TOWARD WORLD ORDER

WORLDVIEW EYELEMICA: A MANIFESTO

J.F. Bennett, Ph.D. Stanford ‘62

(where “die Luft der Wahrheit weht”)

Outside the Box

         What is said here is initially for intellectuals of various stripes, but ultimately for everyone. This is shown by a recent (11/18/11) issue of the Palo Alto Weekly featuring a lengthy piece entitled Getting Off The Treadmill. It contends that lack of a sense of purpose among teenagers, together with a feeling of meaninglessness of treadmilling, may underlie much of their demoralization. An editorial concludes that “Change will come as parents realize that today’s culture is unhealthy, unsustainable, and leaving most kids without purpose at the very time they need it most.”   Some kids will settle for sex, money, drugs, and/or rock’n’roll as “purpose” enough. But there are good kids everywhere who want to “amount to something,” and I sense a yearning for high purpose and meaning in life among them.

The need for meaningful purpose is worldwide, not only for kids, but for everyone up to and including the Powers that Be. We have been living in an Age of Endarkenment at least since the misapplication of Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” take on Darwin: Diverse racial and national delusions that “We are fittest” have made a warring madhouse of the world, rendering our whole species unfit for survival.

        WWII was climactic, with almost the whole planet becoming a battlefield, over land, sea, and air. In a letter to Harry Truman after the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Henry Wallace wrote that it’s one world or none. We seem to be closer to none than to one. Today’s corruptions in finance, politics, and corporatocracy, even in academics, darken the world further.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Consider the level of “stupefying reality” reached by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees in a speech quoted in part by the late Christopher Hitchens: ^“Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

Another writer who might well agree that it doesn’t matter is the quintessentially French philosopher Michel Orphay, quoted by Lewis Lapham in his quarterly on Religion, from Orphay’s recently translated Atheist Manifesto:    “. . . we seem confronted today by nihilism, the cult of nothingness, the passion of nonbeing, a morbid relish for the twilight of waning civilizations, a fascination with the bottomless pits where we lose our souls, our bodies, our identity, our being, and all interest in anything whatsoever. . . consubstantial with a twentieth century that saw death everywhere—the death of art, philosophy, metaphysics, the novel, music, politics.” Yet, he adds, “The death of philosophy engendered works of philosophy, the death of the novel generated novels, the death of art produced works of art, . . . [the death of God prompted] an outpouring of the sacred, the divine, the religious. Today we swim in these purgative waters. . . Our era staggers under the weight of revelations solemnly hailed as the authorized utterances of new oracles. Abundance holds sway, to the detriment of quality and truth—never have so many false tidings been celebrated as so many revealed truths.” 

But I shall argue that it does matter, for we are custodians of High Consciousness, a critically important achievement of the stupendous Cosmos of Energy, to pass on to posthuman successors “forever.”                                                              

        Blindness to the key issue is rife. Some 2500 years ago Democritus, pioneer atomist, put it thus: A person should consider state affairs more important than all else, and see to it that they are well managed. For a well-managed state is the greatest of all successes. And everything is included in it. If it be lost, all is lost. Whereas those who abhor government may boggle at this, the anarchic opposite is existence famously described by Hobbes as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. True, where there’s law, there’s injustice; but equally true, where there’s no law, there’s injustice. And normally it’s better to have access to a fire department than helplessly to watch your house burn down.

While Democritus’ chief concern was the Greek Polis, ours is Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village on Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. It is a Ship of State in danger of going under as the human world drives the planet toward mass extinction by way of self-promotion and ecorape, among other scourges.

        Worldview Eyelemica (W-E) aims at an Age of Reënlightenment. Its application is a long-term project, but nothing is more important for human survival. It puts two essentials on the table:

        1^st, a goal to pursue—steadfast high global civilization, at last. Hence, the missing purpose for the world. We do not need megalomaniac “leaders” in this pursuit: we need humane and capable managers, from community to planet.

        2^nd, a raison d’être—the perpetuation of high consciousness : “hold fast that which is good,” and advance it.

As the ongoing decay of sovereignty runs its course, with the demise of autocrats in the “Arab Spring,” and hopefully of criminal liars in the spinoff dubbed the “American Spring,” (or “Autumn”), W-E points forward toward a New World Order and Theory of Everything (ToE) based on scientific truth.

Some background should make plain that this is not just more New Age drivel. In youth I turned from the pursuit of physical fundamentals to problems of life in the conviction that the growing chaos in human affairs was threatening the survival of what most deserved survival on our planet.  I have not come up empty. Ironically, in embracing unmathematizable phenomena, W-E is seemingly opposite the aim of Einstein et al. in theoretical physics, whose steps I had set out to follow, to mathematize everything; but it meets Einstein’s own criterion of good theory, in being “simple, but not too simple.” And it puts a full-blown ToE on the table, which physics as it stands cannot do.

My dissertation on Anagenesis and Macroevolution is a once well-received footnote to Darwin’s Origin of Species, dealing with a deep argument about the origins of high-ranking taxa. It includes the idea that evolution involves an increase in negentropy, i.e. complexity.

After a Fulbright year in Vienna, I published a paper in 1969, seminal for me, broaching the idea of Earth as an evolving multitransducer of sunlight energy. The next step was long delayed by personal problems. Then in 1980, while teaching a college course in Cosmos, Earth, and Life, featuring the prodigiously varied channeling of sunlight energy through the biota, it came to me that  my consciousness too was transduced sunlight energy. This sudden insight was a secular “mystical experience” so intense  that even full sexual gratification with a beloved pales in comparison.

My friend John Heilbron, eminent historian of science, said of my epiphany “That sounds like Ostwald.” Checking this out, I found that Wilhelm Ostwald [1853-1932: Nobel chemist 1909] had reported a similar exalting experience around 1890. His brainstorm was the idea that everything from matter to mind is energy, which I called Ostwald’s Law. He described energy as a “sublime clay,” persuading me that he got almost the whole picture.  Clearly he thought this to be his greatest contribution. He was ahead of his time then and now.

Heilbron has recently informed me that Ostwald’s Law is by rights also Ernest Solvay’s Law. Solvay, a wealthy industrialist of scientific mind, motivated by Auguste Compte’s positivist, post-religious/post-metaphysical approach to truth, had independently arrived at a ToE based on a generalized concept of energy. Despite different languages, he and Ostwald became fast friends, Ostwald lauding Solvay for pioneering “social energetics.”

Solvay’s ToE is very similar to W-E, with one profound difference: In writing that “A mind that is truly scientific and entirely free knows perfectly well that it is not free at all,” he reveals a commitment to the equivalent of LaPlaceian absolute determinism, whereby given all the initial conditions, everything from first to last could be computed from F = ma (force is mass times acceleration, i.e. change of motion, from basic physics). In contrast, W-E stands for freedom, willed or random, in the course of evolution. This, by postulating that energy, except for fixed modes (made lasting, as in motions like planetary orbits, the chemistry of the periodic table,  established species) is unpredictably innovative and so not fully mathematizable, as in everyday life. We can never be sure what’s next. Maybe love and prosperity. Or maybe a tsunami of cosmic energy that cremates our galaxy. Not probable, but possible.

This postulate is the climax of my thinking, and the most important thing I have to contribute, entailing an enrichment of science and of the understanding of ourselves and our place in the Cosmos. It constitutes a naturalistic explanation for the rise of complexity in the whole story since the Big Bang. It features a redintegration of science, thus restoring its lost place as the only approach to truth independent of nation, race, culture, ethnicity, etc. inherent in Newtonian physics, as noted in the 17th century  by Montesquieu. It is more than six decades since the publiction in Science of “Chaos in the Brickyard,” lampooning the intellectual fragmentation of science by the welter of disconnected specialties therein. High time for a redintegration.

A review of my thinking best begins with quotations from Ostwald, which I did not find in English but which richly deserve translation. After a lengthy argument with colleagues he later wrote of his epiphany thus: “In view of the strong growth of the new outlook in my subconscious, [my colleagues’ disdain] did not have the expected result, but rather the opposite. After a late departure and a few hours sleep, I awoke suddenly in the midst of the arguments and could sleep no more. In the small hours . . . I left the hotel and walked to the zoo, where in the sunshine of a wonderful spring morning I had a true Pentecostal visitation, as it were. The birds twittered and warbled from every branch, green-gold foliage shone against a light blue sky, butterflies sunned themselves on the flowers as I wandered in a marvelously elevated state of mind through nature in the spring. I saw everything with new, unaccustomed eyes, as if I were experiencing these wonders and beauties for the first time. I can compare the feeling only with the highest of young love, which were then a full decade behind me. The thought process for the general formation of the energetic worldview completed itself in my brain without exertion, even with rapture; I saw everything as if I were just created as in the biblical account and put in paradise. This was for me the actual birth of Energetics. . . . I have not again experienced such fulfillment, even though a whole series of elevating [and] . . . significant ideas were allotted me [later].” Die Energetik, 1912, p.7; Lebenslinien II, 1927, p.160.                                                     

        “And are thoughts . . . not also realities? [Surely] they are among the most important realities of human life. . . . They are not material, ponderable, or tangible, but neither are light and electricity. . . . Thus there are . . . a great number of realities, very important ones, which cannot be subsumed under the concept of Matter, but which can indeed be understood as Energy. . . . In order to think, our brain must receive chemical energy from the bloodstream, which energy is consumed, i.e., transformed, to thought [beim Denken verbraucht, d.h. in andere Formen umwandelt]; at the moment the bloodstream is stopped, so is thought. The thought itself is not blood, any more than the sound we hear is the oscillation of air. These deliver only the energy for the mental processes of thought and sensation. But since the latter only arise when energy is made available . . . and since the energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but only transformed, then so must thought and sensation be embraced in the system of energy transformation of which all events in the world consist.”  Lebenslinien II, 1927, pp.168ff.

I went on to rediscover Ostwald’s failed philosophy of Energetic Monism: failed largely because Einstein’s E = mc² had not yet been absorbed. Ostwald was shot down primarily by the great physicists Boltzmann and Planck, who found separate mathematizations necessary for matter and for energy. It is a matter of historical interest and importance, for others to explore, that Einstein’s 1905-07 removal of this mathematical obstacle by way of E = mc² did not prompt a major review of Ostwald’s philosophy.

A word about eyelemica. The first advance after my epiphany was the discovery that decades ago George Gamow resurrected from Middle English the term ylem, then used for the substrate of all elements, be they water, air, fire, and earth or (later) elements of the periodic table. A pioneer of Big Bang theory, Gamow applied the term to the universe of energy at the time of the Bang, when everything was so hot that perhaps not even sub-atomic particles  as we know them could exist. To suggest the inclusion of Mind, I altered the spelling to eyelem, and since Mind requires brain, utterly impossible at temperatures of the Bang, I was led to the idea that the Cosmos, once ylem, is forever eyelem [energy, sensu latissimo]. Modification of the derivative term eyelemics to eyelemica puts the keyword worldview front and center. Eyelemics is equivalent to Energetics except  in honoring Gamow’s input, and embracing the rise of complexity ever since the Big Bang.

 Vital Questions

         First, a word about Truth, vital in itself. Our Endarkenment has included a darkening of the pursuit of Truth, what with resurgence from the woodwork of every crackpot idea ever conceived, obscuring scientific truth in the shuffle. Previously the turn of the quest for Truth from Authority to Nature, especially the revelations of Newton’s Philosophia Naturalis with its Laws of Motion and Gravitation, pointed toward a Truth independent of all religious and cultural authorities, as noted early on by Montesquieu. Natural Philosophy became Science, which precipitated the Enlightenment, featuring this advance on Truth. But recently denial even of truth in science has been fomented by Kuhnian paradigm philosophy. Shifts of paradigm like that from Newtonian-Einsteinian mechanics to quantum mechanics suggest an endless turnover of received “Truths,” evermore mathematically inaccessible. And the hostility to new paradigms by monarchs of the old suggests corruption of the pursuit of Truth by Ego.

To evade such corruption, I endorse Georg Lichtenberg’s dictum that Truth is the asymptote of research [Wissenschaft], never attainable but indefinitely approachable. Nothing can be said that no one will dispute, but that science has gained on Truth in the past half-millennium is about as indisputable as can be. Even Gorgias, antagonist of Socrates who denied the very existence of Truth, might agree.

In pursuit of Truth, I do not believe in belief, for it closes the mind. T. H. Huxley’s “working hypotheses,” though we seldom know what they are, lie behind our understanding of every Being and every Happening. It is the business of metaphysics to root out these working hypotheses and better them if possible, as Einstein did with the concepts of space and time. The idea of Mind as Energy is a working hypothesis similarly rooted out.

Men of scientific truth have widened our horizons and deepened our insights throughout history, with little or no pursuit of wealth or power. Consider the dying Copernicus’ demotion of Earth from cosmic center, in favor of Sun. Hear Newton: What’s done before many witnesses is seldom without some further concern than that of Truth. Attend to Maxwell and Hertz, who revealed light as electromagnetic waves, and so introduced us to a universe of electromagnetic radiations of all frequencies, in which we are as totally embedded as in Newton’s material universe. Note Einstein’s answer when asked how much to pay him when he arrived at Princeton: $5000/yr. (Knowing they would look bad paying such a towering genius so little, they forced him up to $20,000, relatively high in those times.) Today’s technological billionaires are exploitive poachers of the truths revealed by the likes of Copernicus, Newton, Maxwell, Gibbs, Einstein, Planck, Curie, Bohr, and their ilk: the injustice is flagrant.

(It has been brought to my attention that a series of otherwise able men , from Benjamin Whorf to Henry Morris and beyond, versed in the seeming contradiction between a Law of Levitation (rise of negentropy or complexity) and the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics (equilibration to cosmic “heat death”), have argued, largely in publications of the Institute for Creation Research, the impossibility of a naturalistic explanation of the origin and evolution of life: that an explanation requires the existence of a Creator, i.e., God (or Allah?). My take, influenced by their frequent reference to the Bible and denials of compelling scientific truths, e.g. the fossil record, is that they have been hopelessly brainwashed in religious dogma in youth. I cannot accept that the stories of the sages of antiquity, though not without wisdom, are anywhere near the degree of truth reached by modern science.)

Regarding What are we? and Where do we come from? W-E’s “theory of life,” with minor caveats can be framed so: We have evolved in a balanced open thermodynamic star-planet system, with high quality blackbody starlight input and equal but lower quality blackbody infrared output, wherein the biota gets evermore complex and consciousness rises ever higher (and perhaps sinks ever lower). A thereby inspired Law of  Levitation  (complexity rises) parallels Newton’s Law of Gravitation. Both Laws are essential to the understanding of our place in the Cosmos, and should be taught side by side.

What we are and Where we come from is further illuminated by the most astounding “fact of life,” that as with virtually all organisms, we begin life not as babies, but as zygotes, single cells scarcely visible to the sharp human eye, from which we develop into sentient beings. A naturalistic explanation of this seeming miracle is provided by application of my postulate that except in fixed modes energy is unpredictably innovative and unmathematizable in enduring open thermodynamic systems such as that of Sun and Earth, e.g., in our lives: our bodies are partly fixed modes, but what happens to us moment to moment is unpredictable and unmathematizable, though we may kid ourselves otherwise.

In recent years I realized that this postulate entails that every wisp of energy in the whole Cosmos is potentially conscious, albeit far from all at once. The case for this inference can be summarized in a few words: We have to eat. No food, no consciousness. No photosynthesis, no food. No starlight, no photosynthesis. No nuclear fusion in star cores, no starlight. No Real World Out There (Cosmos),  no nuclei to fuse, and no Real World In Here (Mind). Energy from any star, appropriately channeled, will do. It is implicit that any mode of energy is transducible to any other, though not usually directly or without other input energy. I know of no exceptions.

The inference is critically important regarding the vital question Where do we go? That all is potentially alive prompts the concept of the Cosmos as a sleeping colossus, rather than a stupendous corpse, which awakens from time to time on waterplanets here and there. This in turn prompts a scientific “theory of death.” Piecemeal, by way of many transductions of the energies of our remains, we go back to a Reality stuck with the prospect of conscious life, not to a phantom Heaven or Hell. A moral implication falls out: “Do as you would to make the world a better place to come back to.”

The ultimate impact of W-E is a shift of mindset, from self-centered to cosmo-centered. To be sure, identification of conscious Self with Cosmos can be expected to take a long time to sink in. (Hearken to Dale Carnegie: When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.) But it is a momentous insight, deserving expression as a Principle of Latent Cosmic Consciousness: lc². Major offshoots may include reduction of egotism and chauvinism, of competition in favor of cooperation, suppression of gluttony for power and wealth, and mobilization for a global drive toward long sustainable high civilization.

At point is mankind’s emergence from self-centered childhood. We are most recently descended not from apes, but from “savages.” We are, indeed, still savages, in adornment, ritual, dogma, and perhaps especially, delusions of grandeur. As multimodes of energy, we begin to emerge from savagery with perceptions of the good, the true, the beautiful: perceptions by energy, achieved on Earth after billions of years of evolution, involving enriching innovations such as color vision. Fundamentally the emergence is a matter of sublimation of crass energies. Pure music is perhaps the best example, sublimating sound energies independently of language. Beethoven put it ahead of the written word in any form, and I tend to agree. (Why then am I not a composer? I tried: not good enough.)  Other life-forms on Earth may have reached sublimated perceptions in smaller measure, e.g., visual perceptions of beauty by birds of paradise, aural by songbirds. But the main responsibility for their perpetuation is ours.

 High Consciousness

         Most of our conscious life is banal, much is warped by problems of love, work, health, accident, quiet or unquiet desperation, etc; and some so bad it invites oblivion, like shell-shock. According to a Chinese proverb, ‘tis marvelous to behold a creature, terrible to be one; but let it be added that ‘tis vital to stay mindful of the marvelous. As for the whole “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” San Francisco’s celebrated DJ Don Sherwood added “But it’s the only game in town.” It follows that we must work with what we’ve got toward something better, in the light of scientific truth rather than cultural cons. The “better” is high consciousness.

        Reverence for the almighty Cosmos of Energy is implicit. That in the multibillion-year evolution on Earth the Cosmos has reached high consciousness at least sporadically in the human species, is an achievement which deserves reverence. Thus     W-E, among other things, essays to do what religion is supposed to do, but without bogus dogma.

Characteristically, Einstein put a finger on what is at issue. Asked in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki what he thought of the prospect that we might nuke our species to extinction, after due reflection he replied “Then there would be no one to listen to Mozart.” From the panoply of things we do with our metabolic energy, Einstein picked out this inspiring experience to nail the loss precipitated by our extinction. He sensed our ultimate value, the capacity for high consciousness and its perpetuation. Note his implicit recognition of the primacy of Mind among the probable infinity of modes available to energy. Physical energy is involved in listening to Mozart: that of our relentless physiology, of the mechanical energy of sound waves, of its transductions in the living brain. But all that is ballast for the inspiration experienced in high mental modes, in this case of hearing great music.

Much the same point was made most eloquently as early as the fifth century B.C., by a remarkable woman from Mantineia named Diotima, as reported by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium:“One must be instructed and shaped from the earliest years with habitual exposure to what is beautiful, and encouraged to love it. . . . Soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to that of another, and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same . . . and will become a lover of all beautiful forms. In the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of outward form, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences that he may see their beauty. He who is instructed thus far in the things of love, and has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end, he will perceive a Nature of wondrous beauty, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates, is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.”

(Edgar Allan Poe agreed: The pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.)

        Note that this wisdom stems from a woman, evidently living in a pagan culture superior to our own in spirituality. We learn from these exemplars that the selfish pursuit of wealth, glory, and/or power is not a worthy human life. T0 know and love Nature, and the “mahatmas” of our arts and sciences, is more like it.

In advocating that genius is what matters most, Gustav Mahler made a point similar to Diotima’s. Genius is part of human nature insofar as the recognition of it requires the possession of it. When it comes to God, Darwin said “a dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.” (So much for theology.) But when it comes to Newton, many people besides Darwin, but no dogs, can sense his genius. Appreciation of genius is a goal of education. It raises us to something above cosmic pollutants. And there are sources other than genius to which also we can turn for high inspiration. Pivotal is the total Cosmos, which is not Ghiselin’s “ultimate horror,” because it is all there is and all potentially alive.

Applications

         The most urgent application of W-E is to education. Motivated by his famous dictum that civilization is evermore in a race between education and catastrophe, H.G. Wells made a valiant attempt to reëducate the human species after WWI with his monumental Outline of History, Science of Life, and Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (a pioneering work on human ecology). The effort was ignored by the Powers that Be. In his last year (1946) he was asked at his club what he was currently up to. “Composing my epitaph” he said.  “What will it be, H. G.?” “God damn you all, I told you so,” was his reply.

But it is time to try again. I hope for the sake of my grandchildren and everyone else, for a better result than Wells’s. I am not holding my breath. Though the world is changing faster now, the “sale” of W-E to the human populace may take centuries if not millennia, what with the deeply entrenched tribal, ethnic, racial, national, and religious prejudices to be overcome. Moreover, some deep thought is behind a full grasp of W-E. Bertrand Russell was perhaps right in saying that “most people would rather die than think” (adding Darwinistically that “many do”). Some will be impossible to reach. But there are plenty with minds open to scientific truth. Though every culture may be a madhouse of prejudice, almost surely there are children in all of them who can see through humbug and catch the scent of scientific truth in W-E.

What follows is an outline in progress of a global education in W-E. There is much variability in the age at which this should begin, and a future turnover from classroom to individual teaching with computers, DVDs, and tutors may be prerequisite to solving this problem. As things stand, high school is the most appropriate starting point.

All students should see the DVD of Brian Swimme’s Journey of the Universe. They should come away from a discussion of it knowing that the sun is an average star with several billion years to go before it burns out, into which a million Earths could fit, in a cosmos of sextillions of stars (current estimate), and that Earth is but one of the minor planets in our solar system, special in that it is a waterplanet, on which H₂O has existed in the liquid state for multibillion years; that there are possibly gazillions of similar stellar systems out there, surely some with waterplanets suitable for life; and that we are tiny creatures in a colossal Cosmos, “mites on a mote” (dinky planet Earth), but important because we are (except in sleep) conscious. (Without consciousness is there a universe?)

At this point, main lines of the story of the quest for energy by Earth’s living things, microbial, plant, and animal; photosynthetic, herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous, etc.; can greatly enrich the education process. The variety is endless, of ways organisms including man get their energy and transduce it. Nothing can serve better to convey the unifying power of W-E than to survey this variety, attending to the cooperation of energies, notably chemical, in the forming and functioning of the millions of kinds of organisms, and of ecosystems and ecozones. Thereby our progeny’s eyes can be opened as never before to what’s going on around us on our planet.

A unified global general education in W-E, featuring the oneness of science with minimal mathematics, amounts to a selective evolutionary-historical account of the multitransducements of solar energy on Earth during the past 3 to 4 billion years. The length and detail of the account should in future be adjustable to the backgrounds and interests of students individually, by means of computers and DVDs: classroom teaching should be minimized, because of the great divergence of background and interest even in small classes. Social interaction belongs in classrooms. But perhaps especially in math and science, monitoring of individuals by eyelemically informed mentors is important, to stretch their minds as far as possible outside the box of human affairs.

Thereby with W-E, we could have “no child left behind” in exposure to a science-based worldview, our closest approach to general Truth. Furthermore, we could effect the restoral of the University from the Multiversity. Decades ago, J. Robert Oppenheimer described Harvard as “an enormous cognitive jungle,” and Clark Kerr spoke of the U. C. Multiversity faculty as “a collection of intellectual prima donnas united by a common grievance about the parking problem.” W-E is a much better basis than parking space for reuniting these faculties, particularly those of  C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures. And it is grounds for offsetting the gradual fall of the multiversities into the deep pockets of the corporatocracy, with a reëmphasis on unitary, reverent understanding of the world.

Different brainwashing of children in different cultures is a major impediment to such unitary understanding. Were it globalized, education in W-E might well gradually lead to this unity. As distinguished from training for jobs in capitalist society, W-E  involves bringing inspirational mentations to the highest level we can reach. General education in W-E offers not only a coherent understanding of the overwhelming outdoor world, but also of spiritual alongside material reality, subjective alongside objective reality. It opens the door to ultimate reconciliation of the religions, by replacement of reverence for phantom Gods with reverence for the almighty real Cosmos, all potentially alive, upon which we will always be utterly dependent.

Of course, it is a major challenge to condense our vast and burgeoning knowledge into a single eyelemic package, reorienting every citizen of Earth. However, W-E affords an approach with minimal mathematics.

Working toward unity, let it begin with the energy concept as defined when it entered modern science some 200 years ago, as the capacity to do work, which is to exert a force through a distance, where force is what accelerates (changes the motion of)  all modes of energy. Except for recognition of Anaximander, perhaps the first true scientist, whose “apeiron” (boundless) is much the same idea as energy, as noted by Toulmin and Goodfield (influenced by Ostwald?), the term’s meanings before scientific definition, and its modern corruptions in psychobabble, should be dismissed.

There are too many measures of energy, e.g. electron volt, joule, calorie, British thermal unit. The kilowatt hour [kwh] is the main one to teach, it being the unit we usually pay for. But everyone should also be taught its meaning, revealed by relating it to the somewhat lesser horsepower hour, the work an average horse can do in an hour. A useful translation of the kwh is the “Shirepower hour,” Shire being the breed of biggest horses: kwh consumption then translates as hours worked by an oversized horse. Alongside saving money, this earthy insight, globally taught, might substantially improve everyday energy conservation, curbing such abuses as running a single panty through an entire washer-drier  cycle at kwh expense.

Let energy’s main modes then be introduced: kinetic, potential, thermal, current electric, radiant, chemical, nuclear, and mental, with examples of transduction from mode to mode. There should follow discussion, with everyday examples, of the laws of thermodynamics: the 1st or Conservation Law, the 2nd or Entropy Law of closed systems, the 3d Law that entropy vanishes in absolute cold, the Law of Levitation in enduring open systems. Then Ostwald’s Law, the Law of conservation of Matter, Einstein’s combination of that with the Law of conservation of Energy into E = mc², and the energetics of Mind.

Next, trace the path of energy involved in moving, say, a refrigerator: back from the muscle energy of the mover to that of his food, to the input of hot blackbody radiant energy of the sun which was photosynthesized into that food; forward to the heat energy transduced by friction from mechanical energy during the move, to the output of infrared blackbody radiation to space. Generalize to the explanation of all happenings on Earth in terms of transductions between this input and that output in the open Sun-Earth thermodynamic system.

Every living organism is a multitransducer in an open thermodynamic system, its development, anatomy, physiology, activity, ecology and evolution potentially describable, thus qualitatively understandable, in terms of modes and transductions of energy. But it is not only biology (endo- or exo-) which can be so understood. Viewing mind as energy, humanities likewise appear as fundamentally the same as hard sciences in being rooted in modes and transductions of energy.

This worldview embraces all fields of study, including those of the esoteric phenomena of new life forms and mentations. While allowing for the persistence of low life, human and other, W-E recognizes our responsibility as cosmic stewards of high consciousness, to raise that consciousness individually and collectively, seeking high inspiration throughout our lives, holding fast that which is good, alongside working, learning, partying, and helping each other.

What has been disclosed by science is a multibillion-year evolutionary advance of energy, by way of natural selection, toward knowledge of Itself, featuring inspiration by cultural and natural wonders. Alongside the mahatmas of our arts and sciences are billions, especially of women, intent upon beautifying their little squares, often with success. We are custodians of these achievements. It is our duty to further them, via intelligent planetary management. For therein lies the sanctity and raison d’ètre of human, and hopefully posthuman, life.

        W-E thus comes in view as the basis for a global general education independent of culture, indeed universal, rooted in a unitary scientific mindset—enlightening students in their choice of career from the ever-growing smorgasbord of specialties: an update of the now obsolete History of Western Civilization course, an update inching forward toward the unity of mind essential to human survival as steward of intelligent and compassionate life on Earth.

As is, the exponentially growing output of disunited specialized knowledge is swamping us in Oppenheimer’s “enormous cognitive jungle” without a scientifically sound worldview. Many fiddle for the Nobel Prize while Rome burns. Physics spends billions improving on Thales’ guess that everything is water, while the world rips; biologists probe every twist and turn of evolution, while the world rips; humanists pursue their specialties, while the world rips.

        W-E is a scientifically sound consilient worldview. It is not a religion, but should be taught as an alternative to religion in the quest for enduring high global civilization. The scientific establishment could begin its “marketing” in America by adding  W-E to the high-school science curriculum. That might well reënergize our faltering school system. Intelligent students can be expected to appreciate such an overview of the “enormous cognitive jungle.” And they may appreciate even more the meaningful purpose in life inherent in W-E.

Beyond education, W-E is a basis for planetary politico-socio-economic policy and action. Though perhaps fading as a superpower, the USA still has the clout not to impose, but to negotiate adoption the world over of the goal of an enduring high global civilization, as international policy.

After WWI H.G. Wells wrote that All ideas of unifying mankind’s affairs depend ultimately for their realization on mankind having a unified mind for the job.. While men’s minds are still confused, the social and political relations will remain in confusion, however great the forces that are grinding them against each other and however tragic and monstrous the consequences.                                                      

        W-E embodies the required “unified mind for the job.” Given intelligent praxis, it gains on the goal of enduring high global civilization, to the huge advantage of posterity. Apart from enlarging and deepening our understanding of the Cosmos and our place in it, W-E abets mobilization for the pragmatic drive toward a New World Order. Fully intelligent life cannot be claimed for Earth before it has taken aim at this goal and launched a concerted effort to reach it.

The drive ought to be administered by a beefed-up and cooperative United Nations: a prospect not out of sight, for globalization is already undermining national sovereignty, and tending to put delusional autocrats out of business. Even in America, the takeover of leadership by wealth-and-powermongers is failing.  A worldwide upturn in morality might even be inspired by this drive.

It involves a great array of technical problems, local, regional, national, as well as international. In working on this array, Watt’s reference to human rascality should never be forgotten. We are all hardwired with some degree of selfishness and criminality. The softwiring to help each other is what to tap. The institution of international organizations on a purely non-profit basis analogous to the American CCC, WPA, and Peace Corps is the way to go, given intelligent direction. Whereas the lack of such agencies often breeds thugs, their institution tends to breed responsible citizens.

It remains here to recommend to future UN planetary managers that they administer the global provision of freshwater, electricity, housing, feeding, health care, and birth control of its human habitants, on a strictly nonprofit basis. Thereby the UN could effect much reduction of the widespread problem of unemployment. Indeed, intelligent organization and management of nonstop pursuit of the goal would provide meaningful occupation for the whole world’s populace into the indefinite future. It is a policy suitable not only for mankind, but also for life-forms on any planet far enough evolved to aim at intelligent life.

A check on capitalism is entailed. While it has enriched us, making of life an “indulgence trip” as remarked by one of my college students in the ‘70s, capitalism has worsened life in at least two key respects: it has fostered greed, and except in China, already overpopulated, it has chiefly ignored the global population problem in favor of enlarging markets for more profit. Capitalists say that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, but ignore the billions who have no boat. The tide goes up their billion noses, and many drown.

This is criminal. But “we have met the enemy, and they is us.” Investment of money is a gamble, and everyone wants at least to win a jackpot. Corporations are compelled to move abroad where labor is 90% cheaper, and lay off the workers too poor to gamble except in lotteries, in order to fatten their greedy investors, who need not lift a finger to make money off their money.

The system is insane. It is unconscionable that there is a freshwater problem anywhere on habitable land, on a planet 70% covered with seawater, with a technology capable of drilling for oil in mile-deep ocean and piping it thousands of miles across tundra. Were technologies like those of Lonnie Johnson given global application under UN administration, transducing otherwise wasted sunlight input energy to freshwater from seawater, and beyond that to hydrogen from freshwater, there could be launched assault on global supply problems of freshwater, electrification, and fuel (hydrogen), with minimal pollution, exploiting an indefinitely renewable clean energy resource: sunlight.

No major civilization has yet endured more than a few millennia. We too may find that “all is lost” of ours, if we cannot lift it from madness to sanity. It is essential that we keep our eye on the ball: the perpetuation of high consciousness in the light of scientific truth.

Cathedralization

        Recent arguments for building up rather than out in America, and the takeover of high-rise construction in the near and far East, suggest that the world is ready for consideration of the construction of mile-high skyscrapers like the beautiful one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Any mile-high should go up not as a status symbol, but as a Wellsian “reach for the stars.” Indeed, the buildings should be high enough to provide all occupants a view at the top, of the sky full of stars from horizon to horizon—a spiritual experience increasingly difficult to access in our increasingly polluted world.  Such an experience can inspire reverence for the Cosmos. By analogy with medieval sites of reverence, mile-highs are then likewise “cathedrals,” though in keeping with an education in W-E. rather than Christianity.

About 100,000 mile-highs with appending support buildings would house the present global population and somewhat more—a staggering challenge, but worth considering in long-term planning. As well as bearing heavily on the global housing problem and the unemployment problem, such buildings would be places of living and working that made people much less dependent on cars, thereby forestalling the “carmageddon” we are facing.

Rather than just office buildings, these mile-highs, together with a few surrounding lesser high-rises, would be communities of some 100,000 citizens, ecologically as self-sufficient as possible, built to last as long as the Egyptian pyramids, but with alterable interiors. One of the surrounding lesser high-rises should be a “farmscraper” of some 30 stories, devoted entirely to state-of-the-art year-round agriculture, which could keep 100,000 fed, according to the BMW Group. Such constructions, built and lived in and artfully decorated in tribute to the Almighty Cosmos, would go far toward unifying mankind’s mind for pursuit of high global civilization. The project must be totally devoid of profiteering. The UN could do something worthy of its name by taking on its administration. Funding should be based on the general principle that if people want something done, reward them for doing it, not necessarily with money.

Ultimately the drive would result in a change of lifestyle like those of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, giving mankind at all levels and varieties of lifestyle the option to live in relative luxury and ease—given adherence to the maxim of longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, that the difference between civilization and barbarism is maintenance. Let everyone be encouraged to “adopt a (metaphorical) pothole,” fix it, and keep it fixed. (My “pothole” is worldview.)

The upshot of the whole project might be described as the “cathedralization of high global civilization,” with the proviso that it is not religious, but honors the Almighty Cosmos of Energy which deserves credit for achieving high consciousness in some 4 billion years of bioevolution on Earth.

Aside from its basis for whatever sanctity and significance human life may have, high consciousness has survival value in making life more worthwhile.

Epilogue

         Since we are lone perpetuators of high consciousness so far as known, the cosmic survival of high consciousness may be at stake in the global “marketing” of W-E. However, there are sextillions of stars. So long as there are enduring open thermodynamic systems such as that of Sun and Earth, wherein the postulate applies that except in fixed modes energy is unpredictably innovative and unmathematizable, there is the possibility of recurring bioevolution to high consciousness, beyond us to imagine. This suggests that alongside “heat death,” the Cosmos tends toward ever-increasing complexification, in accord with the Law of Levitation. Some astrophysicists argue that the era of stardom will pass, but unless gravity is repealed, it seems likely that there will always be enduring open thermodynamic systems of some kind. And if we master controlled fusion, we won’t need stars anyway.

In summary, we arrive at the worldview that everything from matter to mind is energy, wherein we find ourselves as multimode energy composites, physical and mental, in a cosmos of stupendous energy, on a puny waterplanet in an open thermodynamic system with high-grade (low entropy) solar input and lower grade (higher entropy) infrared output to space, evolving in place after billions of years of bioevolution under the Law of Levitation, and held there by the Law of Gravitation.

        W-E sparks the vision of a planet populated by intelligent life, which sees unity in everything that is or happens. The full impact of such a Kuhnian paradigm shift, notable perhaps above all for bringing the Afterlife from fantasy back to Reality, cannot be foreseen. But at least we can say it affords the chance of  a better life for posterity in an Age of Reënlightenment.

Years later I realized a major implication of the Ostwald-Solvay Law: that every wisp of energy in the whole Cosmos is potentially conscious, albeit far from all at once. The case for this inference can be summarized in a few words: We have to eat. No food, no consciousness. No photosynthesis, no food. No starlight, no photosynthesis. No nuclear fusion in star cores, no starlight. No Real World Out There (Cosmos),  no nuclei to fuse, and no Real World In Here (Mind). Energy from any star, appropriately channeled, will do.

It is a momentous insight, in that major offshoots may include reduction of egotism and chauvinism, of competition in favor of cooperation, suppression of gluttony for power, prestige, and wealth, and mobilization for a global drive toward long sustainable high civilization. It thus deserves elevation to a Principle of Latent Cosmic Consciousness: lc².                                                             

         Solvay’s ToE is very similar to W-E, with one profound difference: In writing that “A mind that is truly scientific and entirely free knows perfectly well that it is not free at all,” he reveals a commitment to the equivalent of LaPlaceian absolute determinism, whereby given all the initial conditions, everything from first to last could be computed from F = ma (force is mass times acceleration, from basic physics). In contrast, W-E stands for freedom, willed or random, in the course of evolution. This, by postulating that energy, except for quasifixed modes (made lasting for a time, as in motions like planetary orbits, in the chemistry of the periodic table, in established species) is unpredictably innovative and so not fully mathematizable, as is our everyday life.

This postulate is the climax of my thinking, and the most important thing I have to contribute, entailing an enrichment of science and of the understanding of ourselves and our place in the Cosmos. It provides for a naturalistic explanation for the rise of complexity in the whole story since the Big Bang. It is implicit that any mode of energy, material or mental, is transducible to any other, given adequate channeling. No exceptions have come to mind.

(It has been brought to my attention that a series of otherwise able men , from Benjamin Whorf to Henry Morris and beyond, versed in the seeming contradiction between a Law of Levitation—rise of negentropy or complexity—and the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics—equilibration to cosmic “heat death”—have argued, largely in publications of the Institute for Creation Research, the impossibility of a naturalistic explanation of the origin and evolution of life: that an explanation requires the existence of a Creator, i.e., God. My take, influenced by their frequent reference to the Bible and denial of compelling scientific truths, e.g. of the fossil record, is that they have been hopelessly brainwashed in religious dogma in youth. I cannot accept that the stories of the sages of antiquity, though not without wisdom, are anywhere near the degree of truth reached by modern science.)

Music affords an example of how W-E offers naturalistic explanations: Consider a composer’s creation of a theme. Some 20% of his waking metabolic energy goes through his brain. The theme which enters his mind derives from unpredictable innovations in his brain by some of that energy. To sound it is to sublimate crass sound energies of various wavelengths with voice or instruments. If the theme outlasts the composer, we may have an example of high consciousness of long endurance, i.e. quasifixated, experienced by generations of humans and possibly even of posthumans. And the source of the brain energy which initiated it is any of the cosmic energy channeled by photosynthesis into the composer’s food.                                                                                     It is the same story for all fleeting thoughts and emotions of our daily lives, most of which get negligible quasifixation if any. Most of our conscious life is banal, much is warped by problems of love, work, health, accident, quiet or unquiet desperation, etc. According to a Chinese proverb, ‘tis marvelous to behold a creature, terrible to be one; but let it be added that ‘tis vital to stay mindful of the marvelous. As for the whole “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” San Francisco’s celebrated DJ Don Sherwood added “But it’s the only game in town.” It follows that we must work with what we’ve got toward something better, in the light of scientific truth. The “better” is high consciousness.

It is clear from the fossil record that complexity has increased over the billions of years since the planet took shape. Yet every complexity, from material structures to mentations, is subject to depreciation, except as temporarily sustained or improved by maintenance or renovation—including us, after maturation. Nothing except perhaps the proton, for which no half-life has yet been found, is immortal. Even gold 197 has a half-life.

What fosters the growth of complexity in the teeth of all this depreciation is existence of the planet in an enduring open thermodynamic system, with high-grade blackbody electromagnetic input energy from its star, and equal but lower-grade blackbody infrared output energy to space. A modification of open system thermodynamics is entailed: rather than purely mathematical, it must be a transmathematical science, embracing unmathematizable as well as mathematizable phenomena.                                                                                         The ultimate impact of W-E is a shift of mindset, from self-centered to cosmo-centered. To be sure, identification of conscious Self with Cosmos can be expected to take a long time to sink in. (Hearken to Dale Carnegie: When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.) But whereas we are hardwired with drive for personal survival, we are softwired to help each other, as in earthquakes, floods, storms, and friendships. Once this softwiring is well tapped, enduring high global civilization has a chance.

At point is mankind’s emergence from self-centered childhood. We are most recently descended not from apes, but from “savages.” We are, indeed, still savages, in adornment, ritual, dogma, and perhaps especially, delusions of grandeur. As multimodes of quasifixed energy, we begin to emerge from savagery with perceptions of the good, the true, the beautiful: perceptions by energy, achieved on Earth after billions of years of evolution, involving enriching innovations such as color vision.                                                                         Fundamentally the emergence is a matter of sublimation of crass energies. Other life-forms on Earth may have reached sublimated perceptions in smaller measure, e.g., visual and aural perceptions of beauty by various birds. But the main responsibility for perpetuation of high consciousness is ours.

        Reverence for the almighty Cosmos of Energy is implicit. That in the multibillion-year evolution on Earth the Cosmos has reached high consciousness at least sporadically in the human species, is an achievement which deserves reverence. Thus     W-E, among other things, essays to do what religion is supposed to do, but without bogus dogma.                                                  

        Most recently I’ve had an insight showing better how in the light of this postulate Worldview Eyelemica illuminates our understanding of the world. Starting from the Ostwald-Solvay Law, together with my postulate, take a look around in any habitable place on the planet. What you see is a staggering diversity of quasifixed modes of energy, subject to random motions like fluttering leaves, and directed motions like those of the birds around them. Complexity abounds. And even where complexity seems to be missing, as on oceans or extreme deserts, there is hidden complexity, especially in the oceans where water is abundant.

So when you look around outside, despite the narrowness of the band of electromagnetic radiations which your eyes can detect, you are seeing a countless array of depreciating quasifixed modes of energy undergoing countless unpredictable and  unmathematizable transductions leading toward ever increasing complexity. And that will go on as long as the open system endures, which the astrophysicists tell us will be several more billion years for Earth–unless perhaps a tsunami of cosmic energy cremates our galaxy: unlikely but possible.

What this all means is that energy, ever since the Big Bang, has been working waywardly toward conscious life, in us and probably elsewhere in this stupendous cosmos. That is not all to the good: there are states of consciousness worse than oblivion, and most of our conscious life is inane. But there is high consciousness in the pursuit of love, truth and beauty. It is our raison d’être to advance and perpetuate this pursuit. Thus transmathematical W-E illuminates our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. 

Men and women of scientific truth have widened our horizons and deepened our insights throughout history, with little or no pursuit of wealth or power. Consider the dying Copernicus’ demotion of Earth from cosmic center, in favor of Sun. Hear Newton: What’s done before many witnesses is seldom without some further concern than that of Truth. Attend to Maxwell and Hertz, who revealed light as electromagnetic waves, and so introduced us to a universe of electromagnetic radiations of all frequencies, in which we are as totally embedded as in Newton’s material universe. Note Einstein’s answer when asked how much to pay him when he arrived at Princeton: $5000/yr. (Knowing they would look bad paying such a towering genius so little, they boosted him up to $20,000, relatively high in those times.) Today’s technological billionaires are exploitive poachers of the truths revealed by the likes of Copernicus, Newton, Maxwell, Gibbs, Einstein, Planck, Curie, Bohr: the injustice is flagrant.                                                                                                 W-E bears heavily on such vital questions as What are we? Where do we come from? Where do we go? What to do? Not do? Why? What about God? What about Money? Even children ask these questions. For answers, they are entitled to the most honest working hypotheses at hand, which they seldom get.

Regarding What are we? and Where do we come from? W-E’s “theory of life,” with minor caveats can be framed so:  We have evolved in a balanced open transmathematical thermodynamic star-planet system, with high quality blackbody starlight input and equal but lower quality blackbody infrared output, wherein the biota gets evermore complex and consciousness rises ever higher (and perhaps sinks ever lower). A thereby inspired Law of  Levitation  (complexity rises) parallels Newton’s Law of Gravitation. Both Laws are essential to the understanding of our place in the Cosmos, and should be taught side by side.

The inference that all energy is potentially conscious is critically important regarding the vital question Where do we go? It prompts the concept of the Cosmos as a sleeping colossus, rather than a stupendous corpse, which awakens from time to time on waterplanets here and there. This in turn prompts a scientific “theory of death.” Piecemeal, by way of many transductions of the energies of our remains, we go back to a Reality of Energy stuck with the prospect of conscious life, not to a phantom Heaven or Hell. A moral implication falls out: “Do as you would to make the world a better place to come back to.”                                                                                                                        What we are and Where we come from is further illuminated by the most astounding “fact of life,” that as with virtually all organisms, we start as zygotes, single cells scarcely visible to the sharp human eye, from which we develop into sentient beings with a life to live. A naturalistic explanation of this seeming miracle is provided by application of my postulate about energy. Our bodies are largely quasifixed modes, but what happens to us every moment after birth is unpredictable and unmathematizable, though we may kid ourselves otherwise.

                             Applications

The most urgent application of W-E is to education. Motivated by his famous dictum that civilization is evermore in a race between education and catastrophe, H.G. Wells made a valiant attempt between the World Wars to reëducate the human species with his monumental Outline of History, Science of Life, and Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (a pioneering work on human ecology). The effort was ignored by the Powers that Be. In his last year (1946) he was asked at his club what he was currently up to. “Composing my epitaph” he said.  “What will it be, H. G.?” “God damn you all, I told you so,” was his reply.

But it is time to try again. I hope for the sake of my grandchildren and everyone else, for a better result than Wells’s. However, I am not holding my breath. Though the world is changing faster now, the “sale” of  W-E to the human populace may take centuries if not millennia, what with the deeply entrenched tribal, ethnic, racial, national, and religious prejudices to be overcome. Moreover, some deep thought is behind a full grasp of W-E. Bertrand Russell was perhaps right in saying that “most people would rather die than think” (adding Darwinistically that “many do”). Some people will be impossible to reach. But there are plenty with minds open to scientific truth. Though every culture may be a madhouse of prejudice, almost surely there are children in all of them who can see through humbug and catch the scent of scientific truth in W-E.

What follows is an outline in progress of a global education in W-E. There is much variability in the age at which this should begin, and a future turnover from classroom to individual teaching with computers, DVDs, and tutors may be prerequisite to solving this problem. As things stand, high school is the most appropriate starting point.

            All students should see the DVD of Brian Swimme’s Journey of the Universe. They should come away from a discussion of it knowing that the sun is an average star with several billion years to go before it burns out, into which a million Earths could fit, in a cosmos of sextillions of stars (current estimate), and that Earth is but one of the minor planets in our solar system, special in that it is a waterplanet, on which H₂O has existed in the liquid state for multibillion years; that there are possibly gazillions of similar stellar systems out there, surely some with waterplanets suitable for life; and that we are tiny creatures in a colossal Cosmos, “mites on a mote” (dinky planet Earth), but important because we are (except in sleep) conscious. (Without consciousness is there a universe?)           

(For more on pragmatics, see Zeitgeist movement and Venus project, featuring Peter Joseph’s post-capitalist suggestions for a profound revision of the approach to globalized civilization, based on the institution of a cybernetic Resource rather than Monetary economy; see especially the video Zeitgeist Movement: Orientation Presentation. Though futuristic and utopian, it is highly relevant to the problem of planetary management.)

TOWARD WORLD ORDER

WORLDVIEW EYELEMICA: A MANIFESTO     J.F. Bennett, Ph.D. Stanford ’62

(where “die Luft der Wahrheit weht”)

Outside the Box

What is said here is initially for intellectuals of various stripes, but ultimately for everyone, as indicated by a recent (11/18/11) issue of the Palo Alto Weekly featuring a lengthy piece entitled Getting Off The Treadmill. It contends that lack of a sense of purpose among teenagers, together with a feeling of meaninglessness of treadmilling, may underlie much of their demoralization. An editorial concludes that “Change will come as parents realize that today’s culture is unhealthy, unsustainable, and leaving most kids without purpose at the very time they need it most.”  Some kids will settle for sex, money, drugs, and/or rock’n’roll as “purpose” enough. But there are good kids everywhere who want to “amount to something,” and I sense a yearning for high purpose and meaning of life among them. The need for meaningful purpose is worldwide, not only for kids, but for everyone up to and including the Powers that Be. We have been living in an Age of Endarkenment at least since being duped into war and greed by Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” take on Darwin. Diverse racial and national delusions that “We are fittest” have made a madhouse of the world, rendering our whole species unfit for survival. WWII was climactic, with almost the whole planet becoming a battlefield, over land, sea, and air. In a letter to Harry Truman after the Atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Henry Wallace wrote that it’s one world or none. We seem to be closer to none than to one. Today’s corruptions in finance, politics, and corporatocracy, even in academics, darken the world further.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Consider the level of stupefying reality reached by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees in a speech quoted in part by the late Christopher Hitchens. “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.” Another writer who might well agree that it doesn’t matter is the quintessentially French philosopher Michel Orphay, quoted by Lewis Lapham in his quarterly on Religion, from Orphay’s recently translated Atheist Manifesto:    “. . . we seem confronted today by nihilism, the cult of nothingness, the passion of nonbeing, a morbid relish for the twilight of waning civilizations, a fascination with the bottomless pits where we lose our souls, our bodies, our identity, our being, and all interest in anything whatsoever. . . consubstantial with a twentieth century that saw death everywhere—the death of art, philosophy, metaphysics, the novel, music, politics.” Yet, he adds, “The death of philosophy engendered works of philosophy, the death of the novel generated novels, the death of art produced works of art, . . . [the death of God prompted] an outpouring of the sacred, the divine, the religious. Today we swim in these purgative waters. . . Our era staggers under the weight of revelations solemnly hailed as the authorized utterances of new oracles. Abundance holds sway, to the detriment of quality and truth—never have so many false tidings been celebrated as so many revealed truths.”

But I shall argue that it does matter, for we are custodians of High Consciousness, a mission to pass on to posthuman successors “forever.”

So much for spiritual endarkenment. As for material endarkenment, there is a growing body of literature on the collapse of America, and even of Western Civilization as a whole. Notable is a video of Mike Ruppert proclaiming that we are approaching an outlay of energy in the construction and maintenance of energy-producing infrastructure, such as windmills and solar panels, greater than the energy thereby accessed. Recent efforts to launch a global community of intelligent life in our present Age of Endarkenment have so far gone nowhere, partly because of overemphasis on religion and underemphasis on science, which in turning to Nature rather than Authority is an approach to truth independent of culture, even universal, as noted early on by Montesquieu.  Blindness to the key issue before us is rife. Some 2500 years ago Democritus, pioneer atomist, put it thus: A person should consider state affairs more important than all else, and see to it that they are well managed. For a well-managed state is the greatest of all successes. And everything is included in it. If it be lost, all is lost. Whereas those who abhor government may boggle at this, the anarchic opposite is existence famously described by Hobbes as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. True, where there’s law, there’s injustice; but equally true, where there’s no law, there’s injustice. And it’s better to have access to a fire department than helplessly to watch your house burn down. While Democritus’ chief concern was the Greek Polis, ours is Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village on Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. It is a Ship of State in danger of going under as we rape the planet. Worldview Eyelemica (W-E) aims at an AgeofReënlightenment. Its application is a long-term project, but nothing is more important for human survival. It puts two essentials on the table:

1st, a goal to pursue—enduring high global civilization, at last. Hence, the missing purpose for the world. 2nd, a raison d’être—the perpetuation of high consciousness in the Cosmos, which perhaps we alone can do. We do not need megalomaniac “leaders” in pursuit of this goal: we need humane and capable managers, from community to planet. It may take millennia, but the current worldwide “spring” of revolt, especially of youth against cruel oppression, suggests that we may be ready even now for an Age of Reënlightenment. As for high consciousness , experiences of love  (apart from lust), truth, and beauty head the list. As the ongoing decay of sovereignty runs its course, with the demise of autocrats in the “Arab Spring,” and hopefully of criminal liars in the spinoff dubbed the “American Spring,” (or “Autumn”), W-E points forward toward a New World Order and Theory of Everything (ToE) based on scientific truth. Some background should make plain that this is not just more New Age drivel. In youth I turned from the pursuit of physical fundamentals to problems of life in the conviction that the growing chaos in human affairs was threatening the survival of that which is right and good. I have not come up empty in this pursuit. Ironically, in embracing unmathematizable phenomena, W-E is seemingly opposite the aim of Einstein et al. in theoretical physics, whose steps I had set out to follow, to mathematize everything; but it meets Einstein’s own criterion of good theory, in being “simple, but not too simple.” And it puts a full-blown ToE on the table, which physics as it stands cannot do. My dissertation on Anagenesis and Macroevolution is a once well-received footnote to Darwin’s Origin of Species, dealing with a deep argument about the origins of high-ranking taxa. It includes the idea that evolution involves an increase in negentropy, i.e. complexity. Anagenesis is variously defined, but boils down to genome growth. Macroevolution features the rise of taxa above the species level, from genus to kingdom. A review of my subsequent thinking best begins with quotations from Wilhelm Ostwald [1853-1932: Nobel chemist 1909], which I did not find in English but which richly deserve translation. After a lengthy argument with colleagues about his brainstorm ca. 1890 that everything from matter to mind is energy he later wrote of it thus: “In view of the strong growth of the new outlook in my subconscious, [my colleagues’ disdain] did not have the expected result, but rather the opposite. After a late departure and a few hours sleep, I awoke suddenly in the midst of the arguments and could sleep no more. In the small hours . . . I left the hotel and walked to the zoo, where in the sunshine of a wonderful spring morning I had a true Pentecostal visitation, as it were. The birds twittered and warbled from every branch, green-gold foliage shone against a light blue sky, butterflies sunned themselves on the flowers as I wandered in a marvelously elevated state of mind through nature in the spring. I saw everything with new, unaccustomed eyes, as if I were experiencing these wonders and beauties for the first time. I can compare the feeling only with the highest of young love, which were then a full decade behind me. The thought process for the general formation of the energetic worldview completed itself in my brain without exertion, even with rapture; I saw everything as if I were just created as in the biblical account and put in paradise. This was for me the actual birth of Energetics. . . . I have not again experienced such fulfillment, even though a whole series of elevating [and] . . . significant ideas were allotted me [later].” Die Energetik, 1912, p.7; Lebenslinien II, 1927,p.160.    “And are thoughts . . . not also realities? [Surely] they are among the most important realities of human life. . . . They are not material, ponderable, or tangible, but neither are light and electricity. . . . Thus there are . . . a great number of realities, very important ones, which cannot be subsumed under the concept of Matter, but which can indeed be understood as Energy. . . . In order to think, our brain must receive chemical energy from the bloodstream, which energy is consumed, i.e., transformed, to thought [beim Denken verbraucht, d.h. in andere Formen umwandelt]; at the moment the bloodstream is stopped, so is thought. The thought itself is not blood, any more than the sound we hear is the oscillation of air. These deliver only the energy for the mental processes of thought and sensation. But since the latter only arise when energy is made available . . . and since the energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but only transformed, then so must thought and sensation be embraced in the system of energy transformation of which all events in the world consist.”  Lebenslinien II, 1927, pp.168ff. I went on to rediscover Ostwald’s failed philosophy of Energetic Monism: failed largely because Einstein’s E = mc2 had not yet been absorbed. Ostwald was shot down primarily by the great physicists Boltzmann and Planck, who found separate mathematizations necessary for matter and for energy. It is a matter of historical interest and importance, for others to explore, that Einstein’s 1905-07 removal of this mathematical obstacle by way of E = mc2 did not prompt a major review of Ostwald’s philosophy. After a Fulbright year in Vienna, I published a paper in 1969, seminal for me, broaching the idea of Earth as an evolving multitransducer of sunlight energy. The next step was long delayed by personal contingencies. Then in 1980, while teaching a college course in Cosmos, Earth, and Life, featuring the prodigiously varied channeling of sunlight energy through the biota, it came to me that  my consciousness too was transduced sunlight energy. This sudden insight was a secular “mystical experience” so intense  that even full sexual gratification with a beloved pales in comparison. My friend John Heilbron, eminent historian of science, said of my epiphany “That sounds like Ostwald.” Checking this out, I found the above quotes, the essence of which I was triggered to think of as Ostwald’s Law. He elsewhere described energy as a “sublime clay,” persuading me that he got almost the whole picture of W-E. Clearly he thought this to be his greatest contribution. He was ahead of his time then and now. Heilbron has recently informed me that Ostwald’s Law is by rights also Ernest Solvay’s Law. Solvay, a wealthy industrialist of scientific mind, motivated by Auguste Compte’s positivist, post-religious/post-metaphysical approach to truth, had independently arrived at a ToE based on a generalized concept of energy. Despite different languages, he and Ostwald became fast friends, Ostwald lauding Solvay for pioneering “social energetics.” A word about eyelemica. The first advance after my epiphany was the discovery that decades ago George Gamow resurrected from Middle English the term ylem, then used for the substrate of all elements, be they water, air, fire, and earth or (later) elements of the periodic table. A pioneer of Big Bang theory, Gamow applied the term to the universe of energy at the time of the Bang, when everything was so hot that perhaps not even sub-atomic particles as we know them could exist. To suggest the inclusion of Mind, I altered the spelling to eyelem, and since Mind requires brain, utterly impossible at temperatures of the Bang, I conceived that the Cosmos, once ylem, is forever eyelem. Change of the derivative term eyelemics to eyelemica puts the keyword worldview front and center. Eyelemics is equivalent to Energetics except  in honoring Gamow’s input, and in embracing the rise of complexity ever since the Big Bang. Years later I realized a major implication of the Ostwald-Solvay Law: that every wisp of energy in the whole Cosmos is potentially conscious, albeit far from all at once. The case for this inference can be summarized in a few words: We have to eat. No food, no consciousness. No photosynthesis, no food. No starlight, no photosynthesis. No nuclear fusion in star cores, no starlight. No Real World Out There (Cosmos),  no nuclei to fuse, and no Real World In Here (Mind). Energy from any star, appropriately channeled, will do. It is a momentous insight, in that major offshoots may include reduction of egotism and chauvinism, of competition in favor of cooperation, suppression of gluttony for power, prestige, and wealth, and mobilization for a global drive toward long sustainable high civilization. It thus deserves elevation to a Principle of Latent Cosmic Consciousness: lc2. Solvay’s ToE is very similar to W-E, with one profound difference: In writing that “A mind that is truly scientific and entirely free knows perfectly well that it is not free at all,” he reveals a commitment to the equivalent of LaPlaceian absolute determinism, whereby given all the initial conditions, everything from first to last could be computed from F = ma (force is mass times acceleration, from basic physics). In contrast, W-E stands for freedom, willed or random, in the course of evolution. This, by postulating that energy, except for quasifixed modes (made lasting for a time, as in motions like planetary orbits, in the chemistry of the periodic table, in established species) is unpredictably innovative and so not fully mathematizable, as is our everyday life. This postulate is the climax of my thinking, and the most important thing I have to contribute, entailing an enrichment of science and of the understanding of ourselves and our place in the Cosmos. It provides for a naturalistic explanation for the rise of complexity in the whole story since the Big Bang. It is implicit that any mode of energy, material or mental, is transducible to any other, given adequate channeling. No exceptions have come to mind.   (It has been brought to my attention that a series of otherwise able men , from Benjamin Whorf to Henry Morris and beyond, versed in the seeming contradiction between a Law of Levitation—rise of negentropy or complexity—and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics—equilibration to cosmic “heat death”—have argued, largely in publications of the Institute for Creation Research, the impossibility of a naturalistic explanation of the origin and evolution of life: that an explanation requires the existence of a Creator, i.e., God. My take, influenced by their frequent reference to the Bible and denial of compelling scientific truths, e.g. of the fossil record, is that they have been hopelessly brainwashed in religious dogma in youth. I cannot accept that the stories of the sages of antiquity, though not without wisdom, are anywhere near the degree of truth reached by modern science.) Music affords an example of how W-E offers naturalistic explanations: Consider a composer’s creation of a theme. Some 20% of his waking metabolic energy goes through his brain. The theme which enters his mind derives from unpredictable innovations in his brain by some of that energy. To sound it is to sublimate crass sound energies of various wavelengths with voice or instruments. If the theme outlasts the composer, we may have an example of high consciousness of long endurance, i.e. quasifixated, experienced by generations of humans and possibly even of posthumans. And the source of the brain energy which initiated it is any of the cosmic energy channeled by photosynthesis into the composer’s food. It is the same story for all fleeting thoughts and emotions of our daily lives, most of which get negligible quasifixation if any. Most of our conscious life is banal, much is warped by problems of love, work, health, accident, quiet or unquiet desperation, etc. According to a Chinese proverb, ‘tis marvelous to behold a creature, terrible to be one; but let it be added that ‘tis vital to stay mindful of the marvelous. As for the whole “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” San Francisco’s celebrated DJ Don Sherwood added “But it’s the only game in town.” It follows that we must work with what we’ve got toward something better, in the light of scientific truth. The “better” is high consciousness. It is clear from the fossil record that complexity has increased over the billions of years since the planet took shape. Yet every complexity, from material structures to mentations, is subject to depreciation, except as temporarily sustained or improved by maintenance or renovation—including us, after maturation. Nothing except perhaps the proton, for which no half-life has yet been found, is immortal. Even gold 197 has a half-life. What fosters the growth of complexity in the teeth of all this depreciation is existence of the planet in an enduring open thermodynamic system, with high-grade blackbody electromagnetic input energy from its star, and equal but lower-grade blackbody infrared output energy to space. A modification of open system thermodynamics is entailed: rather than purely mathematical, it must be a transmathematical science, embracing unmathematizable as well as mathematizable phenomena. The ultimate impact of W-E is a shift of mindset, from self-centered to cosmo-centered. To be sure, identification of conscious Self with Cosmos can be expected to take a long time to sink in. (Hearken to Dale Carnegie: When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.) But whereas we are hardwired with drive for personal survival, we are softwired to help each other, as in earthquakes, floods, storms, and friendships. Once this softwiring is well tapped, enduring high global civilization has a chance. At point is mankind’s emergence from self-centered childhood. We are most recently descended not from apes, but from “savages.” We are, indeed, still savages, in adornment, ritual, dogma, and perhaps especially, delusions of grandeur. As multimodes of quasifixed energy, we begin to emerge from savagery with perceptions of the good, the true, the beautiful: perceptions by energy, achieved on Earth after billions of years of evolution, involving enriching innovations such as color vision. Fundamentally the emergence is a matter of sublimation of crass energies. Other life-forms on Earth may have reached sublimated perceptions in smaller measure, e.g., visual and aural perceptions of beauty by various birds. But the main responsibility for perpetuation of high consciousness is ours. Reverence for the almighty Cosmos of Energy is implicit. That in the multibillion-year evolution on Earth the Cosmos has reached high consciousness at least sporadically in the human species, is an achievement which deserves reverence. Thus W-E, among other things, essays to do what religion is supposed to do, but without bogus dogma. Most recently I’ve had an insight showing better how in the light of this postulate Worldview Eyelemica illuminates our understanding of the world. Starting from the Ostwald-Solvay Law, together with my postulate, take a look around in any habitable place on the planet. What you see is a staggering diversity of quasifixed modes of energy, subject to random motions like fluttering leaves, and directed motions like those of the birds around them. Complexity abounds. And even where complexity seems to be missing, as on oceans or extreme deserts, there is hidden complexity, especially in the oceans where water is abundant. So when you look around outside, despite the narrowness of the band of electromagnetic radiations which your eyes can detect, you are seeing a countless array of depreciating quasifixed modes of energy undergoing countless unpredictable and  unmathematizable transductions leading toward ever increasing complexity. And that will go on as long as the open system endures, which the astrophysicists tell us will be several more billion years for Earth–unless perhaps a tsunami of cosmic energy cremates our galaxy: unlikely but possible. What this all means is that energy, ever since the Big Bang, has been working waywardly toward conscious life, in us and probably elsewhere in this stupendous cosmos. That is not all to the good: there are states of consciousness worse than oblivion, and most of our conscious life is inane. But there is high consciousness in the pursuit of love, truth and beauty. It is our raison d’être to advance and perpetuate this pursuit. Thus transmathematical W-E illuminates our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. Characteristically, Einstein put a finger on what is at issue. Asked in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki what he thought of the prospect that we might nuke our species to extinction, after due reflection he replied “Then there would be no one to listen to Mozart.” From the panoply of things we do with our metabolic energy, Einstein picked out this inspiring experience to nail the loss precipitated by our extinction. He sensed our ultimate value, the capacity for high consciousness and its perpetuation. Note his recognition of the primacy of Mind among the probable infinity of modes available to energy. Physical energy is involved in listening to Mozart: that of our relentless physiology, of the mechanical energy of sound waves, of its transductions in the living brain. But all that is ballast for the inspiration experienced in high mental modes, in this case of hearing great music. Much the same point was made most eloquently as early as the fifth century B.C., by a remarkable woman from Mantineia named Diotima, as reported by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium:“One must be instructed and shaped from the earliest years with habitual exposure to what is beautiful, and encouraged to love it. . . . Soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to that of another, and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same . . . and will become a lover of all beautiful forms. In the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of outward form, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences that he may see their beauty. He who is instructed thus far in the things of love, and has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end, he will perceive a Nature of wondrous beauty, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates, is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.” (Edgar Allan Poe agreed: The pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.) Note that this wisdom stems from a woman, evidently living in a pagan culture superior to our own in spirituality. We learn from these exemplars that the selfish pursuit of wealth, prestige, and/or power is not a worthy human life. Worthier is t0 know and love Nature and the genius of our arts and sciences. In advocating that genius is what matters most, Gustav Mahler made a point similar to Diotima’s. Genius is part of human nature insofar as the recognition of it requires the possession of it. When it comes to God, Darwin said “a dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.” (So much for theology.) But when it comes to Newton, many people besides Darwin, but no dogs, can sense his genius. Appreciation of genius is a goal of education. It raises us to something above cosmic pollutants. And there are sources other than genius to which also we can turn for high inspiration. Pivotal is the total Cosmos, which is not Ghiselin’s “ultimate horror,” because it is all there is and all potentially alive.

Vital Questions

First, a word about Truth, vital in itself. Our Endarkenment has included a darkening of the pursuit of Truth, what with resurgence from the woodwork of every crackpot idea ever conceived, obscuring scientific truth in the shuffle. Previously the turn of the quest for Truth from Authority to Nature, especially the revelations of Newton’s Philosophia Naturalis with its Laws of Motion and Gravitation, pointed toward a Truth independent of all religious and cultural authorities.  Natural Philosophy became Science, which precipitated the Enlightenment, featuring this advance on Truth. But recently denial even of truth in science has been fomented by Kuhnian paradigm philosophy. Shifts of paradigm like that from Newtonian-Einsteinian mechanics to quantum mechanics suggest an endless turnover of received “Truths,” ever less mathematically accessible. And hostility to new paradigms by monarchs of the old suggests corruption of the pursuit of Truth by Ego. To evade such corruption, I endorse Georg Lichtenberg’s dictum that Truth is the asymptote of research or learning [Wissenschaft], never attainable but indefinitely approachable. Nothing can be said that no one will dispute, but that science has gained on Truth in the past half-millennium is about as indisputable as can be. In pursuit of Truth, I do not believe in belief, for it closes the mind. T. H. Huxley’s “working hypotheses,” though we seldom know what they are, lie behind our understanding of every Being and every Happening. It is a job of metaphysics to root out these working hypotheses and better them if possible, as Einstein did with the concepts of space and time. The idea of Mind as Energy is a working hypothesis similarly rooted out. Men and women of scientific truth have widened our horizons and deepened our insights throughout history, with little or no pursuit of wealth or power. Consider the dying Copernicus’ demotion of Earth from cosmic center, in favor of Sun. Hear Newton: What’s done before many witnesses is seldom without some further concern than that of Truth. Attend to Maxwell and Hertz, who revealed light as electromagnetic waves, and so introduced us to a universe of electromagnetic radiations of all frequencies, in which we are as totally embedded as in Newton’s material universe. Note Einstein’s answer when asked how much to pay him when he arrived at Princeton: $5000/yr. (Knowing they would look bad paying such a towering genius so little, they boosted him up to $20,000, relatively high in those times.) Today’s technological billionaires are exploitive poachers of the truths revealed by the likes of Copernicus, Newton, Maxwell, Gibbs, Einstein, Planck, Curie, Bohr: the injustice is flagrant. W-E bears heavily on such vital questions as What are we? Where do we come from? Where do we go? What to do? Not do? Why? What about God? What about Money? Even children ask these questions. For answers, they are entitled to the most honest working hypotheses at hand, which they seldom get. Regarding What are we? and Where do we come from? W-E’s “theory of life,” with minor caveats can be framed so: We have evolved in a balanced open transmathematical thermodynamic star-planet system, with high quality blackbody starlight input and equal but lower quality blackbody infrared output, wherein the biota gets evermore complex and consciousness rises ever higher (and perhaps sinks ever lower). A thereby inspired Law of  Levitation  (complexity rises) parallels Newton’s Law of Gravitation. Both Laws are essential to the understanding of our place in the Cosmos, and should be taught side by side. The inference that all energy is potentially conscious is critically important regarding the vital question Where do we go? It prompts the concept of the Cosmos as a sleeping colossus, rather than a stupendous corpse, which awakens from time to time on waterplanets here and there. This in turn prompts a scientific “theory of death.” Piecemeal, by way of many transductions of the energies of our remains, we go back to a Reality of Energy stuck with the prospect of conscious life, not to a phantom Heaven or Hell. A moral implication falls out: “Do as you would to make the world a better place to come back to.” What we are and Where we come from is further illuminated by the most astounding “fact of life,” that as with virtually all organisms, we start as zygotes, single cells scarcely visible to the sharp human eye, from which we develop into sentient beings with a life to live. A naturalistic explanation of this seeming miracle is provided by application of my postulate about energy. Our bodies are largely quasifixed modes, but what happens to us every moment after birth is unpredictable and unmathematizable, though we may kid ourselves otherwise.

Applications

The most urgent application of W-E is to education. Motivated by his famous dictum that civilization is evermore in a race between education and catastrophe, H.G. Wells made a valiant attempt between the World Wars to reëducate the human species with his monumental Outline of History, Science of Life, and Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (a pioneering work on human ecology). The effort was ignored by the Powers that Be. In his last year (1946) he was asked at his club what he was currently up to. “Composing my epitaph” he said.  “What will it be, H. G.?” “God damn you all, I told you so,” was his reply.

But it is time to try again. I hope for the sake of my grandchildren and everyone else, for a better result than Wells’s. However, I am not holding my breath. Though the world is changing faster now, the “sale” of  W-E to the human populace may take centuries if not millennia, what with the deeply entrenched tribal, ethnic, racial, national, and religious prejudices to be overcome. Moreover, some deep thought is behind a full grasp of W-E. Bertrand Russell was perhaps right in saying that “most people would rather die than think” (adding Darwinistically that “many do”). Some people will be impossible to reach. But there are plenty with minds open to scientific truth. Though every culture may be a madhouse of prejudice, almost surely there are children in all of them who can see through humbug and catch the scent of scientific truth in W-E.

What follows is an outline in progress of a global education in W-E. There is much variability in the age at which this should begin, and a future turnover from classroom to individual teaching with computers, DVDs, and tutors may be prerequisite to solving this problem. As things stand, high school is the most appropriate starting point.

All students should see the DVD of Brian Swimme’s Journey of the Universe. They should come away from a discussion of it knowing that the sun is an average star with several billion years to go before it burns out, into which a million Earths could fit, in a cosmos of sextillions of stars (current estimate), and that Earth is but one of the minor planets in our solar system, special in that it is a waterplanet, on which H2O has existed in the liquid state for multibillion years; that there are possibly gazillions of similar stellar systems out there, surely some with waterplanets suitable for life; and that we are tiny creatures in a colossal Cosmos, “mites on a mote” (dinky planet Earth), but important because we are (except in sleep) conscious. (Without consciousness is there a universe?)

At this point, main lines of the story of the quest for energy by Earth’s living things, microbial, plant, and animal; photosynthetic, herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous, etc.; can greatly enrich the education process. The variety is endless, of ways organisms including man get their energy and transduce it. Nothing can serve better to convey the unifying power of W-E than to survey this variety, attending to the cooperation of energies, notably chemical, in the forming and functioning of the millions of kinds of organisms, and of ecosystems and ecozones. Thereby our progeny’s eyes can be opened as never before to what’s going on around us on our planet.

A unified global general education in W-E, featuring the oneness of science with minimal mathematics, amounts to a selective evolutionary-historical account of the multitransductions of solar energy on Earth during the past 3 to 4 billion years. The length and detail of the account should in future be adjustable to the backgrounds and interests of students individually, by means of computers and DVDs: classroom teaching should be minimized, because of the great divergence of background and interest even in small classes. Social interaction belongs in classrooms. But perhaps especially in math and science, monitoring of individuals by eyelemically informed mentors is important, to stretch their minds as far as possible outside the box of human affairs. Thereby with W-E, we could have “no child left behind” in exposure to a science-based worldview, our closest approach to general Truth.

Furthermore, we could effect the restoral of the University from the Multiversity. Decades ago, J. Robert Oppenheimer described Harvard as “an enormous cognitive jungle,” and Clark Kerr spoke of the U. C. Multiversity faculty as “a collection of intellectual prima donnas united by a common grievance about the parking problem.” W-E is a much better basis than parking space for reuniting these faculties, particularly those of  C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures. And it is grounds for offsetting the gradual fall of the multiversities into the deep pockets of the corporatocracy, with a reëmphasis on unitary, reverent understanding of the world. Different brainwashing of children in different cultures is a major impediment to such unitary understanding. But were it globalized, education in W-E might well gradually lead to this unity.

As distinguished from training for jobs in capitalist society, W-E  involves bringing inspirational mentations to the highest level we can reach. General education in W-E offers not only a coherent understanding of the overwhelming outdoor world, but also of spiritual alongside material reality, subjective alongside objective reality. It opens the door to ultimate reconciliation of the religions, by replacement of reverence for phantom Gods with reverence for the real Cosmos, upon which we are utterly dependent.

Of course, it is a major challenge to condense our vast and burgeoning knowledge into a single eyelemic package, reorienting every citizen of Earth. However, W-E affords an approach with minimal mathematics. Working toward unity, let it begin with the energy concept as defined when it entered modern science some 200 years ago, as the capacity to do work, which is to exert a force through a distance, where force is what accelerates (changes the motion of) all modes of energy.

Except for recognition of Anaximander, perhaps the first true scientist, whose “apeiron” (boundless) is much the same idea as energy, as noted by Toulmin and Goodfield (influenced by Ostwald?), the term’s meanings before scientific definition, and its modern corruptions in psychobabble, should be dismissed.

There are too many units of energy, from electron volt to British thermal unit. The kilowatt hour [kwh] is best to know, being the unit we usually pay for. But everyone should also be taught its meaning, revealed by relating it to the somewhat lesser horsepower hour, the work an average horse can do in an hour. A useful translation of the kwh is the “Shirepower hour,” Shire being the breed of biggest horses: kwh consumption then translates as hours worked by an oversized horse. Alongside saving money, this earthy insight, globally taught, might substantially improve everyday energy conservation, curbing such abuses as running a single panty through an entire washer-drier cycle at kwh expense.

Let energy’s main modes then be introduced: kinetic, potential, thermal, current electric, radiant, chemical, nuclear, and mental (transductions of brain energy), with examples of transduction from mode to mode. There should follow discussion, with everyday examples, of the laws of thermodynamics: the 1st or Conservation Law, the 2nd or Entropy Law of closed systems, the 3d Law that entropy vanishes in absolute cold, the Law of Levitation in enduring open systems. Then the Ostwald-Solvay Law, the Law of conservation of Matter, Einstein’s E = mc2 synthesis, and the energetics of Mind.

Next, trace the path of energy involved in moving, say, a refrigerator: back from the muscle energy of the mover to that of his food, to the input of hot blackbody radiant energy of the sun which was photosynthesized into that food; forward to the heat energy transduced by friction from mechanical energy during the move, to the output of infrared blackbody radiation to space. Generalize to the explanation of all happenings on Earth in terms of transductions between this input and that output in the open Sun-Earth thermodynamic system.

Every living organism is a multitransducer in an open thermodynamic system, its development, anatomy, physiology, activity, ecology and evolution potentially describable, thus qualitatively understandable, in terms of modes and transductions of energy. But it is not only biology (endo- or exo-) which can be so understood. Viewing mind as energy, humanities likewise appear as fundamentally the same as hard sciences in being rooted in modes and transductions of brain energy.

This worldview embraces all fields of study, including those of the esoteric phenomena of new life forms and mentations. While allowing for the persistence of low life, human and other, W-E recognizes our responsibility as cosmic stewards of high consciousness, to raise that consciousness individually and collectively, seeking high inspiration throughout our lives, holding fast that which is good, alongside working, learning, partying, and helping each other.

What has been disclosed by science is a multibillion-year evolutionary advance of energy, by way of natural selection, toward knowledge of Itself, featuring inspiration by cultural and natural wonders. Alongside the mahatmas of our arts and sciences are billions, especially of women, intent upon beautifying their little squares, often with success. We are custodians of these achievements. It is our duty to further them, via intelligent planetary management. For therein lies the sanctity and raison d’ètre of human, and hopefully posthuman, life. W-E thus comes in view as the basis for a global general education independent of culture, indeed universal, rooted in a unitary scientific mindset—enlightening students in their choice of career from the ever-growing smorgasbord of specialties: an update of the now obsolete History of Western Civilization course, an update inching forward toward the unity of mind essential to human survival as steward of intelligent and compassionate life on Earth. As is, the exponentially growing output of disunited specialized knowledge is swamping us in Oppenheimer’s “enormous cognitive jungle” without a scientifically sound worldview. Physics spends billions improving on Thales’ guess that everything is water, while the world rips; biologists probe every twist and turn of evolution, while the world rips; humanists pursue their special interests, while the world rips. W-E is a scientifically sound consilient worldview. It is not a religion, but should be taught as an alternative to religion in the quest for enduring high global civilization. The scientific establishment could begin its “marketing” in America by adding W-E to the high-school science curriculum. That might well reënergize our faltering school system. Intelligent students can be expected to appreciate such an overview of the “enormous cognitive jungle.” And they may appreciate even more the meaningful purpose in life inherent in W-E. Beyond education, W-E is a basis for planetary policy and action. Though fading, the USA still has the clout to negotiate adoption the world over of the goal of an enduring high global civilization, as international policy. After WWI H.G. Wells wrote that All ideas of unifying mankind’s affairs depend ultimately for their realization on mankind having a unified mind for the job.. While men’s minds are still confused, the social and political relations will remain in confusion, however great the forces that are grinding them against each other and however tragic and monstrous the consequences.

W-E embodies the required “unified mind for the job.” Given intelligent praxis, it gains on the goal of enduring high global civilization, to the huge advantage of posterity. Apart from enlarging and deepening our understanding of the Cosmos and our place in it, W-E abets mobilization for the pragmatic drive toward a New World Order. Fully intelligent life cannot be claimed for Earth before it has taken aim at this goal and launched a concerted effort to reach it. The drive ought to be administered by a beefed-up and cooperative United Nations: a prospect not out of sight, for globalization is already undermining national sovereignty, and tending to put delusional autocrats out of business. Even in America, the takeover of leadership by wealth-and-powermongers is slipping. A worldwide upturn in morality might even be inspired by this drive. It involves a great array of technical problems, local, regional, national, as well as international. In working on this array, Watt’s reference to human rascality should never be forgotten. Rascality may be offset by teaching that “greed is not good,” in keeping with our softwiring to help one another, at the expense of our self-centered hardwiring. The institution of international organizations on a purely non-profit basis analogous to the American CCC, WPA, and Peace Corps is the way to go, given intelligent direction. Whereas the lack of such agencies often breeds thugs, their institution tends to breed responsible citizens. A check on capitalism is entailed. While it has enriched us, making of life an “indulgence trip” as remarked by one of my college students in the ‘70s, capitalism has worsened life in at least two key respects: it has fostered greed, and except in China, already overpopulated, it has chiefly ignored the global population problem in favor of enlarging markets for more profit. Capitalists say that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, but ignore the billions who have no boat. The tide goes up their billion noses, and many drown. This is criminal. But “we have met the enemy, and they is us.” Investment of money is a gamble, and everyone wants at least to win a jackpot. Corporations are compelled to move abroad where labor is 90% cheaper, and lay off the workers too poor to gamble except in lotteries, in order to fatten their greedy investors, who need not lift a finger to make money. The system is insane. It is unconscionable that there is a freshwater problem anywhere on habitable land, on a planet 70% covered with seawater, with a technology capable of drilling for oil in mile-deep ocean and piping it thousands of miles across tundra. Were technologies like those of Lonnie Johnson given global application under UN administration, transducing otherwise wasted sunlight input energy to freshwater from seawater, and beyond that to hydrogen from freshwater, there could be launched assault on global supply problems of freshwater, electrification, and fuel (hydrogen), with minimal pollution, exploiting an indefinitely renewable clean energy resource: sunlight. No major civilization has yet endured more than a few millennia. We too may find that “all is lost” of ours, if we cannot lift it from madness to sanity. It is essential that we keep our eye on the ball: the perpetuation of high consciousness in the light of scientific truth. It remains to recommend to future UN planetary managers that they administer the global provision of freshwater, electricity, housing, feeding, health care, and birth control of its human habitants, on a strictly nonprofit basis. Thereby the UN could effect much reduction of the widespread problem of unemployment into the indefinite future. It is a policy suitable not only for mankind, but also for life-forms on any planet far enough evolved to aim at intelligent life.

Cathedralization

Recent arguments for building up rather than out in America, and the takeover of high-rise construction in the near and far East, suggest that the world is ready for construction of mile-high skyscrapers like the beautiful one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Any mile-high should go up not as a status symbol, but as a Wellsian “reach for the stars.” Indeed, the buildings should be high enough to provide all occupants a view at the top, of the sky full of stars from horizon to horizon—a spiritual experience increasingly difficult to access in our increasingly polluted world.  Such an experience can inspire reverence for the Cosmos, though knowledge thereof well beyond “twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are” is prerequisite. By analogy with medieval sites of reverence, mile-highs are then likewise “cathedrals,” though in keeping with an education in W-E. rather than in religion. About 100,000 mile-highs with appending support buildings would house the present global population and somewhat more—a staggering challenge, but worth considering in long-term planning. As well as bearing heavily on the global housing problem and the unemployment problem, such buildings would be places of living and working that made people much less dependent on cars, thereby forestalling the “carmageddon” we are facing. Rather than just office buildings, these mile-highs, together with a few surrounding lesser high-rises, would be communities of some 100,000 citizens, ecologically as self-sufficient as possible, built to last as long as the Egyptian pyramids, but with alterable interiors. One of the surrounding lesser high-rises should be a “farmscraper” of some 30 stories, devoted entirely to state-of-the-art year-round agriculture, which could keep 100,000 fed, according to the BMW Group. Such constructions, lived and worked in and artfully decorated in tribute to the Almighty Cosmos, would go far toward unifying mankind’s mind for pursuit of high global civilization. The project should be totally devoid of profiteering. The UN could do something worthy of its name by taking on its administration. Funding should be based on the general principle that if people want something done, reward them for doing it, not necessarily with money. Ultimately the drive would result in a change of lifestyle like those of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, giving mankind at all levels and varieties of lifestyle the option to live in relative luxury and ease—given adherence to the maxim of longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, that the difference between civilization and barbarism is maintenance. Let everyone be encouraged to “adopt a (metaphorical) pothole,” fix it, and keep it fixed. (My “pothole” is worldview.) The upshot of the whole project might be described as the “cathedralization of high global civilization,” with the proviso that it is not religious, but honors the Almighty Cosmos of Energy, which deserves credit for achieving high consciousness in some 4 billion years of bioevolution on Earth. Aside from its basis for whatever sanctity and significance human life may have, high consciousness has survival value in making life more worthwhile.

Epilogue

Since we are lone perpetuators of high consciousness so far as known, the cosmic survival of high consciousness may be at stake in the global “marketing” of W-E. However, there are sextillions of stars. So long as there are enduring open thermodynamic systems with waterplanets like ours, wherein the energy postulate applies, achievements of higher consciousness beyond us to imagine are enabled. For alongside “heat death” of the rest, enduring open thermodynamic systems in the cosmos tend toward ever-increasing complexification. Some astrophysicists argue that the era of stardom will pass, but unless gravity is repealed, it seems likely that there will always be enduring open thermodynamic systems of some kind. And if we master controlled fusion, we won’t need stars anyway. In summary, we arrive at the worldview that everything from matter to mind is energy, wherein we find ourselves as multimode energy composites, physical and mental, in a cosmos of stupendous energy, on a puny waterplanet in an open thermodynamic system with high-grade (low entropy) solar input and lower grade (higher entropy) infrared output to space, evolving in place after billions of years of bioevolution under the Law of Levitation, and held there by the Law of Gravitation. W-E sparks the vision of a planet populated by intelligent life, which sees unity in everything that is or happens. The full impact of such a Kuhnian paradigm shift, notable perhaps above all for bringing the Afterlife from fantasy back to Reality, cannot be foreseen. But at least we can say it affords the chance of  a better life for posterity in an Age of Reënlightenment.

(For more on pragmatics, see Zeitgeist movement and Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project, featuring Peter Joseph’s post-capitalist suggestions, for a profound revision of the approach to globalized civilization, based on the institution of a cybernetic Resource rather than Monetary economy; see especially the video Zeitgeist Movement: Orientation Presentation. Though futuristic and utopian, it is highly relevant to the problem of planetary management.)