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.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
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.