First Principles & First Values

A New Story of Value for Our Times

Last week I wrote about MIT researcher Otto Scharmer’s concept of “fourth-person knowing” as a very helpful new way of understanding the significance of approaches that cultivate emergent group consciousness at this time of polycrisis. Today I want to share about (what I think is) a vitally important new book that offers profound context for why we need these novel forms of knowing to start to move into the center of culture as a matter of urgency in this time between worlds.

The book is First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on Cosmoerotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, by David J. Temple. David J. Temple is a pseudonym that represents a consortium of writers associated with the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein being the primary authors.

Because of the significance of the book’s thesis, I go into some detail below to convey the essential argument. I hope you will stay with me, because there is something deeply hopeful about these ideas for our future.

First Principles is an attempt to articulate the foundations of a new worldview that can guide humanity through the global metacrisis. We have become deeply conditioned by postmodernity to be cynical of intellectual efforts to create frameworks of universal value, but this is indeed at the heart of the authors’ thesis. Post-modernity’s deconstruction of old stories of value has overreached, resulting not only in a pervasive global mood of nihilism but also an inability to coordinate in any meaningful way at a time when the stakes could not be higher.

Into this void, First Principles offers a ‘New Story of Value’ that provides a context for integrating the best of premodern, modern, and postmodern thought. It does so by explicitly articulating a universal set of values that underlies reality all the way up and down the evolutionary chain, and is validated by both science and the wisdom traditions. Below I provide a specific example.

The authors note that most modern people, when asked to describe the basic structure and nature of the universe, would rely on science to provide the answers, in the form of such qualities as time, space, matter, energy, motion, and causality. Yet a crucial premise of First Principles is that this is far too limited a metaphysical view and that “value and consciousness need to be added to the list of what counts as fundamental to the Cosmos.”

Moreover, the authors argue that this must become the dominant view of humanity “thereby changing the mood of humanity and our sense of what is possible” or we should expect “within two generations” the likely end of the human experiment as we know it.

I deeply appreciate this forceful statement of the stakes involved if humanity fails to integrate consciousness into the center of culture. For far too long, no matter how intelligently the case has been made for the significance of consciousness as an irreducible dimension of reality, modern culture has continued to dismiss such ideas as quaint premodern fantasies. (Scharmer, by the way, calls this neglect of consciousness in the consideration of social systems the “epistemological blind spot of Western cognition.”) A similar sense of urgency has driven my own project of subtle activism, which can be seen as a kind of praxis or yoga to directly transmit consciousness or value — or truth or love or beauty — into the heart of culture.

What is at stake

In making their case for the vital importance of a new story of value to guide culture at this “time between worlds”,  the authors point out the profound link between the collapse of value at the center of culture and the emergence of catastrophic and existential risks to human civilization.

The authors identify two distinct forms of existential risk facing humanity, which correspond to the exterior and interior dimensions of the meta-crisis. The first — the “death of humanity” — is how existential risk is typically understood, that is, the death of the human species through an extinction or near-extinction event. Here we are talking about the now familiar litany of unprecedented global systemic threats, such as the potential death of the Earth’s biosphere, the rise of exponential technology and its associated risks, the collapse of economic systems and supply chains, the complexity and volatility of the current geo-political situation along with the capacity to deploy catastrophic nuclear, biological, cyber, and robotic/AI-enhanced weaponry, etc.

But alongside this exterior dimension of the crisis, the authors also draw attention to an interior dimension where the death of our humanity “quietly and invisibly occurs.” In addition to indicators like the youth mental health crisis (in which, e.g., more than 3/4 of teenagers in the United States have seriously considered suicide), or the vast number of people worldwide in conditions of exploitation and forced labor, the authors note our increasing capacity for “digitally and bio-medically mediated large-scale social control” moving us toward a likely socio-political outcome they call “TechnoFeudalism.”

“The undermining of free will and conceptions of autonomous personhood through the design and totalized control of human experience is now probable given current trends.” (My emphasis)

I find it crucially important that this interior dimension of the meta-crisis be explicitly named. Although I think many people have a vague sense of dread that something terribly corrosive to the human spirit is happening through the mechanisms of digital control, the threat is subtler and harder to conceptualize than physical dangers like nuclear war or biosphere destruction, and therefore more insidious. Indeed, the rationale underlying the growing system of totalized digital control is that, in light of the existential risks facing humanity, such a system is necessary to force humanity to make the right choices to avoid catastrophe. Yet in the process, we would lose the very essence of what makes us human.

In spite of the direness of our situation, the authors maintain that a post-tragic view is possible, beginning with the recognition that crisis has always been an evolutionary driver and thus our current meta-crisis can be seen as the birth of something new.

Global Intimacy Disorder

Pointing toward a way out, the authors diagnose an underlying root cause of the dynamics driving catastrophic and existential risk — a global intimacy disorder.

They note that one of the generator functions of existential risk is the success story that governs global culture in both open and closed societies: “zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics.” This story has led to the development of vast, highly ‘complicated’ and therefore fragile global systems. Here a distinction is made between complicated systems — in which the parts do not relate to or ‘feel’ each other (such as an airplane) — and complex systems (like a forest) that inherently self-organize, self-repair, and are thus anti-fragile. Global civilization is complicated but not complex, fragile rather than robust — there is no intrinsic relationality between the parts and thus no basis for an authentic sense of shared value.

This state of affairs is summarized by the authors as the ‘global intimacy disorder.’

“When there is no allurement between the parts or when the parts are alienated, the result is rivalrous conflict governed by win/loss metrics, which then spawn fragile systems.”

The authors argue that this disorder can be healed only by “the emergence of new configurations and structures of intimacy.” This might mean restoring old forms of intimacy that have been lost, but more likely involves evolving new structures that are “at once emergent even as they are also….more evolved versions of older forms.”

Linking back to the ideas explored in last week’s essay, I note that Scharmer’s ‘fourth person knowing’ as well as the group field practices developed in my work are examples of precisely these new, emergent ‘structures of intimacy’. Significantly, while the kind of intimacy accessible in these group fields may in some ways represent the recovery of ancient forms of knowing, in other ways it offers a new, emergent, and global level of intimacy that honors the unique essence of each individual while weaving participants together into a profound communion with each other and the whole. This provides further context for why participants in such group experiences tend to find them so meaningful. They intuitively recognize that the mode of consciousness being explored represents an evolutionary response to the condition of alienation — the ‘global intimacy disorder’ — that is at the heart of the meta-crisis.

A New Story of Value

The core of the book is an attempt to develop a ‘New Story of Value’ in the form of an explicit set of universal ‘first principles’ that integrates the best of premodern, modern, and postmodern thought.

The authors note that in the premodern era, defined as the period between the Axial Age (involving the birth of the world religions) and the Renaissance, universal principles that assumed the reality of intrinsic value were formulated in nearly every society. However, these universal systems were embedded in ethnocentric religions and societies that presumed that they alone had the “clearest, most direct access to the source of all value.”

In this sense, the authors point out that premodernity was also characterized by the success story of “rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics”, but the principal conflict was not Hobbes’s war of all against all but between the religions themselves and between political entities such as clans, tribes, and kingdoms.

In most premodern traditions, there were attempts to articulate a set of unchanging universal moral principles governing both nature and humanity. These systems lost credibility, however, when certain claims about the nature of the world endorsed by religious authority were debunked by the discoveries of modern science, and when it became evident that certain mutually exclusive truth claims made by different religions were clearly based in culture, not eternal divine truth as claimed.

Modern culture proudly regarded itself as a radical break from premodernity, involving a shift from a world that revolved around God to one where man was at the center. In this process, modern thinkers began to deconstruct premodern notions of intrinsic value. In reality, the authors contend that modern culture was profoundly shaped by “common-sense sacred axioms” that were a given for nearly everyone up until the late industrial age. These were not explicit theoretical principles, but more like the unspoken background assumptions of social life, or the ‘self-evident truths’ of the early democracies. (For example, “choice matters” — there are better and worse choices, some being aligned with the good and others not.) Importantly, these sacred axioms can be seen as the “hidden loan of spiritual and social capital from the premodern religions”, operating in practice to sustain modern culture even while modern thinkers went about undermining the concept of intrinsic value that underlay them.  

Postmodernity deconstructed and demolished all claims of intrinsic value, including the common-sense sacred axioms that had undergirded modern culture. In doing so, the authors note, postmodernity merely extended and amplified the core logic of materialism that appeared at the very beginning of modernity. One of postmodernity’s strongest critiques was based on the observation that so-called universal and eternal principles clearly change across culture and time, refuting the premodern and perennialist idea of values that transcend historical context. For postmodernity, values are simply “social constructions that serve a power narrative at a particular point in time.”  

In response, the authors propose that intrinsic value is eternal, but not in the sense of being unchanging or everlasting. Rather, value is eternal and evolving. This they call, somewhat paradoxically, “Evolving Perennialism.” They maintain that the notion of evolving value “effectively undoes the core critiques of intrinsic value that animated modernity and postmodernity.” As such, it paves the way for a project to reconstruct value, through an explicit set of universal First Principles and First Values that can be understood as both always already existent and ever-evolving into more complex and beautiful forms.

In this light, the authors argue, the modern and postmodern deconstructions of intrinsic value can be reinterpreted as vital and even heroic contributions that ‘purified the old conceptions of value of epistemological dross’, and thus were not ultimately for the sake of deconstruction as an end to itself, but for the sake of the reconstruction and evolution of value.

As will no doubt be obvious, I’m jumping over vast swathes of important argument here in the interests of keeping this essay to a manageable length. My main intention is to entice at least some of you to take a closer look by reading the book for yourself.

Evolution as the Progressive Deepening of Intimacy: an example of a First Principle and First Value

Intimacy is one of the explicit set of First Principles and First Values proposed by the authors, meaning that a precise definition of intimacy can be used to explain how the Universe works in a fundamental way. The authors define intimacy as a state when individuals “share an identity in the context of relative otherness, in which there is mutuality of recognition, feeling, value, and purpose.”  Intimacy here is understood to involve ever-deeper unions but not fusions — “there is always the dialectical dance between allurement and autonomy.”

For example, in a family, each person is unique but identifies as part of the family and thereby experiences varying degrees of “mutual recognition, feeling, value, and purpose”. This intimacy holds families together and tends to be experienced as intrinsically valuable by family members who benefit from its integrative influence. The authors argue that something like this kind of intimacy is a feature of every level of evolution and is part of the intrinsic value of the Cosmos, in the sense that everything at all levels desires and moves toward greater intimacy.

For instance, at the level of physics, sub-atomic particles drawn together to create an atom can be described in terms of the same general pattern — “even at that level, there is a proto-desire to touch and form larger unions, a desire that is inherent in the structure of the Universe as a whole.” Yet while the atom is an emergent whole with entirely new capacities, the sub-atomic particles continue to exist as independent realities.

In biology, the very emergence of cells themselves can be understood as the intensification of intimacy between the macromolecules that preceded them. The same can be said to be true of multicellular organisms, whereby cells are configured into increasingly complex forms of intimacy, while retaining their integrity as autonomous entities.

At the level of human psychology, the drive for intimacy is self-evidently central to the human experience — we long to be in some form of relationship with another without sacrificing the integrity of our autonomy. Attachment theory and other psychological research demonstrates that the drive for intimate communion is literally a survival need.

At the level of human organizations, companies or nation-states are successful when each part or division of the whole is ostensibly independent, but operates within a context of deep shared identity. Organizations break down when their sub-factions develop separate identities that alienate themselves from the shared identity of the larger group.

Examples of this same general pattern of intimacy could be extended across many other fields.

Thus the “intimacy equation” holds true across all dimensions of reality, between all parts longing to participate in larger wholes, be they subatomic, molecular, cellular, organismic, organizational, or interpersonal, “from atom to amoeba to Adam.”

Obviously there are many details to be filled in to make the above claim land in a more comprehensive way. The point here is to provide an example of what the authors mean by First Principles and First Values. What is crucial to realize is that the principle of intimacy as defined by the authors, unlike many premodern formulations of value, cannot be refuted by appeal to scientific evidence, nor reduced to a social construction that only applies to a certain moment and place in time, yet provides a sense of meaning congruent with the highest intuitions of the wisdom traditions about our place in the Cosmos.  

What this means for our moment

I once wrote about an ayahuasca experience I had during which the spirit of the medicine mercilessly exposed the false construct of my separate self, one belief after another. It showed me that my very sense of self was comprised of a matrix of consoling beliefs that gave me a sense of hope in life. The medicine systematically exposed and dismantled each and every strand of my identity, each and every false hope, leaving me on my knees begging God for mercy. Yet that state of hopelessness then gave way to an experience of utter absorption into the One and the most profound sense of homecoming in my life.

Since then it has seemed self-evident to me that the deconstructive frenzy of postmodernism represents an analagous process taking place at the level of the collective psyche, a stripping away of consoling beliefs that will eventually burn itself out, and thus serve ultimately to prepare the collective psyche to meet the Real again at an entirely new level. The release of this book seems to me a sign that we may be starting to make that crucial turn in our collective journey.

Although the principles and values described in this book are likely too dense to be easily assimilated into the layperson’s worldview, they are, I think, deeply significant as building blocks of a new intellectual edifice starting to emerge at the leading-edge of thought. We may be seeing the early convergence of neo-realist intellectual visions from integral and metamodern thinkers who broadly agree on the deep holistic structure of reality. The importance of this as a foundation for the profound cultural shift that must happen in our times if we are to avoid catastrophe can scarcely be overstated.

In my next essay, I’ll introduce a new project I’m excited about that promises to bring forth a beautiful and sacred expression of global intimacy; as such it could be said to represent an embodiment of the ideas explored in these last two essays.