Weaving Meaning Back into Life
In this episode, we speak with deep and integrative thinker and writer Jeremy Lent, whose work weaves together science and traditional wisdom to lay out a solid foundation for a life-affirming worldview of deep interconnectedness. By dismantling the dominant narrative that we are machines driven by selfishness and competition, Jeremy helps us reconsider our human identity in the context of the deep intelligence and cooperativeness that animates life both within and around us. Such a recognition behooves us to drop the veil of supremacy that keeps us separate from the rest of nature and to embrace a path in which we can participate in changing the course from that of potential collapse to one of regenerating the Earth for symbiotic flourishing.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Jeremy Lent 0:00
We need to recognize that as our society itself is moving towards catastrophe essentially - this ecological devastation and these incredible mind boggling inequalities, and climate breakdown, and all everything around that - that as that happens, it's as though the dominant worldview was tightly knit and couldn't really be critiqued or couldn't really be changed, begins to unravel. Like there's this image, you can sort of imagine a tightly woven rug. And if you try to sort of tear that rug, because the pattern is wrong, and you want to repattern it, you can't because it's tightly woven. There's nothing you can do with your hands. But imagine all of the weave starts to unravel. And that unraveling might make things look kind of ugly and be kind of terrifying, but it also allows you to reweave the rug in a different kind of way.
Alan Ware 0:51
In this episode, we'll be hearing more from Jeremy Lent, an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization's existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life affirming future.
Nandita Bajaj 1:12
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:32
And I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, anthropocentrism, and overpopulation and their combined devastating impacts on social, reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice.
Nandita Bajaj 1:54
And thanks to you, our wonderful listeners, we now rank in the top 2% of all the podcasts globally. In addition to the podcast, we also run virtual educational programs at schools and conferences with a goal of empowering people to make liberated and responsible reproductive and consumptive choices. We do all of this with a really small staff and a tiny budget, and we count on you to keep doing this important work. As 2022 draws to a close, we hope you'll consider supporting our transformative programs. The vital work we do is not possible without the generosity of supporters like you just a small donation goes a long way to keep our podcast on the air and keep us expanding our outreach programs. Please click on the donate button in our show notes to learn about the different ways you can give which include one time or monthly donations as well as legacy gifts.
Alan Ware 2:50
Yes, legacy gifts are a really great way to support us. You can give to Population Balance through your will or trust or by naming Population Balance as a beneficiary of your life insurance policy, retirement plan or royalties. You can learn more on our website, populationbalance.org. And if you have feedback or guest recommendations, you can email us at podcast@populationbalance.org.
Alan Ware 3:14
And now on to today's guest, Jeremy Lent. Born in London, England, Lent received a BA in English literature from Cambridge University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. His award winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning explores the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His new book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe offers a coherent and intellectually solid foundation for a worldview based on connectedness that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future. He is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network, a global community exploring pathways to an ecological civilization and the nonprofit Liology Institute dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that can enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. And now on to our discussion. Hi, Jeremy, welcome to our podcast. We've been following your incredible work for a number of years and we're so excited to have you here.
Jeremy Lent 4:21
Thanks so much for having me here on the podcast. Looking forward to this conversation. Definitely.
Alan Ware 4:25
You've had a unique journey in that you've gone from being a tech entrepreneur in the late nineties to becoming this incredibly broad, deep thinker and seeker over the past two decades. I read your book, The Patterning Instinct a few years ago and your most recent book, The Web of Meaning not long after it came out last year. And we'd love to explore your personal journey that led you from being that business-oriented focus person to this truly integrative thinker, writer, motivator a little bit later on in the interview. But we'll start with your latest book, The Web of Meaning, where you open the book by asking the reader to visualize a family gathering with an imagined relative called Uncle Bob, holding forth on what he thinks the real world is. How would you describe the worldview of Uncle Bob?
Jeremy Lent 5:12
Yeah, Uncle Bob is a great place to begin. Because for a couple of reasons, really. Because we've all had that experience of being with family or friends or at work, or whatever it might be, and expounding some idea of what's possible, and somebody comes in, throws cold waters and say, "Oh, let me tell you about that. When you've been around the block like I've been, you'll know here's how things are." And all of a sudden, there's this kind of deadening quality to the sense of possibility. But an equally important reason to really kind of think about Uncle Bob is that we all have Uncle Bob within us, even those of us who feel we've got a glimpse of what's possible, and a different kind of transformed future that's out there. Because at least anyone who's born and raised within a dominant culture, we get so many of these ideas imprinted on us, there's always voices within us that sound like Uncle Bob even if they're not necessarily the dominant voice. So basically, Uncle Bob in this kind of tea party, represents what we might think of as like the dominant culture. And if you sort of just take the essence of what Uncle Bob is saying, it goes something like this, it says, you know, ultimately, all the world is competitive. That's the fundamentals of life. Humans are selfish, rational maximizers. And that's why capitalism works so well, because it just takes all that selfish, rational, maximizing and makes it the most efficient way it can be. And in fact, even life itself is like that. Look at The Selfish Gene. Evolution itself is just about this battle where one particular, even as the species is just like this machine dominated by this gene, but one organism outcompetes the other. And so humans have out competed the rest of them. That's why we've been successful. And we use technology. And sure, there might be a few problems, like global climate change, or ecological problems, or whatever. But you know, technology will solve that. Just let the market do its thing, and everything will be okay. And in fact, progress has been so great. Don't you know Steven Pinker's work? Everything is really getting better and better. And all the bad news we see in the headlines, that's all just because of the way in which human beings focus on the negative. And in this book, The Web of Meaning, I kind of show how every single thing I just said, those statements basically, is not just dangerous, leading us to destruction, but plain wrong, has been shown to be wrong scientifically. So what we think of as this kind of core scientific foundation for this dominant worldview, mostly are ideas that got formed hundreds of years ago, that have been completely superseded.
Alan Ware 7:48
Right. That would be like Tina, or the idea there is an alternative to markets and technology.
Jeremy Lent 7:54
Right, exactly. That was a statement from Margaret Thatcher back after the end of communism in the Soviet Union. And that is still an amazingly powerful notion. I mean, even you read people like Yuval Noah Harari that has more than ten million readers, is hugely influential intellectual, and somebody who's clearly like a deeply caring, real deep thinker who wants to see a positive outcome in all the issues we're looking at. And one of his books, he's explicitly makes that statement essentially, like, you know, there's only been these two alternatives, and one of them got like demolished with the loss of communism. So this is what we're left with. There's just one story. And that's just not the case. But the other stories have been basically they don't get out there in the mainstream media. So even somebody like Harari is not even aware that there is this other story out there.
Alan Ware 8:50
Right.
Jeremy Lent 8:51
I wrote an article, like an open letter if you will, to Harari a few years back where I talked about something like the fictions that Harari himself is not aware of. Because he's completely right that we do make meaning out of the world through patterning things in and out of our worldview. But we make up the story. Essentially, if you think what a pattern is, we exclude certain things, and we focus on certain things. And we look at the connections between those ones we focus on. Just like when we look at constellations in the stars or whatever, and we see a constellation, we see a pattern. And that's really the meaning making that humans do. But in that sense, Harari is completely right that, in fact, we can actually look at how the shape of history itself has been driven by the patterns of meaning that different cultures have put into their understanding of the universe. And of course, the implication of that is so profound, because what it says is that the ways in which we make meaning right now out of things, and the values that arise from that will actually direct the future of humanity in the future of Earth.
Nandita Bajaj 9:56
And you kind of talk about the dominant worldview of separation in your latest book, The Web of Meaning, and you talk about how it's at the heart of the modern worldview. And a big part of what you're calling for is a shift in humanity's worldview. How would you describe that separation and how do you think it has led us astray as you were just speaking in the modern world?
Jeremy Lent 10:19
Well, separation definitely is, if you have to take one single word, the word the best describes how this worldview actually works. But it's also helpful just before I even describe this dominant worldview, to recognize that, really, we can sort of go into deep history and look at the way different worldviews from the earliest times have been essentially like layers of separation, building on each other all the way back to when humans first evolved as human beings and things like language and self-awareness led to a certain separateness from the rest of life that hadn't existed before that did make humans unique among other animals that we share the planet with. And then with the rise of agriculture, you get a new separation with people putting fences up and saying, here's like the very notion of cultivation, here's what we cultivate and here's the sort of scary wildness outside of our fences, and separation between human beings. And, and then really, the foundations of this dominant worldview actually can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece, with a separation between mind and body, except in those days, it was like soul and body, and a sense that rather than sort of the source of value being in life itself, it came from some sort of perfect external source and the world itself is just polluted, messy kind of, world that was trying to be perfect, like this eternity out there. And that ultimately led to Christianity. And what's interesting is, and we think right now of science as being in antagonism with Christianity, but Christianity with its dualistic thinking was really incubated this dominant worldview, which arose in Europe in the seventeenth century. And what this dominant worldview basically says is that nature is a machine, that humans with that dualistic spirit I was talking about, that famous statement from Descartes, the foundation of Western philosophy, "I think, therefore I am," that our very identity comes from our thinking capacity, and that thinking capacity both separates us from other nonhuman animals because they don't think the way we do - it even separates us from our body, like our thinking capacity, the soul became basically translated as mind and we got this mind/body split. And when you think of nature as a machine, then it gets to be okay to do whatever you want to it. It basically becomes a resource to exploit for human benefit. And that same notion of separation also lead to a sense of separation between human beings and this sense that a human is an individual, and that the identity of a human being is not part of a shared collective identity, but is separate from others. And along with that, finally, came this notion of some sort of myth of this inherent superiority of the white, European Christian and I'd add white, European, Christian male, basically, at this sort of apex, and that all other races, all other elements of humanity around the world, in a way were seen as no better than the other animals, like subhuman in some ways, and therefore ripe for exploitation. Even considered to be actually a moral imperative to bring this kind of understanding of Christianity and basically exploit the natives in order to bring this, what was considered a superior worldview, into being. And that has been so successful, even though it just grew up in a few countries in Europe hundreds of years ago, because of the success of imperialism and colonialism in its exploitation is now considered by most people who just raised in the dominant world, no matter where they live, to be - this is reality, this is the way the world is.
Alan Ware 14:06
And that can lead to a reduction of science that sees everything in its parts, breaks them down into their parts. And that's been very powerful for us. And as you mentioned, we started doing that when we separated these are cultivated crops from these are weeds.
Jeremy Lent 14:22
Right.
Alan Ware 14:22
We started separating our world into useful and non-useful and modern science allowed us to reduce things much more to useful on our human terms. And I like how you mention in the book the difference between complicated and complex. That complicated would be a seven-forty-seven airplane, you take it all apart, but if you take a frog, a giraffe or anything else and take it apart, you cannot put it back together again.
Jeremy Lent 14:46
Yes, exactly. Or even a single cell. It seems like so simple, but even a single cell, of which we have forty trillion in our bodies, each one is complex and can't be understood in the way that something is, you know, like you say, a seven-forty-seven or an oil rig can be understood, because it's not mechanistic. Before we move on, you raise an important point I just wanted to emphasize - that rise of reductionist thinking that came with a scientific revolution. Even though I've been saying a lot of derogatory things about the dominant worldview, I want to emphasize that it's absolutely critical for us to appreciate and recognize the benefits of that worldview. That even though science is not just reductionism, and we can go into that, that recognition that science is actually way more than reductionism. Reductionism itself, which was a methodology that Descartes actually was the one who first invented, came up with this idea, it's been incredibly powerful, and it's given us all these branches of understanding of chemistry and physics and biology. And it's given us the ability to understand fundamental concepts like whatever it is a germ theory of disease, or electricity, or our ability to talk to each other over thousands of miles away, and all the different benefits of our modern world. And I don't want anyone to misperceive that I'm saying there's something wrong with all of that. What has happened, though, is in our current world, we have this massive imbalance where one particular way of looking at the world, one particular way of thinking, has become so dominant, that there's no room, there's no space to recognize it's part of an overall integrative, larger way of thinking, which is what we need to get our relationship with rest of the Earth back in balance again.
Alan Ware 16:33
That leads very well on to the third question, when you talk about the book, The Original AI or Animate Intelligence, how would you describe that and what are we learning about it?
Jeremy Lent 16:44
Right. That's really a key concept. So as you say, this notion is that we think of AI, obviously, as artificial intelligence. And it's kind of this mind blowing idea that we can create intelligence, potentially even beyond human intelligence and everything else. But what we discover when we start looking now at the findings in recent decades of deep biology, and cellular biology in particular, is that there's actually this incredible intelligence in nature that in our dominant worldview, we don't even account for when we think about intelligence. Again, going back to that Cartesian split of "I think, therefore I am." There's a fundamental notion in Western thought is that intelligence is something that has to do with that human capacity for symbolic thought. And we think that intelligence is something you can measure with IQ in just the same way you can measure your height or your weight, you can measure your IQ. And that's what your intelligence is. And if you look at intelligence in that way, then clearly humans are in a different league than other animals. And so that leads to a foundation of human supremacy, and anthropocentrism. But when you look at the original AI, what you begin to see is that there's a different form of intelligence. As you say, starting at the cellular level, where a single cell is capable of receiving thousands of signals and transmitting thousands of things all at the same time. And a single cell will be in community with other cells, they'll make consensus decisions as groups, will decide what to do next for themselves. We now know that plants have multiple senses, like fifteen to twenty different senses through which they understand and relate to the environment around them. And they also engage in collective decision-making, and actually will share resources together. And they can act intelligently and do act intelligently. And that's plants. And then, of course, when you look at other animals, especially when we look at the animals that have the most developed levels of social intelligence, like cetaceans, or wolves, or elephants, we find that they're capable of deep ways of being in the world. So Frans de Waal, who's written a lot about this, just a fabulous biologist, he comes up with this notion of we can think of intelligence really, imagine a landscape where lots of mountain peaks, and every peak there is a particular peak of intelligence. So maybe elephants, for example, have a particular elephant kind of intelligence that allows them to maybe access levels of consciousness or senses of sadness or profundity, that we humans can't even begin to conceive of. But just because we're humans, we think that we're the only ones, but we have a particular peak of intelligence. And it's not that that peak is necessarily even a higher peak than the others, but it's a particular kind of peak that allows that intelligence to become cumulative through culture. And it's only through cumulative intelligence happening over basically millennia that we've developed this ability as we basically become inculturated from infants onwards to share in this collective human intelligence that has allowed us to dominate the rest of the world in this incredibly profound way. So that's a more of a humble way of understanding without necessarily negating what is special and unique about human intelligence. But recognizing there are other unique qualities to all the other intelligences around us.
Alan Ware 20:19
And as we went from the initial early science view that animals can't feel, they can't feel suffering, they're machines of the most instinctual kind of mechanistic type of behavior to what we've learned now about all kinds of animals' thoughts and feelings. And intentionality, as you mentioned, even a cell has intrinsic intentionality.
Jeremy Lent 20:41
Right.
Alan Ware 20:42
To get energy from the environment to survive, to reproduce. So we're not only learning about all of the thoughts and feelings, different personalities even of animals, whether it's orcas or dolphins or chimps, and so the differentiation of the individuals and then cultures that were learning about through different orcas and where they almost speciate to an extent where certain orcas that feed on certain fish don't end up mating, even though they physically could, they've kind of culturally spread apart by that point.
Jeremy Lent 21:13
That is very interesting.
Alan Ware 21:15
Yeah.
Jeremy Lent 21:15
And in terms of different personalities, as de Waal even talks in the great book about trees, even even different trees will have different personalities. You can look at three different trees all in some area. And one tree basically always chooses to shed its leaves a little bit earlier before the winter comes because it's a little more cautious. So when we recognize that, it also allows us to recognize this deep, deep interconnectedness with ourselves with all of life. Because as humans, we have this unique human conceptual consciousness that we've been looking at. And we also have animate intelligence and animate consciousness ourselves. And that's one of the key things to recognize. Like if we're talking to each other, and all of a sudden, say you pick up a ball and throw it at me, in a second, I might like put my head up and catch it. It's not because I'm thinking I should catch this. But it's like, I've got my own animate intelligence, my own ability to just relate to the world in a way just like other animals do all around us. And once we begin to see that, we can actually apply internal practices to connect with our own animate intelligence, and to honor it within us, and to recognize that what we are as human beings is this wonderful combination of that conceptual and animate intelligence, and allows us to then try to develop what I call an integrative intelligence, one that recognizes what all of us is as a human being. And that then through that animate intelligence, allows us to connect more deeply with our shared connection with all of life on Earth.
Nandita Bajaj 22:46
You know, the comparison that you've just made between our fascination with artificial intelligence as being superior to our own intelligence as something more brilliant, in a huge way, it's arrogant. What an arrogant way of thinking.
Jeremy Lent 23:03
Yes.
Nandita Bajaj 23:04
That we are the benchmark from which everything else gets measured, the inferior intelligence of nature that we have yet to really begin exploring in a deep way. And then we have assigned the superior value to artificial intelligence because we think we've already reached the pinnacle of where we can be as human beings. Yes, we are quite unique in the way we have an ability to think and feel and philosophize. But wouldn't that uniqueness best be demonstrated through more humility and through a deeper connection with the root of our existence, which is all of nature?
Jeremy Lent 23:48
Yeah, I think that that is such a great point. And yeah, to follow on from what you're saying, once again, this kind of line of thinking doesn't need to say there's something wrong, for example, with studying AI and with the amazing, mind blowing miracle, almost of like what's being developed in AI. But what is wrong is the arrogance that underlies so much of that, just the way you were describing. And what I offer when we think about technology is the idea of not for one moment trying to restrain or take or invalidate the potential of technology, but to look at the basis from which that technology is developed. Because right now, almost all of that is developed from the basis of conquering nature from that same dominant worldview, from the scientific revolution onwards, seeing it all like this kind of machine to be broken apart and do what we can for human benefit. But what I love to consider is, if you started off with this question of what can we do for the service of life with this recognition that we as humans are part of the rest of life, and we have a particular role to play play on the Earth because of this shared cultural, cumulative, conceptual intelligence that we have. And so rather than say there's something wrong with that intelligence so we need to limit it, what we can do is say, "How can we use it to truly be in the service of the Earth and of life, the unfolding life that's been going on for billions of years?" Which leads to a very different way of thinking about the potential for technology, and the potential really, for the human future, the possibility that we could actually be looking at some long-term projection for human relationship with the Earth where if we think of our own human organism as being something that's an integrated organism, but with a prefrontal cortex that mediates this kind of symbolic conceptual thinking, but integrated with the rest of our animate intelligence, can we play the role as a human species a little bit like that prefrontal cortex for the rest of Earth? And can we play the role to be in service of all of Earth, to find ways that we humans can be flourishing and thriving, but on a regenerative, thriving Earth. That's how we can you develop technology.
Alan Ware 26:07
And that would not be an eco-modernist, as you talked about in the book, the new conservationist view of we are the highest conceptual intelligence, therefore, we have to manage the planet, but it's very much for our benefit, and it's still within the growth mindset, right? For primarily human benefit.
Jeremy Lent 26:26
Yes.
Alan Ware 26:26
Whereas you're talking about understanding, appreciating life as a whole in helping life on the planet thrive.
Jeremy Lent 26:34
Yes, that is completely right. It's almost like the inverse, if you will, of that eco-modernist mindset, which basically says, "We need to recognize that there's this primitive notion of nature untrammeled, pure nature, that's never been like that since humans evolved. So we might as well accept that and just ask, "How can basically nature earn its living as part of this kind of market society? And how can we make nature work for us as humans?" So it like turns it around and say, how can we work for the benefit of life - of all of life? And that's not being against the benefit of humanity, and that's not saying anything negative about humans as a unique species, but saying, "How can we find ways for us to flourish as part of, in a symbiotic way, a mutually beneficial symbiotic way with the rest of life on Earth?" So it inverts it completely.
Nandita Bajaj 27:24
And you're suggesting that it doesn't require us to go against our nature to embody that kind of a worldview, that it's part of our nature, like the animate intelligence, to be cooperative, you know, much more in symbiosis with nature. And so it's not a sacrificial kind of an approach that we need to take to switch off our dominant brain that we're predisposed to think in a certain way. Of course, it'll require a little bit of effort, but that is more of our natural proclivity.
Jeremy Lent 27:58
That is completely right. And so then we need to recognize that this path of becoming sort of more integrative is really like a liberating path. It allows us to actually more fully experience what it is to be a human being in the way that we evolved. Because as humans, we evolved, as you've just mentioned, to be super-cooperative. In fact, it's what differentiates humans from other primates, in fact. It's how we became so hyper-cooperative. And millions of years ago, our pre-human hominid ancestors sort of found themselves in the changeable environments of the savanna. And what they discovered is that only those groups that really cooperated closely together could actually be more successful. And so over a few million years, we developed what are known as moral emotions and emotions, like sort of shame, or guilt or embarrassment, or loving people who are generous and naturally having a deeply felt sense of fair play, being ready to even sometimes risk our lives to put something right that we see elsewhere around us. And rather than having to sort of rise above our selfish nature, using our minds to sort of overcome our selfish genes or whatever is the way someone like Richard Dawkins talks about it. It's the opposite. It's actually what we need to do is really is simply to connect with our truly evolved human nature. And what has happened over, in our dominant culture is that our culture conditions us from earliest years, as soon as infants begin to watch TV or just get imbibed in what the dominant culture says, it teaches them to actually suppress what has evolved within them and learn how to become more sort of successful in what is basically a pathological society. There's a biologist Darcia Narvaez who's written extensively about this. And she writes about this concept of what she calls the evolved nest, which is basically the natural ways in which humans, as we evolved, raise their infants and children, and shows that that evolved nest has been completely demolished by the ways in which children get raised in our society today. And so we need to recognize that actually, what is possible is move towards more fully living who we are as human beings. And we can develop a culture and a society that allows us to feel that deep connection, and not just connection with other humans, but that deep connection with all of life, that is, again, another evolved part of being a human being.
Nandita Bajaj 30:39
Yeah, and I love that you said it's more of a liberating path, because it's bringing us closer to our true nature. Liberation is felt when you're closer to the truth. And in this case, it's our truer nature to cooperate. But of course, you also say that natural systems have both cooperation and competition. It's just that cooperation as a whole has been downplayed relative to competition in our modern world view. Why do you think competition has been given so much more importance as a cultural value?
Jeremy Lent 31:13
That's a great question. And to really fully answer it, we have to go all the way back to really the rise of agrarian civilizations thousands of years ago, which also came about with the rise of the patriarchy around that same period of time. And that's really where we see the first shift in the human experience, where ideas like competition, or like hierarchy, private property, and the patriarchy, all those really are constellations of a different way of organizing society, leading to a different set of values. And you see that basically, you have what's known as a ratcheting effect. Like, if you think back to a process where for 95% of human history, we basically lived as nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. And that's where cooperation was most important. But even then, in the earliest time, you'd have the occasional male who'd still have this more primal instinct shared with other primates and want you to be the sort of big head honcho male. But the anthropologist and ethololgist Christopher Boehm describes us best. What developed was sophisticated social technologies that groups would use to prevent those males from getting like too big for their britches and, and they would do things like make fun of them, or ridicule them, or even do things like what are known as arrow exchanges when they'd go hunting. So the person who was the best shooter wouldn't always be the ones who bring back the best game, because the arrow that he gave to somebody else, whoever shot that arrow, it will be the arrow itself, that will determine who brings it back rather than the shooter. So all these kind of complex ways to not let somebody get ahead of themselves. And if none of those worked, every now and then they'd have to sort of gang up on this person either ostracize them entirely, and in most extreme sanction, would just kill them if they wouldn't listen to anything else. That changed with the rise of agrarian culture and civilization because suddenly you put up fences, somebody who's lucky and they get more wheat growing in their particular area, they can then begin to hire other people to be their bodyguards, and stop other people from taking charge of them. And so over time, you get this sense of the value of possessions. And then once people begin to settle and have possessions, then you get like gangs of males go together and raid another group. And then if they do succeed in that, and then they've sort of own more property, then they begin to inculcate new values, values of the warrior, and the sort of heroism and some of these values that we see in sort of ancient Greek epics like the Homer like the Iliad or the Odyssey, where it was considered okay to conquer some other group, kill all the males, rape all the women and, you know, take all the children back and use them as slaves. So this notion, different ideas got to develop, which basically led to these cultures of hierarchy and authoritarianism. And the writer Riane Eisler speaks very well about that, about this difference between like authoritarian cultures and partnership cultures. We're going way before the rise of the dominant worldview or capitalism or anything else. But with the rise of the scientific thinking - the quasi-scientific thinking, the original sort of ideas back in the seventeenth century, came this notion, Thomas Hobbes is really the one who described it best, of the sense that this was the way in which humans are. That everyone's out for themselves and life is like mean, nasty, brutish, and short. So you need authority to be in charge. I mean, his view of the sort of primitive state of man, as you would think of it, was fundamentally wrong. And yet, it's formed the basis for then the theories of capitalism and everything else. So what we see in each case is that the the society that conquers, that gets to be the most successful by being the most extractive and exploitative, then gets to impose its values on those that are conquered. And then new generations arise in people who were conquered, with young people going, "Well, the way I'm going to get ahead is buy into those new values of this conquering group." And that's how this dominant worldview came. So we have to recognize these deep roots to it. So to shift it is not simple. We have to go to the deeper levels. But what is the positive potential about shifting it is the actual evolved way in which we, as humans, want to live our lives is that form of cooperation. And now in the modern world, we do have the potential to look at much larger sense of a planetary consciousness, of a shared consciousness among all human beings, and really begin to find an alternative way to be connected that can supersede this competitive myth essentially.
Alan Ware 36:10
So you've been talking here about cooperation/competition between humans, amongst human groups. We've also talked on this program with people like Eileen Crist about the idea of human supremacy over the natural world.
Jeremy Lent 36:24
Right.
Alan Ware 36:24
Something deeply ingrained in our worldview, and in our language. How is your study of Indigenous wisdom informed your thinking about how we can transition away from that human supremacist outlook?
Jeremy Lent 36:36
Yeah, thank you for asking that. Because really, that's this great source, this treasure for the human consciousness that is still there and has been maintained in spite of the depredations over the millennia, and last few hundred years. And the Indigenous worldview, and even though in one sense, you can say, well, how can you even talk about something - a collective, the Indigenous worldview - because there's so many thousands, at least, of different Indigenous worldviews all around the world. And some are more hunter-gatherer based, and some are more pastoral based, etc., etc. But some Indigenous scholars who have really looked at this, have identified a shared collective, deep values, that you can look at Aboriginal cultures in Australia, you can look at African early cultures, you can look at cultures in North and South America, and you can find these shared ways of relating. And what is important is to recognize that even though, Nandita, you were saying before about how, you know, it's only recently that we have come to recognize this kind of animate intelligence in nature, it's absolutely true of the dominant culture. But in the Indigenous peoples around the world have always sensed this, they've always known this. And so they have always had the sense that every sentient being has a spirit of deep value within itself. And so even virtually all Indigenous cultures engage in hunting and eating other nonhuman animals. They don't take that to become vegetarian, but what they do is they recognize the deep respect that they have for the spirit of those that they kill for their own sustenance. And in almost every Indigenous culture, you see developed over time, a way of relating to the sacredness of the rest of life in such a way that it leads to a truly sustainable way of being. Not the way that we use the word sustainable in the dominant worldview is more like, basically grab nature by the throat, rape nature, take everything you can from nature, and then try to keep nature just alive enough that we can keep that raping. That's kind of the way that the dominant worldview talks about the word sustainable. I'm talking about a different kind of sustainable, where it's more like symbiotic, where human activity can actually be for the good of the species around them rather than against that benefit. So I think there's tons for us to learn from that. And there's one particular Indigenous scholar, Comanche social activist, her name is LaDonna Harris, who wrote a great paper I think is really important. She, and again, this is in conjunction with Aboriginal scholars in Australia. This is a shared development, what they call the four R's of Indigeneity: of relationship, responsibility, reciprocity, and redistribution. The relationship is a sense of this kinship obligation with all of life, not just with people you know, or your sisters or brothers or whatever. And then responsibility is this community obligation to like nurture and care for those relations. And reciprocity as a sense of balancing what's giving and taking. And redistribution is a sense that every person might have particular skills or particular strengths, and they can redistribute that for all of the community around them. And one thing that LaDonna Harris emphasizes, which I think is crucially important, is really a sense of identity coming from our community. This does not in any way, reduce a sense of individuality. What you see in Indigenous values and culture is for individuality. People are free to like make their own decisions, they're free to like, go off for a few months at a time, join another group come back a few years later, there's no sense like, you have to do it a certain way. But what is recognized is humans can fulfill their individuality to the fullest, once they recognize that their identity is not separate, but it's actually part of their community and part of all of life. And then it's like this expansion that you can take in fulfilling who you are as a human being is massive.
Alan Ware 40:48
That reminds me of early accounts of Jesuits in Canada, New France, and how the natives would look at the way the Europeans were organizing their society and, and not want to be bossed around. Their chiefs could not boss them around the way those Frenchmen were bossed around. And often it was the French settlers running away to live with natives, right? And hardly ever the other way around.
Jeremy Lent 41:12
That's right.
Alan Ware 41:13
Because they could be more fulfilled individuals in that native community than they could in this hierarchical class-based French society.
Jeremy Lent 41:22
Exactly. And in fact, I think, David Graeber and David Wengrow write about that really well in the book recently published called The Dawn of Everything, which does a great job of showing exactly what you're saying. I also think we have to be careful not to sort of idealize or romanticize certain elements of the past, or other cultures that are not part of this dominant culture. So for example, I could see people listening to this conversation who might have some knowledge of some of this deep history who might say, "Yes, but there's also this fact that as humans left Africa and moved into different continents, even as nomadic hunter-gatherers, that led to massive megafauna extinctions in each continent." And these are important things to look at as we try to get its full picture. And so to me, the path to go forward is not to try to glorify something in the past and say, "We need to go back there." The path for future flourishing is not just to, or find some way to depopulate the Earth, so we can just become hunter-gatherers again, but to look at the rich and incredible wisdom that evolved over those thousands, even millions of years, even before we became modern evolved humans, but this deep wisdom, and to look at how we can work that in the modern world. And similarly, when you look at this issue of Indigenous people causing these massive extinctions - that's true. And over thousands of years, in every case, they've developed ways of actually making their culture such that they would see the sacredness of life around them, and develop practices that lead to their true symbiotic sustainability. So I think that what we can learn from what Indigenous cultures learned over those millennia, is that we can shift our own culture then so that we can find ways to basically see the sacredness in life around us. And we can take the core principles of what those cultures have and apply them in ways that actually can work going forward in our highly developed, highly technological globalized society today.
Alan Ware 43:33
And yeah, as you mentioned, having a synthesis of worldviews that takes the best of the Indigenous ideas of relationship, responsibility, connection, kind of limits often passed down by elders through beliefs and rituals, probably based on hard won experience of that particular tribe when they exceeded limits.
Jeremy Lent 43:52
Exactly.
Alan Ware 43:53
And they codified the lessons on those limits and rituals and stories and teachings. If we could synthesize that with the best of Western science, what we've learned about ecology, which is only hardly a hundred years old, that we've really been looking systematically-
Jeremy Lent 44:08
Right.
Alan Ware 44:08
At nature in a deep way. So you termed this the Symbiocene, right? Is the way to go.
Jeremy Lent 44:14
Yes. Yeah. Right. Exactly. That is a beautiful notion, the Symbiocene. Like essentially, if we all recognize we're in the Anthropocene now, this period of human domination of the earth, which is inherently unstable and destructive, and the potential, with our shifting consciousness, it's a term that Glenn Albrecht, deep thinker in Australia, evolutionary philosopher, came up with. The Symbiocene. You could imagine a period going on for way longer than thousands of years, you know, untold indefinite period of humans actually learning how to be in a full, deep, symbiotic relationship with all of life. That that's the possibility that is open to us if we can make it past this bottleneck we're in right now, of this period that is so horrifying of these mass extinctions. And this potential for a total collapse of civilization itself, which is where we could be headed if we don't actually make some of these deep shifts that are needed fairly soon. But that's the hope, the potential that's available to us.
Nandita Bajaj 45:23
So Jeremy, you've written two very big idea books. The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. And you've spoken a bit about both of them. And both of the books required you to spend years integrating research from all kinds of fields like neuroscience, history, anthropology, religious traditions, and also Indigenous wisdom, which you've been talking about just now. What spurred you to undertake such an ambitious, lengthy project?
Jeremy Lent 45:50
Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Well, this was basically there are deep transformations in my own life that led to that. And in simple terms, really, the first half of my life was spent essentially living as an Uncle Bob, if you will. We talked about Uncle Bob at the beginning. And it's not that I necessarily believed in Uncle Bob's values. As a student, originally, I grew up in England, when I was a student at Cambridge, I was excited by ideas around anarchism. And at the time, I wanted to be a hippie like I saw in Woodstock. And so I had this different kind of feeling as a young person. But I actually came to the United States kind of looking for Woodstock, if you will, and ended up sort of getting diverted for half of my life, being with somebody who I raised a family with, and she passed away some years back. But with her, I ended up getting an MBA, and ended up starting an internet company - took it public. And so I was living the Uncle Bob dream, if you will. But then actually, things collapsed around me. My first wife became sick, and I left the company to look after her. The company was too young, and it became part of the internet crash, the.com casualties from that first internet boom, back in the late 1990s. But for me, I spent years with everything crashing around me. And even my wife began to suffer cognitive decline. So even that relationship sort of got lost, even though I spent years looking after her. And I was determined that whatever I did with the rest of my life was going to be truly meaningful. But my question was, what is meaning? And I didn't want to take somebody else's word for it. So started this kind of search for myself. And it was like this cognitive search. These ideas that we have in our dominant well, like soul, or human consciousness - where did this come from? These questions everyone asks, like, is there a God and what does that mean? And all those things. And that led me to looking at the way different cultures made sense of the world. And as I started to go through this path, I was kind of looking for the book that I ended up writing that would sort of map it all out for me. So I was trying to sort of put these jigsaw puzzle together. And I realized there was a maybe a benefit I could offer others in actually taking all my own exploration and turning it into a book. And that also led me to really writing The Web of Meaning to both of those books, were part of the same search that took really ten, fifteen years of not just cognitive research, but embodied research, if you will, in the sense that I discovered things like meditation and traditional Chinese energy practices like Chi Gong or Tai Chi. So when I was writing about animate consciousness, it wasn't just an intellectual idea. But I was actually learning myself to be in touch with that part of my own being that I hadn't even realized existed until those more recent years. So really, what you see in both of those books, The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, are the results of my own deep inner journey that took place over a big chunk of my life.
Jeremy Lent 46:14
And I think you mentioned somewhere that as times get more difficult for a lot of people, they'll have failed kind of narratives that might lead them on a journey similar to something like what you went on, that kind of journey. And we already see some young people - the quiet quitting, the great resignation.
Jeremy Lent 49:18
Right.
Alan Ware 49:19
I think they call it lying down in China where some young people are just saying, "I refuse to get on this materialistic status kind of ladder." Do you think in the coming years we'll see more people searching for new meanings?
Jeremy Lent 49:35
Yeah, great points. Great question, Alan. And I do. And, you know, we can look at that sense of that meltdown. Like for me, it was like a personal meltdown that sort of happened. And the opportunity came, if you think of the very notion of a meltdown is like the previous structure melted and allowed a new form to actually emerge a little bit like you see in a chrysalis where a butterfly can emerge from this kind of what just looks like this gooey mess. Similarly, the potential is not just for people. I wouldn't want anybody to go through that kind of crisis or meltdown. But it obviously happens in almost all of our lives at some point where we go through these places of deep questioning. But we need to recognize that as our society itself is moving towards catastrophe essentially, this ecological devastation, and these incredible mind boggling inequalities, and climate breakdown, and all everything around that, that as that happens, it's as though the dominant worldview was tightly knit and couldn't really be critiqued or couldn't really be changed, begins to unravel. Like, there's this image you can sort of imagine a tightly woven rug. And if you try to sort of tear that rug because the pattern is wrong, and you want to repattern it, you can't, because it's tightly woven, there's nothing you can do with your hands. But imagine all of the weaves starts to unravel. And that unraveling might make things look kind of ugly, and be kind of terrifying. But it also allows you to reweave the rug in a different kind of way. And that I think is the challenge and the opportunity that we have in this generation ahead right now, that as things unravel, it is terrifying. And again, I don't for an instant want that, and I don't encourage the unraveling to take place. It's what is happening as a result of this deep inherent incompatibility of our dominant worldview with the way the world is. But as that happens, the opportunity is to then rework it from within. So the challenge is, can we actually begin to create this new potential symbiotic way of relating with ourselves, with each other, and with the Earth? Can we actually begin to build an ecological civilization from within the kind of relics of this dying civilization that we're in right now? That's the potential. And I don't know if it'll happen, none of us know. But what we do know is that we are entering into its period right now of massive transformation. And it's an exciting period, as well as a terrifying period, because each of us has the potential to take part in helping to reorient what the future of humanity itself, and the Earth might look like in the distant future.
Nandita Bajaj 52:23
Yeah, because you've so brilliantly demonstrated through both of your books and sort of talking with us today is this dismantling this idea of the dominant worldview, that the universe is meaningless, and that, you know, life doesn't have any purpose. And that if you were to look as you've done, over billions of years, life continues to regenerate, and the planet knows, you know, how to come back alive after collapse. And we've had civilizations come and go and collapse before. Do you feel that there's a different essence to where we're at as a civilization today, where maybe there's, you know, a different sense of hopefulness in terms of building or rebuilding an ecological civilization?
Jeremy Lent 53:13
Yeah, I do. I think we are in really a unique period in the current era right now. Like, if we look back over all the vast history of human experience on the Earth, there's been a couple of phase transitions, if you will, in that human experience that changed every aspect of what it was like to be a human being on the Earth. One was that shift we talked about earlier, from nomadic hunter-gatherers to the rise of agrarian civilizations about ten or twelve thousand years ago. It took a few thousand years before that shift really took place. But when it did, everything changed for humans living in that new way of being. And the second change was with the scientific revolution, which within a period of just a couple hundred years, essentially transformed the world for virtually everyone alive on the Earth. I think we're going through a period right now every bit as large a transformation as those two. The thing is, what we don't know is what that will be like, even though of course, other civilizations have collapsed. But they basically had a footprint of one particular region on the earth. So while that collapse was a massive event for those people, it didn't affect maybe another civilization a few thousand miles away, or whatever. Life continued, and it sort of came and went. This global civilization is really a one off event, really, probably in the whole story of the Earth. Because if you look at what we've done technologically, we've already accessed all the easy fuels, the coal, the metals, everything else we've extracted and exploited that so that basically if our entire civilization collapsed, and everything around it collapsed, it's not like some cyclical thing where oh, maybe a few thousand years later, those new people will begin to figure - there's no coal for them to access, there'd be no metals for them to access because everything has already been used by this one. So this was almost like this one potential that a conceptually intelligent species, that distinction we're making earlier, on the Earth has to actually move to a different way of relating with the Earth. And so it's a huge event. And the stakes could not be higher. And we have to recognize there is a possibility of total collapse. There's also a possibility of what I call like a techno split, which other people think about using a term like fortress Earth, which essentially is the elites just basically breaking off from the rest of humanity. And the Elon Musk's developing new ways to neurally connect with each other through his kind of neural enhancements and genetic enhancements, and almost like speciate, and then basically leave most of humanity to just be living with this total collapse that they left behind. Well, they tried to find some way to sort of explore the potential. To me, morally, that future is even more egregious than a future of total collapse. And I think we need to look at that. Because I think oftentimes, we ask sometimes, why aren't the powerful elites looking at this disaster that's unfolding and doing something about it? Well, I think either quietly, or maybe among themselves, they talk about it, this is what they're considering, well, we'll be okay, we just need to kind of fence off masses of humanity that is having this problem. So these are some of the worst outcomes. But the potential is there for this potential of long-term future flourishing. And I do feel that what any of us need to do though looking at this situation right now is to offer for these young generations of people, people like Greta Thunberg and the millions of others who don't have the platform that she has but see things in a similar way - what we need to do is give that younger generation the tools to realize they can build something better. They're going to say, "We don't accept this bullshit from our older generations telling us all this crap, look what they've left with us." And so there is that sense that they are moving towards a different worldview, they want something different. What we can do right now, those of us who are in some of the older generations, is use everything we've got to give them a real coherent foundation, a platform for building that positive future. To recognize it is possible. We talked earlier about that notion of there is no alternative, Tina, that Margaret Thatcher loves to talk about. I think what we have as our overriding imperative is to show there actually is an alternative. And it's a beautiful one, and it's a positive one. And it's actually being lived in by people around the world in different ways in different forms right now. All we need to do, I mean, all is a big challenge. But we need to shift the political awareness, we need to let people become aware that that is possible, because the only thing between us and that future is the political will basically, and the power structures that are currently dominating. And so part of that shift is, I think it's really helpful when people are acting almost like these kind of islands of coherence in a sea of chaos or whatever, for them to realize that they're not alone. They're like more like part of a massive archipelago that is rising up and might be turning from little island to a new continent that is kind of rising up. And so having that recognition, and then learning from what others are doing in different dimensions, that's a part of what I think can enable this transformative change.
Alan Ware 58:39
And this could be a good plug for your Deep Transformation Network that seems to be building that archipelago.
Jeremy Lent 58:46
Oh, really? Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate that. Yeah, well, so this is an online network that I really just instigated earlier this year as a result of giving courses to people in these topics, who wanted to stay connected after the course was over. So it's a network that allows people to kind of share ideas, get involved in interactive conversations with others from around the world. And to do it in a way that is once again, self-organized. More than a couple of thousand of people have joined this network from around the world, it's vibrant. So it's called the Deep Transformation Network, you can find it basically at deeptransformation.network. And then it's a little bit like a Facebook group where you kind of share ideas and articles and things like that, but without some big corporation telling you what you should be looking at, but rather, it's self-organized. And it also goes beyond just sort of sharing articles, whatever, to these live interactive conversations where we're really building a sense of global coherence, thinking about the very issues that we've been discussing in the last hour and looking at them more deeply and having really meaningful conversations. So it's exciting. And the idea behind it is that it's there open as a platform to try to enable a network transformation that is needed in the future. So I invite anyone who is interested in these topics in this conversation to just check it out and to join it.
Alan Ware 1:00:10
Well, thanks so much for creating that network and helping those of us who can feel so alone feel more connected. Thank you for doing that.
Jeremy Lent 1:00:19
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:20
Thank you for doing the hard work and sharing your wisdom in such a simple and accessible way with all of us. It was a brilliant conversation.
Jeremy Lent 1:00:29
Yeah, thank you both. Thanks for all the work that you're doing. And I truly enjoyed this conversation. It was just really great, great, rich topics to explore together. Thank you.
Alan Ware 1:00:38
Well, that's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guests recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. Also to help expand our listenership, please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:06
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts and helping us all shrink toward abundance. And on behalf of our entire team at Population Balance, we wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season. See you in the new year.
