Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Omega Point

  • Extinction Rebellion

    Extinction Rebellion

    I find it hard to criticize any of the aims of Extinction Rebellion. Almost all of what they advocate accords with my own deeply felt convictions on what is wrong with our world.

    I have no experience of “activism” and instinctively I have steered clear of trouble all my life. Not for me, banner waving in Parliament Square. Let alone getting mown down by a fireman’s hose or injured by a rubber bullet. But someone has to do the job I suppose.

    I am greatly opposed to violence in any form but these people profess pacifism. I have always been a fan of Mahatma Gandhi.

    I am only peripherally aware of what Extinction Rebellion has achieved so far. I don’t know the people involved and can not judge their sincerity or true motivation. But what I can do is to admire their vision. And to wish there was a political party I could vote for whose agenda included these aims, so close to my own heart.

    Take a look at their vision. Can there be a man of any religious conviction at all who could quibble with these stated aims? Can there be a woman of any decency who can deny that all of this and more is needed to create a just world of which we can be proud?

    Is any of this achievable in practice? The naysayers, the cynics, the greedy will deny it. But denial does not make such aims foolish or impossible. It would of course require a complete reversal of our evolutionary instincts but we can not grow as a species without abandoning vicious Darwinism.

    Without further ado, let me quote some of my favorite passages.

    We catch glimpses of a new world of love, respect and regeneration, where we have restored the intricate web of all life. 

    We rise in the name of truth and withdraw our consent for ecocide, oppression and patriarchy. We rise up for a world where power is shared for regeneration, repair and reconciliation. We rise for love in its ultimate wisdom.

    We live in a world of fear, where dog eats dog and man’s insatiable lust for power and material possessions runs unchecked. We live in a world where the likes of Donald Trump are allowed to preach racism and violence. We live in a world where almost half of the richest nation on earth voted for a man of ignorance, deceit, and violence as their leader.

    Our world values something we call “economic growth” above anything else. A world where beauty and natural resources are trampled and destroyed so that titans of industry can accumulate ever more. So that corrupt politicians and their supporters can continue to fill the troughs out of which they gorge themselves.

    We need to bring about a world where we aim for growth in happiness, not the economy. An environment where what we care about is the eradication of poverty and suffering above all else.

    My detractors will trot out well worn tropes, the trickle down effect being chief among these. But try trickling down to the people in Grenfell Tower. Try trickling down to the victims of Robert Mugabe or the human detritus so despised by the American presidency.

    I am not a believer in Christ, but try reading the Beatitudes and see if you can spot any similarities with the aims outlined by Extinction Rebellion.

    Take a look at the Eightfold Noble Path and dare to tell me I am wrong to feel the way I do.

    For thousands of years good men (and women) have seen the “truth”. For thousands of years we have ignored and trampled such people underfoot.

    If we are to rise to Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, it is time to start listening. And time to act. Peaceably, but decisively. NOW.

  • Ancient and Modern

    Ancient and Modern

    While I am mesmerized by the beauty of nature and the past, naive Luddism is not a philosophy to be espoused or admired.

    A spirit seems to inhabit my world, it is true. I hear its call most clearly in the silence of quiet contemplation, far from the brashness of modernity. Far from concrete, distanced from a world in which acquisition is all, removed from a society ruled by the market and Margaret Thatcher’s hungry ghost.

    Does that mean that I despise modernity? That I seek a return to the ideal of a noble savage of innate goodness, unsullied by the corrupting influences of civilization?

    It does not. Of my many faults, rank ignorance and foolish daydreaming are not writ large.

    I may long for a life of remote beauty untroubled by modernity and the motor car, but I am in no doubt of the need for the dentist and the doctor when dis-ease comes knocking at my door.

    Does modernity and progress by necessity go hand in hand with ugliness and the destruction of all that is beautiful and sacred? Is a market economy, where only the fittest survive, the only secure route to technological advance? I think not.

    My concept of god, spirit, nirvana may be more of a mindset, than a place I can reach by boat across the Styx, or through a life dedicated to the service of religion.

    I hope that godhead may be our future, but not in the form of dead handed dogma from the past. But I believe that such a future may, should, encompass all that is good from our past. Our dreaming spires, our great works of art and music, our philosophy, our humanity. Modernity should encourage and preserve what we have got right, while encouraging us to leave behind what we have got so badly wrong.

    That I am a mystic will not have been lost on those who have followed my pages. What may be less clear is that my mysticism espouses the future while worshiping the best in our past.

    Where does modernity meet mysticism? Or rather where would I like to see the two combine. In the Omega Point of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Developed further by thinkers such as the physicists David Deutsch and Frank Tipler.

    Many will consider such views to be nonsensical pseudoscience. Many will despise equally the technological singularity of futurists such as Ray Kurtzweil.

    And yet if man can not dream, what chance of a better future? We must dream and we must believe we can achieve perfection. That we can elevate ourselves, levitate by pulling on our own bootstraps.

    Skepticism appears to this non-scientist to be short sighted and unhelpful. Those with their noses too close to the coal face of scientific endeavor may not be in the right position to see the wider implications of the progress they are helping to achieve. Perhaps that is where philosophy must play its part.

    Asked if sentience is innate to the universe, I would have to respond that I do not know. Asked if consciousness is a mere by product of materialism I would respond that I hope not. Asked if we have a soul, however that may have emerged, I would answer that I hope so.

    And if we have no soul? What should we make of a world where our very awareness is some cosmic and unforeseen accident?

    If we are a by-product of random algorithm, we should rejoice that such an accident has come to pass and we should seek to transcend blind chance. If an Omega Point has not been pre-ordained by a deity of old, then all the more reason to make it our goal.

    To transcend the animal and the primordial soup from which we came and to seek to become gods. To create divinity, if none exists. Not Olympian gods though, not fearsome gods of wrath wielding hammers in the halls of Valhalla.

    We must become gods of peace and hope, decency and good nature.

    Guided by the still, small voice we hear within, we must use our gifts to eradicate the pain, poverty and misery with which uncaring evolution has burdened us. If there is a god, then perhaps, as de Chardin believed, we are destined to meet up with him on his own plane.