Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD
December 4th, 2024
“Nones” are religiously nonaffiliated people whose numbers are rising, especially in the United States and other industrialized nations. Do we need religion, or can we do without it? If not, what are our alternatives? And what sort of worldview can help us make sense of our troubled time?
Conventless Nones
The number-crunchers call us “Nones,” the spiritual-but-not-religious people with some agnostics and atheists mixed in. We pick “None” on surveys when asked about religious affiliation. In the United States, we make up 28% of adults: the largest religious group in the nation (Pew Research Center). That number has been rising since 1948, when it was 2%.
Who are Nones? Some of us weren’t raised religious. Some were and began asking questions. Some suffered religious abuse and walked away. Most of us can’t stomach the hypocrisy of wielding religious hatred and intimidation to deprive fellow citizens of their rights. Where authoritarianism rises, religious people of a certain type (there are exceptions!) line up behind it: the same people who cherry-pick which religious teachings to take literally and club other people with.
Although roughly 72% of Nones recognize some sort of higher power, if not a vengeful cosmic dad, we don’t go to church, mosque, temple, or synagogue. We call no current religion home. (There is one “religion” I would join; more on this later.) For some of us, nature is our holy place. We tend not to congregate.
Does that matter? It certainly does in politics. A third of the nation—with plenty of Nones mixed in—didn’t vote in the 2024 US national election. About 80 million people voted for Trump. Nones total about 86 million. A characteristic frequently attributed to us as a group is political and religious “indifference.”
Some of us seem fine, at least at a conscious level. We tend to be fairly educated, look favorably upon science, rely on logic and reason, and avoid uncritical belief. When we feel spiritual, we might do it rather intuitively or spontaneously, holding it more as an enjoyable state of mind than as a sanction from above. Some among us are “remixers” who borrow a bit of this or that religious truth, habit, or ritual at need: they are for us, not we for them.
Why, then, do so many of us feel a painful gap, a persistent anxiety, a sense that something important is missing? Where is our big story about what it all means and why we are here beyond the purposelessness of our scientific cosmologies and the uncaring void of the universe? Are our sleeplessness, restlessness, or numerous psychosomatic symptoms trying to tell us something?
We have no mythology, most of us Nones, because when we threw out the gods, including the angry big one, the orienting stories went with them. And while science might help, it doesn’t tell us why we are here. The big why. It doesn’t tell us how should we live or which concerns are ultimate or what we are supposed to do with ourselves.
“The Advent of Nihilism”
In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight.
—Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy
According to a 2022 study of contemporary Western culture by Abramof and Peixoto, “People have lost their ancestors, their territories, their gods, and assume a private life where they find themselves helplessly entangled in their problems.” This pervasive if unacknowledged sense of loss increasingly pervades nations outside the West or Global North as well, where the spread of hyper-individualistic materialism uproots our deep connections to the inner, social, and natural worlds.
In 1960, several months before he died, Jung wrote to Eugene Rolfe that his feelings were at the lowest ebb ever. He had failed at his main task, Jung said: "to open people's eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state." In his journals, Jung had wondered at age 39 where his soul had gone. He had turned to dreams and imagination and art for answers. One of his patients, Hermann Hesse, wrote about people with “one dimension too many” longing for more than daily routines.
Before Jung, “I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.” Nietzsche wrote those words in the winter of 1887. He was talking about what happens when customary values and goals turn out to be hollow, because outworn. What he felt then, isolated and alone, millions feel today.
After Jung, psychiatrist Victor Frankl wrote about facing the widespread “existential vacuum” and the need for a search for meaning. Psychologist and artist Rollo May described “the cry for myth” and the yearning for orienting tales, and Abraham Maslow discussed “metapathologies”: sicknesses of the spirit which psychotherapy was not designed to deal with and that clergy tried to paper over with mere belief.
I ran face-first into this in college, where, having survived church-enabled child abuse, I read voraciously as my favorite instructor turned me loose on Hesse, Jung, mysticism, Clarice Lispector, and James Baldwin. The Good Conscience by Carlos Fuentes haunted me. Having been passive for most of his life, sad Rodolfo lay down on his death bed. “We don’t live long,” he tells his son Jaime, “but we die a long time.” And then: “How much more we could be than what we are.” Never did I want to end up like that.
To satisfy these longings for more, many of us read the deep stuff, go to self-help workshops, get into yoga, meditate, journey, journal, and take classes on how to reorgnize our consciousness. We study mythology, depth psychology, the meanings of dreams. We rolf, chant, stretch, sweat, collage, and wander through guided imagery. All of which helps and transforms, sure enough—and none of which fills the cultural gap of the missing set of tales for our time.
Patriarchal religion is weary and corrupt, science is supposedly (and phobically) value-free, and materialism offers no guidance. We have no epic, no grand adventure, no saga of higher meaning.
Maybe our worldviews need therapy even more than we do.
Battling Worldviews
Like our size-large collective worldviews, the metaphor of the fish not noticing the water is worn out, so let’s switch to air pollution.
I grew up in Southern California. Even back then, hazy afternoons were the norm, especially in warm weather. We gave no thought to allergies, asthma, mild emphysema, headaches, wheezing, or irritated lungs. It was just how things were. Nobody talked about it except the occasional environmental activist. Only after a rain did we see and smell the world clean.
Likewise, only when caught by unexpected joy or bliss do we rise above our worldview long enough to glimpse how good life could be without the ideological smog.
A worldview is an internal guiding story—a keystone fiction in the language of my work—that gives us a way of looking at the world and our place in it. It is a comprehensive set of assumptions, values, goals, norms, and expectations that orient us. It also contains a cosmology to tell us about the world and the universe. Because growing up in a particular time and place socializes us to accept it, our collective worldview is largely unconscious and taken for granted. It’s just how things are.
We live in a time of colliding worldviews. The worldview of the religious right, for example, is similar to the Middle Ages worldview of Western Europe: a young Earth, hierarchies topped by powerful men, obedience as a supreme virtue, two rigidly separate sexes, male privilege, Christianity for everyone, state violence on command, and—thanks to the power of social media algobubbles—even a return of the Flat Earth no competent sailor ever believed in.
The longer a worldview endures past its prime, the more sour and sick it smells. Those in the grip of this Heavenly City worldview (to lend it an image) erect thick walls of hostility and denial to keep from understanding other worldviews. As the existential vacuum looms in the background, zealots hang on fiercely to their eroding positions, like ancient Greeks furiously protesting plays that made fun of Zeus and Hera just as these gods were passing from supposed fact into fiction. (Most of what we know of ancient Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology was written down in fictional form.)
Opposing the Heavenly City is the Big Machine worldview in which everything is made of nonliving parts.
The rise of science, first in the Islamic world and then in the West, resounded with the turning wheels of the Big Machine. It has also been called Modernity: an emphasis on reason, contracts, individualism, capitalism, industrialization, progress, and urbanization. Modernity is one face of the Big Machine because, having run off the interstate during World War I, its undercarriage, Postmodernity, rolled out of the factory of collective (un)consciousness as a largely critical movement of value and thought. In a sense, Postmodernism is Modernity’s trickster shadow. They can’t live apart from one another. True believers cling to one or the other, but they are both part of the machinery.
The Heavenly City and the Big Machine are worldviews out of date. A newer one, which I think of as Earthrise, sprouts here and there like shoots of fresh grass. It emphasizes participation, networking, holism, interdependency, ecology, diversity, complexity, and the return of intuition and spiritual experience, though not dogma. So far, it lives mainly in disconnected patches. Its shadow is malignant globalism.
The ideal would be to consciously integrate what is best in passing worldviews while accepting and exploring the new arrivals. Instead, we tend to hang onto the worldview we grew up in or were converted into, fighting bruising surface battles like faith versus science while ignoring the underlying collisions of outworn storied structures. Without knowing it, we are arguing about whose outdated idols are truer as big stories trade punches in the smoky arena of collective consciousness.
Worldview Therapy
Nones feel all this. However we explain it to ourselves, we know the old worldviews don’t work for us. Either we outgrew them, or they never appealed to us to begin with. We hang in suspension between big stories, as Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme would put it. I would say we are between mythologies: no single story will work for world-sized groups of us. By “mythology” I mean an evocative saga or epic that helps us make sense of the time we live in.
We have never faced the need to assemble a planetary mythology. Our survival might depend on figuring out how to.
That is one reason why purely individual solutions won’t move us forward. They can help, but waiting on the heroic, lonely striver—or busting our bones to become one—is yet another example, if we needed any, of Modernity/Big Machine atomized thinking. (In mythology, the hero usually destroys as much as saves.)
Another reason is that hyper-individualism is an appendage of Patriarchy, a worldview so gigantic that it contains the Heavenly City and the Big Machine like Saturn swallowing his resentful offspring. Even as the Dadgod of exclusionary monotheism draws his lingering power from the patriarchal mindset, alchemical art depicting the old king’s death acquires new relevance.
What would a good-enough worldview adequate to our time contain? At the very least, it would need:
Inclusivity and delight in difference. Diversity is cosmic, going back at least to star-forming lumps in the primeval plasma cloud. Philosophy calls this the problem of the one and the many, but it’s a problem when we split the two.
A transnational ethic of care. Some version of the Golden Rule shows up everywhere, culturally. Everybody matters and has worth.
Humane values for living well on a finite planet. One of these values is maturity. What is a wise, conscious, generous, full-stature human being?
Examples of what wise and humane leadership looks like and can do.
A cosmology that speaks to the heart, imagination, and human need for purpose.
An invitation to rejoin the Great Conversation: the lively trans-species exchange of sound, movement, and gesture on Earth. We aren’t the only talkers here.
An emphasis on ecoresilience as a paradigm for dealing with accelerating climate chaos. One example of millions: All the aqueducts into Los Angeles are cracked. In a big earthquake, their rupture would leave 4 million people without water. We can’t build like that anymore.
Faith in humanity. As Maslow and others have pointed out, human nature is routinely sold short. We tend to see only the worst of it without appreciating it at its most mature.
Post-patriarchal receptivity to intuition, vision, and sacred experience without dismissing them or hardening them with the literalisms of absolutist belief. (The sage Ibn 'Arabi refers to literalizing as tashbīh: metaphysical idolatry.)
Friendliness to science (a form of inquiry and discovery) if not to scientism (the ideology that we can only know things through scientific verification).
Reinterpretations and updates of traditional lore. For example, when Jesus said to take the beam out of your eye before trying to remove the splinter from your brother’s, in today’s language he meant: Deal with your projections.
Lessons in and examples of how to counter authoritarianism (the fearful and regressive idolization of the violent father), which now has gone global.
Ongoing joyful celebrations—local, regional, national, and planetary—of our life here together. (See my novel Lamplighter for examples.) Celebration of being members in one extended human family.
Imagination, vision, story, play, and dream as tools for wisdom, creativity, and adaptation (Chalquist, Restorying Our Lore).
Visions of the kinds of community we most desire to participate in.
Clearer views of where technological innovation helps and harms us and what we should do about that.
Images of sane governance and the inclusiveness and equity it embraces. In fact, for our own survival we need to reimagine every institution invented during Modernity or before it.
Stories of hope. Whereas intellectuals sometimes think hope is an evil we should do without, activists like Rebecca Solnit, who wrote Hope in the Dark, advocate for it. We need to distinguish between false hope and the genuine kind.
An organizing cause to get inspired by. How about building an adequate worldview to help us move toward an international society governed democratically by sagacious and balanced human beings?
A source of inspiration. An adequate worldview has to tell a good story. It has to enchant, move the heart, spark enthusiasm for beneficial change.
A story-based way of saying it is: We need a new planetary mythology, locally rooted and wide of mind.
But as Joseph Campbell and many others have observed, old-style mythology, with tales of heroes and gods and monsters taken literally, lay broken into fragments on every side. The days of creeds and institutions built around the town seer’s visions are gone. The need in our time is for visioning together to make new stories—inspiring fictions—to live by. We don’t have to take them literally. Absolute belief always divides anyway. We demand such illusory certainty when we haven’t grown up enough emotionally to live with ambiguity.
Where do we go for all this? To the humanities, of course. To film, literature, poetry, art, dance, theater, and storytelling as well as to psychology (the deep kinds), philosophy (the embodied kinds), history, and the study of religion, especially pre-patriarchal. To the activists, artists, dreamers, and reimaginers: the real therapists for our long-standing metapathologies. Then we call in everybody else.
Many of us who walk or hobble down the path of creativity are producing this kind of guidance for our time. Mine is one very small effort among many. Let me sketch it.
Assembling Terrania
It was interesting, and challenging, to write my first novel while gathering research evidence for the centrality of story in human life (see Chapter 2 of my dissertation). Change the guiding story, and the attitudes, goals, values, and projects rooted in it change as well, as systems theorist Donella Meadows and others have pointed out.
I’ve written speculative fiction for my own amusement for years, but only with my dissertation did the central theme of all the stories come into focus: a Long Adventure during which humanity struggles toward full specieshood and responsible adulthood. How do we finally grow up? What will it take? What will the result look like? One author could not possibly write a mythology about that, but he could at least make a start and see where it headed.
The result was Assembling Terrania, a cycle of tales that now includes three novels (Soulmapper, Heartlander, and Lamplighter comprising the Lamplighter Trilogy) and a free story collection, Tales of Terrania Rising. All are available at Chalquist.com/fiction. I’m working on a second story collection, Voices on the Road to Terrania. Although much of my nonfiction work is published commercially, I publish my fiction independently so creatives can play with the settings and characters and ideas without running into legal problems.
The word “Terrania” came to me several years ago, while I walked in the evening just as a meteor passed hissing overhead on its way to the Pacific. Terrania is an example of the good society, a civilization governed by justice, equity, abundance, and care: care of each other, Earth, and all its creatures. This is not utopia; Terrania is not perfect. It is the kind of society that visionary, psychologically mature people can build if enough work together, starting with imagining together, a necessary first step.
Cosmopolitanism is an expansive act of the moral imagination. It sees human beings as shaping their lives within nesting memberships: a family, a neighborhood, a plurality of overlapping identity groups, spiraling out to encompass all humanity. It asks us to be many things, because we are many things.
–Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Importance of Elsewhere”
The difficult gradual movement toward Terrania, which in the end just means living together sanely on our homeworld, plays out in a cosmos described from the outside by science. Seen through a mythic-imaginative lens, this cosmos is structured by sentient Powers similar to Jungian archetypes. Both views are correct, if partial.
For example, thoughout the universe we find a basic theme of attraction, from the paired play of virtual particles to the strong force binding quarks to multicellular organisms and on up to the gravity that sculpts galactic clusters. In the world’s mythologies, the deities of attraction include Anahita, Aphrodite, Asherah, Branwen, Dione, Enya, Freya, Hathor, Inanna, Kythereia, Lakshmi, Mami Wata, Medb/Maive, Ninlil, Oshun, Phra Naret, Rati, Sauska, Turan, Vanadis, Venus, Xochiquetzal, Yang Asha, Yao Ji, and many others. All these and more are faces worn by Aluere, one of thirty primal Powers who interact with characters human and nonhuman. The Powers call themselves the Komuay, similar to an Ainu word for “deity.”
Cosmologically, the Powers are offspring of the Source, Radantia, the primal origin of everything. The Powers roam everywhere but live in the Infrarealm, a kind of Platonic dimension of abstract potentiality. You can look for them somewhere below the Planck length, but they are easier to see in your dreams, in fantastic tales, or in active imagination.
Speaking of which, the Dreamvale is the third realm of being in the Tetraverse. It is the realm of imagination understood not just as a human capacity, but as a dimension in its own right as described in esoteric Islam, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Romanticism, and other visionary traditions. Every fable, fiction, fantasy, hope, and imagining of any persistence lives somewhere in the Dreamvale. Its denizens think us strange for believing we create them by our arts; from their point of view, we inhabitants of the Coaguum, the realm of material being, merely provide openings for Dreamvalers to speak and appear.
Which makes sense. Studies show that most fiction writers talk to “their” characters—and they talk back. For my own fiction, they often tell me where the story will go next. Things live in the psyche, Jung wrote, which do not derive from the conscious mind. Jung’s Red and Black Book journals provide a 19-year record of his conversations with his own imaginal cast of characters. Some criticized him for his judgmentalism, lack of self-care, and limited grasp of gender complexity. That we somehow make up these “inner” voices reflects the egotistical, human-centric bias of the rusty Big Machine worldview.
It was fun to ask: Which archetypes—which gods—chose which sides in historically pivotal conflicts like the rise of the Akkadian Empire? Did agents of the warlike Power Bellum rescue Enheduanna from captivity by rebels? Imagining this way gives us a depth perspective, a view of underlying but neglected dynamisms such as mythic motifs and recurring plots pulsing behind events. The events make the news; the depth dynamics do not. The machinery cannot see them, but we can.
My tales show the shortcomings of holding onto old worldviews. For example, the Hero figure exalted by patriarchy has sucked up a lot of cultural air. Heroes make messes, some not repairable. They are impulsive, and, at worst, murderous: look at Herakles, Cuchulainn, and Gilgamesh. Captain Picard almost destroyed the universe. Heroes prop up the status quo, like when Batman goes after street criminals while letting the corrupt run Gotham. Thor defends Asgard, a celestial city built on treachery: hence Ragnarok, where all goes up in flames.
Why can’t people gather and get things done without a savior, a redeemer, a parent to look up to? The heroes have done their job. When will we grow up and do ours? In Soulmapper, when the protagonist asks Radantia where God has been while chaos reigned on Earth, she replies: Me? Where were all of you?? Authors of speculative fiction are increasingly critical of the infantilizing influence of saviors and heroes. Poets are, too. As William Stafford says it in “Allegiances,”
It is time for all the heroes to go home if they have any, time for all of us common ones to locate ourselves by the real things we live by.
All my novels begin with a quotation. Lamplighter starts with this one from Ursula K. Le Guin (Tales from Earthsea):
The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.
As the United States enters a winter of discontent, we face that bitter lesson. Fiction said it long before we realized it: No one is coming to rescue us.
Beyond Belief
Like myth, like art, fiction speaks storied truths of existence rather than literal truths of supposed certitude. In Frank Herbert’s novel Children of Dune, the tribal leader Stilgar is forced to realize that tradition is not an adequate guide into the future. Taking a character from The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien offhandedly coined the word sarumanism: the false belief that only power and influence make change in the world. Fiction holds many lessons.
Likewise, an adequate worldview (mythology, big story set, fictionarium) does not tell us how to live but suggests what might be worth living for. It can inspire us to rise above who we think we are. The Deep Space 9 character Damar, a drunken killer who evolves into an inspiring revolutionary leader, sheds light on plenty of real-life counterparts.
“I want to believe” goes the UFO meme from The X-Files. We hear this refrain in organized religion and in every quest for absolute certainty. How limiting belief can be. I don’t believe Mariam Najjar, wise protagonist of Lamplighter, to be literally true, but I believe in her as a hopeful look at what a post-belief spiritual leader might be like. She showed up in my dreams months, perhaps years, before I started writing about her. Believing our myths is divisive, but believing in them just might reenchant them—and us.
With all this in mind, let us take a fresh look at spirituality without a Dadgod, noting in passing that the father image in religion isn’t always problematic. (Jungian writings about the Divine Masculine or Feminine seem dated but contain grains of experiential truth.)
In many cultures, the word for “spirit” points back to wind and breath. A classic clank of Big Machine reduction concludes that “primitives” believe in spirits because when people and animals die, they stop breathing. Obviously. Instead, the words describe the deeper sense of things being animated.
All our ancestors were animists, but not because they thought a god or demon hid inside rocks or brooks. To a consciousness not rigidly split into inner and outer worlds of perception, things show up with hospitality when we appreciate them. The field of terrapsychology looks at how these animate things—including places, rivers, mountains, the elements—come to life inside us as moods, conflicts, and even dream characters. They also dwell in our myths and fictions.
This quality of spirit, of animation, whatever its origins, is a psychological reality. Atheists too have been known to curse stuck doors. For me, feeling spirit’s presence is a bit like sensing the Force of Star Wars through emotion, intuition, and imagination. Spirit is an archetypal idea, whether we call it Force, mana, Brahman, aether, grace, God, or something else, as George Lucas was well aware.
In a discussion with Brenda, Simeon Mackenzie, protagonist of my novel Heartlander, says,
…For my entire life I’ve sensed, at the edges of things, a subtle presence or animation around and within me. It does not command, it hints and whispers. It shows up as the Powers in visions and dreams. The Powers themselves are made out of it. I don’t create it because it lives beyond or below divisions like subjective and objective. It’s as though the cosmos has soul, and spirit is its invisible and ineffable breath. Hermetics called it Big Mind; Chinese philosophers, the Tao…
No belief is needed. Simeon is talking about an experience. Spirituality isn’t about belief; it’s about being open to what is animated and speaking to us inwardly and outwardly. In fact, when religious institutions are kidnapped by the ambitious and controlling, the spiritual visionaries are among the first to be co-opted or killed. They are then rejected by fundamentalists on the one hand and by materialists on the other.
What if soul were not a metaphysical entity to be believed, but the felt sense of where spirit—animation, vision, inspiration, numinosity—lands in the body? Soul reaches down, and spirit lifts up. The entry for “soul” in the free philosophy glossary I’m working on (online debut in 2025) reads in part:
“Soul” is perhaps more a verb than a noun, and felt more than defined. When spirit meets body and emotions, there soul awakens. The arts bring it to life. You can hear it in Aretha Franklin and Jimmy Hendrix and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the mother of rock ‘n roll. Without using the word “soul,” Yo-Yo Ma evoked it at Harvard, where he said music has a bigger purpose than “art for art’s sake.” Art is never that. It’s about taking an ideal and making it visible, audible, tactile: “I want to make it felt.” It’s not analytical thought, it’s behind it. “What gets you to say, ‘I’m really going to look at this thing?’”
What about religion?
Only recently, due to the goose-step march of patriarchal domination, has religion been understood as rigid adherence to a doctrine. Even in the time of Jesus, only a minority of proto-Christians thought of it like that. The ones who did were ambitious and took to themselves the label “orthodox,” from the Greek for “having the right opinion.” Frightened people in a violent world find that appealing.
As Simeon discovers, religion shows up in every culture all the way back—but not in its current forms. In the past, it looked more like awe, reverence, conversation with the other-than-human; ritual, sacred art, dance, and music; joyful community; and sacred materiality, with all things imbued with spiritual presence. In other words, our ancestors practiced varieties of ecospirituality as religion. Only much later historically did religion fall under the shadow of empire and manpower, mutating to emphasize absolute belief, otherworldliness, power hierarchies, armies, dogmas and doctrines, us versus them, and exclusivist monotheism—which, current showiness to the contrary, is on its last legs.
Simeon again: “For me, identifying as ‘spiritual’ is when we consciously tend our relationship with the Invisibles or with felt Spirit. ‘Religion’ is when we do that together as a community, whether or not any belief or doctrine is involved.” Even atheists recognize the need for devotional community. Some have set up little congregations with pictures of Jesus replaced by those of Sir Isaac Newton.
Earlier, I mentioned one “religion” I would belong to. That would be Lamplight, the fictional religion of the Lamplighter Trilogy. It begins with Mariam’s dream about a vast World Tree bearing shining lamps. This dream is of such power that it impels her to gather and converse with her spiritual kindred. Three women found a post-patriarchal religion sourced not in belief or dogma, but in imagination, storytelling, play, creativity, and a lived ethic of care.
Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of freshmeaning—We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failuresand misunderstandings. There is only love.
— Joy Harjo, “Bless the Poets”
Lamplight accepts science but not scientism; tradition, but not doctrine; lore, but not literalized myth; empowerment, not exclusivity. Its humane practices center on care and service to the vulnerable, as good religion always has. It welcomes mature love in all its fluid forms. It also accepts outliers like Lucas Murdock, who aren’t into ceremony or groups but do transformative work in the world: small-l lamplighting. (Maybe “lamplighter” would be a better word than “none”?)
So, there’s a glance at my kind of worldview-building. I invite others to the task, whether by working with me on the start I’ve made or crafting their own. In fact, I just received a grant to found a new kind of educational institution chartered to grow worldview visions for a better world to live in. May the most inclusive visions prevail. I’m serious about all this, which means I’m also playful with it. All my work over the years bears on it: every book, every presentation, every classroom activity.
Lévi Strauss said that “myth is good to think with.” So is fiction, including that of imagined worldviews. If we are serious about being humane, for example, we wouldn’t put Iago to death, but neither would we invite him onto a leadership council. According to Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, being tolerant to the intolerant can destroy a community. We can meet this—I and others have—with what I call the Principle of Discerning Inclusivity: Everyone belongs in the world, just not in certain meetings.
If we are indeed between big collective stories, perhaps gathering to knit together new ones could be enough of a religion alternative to keep us busy and inspired while filling the transitional void.
Every significant human achievement begins with some vision of how things could be different. One of the most urgent and practical activities of our time is relearning how to dream together. Our salvation is not in saviors, but in what we invite back in from the margins of consciousness and culture: outcast people and places, disregarded potentials and options, engaged wisdoms and spiritual insights, hints from dreams and imaginings, and even symptoms awaiting rebirth as symbols for the Earthrise era now dawning.
See also my article “Depth Philosophy: Coming Alive in a Reimagined World.”
A wonderful, wise essay and so beautifully written.