https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZuCieejIEbI
Welcome everyone to a special Voices with Fervake. I’m here with my good friend Greg Thomas. Many of you know that Greg and I have done a series of the integration of his work with my work, particularly his reflections on the blues, jazz, democracy and being a radical moderate. And I’ve been developing, oh we could maybe talk about that too, I’ve been developing something of an argument about what the radical moderate is committed to. And so first of all it’s wonderful to see you again Greg. What the intent of this is to be kind of a reflection for both of us and any amendments or addendum to the series. This doesn’t mean that Greg and I are finished with each other or anything ridiculous like that. We are of course going to be working together and maintaining relationship. But we did think it was appropriate. Greg suggested this to me and I totally agree that we should have some reflective finale if you could put it that way. So welcome Greg, it’s great to be with you again. Thank you so much John. It’s a pleasure to be here again. And I tell you the feedback we got in the comments section, they were kind of moving to me because people really seem to gravitate to it for many reasons. So it’s a pleasure and an honor to be in conversation with you again. I would also add to the description of the previous conversations that we also dealt with race versus culture in the last session. Yes. So go ahead. And I was particularly pleased with how that was taken up. We both knew we were walking on a bit of a rope bridge that could sway to extremes very easily. But you took us through that with such grace and rigor and authenticity that I think you can see in the comments specifically about that video, that it was appropriately and well received. And I think people are hungry for a more nuanced and penetrating response to this burning question. Absolutely. So it’s a couple of I don’t know if you would call it housekeeping, but I like the way you put it addendum. Very quickly, I want to mention that in the very beginning, in the very first conversation, you mentioned that we would be doing both doing a particular leadership program. And that leadership program is something I was brought into through my colleague, Bruce Alderman, who you’ve been in conversation with many times on his show, the integrals, integral stage with layman Pascal. And that program is called the blue sky leaders program. So I want to mention that to kind of round the circle there. Yes. Thank you. I also wanted to mention that I was remiss when I mentioned a particular scholar. She came up several times in the second and third conversation. The second conversation had to do with with, you know, democracy as antagonist to cooperation or opponent processing. And in the third where we dealt with the race and culture, but you know, we were weaving in these themes throughout. And I’m talking about Harvard professor Danielle Allen. And as I looked at as I looked at the, you know, our conversation, I said, you know, I just mentioned her name, like everybody knows her. And that was that I was remiss. I’d like to take a moment to correct that, to let you and your readers know your listeners know that she is the James Bryant University professor at Harvard and director of the Allen lab for democracy renovation at Harvard Kennedy School as Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. And she’s also a professor of political philosophy, ethics and public policy. She’s a nonprofit leader, a democracy advocate, a tech ethicist, a distinguished author and mom. And in the 90s, to go back early in her career after earning an undergraduate degree from Princeton, she earned a PhD in classics from Cambridge, and then a PhD in government from Harvard. She’s got to all right, so to give you a couple of the books that really apply. And this this one, the first one I’m going to mention was one that I think was a bestseller. And it was called or titled our declaration, a reading of the Declaration of Independence in defense of equality. She actually makes a case for equality and egalitarianism, since she thought that things that move so much in the direction of liberty, that the equality peace was was not balanced. And then in her latest book, Justice by Means of Democracy, she expands upon that greatly. Here’s one that as far as you, John, I was really, really remiss. Would you believe that in 2012, she’s the author of a book entitled Why Plato wrote? I got that. Ah, glad to hear that. But I’m not surprised. After our discussion. After our discussion, I ordered it. I now have that book. I haven’t started reading it yet. But I have that book now. Because I tell you, you know, in jazz, there’s a tradition, and it’s not just in jazz, but you know, that’s one reference point. There’s a tradition of great musicians, you know, just like, you know, in tennis, you know, great competitors, and they allow each other to raise to higher and higher heights. And this could happen in conversation, not adversarially per se, but frankly, democratically in terms of democratic conversation, you know, Habermas. Yeah. And to see a conversation between you and Danielle Allen is something that I am going to work assiduously behind the scenes to make happen. That needs to happen. I would love that. And you know, that would mean that I would definitely have to read the book and soon, which would I’m happy to do. I mean, reach out to the Vervecki Foundation, Christopher Mastipietro. He you know, he’s now the new executive director of the Vervecki Foundation. And he is very much about trying to get pairings like this going. And so she’s I’m sure open to it. She happens to be on sabbatical. And so when she’s on sabbatical, she declines most interview requests. But, you know, time passes pretty fast, you know, so she would be off sabbatical towards the middle of next year. We’ll see if we can make it happen. Okay, well, we’ll look towards it, like I said, but that’s, that’s great. And well, I’m looking forward to reading her book. It’s not a very thick book, which is one as I get older, I really look for these thinner books. And then I say that and I started reading with Dan Schape, Robert Brandeam Spirit of Trust, which is 900 something pages. But but generally, yeah. Okay, and that’s two two quick announcements. The first announcement is that on September 28, a podcast that I’m the co host of along with my co host and fellow co director of the Omni American Future Project, R.A. Tepper of a podcast titled straight ahead, the Omni American podcast. So I am so happy that, you know, we’ve been in pre production working on it very much, which is one of the reasons that those who saw our first series will see a different look and setup and probably a better audio experience for me because of that. And then lastly, I have been contracted to write my memoir. Excellent. And the title of the memoir is the making of an Omni American, my journey from race to culture to cosmos. Oh, what a great title. Oh, my gosh. Beautiful title. And if we could start with the last the last word there, because this is going to be a jazz conversation that they were going to be riffing will enter into the themes, you know. So Cosmos now, obviously, Cosmos is something we talked about in relation to cosmopolitanism, which then you refer to stoicism and then asked about Ralph Ellison in that context in one of our conversations. But one of the things I’d like to ask you, it seems to me. That one of the fundamental aspects of our mythos as not only humans, but Western people in particular, is that since modernity, there is an idea or a notion that we are in. Obviously, we know that we are in a vast, expanding universe. And I’m going to relate cosmos and universe to I know they are not necessarily one in the same. I’ve actually read on those distinctions, but I’m just going to equate them because most people can, I think, understand that there is a connection there. And it seems to me in my work, and this will be reflected in the book, that one of the fundamental important philosophical, and it’s more than this is philosophical, I think it deals with the mythos as I alluded to the question of whether the universe is dead or alive. If the universe is dead, we are floating in a dead universe in which, you know, there’s not much basis for meaning. If we’re in a universe that’s alive, and we see ourselves as a part of that alive universe, and it seems to me that we can have an influence here on Earth, though of course, mankind has ventured out into space, but that we can see ourselves as a part of a evolving universe where we can actually have some impact on the course of our growth and development and even deepening as human beings. What do you think about that, that contrast? Well, that’s a long and sophisticated question. So I’ll need a bit of time to respond as an answer because I want to give you a complex melody to play with. So first of all, I know you’re equating them, but I would want to bring back the distinction only to try and say how we move between them. And I think one way of understanding a lot of my work and what we’re talking about right now, how those come together is part of our project is transforming a universe into a cosmos. And that’s not an astronomical event that’s going to occur, right? This has to be about what is our deepest, most justifiable connectedness to reality, and what does that disclose about that reality? And what does that disclosure, how can that disclosure or does it, and if it does, how can it guide us to cultivating the meaning in life that makes life worth living even though we are foolish and fail and we are faulted and we’ve experienced futility and frustration, etc. And so for me, all of this comes back to an emerging theme. I’ll be talking about it actually not next week, but the week after in Oxford with Ian McGillchrist and Janell Schmachtenberger about the rebirth or the reinventio of the sacred. So to say the universe is a cosmos is to not say that there’s been some, there are new galaxies or stars or anything like that, it’s to say it is appropriate, it is proper, and it has existential and sapiential cultivation of wisdom consequence to say that there is a sacred dimension to the universe and that we can enrich our lives individually and collectively by coming into relation to that and to making its birth more present in a time in which people are seeking for it and looking for it. So first of all, that’s my first proposal. And then I have lots of arguments where, you know, you’ve been seeing some of them with Greg Enriquez about transcendent naturalism and a way in which we can philosophically and scientifically talk about strong transcendence, a deep kind of connectedness, a new sense of the sacred that doesn’t put us at odds with our best science, but in fact can help enrich that particularly enrich the cognitive science that will give us a scientific explanation of how scientists make meaning and seek truth and therefore put human beings back into a cosmos as opposed to having them spectators on a cold universe. That’s the second point. The third point, and after I make the third point, I’ll turn things back over to you is all of that needs to be addressed within a framing of the fact that in terms of our horizontal participation in the universe, the causal network through time, we are vastly minuscule. We are measured quantitatively, temporally. We are statistically causally insignificant beings. And if you just stay there and if you think that scientific worldview commits you to that, then I think you do not have a cosmos. One is not possible for you. However, if you look at the vertical and that human beings represent a qualitative thing, a qualitative disclosure that you can pile suns on top of suns and stars on top of stars, and you do not get the difference made to the universe of a human mind. The capacity to appreciate the true, the good and the beautiful, the capacity to seek a meaningful existence. We disclose potential in the cosmos that no other beings, as far as we know yet, can disclose. Now we might produce AI, we might encounter aliens, but nevertheless, qualitatively, we have a iconic relationship. We are icons of depth and creativity that must be part of the universe that are only disclosed in us. And therefore, in that iconic relationship, we bear a special responsibility. I think if you put all the three of those together, let’s talk about what it is to convert the universe into a cosmos by coming up with an intellectually justifiable and existentially challenging relationship to the sacred, understand what that might mean for us, and that also understand that although quantitatively, horizontally, we might be, you know, temporally insignificant things, vertically, eternally, we are extremely important beings in terms of the icon. And what we have tended to do in the past mythologically is conflate those together, to think we must be horizontally in the center of the cosmos, and all of the events in the cosmos are somehow for us. That’s a mistake. We then swung to the other end, the other way of saying no, then that’s, we sort of accepted that framing. And then within that framing, we are not at the center and we don’t, and things are not here for us. But then we lost the vertical, which is precisely the axis in which the sacred has to intersect with the horizontal. I’m not saying the sacred is only in the vertical. The sacred is actually the nexus point of eternity and temporality epitomized in things like music, which is why we find when we try to express the most symbolic representation of the sacred we come up with, people are almost always drawn to music as that which most expresses it. And so that would be my response. Sorry, it was long, but you asked me something really, really profound. Thank you. Many things come to mind. I would just share a few responses. One, I refer listeners and viewers to our first conversation that dealt with kind of the blues idiom as a wisdom tradition and jazz as an ecology of practices, because we did quite a bit of riffing on the sacred and secular dimensions of a culture within an American context. You can say it’s a subculture, but it’s a culture that is integral to American culture. And I’m talking about Afro-American culture that has sacred and secular dynamics. I just refer people to check that out. But further, you mentioned the horizontal and the vertical and within a jazz improvisation context that has particular application. So I’ll name two individuals who are iconic within the jazz historical context, and that is Coleman Hawkins, who was called the father of the tenor saxophone, and Lester Young, who’s nicknamed Prez. Coleman Hawkins was Hawk. And Hawk and Prez Iconically represented two approaches from the earliest of jazz, from the 20s and 30s in particular, of approaches to jazz improvisation. Now, for some people who know things about music history, Coleman Hawkins in 1939 produced an incredibly powerful and moving version of an improvisation on the song Body and Soul. Some people might recall that. If you were a tenor saxophone player in jazz, you needed to learn that solo. Okay. And so Coleman Hawkins took more of a horizontal approach. I was very good friends with a gentleman named Michael James, who was Duke Ellington’s nephew, his sister, sorry, Duke Ellington’s sister. Ruth Ellington was Michael’s mother. But when I met him, you know, he was two generations older than me, and I was actually introduced to him by Michael James. I’m sorry, by Albert Murray. Albert Murray, I was talking to Albert Murray. And good Lord, Albert Murray was born in 1916. I was born in 1963. So, you know, he was like an intellectual grandfather or great grandfather, something like that. And so, but he was very open with his time. But some of it, you know, he thought that I needed to get some more grounding. So he says, let me introduce you to Michael James. He knows jazz from the insides, backwards and forwards. And you know something? He’d kick your ass. So so he introduced me and Michael proceeded to take me through as I was in grad school. This was actually during grad school when I was doing a doctoral program in American studies at NYU, really deepening my knowledge and study of history, anthropology, and history, anthropology, and literature. He would take me through foundations of what I call the Ellison Murray continuum, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. So, you know, took me through Hemingway that I hadn’t read. And by the way, Hemingway is also part of the blues existentialism that I referred to. That was another point I wanted to mention. Tomas Mann and many others, Andre Malraux, Kennesburg. And he would say to me about Coleman Hawkins, Hawk never missed a change, a chord change, you know, he was on it. You know, so he was a horizontal harmonically based soloist, whereas Lester Young was more of a vertical improvisation master where he improvised themes and variations primarily on the melody. Okay. Charlie Parker, who came along after Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins were already established as icons in jazz, and he in some ways synthesized a horizontal and a vertical approach. So I wanted to give you that in terms of horizontal and vertical approaches to improvisation. Then there’s one other, but before I go into that one other, I have to give you a quote from Quincy Jones on melody, or what’s the basis of the vertical approach. And he says, you know, in music, you know, and he studied music so deeply. I mean, as a composer, he studied with Nadia Boulanger. I mean, he was just so learned and studied and he applied all of that in writing movie scores. And he had a jazz big band and he’s done all kinds of things, of course, in pop music. He worked with Michael Jackson. But anyway, one of his books, he said, you know, there’s a lot of people who deal with kind of the mathematics of music and deal with, you know, counterpoint and inversions and all that kind of stuff. He says, you know, but when you’re talking about melody, all of that’s some bullshit. And he said it from this, he says, melody is the only thing that doesn’t have a technique. Melody doesn’t have rules. Melody comes from God, another power. So that points to that verticality, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is interesting. And then lastly, the best selling jazz recording of all time is Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. That featured Miles Davis on trumpet, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. And I mean, this, so the bebop period in the 40s with Charlie Parker, you know, was an incredible era of virtuosity. After that, in the 50s, there was kind of a dispersion of styles. So you had hard bop, which went back to more of a grounded kind of blues gospel bass in its orientation. You had something called third stream, which attempted to integrate a classical music with jazz and other styles. But you also had something that was based on modes. Kind of Blue is a recording that occurred when Miles Davis had the musicians come into the studio. He didn’t prepare them. And these are some of the greatest, you know, improvisers and performers of jazz history. And he put in front of them charts that had modes. So when you’re talking about modes, it goes back to the Gregorian chants in Western music. So if you have a C scale, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, a mode would be a scale that starts from each note. So a scale starting with C going all the way up to the octave C, but then D going all the way up to D. So these modes are names things like Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. So they didn’t know what they were going to be playing. They of course were great readers. They could read, but these were themes and they had to on the spot improvise using not the usual chord changes of the American songbook. They had to use modes and create on the spot. So that’s one of the appeals of kind of Blue soloing on modes and being creative. You know, John Coltrane, Cannonball, Adelaide, oh my God, Miles. So modes are another way of improvising in jazz. So you’ve got a horizontal, a vertical approach and a modes approach. And that applies to so many things that we talked about and that you’ve been talking about, you know, in some of your conversations on transcendent naturalism and other places. So how does that reach you, John? Well, first of all, wonderfully. Secondly, you know, I have been intrigued ever since I read John Roussin’s Bearing Witness to Epiphany and I got a chance to talk with him and he laid out the musicality of being and he talked about, you know, rhythm and melody and harmony and how that’s actually not just in music, it’s in the very way in which we make sense of reality and reality, you know, makes sense to us because we should always think about it going both ways. And then the whole, and I’ve been picking up a little bit on the Pythagorean tradition running through the Platonic tradition historically and the deep connections between music and I want to say math, we have to remember it’s geometry. So it’s inherently imaginable for the Greeks. So math. The music of the seas. Yes, yes, all that kind of stuff. And sacred geometry, right. And of course, intelligibility. And it was Pythagoras who actually coined the word cosmos. It was Pythagoras who coined the word philosophy, etc. And so first of all, that you just strengthened that resonance for me just by what you said. So it just landed sort of knitted my agency together a bit better. So thank you for that. Very, very welcome. Yeah. And I mean, I just finished for Johanna, Johanna Snyderhuisers Academy, the Beyond Nihilism course where we were going through the works of Tillich, Rosen, Nishitani and David Schindler, my friend David Schindler. And I was slowly developing an argument based on the astonishing work of James Filler, especially his book on Heidegger Neoplatonism and the Ground of Being about these dimensionalities and how nihilism emerges when you try to reduce all the dimensions to one dimension. And Filler has a great way of talking about it, right. The vertical is basically the problem of the one and the many. And when you said that about melody coming from God, it’s so, isn’t it such a, what do I want to say, an iconic exemplification of the problem of the one and the many, because there’s the many, but somehow you’re finding a one. And yet the many, the minis are never exhausted, but they are always finding a one. And that has a sense of emanating into the situation. So that lands perfectly for the vertical. And of course, the horizontal, as you said, it unfolds very readily with what you’re saying. And what you just said regarding the one and the many, of course, ties to E Pluribus Unum, which is the motto of the United States out of many, one, which to me not only has democratic and political implications, but as you’ve been alluding to, it has such deep spiritual and philosophical implications. Oh, for sure. For sure. I mean, Plato made it explicit in the Republic, our models of our society and our models of our psyche are deeply interwoven. And the sacred capacity of one interweaves with the sacred capacity of the other. If we don’t have a way in which the one become a many socially, we don’t know how the one becomes a many psychologically. And therefore we can’t realize it ontologically if both the social and the psychological are not available to us, and especially any kind of affinity between them. This is, again, this is why for me, Plato’s Republic is a sacred book. You can keep finding more and more of these kinds of profound insights in this book. So definitely the vertical, the horizontal. So Filler talks about the ancient world was wrestling with the problem of the one and the many. The modern world has the same problem of what is intelligibility, but it’s turned it not from the up and down, but to the problem of the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective. And then what we’ve been talking about, especially in the way in which, you know, all throughout there’s been this theme, both in the music and the discussion of culture and democracy, about how these things, music, culture, democracy, are designed to remind you that there is something deeper than the subjective and the objective, that which binds them together horizontally. So that was landing for me as well. And then you said, I think you said Parker put the two together and I just, okay, I want to understand that better. What does that mean? And then the modal is a really interesting one because I don’t have a strong sense of, like I understood it abstractly, but because there’s another dimension that I argued for and beyond nihilism. So I was arguing that what happens is you need to overcome the subjective objective as you’re overcoming the one and the many, the two worlds, right? So a non-duality in the horizontal, a non-duality in the vertical. And then I talked about another non-duality that Filler talks about, which is a kind of figure ground reversal. And maybe that’s going on with the modal. I don’t know. So let me propose it to you and see. And what Filler argues is that the West had a choice, and this is a philosophical spiritual choice, Aristotle or the Neoplatonists. And what he argues is Aristotle became dominant, but the Neoplatonic tradition carried on and would resurface. And for Aristotle, things, nouns, noun things are what’s ultimate and relations between them emerge from the noun things. For the Neoplatonists, it’s exactly the reverse. The relation is the primordial reality and the relata, the things related emerge out of it. And that means intelligibility. And this is how, because intelligibility is a relational thing, and information is inherently relational, right? This is how they were trying to say that intelligibility and what we would now say information, speaking a little bit more like the physicist might, are fundamental to reality. And of course, our science is moving towards that. Both quantum and relativistic are emphasizing the relationality over the thing. And the nominalists tried to make things the basis of reality, and we lost the real patterns. The third thing is to give up on, and I’m going to use this term the way Aristotle meant it, a substance for an Aristotle isn’t stuff. A substance is a thing that has properties. And you can see how this lines up with Zen as well. And then the next move is the figure ground reversal. Instead of saying foregrounding the things against the background of the relations, you say, no, no, the relations should be foregrounded and the things emerge out of it. Because that’s a third dimension that you see things as otherwise diverse as Neoplatonism and Zen converging on getting people to try and real. It’s also in Vedanta, the web of the net of Indra. And I don’t know, because I don’t know enough about that thing you said, but is the relationship between the modal stuff you’re saying and that move where the relationality is taking priority over the noun things? Well, I make some connections there, and I’m going to riff on some of them. I won’t be able to relate it directly to the musical modes. It’s getting to some of the limits of my understanding of music theory in relation to the philosophy you’re talking about. But based on some of the things you said, I would say that the thinginess, the nouns, the connections, let’s counterpose it to verbs. Being in action, we talked about pragmatism and being in action as something in the previous conversation. So that’s one connection. If we look at a word like swing, the swing era, that’s a noun. But if you look at the practice of swinging in jazz, that’s a verb. Action is in motion. So I would connect those. You mentioned subjective and objective. I’m actually taking, of course, my wife and I are taking a course with Steve March and his team, Alethea, who you’ve been in conversation with. And his particular methodology is based on an ontology of depth. It’s really a beautiful process through which you start with a depth of parts. We have different aspects of our personality. We have parts of ourselves that haven’t been integrated based on developmental, arrested development as we are growing up, or trauma in some cases, and those parts are there. Then there’s the depth of process, which is kind of a transition between the depth of parts to the depth of presence and absence, which is somewhat analogous to yin and yang. And that’s moving towards that pure relationality I was talking about. And then the fourth depth is a depth of something else you mentioned, non-duality. So by the time we get to presence and absence, the subject-object binary is really collapsed. So I think an ontology of depth, and it’s powerful because you can actually experience it. It’s not something that’s just theoretical. You can experience all of these depths within oneself, but it’s not just within oneself. I think it’s connecting to being itself, I think one can say. So I’d like to respond to that. I’ve been in conversation with Steve. I should get in conversation with him again. We tried to make arrangements for me to do his course, but my schedule is crazy right now, but I’d like to still do it at some point. So I noticed that you were talking, and the three, let me say axes, the vertical, the horizontal, and I’ll call it the orthogonal for the z-axis, we’re all being invoked. So you were doing depth, which is clearly a vertical, and you’re talking about dropping down, and your phenomenology moved into that, and then you’re moving into the relationality. The relationality is becoming more and more pronounced. And then you talked about how the subjective-objective divide dissolves. You get into being, which is neither subjective nor objective. And what I think is going on there is exactly that. Although analytically, I talk about the three axes, they are almost always interwoven. Now that means they’re interwoven both positively and negatively, which is as you start to cultivate one and you are respectful of its interdependence, its relationality to the other two, then they will mutually afford each other. But if you are disrespectful and try to reduce any of the dimensions to another one, you will actually destroy all of them, even the one that you are trying to make singularly primary. And that’s part of the argument of the Beyond Nihilism course, we have lost both the virtuosity of reverence and the virtue of reverence with respect to how to properly respect those three dimensions and their inherent relationality. And so being you and the kind of person you are, you just very naturally wove the three together. But I am asking you to consider that while that is natural to you and your character, the way you have cultivated and your sensibility, that it is very not natural for the culture at large. And that therefore there is something important to be said about what’s happening between us right now. Absolutely. I mean, there’s a reason why the expression the cultivation of wisdom is there. Yes, yes, yes. Cultivation relates to agriculture. Yes, culture itself, you can have a culture which is, you know, biological turn, you have a, you have a what do you call the the the culture in there. So there’s connection here, you know, cultivation, culture, and also cultists. Yes, a sacred center. Absolutely, which is why Jamie Weal in Recapture the Rapture, you know, he talks about, you know, basically, you know, cults, of course, have a negative connotation, but he’s saying that you’re going to have groupings of people, relationality who are doing things to try to do some kind of exercise of an ecology of practices towards some type of collective action based on collective intelligence. So he looks at, you know, I forget the exact term Jamie uses, but see a positive way of looking at cults, you’re going to have them anyway. So let’s identify what has happened over time, you know, with negative cults. But let’s cultivate the ability to be in relation in groups towards positive ends. Now, there’s two words you use that I just want to quickly riff on. You mentioned you mentioned virtuosity, which in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, I just loved it when you started talking about virtuosity, because virtuosity is so important in music, particularly when you’re talking about the Western symphonic concert classical tradition. I mean, virtuosity is a thing. I mean, it’s like, whoa, the you’re talking about the procedural knowing. I mean, goodness gracious. And the same thing in jazz virtuosity, but how you connected virtuosity and connect virtuosity to virtues, which is one of the things we said we would talk about. So I want to, I want to put a pin in that for reference. And then you also mentioned interdependence. And this is yet in another addendum that I did not mention that in the article that I wrote in my review of civic jazz. One of the things that the author talked about is what he calls our democracy is an attempt to exercise independent interdependence. We can maintain our independence, we can maintain our individuality, quote unquote, but we do it within the context of being interdependent. And he says that tension is something that we have yet to resolve in democracy. So I wanted to mention that term, because I think it’s one important to put out here, because I think it resonates with some of what we’re talking about, too. It does both of those two. I think I mean, I mentioned Tillich in connection with this course, and Tillich has the notion of like tonos. I prefer the Greek word, because the English word tension is almost always now understood negatively. It has a negative connotation where tonos is neutral. Tonos can have a very positive connotation like the tonos of the bow or the tonos of the liar. And Tillich talks about these kinds of, like the tonos, there are various instances of tonos. And he talks about the one between individuation and participation, which is very much the cultivation of independence, I think understood largely what I’m hearing you say as autonomy, not as disconnectedness. I don’t mean rugged individualism. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the fact that in some sense, what we’re, so this is a classic distinction made by Hegel and very clarified very well by Brandon between power and authority. Power is when somebody puts you under duress and threatens you. Authority is when you acknowledge that somebody has a legitimate claim upon you in some way. So the argument of Hegel is, authority comes from reciprocal recognition. I recognize you as somebody who has the legitimacy to give me authority, and you recognize me, etc. So authority depends on our autonomy. That we are, autonomy is we agree with something as opposed to we are threatened or forced into something. And so I think if we’re talking about autonomy, then I think we’re in the right ballpark. And then notice how, as I tried to describe it, Hegel’s argument as opposed to Kant is, yes, but your autonomy, your ability to be an authority over yourself is interdependent with people recognizing you as that kind of being, and you reciprocally recognizing them as that kind of being. And this is not only a philosophical point about what autonomy is, it’s also a psychological point. I don’t become a self-reflective, metacognitive agent except by indwelling and internalizing other people and vice versa. So putting those two points together. And then Tillich builds on that and he says, look, and he uses this first term like Jung does, like, we’re always bound between these two poles of individuation and participation, where participation is this interdependence and individuation is this cultivation of autonomy, but recognition is that they are also interdependent. You don’t want to make a category mistake, but there’s an interdependence between interdependence. That’s why I like his language. It’s a little bit helpful. There’s an interdependence between the pursuit of individuation and the pursuit of participation, and we need both of them. And what human beings can do is they can vacillate between them in a way that is drifting where, you know this, I’m just too out there and I gotta withdraw, and I gotta like, who am I? And I withdraw, and then after a while I say, I’m kind of lonely, and I don’t feel like I’m connected. I better go out and get involved. And I go out and get involved, and I say, and our culture makes us vacillate with that. Or the other thing we do is we try to emphasize one of these poles at the expense of the other. So instead, Scalic, and I would agree, argues for the polarity, that what we have to do is we have to accept that we can’t resolve that in the sense of how can we end that tonus, because that is not possible. But what we do have to do is we have to cultivate the wisdom. Are we oscillating in a way that’s vacillating, or are we continually evolving our optimal grip in the relationship between the two? And that’s what’s actually on offer. That’s beautiful. That is beautiful. I’d like to introduce another concept that I think aligns or resonates, maybe use that word since, you know, resonating is kind of a vibrational, you know, frequency thing. It resonates, dynamic equilibrium. Yes, yes. You have an equilibrium, but it’s dynamic. Of course, that comes from, you alluded to that, physics, I think comes from physics. But, you know, check this out. Albert Murray, my mentor, he actually said that he equated that term with happiness. He says that’s what we’re looking for, a dynamic equilibrium. So, you know, one way of understanding dynamic equilibrium is like walking on a tightrope. And there’s a balancing that you have to do. And when you achieve that balance, you’re able to stay focused. But at the same time, you’ve got to balance the independence and interdependence, you got to balance the autonomy and the connectedness. All these things, you know, relate to, I think, kind of a dynamic equilibrium. You mentioned a reciprocal. And in one of our conversations, when I mentioned to you, at the end of the conversation on dealing with democracy as antagonist cooperation, I mentioned that in Danielle Allen’s work, dealing with, oh, goodness, it was dealing with democracy and talking to strangers, I know I get it. Right. And a fundamental idea in that work was reciprocity. And how reciprocity allows us to appreciate the contributions of other citizens, and to conceive of them more like friends than strangers, even though, as I said, it may not be family, you know, may not be neighbors in that sense. And then you related to Hegel, just like you did now. So I just wanted to draw those things together. You also mentioned agent. And I got to ask you this, because in that same conversation, I talked about how, you know, democracy, in many ways, is still an ideal that we’re striving for. And you said something to me that’s very profound that I would like you to go into a little more detail about. You said, yes, but it’s not just that democracy is an agent. What did you mean by that? Okay, so I’ll come back a sec to the democracies and agents. I just want to what you said resonated with me that, you know, and it’s also it’s the tonus of the rope that keeps you from falling, by the way, if that creative tension goes out, you fall. So that’s there. And notice what we’re invoking the three dimensions again, when you’re walking the tightrope, you’re balanced forward and backwards, but you’re also balanced up and down. But you better be focusing on the relations and not on the things like or you’re gonna you’re gonna fall. I know this from like balance or like martial like Tai Chi Chuan, you have to focus on the chi, which is inherently relational. And you get focused on the things you’ll you’ll drop out of the flow in a very fast way. So I just wanted to resonate how that and how the stuff we were talking about the sacred and those three dimensions and this it’s it’s now on the agency. So as you know, I do a lot of work, especially with my good friend, dear friend, lifelong friend, almost from basically when I was doing my second undergraduate degree, Dan Chiapi, we published on we agency and that sort of thing. But I just and I mentioned this to you before we began. So this is from trends in cognitive science. It’s just cutting edge theory of collective mind. And I don’t know if that’s coming through or not. But there I think that’s it. Now you can see it. This is basically it’s an opinion piece. What it is, is they’re gathering the all of the authors are gathering together and basically providing a consensus kind of argument, an emerging consensus, an emerging plausible understanding of this idea of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition forms its own kind of agent, we agent that is capable of doing things that the individual can’t do. And most problems are solved by this we agency, not by individual agents. That is not this is not about trying to diminish the importance or the sacredness of the individual. This is about trying to get things in the proper balance. But and then this is something that Dan and I have said, and this is what how it relates back to democracy as an agent, I think, with along with the proposal that you and I discussed about opponent processing within the collective intelligence and democracy being a way of trying to institute that as a cultural practice. But one of the things that Dan and I proposed is that the hyper agency of the we agency, the collective agency, we should settle on a term eventually of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition when it is properly educated, and we have to talk about what is it to educate and cultivate at that level and democracy and music are very important to answering that question. But when it is properly educated, it has the ability to I’m going to use a term from Robert Heinlein, strange in a strange land, distributed that we agent that educated collective intelligence and distributed cognition has the capacity to grok hyper objects that individual cognition cannot grok. It can have sort of an abstract referential relationship to like global warming. And here I’m making use of Morton’s arguments, but actually being able to track and intervene and measure and comport ourselves towards global warming actually takes a whole bunch of people all over the world with a whole bunch of equipment and doing relying on a whole bunch of psycho technologies like literacy and mathematics, etc, etc, to actually track to trace out to follow you know it’s I’m trying to use perspectival and orientation language and connect to participatory language global warming or evolution you can you and I can’t see evolution you and I in fact individually can’t see evidence for evolution or Ed Hutchins who navigates a ship no one person a whole bunch of people and some equipment and some psycho technologies and they are all woven together and that’s what actually allows you to move this huge object in the hyper object for human beings at least of an ocean. And so and that for me we’re now we’re now we’re now coming almost full circle because being in relationship to those hyper objects allows us to do a kind of sense making that has a kind of profound access to the sacred that is not available to individual cognition. Now individual cognition has special access to because it has consciousness and it can right and there’s ways you know in the psychedelic renaissance is a rediscovery of this by altering consciousness we can perhaps get access to the sacred but there’s the ancient recognition that the we agents the gods or the angels or the or or the daemons give us access to the sacred in a way that is specific to them. So that that’s my extended response. Yeah when I think of one of the things about this memoir that I’m writing is that I’ll be able to talk about and explicate aspects of my life experience that I haven’t written much about but but I went through a period in which I pursued what in ideological terms is called afro-centricity but for me as is the case with me it was less about a political ideology like black nationalism than the actual experience of delving into particular practices and ideas that went beyond my Christian upbringing and this is late 80s into 90s. So through this this this community that I was involved in we engaged in actual rituals rituals where there’s a particular archetype or deity or they call them netero oh yeah and you actually invoked invoked these these deities and they would now of course in in in western a western a view of some of these practices they would say you know they’re worshiping trees animism you know they’re worshiping yeah it’s actually it was more sophisticated than that. No doubt no doubt people are yeah people are usually way more sophisticated when they have but the word neter ntr but you put the vowels in it was was the ancient committee you know ancient Egyptian word you know for the one but they had various you know quote unquote gods but the small neter or the neteru were the gods and so I have I have actually it was interesting when I heard you talk about some of these things and some of the books that are coming out I’m saying wow I studied that stuff in the in the 90s and experienced a lot of it and then there’s also the ancestral dimension where yes that’s really important for us to conceive of in terms of I’ll give you something from Ellison he would say that he was replying it to being a writer in literature but I think it has broader applications he says you can’t choose your relatives but you can choose your ancestors in other words isn’t that great that’s great wow what a beautiful turn of phrase he said you know because your ancestors are those who you know are iconic to you who you look up to who are exemplars for you they could be sages they could be you know and and even if you don’t follow their bloodline you still could be influenced by them yeah so that ties to me to the beautiful way that James Carson finite and infinite games talked about how when you talk about a a cultural you know a period or a cultural form like the renaissance he says you know you’re not going to form a political movement against the renaissance no yeah it doesn’t make it doesn’t make it doesn’t make sense and I’m gonna have it here I have some notes he says properly speaking the renaissance is not a period but a people more over a people without a boundary and therefore without an enemy the renaissance is not against anyone whoever is not of the renaissance cannot go out to oppose it or they will find only an invitation to join the people it is a culture is sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas its works even its language this is the common strategy of a society afraid of culture growing within its boundaries but is a strategy certain to fail because it confuses the creative activity poises with the product poema of the activity so so when we talked about race versus culture you know this cultural dynamic that afro-americans created through the chaos I mean you’re talking about we talked about absurdity we talked about horror the chaos that you know being taken from their ancestral lands and brought here and having to keep the most essential aspects of their culture and deal with for hundreds of years the domination dynamic they were dealing with and finding ways to cope ways to still maintain a sense of the sacred even through the secular finding ways through folk tales through dance through certain rituals that they engaged in I don’t know if I mentioned this but if I didn’t the it’ll come to me there was a ritual where they went into a circle I think I mentioned this and in this circle they would it would be wearing all white the ring shout there it is and they would be going around in a circle and one person would go in the middle of the circle and do their individual dance that’s their own style then they would go be a part of the circle again into the collective of course another one would go so that’s the independent interdependence so it’s right there so if we have to develop the cultural intelligence to be able to read these forms read the symbols read the archetypes and then draw from it the wisdom that’s there that was beautiful what came up for me is how human beings want to inhabit that space the space of the angels and the daemons right the matak the mataksu right there’s a space in between and they they inhabit that in the ritual like between the mini and the one and all that and between the inner and the outer there that’s what’s happening in that ritual and then in the outer there that’s what’s happening in that ritual and then in the in the in the African origin rituals you were talking about but it occurs to me that we should therefore view that space as not just empty space like human beings are drawn into it and if that space is is blocked so we can’t properly enter into it it’s not it’s well it’s i’m doing the nature of pores a vacuum thing that that space will will it will so it is not optional that space is filled so i’m going to play on a word here what’s optional is our relationship to it so it’s filled daemonically or our improper relationship to it so it’s related demonically filled demonically and i think we’re and you know and young said something basically sort of about that intra-psychically and i think we’re also now talking about it inter-psychically and then also sort of trans-psychically like beyond the psyche did that land for you when i said that that that that if we don’t because i hear i hear your project this is intended as a compliment i hear your project about trying to get us because of understanding these things that are deeply within our cultural provenance music and culture and democracy that we can if we are called properly back to them then we can then fill that space daemonically rather than have it attack us demontic absolutely yes it resonates very deeply um we mentioned zack stein and his meta-psychology yes and when i talked to him about you know where’s the foundation he’s said this publicly too um because it’s james hillman so yes code you know um so i started reading hellman um and he’s been very influential on my conception of of the soul the daemon you know but what is the demon okay um yeah if we look at race versus culture you know oh this i’m i’m all i’m just i’m really waiting for what you’re gonna say hey cheng yeah yeah yeah good good good look at what race did and this ties into the monological versus the pluralistic also if you take a monological view and say that there is one people quote unquote people who are racialized as white who are the be all and end all of beauty goodness and truth yes if you say that one person is the leader that can tie into authoritarianism totalitarianism it seems that our metaphysics in many ways what of necessity has to be pluralistic you know what william james pluralistic universe we have to have a pluralistic way of looking while not losing sight of oneness we you know we yes do together but the pluralistic perspective is so profoundly important so we could look at what mary called albert mary call you know if you’re talking about e pluribus unum he says no image better describes e pluribus unum than an infinite tributary of influences oh yeah you know beautiful so that you know it’s not just that afro-americans have contributed you know native americans contributed yankees contributed you know asian people uh uh uh contributed various ethnic groups contributed all a part of contribution to what we consider democracy in america and but i’m going to take it wider because anthony appiah who from whom i heard the term and studied the term rooted cosmopolitanism he actually talks about how even the concept of the west itself when you look under the surface it has tributaries from all over the place yes so the idea that we can equate western with just european and god help us whiteness is ridiculous it’s you know there’s there’s all these contributions that we have to look at so you know i’m sure we’re coming to our time of closing i hate too but i gotta ask you i gotta ask you man you know because people we can’t leave people hanging talk about virtue we said we talk about virtue riff on virtue so well i mean in one sense that’s all we’ve been doing so i mean just to stand back and what am i so let’s remember that and this is the connection to the word virtuosity and virtue means power and power means an actualizable potential to do something and so that’s why we say in virtue of this is the thing that sets up the conditions is the actual conditions that afford or make possible something so virtue is there are the actual conditions within and without that make possible a good human life or even better if we move out of sort of a greek definition that tended to be somewhat individualistic right the set of conditions that make for good people living good lives within a good community of people that was like eudaimonia to me it well virtue is the affordance of eudaimonia properly understood as that interpenetration of the individual and the collective and then what i would say what what what do we mean by those conditions especially within and then i’ll do without what we mean by those conditions within are a virtue is the the alignment the coordination through all four kinds of knowings of beliefs skills perspectives or sensibilities and character traits such that they mutually support each other such that one is coupled to oneself the world and other people that one has the greatest power and i don’t mean that politically i i mean like what i just meant that actual potential to realize a a good life to be a good person living a good life within a good community of people and but that right and that of course means we’re talking about virtue sorry we’re talking about wisdom and i and i happen to agree with the proposal one reading of socrates is that every virtue is the way in which you are wise within a particular particular context particular context situation you know and the leadership literature they talk about situational leadership and then yes i equate that to yeah i mean there’s a a right way a right mode a right response for a particular situation that one hopes will be good for you good for those you’re doing it for and good for the world ideally but it might be different based on the situation of the context might be a different response that’s necessary which ties to improvisation why spontaneity exactly that’s and that’s exactly where i was going to go because you see the even you see this even in virtue ethics where we move off thinking about applying a rule sort of the contian perspective to something exactly so is that so virtue is you know the improvisational excellence are at a yes right right that brings one into this religio this proper connectedness this optimal gripping this meta-optimal gripping right that affords you reducing self-deception affording flourishing and then here’s the thing we have to talk about the virtues of the individual but we also have to talk about the virtues of the we agent the collective intelligence the distributed cognition the we also has to be yes and that cultural intelligence also has to be educated into virtuosity and virtue and then if you have and i tend to use the two together because the greek word arete covers both our words virtuosity and virtue if we have the virtuosity and virtue of the individual and individual cognition and of the distributed cognition and like in playdoh’s we said earlier about how they they resonate with each other and are fine to each other then i think that is virtue most properly understand well i would say that and i said this um on the deep transformation podcast that i share with you that one means and this is ellison one means to our it is technique yes yes you know the the way we go and and also style one of the things ellison said he says you know i’m much more interested in style than power you know now from a democratic perspective as we discuss is power participation and wisdom you know i think those three go together yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly you know it’s not just being technical in a scientific or engineering sense engineering sense but techne is in the way i’m relating techne and stylus the way you go about it okay so and you see my movements my movements are like tai chi yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so so i just wanted to bring that in also because uh you know we need all four p’s and the procedural is foundational you know you have to you have to have certain skills and these virtues are developed by having these skills become habitual so you can be in flow yeah and we have to get out of certain bad habits race and racism and racialization and racial worldview in many ways these are just bad habits you know what i mean i i and this is from my this is from a perspective of pragmatism you know so one of the ways we du bois dealt with this some and then there’s a scholar who wrote a book called habits of whiteness to try to use pragmatism as a way of saying well let’s look at these as habits and look at the habits that we can get out of and habits that we can develop which will then oh i like that to develop virtues well notice what he’s done he’s de-rayified it and he’s moved it from a noun back to a relational a relational um process um so that it’s it’s it’s it’s in some ways i mean i don’t want to oversimplify but in some ways that’s what you’re doing especially in our last discussion right you’re trying to get us off this reification mindset into a relationality mindset is that that’s that is that fair lands very much you know because when it comes to race for some reason it’s so reified yes as i alluded to in one of the other comments it’s we’re socialized into it so i’m not placing blame there we learn it in our language and one of the ways of countering it is to shift our language that’s the way we language these things i’ve mentioned that too that’s one of the techniques there are others um but people whether it’s the left or the right they hold on to this reification of race because it becomes a part of your identity and i’m thinking that if we can make a separation between race process of racialization a way of seeing the world through race racial worldview and then the behavior and practice we call racism and then go to cultural intelligence balancing the individual and the group uh and all the things we’ve been talking about that that’s one way of of countering this counterstating it and then living more because i really believe that race and racism and what murray called the folklore of white supremacy and the fake law of black black typology is holding back the west and america from developing spiritually and philosophically towards wisdom i was just going to say the exact same thing i was kind of i can’t we are like we are we’re asynchronous right now because i was going to say if we did what you’re proposing i think that would be a way in which we could further afford this birthing of sacredness of a new realization of sacredness that is trying to happen right now and that one of the rewards of doing this would not only be the very important reward of the you know dealing with the injustice that racism and the harm racism is inflicted on people there would also be the so that’s retrospective but there’s also the prospective reward of yes but a new way in which we can our cultural intelligence can become virtuous and and virtual like in virtue related to the birthing of the sacred that’s a prospective reward that is available to us if we make this move exactly i feel that that’s it and i think you’ve said it john and i think for this fourth conversation that’s a beautiful place for us to close wouldn’t you agree so so much my dear friend so we like we were you know we’re getting into dialogos because we’re getting into that where your thoughts and my thoughts are like almost synchronous and there’s a synchronicity coming out and it was just wonderful and well i’m going to take my last word other than saying goodbye to everyone to thank you this has been wonderful like i said i genuinely hope we will be working together again in multiple ways but i want to give you as i always do for my guests the last word and then we’ll close it down what comes is to ask people to consider expressing an attitude of gratitude finding a way not to be comfortable or accepting of injustice but to find ways to move from the tragic to the post tragic and appreciate life breath you know exercise joy if you have trauma confront it deal with it individually there there’s work out here that you can deal with trauma individually you can deal with it as a group you can deal with it societally thomas i think hubbell is talks about societal trauma res mama knock him author a book called my grandmother’s hands talks about group trauma and oh it’s important for me to say this and i have it here and i want to this gentleman who is the author of a work on individual trauma the monster’s journey where the hero’s journey is one thing but if you look at the monsters your trauma can build monstrous people on the inside who don’t know how to fit in and become good so deal with trauma it’s real yes and there are ways of doing that but i believe that we can individually collectively move and evolve towards a better better self towards the sacred and i and i and that’s one of the reasons i’m talking to you john because i we we have this within our grasp and we need to get to it before it’s too late and i think we can do it yes i’m confident we can do it i’m a tragic optimist i the tragedy is there but i’m still i still hold on to some optimism well my friend you’re you’re just a genuinely beautiful person and that is just like through this whole series but for me so much so even this final episode of our series you’re just shining you’re just shining and so i so appreciate i want to thank that’s what i feel about you but yes this is this is reciprocal opening here man this is reciprocity yeah we swinging i said we’re going to do jazz and we were swinging we are we are thank you so much john so i thank you greg and i want to thank thank you so much i want to thank all of you for your time and attention i think this series is really important to share it share this series with as many people as you can i don’t usually make specific recommendations about my work because i leave that to people to decide because they should but for me i want to make a special call about this series to share it because of the the pertinence and the sophistication of the way in which it is trying to address some of our most burning issues right now thank you everyone thank you for watching this youtube and podcast series is by the verveky foundation which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses practices workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis if you would like to support this work please consider joining our patreon you can find the link in the show notes