Dear Friends of the POP-UP School,
I am happy to announce a new initiative of the POP-UP School: SEEDS, an occassional newsletter “brief” covering pivotal ideas, offering crucial insights and highlighting collective actions that steer toward preferable futures.
Seeding our collective imagination in order to seed collective change.
I don’t want this newsletter to be mere commentary on popular memes and the ususal tropes that surreptitiously make their way into our thoughts. Rather, I hope to spark your curiosity with perspectives and views that come as a surprise, or may seem entirely alien to you, or alternately, may seem like timely articulations of some deep-seeded [sic] intuitions that are rumbling through your gut, like tremors that precede a volcanic irruption, or are drifting in your imagination, like the volatile movements of the techtonic plates, shifting along a fault-line.
What I have to offer is different, oftentimes provocative and discordant in ways that you might at first recoil from, due to the cognitive dissonance it might spark. The only thing I have for you to hang your trust on, is the overwhelming evidence, that our old patterns of thought, mental models, and views of reality are horribly wrong, or at least, irrecoverably obsolete. And to that I say - Let’s inject some novelty into our collective consciousness.
In other words, these seeds that are going to be sown here, will be hybrids, mutations, and “generatively modified” to grow in our imaginations into something new – possibilities that were never seen as possible before.
Here you will read my words, but I will situate them in, as I introduce you to, the works of authors, artists, and social innovators who I believe are gesticulating toward wisdom and sagacity that, shaped by the conditions of our times, and tailored to the kinds of dreams we hold for our futures, are seeding a new resistance to business as usual, and a revival of human ingenuity.
I hope these writings can also seed generative dialogue here in our open mic sessions (called SOLUT!) as well as in conversations with your friends, colleagues and social groups. I look forward to those reverberations!
For starters, I am planning a series of essays on virtue, virtue ethics, and wisdom. We will explore if the western tradition of virtue-ethics holds up to what the eastern traditions had to say about virtue, ethics and wisdom, and in what ways the new philosophies of cognitive neuroscience and neurophenomenology can inform a new conception of wisdom for our era.