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Mark Vernon's avatar

Thanks Jonathan. An educational summary of the IDGs for someone who doesn’t know that much about them. Though my fundamental sense/prejudice remains, which is implicit in the Judge’s charge sheet though not quite one of them, and might be called, to give it some rhetorical punch, the narcissistic fallacy: the conviction that human beings, through their own efforts, can co-constructively “emerge” themselves, inwardly and outwardly, towards a better tomorrow.

To my mind, what this overlooks are fundamentals of our existence, such as that we didn’t make ourselves and don’t own our intelligence, consciousness or even self-consciousness. They are an active sharing in a wider being, which most humans, for most of history and still nowadays, have approached through activities striking absent from the IDGs (unless I’ve missed something), such as worship, devotion, prayer, divination, sacrifice, offerings, faith, love.

You do reference love in passing, and I think that it might be key. The spiritual traditions teach that love can reach over reason’s horizons and break us free of self-imprisonment - indeed, is core to our transhumanising, as Dante who first coined the word, put it - because love longs for, and so draws attention towards, the more, whilst also making us receptive to and readier for it.

Moreover, it is a prerequisite for a rebalancing of the self, personal and collective, away from all the modern obsessions around self-awareness, self-development, self-transcendence, etc, that might then become more open to this spiritual commons or higher power, which exceeds us and gives itself for us, and all things. (I did wonder whether a sudden realisation of the overwhelming burden imposed by a belief in self-salvation was the cause of the IDGs weeping in your piece.)

Incidentally, I was reading the other day that the word “contemplation” originally referred to the building of cities with the temple at the centre, con-templum, much as “consideration” was originally engaging with the divine stars, con-sideris. That both these words have become wholly inner struck me as significant, part of the closed-system cosmology that is assumed as default by the modern educated mind.

Funnily enough, I’m participating in a week on love whilst you’re at the summit. The word “love” comes with all sorts of problems of its own, of course, from sentimentality to Utopianism. But your piece is helping me sharpen what I hope to take to our week, to see whether we can rise to the challenge. Hence my writing this response.

As the experience of falling in love reveals, love has us, rather than we having it. That shift of perspective must be key, I think - as has been noted at least since Plato.

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Elsa Stevenson's avatar

There is something about the institutionalisation of ideals that is inherently corruptive. It’s beyond the intentionality and/or context of what is being proposed. And it seems to go worse the more it is scaled up.

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