Future – Page 14 – Public Intelligence Blog

2008/02/242009/10/30

Review: The Ingenuity Gap–Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Future, Information Society

Key Piece in a Body of Work of Great Import, February 24, 2008

Thomas Homer-Dixon

I have read and reviewed one earlier book by this author, and bought the two more recent works a week ago after realizing I had seriously under-estimated the relevance of this author's work to my holistic integrative “civilization resilience” intent.

This is a five-star book and I expect Upside of Down will be as well.

I was immediately struck by the grace with which the author credits key other minds in the body of the work rather than just as a footnote.

Here are the highlights from my flyleaf notes, and a few other recommended readings:

+ Complexity soaring, need ideas for better institutions and better social arrangements.

+ Delusion of control over complex systems we barely comprehend

+ Citing Paul Rober: ideas co-equivalent to capital and labor

+ Not enough time to reflect (I am reminded of

The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

+ Full credit to H. G. Wells for anticipating the need for a World Brain to manage the complex of complexes

+ Excellent overview of mistakes by the economists. I recommend as well

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

+Wealth gaps + migrations = poor global management

+ Losing 25% of our biodiversity

+ Delays in policy understanding, decisions, action, and outcomes compound losses over time

+ Mike Whitfield cited on need for holistic view, keystone species, and radical differences in compressed time scales. I am reminded of everything written by Richard Falk, Ervin Laszlo and others in the 1970's and 1980's.

+ Population factor is profound

+ Corruption is the primary obstacle to reform

+ Garbage overtaking coastlines while nitrogen leeches into water and carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere

+ Citing David Harvey, “hypercapitalism” compresses time and space while over-producing both wasted production and concentrated wealth

+ Our collective ego is blocking our collective intelligence. See the new book, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

+ Losing our sense of place, not getting enough signals to understand the tipping point circumstances

+ Complexity goes awry (he cited Perrow, whose book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies remains a seminal work (simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and fix; complex systems have multiple points of failure that interact in unpredictable and sometimes undiscoverable ways; we live in a constellation of complex systems well beyond our ken)

+ Complex systems characterized by multiplicity; causal feedback; some tightly coupled; interdependence; openness; synergy; and nonlinear behavior.

+ Chaos theory warns us that nature will magnify the smallest perturbation from humans

+ Four stages of human perception of nature: 1) Balancing; 2) Anarchic; 3) Resilient; 4) Evolving.

+ Citing Wally Broeker: “Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”

+ Social systems are path dependent, delay at any point can be disastrous

+ Lessons of financial crises: governments and the IMF are out of touch with speed and breadth of financial systemic changes; computer-driven changes can accelerate and deepen mistakes

+ Citing Kofi Annan: “imbalance between economic, social, and political realms can never be sustained for long.”

+ Author: social system out of synch with natural and technological systems

+ Software code doubling every two years, bugs a real problem, still in pre-industrial era

+ Information glut has a critical bottleneck, lack of a sense-making bridge from data to our cognitive absorption

+ Ingenuity is both technical and social

+ Our biggest problem is the failure of our economic institutions and policies

+ Washington DC bureaucrats, including senior CIA analysts, “largely out of their depth”

+ Pace of change, depth of ignorance, and political resistance all assume scary proportions

+ Self-organizing resilience and adapting systems could be key

+ As ingenuity gap widens “need imagination, metaphor, and empathy more than ever.”

+ Afterword: relentless increase in complexity while “world economic system is profoundly dysfunctional.”

+ Most interesting to me, as I have committed to publish a book on “Cultural Intelligence” in 2009, is the author's citing of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, saying culture is “information–skills, attitudes, beliefs, values–capable of affecting individuals' behavior.”

There are other notes but Amazon imposes a word limit. This is a great book, and I honor it by listing other great and relevant works below (to my limit of ten):

The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

2008/02/242009/10/30

Review: The Upside of Down–Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Future, Information Society

Spectacular Synthesis, Signals Emergence of Collective Intelligence, February 24, 2008

Thomas Homer-Dixon

I learned a great deal more about this author when two chapters in a book I just published, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace featured his thinking: an interview of him by Hassan Masum; and his interview of the Rt Hon Paul Martin on the important topic of the Internet and democracy.

Consequently, I may place more value on this book than some of the other reviewers, but I choose to give it a solid five stars. In combination with his earlier book The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future, and the work of many, many people on emergent collective, peace, commercial, gift, cultural, and earth intelligence, all subsets of the emerging discipline of public intellligence (self-governance founded on full access to all information to produce reality-based balanced budgets), I regard the author as one of a handful of individuals exploring the possibilities of cognitive collective integral consciousness.

I have a note: superb single best overview. I cannot list all the books I would like, being limited to ten links, the ones I do are a token. See my 1100+ other reviews and my many lists for a more comprehensive stroll through the relevant literatures.

Highlights from my notes:

+ Five stresses (population, energy, environmental, climate, economic)

+ I have a note, what about mental, cultural, physical stress (e.g. dramatic increases in mental illness, blind fundamentalism, and obesity).

+ See the image on predicting revolution, the author observes that revolutions come from synchronous failures with negative synergy.

+ Connectivity and speed are multipliers, and I am reminded that virtually all US SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems in the US are connected to the Internet and hackable (meanwhile, the Chinese have figured how to hack into systems not connected to the Internet, but drawing electric power from the open grid).

+ Synchronous failures get worse when they jump system boundaries and created frayed less resilient networks.

+ He write of the thermodynamics of empire and the declining return on investment from energy discovery and exploitation.

+ He writes of migration getting much much worse in the future, which confirms my own view that border control is not the answer, stabilization & reconstruction of the source countries is the longer-term sustainable answer.

+ He credits George Soros with having the first intuitive understanding of the asymmetries of wealth in relation to destabilization of the world.

+ He observes that we have transformed and degrades half the Earth's land surface, and is particularly concerned with the washing away of entire nations of topsoil (compounded by agriculture that does not do deep-root farming).

+ As the book winds to a conclusion, the author discusses massive denial and the loss of resilience that gets worse each day.

+ “Non-extremists have a formidable ‘collective action problem.'”

+ Need alternative values (I am reminded that the literature points out just two sustainable approaches to agriculture and community: the Amish and the Cuban). He notes that fundamentalists are especially ill-equipped by their myopia to be adaptive or resilient.

+ He covers the polarization between rich and poor. While other books listed below are more trenchant, the author has done a superb job of integrating historical, economic, social, and cultural works. This is a very fine book.

+ He adds a useful snippet on Cultural Intelligence, distinguishing between utilitarian values (likes and dislikes), moral values (fairness and justice), and existential values (significance and meaning).

+ Violence is discusses as stemming from motivation, opportunity, and framing–all of which can be found in the eight stages of genocide as defined by Dr. Greg Stanton of Genocide Watch.

+ He ends the book with praise of the open source model (search from my Gnomedex 2007 keytone, “Open Everything”) and concludes that the Internet is not living up to its potential as a platform for large-scale problem solving. I agree, and I condemn Google for choosing to become an illicit vacuum cleaner of other people's information, rather than an open source platform for allowing every person to be a collector, processor, analyst, producer, and consumer of public intelligence (search for my book review of “Google 2.o: The Calculating Predator.” IBM ando the Google partners are literally BLIND and refusing to assimilate documented early warnings on how Google is preparing to scorch banking, communications, data storage, entertainment, and publishing, all without respect for privacy or copyright, and without regulatory oversight.

I list below eight books I recommend for reading as an expansion of this elegant synthesis. At Earth Intelligence Network you can find a table of 1000+ books I have reviewed, sortable by threat, policy, or challenger.

A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)

2008/02/222009/10/30

Review: Microtrends–The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes

3 Star, Future

Eye-glazing trivia of limited value to seeing big changes, February 22, 2008

Mark Penn

Edit of 23 Feb 08 to reexamine conclusion of book and add context.

FOUR STARS for trivia buffs. Absolutely nothing wrong with the well-organized micro-trends, but they don't connect to “tomorrow's changes.”

I like books that pupport to discuss trends that reveal “tomorrow's big changes,” but this book, while clever, has been over-sold.

Rather than provide my usual summative review, I will describe this book with just one word: disappointing.

Below are books I pulled from my shelf that I have found to be much better, along with everything ever written by Alvin and Heidi Toffler.

What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States
The Nine Nations of North America
How The World Really Works
The Clustering of America
The Clustered World : How We Live, What We Buy, and What It All Means About Who We Are
Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
New Rules Searching for Self Fulfillment in a World Turned up Side Down
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

On the latter book, I have to ask myself how is it possible for the two Democratic contenders to campaign for the Presidency without once mentioning Dick Cheney and the documented high crimes and misdemeanors he is alleged to have committed? I place the last two books at the opposite extreme from this book on microtrends. The book lacks any semblance of a “so what” and it certainly does not portend, as its subtitle claims, “tomorrow's big changes.”

Out of respect for the early negative comment, I reread the conclusion and reconfirmed that while it lays claim to predicting increased fragmentation in the future and a heavy Internet play such as Internet marriages, this is much too facile and presumptuous. My reading focuses on the collapse of complex societies, the desperate straits of the five billion at the bottom, one billion of them in extreme poverty that produces wars, crime, and disease without borders. It is in that light that I find this book to be disappointing. This is a rich boy's tour of his own (expanded neighborhood) and has no connection to the reality that I follow on a daily basis via Earth Intelligence Network.

Definitely FOUR STARS for mega-trivia, but only three, at best, for serious students of how we might shape our future to create a prosperous world at peace.

2008/02/132009/10/30

Review: Creating a World Without Poverty–Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Future, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Other Side of C. K. Prahalad's Fortune at the Bottom, February 13, 2008

Muhammad Yunus

I realized close to two years ago, after reading C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks), that I wanted to be intelligence officer to the poor instead of to a president, and that I needed to create the field of public intelligence (decision support for everyone at no cost). I strongly recommend that the two books be read together. See my review of that book. See also John Bogle's The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism as well as William Grider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy. Natural Capitalism, Capitalism 3.0, Green to Gold, Cradle-to-Cradle, all book titles, are converging with Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business as well as unconventional Global Assemblages.

This book, the last that I read during a power outage lasting most of the day, really rocked me. Apart from the fact that the author has labored anonymously for three decades before being propelled into the public consciousness with his well-served Nobel Peace Prize (a prize that Prahalad should be considered for as well), everything in this book resonates with the path the 24-founders of Earth Intelligence Network have chosen.

The author's Nobel presentation, “Poverty is a Threat to Peace,” is at the back of the book, and has since been validated by the UN High-Level Threat Panel in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

The author not only lent to the poor, he lent to beggars at no interest with no schedule, and proved conclusively that the poor and beggars are “credit worthy” by virtue of “being alive.” He also pushed technology to rural areas.

By page xvii I have goosebumps and a glorious feeling that good stuff is happening faster and bigger than most realize.

The author notes early on that unfettered capitalism creates sccial problems rather than solving them. He suggests most compellingly that social business fills a gap left by government, foundations, and multilateral institutions.

While the book is missing a sense of shared information and a global Range of Gifts Table that anyone, from individual to foundation, can use to make precision contributions and interventions, it is very easy to see how this book and Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom as well as How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition and all come together with Prahalad's vision and my own of public intelligence in the public interest.

The author recognizes, as Alvin Toffler and others have pointed out, that all of our institutions are failing. I recommend books I have listed and reviewed on how complex societies collapse. I would venture to say that the US Government, with 27 secessionist movements, is collapsing from a mix of political and economic corruption compounded by cultural arrogance, but most importantly, because the government is stuck in the top down elite driven secret information Weberian model, and the government has failed to empower all local communities and all individuals with bottom up resilient adaptable information sharing capabilities.

The bookm draws a stark contrast between the World Bank which measures loans given out, and the Grameen Bank, which measures outcomes at multiple levels including kids staying in school.

As I read about a social business, I envision every village as its own business.

The author addresses and dismisses Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as insufficient. He calls for proactive collaborative engagement with potential customers in the five billion poor, and I am instantly reminded of the Business Week cover story of 20 June 2005, on the power of mass volunteer collaboration.

The author focuses on women, mothers, and their children. This tallies with Michael O'Hanlon and Ralph Peters, both of whom regard the education of women as the single best investment bar none.

The author took several steps beyond his pioneering micros-cash loans. He created social networks of those being helped, and he froze payments or interst and did whatever necessary to get defaulters back on track without penalty. This guy is the Mother Teresa of micro-economics!

Today self-help groups of around 20 can apply to the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development for group loans.

His integrity is without peer. Interest over the life of the loan would never exceed the loan itself.

He prefers social business to charity because charity encourages corruption (in my own experience, 50% of every AID or contractor dollar goes toward corruption or fraud).

He observes that social business does not have conventional metrics, but it provides meaning and opportunity, and I observe in my own note, it lowers the “true costs” of virtually everything it touches.

Featured in this book, the middle half, is the French company Danone, and the joint venture to create a yogurt for the poor children, ultimately being delivered in a bio-degradable cup that converts into fertilizer.

The last chapter is on information technology for the poor. I personally envision free cell phones for each village, then for each neighborhood, and finally for each household, monetizing the transactions and the real-time knowledge.

The author concludes that we need new social value metrics and even a Social Dow Jones Index. This is the opposite of what I have been thinking about ever since Paul Hawkins taught me about “true costs.” Now that Scanback allows a person at the point of sale to photograph a bar code and send it to Amazon to get their price, the channel is open to send back water content (4000 liters in a designer shirt from Bangladesh cotton), fuel content, child labor hours, and tax avoidance status).

The last note is one I want to present to a Fortune 50 Assets Management firm. Danone is to be admired and respected for committing to a sccial business, and it found a solution that permitted it to engage without letting down its investors: it created a new fund explicitly advertised as 90% traditional and 10% social business, and it was over-subscribed instantly.

On page 25 are listed 25 distinct Gameen companies. On pages 58-59 are Sixteen Decisions that alone warrant the Nobel Peace Prize. What these sixteen decisions do for the beneficiaries of micro-cash loans is nothing less than a socially-inspired form of the Ten Commandments, focused on creating health people in a healthy family within a healthy community.

A few other exceptional books:
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People

I am increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that all the books I am reading and reviewing are in English. I have read a few in English stemming out of India and elsewhere, and I am beginning to feel a very deep vacuum that needs to be filled. I envision 100 million volunteers using Telelanguage.com to educate the poor one cell call at a time, but I now also see an urgent need to translate and make available non-fiction literature in other languages, easily retrievable in micro-text for micro-cash.

2008/01/112009/10/30

Review: Plan B 3.0–Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Priorities, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

The Best and Most Essential Guide, Not the Whole Picture, January 11, 2008

Lester R. Brown

I have followed Lester Brown's dedication to evaluating the state of our planet for over a decade, and wrote to the Nobel Committee urging them to recognize him, Herman Daly, and Paul Kawkins and the two Lovins instead of Al Gore. They have all done a great deal more of the heavy lifting.

I decided to purchase this book when Medard Gabel, creator of the analog World Game with Buchminster Fuller, gave me a budget for saving the planet that totals no more than $230 billion a year (at a time when we spend $1.3 trillion waging war).

I've gone through the book and consider it to be a best in class effort, a seminal work no one else on the planet could have produced. In the author's chosen area of focus, there is no other book like this one. However, some other books are easier to read and understand, such as High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them, and others do a better job of addressing all ten high-level threats to Humanity and Earth, such as A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

Here are a few highlights:

+ Book is offered free online (but the hard copy is much better deal, easier to work with, mark up and return to as a reference….use the online version to search for specifics.

+ The Introduction is clear and inspiring. This book is loaded with carefully collected facts ably presented.

+ $12 per gallon of fuel in “true costs” externalized and not billed

+ One 25 gallon ethanol tank takes enough grain to feed a person for a year. This means that those in hunger going to double from 600 million to 1.2 billion, as cars compete for grain (which is nuts).

+ Food-oil axis is developing into a triple crisis: oil, food, water. As 50% live in cities, the fuel intensity of food in the face of Peak Oil is becoming a major issue.

+ Stopping the ethanol program dead in its tracks is the single best thing US Government could do, followed my more wind farms and an end to coal plants.

+ Amazon reaching a tipping point, mega-fires are foreseen (as with New York City if its 1920's water system fails and a firestorm emerges)

+ Western model will not work for China or India (or Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and other Wild Cards)

+ Ice cap is melting fast, gfalciers are melting fast and causing small earthquakes.

+ 600 million refugees expected if sea level rises ten meters (33 feet)

+ Mortality has been reduced, but fertility has not, leaving persistent population issues.

+ 15 of 24 primary ecosystems degraded or pushed beyond their limits.

+ Climate has become more destructive, with 55 weather events costing $1.5 billion or more each since the 1980's.

+ Great discussion of the ecology of cities, Bioneers would resonate with all the author recommends.

+ Scarcity crossing national boundaries.

+ Excellent notes, heavy reliance on UN and other primary sources.

+ He proposes a budget of $190 billion a year to achieve our social goals and restore the Earth.

+ The only thing missing from this book are some of the positives, for example bacteria as an energy source, healing bacteria, eletrified water as a cleanser needed no other ingredients, the recovery of the Dead Sea with furrows that retain every drop of water.

I am so surprised to find only one review that I wanted to quickly add my praise for this author, while also pointing out three things that a handful of wealthy philanthropists could do tomorrow to execute this vision.

#1 We should all support the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) as created by the Natural Capital Institute, and encourage colleges and universities around the world to begin loading the “true cost” information for all products and services (e.g. 4000 gallons of water in a designer T-shirt). Delivered to end-users via cell phone query at the point sale, this will dramatically affect markets.

#2 We should ask the 90 major foundations in the USA to host a summit to which all governments, non-governmental organizations, prominent wealthy individuals, and the United Nations are invited. The objective should be to create an online “Range of Gifts” Table that identifies specific contributions that can be made at every cost level, to eradicate the ten high level threats within fifteen years, by harmonizing the twelve policies such that ALL organizations and ALL individuals can opt in on a master budget that is strategically sound, operationally executable, and tactically open to all.

#3 We must absorb the wisdom of C. K. Prahalad, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and others listed below, and recognize that the only enduring sustainable solutioin lies in educating the five billion poor, who do not have the time or the money to sit in a classroom for 18-22 years. We can create today, using Telelanguage.com, an immediate registry of 100 million volunteers with Internet access, speaking 183 languages among them, who can educate the poor–who are not stupid, just illiterate–one cell call at a time.

I believe that Reuniting America, True Majority, and WISER are reaching critical mass. All we lack now is one well endowed champion who sees that it is our collective intelligence that will solve the world's problems, and there is no need to run for President. Here are the handful of books I would recommend to Michael Bloomberg if he were to ask me today how to fulfil his vision of political, educational, and philanthropic reform.

Visit Earth Intelligence Network for free public intelligence on the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. The weekly report “GLOBAL CHALLENGES: The Week in Review,” will appeal to anyone interested in this book and its topic.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
The Future of Life

2008/01/052011/10/22

Review: Living Beyond Your Lifetime–How to be Intentional About the Legacy You Leave

5 Star, Future, Politics, Religion & Politics of Religion, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Final Review of Four Books Taken Together

January 5, 2008

Mike Huckabee

I bought four of Governor Huckabee's books, and spent much of Sunday going through them. I've decided to do one review posted four times, to provide anyone visiting one of the four books to see four snapshots in one place. I am NOT looking for multiple votes. This is my bottom-line over-all assessment of one of the three people I believe is qualified to b;ring our Nation together, the others being Senator Obama, and Representative Paul, who will not win but could demand electoral reform when Congress returns.

1998,Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence, is his first book and also the most earnest. I like this book, very much. The Governor weaves a rich tapesty of a culture of disrespect, too many bad laws, not enough community and faith, and I for one buy into his message: our society has fragmented and we reap what we sow. See also my reviews of:
Rage of the Random Actor: Disarming Catastrophic Acts And Restoring Lives
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead

2000, this book, I find equally earnest, with a very strong consistent appreciation for God and faith and community in faith, for stewardship. Like the first book, I give this one five stars. I now include this book with other positive books on religion, see my reviews of:
GOD'S POLITICS: Why The Right Gets It Wrong & The Left Doesn't Get It (H)
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik

2007 Character Makes a Difference: Where I'm From, Where I've Been, and What I Believe
2007 From Hope to Higher Ground: My Vision for Restoring America's Greatness

Both of the above are formula books, somewhat contrived, but earnest and sufficient to come to at least two conclusions:

1) This citizen is not going to let go of God or faith. He is completely different from Milt Romney, whom I consider to be just a little too slick about his Mormon loyalties (CIA officers who were Mormons would fall asleep at their desks because the Mormon church had them up working all night).

2) This is a sincere good man (I based this on seeing him elsewhere as well). I frankly think that he brings the right respect for faith and God, and we need some of that in the White House, not lies and treason documented in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. As an estranged moderate Republican and Methodist, outrages by the crimes committed in our name, I think its time we had a moderate faith in God back in the White House.

The latter book touches on various “mandate for change” issues, and one has to be somewhat dubious on his record, since more than one person from Arkansas has told me they lost income and the schools lost funding during his tenure.

We need change. I'd like to see Mike Huckabee lead a dialog with all congregations on God's Politics, the Left Hand of God, and Faith-Based Golden Rule morality in all our policies at all levels. Barack Obama is energizing the young, but still severely handicapped by his elderly advisors who are out of touch with global reality.

In my view, as a person who cares deeply about the Republic and has spent the last 15 years obsessing on global reality and a strategy for saving the Earth for seven generations and beyond, I would like to see Mike Huckabee being the evangelicals back into the fold, without the attendant lunacy and criminality that characterized the Bush-Cheney White House.

Please do not vote for this review in more than one place.

2007/10/192009/10/17

Review: Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Superbly Crafted Primer on “The Next Step”

October 19, 2007

Steve McIntosh

My first note is: “the next step.”

The two Appendices are, in my view, a better starting place for the book as a whole.

The author synthesizes natural sciences, developmental psychology, political thought, philosophy, and spiritual traditions. I have a note later in the book on “this helps to understand the DNA of the body-mind-soul.”

The author tells us that integral philosophy can and should be used to design a world federation Constitution, and later on in the book tells us that philosophy should be the bridge between science and religion and later on suggests that philosophy, science, and spirituality (the opposite of rote religion) should retain their distinct values, and not be “blended” inappropriately.

The author is confident that a global self-governance network, while moving some powers up from the national level, will also result in moving many more powers *down* to the local and provincial levels, and this struck me as a point that needs to be developed further if we are to reunite the 27 secessionist movements in the US and the 5,000 secessionist and indigenous splinter groups around the world. That could be a second book in the making!

The author posits (and provides) a universal declaration of human rights, and suggests that tiered membership in a World Federation could start with the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan, and gradually absorb others who are at differing levels of consciousness.

If I had one criticism of the author's work, it is his ready confusion of American and European consciousness and the naked amorality of American policy-makers, including an abjectly dysfunctional and corrupt Congress, with the 50 million plus cultural creatives or the 80-110 million members whose parent organizations belong to Reuniting America. This needs more dissection and remediation.

He tells us that most institutions are artifacts, and this is consistent with the view in Conversations with God and other works about how religions as intermediaries have become false gods, while government and economic and media institutions have become corrupt and mis-representative.

The Wilburian distinction of the it, the I, and the we–nature, self, and culture–is helpful, and the author takes this a step further with his discussion of a cross-cultural spiral.

He provides superb tables and text describing each of the different levels of socio-cultural consciousness, and I now begin to see his view of how integral consciousness can embrace, welcome, and deconflict among differing levels of consciousness, including warrior consciousness among the Islamic fundamentalists, and the modernist and post-modernist consciousness of more developed societies (again, he neglects to address the sharp imbalance between the American people and their terribly retarded government).

He discusses cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, and values intelligence, and stresses that science without values is not complete. He acknowledges E. O. Wilson's contribution of Consilience, but does not cite John … who gave us Voltaire's Bastards.

Importantly, he outlines how “what is truth” changes at each level of consciousness, and I find this to be among his most important insights. This is one of the author's most vital contributions, and one that future Administrations would do well to recognize: reality really is socially-constructed, and one must not only see reality as the other person sees it, but see it as a parallel universe that must be respected if one is to engage constructively.

The book works toward a conclusion by noting that integral politics transcends the schism between left and right, and here he cites Paul Ray's work reported out in 1995 on the distinctions in America between the traditionals, moderns, and cultural creatives. He says the degree of transcendence is determined by the scope of *inclusion* and that our challenge is to harmonize and integrate distinct cultures, not subdue them!

Integral consciousness finds *new* solutions via “vision-logic” centered in volition (good intention) rather than cognition, and this is very consistent with the spiritual literature that puts being (action) before planning (cognition). This is a 100-year path of value metabolism equal to the 100-year path since the last Enlightenment.

The author furthers my belief that religions should be rejected as we all adopt direct spiritual relationships with ourselves, others, our societies, and God expressed as the community of man. Beauty, truth, and goodness are the commonalities across cultures and consciousness, windows on the divine, and the place where we examine how values impact on evolution.

A rapid survey of past pioneers if offered:
* Hegel: dialectic of consciousness
* Bergson: intuition, unmediated knowledge
* Whitehead: philosophy as mediator between science and religion
* Teilhard de Chardin: evolutionary thresholds, physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere
* Gebster: coined term “integral consciousness”
* Baldwin: development psychology and genetic logic
* Graves: bio-psycho-social
* Habermas: founder of integral philosophy
* Wilbur: framer of integral philosophy, “big picture”
* McIntosh: need to distinguish, not blend, science, philosophy, spirituality

The author goes on to address the integral reality frame, the spiral of development, and the evolutionary goal of global (but not natural) governances. I was reminded of the “Salmon Nation” and wondered how species representation would play here.

VALUES are what link and nurture the inner and the outer, while making visible previously invisible structures of consciousness and culture across societies and civilizations.

Toward the end the author brings up the Koestner concept of holons, and the view that individual organisms and their social networks co-exist and help define one another in ways that cannot be isolated.

The bottom line: we are moving toward increased complexity and increased unity, and I would add that the author posits a new solution that addresses the reasons why complex societies collapse, when their institutional artifacts fail to rise to the higher consciousness and social network “community mind and soul” that is necessary to scale.

The general direction of truth is the way forward and the transcendent purpose, evolution is sacred (I am reminded of Michael Dowd).

My last comment: “WOW.”