of combining that have
been proven successful more than once in the grand sequence. And therefore the
templates might be useful as generalizations for exploring possibilities for
the planetary scale. This is crucial to think about right now.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
Gosh! I hope to connect people in all walks of life to this extraordinarily lively, creative, full of surprises universe that we find ourselves in and which, frankly, we do not ponder in its fullness often enough. Life has demands. Life has distractions. And it requires stretching of the mind to get into all the levels to at least the degree of detail that I think is useful for expanding our minds and such exercise can lead to exhilaration.
I also would like to say in these concluding moments that some of the families of patterns within the 12 fundamental levels can be useful as templates for thinking about the organization of systems that anyone might want to use.
For example, I noted earlier the part three of the book. In that part, I discover, shall we say, or make a case for, three families of adjacent levels that I am calling the dynamical realms: physical laws, biological evolution, and cultural evolution. I will leave it to readers to get into that part, and in particular to see how I justify using the word evolution to refer to certain dynamics within cultural systems, from the upper Paleolithic to the geopolitical state. But the implications of the logic indicate that a next level would be some sort of merger of nations into a planetary scale.
I have an epilogue exploring what this might mean, which I will not go into here. But let me say I believe that new perspectives on the emerging planetary scale can be gained by studying these templates just referred to. You can think of these templates as ways of combining that have been proven successful more than once in the grand sequence. And therefore the templates might be useful as generalizations for exploring possibilities for the planetary scale. This is crucial to think about right now.