ABC of Politics: Honor

When Alexander Hamilton agreed to a duel with Aaron Burr, his reason was that, as a General in the US armed forces, he had to have a reputation for courage.

Among men, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, honor is the reputation for courage. Among women, honor is the reputation for chastity. I believe that male courage is to be understood not just as physical courage, but the moral courage to do the hard thing. I believe that female courage is to be understood not primarily as sexual chastity, but in being "practically perfect in every way."

Now, I believe that the male concept of honor spawns two cultures: the first is the Culture of Courage; the second is a reflection of the Culture of Courage, the Culture of Insult. A man can demonstrate his courage by his fearless actions, that "boldly did outdare / The dangers of the time." Or he can engage in friendly insult with his fellow men, preferably during a friendly mutual consumption of adult beverages.

For women the female culture of honor spawns two cultures: the first is the Culture of Kindness; the second is the Culture of Complaint. A woman can demonstrate to the world her pure femininity by a constant life of kindness. Or she can advertise the lack of kindness in others by constant complaining. George Eliot in Adam Bede suggests that the Culture of Complaint is in fact a desire to be "soothed."

You can see the application of this in the world of politics. The male politician always needs to advertise his courage, his determination to fight for his nation, or for some particular group of voters: "Fighting for Seniors." He can choose either the high road of the Culture of Courage, just demonstrating to the world his courageous nobility, or he can get down and dirty with the Culture of Insult and deploy pejoratives like racist, sexist, or homophobe.

But for women politicians things are more complicated. She must seem to be courageous, yet not aggressively so, and she must combine kindness as a Lady Bountiful with the tough feminist carapace of complaint against the monstrosity of male privilege. And there is always her secret weapon, that a woman's tears always win against a man.

ABC of Politics: Activism

Back in the day, I had never really thought much about "activism." I knew about it, disliked it, but had never tried to understand it. It was a political "ism" that belonged to the left-wing world -- as are many isms. It was a foreign country and was no concern of mine. But one day a friend told me that she was quitting her corporate job in order to go back to school and become an activist. She had always wanted to "get into activism."

One can ignore the madness of strangers, but a friend one has to try to understand.

Why would a educated woman in mid-life want to get into activism? It was not because she wanted to rebel, I decided, but because she wanted to conform; she wanted to be the best person she could be, and that, she believed, meant activism. I suspect that her yearning was a consequence of the fact that today's youngsters are taught, from kindergarten through graduate school, to believe that political activism is the highest and noblest form of life.

After years of investigation I have come to believe that today's Activism Culture is very similar to the Medieval Romance culture of the olden time. That is to say that I believe it to be a ruling-class conceit, a form of high-class virtue-signaling.

Why do we teach our children to become political activists? It is a long story.

Politics, according to Nazi Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, is the distinction between friend and enemy. Simply put, according to neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy." Or, I would say, the more politics the more enemies.

Now back in the good old days every human community was surrounded by enemies, and it was the job of the men to put a stop to any dawn raids that might be visited upon the community. So, back in the day, political activists were border warriors defending the community against the enemy. 

Later on, in England, King Alfred was sorely tried by various Danes that liked to come a-viking to loot the Wessex villages of grain and silver and sell the women and children as slaves. Looters and slavers as enemies.

Later on, wars developed into high-toned arguments about dynastic succession: the Wars of the Roses. Rival lords as enemies.

Then there came a change: the age of religious wars: Puritans against Cavaliers. The Thirty Years War of 1618-48. And the Protestant Dutch invaded England in 1688 to create a counter-force against Catholic France. Rival religions as enemies.

But then there was Frederick the Great. He may have been an Enlightenment intellectual, but his conquest of Silesia was reactionary: back to simple loot and plunder. Silesia was much richer than the sandy Brandenburg lands around Berlin that he had inherited from his father. Think of the revenues!

Next we get to the French Revolution. It ended up in a Reign of Terror, but it began with an Assembly of Notables -- princes of the blood, archbishops, dukes, marquises and counts -- proposing fairly sensible revisions of the tax system. Then came the men that made the French Revolution a revolution, the Mirabeaus, the Marats, the Robespierres, ideological activists punishing moderates for their moderation with a bit of regicide on the side. And there was no war at all until the peasant revolt against the revolution in the Vendée. The French Revolution was an ideological war, with the old regime, the moderates, or anyone, as enemy.

There is no politics without an enemy. So, as society has changed and politics has changed, the enemy has changed. In our day, we are no longer surrounded by enemy Vikings and looters, but we are still surrounded by enemies. The US Pentagon just announced that climate change and China are both "security threats." The Biden administration early on advertised its determination to tackle the two existential threats of climate change and systemic racism. There is no politics without an enemy.

China? Climate change? Systemic racism? Of course. Each one is an existential threat, an enemy to our way of life, experts agree. If those enemies didn't exist there wouldn't be a need for a government to protect us from anything. No enemy? No need for a government? Fuggedaboutit.

If the foregoing has not persuaded you about the change in political enemies since the good old days of the dawn raid, there is another "tell" that might convince you to believe that the enemies problem has changed in recent times. The "tell" is that our modern ruling class in the developed countries is not a warrior class but an educated class. A warrior class is the ruling class you want when you need to fight military wars to protect the homeland from Vikings, Goths and Vandals. But what is the point of an educated ruling class? What wars would it be needed to fight?

Test Question: What is the difference between a warrior ruling class and an educated ruling class? Explain.

The answer is obvious. Our modern ruling class fights ideological wars, as Robespierre and his ilk did in the Reign of Terror and Virtue. In World War I we were fighting against the horror of old-school Teutonic emperors with stupid mustaches and with knightly stars on their chests; in World War II against the monstrosity of fascism and another mustache; in the Cold War against the horror of Communism and Stalin's mustache. And in the War on Terror? Mullahs with beards.

Of course, we moderns like to sneer at the dynastic wars of the old kings and princes and the religious wars of the 17th century. But is there anything more contemptible than the ideological world wars of the 20th century and the ideological civil wars of the 21st century? And don't get me started on our current Wars of the Wokies that began in the USA and is spreading throughout the mind-world of the West.

I repeat: politics always needs an enemy, and it is the particular talent of an educated class to be able to call up an ideological enemy from the vasty deep on demand. Yes, but what enemy?

Perfectly simple. The ideological enemy of today's ruling class is the ordinary middle class, people that we might call yeomen or commoners. This is a necessary consequence of the over/under political formula that has inspired today's ruling class ever since Rousseau invented it in his Discourse on Inequality and Marx supercharged it in The Communist Manifesto. Our rulers experience themselves as the noble protectors of the lower class against the dawn raid of the bourgeoisie. In the Ally narrative, the rulers are the allies of the "oppressed peoples" and fight the "white oppressors."

There is a difference between olden times and today. The old nobility was a nobility of blood; the new nobility is a nobility of education, of selective college, and credential. In the high Middle Ages the king and his nobles were warriors. In high modernity the leaders of the intellectual class were revolutionaries. But you can see that nothing has changed: the key to any ruling class is its self-perceived specialness.

Every ruling class needs a self-congratulating narrative, especially when it is in decline.

In the Autumn of the Middle Ages the ruling class fell deeply in love with the medieval romance -- stirring tales of knightly virtue, damsels in distress and Holy Grails -- to enjoy before the blazing fire of an evening in the castle keep. Of course, these late feudal nobles were not saintly knights shepherding pilgrims to the Holy Land; they were just powerful men looking after No. 1. But it was their conceit to think of themselves as soldiers of Christ searching for the lost Holy Grail from the Last Supper. They needed something that would make them feel special.

Why should things be any different in the Autumn of the Administrative State? Today's stirring tales of activism are merely the modern version of the medieval romance, putting lipstick on the pig of ideological warfare, elevating the sordid loot and plunder of the modern state into a sacred reparation to peoples oppressed since the dawn of time. Activists are the noble knights -- or at least aspiring squires -- of the ruling class, ideologically setting forth from their NGO castles every morning sans peur et sans reproche to rescue victims in distress from the bigotry and violent extremism of the middle class.

More than that, the activism concept answers a real social need for our well-born youth. In any society it is a real challenge for the child of a wealthy or high-status parent to find a métier that accords with her noble status. In our age the problem is bigger than in the Middle Ages, because children don't automatically inherit the status of their parents. For instance, Stanley and Danko in The Millionaire Next Door asked: how does a millionaire mom raise her children? Not to go into business, because of the risk of failure. Instead she raises her children to the high-status and well-paid professions of medicine and law. That was then; this is now, and the most prestigious of today's professions is surely activism. Our universities teach activism as they once taught theology to well-born youngsters fated to become priests in the state established church, and our billionaires fund activism. Activism is a way of acquiring high moral status in a society ruled by an educated elite.

One question that still troubles me: what on Earth did Richard Wagner think he was doing in the middle of the 19th century with all his medieval-romance operas about swan knights and Grails and Teutonic myths?

Ruling classes like to flatter themselves, because the reality of political power is not very pleasant -- since politics is about the enemy. The feudal lords of the Middle Ages were the original robber barons, not noble knights. Today's activists are the bribed apologists of today's ruling class, not dedicated monks of truth and justice. We can tell that as we look back on the riots of the US 2020 election season. Our rulers seemed to be quite untroubled by the riots staged by the activists of Black Lives Matter and AntiFa. But they were deeply offended by teenager Kyle Rittenhouse battling the Kenosha rioters in August 2020 and the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021. The lesson is obvious. Left-wing activists are tolerated by the regime; their riots are judged to be "mostly peaceful protests." Right-wing activists are not even rioters; they are "armed insurrectionists."

For us, the medieval romances and Wagner's operas are delightful entertainment. And there is nothing more delightful than watching Shakespeare's Harry Percy and Prince Hal duke it out at the battle of Shrewsbury.

But the melodrama of modern activism is not so funny. For it is based on a lie, that modern society does not care about the travails of the oppressed, and that the only way for the voice of the oppressed to be heard is through the intercession of well-born activists. Not at all. Our era is remarkably sensitive to the cry of the oppressed, beginning not later than the Duke of Wellington persuading the British House of Lords to pass the great Reform Bill of 1832 that broadened the franchise to include small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers.

Indeed, the concurrence between the medieval romance and the modern activist romance is telling. It is telling us that the present age, in which all good people are devoted to digging out oppression wherever it can be found, is in its autumn. Just as aristocrats down the ages sported the stars and crosses of various orders of chivalry on their chests, so do our modern aristocrats sport their NGO exploits on their college applications and resumes.

Politics needs an enemy. But a ruling class also needs to believe it is doing good.

ABC of Politics: Blame

I was reading a piece by a friend mourning how politicians never admit they are wrong. And that set me to thinking. Why not? Why don't politicians admit when they are wrong? I realize that politicians are not like ordinary people that can just say, sorry, I screwed up. Not that anyone ever likes to admit being wrong or take the blame.

It's obvious really.

It starts with this: there is no politics without an enemy. The corollary is that a politician is always fighting an enemy. And when you are fighting an enemy you are in a battle of life and death. You cannot just say: "aw shucks, we screwed up."

If something goes wrong with the Emperor of China, it is said that he has lost the Mandate of Heaven. So it's the end of him, the end of his dynasty, and a Time of Troubles until the next emperor appears and crowns himself with the Mandate of Heaven.

Put it this way: Imagine that President Roosevelt had said, on December 8, 1941, that "gee fellas, we really screwed up the intelligence, allowing a Japanese naval fleet to steam half way across the Pacific and attack our naval base at Pearl Harbor. Better luck next time." If he had done that he would have had to resign.

No, instead President Roosevelt rallied America to arms, starting with: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941— a date which will live. In infamy." And went on to win the biggest war in world history. That's how a political leader acts. That's how a political leader must act.

But most questions in this life are not a matter of life and death. But still, a politician never admits a mistake, and never takes the blame.

So the question becomes: what questions should come under the care of politics, given that politics requires an enemy, and treats every issue as a matter of life and death?

Or to put the issue another way, when we consider the question of an enemy, there is the fact of conflict, extending "to the real possibility of physical killing", according to Carl Schmitt. Just who among the people with whom we interact deserve to be named and treated as enemies?

Or suppose that we have misinterpreted someone else's action as an act of malevolence, when it was just an act of selfishness?

And that is the key to the question of why a politician can never admit a mistake and stay in office. Because politics is about the enemy, and action against the enemy involves the possibility of conflict and "the real possibility of physical killing," a mistake in politics is always colored by the possibility of killing someone that didn't deserve to be killed, or "one of ours" being killed for nothing.

If a politician identifies an enemy and it turns out that the so-called enemy is really our friend, then the politician is a monster.

If a politician sends our young men out against the enemy, and it turns out it was all a mistake, then that politician is a monster.

If a politician sends our young men out against the enemy, and the enemy beats them, then the politician is a monster.

So, a politician can never admit a mistake and take the blame. Because if he has made a mistake he is a monster.

And he is history.

So, politics should only be involved in issues where the leader cannot admit to being wrong, because the issue is a matter of life and death about which we must fight to the death right now or get annihilated, where doing nothing and making a mistake amounts to the same thing: oblivion.

Everything else we should resolve in a free and good-natured discussion of the issues among equals.

Self-Creating Universe 8: Making Sense of Life

Clarke develops the idea of emergentism as a worldview, in the sense of the German notion of Weltanshauung, a narrative, or "conceptual scheme," that attempts to bring the aspects of existence into a unifed story about the meaning of life, and to rediscover the sense of the sacred in a reintegration of the art and humanities with the sciences. 

But what do we value most in life: what do we regard as sacred. For Clarke, the emergentism that understands 'human persons as agents and self-creators is a reflection  of the sacredness of nature itself as a self-organizing, self-creating cosmos". It re-enchants the disenchanted universe of the old materialist-mechanical model. Instead of the pessimism of Christianity and Sin and the Fall, we can take heart in a view of "this emergent world of unending creativity as sacred" with the idea of "God" as our name for creativity in nature. But what of destruction and death? There is a a complementarity between creation and destruction, and the notion that we fight against violence and evil is a sign of "moral and religious emergence."

How does emergentism speak to the moral life, about "the good life, about ethical principles, about human morality, about rights and wrongs, justice, honesty, and compassion?" Clarke proposes to develop an "autopoietic ethics," self-generating and self-developing. If human life is self-creative, so then can human ethics.

But does that pitch humans into nihilism, where everything is permitted? Clarke thinks not, asserting that even traditions developed with God's authority "we are still the creators and interpreters" of God's authority. We do not become altruistic by "learning rules or commandments... but by becoming altruistic persons". It presupposes a "long and often agonized 'conversation of mankind', an "ever-developing "communicative rationality." Is this just egoistic "self-realization"? Clarke thinks not; we are social beings in a network of interdependence genuine self-realization means the self-realization of all beings. However, this is not easy, as the critics of both Marxist equality and liberal freedom demonstrate. Perhaps the Green philosophy, with its vision of "close affinity with the natural world" is a better approach, with "adaptive, self-regulating systems" rather than command-and-control. But does this approach extend beyond the human species? Yes, but not too far. Clarke feels that his approach to morality aligns with Buddhism and the Tao.

Now Clarke moves on from the moral life to the spiritual life. What does that mean in an emergent philosophy?

Next: Emerging Futures.

Self-Creating Universe 7: Making Sense of Human Nature

How do we understand human nature, our "being-in-the-world from an emergentist perspective"? And that obviously, has to do with our notion of human consciousness, and our notion of human "freedom." The idea is to get beyond the old question of free will vs. determinism. Can emergentism throw new light upon human "free will?" Clarke proposes to develop a model to understand human action "as a natural, albeit non-reductive, emergent phenomenon."

Clarke proposes to develop his idea based upon the notion of human agency, that humans make choices in the world not just consciously, but "in terms of our biological inheritances, languages, social customs, and external circumstances and demands." And, human agency is understood "not only   in personal terms but as a collective process... as nations, tribes, families, businesses, or teams."

We humans like to think of ourselves as special, but Clarke identifies agency-like behavior in almost all living things. Thus the idea of "protoagency" in living things as basic as "a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient" that seems to "act on [its] own behalf and [is] able to detect and respond appropriately to both nutrients and threats". Thus agency could be an emergent property of living things that becomes more complex with more complex living things.

Clarke does not want to think of agency or free-will as "random and unpredictable" but rather as "the production of order by means of human agency, individual and collective."

But how does agency work, since agency is a top-level property of living things, while science generally likes to explain the complex in terms of the less complex? The answer is to assume that emergence works from the top-down as well as the bottom-up. This applies at the social level too: it is not possible to understand the operation of society purely from the behavior of individuals. Society clearly affects individuals. This "downward causation" also applies to the mind-body question. Mind and body must be connected and mind must have an influence on body.

In understanding the behavior of a human agent... we need to take into account different levels of understanding -- physical , biological, psychological, and spiritual.

Yet we are also an unity "in which these different levels overlap."

So Clarke proposes a view that "one level of phenomena or type of property... is dependent upon another level... while at the same time not being reducible to it." And that applies to the interdependence of mind and matter. 

Another vexed question is the question of "purpose," that seems obvious in a world created by God, but problematic in an naturalist presumption. Clarke thinks it is better to talk about "function" rather than "purpose." And the same applies to the notion of "progress." Clarke decides to reject a teleological tending towards some "ideal goal" while accepting that there seems to be, in the emergent understanding of the universe, some sort of "urge to create" that seems to move towards "more diverse, complex and self-ordered beings."

And then there is the question of morality. Is morality, and our understanding of morality, progressing? And does the concern about violence, "our horror of wars," and "famine, disease, poverty and injustice" might be regarded as "indications of moral and religious emergence." On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe, as with Kant, it helps "to proceed as if something has a purpose" even if it doesn't.

How about extending purpose and functions to values? Wittgenstein says that the world is the totality of facts; Sartre says that values are a creation of our "subjective conscious freedom;" Whatbout the "fact-value" debate? Can we achieve a "naturalization of ethics?"

There is Darwin proposing that pre-human species display a kind of "protomorality." Others show that many animal species have a sense of fairness, empathy, and help others in distress. And there seems to be an evolution in this, not just from apes to humans, but also within the human species, as in the evolution of the common law, that combined a connection with tradition with "constant reflection and adaptation." There seems to be a kind of creatvie emergent order, where values are concerned.

Next: Making Sense of Life.

Self-Creating Universe 6: Making Sense of Emergentism

What is emergentism? Is it a Theory of Everything or a "ghostly last stand for metaphysical mysteries?" Paul Davies thinks that "emergentism is a new scientific paradigm;" Imre Lakatos thinks of it a "progressive research programme," meaning that it is fruitfully combining together in various fields that is "going somewhere and it gaining support on the way."

Clark's notion is that, while emergentism falls short of a unified model of science, at least provides a consistent language "applicable to a whole range of phenomena" with concepts such as "dynamic systems, chaos, complexity, and self organization." It seems to be a comfortable compromise between unified theory and Paul Feyerabend's notion of "anything goes." And that influences the experience of scientific enterprise: not as crystalline, but a human discourse "involving a converging practice and mutual influence between our best theories in science."

And perhaps its very uncertainty and unpredictability brings into question the eternal dream of "ultimate certainties and universal foundational principles" and that is a good thing.

But how emergent and creative is emergence? There are two explanations: the weak explanation is that "living beings [only] appear to be relatively independent of their chemical constituents." Living things are just a consequence of their complexity. The strong explanation is that, say, in the emergence of life, there is something that is "irreducible" to "nonliving entities." Some thinkers limit this to consciousness versus non-consciousness. But Clarke prefers a general idea that we can't reduce new phenomena to its constituents. It is just useful to "make sense of nature as being driven by... a creative principle."

There's a problem with this, that it seems to contradict the idea of entropy, that the universe is running down from order to chaos. The argument is that living things are not like steam engines, but can export disorder into the environment and import order from it. They "dissipate" entropy, or used-up energy, into the environment. According to Ilya Prigogine

such processes of transformation, of self-organization and self-creation, lead to the formation of new system which are not apparently or readily explainable in terms of preceding conditions or constituent microscopic processes.

Thus, "small fluctuations may iterate and kick-start an entirely new transformational process. Such "turbulence" may lead to new organization or to "disintegration and disorder," e.g., creation of a new species or extinction of an existing species. This goes beyond traditional Darwinian natural selection theory to propose change by random mutation and adaptation to propose "self-creative, emergent processes," for random mutation by itself should lead to disorder.

Another way to think of this is in the notion of "play" or "playful variation on old ideas," a breaking out of "rule-bound or goal-directed behavior." The point of it all is that it accounts for chaos and creation in purely naturalistic terms. No need for something higher or supernatural.

Another speculation is that "the spontaneous formation of new kinds of order might be explainable in terms of quantum coherence" as suggested by quantum theory. But Clarke doubts whether this applies or explains emergence. Self-organizing phenomena -- especially humans -- "are not strange in the way that quantum processes can be strange."

But is an explanation of emergence in sight? Probably not. It is likely that the current "unpredictability of emergent complexity" demonstrates the primitive state of our state of knowledge, or ignorance, rather than the way nature works.

Clarke raises the question whether emergence is "description" rather than "explanation," but then decides, with references to Newton and Einstein and Wittgenstein, that all science is description, the "how" rather than the "why." The "why" is for theology.

How does emergence relate to fundamental concepts of philsophy like "being?" Does emergence mean new levels of knowlege, or new levels of being. Clarke argues that emergence doesn't really fit any of the previous accounts of reality. It does not assume all the world is "matter," nor does it divide the world into two, material and mental. Clarke argues that

[Emergentism] runs counter to both monistic and dualist philosophies, and in their place offers instead a dynamic, process model in which being comes to be understood, not in terms of unchanging qualities or features or essences, nut rather of continual change punctuated by relative equilibrium.

But is he saying that emergence means something coming out of nothing? Not quite, he suggests: not "a "something for nothing" but a "more from less,"that the potential is there, but not yet realized.

What about God? Does not the concept of emergence suggest the present of a creative intelligence in the universe? Recently, the concept of "intelligent design" in nature has been advanced, and a number of people have questioned the adequacy of Darwinian evolution to accont for the "'irreducible complexity' of living beings." But Clarke would rather not go down that path.

We can now see that the astonishing coherence of the universe, clearly evident at many levels, is not a static or eternal one, but is a highly complex dynamic process, one in which harmony, disharmony, order, and chaos are complementary performers and transformers over deep time.

In other words, we don't know. 

 Next: Making Sense of Human Nature

Self-Creating Universe 5: Acts of Creation

"Creativity is a key idea in all facets of emergentism." Something new and unexpected occurs.

Out of chaos comes order and out of order comes life, and out of life come the "ten thousand things".

Karl Popper speaks of creativity as the greatest riddle of cosmology, "that the universe is in a sense creative." 

Creativity, the word, first appeared in English in 1875. Now it is a fashion: everything has to do with creativity. On the one hand it is associated with accelerating changes in science and business competition and in responding to challenges. On the other hand it is criticized by the left as being elitist and imperialist. Philosopher Roger Scruton called it "a fad for self-indulgent exhibitionism".

But Clarke wants to connect the interest in creativity with the relevance of emergentism.

In the old days, only God could be creative, and to talk about humans as creative was to trespass upon God's work. But then Spinoza suggested that maybe nature could be a "self-activating agent," and Coleridge proposed that nature was "one connected whole... a living being rather than a collection of parts... with creative powers within itself." 

This ties in with Kant, who wrote about each part of an organism producing the other parts, "so that it will be both an organized and self-organized being. And in his Critique of Pure Reason he "painted a picture of human knowledge in which the mind actively constructs the world" with the rational mind involved "in the shaping of knowledge." Thus, also, the artist in not "primarily an imitator, but a creator." Thus Wackeroder who portrayed "the artist as a priest who cooperates in the divine creative act"; Schelling pronouncing art as "a holy, creative, elemental power of the world." Then Fichte and the idea of self-creation: "I am wholly my own creation."

Thinkers in the 19th century developed the notion of self-creation. Marx argued that we create history with our labor; John Stuart Mill wrote that we are like a tree that grows and develops itself. Even Samuel Smiles that "self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual." Then there is Nietzsche: we "must take upon ourselves the task of self-creation" as man "become a work of art." Thus the physicist M. Mitchell Waldrop who sees us opening ourselves to "a kind of deep, inner creativity that is woven into the very fabric of nature."

In the 20th century thinkers have zeroed in on the idea that language is the agent of creation. Thus Noam Chomsky wrote that "The normal use of language is... a creative activity." Thus Freud and later psychologists looked at the potential for understanding "irrational forces locked up in the unconscious" through the talking cure. Or Jung proposing "transformation of the self" through the "creative dialogue" that leads to individuation. We can alter our states of mind by working on the brain, So, with Fromm, man's existence is "a problem he has to solve." Or Foucault considering that "one's life become a work of art." And this is experienced by some as a "democratization of the spirit" with people creating their own spiritual goals and methods. Thus the ex-Dominican priest Matthew Fox who moves theology towards the "cultivation of the sacredness of creation." And the celebration of the creative work of women down the ages, "whether as mothers, workers, or artists."

The idea of creativity moves from individual minds into movements. Thus Toynbee saw a civilization as "a dynamic, self-organizing entity" and revolutionary movements took the ideas of Marx and attempted "the creation of a new kind of humanity. The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s sought to create a new kind of consciousness, "to wake up and discover, even to create, our new selves." The point is that they experience creativity as not just for God or a "few privileged individuals" but something in which everyone can participate.

Natural science is experienced as "one of the great cooperative creations of modern times" and in Thomas Kuhn as revolutions when a prevailing paradigm is transformed by "a new set of assumptions and terminologies." In Karl Popper the paradigm notion becomes the social interaction of evaluation and the possibility of the "falsifiability" of a theory by others.

The postmodern movement has a different take on creativity, reacting perhaps against a "totalizing" notion of the creative individual as a "transcendental subject." One way to approach creativity differently is to experience creativity as "play," and out of play come stories and narratives, "not as a mirror of the world but as something extra and unpredictable emerging from it," as Derrida puts it. So, "meaning is never closed but always deferred." And this is allied to the notion of reality as socially constructed that goes back to Kant. Thus creativity is a "conversation of mankind" rather than the brilliant "all-embracing world view."

Of course, some thinkers want to "depreciate the idea of creativity." But at least emergentism allows for the creation of new ideas without "divine mysteries" and other authoritarian structures.

Next: Making Sense of Emergentism