January/February 2004
(Patterns is sponsored by the Systems Thinking and Chaos Theory Network
and the American Society for Cybernetics)Matters of Consequence
by Copthorne Macdonald
Big Ideas Press. ISBN: 0968961878Excerpts from the Foreword by Paul H. Ray
Between these two covers is a model of responsible inquiry into many of the big questions that we really need to encounter, whether as youths or adults, not only for our personal benefit, but for the good of our civilization. At the level of our own personal inquiry, this is a tasty, chewy, energy-bar book designed to accelerate good thinking in new ways, not one of those castor oil books that some desiccated scholar would insist we need 'for our own good.' But we also need this one the way we need a compass as we step into an unknown land. A future world has thudded onto our doorsteps after 2000, and we're not so sure we like what we see. Our 500-year old "modern civilization" shows many signs of falling apart, and it really does look like a new and wiser civilization is trying to be born, side by side with looming planetary catastrophes. When both the facts and the rules of the game are changing, we need to pay close attention. As you'll read here, what needs our attention isn't just a matter of what we now know, but how we know it. Most important is what significance it has both for our individual life choices and our collective lives. Across our rapidly globalizing world, both business and governmental elites are indeed failing to see our world anew, much less think anew, and it harms all our chances.....
The most important matter of consequence
is our pressing need
to make history ourselves.The media serve as the gatekeepers of the official culture of Modernism, and seem quite intent on keeping paradigm-busting new ideas from reaching the general population, refusing to report on all the movements. As heavy consumers of news, Cultural Creatives rarely see their own faces there, and regularly see their values scorned. Consequently, one of the odd things about it is that they do not yet realize how many they are, nor do they have a collective identity-yet. That seems to be changing rapidly. We are starting to see a cultural change process that is self-aware, rather than the unconscious process of the past forty years.......
Most importantly for this book, we can see that it points us toward bringing a better quality of awareness to redesigning our world so that it works for all of us. At the end of the day, the most important matter of consequence is our pressing need to make history ourselves. It means changing our civilization ourselves rather than taking it as given. First, we must envision a world worth inhabiting, and then we must work to create it. We sometimes hear the term transformation bandied about as if it were a magic talisman, but in fact, all it means is structural change. Personal transformation is the hard work of changing the structure of our awareness, and social transformation is the even harder work of changing the structure of our society. .....
It would probably take the form of a new renaissance, where new social systems can support personal transformation and better cultural knowledge, and where transformational change in large numbers of people and their micro-cultures gives rise to new orders of cultural creativity that support further development of the social and cultural milieus that further support the people, and so on. We are then playing in the biggest game that anyone could imagine. What matters could be more consequential than that?
Comments by the Editor of Patterns, Barbara Dawes Vogl
In the process of rearranging our perspectives, our emotions, understandings and actions, many like Paul H. Ray and his wife Dr. Sherry Anderson, authors of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World have documented that the process of changing to a wisdom culture has already begun.
In the foreword to a very important book for the new year called Matters of Consequence, by Copthorne Macdonald, Ray writes that "Over the past forty years a new subculture has emerged whose values, lifestyles and worldviews are a kind of Third Way beyond left and right, beyond the culture wars between the Moderns (who believe in a materialist world, pretty much the one of Time magazine) and the Traditionals (cultural conservatives who want to return to small town and Bible-thumping verities of the kind espoused by Jerry Fallwell).
"We called them Cultural Creatives because everything about this population leads to creating a new culture, especially given their bias toward action as citizens who have participated more within, and learned more from, the various kinds of social movements and consciousness movements of the last forty years. We told the remarkable stories of some of those 50 million Americans and some 80-90 million more Western Europeans, and documented some of what they are already doing to change the world toward that emerging culture."
Of particular interest are two new books soon to be on the market. One is Matters of Consequence written by Copthorne Macdonald, an independent scholar, and former communication systems engineer. He writes about the nature and development of wisdom, new perspectives on mental and physical reality, and creating a sustainable future. Both he and his publisher mirror the qualities of the Cultural Conservatives mentioned above.
Formerly a columnist with two U.S. national magazines and Associate Editor of one of them, Macdonald is currently on the Editorial Board of Integralis: Journal of Integral Consciousness, Culture, and Science. His engineering-related positions in the U.S. included Project Manager, Visual Communication and Display, at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh; Manager of the Electronic Design Department at Ball Brothers Research Corporation in Boulder Colorado; and Director of Research at Vidcom Electronics in New York City. He is a citizen of both the U.S. and Canada, and lives in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
The publisher, Big Ideas Press, is dedicated to publishing books that foster wisdom and a wisdom-based cuulture. They write: "Our books deal with big ideas—ideas that are broad in scope, address matters of deep human concern, transcend narrow categories and knowledge boundaries, and deal with complexity in helpful ways. We publishe books that help us sift what is really important in life from the not so important and downright trivial—books that respond to primal concerns such as our place in the cosmos, to personal concerns such as living an enjoyable, creative, significant life, and to societal concerns such as sustainability and economic justice."
