Multiverse Minutiae

Mormons, Adventists, New Thought, Quakers, and Pentecostals   Joseph Smith  (December 23, 1805 – June 27, 1844) was an American religious leader and founder of  Mormonism .  Raised on the folklore of the Burned-Over District, Joseph Smith of Palmyra New York would go on to establish one of the fastest-growing religions of the contemporary world. Magic and myth were part of the firmament of the Smith household. According to historian D. Michael Quinn in his monumental study  Early Mormonism and the Magic World View,  Joseph Smith’s family owned magical charms, divining rods, amulets, a ceremonial dagger inscribed with astrological symbols of Scorpio and seals of Mars. In her 1845 oral memoir, the family matriarch, Lucy Mack Smith, recalled the Smith’s interest in “the faculty of Abrac.” In fact, Abrac or Abraxas, is a Gnostic term for God that also served as a magical incantation. It forms the root of a magic word known to every child:  abracadabra...

  Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process in social networks including economics though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical changes and biological processes while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language , crystal structure, the Internet and a “freed” market have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order. In matters of social organization, spontaneous order is recognized as a significant and positive coordinating force- in which decentralized negotiations, exchanges, and entrepreneurship converge to produce large scale coordination without, or beyond the capacity of, any deliberate plans ...

Elinor Ostrom studied the interaction of people and ecosystems for many years and showed that the use of exhaustible resources by groups of people (communities, cooperatives, trusts, trade unions) can be rational and prevent depletion of the resource without government intervention. Her later, and more famous, work focused on how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields. Common pool resources include many forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems. She conducted her field studies on the management of pasture by locals in Africa and irrigation systems management in villages of western Nepal. Her work has considered how societies have developed diverse institutional arrangements managing natural resources and avoiding ecosystem collapse in many cases, even though some arrangements have failed to prevent resource exhaustion. Her work emphasized the multifaceted nature of human–ecosystem interaction and argues against any ...

If we can’t switch from seeing the image of a rabbit to seeing also the image of a duck— if we can’t move from seeing the face of the human Other, which philosopher Emanuel Levinas considers the ground of all ethics, to also seeing the face of the natural Other, the face of the planet—then will we be able to see any face other than our own, or even any face at all? Let us then think carefully about how concepts drawn from moral and political philosophy can be interpreted to help meet the fundamental ecological challenges of our time. As a starting point, expanding the scope of the norms of right recognition and right relationship involves consideration of two key concepts. These are the concepts of eco-membership and eco-solidarity. Right recognition involves membership in some kind of common condition or common lot, and it carries with it a claim to what has been called “moral considerability.” This commonality can be invested with particularly human cultural and sociological content...

The following are excerpts from the essay “Precautionary and Proactionary as the New Right and the New Left of the Twenty-First Century Ideological Spectrum” by Steve Fuller.  Proponents of the proactionary principle would re-invent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitized risk taking, while precautionaries would aim to protect the planet at levels of security well beyond what the classic welfare state could realistically provide for human beings, let alone the natural environment. Taken together, these two opposing innovations to the modern concept of welfare imply a rejection of the classic welfare state ideal. For all their substantial disagreements, both poles of the emerging ideological order dismiss the welfare state as a twentieth century fantasy. Not surprisingly, conventional political and business leaders are not entirely comfortable with either the precautionary or the proactionary principle, which in turn helps to explain their lingering attachment to so...

  At the advent of the Anthropocene or the geologic epoch in which humanity has become the prevailing geophysical force driving the overall dynamics of the Earth, we are experiencing a reconfiguration between the human and natural spheres. How may policy practitioners best approach adaptive management of ecosystem services within this changing context? The work of Elinor Ostrom will help us navigate this new framing by way of her approach to Social Ecological Systems (SES) which overcomes this duality between humanity and nature. Social Ecological Systems are adaptively managed by what Ostrom refers to as the commons, which not only conceptualizes sustainable relationship between humanity and nature but also transcends the political left-right binary anchored in the constructs of the state and the market respectively.  A Nobel laureate in economics, Ostrom challenged the myth of the “tragedy of the commons” introduced in the 1968 paper by Garrett Hardin who argued that resourc...

Throughout his life, prophetic American philosopher Murray Bookchin created social ecology as a comprehensive social program for the challenges of our present era. Through tireless teaching, speaking, organizing, and writing, he presented a humanist vision of ecology based on community, direct democracy, and the better promises of the Enlightenment, showing how we could transform our society into one that is free and egalitarian. Bookchin’s abandonment of the anarchist label was not a renouncement of his radical libertarian ideals, but a symbolic act at showing how little meaning there is in ideological dogmas and ideological purity. As a true child of Enlightenment, he was most interested in the power of vibrant and developing ideas.  His thirst for knowledge and research resembled the spirit of the age of Enlightenment. Bookchin refused to remain entrapped in old ideological interpretations of the world, which is evident from his secular interest in ecology. Traditional leftist f...