Matters of Consequence by Copthorne Macdonald
Foreword
By Paul H. Ray
What’s really important in life? What really matters in this world? What really deserves our scarce time and attention, beyond the crush of everyday demands that are merely urgent? As a college student, I kept asking these big questions, going to whole libraries of books in search of the answers. But the scholars of the time had trouble formulating helpful answers. Now, finally, after four decades, here’s the book I was looking for as a student. It says that surprising new answers are emerging, and that they can both excite and dismay us. Coming back to those big questions just after the turn of the millennium, I am aware just how much unwisdom drives modern society, and how in risky times, good books like this give a solid basis for serious action in the world. In an endorsement for this book, I wrote: “Get it. You need it.” Why?
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.
How do you look into what’s important in life without getting caught in arid academic abstractions, or the media maelstrom of the moment, or canned religious homilies? For most of the twentieth century, the average person of the Western world knew deep in her guts that the abstractions of linguistic philosophers were even farther from life than their predecessors. Good thinkers need what lies just a step this side of philosophy toward real data and real life, what is indeed being offered here:
· How to spot, and then how to ask, the most important life questions.
· How to reason about those questions, including whatever the latest new paradigms offer.
· How to turn library research into a coherent, compelling new narrative appropriate to our time of change from one kind of civilization to the next.
· Where to look, such as the resource list at the end of the book, for digging further into the big questions.
· Which shoulders we need to stand on to see farther than the giants of the past.
· Which curiosity bump is really worth scratching.
Copthorne Macdonald and I — and a whole population of independent thinkers, many of whom are named in this book — are concerned with the questions of how real wisdom might emerge in our times. In my own body of work, I argue that a Wisdom Culture is trying to be born, one that can serve as a crucial holding environment for personal wisdom and societal wisdom to be much more common than it is today.* I wrote a book with my wife, Dr. Sherry Anderson, called The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, which is the first of what is planned to be a whole series of books to document what is emerging, and what our conscious intent could create.
That first book is a kind of existence proof: The process of changing to a Wisdom Culture has already begun. If it’s already here, then even the most hardened cynics must admit it: it’s real. 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, and 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 a return to small town and Bible-thumping verities of the kind espoused by Jerry Falwell). We called them Cultural creatives because everything about this population leads to creating that a new culture, especially given their bias toward action as citizens who have participated more within, and learned more from, the many 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.
What is remarkable is that these developments are not just about our possible future, but what has already been developing in our recent past and present. Yes, it started in the Sixties, but it’s been going on continuously ever since. Yet almost none of that is “news” by the standards of the corporate media of our time, and the West scarcely knows that all those twenty kinds of movements have been continuously going on. So we are shocked when there are massive demonstrations against the WTO and the corporate takeover of globalization, occurring in cities around the globe. Where did they come from? Answer: they’ve been here all along. 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 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.
Matters of Consequence is about ideas, and how they change the world. It is also about how ideas change our minds, and our worldviews, to the point that we can say that what we now are coming to believe is real is starting to overturn the materialist worldview that the West has lived with for 500 years. But it is not just a matter of the quality of content of our thinking and beliefs, it is also a matter of the quality of consciousness we bring to the process. Merely changing our minds in a content-based sense is trivial. Macdonald carries the whole matter to a new level, following the trail that has been blazed by the consciousness movements over the last forty years, drawing upon the seminal Cultural Creatives thinkers who are scarcely visible to the larger culture, who in turn are drawing upon the Perennial Philosophy that goes back for millennia.
It is important to grasp that this is not about accepting anybody’s religious belief, but rather is about developing the quality of that awareness which holds our thinking minds. Furthermore, to be effective, this takes training and hard inner work. The Modern mind scarcely acknowledges different forms of consciousness than waking, dreaming or sleeping, drunk or sober. The notion that there might be several hundred additional forms of consciousness, some of which are vastly more effective for important problems, and for developing a satisfactory life, is well beyond what our materialist civilization can encompass. It will however, be a linchpin of the emerging culture.
Fortunately, we have voluminous evidence that this works from other cultures, diverse spiritualities and sophisticated spiritual schools, who in effect are saying, “don’t believe anything without proof: get the training and see for yourself.” It’s a form of skillfully guided empiricism that differs only slightly from both science and technology, except that it is applied to the psyche and inner experience. This yields larger and more encompassing forms of consciousness, deeper forms of consciousness that are closer to objective reality, and more acute thinking that is dehypnotized from neuroses and cultural prejudices. In other words, it takes the question of what is most important really seriously, and changes our minds in truly fundamental ways.
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.
New social structures can be built from the bottom up by citizens, and especially by civil society organizations, called NGOs, or they can be built from the top down by power centers. As Macdonald notes, the civil society organizations have a moderately good track record. Top down changes from the power centers often don’t, because they lack the detailed knowledge and experimentation that goes into the bottom up kind. The value of all the work on transformations of the social system and of our psyches is that at the end of the day, it looks like it creates a new kind of virtuous spiral upward. 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?
* In the research monograph, The Integral Culture Survey, I called that emergent culture an Integral Culture, but found that the term did not communicate well to a general audience, and tended to get confused with what Ken Wilber was doing in parallel with my work. So I decided Wisdom Culture is the better term. But as Macdonald says, what will get us there is very much an “integral” approach.