3 recipies

Recipe 1 - Chris' 'see ya later' Banana and Date loaf

ingredients:

2 cups SR flour
3/4 cup raw sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup vegetable oil
soy milk
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped dates
1 banana (the older the better)

method:

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

Mash the banana, then combine with the flour, raw sugar, brown sugar, egg, oil and cinnamon in a mixing bowl. Add enough soy milk to create a thick batter. Mix with electric beaters until smooth. Add more soy milk if necessary. Fold in the chopped dates.

Pour the mixture into a loaf-tin (greased or lined with baking paper) and bake at 180 degrees for approximately 40 minutes, or until brown.

Recipe 2 - Hot nights noodle salad

salad:

1/2 green capsicum
2/3 of a lebanese cucumber
handful of fresh snowpeas
1 carrot
handful of mushrooms
2 cloves garlic
1 egg
small block of tempeh
1 standard block of instant noodles or equivalent
1 teaspoon sesame seeds

dressing:

soy sauce
chilli sauce
hoi sin sauce
sweet mango chutney

method:

Boil the noodles and hard-boil the egg in separate pots. Drain the noodles when soft and run them under some cold water. Leave the noodles and egg to cool.

Slice the tempeh into long thin strips (about 1/2-3/4 of a centimetre wide, about 4cm long). Slice the mushrooms and the garlic. Cook the tempeh, mushrooms and garlic in a small frypan over a high heat with some vegetable oil until the tempeh browns. When almost done, add a slurp of hoi-sin sauce and a slurp of sesame oil and fry for another minute, or until it starts to smoke.

Grate the entire carrot and slice the capsicum. Chop the cucumber into small cubes, and cut the snowpeas into thirds.

Shell the hard-boiled egg and slice into 5 strips.

Dressing:

In a small bowl, mix 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, a few squirts of sesame oil, a slurp of hoi-sin and a dash of chilli sauce and stir thoroughly. Taste and alter as necessary.

Place the drained noodles in the base of a large salad bowl. Throw the capsicum, cucumber and grated carrot on top. Put the fried mixture of tempeh, mushrooms and garlic on top. Place the sliced egg on top of the whole pile. Looks nice.

Pour over the dressing. Sprinkle some sesame seeds on top.

Toss carefully and serve into a small bowl.

Eat with chopsticks and a glass of cold white wine.

Recipe 3 - One day in the pressure-cooker

ingredients:

1 eerie waking dream about strangers lurking in your house
5 minutes of yoga
20 minutes of meditation
25 push-ups
1 page of barely interesting headlines
30 minutes of urban transit
6 hours of trying to stay awake, interested and inspired
1 page of inspiration
30 minutes of dozing on green grass in grey shade
2 hours of attempted good conversation, mostly failures and misunderstandings
10 minutes of successful good conversation
45 minutes of quiet anxiety
20 minutes of genuine exhiliration
1 hour of desperate exhaustion
as much sleep as is left in the cupboard

method:

Arrange ingredients on a bench. Sweep roughly into a deep ceramic bowl. Toss with determination.

Enjoy with good humor, hope and follow with a sherry-glass of equanimity.

Book Review: Non-zero by Robert Wright

In this book Wright tells the story of a planet where biological and social complexity both arise out of largely similar core processes: evolution via natural selection plus technological innovation plus 'non-zero sum' dynamics.

In short, 'zero-sum' interactions occur wherever one player's gain is another player's loss - where the net value to be obtained out of the interaction must sum to zero (think duel to the death). 'Non-zero sum' interactions occur wherever certain actions by players may lead to gains by both players. The language of games and players comes out of game theory – the classic non-zero sum game being the Prisoners' Dilemma, about which much has been written. The interesting bit here is that our 'players' may be humans, but they might also be genes, chromasomes, molecules, organs or memes. Memes are theorised units of cultural evolution: they replicated, mutate and survive insofar as they successfully colonise 'niches' within human minds. The meme for the belief “slavery is fine” isn't doing so well at the moment, but the meme for “we should try to stop global warming” is doing pretty well. The existence of non-zero sum interactions doesn't guarantee that the players actually choose actions which realise the potential positive sums, it simply provides a potential for mutual gain.

One approach to the talk of non-zero sumness would be to say “so what, he's just saying that co-operation is good for everyone.” But as Wright points out, there are many non-zero sum interactions which don't look much like cooperation at all. When you buy a watch made in China you are involved in a non-zero sum interaction with the factory worker who assembled it — you get a cheap watch, he gets paid (hopefully) but the relationship hardly constitutes cooperation. Alternatively, mitochondrial DNA and regular nuclear DNA both benefit from their contributions to the reproduction of a eukaryotic cell, but again, calling it cooperation would be stretching the meaning of the word pretty far.

Wright writes the book from a fairly hard-line technological determinist perspective (which at first I found disappointing, but it paved a solid path on which to ground more speculative considerations near the end of the book). What allows the non-zero sum interactions to expand over time, in number and scope, is the availability of certain technologies (as he says: “Add technology and bake for five millenia”). The two critical types of technology are: information technologies, which allow quicker, more accurate transmission and processing of information (writing, the invention of money, printing, the internet); and trust technologies, which produce an environment where the procedures and outcomes of interactions are increasingly stable and predictable (authority of the chief of a village, rule of law, contracts).

Add to this his claim that humans have an innate tendency to innovate — to find new ways of doing stuff. This in itself is a predictable outcome of evolution powered by non-zero sum interactions: humans who were less interested with tinkering with stuff are less likely to stumble across cool new tools that help further harness potential non-zero sum interactions. As information and trust technologies progress, those with access to them can productively realise the benefits of non-zero-sum interactions with more and more people who live further and further away. These increasingly large and interconnected social units, armed with good information processing and some semblence of stability, operate effectively as social/collective brains — creating feedback loops which increase innovation and so on. This is what leads to the broadening of complexity and geographical scope of human collectivities: nomadic tribes to villages to chiefdoms to towns to city-states to fully fledged nation states to some possible future institution of global governance. All pretty neat, right?

As any history-of-everything is, Wright's story is very selective. But it is also well considered, and tackles many of the important questions along the way: why did humans make the leap to agriculture when life what pretty cruisy as a hunter-gatherer? why did the industrial revolution happen in western Europe, even though China was far more advanced technologically, hundreds of years beforehand? didn't civilization nearly get 'lost' in the middle ages anyway? what about the continuous threat of the 'barbarian hordes' — aren't they a counterexample to the story of increasing complexity? if non-zero sum interactions always tend towards larger social organisations, why did all the big empires collapse? For someone who hasn't read much history, there are many interesting stories here.

Wright generally reads history in an optimistic light — even given all the horrors of war, , genocide, famine and disaster, human societies have basically moved consistently in the direction of greater individual freedom and wider distribution of power. Although war was often a potent tool in engendering stability within social units (and hence increasing non-zero sum potential locally), increasingly our interdependence is making all-out war a less and less productive strategy. This is not to say that we can't screw it all up by dropping A-bombs everywhere, but it is the increasingly negative-sum nature of war that makes it less and less palatable: “Hate ain't what it used to be”. The rise of the internet is the next big thing in information technology and prefigures the arrival of masses of new potential non-zero sumness, if we can develop sufficient trust technologies to catch up with all the potential. It also heralds some good news on the social front: “...the most ambitious realistic hope for the future of amity — a world in which just about everyone holds allegiance to enough different groups, with enough different kinds of people, so that plain old-fashioned bigotry would entail discomfiting cognitive dissonance. It isn't that everyone will love everyone, but rather that everyone will like enough different kinds of people to make hating any given type problematic.”

The sad part, however, about the story is that history's progress is still framed largely in terms of human beings' self-interest (and correspondingly their genes'). Sure, cooperation evolves with near certainty as the devlopment of technology broadens the scope of potential non-zero sum interactions, but in the end this is only because engaging in more non-zero sum games brings windfalls of material goods, status and sex for the players (there is a complete ignorance of any questions of gender here — it's always the men getting the sex...).

This is a bit of a caricature though — Wright admits his story is partial, and there are many complications surrounding selection at the level of the gene, organism and group. But the question I think it raises is an interesting one: yes human beings are often selfish, we do like to accumulate things and status. But we are also genuinely caring and innately socially minded. “Aha,” the critics will say “but all this altruism evolved only because it served your innate self interest, therefore it is not really altruism, just selfishness disguised as unselfishness.” Well, maybe, but no one claims that just because we evolved from apes that we are actually apes. In fact, by the above line of argument you may as well say that humans are in fact just primordial slime from which all life evolved. My point is that just because we can theorise how our innate tendencies towards cooperation, altruism and love might have arisen because they served the replicative needs of our genes, it doesn't mean that the resulting altruism is actually selfishness. The response should be quite the opposite – isn't it amazing and wonderful how essential selfishness could evolve into real, genuine altruism! Of course we're still pretty much beginners at this whole altrusim thing. Wright does point to a sort of necessary spiritual transformation but, typical of his cautious style, doesn't elaborate, and sticks with the nuts and bolts.

After being a bit underwhelmed by the materialistic and economic style of Wright's major arguments, I was quite impressed with his movement into the problem of consciousness and more theological speculations. Far from solving the intriguing problem of consciousness, he reminds us, modern science has actually emphasised its mystery. By showing that the brain operates consistently and coherently as a purely physical system, with no apparent need for 'input' from a conscious inhabitant, modern neurosciences have in fact highlighted its own inability to explain consciousness. If consciounsness doesn't appear to do anything, then why does it exist? Why did consciousness evolve if it doesn't achieve anything? Why is it like anything to be alive, to feel? Science cannot explain this because there is just no evidence that consciousness is useful to explain anything in the material world, it's just neurotransmitters and action potentials in there. This makes the question of what the heck consciousness is much more interesting and important than ever. The best explanation so far is that consciousness is some sort of correlate of increasing density and speed of information processing, which matches up with the idea of human collectivities operating as 'social brains'. Consequently, Wright asks — could a global brain ever become conscious? I think he misses the most obvious point here: even if neurons do have some sort of limited consciousness of their own, their consciousness is not identical to the consciousness of the whole brain. As a corollary, even if a true global consciousness could emerge (or has emerged!) we would not have access to the experience of that consciousness, as we are but the neurons, not the whole brain. However dissapointing this may be, it's still an interesting line of thought: human beings + internet may well be conscious, but me might never know it.

Although relying on the random processes of mutation and selection, the combination of self-replication and non-zero sum dynamics produces, according to NZ, a systematic tendency towards evolutionary units of higher and higher complexity. Major debates about the notion of 'progress' aside (insert 100 years of debate here), this places Wright within a movement exploring notions of models and scales of human development. A central qualification of his argument is that although we, as homo sapiens, with our particular version of a highly complex, globally integrated society were incredibly unlikely to have eventuated (given all the randomness of evolution), it is almost certain that some kind of highly complex, intelligent, integrated organims would have arisen out of the same primordial goop that produced us. Given enough time, and escape from giant meteors and invading aliens, something resembling us would eventually develop. This is directly contra the well known writer Stephen Jay Gould who sees us as an altogether very unlikely accident, and that's all. If somewhere along the way homo sapiens had all been obliterated by a meteor then, according to Gould, that was our one and only chance, gone.

These arguments lead to an interesting discussion concerning in precisely what way (once we admit the importance of non-zero sum dynamics and the tendency towards complexity) we can say that evolution has a 'goal', or shows evidence of 'design'. I've always been extremely tetchy about people who talk about natural selection 'designing' things (eyes, cell walls etc) but Wright makes some points that help tease out the concept. If you belive NZ progress in a restricted sense, and indeed intelligence and possibly consciousness, are so deeply embedded in the natural world that we cannot ignore it. In the end it might come down to questions of semantics whether we read this tendency as 'design' or not (with one huge caveat to destroy any quacky notions of intelligent design coming from Kentucky). Although not pursued by Wright, I think this connects back to the discussion of consciousness: 'design', 'purpose', 'intention' are all things that only arise in relation to consciousness. So by definition (if we belive the neuroscientists) we can never find these things in the physical world, as consciousness is not a feature of the physical world. The uncomfortability in Wright's discussion I think arises from his attempt to place it there. But if we imagine the world in its totality (as an information processing system) as potentially engendering some sort of meta-consciousness, then it might seem possible to speak of such things as design, intention, purpose at that level.

Read in comparison to Wilber's SES (see book reivew posted on this blog 5/9/2007), NZ is easily an order of magnitude less bold. But because of this, it requires you to take a lot less on faith and appeals much more to common sense and empirical history. What NZ does that Wilber doesn't, is provide a coherent mechanism to explain evolution's remarkable tendency towards higher complexity and apparent 'progress' (however much you dispute the term), without invoking some mysterious 'Omega Point'. Although Wright flirts speculatively with the notion of a teleology or goal-directedness in evolution, his prime movers are always replication, mutation, zero and non-zero sum interactions and lots of time. The interesting implication for our own little slice of history is that the feedback loops of evolution — technology begets more non-zero sumness begets technology — mean that increases in complexity and global interconnection may be on an accellerating gradient, reducing the amount of the 'time' ingredient necessary to bake the next round of tasty evolutionary cakes. In sum, we might be in for an interesting ride within our lifetime.

Where am I being led...

So new interests are:

what it means to be "white" and including this in the discourse on racial politics.

geography... Im very excited about this one. Maybe chris can give me more insight.

positions of power and democratic ideals

Very Happy

Hey,

Im very happy you two have decided to come back. I can't say much about what you have written, but I can say we need to be wary of absolutisms in any form, notice I am not saying "absolutisms are bad." haha funny me.

Nah really, I wish we could all go get a coffee again or have a drink at my place, I need some deep discussions.

Been reading a ton on the history of educational reform in America as well as Sociological studies of teachers and am starting to come to some fun responses that I need to talk out before I can move further with them.

Im also becoming aware of the concept of Youth Activism, and how giving young folks political leverage could affect communities.

Third, I'm looking forward at research and getting ideas of bringing in design research methods to better understand what I hope to examine.

Fourth, I'm excited about the program I am in and realising I have somehow ended up in a very small program in a big university in which there are several people thinking about the same things as me (relatively). I'm not sure the chances, but I think I've landed pretty serendipitously.

Fifth, I wish I could respond to Wilber.

Sixth, I miss everyone over there and want you all to know you are welcome at anytime to come over and we will drink wine and talk and play guitar and watch movies and go for walks along the mississippi.

Wilber (and me)

Hello again,

I’m back! After an absence of many months I’m glad to see the health of this blog is intact. It’s not everyday you learn the name and existence of a new form of punctuation is it!? (I still haven’t worked out how to write one though). I had to respond to Chris’ review, but I’ll try and keep this post brief.

Firstly, I’ll admit upfront that I’m a fan of Wilber’s work. My own history as a lot to do with the reasons for this. As most of you know, I began study at Melbourne University spread across disciplines – economics, history, philosophy, environmental science, French – it always appealed to me to look at knowledge and the world from as many angles as possible. The experience I had with music also opened me up to the effect that the interior dimensions of experience (awareness, emotions, attitude, ego, etc) have on the expression of music. What is art but the creation of something that reflects some form of interior state of an individual? For some reason this notion escaped me when I was younger, but in my early 20s it flooded my interests. This led to me checking out meditation, martial arts and sampling a large part of the new age menu.

What makes ‘new age’ a dirty term? My guess is the largely uncritical acceptance and belief of a whole bunch of wacky ideas that are not well supported by empirical research or observable evidence. From the experiences I’ve had this is largely deserved but occasionally unfortunate. In my opinion, Wilber presents the most sophisticated theoretical framework that provides a space for many new age ideas to exist (satori, altered states and higher stages of consciousness etc).

When I went back to university and did International Studies at RMIT, the course was attempting to provide a holistic range of compulsory subjects that would provide the student with multiple access points to better understand globalisation as the most significant social/cultural transformation of our era. We were required to study economics and the history of techno-economic modes of production, the history of migration, ethnicity, construction of racial categories, languages and cultures other than English, the development of the nation-state system and development of the media. What was lacking in depth was compensated through span. It was fantastic, but something was missing -it didn’t quite all hold together.

There was the Marxist techno-economic history and the importance of the means of production in determining cultural outcomes.

There were the post-colonial critiques of scientific constructs as tools that facilitated domination and disempowerment.

There were the arguments over individual agency versus the effects of social structure in determining how messages in the media are interpreted.

We studied the great visionary leaders and great villains of history, but had no real sense of why and how these individuals emerged.

In other words, my previous studies seemed to prepare the soil for a certain uneasy contradiction between (seemingly) disparate knowledge systems to arise in my understanding.

When I came across Wilber’s work, it appeared that here was finally a framework that not only acknowledged the validity of each of the areas of study that I’d spent time with, but a way of understanding the relationships between them. This is why he calls what they do integral studies.

Now there are some issues that seem quite particular to Wilber when compared to other theorists. He is an extraordinarily charismatic individual and releases regular taped conversations from his websites. This combined with the weightlifting, yoga, 4am meditation, pop-culture references, taste for Armani suits, descriptions of non-dual spiritual experiences, and the constantly explicit description of developmental hierarchies in conversations has created a kind of personality cult that leaves many uneasy. The persona of an integral superman leaves many people suspicious, but I also think it stirs people’s own feelings of inadequacy. I don’t think these facts alone deny the validity of his work.

I'm going to leave this little narrative here, and post a rough overview of the key ideas of his model. If this bores the hell out of you I’m sorry, but at least it will give some substantive points to critique.

book review

So, I just finished reading this massive tome by an amercian philosopher (well, I'll call him that to keep you reading) Ken Wilber. It was quite an interesting ride so I thought I'd do a mini-review. Of necessity, a mini-review of a massive book equals a pretty-monstrous blog post!

The book is called 'Sex, Ecology and Spirituality' (actually, there is very little 'Sex' in the book and I think that was just put there to move units).

The scope of the book is gargantuan to say the least – basically a philosophy of everything built from the ground up: from atoms to the entire cosmos and from basic perception via the emergence of reason to full non-dual spiritual transcendence. This leaves the impression that, even at 550 pages (plus another 250 of footnotes in tiny-type), we are left with a half filled-in sketch and not a full thesis. However, the depth of his scholarship is undeniably impressive, covering the gamut from Plato and the numerous Eastern sages through to Kant, Descartes, Hegel, Schelling all the way through to Derrida and Foucault.

On the down-side, Wilber's writing has flavours of 'undergraduateness' about it on occasions and I see how people who are serious boffins regarding particular thinkers may take objection to his often rather brief interpretations. Overall, the prose is very easy to read and feels remarkably straightforward given the complexity of the task. The text becomes repetitive beyond belief which does inevitably cause irritation. However, I can almost forgive Mr. W. on the grounds that some of the points he is arguing against are so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking that logic has to be supplemented with a little brute-force repetition in effort to dislodge the cobwebs...

First on the hit-list is the post-modern fallacy that all sets of values are equally valuable: How the heck do people out there go on not realising that 'all values are equally valuable' is a deeply value-laden statement‽ (and yes, that was an interrobang) Of course the position that all values should be respected is more valuable than one that says “only my values are valuable” but somehow this just gets warped into the same old meaningless contradiction of 'all values are relative' (except this one...). Just shows you the grip that a watered-down and simplified post-modernism has on much of public discourse (and this coming from a guy who digs his Derrida!).

Wilber's great skill is to take seemingly irreconcilable oppositions and situate them snugly within his overall schema. He manages to do this in such a way that each position makes sense as a partial response to a particular set of problems, and the contradiction between views appears as the manifestation of each party making the same mistake in different ways. Solutions are therefore always close at hand.

The schema is built from two basic concepts: holons, and the four quadrants.

For Wilber, everything in this reality is made up of 'holons' or whole/parts. Nothing is either completely whole, or completely a part, but everything is simultaneously both. Lower order holons aggregate via emergent processes to form new holons of greater complexity which maintain the properties of the lower levels but add novel features. The classic example is that interactions of atoms form molecules, molecules combine to form materials and so on up to organs and entire humans, each level adding greater complexity. To the extent that a holon is more 'whole' it experiences agency/independence, and to the extent that it is more a 'part' it experiences responsibility/boundedness. It is this necessary tension between the two which basically keeps the whole ship going.

The notion of the four quadrants divides the entirety of reality (or 'Kosmos', as Wilber calls it) along two dimensions: interior (left) – exterior (right) and individual (upper) – collective (lower).

Every single phenomena in the Kosmos has aspects in each of the four quadrants, and the scheme works remarkably well in allowing Wilber to locate, well, everything, in it. For example: 'mind' manifests as individual consciousness (upper left - interior individual), as physical processes in a material brain (upper right - external individual), as culture (lower left - interior collective) and as the manifestations of culture in architecture, institutions of education and government (lower right - exterior collective).

Centrally, Wilber posits the main conundrum of modernity as a false choice between two equally doomed alternatives, both emerging from the same fundamental misunderstanding – that of collapsing reality into its merely external (material) surfaces. He calls these two camps the 'Ego' and the 'Eco'.

The 'Ego' camp maintains that the liberation of the modern individual is found in the absolute freedom of the rational ego, released from social convention and mythical religious injunctions, and from the brutality of the natural world (including the 'natural' within the ego: the drives, the id etc). The material world is all there is, and the job of the ego (somehow spliced uncomfortably into this material-only world) is to reflect upon nature in order to gain mastery over it. This camp emphasises the wholeness of the ego, its independence from the natural world and from other egos. This tradition arises broadly from Kant and the liberal traditions including liberal feminism.

The 'Eco' camp, on the other hand, sees that the focus on the individual Ego-subject, abstracted and removed from nature, is the source of our alienation from nature, and hence is responsible for nature's impending destruction at our careless hands. Consequently, liberation is to be sought in immersing the ego entirely in ecology, in its inter-relatedness within the natural world. This perspective emphasises that the value of the individual arises only in its role as part of the 'great web of life', which itself is the only true source of value. From this perspective arises most of modern eco-philosophy, deep ecology, radical feminism etc.

The problem which unites and dooms them both, says Wilber, is their 'subtle reductionism' which denotes the reduction of the entirety of reality to its external (right-hand) components and the neglect of the interior dimensions (individual consciousness, culture etc). It is this mistake that keeps both camps perpetually frustrated and perpetually at loggerheads.

Another aspect of the book which had a striking impact on me was the reminder that if there is some supposed opposition between 'hard', rational, Western philosophy and 'soft', mystical, Eastern philosophy, it is a complete fabrication. Wilber shows how thinkers from ancient Greece (notably Plato and Plotinus), via Christian mystics, all the way up to the German idealists in Schelling and Hegel (and to a lesser extent postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida) made interrogations of reality that explored the same space (or at lest parts of it) as the most profound Eastern mystics. It is part of the 'subtle' reductionism of modernity that all the 'Spirit' gets crushed out of the great Western sages, and is left to be projected on the mystical, exotic East. And we are left with the philosophy of today, the majority of which deserves its reputation as dry, abstract and hollow.

Challenges for any critical reader will include his argument for (at the very least not to exclude) 'transrational' modes of apprehending reality. By working through Piaget and other developmental psychologists we see that human beings develop cognitive and moral capacities in a pretty much regular fashion, from basic sensations right up to formal rational thinking. The simple claim is – why stop at rationality? In each stage we reach a point where the current tools for interpreting the world meet problems for which they can not find a sufficient answer. Anyone who has every sat down for a while and thought about whether ethical frameworks are relative or universal, or about whether minds are just brains or indeed are something different, or have read about Godel's theorem, will have noticed that there are problems out there that rationality simply cannot solve. So maybe there are ways of knowing beyond the rational – and Wilber suggests that various Eastern and Western sages/thinkers have experienced and written about exactly that.

The best thing about this is that Wilber meets head on the charges of un-testability or non-falsifiability that are usually leveled at any claim about mystical or transrational experiences. In the end it's all about practice: If you want to understand what someone means when they say, 'the patterns in the bubble chamber demonstrate the creation of particle-non-particle pairs', (and you don't just want to take it on faith) you go and do a physics degree, spend ten years in a lab and then you understand. If you want to understand when a monk says 'the ground of all manifestation is emptiness', (and you don't want to take it on faith) you go and study zen, sit and meditate for 10 years and then you understand. The fact that we see the first practice as common-sense and the second one as bizarre is just a reflection of a faith in scientists, and a culturally-bound refusal to admit the existence of anything beyond the merely 'material'.

The other challenge will be the inevitable arising of the icky feeling that this could all be a bit too New-Agey. What comforted me is how Wilber persistently (and repetitively, in his signature style) differentiates the genuinely 'non-dual' spiritual traditions, that he endorses, from the various New-Age movements, which he sees as securely stuck in the 'Eco' half of the flatland modernity that he spends most of the book critiquing. New-Age philosophies are essentially all guilty of what he calls the 'pre/trans fallacy', that is, confusing pre-rational structures (sensuous embodiment, basic human desires, communing with nature) with genuine trans-rational structures (mystical awareness & higher order intuitions).

Not everyone will be sympathetic to Wilber's way of seeing things, but the book presents a pretty thorough going-through of many of the problems that I see underpinning what's wrong with contemporary reality, and places them in a relatively consistent and mostly complete historical and philosophical framework. The key to confronting the ecological and social crisis of modernity is not simply to be found in trying to understand and then managing the material world; and neither is it to be found by turning inward and solely focussing on individual personal/spiritual transformation (although this aspect has been largely excluded in modernity and definitely needs work); the real step forward lies in the integration of both of these, incorporating both internal and external, individual and collective aspects into our ways of understanding and our ways of acting.

A pretty glaring inadequacy of the book is its extremely dismissive treatment of theories of evolution (a couple of paragraphs) and its ignorance of fields such as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, which potentially provide other important insights into the evolution of consciousness. For the more kooky aspects, it's a case of take it or leave it. You can make a rational argument for an opening or a space for the transrational, but rationality by definition can't fill that space in. In my opnion, for all its limitations, Wilber in this book has got a lot of things right. If anyone's got a spare couple of months (and enough energy to keep an open mind without getting carried away) I'd say it's definitely worth the effort.

Community, Internet and Commerce?

I was reading about this company/website the other day in Businessweek, sounds pretty fantastic in regards to how it is run, the ideals behind it and then also in that it is doing very well.

See what you think:

http://www.etsy.com/

Businessweek Article:

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun2007/sb20070611_488723.htm