I argued in 1977 that the relatively open, egalitarian, individualistic, and libertarian societies prevailing in the modern world were the luxuriant fruit of an era of unparalleled ecological abundance occasioned first by Europe’s appropriation of the New World’s mostly untapped resources and then by the exploitation of first coal and then petroleum.
[Harrison] Brown’s larger point [published in 1954] was that political, social, and economic systems are decisively shaped by the quantity and quality of the available resources, especially the energy resources that are the sine qua non for exploiting every other resource. This was spelled out in more detail by Fred Cottrell in 1955. Using an array of historical examples, he showed that the availability of energy effectively determined the nature and fate of societies. And as the resource base on which it depended deteriorated, industrial civilization would experience a decline in the “net amount of surplus energy.”3 This would compel a painful regression to the mean that existed before the age of fossil fuels—i.e., an agrarian civilization.
Along these same lines, other authors—myself in 1977 and William Catton in 1980—used prose to describe the same predicament: overshoot followed inevitably by collapse unless major remedial actions were taken decisively and soon.
In the . . . the right hemisphere version [of reality], as in the world the map represents, and in the world revealed to us by physics, by poetry, and simply by the business of living, things are almost infinitely more complex. Nothing is clearly the same as anything else. All is flowing and changing, provisional, and complexly interconnected with everything else. Nothing is ever static, detached from our awareness of it, or disembodied; and everything needs to be understood in context, where, if it is not to be denatured, it must remain implicit.
Long before we had anything other than the most rudimentary knowledge of hemisphere difference, a number of philosophers – Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson and Scheler among them – were able to intuit that there are two fundamentally distinct ways in which we approach the world, what Bergson called ‘two different orders of reality’. I would tentatively suggest that many of the great questions of philosophy in fact turn on which one you choose, an idea I explore throughout the rest of this book. One way of looking at paradox is as an indicator that we are dealing with two apparently valid world-pictures which yet do not concur.
Is There a Method for Reasoning? Reasoning, as we have described it so far, is rather limited. Humans reason when they are trying to convince others or when others are trying to convince them. Solitary reasoning occurs, it seems, in anticipation or rehashing of discussions with others and perhaps also when one finds oneself holding incompatible ideas and engages in a kind of discussion with oneself. Just as with justifications, the production of arguments proceeds by means of backward inference, from a favored conclusion to reasons that would support it.
Liberal science, by contrast, separates the idea from the person. The critical method, Popper said, “consists in letting our hypotheses die in our stead.” In other words, we kill our hypotheses instead of each other.
“Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”
In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature. I have used the word instinctive advisedly.
Evolutionary spirituality is evolution-inspired, world-embracing, and future-oriented. It is a creative, anticipatory spiritual path in which salvation, however we define that word, is to be found not in connection to the ancestral spirits of yesteryear, in promises of a heavenly beyond, in achieving a transcendent state of inner peace, or even in letting go into a timeless present, but in fully embracing the emergent potential contained in the depths of an evolving cosmos.
