​Okay, I’m back for part 2 of the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion. As I covered in my last post, part 1 of this fascinating book offered a vision for “secular ethics for a whole world”, which I was inspired to read because this goal matches ProSocial World's purpose statement as well as my own views on evolutionary ethics and why evolutionary philosophy matters. Each of these sources speaks similarly about how empirical data gives us overwhelming evidence to appreciate our deep interdependence and therefore we need to be compassionate towards all beings as we try to survive and flourish together in this world. Let’s do that!
 
Now, in part 2 of the book, the Dalai Lama tells us how he personally strengthens his mind to work towards these goals in the face of all the obstacles that are sure to come. This mostly amounts to descriptions and tips for various methods of meditation, which is not something I know a ton about. But the evidence shows it is so beneficial, and these tips are coming from perhaps the world’s premiere expert, so I wanted to share them as succinctly as I could, with the hope that it will inspire you (and me!) to take up more of this mental training. As before, the quoted passages below all come from the 2012 UK Kindle version.
 
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness Dalai Lama
 
Part II — Educating the Heart Through Training the Mind
 
Introduction to Part II: Starting with Oneself

• (p. 101) How are we to become more compassionate, kinder, more forgiving, and more discerning in our behaviour?
• (p. 102) Educating the heart takes both time and sustained effort, though I have no doubt that with sincere motivation we can all learn kindheartedness, and we can all benefit from it.

 
We have so many options out there to improve our minds and bodies. Yet all of these are “slaves to our passions”. So, why don’t we spend more time working on our emotions?? This is deeply brilliant. I know Buddhists have practiced this for centuries, but I’m not sure it has been “sold” this way, or always focused towards the secular ethics that the Dalai Lama is now advocating for. Before we get to the actual training, some Buddhist context is helpful.
 
Chapter 8 — Ethical Mindfulness in Everyday Life

• (p. 103) even the most sophisticated ethical understanding, if it is not applied in daily life, is somewhat pointless.
• (p. 103) regarding the question of how to put ethics into practice in everyday life, it may be helpful to consider the process as having three aspects or levels
• (p. 103) As outlined in some classical Buddhist texts, these are as follows: an ethic of restraint — deliberately refraining from doing actual or potential harm to others; an ethic of virtue — actively cultivating and enhancing our positive behaviour and inner values; and an ethic of altruism — dedicating our lives, genuinely and selflessly, to the welfare of others.
• (p. 106) I personally find a list of six principles from a text by the second-century Indian thinker Nagarjuna to be helpful.
• (p. 106) Avoid excessive use of intoxicants. Uphold the principle of right livelihood. Ensure that one’s body, speech, and mind are nonviolent. Treat others with respect. Honour those worthy of esteem, such as parents, teachers, and those who are kind. Be kind to others.
• (p. 107) we require a basic toolkit to help us in our daily effort to live ethically. In Buddhist tradition this toolkit is described in terms of three interrelated factors known as heedfulness, mindfulness, and introspective awareness
• (p. 107) heedfulness, refers to adopting an overall stance of caution.
• (p. 109) mindfulness is the ability to gather oneself mentally and thereby recall one’s core values and motivation.
• (p. 109) Awareness…means paying attention to our own behaviour. It means honestly observing our behaviour as it is going on, and thereby bringing it under control.

 
I don’t see anything wrong with any of that. This is more evidence fitting with my belief that “Buddha Will Survive”, as I wrote during my series of essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers. Buddha came in at number 7 out of 60 on that list. The Dalai Lama might take Buddhism even higher now.
 
Next up, are two chapters about our emotions.
 
Chapter 9 — Dealing with Destructive Emotions

• (p. 113) the greatest impediments to our individual well-being and our ability to live a spiritually fulfilling life are our own persistent propensities toward destructive or afflictive emotions.
• (p. 115) in contemporary psychology the main distinction is often drawn between emotional states which, on the one hand, are pleasurable or joyful and are described as positive, and those which, on the other hand, are unpleasant or painful and are described as negative. In classical Buddhist psychology, however, the distinction is rather different. Instead, the primary distinction is not between those states which are pleasurable and those that are painful, but between those that are beneficial and those that are harmful.
• (p. 117) In the context of secular ethics, this distinction between those mental states which undermine well-being — our own and that of others — and those which promote survival and well-being can be very useful, since it is directly relevant to our pursuit of happiness and an ethically sound way of life.
• (p. 124) Our inner development with regard to regulating our destructive emotions calls for a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we must seek to reduce the impact of the destructive potentials that are inherent within us; on the other, we must seek to enhance the positive qualities that also naturally exist within us. This two-pronged approach to mental training is what I consider to be the heart of genuine spiritual practice.

 
Chapter 10 — Cultivating Key Inner Values

• (p. 137) a few of the other key human values: patience or forbearance, contentment, self-discipline, and generosity.
• (p. 138) There are three aspects of patience, or forbearance, to consider: forbearance toward those who harm us, acceptance of suffering, and acceptance of reality.

 
I really appreciate the difference between contemporary psychology and classical Buddhist psychology. And the focus on enhancing well-being (“our own and that of others”) is brilliant to see. I would just add that the distinction between “beneficial” and “harmful” is often a difficult one because of the uncertainty over short-term and long-term consequences as well as the benefit accruing to yourself or others (which ultimately may or may not benefit you). So, it’s very hard to simply place an emotion into any one category. The ultimate judgment of each one will be very dependent on context — sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful. Rather than looking forward into the mists of this murky future, I found it easier, and very useful, to look to the past for my own taxonomy by asking “what’s causing these emotions?” These are quibbles about how to categorize emotions, though. There doesn’t seem to be any conflict between the goals of my system and the Dalai Lama’s.
 
Finally, in the last chapter, we arrive at the Dalai Lama’s advice for how to work on all of this.
 
Chapter 11 — Meditation as Mental Cultivation

• (p. 155) I would like to say a few words about cultivating mental discipline. For myself, such cultivation is an indispensable part of daily life. On the one hand, it helps reinforce my determination always to act compassionately for the well-being of others. On the other, it helps me keep in check those afflictive thoughts and emotions by which we are all assailed from time to time, and to maintain a calm mind.
• (p. 155) the Sanskrit term bhavana … [and the] Tibetan equivalent gom [are] often translated into English as meditation, [but they] refer to a whole range of mental practices and not just, as many suppose, to simple methods of relaxation. The original terms imply a process of cultivating familiarity with something, whether it is a habit, a way of seeing, or a way of being.
• (p. 156) [There are] “three levels of understanding,” as found in the classical Buddhist theory of mental transformation. These levels are understanding derived through hearing (or learning), understanding derived through reflection, and understanding derived through contemplative experience.
• (p. 156) this progression — from first hearing or learning, to deepening one’s understanding through critical reflection, to conviction — is quite usual.

 
This is great! It really expanded my naïve understanding of “meditation”.
 

• (p. 158) I engage in two main types of mental cultivation practice — discursive or analytic meditation and absorptive meditation. The first is a kind of analytic process by means of which the meditator engages in a series of reflections, while the second involves concentrating on a specific object or objective and placing one’s mind upon it as if dwelling deeply on a conclusion. I find that combining the two techniques is most beneficial.
• (p. 159) The first of these two approaches corresponds to the development of mental states that are more cognitively oriented, such as understanding, while the second develops more affect-oriented mental states, such as compassion. We might refer to these two processes as “educating our mind” and “educating our heart.”

 
Fascinating. And I would say from personal experience that writing philosophy might qualify as an “education of the mind” exercise then. Before we get to the details of how else to do this, the Dalai Lama offers a few practical tips, which makes him seem just as human as the rest of us.
 

• (p. 159) Mental cultivation takes time and effort and involves hard work and sustained dedication.
• (p. 160) As to the specifics of practice, early morning is generally the best time of day. … you need to have had a good night’s sleep beforehand.
• (p. 161) the mind will tend to be sluggish if you have eaten a lot beforehand.
• (p. 161) in the early stages even ten to fifteen minutes per session is quite adequate.
• (p. 161) It is also helpful to plan to practice for a few minutes several times during the day in addition to the main session.
• (p. 162) sit where we will not be disturbed by noise.
• (p. 162) any position that is comfortable will do

 
Love it. Next up, the Dalai Lama gives us details of his different practices. He didn’t lay it out like a simple formula, but I see it starting by taking us progressively through these six steps: 1) Getting Settled; 2) Affirming the Practice; 3) Strengthening Your Focus; 4) Understanding What Focus Is; 5) Really Focusing on Emotions; and 6) Returning to Your Day.
 
So, let’s see these steps in action.
 
1) Getting Settled
 

• (p. 163) take one inhalation and one exhalation while silently counting from one to five or seven, and then repeat the process a few times. The advantage of this silent counting is that, in giving our mind a task to perform, it makes it less likely to be swept away by extraneous thoughts.
• (p. 163) it can be helpful to quietly say a few words over and over. A formula such as “I let go of my afflictive emotions”
• (p. 163) you may find that a whole session is taken up with exercises to calm or still the mind.

 
2) Affirming the Practice
 

• (p. 164) When you have succeeded in establishing a more settled state, perhaps a few minutes into your session, you can then begin the actual work of mental cultivation.
• (p. 165) One very useful exercise at the beginning of a session is to consider the benefits of practice. An immediate benefit is that practice gives us a brief respite from the often obsessive worrying, calculating, and fantasizing with which our minds are habitually occupied. This by itself is a great boon.
• (p. 165) One who never engages in this kind of work has very little chance of dealing effectively with the destructive thoughts and emotions which, when they take hold of us, destroy all hope of peace of mind.
• (p. 165) we should find that the benefits far outweigh any arguments in favour of not practicing. We then rest the mind on this conclusion for a short time before moving on to the next stage of the session.

 
3) Strengthening Your Focus
 

• (p. 165) A more formal meditation practice is the cultivation of sustained attention through single-pointed concentration.
• (p.166) Having relaxed and settled your mind, try to maintain your focus on the object. Visualize it about four feet in front of you and at the level of your eyebrows. Imagine the object to be approximately two inches in height and radiating light, so that the image is bright and clear. Also try to conceive of it as being heavy. This heaviness has the effect of preventing excitement, while the object’s brightness prevents the onset of laxity.

 
4) Understanding What Focus Is
 

• (p. 167) after many, many weeks or months of persistent practice — you now try to inspect the mind itself as it holds the object in view.
• (p. 167) you can start to familiarize yourself with the sort of focus that in ordinary life you may only experience when attempting to solve a particularly challenging mental problem.

 
5) Really Focusing on Emotions
 

• (p. 167) when you have learned to really focus the mind, then, … you can use the whole force of your mind to focus on qualities such as compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness.

 
6) Returning to Your Day
 

• (p. 168) Finally, when we wish to end our session, we can do some deep breathing exercises once again so that we finish in a relaxed state of mind.

 
After a lifetime of working on this, the Dalai Lama next offers several pieces of advice.
 

• (p. 168) Two qualities are essential in this kind of meditation: mental clarity and stability. Mental clarity assists you in maintaining your focus. Stability assists you in ensuring clarity by monitoring whether or not your attention remains vibrant.
• (p. 168) It is through constant application of these two faculties that you can gradually learn to train your focus so that you become capable of sustaining your attention for a prolonged period of time.
• (p. 168) set a forceful intention not to allow your mind to be swept away by thoughts of what might happen in the future or recollections of things that have happened in the past.
• (p. 170) every now and then you will come to experience short intervals of what feels like an absence or a vacuum, when your mind has no particular content. Your first successes in this will only be fleeting. But with persistence over a long period, what begins as a glimpse can gradually be extended, and you can start to understand that the mind is like a mirror, or clear water, in which images appear and disappear without affecting the medium in which they appear.
• (p. 170) Like a detached onlooker watching a spectacle, you will learn how to see your thoughts for what they are, namely constructs of your mind. So many of our problems arise because, in our naive untrained state, we confuse our thoughts with actual reality. We seize on the content of our thoughts as real and build our entire perception and response to reality on it.

 
As your practice gets more advanced, the Dalai Lama offers 4 more options for what you might work on. I see these as options for step 5 above, so I’ll label them that way. They are: 5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness; 5b) Equanimity; 5c) More Equanimity; and 5d) Positive Imitation.
 
Again, let’s see these in action.
 
5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness
 

• (p. 170) Another very beneficial class of practices involves cultivating positive mental qualities, such as compassion and loving-kindness.
• (p. 170) begin with a preliminary breathing exercise to relax and settle the mind.
• (p. 171) when you are struggling with your attitude or feelings toward a person with whom you have difficulty. First, bring that person into your mind, conjuring up a vivid image so that you almost feel his or her presence. Next, start to contemplate the fact that he or she also has hopes and dreams, feels joy when things go well and feels sadness when they do not.
• (p. 171) try to feel connected with the person and cultivate the wish that he or she achieve happiness.
• (p. 171) saying something like “May you be free of suffering and its causes. May you attain happiness and peace.” Then rest your mind in this state of compassion.
• (p. 171) this way of cultivating compassion primarily involves a discursive process, but every now and then it is also good to rest the mind in a state of absorption, somewhat in the fashion of bringing home a concluding point in the course of an argument.

 
5b) Equanimity
 

• (p. 171) equanimity is a state of mind where one relates to others in a way that is free of prejudice rooted in the afflictions of excessive attraction or aversion.
• (p. 172) begin by relaxing and settling the mind through a breathing exercise and then proceed as follows. Call up an image of a small group of people you like, such as some of your close friends and relatives. Establish this image in as much detail and with as much verisimilitude as you can. Then add an image next to it of a group of people toward whom you feel indifferent, such as people you see at work or out shopping but do not know well. Again, try to make this image as real and detailed as possible. Finally, call up a third image, this one of a group of people you dislike, or with whom you are in conflict, or whose views you strongly disagree with, and again establish it as clearly and in as much detail as you can. Having created images of these three groups of people in your mind, you then allow your normal reactions toward them to arise. Notice your thoughts and feelings toward each group in turn. You will find that your natural tendency is to feel attachment toward the first, indifference toward the second, and hostility toward the third. Recognizing this, you next turn to examining your own mind and considering how each of these three responses affects you. You will find that your feelings toward members of the first group are pleasurable, inspiring a certain confidence and strength coupled with a desire to alleviate or prevent their suffering. Toward the second group, you will notice that your feelings do not excite you or inspire any particular thoughts of concern at all. Toward the third group, however, the feelings you have will excite your mind in negative directions. The next step is to engage in contemplation, using your critical faculty. The people we consider our enemies today may not remain so, and this is also true of our friends. Furthermore, sometimes our feelings toward friends, such as attachment, can lead to problems for us, while sometimes our interactions with enemies can benefit us, perhaps by making us stronger and more alert. Contemplating such complexities can lead you to reflect on the futility of relating to others in an extreme manner
• (p. 174) Over time, the aim is to be able to relate to others, not as friends or foes according to your divisive classification of them, but as fellow human beings whose fundamental equality with yourself you recognize.

 
5c) More Equanimity
 

• (p. 174) for the second form of equanimity practice, … The key points are two simple truths: that just as I myself have an instinctive and legitimate desire to be happy and to avoid suffering, so do all other people; and that just as I have the right to fulfil these innate aspirations, so do they.
• (p. 174) over the course of weeks, months, and even years, we will gradually find that we are able to generate true inner equanimity based on a profound recognition of humanity’s shared, innate aspiration to happiness and dislike of suffering.

 
5d) Positive Imitation
 

• (p. 174) Another exercise which can be very helpful in cultivating beneficial states of mind is a discursive practice taking as its object the good example of a person we greatly admire.
• (p. 175) the idea is to train ourselves to act, in our daily lives, as the person we admire would act
• (p. 176) Having chosen which afflictive emotion or attitude you will address first, you begin as described earlier, relaxing the mind with a breathing exercise. Then you are ready to start the actual practice.
• (p. 176) First, reflect on the destructive effects of the mental state you have selected.
• (p. 176) This contemplation of the destructive nature of these mental states needs to be sufficiently deep that over time your basic stance toward such states becomes one of caution and vigilance.
• (p. 177) Once you are convinced of the destructive nature of these afflictions, you then move on to the next stage of meditation. This involves developing a greater awareness of the mental states themselves, particularly of their onset.
• (p. 177) The third stage of this mental cultivation practice for dealing with afflictive mental states is to apply the relevant antidotes to them: for example, forbearance to counter anger, loving-kindness to counter hatred, contemplation of an object’s imperfections to counter greed or craving for that object.
• (p. 177) In all three stages of this practice it is important, as suggested earlier, to combine discursive, analytic processes with resting your mind in single-pointed absorption on the concluding points. This combination allows the effects of your practice to seep deeply into your mind so that it begins to have a real impact in your everyday life.

 
After giving all of these options for a deeper meditation practice, the Dalai Lama offers some more advice about dealing with things you may also encounter there.
 

• (p. 178) there are two principal obstacles to good practice. One is distraction, while the other is laxity or what we can call “mental sinking.”
• (p. 178) Sometimes it will be enough to recollect our purpose in undertaking this mental cultivation. At other times, we may have to leave off whatever we are trying to practice and move on to some other exercise. Or we may do a short breathing exercise, or repeat a few words suitable to the occasion. This may be as simple as saying, “I let go of my distraction,” slowly and deliberately a few times. But sometimes we may need to break off the session and walk around the room for a few minutes.
• (p. 178) laxity or mental sinking, is what happens when the mind becomes too relaxed. We succeed in withdrawing from our habitual preoccupations and manage to free the mind from distractions, but then, because our energy is low or we are not alert enough, the mind sinks and we become, as it were, “spaced out.”
• (p. 179) A short, brisk walk may be an effective remedy, or a few moments spent visualizing a bright light. For those with religious inclinations, briefly considering the surpassing qualities of some figure in their religious tradition may help. Another remedy is to imagine our consciousness springing up into space.

 
To finish up, the Dalai Lama offered some brief reflections on the value of all of this.
 

• (p. 180) what we are talking about here is not suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. Instead, we must learn to recognize them for what they are and replace them with more positive states of mind. And we do this not only to achieve self-mastery but also because attaining this kind of control over our minds puts us in a much better position to compassionately benefit others.
• (p. 182) What we want is a moderate, steady light which enables us to see the objects around us clearly. Thus when we develop some degree of control over our minds we are more able to take events, whether they are positive or negative, in our stride.
• (p. 182) What good practice really requires is a constant stream of effort: a sustained, persistent approach based on long-term commitment. For this reason, practicing properly, even for a short period of time, is the best way.

 
Afterword

• (p. 185) when each of us learns to appreciate the critical importance of ethics and makes inner values like compassion and patience an integral part of our basic outlook on life, the effects will be far-reaching.

 
So, to recap, meditation is great! Of all the books, podcasts, apps, and seminars about meditation that I have been exposed to, this one was by far the most helpful and far-reaching. It is much more than just the emptying of the mind or the building of focus that I have mostly learned about before. Yet it is simple! In its explanation, anyway. I’m sure the experience and effort will be more difficult. But I plan to work on these steps over the years ahead. 10 to 15 minutes at a time.
 
1) Getting Settled
2) Affirming the Practice
3) Strengthening Your Focus
4) Understanding What Focus Is
5) Really Focusing on Emotions
     5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness
     5b) Equanimity
     5c) More Equanimity
     5d) Positive Imitation
6) Returning to Your Day
 
I hope you found this as interesting as I did and are inspired to work on this too. My post here shared a lot of quotes to get you going, but you should really buy the book to capture the full depth of the Dalai Lama’s thoughts and emotions here. I’ll just finish with this quote from the man who caddied for the 13th incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

​Beyond Religion. Sounds like my kind of book! But even though it offers “A New Vision of Secular Ethics” (the title for Part 1 of the book), it was written by a man who goes by “his holiness.” The subtitle states it was written “for a whole world”, but the Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, an offshoot of one of the world’s major religions, practiced by a relatively small number of people in a mountainous enclave that has been in exile since the People’s Republic of China annexed it in 1951. Like a koan, this book appears to be a manifestation of “the identity of opposites.” In fact, I wish it had received the opposite title. Something like Before Religion or Up to Religion would have been more accurate in my opinion. But I’ll explain why at the end of this review.
 
I actually came across this book via my work with David Sloan Wilson and ProSocial World. On every page of ProSocial’s website, its “Purpose Statement” says it wants to “Consciously evolve a world that works for all.” I always liked this because it is deeply aligned with my view of Evolutionary Ethics and Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters. But it turns out this is also highly aligned with the Dalai Lama’s message. And that is no accident! Beyond Religion was published in 2012. According to ProSocial’s 2022 Annual Report, their history “began in 2011 as an initiative of the Evolution Institute and spun off to become its own nonprofit organization in 2020.” And during that incubation time, on October 30th 2019, ProSocial co-founder David Sloan Wilson took part in a conversation with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India about this “whole world ethic.”
 
Part of this alignment comes from evolutionary thinkers arriving at the same conclusion from different locations. And part of this is me being deeply influenced by David Sloan Wilson’s work. But with the Dalai Lama too? That was unexpected so I wanted to dive into this book to see how strong the links really are. And what I found was so good I just had to share it here.
 
Beyond Religion is a short book — the Kindle version has only 189 pages. But it is split into two parts that are so distinct, yet equally important, that I thought my review should reflect this too. Part 2 is about the Dalai Lama’s meditation practice, which by itself is worth the price of the book (and much more!). So, I’ll write about that next. But Part 1 is all about secular ethics, so I’ll cover that first. As usual for these reviews of mine, I’ll share some important passages from the book and just comment on them as we go along. The quoted passages below all come from the 2012 UK Kindle version.
 
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness Dalai Lama
 

• Table of Contents: Cover; About the Book; About the Author; Title Page; Introduction; Part I A New Vision of Secular Ethics; 1. Rethinking Secularism; 2. Our Common Humanity; 3. The Quest for Happiness; 4. Compassion, the Foundation of Well-Being; 5. Compassion and the Question of Justice; 6. The Role of Discernment; 7. Ethics in Our Shared World; Part II Educating the Heart Through Training the Mind; Introduction: Starting with Oneself; 8. Ethical Mindfulness in Everyday Life; 9. Dealing with Destructive Emotions; 10. Cultivating Key Inner Values; 11. Meditation as Mental Cultivation; Afterword

 
About the Book

• (p. 2) [It] may seem extraordinary to hear one of the world’s best-known spiritual leaders argue that we need to move beyond the dictates of faith, but in this ground-breaking book that is exactly what the Dalai Lama suggests.
• (p. 2) the Dalai Lama contends that we will not change the world just by praying: we need to turn to ethics if we are to succeed in sustaining and improving human life on this planet.
• (p. 2) the Dalai Lama is clear that faith without reason can be harmful, leading to fundamentalism.
• (p. 2) His Holiness reveals that another way is possible: to meet the future, we must marry compassion with reason and create a system of secular ethics that can unite us, whatever our beliefs.

 
Amen and hallelujah! But I wonder how many people who have turned to Buddhism are receptive to this message. And I wonder how many secular thinkers know the Dalai Lama is saying this. This is an incredibly brave book, but I fear it could fall on deaf ears all around the world.
 
Introduction

• (p. 2) what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values. By inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warmheartedness — or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner values emerge.

 
This message about the virtue of compassion is central to the book and will be discussed later. Here, though, I would like to highlight the ultimate consequence that the Dalai Lama mentions in passing — “our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive.” Perhaps it is in the nature of a Buddhist to not focus on striving towards something, but science can give us all the guidance we need about this goal, if only we would all agree to it. And knowing this goal is essential to best “alleviate suffering and promote well-being” since avoiding all harm is impossible.
 

• (p. 2) we will never solve our problems simply by instituting new laws and regulations. Ultimately, the source of our problems lies at the level of the individual. If people lack moral values and integrity, no system of laws and regulations will be adequate. So long as people give priority to material values, then injustice, corruption, inequity, intolerance, and greed — all the outward manifestations of neglect of inner values — will persist.

 
This is exactly why atheism alone won’t work. And why the Humanist movement’s shyness about developing an ideology or prescriptive worldview is a missed opportunity.
 

• (p. 2) Science, for all the benefits it has brought to our external world, has not yet provided scientific grounding for the development of the foundations of personal integrity.

 
This is no longer the case. Just to take a few obvious examples, the shift in evolutionary studies from competition to cooperation as a driving force for the survival of life, and the focus on thriving in the fields of positive psychology and ecology could all provide necessary details about how personal integrity can lead life towards the ultimate goal mentioned above. We just need to spell this all out.
 

• (p. 2) any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.

 
Agreed! And I still think our universally-shared evolutionary history is the best source for this approach to ethics.
 

• (p. 2) I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion.

 
So, this may be correct for the Buddhist’s emphasis on inner values. Highlighting compassion would not contradict any religion that I know of. But stating an end goal — is it surviving and thriving here on Earth or an afterlife of heavenly paradise? — does cause conflict. And I don’t believe you can fully express the inner values without having an end goal in mind.
 

• (p. 2) I should make it clear that my intention is not to dictate moral values. Doing that would be of no benefit. To try to impose moral principles from outside, to impose them, as it were, by command, can never be effective. Instead, I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence, and happiness we all seek.

 
Imposing moral rules doesn’t work. But clearly stating the moral guides and the reasons for them could work to gather cooperators together who agree with them. I’ve never seen how Buddhism’s great emphasis on inner values could be enough. To me, they are necessary (and we will develop them in Part 2), but not sufficient.
 
Part I — A New Vision of Secular Ethics
Chapter 1 — Rethinking Secularism

• (p. 5) I am pleased by recent developments in scientific methodology in these areas, in which the traditional scientific principle of objective third-person verifiability is now being expanded to include the domain of subjective experience.

 
Yep. The cognitive revolution of the 1950’s is a great example of this happening during the Dalai Lama’s lifetime.
 

• (p. 5) have also had a longstanding interest in what scientific basis might be found for understanding the effects of contemplative practice and the deliberate cultivation of qualities such as compassion, loving-kindness, attention, and a calm mind. I have always felt that if science could show such practices to be both possible and beneficial, then perhaps they could even be promoted through mainstream education.

 
Bringing mindfulness to schools is happening as we speak.
 

• (p. 5) there is now a reasonably substantial body of evidence in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and other fields suggesting that, even from the most rigorous scientific perspective, unselfishness and concern for others are not only in our own interests but also, in a sense, innate to our biological nature.

 
Yes, but selfishness is also “innate to our biological nature.” The trick is to argue when and why to use each one. And that takes a goal to guide us.
 

• (p. 6) for some people, in particular for some Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters, my use of the word “secular” raises difficulties. To some, the very word suggests a firm rejection of, or even hostility toward, religion. It may seem to them that, in using this word, I am advocating the exclusion of religion from ethical systems, or even from all areas of public life. This is not at all what I have in mind.
• (p. 6) In Indian usage, “secular,” far from implying antagonism toward religion or toward people of faith, actually implies a profound respect for and tolerance toward all religions. It also implies an inclusive and impartial attitude which includes nonbelievers.

 
It would be great if everyone could adopt this inclusive and impartial attitude, but it just doesn’t seem attainable given the epistemological positions of many religions. More on this later.
 

• (p. 9) dating from the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE. One inscription contains the exhortation to “honour another’s religion, for doing so strengthens both one’s own and that of the other.”
• (p. 11) Two of the most important ideas I share wherever I travel — the principles of nonviolence and interreligious harmony — are both drawn from ancient Indian heritage.

 
Once again, this is great, until disagreements about truths and goals occur. Nonviolence and harmony do not provide guides for answers to intractable disagreements.
 

• (p. 12) I should acknowledge that there are some who, though sympathetic to my explanation of secularism in Indian terms, still question the viability of detaching ethics from religion in this way. The mistrust of attempts to separate the two is so strong among some followers of theistic traditions that I have been cautioned, on some occasions, not to use the word “secular” when speaking about ethics in public.
• (p. 13) For those whose religious belief is so closely tied to ethical practice, it is hard to conceive of one without the other. For those who believe that truth requires God, God alone can make ethics binding.
• (p. 13) I do not agree that ethics requires grounding in religious concepts or faith. Instead, I firmly believe that ethics can also emerge simply as a natural and rational response to our very humanity and our common human condition.

 
Wow. These passages could have been written by any of the “four horsemen of the non-apocalypse.”
 

• (p. 14) The systems of belief with which the world’s religions ground and support inner values can, generally speaking, be grouped into two categories.
• (p. 14) On the one hand are the theistic religions, which include Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In these traditions, ethics is ultimately grounded in some understanding of God — as a creator and as the absolute ground of all that is.
• (p. 14) since God is infinite love or infinite compassion, loving others is part of loving and serving God.
• (p. 14) there is the belief that after death we will face divine judgment, and this provides a further strong incentive for behaving with restraint and due caution
• (p. 15) On the other hand, in the non-theistic religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and a branch of the ancient Indian Samkhya school, there is no belief in a divine creator. Instead, there is the core principle of causality, while the universe is regarded as beginningless.
• (p. 15) [These] religions instead ground ethics in the idea of karma. The Sanskrit word karma simply means “action.” So when we talk about our karma, we are referring to all our intentional acts of body, speech, and mind, and when we talk about the fruits of our karma, we are talking about the consequences of these acts.
• (p. 15) When combined with the idea of rebirth and successive lives, this understanding becomes a powerful basis for ethics and the cultivation of inner values.
• (p. 15) All religions, therefore, to some extent, ground the cultivation of inner values and ethical awareness in some kind of metaphysical (that is, not empirically demonstrable) understanding of the world and of life after death.

 
Yes. And these metaphysical stances are blockades to universal agreement wherever they become hardened.
 

• (p. 16) I do not think that religion is indispensable to the spiritual life.
• (p. 16) Today, in a scientific age in which religion strikes many as meaningless, what basis for such values is left to us? How can we find a way of motivating ourselves ethically without recourse to traditional beliefs?
• (p. 16) although humans can manage without religion, they cannot manage without inner values.
• (p. 16) As I see it, spirituality has two dimensions. The first dimension, that of basic spiritual well-being — by which I mean inner mental and emotional strength and balance — does not depend on religion but comes from our innate human nature as beings with a natural disposition toward compassion, kindness, and caring for others. The second dimension is what may be considered religion-based spirituality, which is acquired from our upbringing and culture and is tied to particular beliefs and practices.
• (p. 17) The difference between the two is something like the difference between water and tea. Ethics and inner values without religious content are like water, something we need every day for health and survival. Ethics and inner values based in a religious context are more like tea. The tea we drink is mostly composed of water, but it also contains some other ingredients — tea leaves, spices, perhaps some sugar or, at least in Tibet, salt — and this makes it more nutritious and sustaining and something we want every day. But however the tea is prepared, the primary ingredient is always water. While we can live without tea, we can’t live without water.

 
What an interesting metaphor! We non-religious types need to develop our tea.
 

• (p. 18) there are some who believe, at one end of the spectrum, that we are by nature fundamentally violent, aggressive, and competitive; while others, at the other end, take the view that we are predominantly disposed toward gentleness and love.
• (p. 18) if we view human nature as dominated by destructive tendencies, our ethics will most likely be grounded in something outside ourselves.
• (p. 18) If, however, we view human nature as predominantly oriented toward kindness and the desire for a peaceful life, then we can consider ethics an entirely natural and rational means for pursuing our innate potential.

 
Yes. And we now know that humans are both of these. And for good reason. The signature adaptation of the human species may be cooperation. But the science around prosociality shows that cooperation requires special conditions, including regulation towards shared goals using graduated responses to both helpful AND harmful behaviors. In other words, we need to be kind. And sometimes we need to be cruel to be kind. And it takes wisdom to know the difference between these situations.
 

• (p. 19) I believe that an inclusive approach to secular ethics, one with the potential to be universally accepted, requires recognition of only two basic principles.
• (p. 19) The first principle is the recognition of our shared humanity and our shared aspiration to happiness and the avoidance of suffering; the second is the understanding of interdependence as a key feature of human reality, including our biological reality as social animals. From these two principles we can learn to appreciate the inextricable connection between our own well-being and that of others, and we can develop a genuine concern for others’ welfare. Together, I believe, they constitute an adequate basis for establishing ethical awareness and the cultivation of inner values.

 
That is an argument that is perfect in sync with evolutionary philosophy. And this continues in the next few chapters.
 
Chapter 2 — Our Common Humanity

• (p. 21) in any attempt to develop a genuinely universal approach to ethics, [we have] to have a clear understanding of what unites us all, namely our common humanity.
• (p. 26) Since we are social animals — that is, since our survival and flourishing depend on being part of a group or community — our capacity for empathy has profound implications for our pursuit of happiness and well-being.

 
This is almost word-for-word what Humanists UK says when they teach ethics.
 
Chapter 3 — The Quest for Happiness

• (p. 31) A human being survives only with hope, and hope by definition implies the thought of something better. As I see it, our very survival depends on some idea of future happiness.
• (p. 31) Happiness is a rather general term, so there is potential for misunderstanding. For example, it should be made clear that in this book’s secular context, we are not talking about religious conceptions of ultimate happiness, but rather the simple joy or happiness we all understand in an ordinary or everyday sense.
• (p. 31) what are the sources of human happiness? Three factors immediately suggest themselves which, I think most people will agree, contribute significantly to human well-being, namely wealth or prosperity; health; and friendship or companionship.
• (p. 40) there are also other crucial factors which greatly contribute to our level of genuine happiness and joy. Recent scientific research suggests that chief among these are a sense of purpose which transcends narrow self-interest and a feeling of being connected with others or of belonging to a community. The root of both of these, I believe, is compassion or warmheartedness

 
The positive psychology literature is overflowing with scientific books about this topic. (See here, here, here, or here.) I’ve read many of these and listened to podcasts with the authors of many, many more. Unfortunately, this short chapter by the Dalai Lama is completely lacking in actual references to this field, but it does help to see his simple, straightforward thinking as well as the link to compassion, which is the subject of the next two chapters.
 
Chapter 4 — Compassion, the Foundation of Well-Being

• (p. 41) Without another’s loving care, none of us would have lived more than a few days. As a result of this intense need for others in our early development, a disposition toward affection is a part of our biology. This is a characteristic we share with many other mammals, and also birds
• (p. 48) What is important is that when pursuing our own self-interest we should be “wise selfish” and not “foolish selfish.” Being foolish selfish means pursuing our own interests in a narrow, shortsighted way. Being wise selfish means taking a broader view and recognizing that our own long-term individual interest lies in the welfare of everyone.
• (p. 50) While compassion at the biological level can be unconditional, like the mother’s love for her baby, it is also biased and limited in scope. Nevertheless, it is of the utmost importance, because it is the seed from which unbiased compassion can grow. We can take our innate capacity for warmheartedness and, using our intelligence and conviction, expand it.
• (p. 52) universal compassion is not rooted in any self-regarding element, but rather in the simple awareness that all others are human beings who, just like oneself, aspire to happiness and shun suffering.
• (p. 53) My old friend Professor Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the science of emotion, once told me that even Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, believed that “the love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
• (p. 55) since universal compassion involves gradually expanding one’s circle of concern until it finally embraces the whole of humanity, it needs constant cultivation.
• (p. 56) religion is not necessary for cultivating compassion. In fact, secular techniques for compassion training are already in use, and their effectiveness has even been scientifically demonstrated.

 
It’s striking to me how much this mimics Peter Singer’s book The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, which I tried to take to its logical ethical conclusion by considering the evolutionary story of all of the life that has ever been or ever will be. I’m really looking forward to spending some more time in Part 2 of Beyond Religion to learn about ways to cultivate this compassion. But first, are there limits to this compassion?
 
Chapter 5 — Compassion and the Question of Justice

• (p. 57) For many, it seems, there is a conflict between the principle of compassion, which implies forgiveness, and the exercise of justice, which requires punishment for wrongdoing. As they see it, the principle of justice or fairness, rather than that of compassion, must underpin any humanistic approach to ethics.
• (p. 58) compassion by no means implies surrender in the face of wrongdoing or injustice.
• (p. 61) From a secular point of view, without such beliefs in punishment and reward in the afterlife, we must ask ourselves what punishment is really about. Is it about retribution and revenge — about making wrongdoers suffer as an end in itself? Or is it more about preventing further wrongdoing? To my mind, the purpose of punishment is not to exact suffering as an end in itself. Rather, the suffering inflicted by punishment should have a higher purpose, namely to discourage the wrongdoer from repeating the offense and to deter others from committing similar acts. Punishment is, therefore, not about retribution but about deterrence.

 
This is roughly the same conclusion reached by Dan Dennett and Greg Caruso in their book debating free will, determinism, and “just desert”. We’re aligned once again! But what about the final subject of Part 1 of Beyond Religion — ethics — which is covered in the next two chapters?
 
Chapter 6 — The Role of Discernment

• (p. 73) While intention is the first and most important factor in guaranteeing that our behaviour is ethical, we also need discernment to ensure that the choices we make are realistic and that our good intentions do not go to waste.
• (p. 74) For those occasions when we do not have time to work things out in detail, it is useful to have internalized general rules to guide our actions.
• (p. 80) we will never know all the causes that have given rise to any situation. Nor can we foresee all the consequences of our actions. There is always bound to be some element of uncertainty. It is important to acknowledge this, but it should not worry us. Still less should it make us despair of the value of rational assessment. Instead it should temper our actions with proper humility and caution.
• (p. 80) This uncertainty is another reason why ethics must be grounded at the level of motivation, as I have said, rather than purely on consideration of consequences.

 
In my paper on “Rebuilding the Harm Principle”, I say something similar about how to integrate consequentialism and virtue ethics. (I also add in the third of the three major camps of moral ethics, deontology.) Bravo!
 
Chapter 7 — Ethics in Our Shared World

• (p. 84) people are making a convenient distinction between ethics on the personal level and ethics on the wider social level. To me, such attitudes are fundamentally flawed, as they overlook the interdependence of our world.
• (p. 88) Disarmament is compassion in practice. What is required, therefore, is both inner disarmament, at the level of our individual hatred, prejudice, and intolerance, and outer disarmament, at the level of nations and states.
• (p. 91) On the issue of economic inequality, I consider myself at least half Marxist. When it comes to creating wealth and thereby improving people’s material conditions, capitalism is without doubt very effective, but capitalism is clearly inadequate as any kind of social ideal, since it is only motivated by profit, without any ethical principle guiding it.
• (p. 92) I told [a very wealthy couple], having made your money as capitalists, you should spend it as socialists!

 
This chapter actually consists of several short sections about technology, war, the environment, economics, science, education, and perseverance, but these four quotes are enough to show we’re basically aligned again. All of the points being made are simply a natural extension of the principle of flourishing in an interdependent world. The fact that this secular ethics is coming from the Dalai Lama rather than a typical atheist is completely remarkable. It’s a perfect example of what Cass Sunstein called a “surprising validator”. And it gives me great hope.
 
This marks the end of a fairly long overview of just the first half of this book, but I do hope it sparks an interest to read the whole thing and to share it widely with people who might be receptive to this message. As I said at the start, I only wish the title of this book had been flipped. Here’s why. In David Sloan Wilson’s autobiography, he wrote this about the Dalai Lama:
​

​Tina was my way to finding this book. She’s the fascinating writer behind several projects that would definitely be of interest to anyone reading my site. In T&G, she is described as having “published her debut novel, A Footnote to Plato, in 2023 (Wipf and Stock). She is an Associate Acquisitions Editor at After Dinner Conversation, a magazine dedicated to philosophical short stories. tinaforsee.com.” Her website has links to a couple of Substack newsletters she runs, including her personal one Philosophy and Fiction (subjects I love!) where she recently posted about every chapter of T&G. After I finish my review here, I am definitely going to go engage in the conversations there about this book.
 
(Also, you should know that her book A Footnote to Plato is an excellent addition to the canon of campus novels. It’s like a mashup of Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Definitely check it out if that subject is of interest to you.)
 
While Tina’s solo works are great, T&G is a co-production that has an interesting origin story. This is best explained by quoting from the foreward that Tina wrote.
​

​I thought these ideals would resonate with *someone* in the publishing industry. But see Footnote 2 for a recent example of the blind emotion that clearly dominates there. I just don’t know why writing can’t be more like sculpture, painting, or photography. Artists in those fields create something beautiful to contemplate. Novels rarely, if ever, do. These days, they simply give us heartbreakingly depicted tales of woe. They follow Tolstoy’s example and give us more and more intricate details of more and more intersectional struggles. See Footnote 3 where I’ve conservatively calculated that 86% of the works of fiction in the 2023 New York Times 100 Notable Books fit this description. Is this really the best that books can be?
 
Problems in life happen naturally with entropy. We don’t need more examples to know that this is how the universe grinds on. Life is the struggle to *overcome* these problems. And I believe we could use more inspiring examples to keep us going. Rather than exploring yet another variety of distress with great precision, I want to leave that reality behind and produce art that shows possibilities of strength, resilience, adaptation, and other evolutionary virtues. I believe that imagining this kind of beauty should be a major calling for artists. But after almost 7 years of painfully dealing with publishers, I have realized that this is not aligned with their goals. In order to stay alive, they must make money in the current environment. They must be assured of making a profit by replicating what has already been done. They must take the safe route of simply depicting the reality of our sadness rather than risking rejection by imagining something new and better.
 
Although I haven’t seen anyone diagnose the aesthetics of the industry in precisely this way, I have been noticing other artists struggling with this as well.
​

Footnote 1
Here are the bullet points of just some of my efforts over the past 6+ years seeking publication.

• I started sending query letters for my second novel in October 2017. I scoured books and online lists about the thousands of options out there and picked out several dozen that seemed like possible fits. I submit letters to these places in batches so I can tweak subsequent letters based on feedback and results.
• In mid-2018 I found a local publisher who was interested in publishing philosophical works. They expressed great interest in my work. We met several times. I published some non-fiction essays with them. They said they were keen to publish my novel. But then in May 2019, after working with them for almost a year, they decided to change their publishing strategy and not publish any more books after struggling with their first efforts.
• It took me a while to recover from this and get back on the horse of submissions. But then, the pandemic hit. No one knew what was going to happen and suddenly my book about the prospect of ending aging and living indefinitely seemed extremely out of touch with all of the death and despair that was happening in the world. I threw myself into my philosophical work, completing a book-length treatment on consciousness on October 2021.
• In November of 2021, my wife and I lived in Oslo, Norway for her work. Then in January and February of 2022 we lived in Vienna, Austria for another project. These were busy times, during which I redesigned my entire website to get ready for another publishing push.
• As it happened, I was contacted by David Sloan Wilson in February 2022 to ask if I would work with him on the launch of his non-profit venture ProSocial. He asked if I would help him create an evolutionary philosophy group, the likes of which would never happen at a single university. This was a wonderful chance to test and spread my ideas so I threw myself into that for the next 2+ years.
• Meanwhile, in June 2022, a friend with an MFA, JD, and PhD in Criminology who teaches a class on speculative fictions heard about The Vitanauts and asked if he could read it. After I sent him a copy, he told me it was one of the best things he’s read. He told me:
  • “In no uncertain terms, I loved your book.  You have a real gift for taking the most exciting philosophical questions and presenting them in a clear, thought-provoking way, while still writing a "futuristic" or "sci fi" novel (neither seems like the right description) that is a page turner. Bravo! I'm also extremely impressed with the sheer amount of research that must have gone into this.”
• In January 2023, this friend recommended my book to a small publishing house he had connections with. He wrote:
  • “Ed Gibney is a writer/philosopher and author of The Vitanauts—one of the best books that I have read in the last few years. I'll let Ed describe the book to you, as well as his other work more generally, but in my opinion The Vitanauts ranks up there with works by J.G. Ballard, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Kim Stanley Robinson.”
• After a month, this publisher wrote me back and suggested I go ahead and send them my full manuscript through the normal submissions process. Three months later, I got word that they weren’t interested and they didn’t give any feedback as to why.
• Later that month, through my work with ProSocial, I met an acquisitions editor at another small publisher. She encouraged me to send her a query letter and manuscript. I did. After reading everything, she told me she was excited to pitch it to the president of the organization. In September, she told me the President of the company loved the concept and approach and would submit it to their Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) with the promise of a forthcoming developmental edit. I began looking for editors to work with.
• Then, in February 2024, after hearing nothing for five months, I was told the EAB voted 3-2 against going forward with the novel. The feedback they sent bore no resemblance to the feedback I have gotten from other readers throughout this saga, which indicates this was probably never a good fit anyway.
• After this latest setback, I’ve been struggling with how to move forward. Writing this mini-manifesto has been my way of sifting through the evidence for ideas about what I should do.

 
 
Footnote 2
In a story about Alice Munro story after her death, a writer wrote this in the New York Times:  “But the art of hearing the voice of a fictional person or sensing a fictional world or working for years on some unfathomable creation is, in fact, the opposite of saying something with the opinionated and knowledgeable part of one’s mind. It is rather the humble craft of putting your opinions and ego aside and letting something be said through you.” Ugh! This is a clear and painful example of the kind of anti-rationalism that casually saturates the publishing world.
 
 
Footnote 3
Here are illustrative summaries from 50 works of fiction in the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2023. I have bolded the only stories that might NOT be works about struggles in small segments of society.
 

1. an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers, and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries
2. about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children
3. a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons
4. a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene
5. a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper
6. explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away
7. for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead
8. prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom 
9. generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles
10. uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point
11. tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades
12. a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help
13. the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children
14. a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family
15. the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary
16. successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters
17. a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism
18. it explores the mundane and the horrific
19. to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history
20. a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family
21. the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again
22. a missing-persons case that unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions
23. one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives
24. new translation of the “Iliad”
25. sisters raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things
26. a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man
27. traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.
28. a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps
29. a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state
30. the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins
31. a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal
32. a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams
33. the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries
34. An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet
35. a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment
36. mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death
37. an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family
38. an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel
39. Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons
40. acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia
41. the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother
42. the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community
43. three sisters and their mother reflect on love and regret
44. a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists
45. the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome
46. queer midcentury romance that lingers on small, everyday acts
47. an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash
48. Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers
49. a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul
50. a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own

What an intriguing book title! Who isn’t looking for more purpose in their life, and longing to be part of a strong community? The needs for these are pretty much human universals and it’s hard to imagine having too much of them, so I expect this title will speak to you at least a little. It sure did to me. So, I thought I’d share a bit about it. First, though, a little context.
 
For a little over two years, I’ve been heavily involved with an online community run by the non-profit organization ProSocial World. That’s where I led the creation and day-to-day running of the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle and I was also asked to be on the Stewardship Circle (a kind of advisory board) for the ProSocial Commons in general, which hosts lots of events and oversees the platform that is used by many other prosocial groups. These have all been run while focusing on two intellectual principles—Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prizewinning research on the core design principles of groups that oversee common resources, and the scientifically validated Acceptance and Commitment Therapy used to foster psychological flexibility in individuals and groups. It’s been a fascinating and highly educational experience!
 
But….this has all been led by evolutionary biologists and psychologists who don’t have a strong track record or focus on building businesses. As such, the growing pains we’ve experienced would probably not surprise any entrepreneur. Recently, I started looking around for other examples of community building organizations to see what we could learn from them and the pop-up ad in the picture above splashed onto my screen. It’s from Gina Bianchini, who is the CEO and founder of Mighty Networks, which is currently “trusted by 900,000+ creators, entrepreneurs, and brands.” Bianchini grew up in Cupertino, California, graduated with honors from Stanford University, started her career in the High Technology Group at Goldman Sachs, and received her MBA from Stanford Business School. The front page of the Mighty website asks, “What makes Mighty different? Our obsession with member engagement.” This sounded exactly like the kind of business experience that ProSocial World needs, so I ordered my free copy of Purpose: Design a Community & Change Your Life and I raced through it when it arrived, dog-earing many of the pages and taking lots of notes.
 
Since Bianchini is giving her book away for free, I feel safe in sharing so many good details from it. But really, if you have any interest in joining or creating a community group, and these details pique your interest in the slightest, get yourself a copy and spend a bit more time with these ideas. (I think of this blog post as the “snack”. Go get the book for the full “meal”.)
 
First, what’s in it? Here is the table of contents. This is all covered in bite-size chunks totaling just under 180 pages. You can easily read it in a day or two.

Preface
Part I: Find Your Purpose
1. How I Found My Purpose, and You Can Too
2. Purpose in Modern Life
3. Purpose in Practice
4. Your Future Story
5. Your Future Story is Your New North Star
Part II: Turn Your Purpose into Action
6. From Hero to Host
7. Your First Host Skill: The Power of a Great Question
Interlude: Where We Go From Here—Onward to Digital
Part III: Take Your Purpose Digital
8. The Power of Digital is Creating Culture at Scale
9. What to Expect When You Create a Digital Community
10. Who Needs Your Community the Most Right Now?
11. From Purpose to Big Purpose
12. Launch Your Community to Your Ideal Members with Community DesignTM
13. Your First Digital Members Come from Your Core Community
14. Take Your Members on Quests
15. Conclusion
 
Because of the timing of her upbringing in Silicon Valley, Bianchini’s interests led her to cross paths with a lot of the major players in the development of the internet. I found her comments about “social media” particularly enlightening.
 

• (p.24) Facebook was defining what social networks would become. First, they quietly and subtly shifted from calling it a social network to referring to it as social media. While to the outside world this wasn’t a major shift, I saw it as ominous.
• (p.24) The true value of Facebook and any social network is the connections made between people. The power of social networks, then, is they become more useful to everyone with each new person who joins and contributes.
• (p.24) Facebook would keep the network hidden and replace it with social media operated mainly in a single “newsfeed” and controlled by a complex algorithm.
• (p.24) In Facebook groups, an administrator could no longer message the members of their groups, control which posts their members would see in their feed, or prevent the marketing of other groups to their members.
• (p.24) Where groups or interest pages once enjoyed in their own space, now individual group posts were stripped of all context and shown next to every other post surfaced by the algorithm. In the name of removing friction, Facebook was setting up a single (and fragile) “monoculture”. … The system was much more easily manipulated by outrage and extreme emotion.

 
Bianchini was keeping close tabs on all this as the co-founder of Ning.
 

• (p.26) I pictured a different future, one where creators owned their own communities and could design the cultures, experiences, and relationships they sparked between their own members.
• (p.26) There was content to inspire and influence, but unlike social media that stopped at content, a creator or brand could do something more powerful with cultural software. They could use native courses to educate and apply, enabling people to go deeper around new ideas and begin to apply new frameworks to their lives. Commerce was there not just to ensure creators, entrepreneurs, or brands could charge for access but to help members focus and prioritize. It turns out, people pay attention to what they pay for. Therefore, the fastest way to build a loyal, tightly knit set of early adopters or brand loyalists was by making the community paid, charging for events, or offering paid course communities. Perhaps counterintuitively, the easiest way to move people off social media was to charge for access to people, conversations, writings, and experiences outside of it.

 
Now that the world has experienced all the decay and harm from Facebook’s model of social media, doesn’t this “cultural software” sound like a breath of fresh air? It can’t grow as big or come to dominate the world, but that’s kinda the point. And it’s the right way to build robust diversity. Fragile monocultures all go extinct much more easily.
 
But how do we build all of these online communities? After working on thousands of them, Bianchini has developed some best practices.
 

• (p.27) People who hosted successful networks approached their communities with an openness and their own curiosity. They embraced a “growth mindset”. They also took specific steps to make their communities happen in pursuit of a shared purpose. … I called it Community DesignTM.
• (p.27) Our promise with Community DesignTM? Create a community so valuable you can charge for it, and so well-designed it essentially runs itself.
• (p.28) A course didn’t need to be sterile videos and guides alone. Rather, I could treat it as a living, breathing, and forgiving community of fellow travelers, equally interested in how to unlock the power and potential of bringing people together with intention.
• (p.28) The most successful communities online and in the real world started with a clear purpose. They not only had a clear intention, but the way they stated that intention followed a specific formula that worked time and time again to draw the right people to a new idea, join a community, or sign up for a course or membership, and then contribute in ways that would get them results and transformation in a specific area of their life.

 
But what specific community should you start or join? Bianchini has a plan to help you find out.
 

• (p.40) If you want anything to have a tangible, real impact in your life you need to make it a practice. Daily.
• (p.40) Purpose is a throughline in your life. … We call this your Current Story and there are five questions to structure it. 1) What stands out for you about your upbringing and background? 2) What have been the top three most pivotal experiences in your life? 3) What are your top three proudest achievements? 4) What are three times you’ve taken a stand? 5) When you think of the people you’ve been drawn to help, who are they?
• (p.41) To most effectively crystalize your purpose, the most potent and powerful place to find a clear intention for your time, talents, energy, and focus is in the future.
• (p.43) Create a ritual around [spending] thirty minutes. … Spend them imagining the future and asking yourself the same six questions every day. The ritual and repetition are key to unlocking something new and forcing yourself into a different headspace.
• (pp.43-47) These seven steps make up your Purpose 30. … Step 1: Take your phone, computer, iPad, and TV. Turn them off and slowly walk away. … Step 2: Make your favorite beverage. … Step 3: Have blank paper and a pen ready. … Step 4: Start by clearing out everything that’s on your mind. … Just write down everything you woke up thinking about. Drop all of it on its own blank piece of paper. … Step 5: Set the clearinghouse aside and establish context for your Purpose 30. … Start in the future and picture yourself looking backward. … It’s ten years from now, and you’ve uncovered a secret formula that lets you create the future you want. Your future state is positive, exciting, and unexpected. More than helping you alone, it’s a future where your impact is felt by others. You have a community, are surrounded by exciting challenges and unexpected opportunities, and you have the confidence to put your talents, time, energy, and focus towards anything you want to accomplish. … Step 6: Reflect on your Purpose 30 questions. … Now tackle these questions: 1) What are three things you’re able to do in the future that you’re not able to do today? 2) What are three things you’ve accomplished? 3) What are three things you have taken a stand for? 4) What has changed in your world for the better in the most unexpected and surprising way? 5) Who are the people you have brought together? 6) What are three things they are able to do in the future that they aren’t able to do today? … Step 7: Celebrate when your Purpose 30 is up. … After thirty days you willhave cultivated a picture that allows you—no one else—to define a positive intention and direction for your time, talents, energy, and focus. And you’ll have the blueprint for your next step. Your future story.

 
Great! But why are we building a community exactly?
 

• (p.69) If you take one concept away from this book, let it be this: The quickest and simplest way to translate your purpose into action is through community. Community not in the faux sense of an audience or fans who may talk to you but aren’t talking to each other. A true community is where connections are made, relationships are built, quests are undertaken, challenges are overcome, opportunities are seized, and people are transformed.

 
Okay. But “leading a community” sounds scary. Can I really do that?
 

• (p.72) A host is the most powerful role any of us can take on as we turn our purpose into action. A host can take many forms—gatherer, facilitator, guide, teacher, coach, mentor, or a warm, welcoming friend—but a host does something the rest of us increasingly don’t. They bring people together with intention. The intention to discover, explore, comfort, belong, teach, learn, solve problems, take on challenges, collaborate, celebrate, grieve, and so much more.
• (p.90) The single greatest way to start attracting people to your purpose isn’t to make a video espousing your views or expect someone to do exactly what you say to do. … It is easier and more effective to learn the art and science of asking great questions. They are going to do more to share your purpose with people than anything you can read, consume, or produce yourself.
• (p.90) I’m talking about questions that evoke meaningful responses and spark a connection between people. I call them community questions, and once you get the hang of them, they make nearly every interaction you have twice as much fun.
• (p.92) What makes a great question? Chances are it contains one or more of these four ingredients. 1) It taps into universal, human phenomena and common experiences a majority of people can relate to. 2) It is structured in such a way that it’s almost impossible to give a boring answer. 3) It ignites a domino effect of entertaining answers. Answers spur more answers. 4) It gives people an opportunity to share a part of themselves that they want to be seen.
• (p.93) Now that you have the ingredients, you need the recipe. … I finally landed on the idea of a question generator with two distinct elements—an unlocking phrase and a topic. An unlocking phrase is what your question starts with—it’s the frame and helps you focus in on one aspect of a broad topic. There are thousands of options, but here are my Top 10.
  • What is your favorite…
  • If you could…
  • What do you value most in a…
  • Name one thing…
  • How do you know when…
  • When was the last time…
  • Where would you…
  • What’s an unusual…
  • As a child…
  • What’s the first…
• (p.93) Then you combine your topic—your purpose—with the unlocking phrase. One unlocking phrase could generate endless amounts of questions, based on different topics and variations.

 
Being a “host” and asking questions doesn’t sound so bad. But who do I ask?
 

• (p.109) People who are new to hosting carefully plan their new community guided by perfection. In contrast, those who are ultimately successful accept the beauty of communities as decidedly imperfect and ultimately forgiving. They quickly get to the core questions they need to answer to start inviting folks in. Who is going to want or need my community the most right now? What results or experiences do they want to get? What kinds of activities will they do together? What new things will my members get or be able to do as part of my community? How am I going to make it exciting and awesome? The folks who thrive in this phase are those who realize quickly, “This is so much easier than people think.”
• (p.114) Your ideal member is the person who needs your community right now. They are the people who you want to attract first to help you bring your Future Story to Life.
• (p.115) The number one mistake I see with communities is not getting clear or specific enough at this stage with their Ideal Member. … Your Ideal Member, instead, needs to be brought to life with a story.
• (p.119) Write your Ideal Member’s story. First, start with the questions below… What transition is your Ideal Member navigating right now? Are they experiencing a loss or figuring out how to add something new to their lives? Are they starting something or ending something? What’s on their vision board for the life they’re living five years from now? What’s holding them back? Is it practical? Is it mental? A bit of both? What are they Googling late at night? What’s the biggest question they have right now? What are they losing sleep over? What does a typical day in their life look like? What emotions do they cycle though each day? Where have they looked for support already? Their spouse? Books? A therapist? A coach? Social media? A spiritual advisor?

 
Got it. But what are we going to talk about exactly?
 

• (p.126) Your Big Purpose is the motivation for your community—not just yours, but your members’ motivation. Why they’ll join, why they’ll contribute, and why they’ll walk arm in arm with you toward your Future Story.
• (p.127) Community builders tend to fall into two camps: 1) They try to create an elegant, almost “tag-line” like Big Purpose…something they can fit on a bumper sticker. Or 2) They write an essay combining their Future Story, their Ideal Member Story, and even their diary entries into a novel-like experience. Like most things, there is a middle path. It’s where the most successful Big Purposes end up.
• (pp.127-9) I’ve developed a simple, three-part formula that gives you enough room to be expansive and add the details. … Step 1: Identify the Transition. … The transitions in our lives are when we need community the most. It’s when we may find ourselves more isolated, because the people we need to go to are a part of our old life, and we don’t yet have any connections in our new life. … Step 2: Define the Results. … Be specific. … Be ambitious. … Step 3: Build a Bridge. … Describe how your Ideal Member will move from A to B, from their moment of transition to the results and transformation.
• (pp.129-130) Put it all together. “I / We bring together ____(your Ideal Members with a transition)____ to ____(the bridge, or the activities your members will do together)____, so that we can ____{achieve the results we want)____.

 
That’s a very clear and inspiring start. Then what?
 

• (pp.140-1) Your Community Design PlanTM is…a structure that guides your Ideal Members to your community—that gets them to answer the call—and takes them to a new future, a year from now, where they’ve achieved results and transformation they couldn’t imagine today. It has five elements. … 1) Your Big Purpose. 2) A Year in the Life. 3) Monthly Themes. 4) A Weekly Calendar. 5) Daily Polls and Questions. They start wider, with the overall motivation for your community, and then break it down by time period.
• (p.149) Your first digital members come from your core community.
• (p.152) Your superpower right now is that you know these people.
• (pp.158-60) Create a magical first experience. … The Enemy of Magic is the Expected. … Purpose + Connection + Surprise = Magic.
• (p.161) Instead of focusing on the mechanics and what not to do, focus on how someone can contribute, what they’re going to get out of it, and who’s there in it with them. It’s focused on joy and assumes the best of everyone who’s walking through the door. A community built on that foundation is going to be more focused and powerful than anything you’ve encountered before.
• (p.164) Your people and your people’s people are gathering around your Big Purpose. Energy is building. Ideal Members are joining, and you’re delighting them with a magical first experience. … How do you take all this emerging promise and potential and turn it into deeper impact, results, and transformations? … Quests!
• (p.164) Quests are the activities in your community designed to connect your members to each other and the results they want to achieve. Human beings are built for Quests, which help us belong to something bigger than ourselves, make connections to people on our same path, and master something interesting or important together.
• (pp.165) Quests can loosely be categorized into four types: courses, challenges, experiences, and collabs.

 
How fun. But not everything is done in a community. And not all of us can host a community, right?
 

• (p.172) If I haven’t made you a true community believer yet, that’s all right. You still have the potential to turn your purpose into a practice and develop more energy and resilience with any action you choose to take with just the Purpose 30 and your Future Story.

 
Amazing. This book really landed with me at a time I needed it most. I’ll write more on my own purpose and future story soon, but I wanted to share this first as a gift to all the ProSocial communities I’ve been involved with over the last 2+ years and to anyone else who’s still looking for more communities to join. Please get Bianchini’s book for more!

​
Next, we want to see the balance point after a positive result has been received (Figure 3). On the left hand side, we were told the test has a 20% false positive rate, so 18 of the 90 people stay on our giant seesaw even though they don’t actually have the condition. On the right hand side, we were told 60% of the 10 people who have the condition would test positive, so this leaves 6 people. Therefore, the new ratio after the test is 18 to 6, or 3 to 1. This means the fulcrum must be shifted to the inverse ratio of 1 to 3 in order to restore balance. There are now 4 total units of distance between the left and right, and the fulcrum is 1 unit from the left. So, after receiving a positive test result, the probability of having the condition (being in the group on the right) is 1 in 4 or 25% (the portion of beam on the left). This confirms the answer we derived earlier using abstract mathematical formulas, but many may find the concepts easier to grasp from the graphic representation.
​

[1] Sternbergh, A. (2006, October 16). Stephen Colbert Has America by the Ballots. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/news/politics/22322/
[2] The Paley Center for Media. (2009, November 7). Colbert Report Writers—Truthiness and Pun Journals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvnHf3MQtAk
[3] Blake, A. (2017, January 22). Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has ‘alternative facts.’ Which pretty much says it all. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/22/kellyanne-conway-says-donald-trumps-team-has-alternate-facts-which-pretty-much-says-it-all/
[4] Friedersdorf, C. (2018, January 8). The Difference Between Speaking ‘Your Truth’ and ‘The Truth.’ The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-power-and-perils-of-speaking-your-truth/549968/
[5] See especially: Shermer, M. (n.d.). Jordan Peterson & Michael Shermer on Science, Myth, Truth, and the Architecture of Archetypes (174). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/jordan-peterson-beyond-order-12-more-rules-for-life/. For more examples see: Shermer, M. (n.d.). Simon Winchester—How We Transfer Knowledge Through Time (355). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/simon-winchester-transmission-of-knowledge-from-ancient-widsom-to-modern-magic/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). The Sacred Depths of Nature—Ursula Goodenough on How to Find Sacred Scientific Spirituality (336). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/natures-sacred-depths-ursula-goodenough-on-finding-sacred-scientific-spirituality/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Gale Sinatra & Barbara Hofer—Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It (212). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/science-denial-why-it-happens-and-what-to-do-about-it-gale-sinatra-barbara-hofer/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Richard Dawkins on evangelizing for evolution, science, skepticism, philosophy, reason, and rationality, based on his new book Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science (205). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/books-do-furnish-a-life-reading-and-writing-science-richard-dawkins/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Jonathan Rauch—The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (190). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/jonathan-rauch-constitution-of-knowledge-a-defense-of-truth/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Robert Pennock—An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science (98). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/robert-pennock-an-instinct-for-truth-curiosity-moral-character-of-science/. Shermer, M. (2020, June 26). What is Truth, Anyway? [YouTube]. https://www.skeptic.com/skepticism-101/what-is-truth-anyway-lecture/.
[6] Holy Bible, New International Version, Matthew 19:26. (n.d.). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2019%3A26&version=NIV
[7] Ichikawa, J. J., & Steup, M. (2018). The Analysis of Knowledge. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/knowledge-analysis/
[8] Schwitzgebel, E. (2021). Belief. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/belief/
[9] Dowden, B., & Swartz, N. (n.d.). Truth. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://iep.utm.edu/truth/
[10] Hasan, A., & Fumerton, R. (2022). Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/justep-foundational/
[11] Laertius, D. (1925). Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Vol. Book IX (R. D. Hicks, Ed.). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D9
[12] Hume, D. (1902). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (L. A. Selby-Bigge, Ed.; Second). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9662/pg9662.txt
[13] Gillespie, M. A. (1996). Chapter One: Descartes and the Deceiver God. In Nihilism Before Nietzsche. University of Chicago Press.
[14] Hetherington, S. (n.d.). Gettier Problems. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/
[15] Dennett, D. C. (2016). Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism. In D. L. Smith (Ed.), How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism (pp. 9–22). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107295490.002
[16] Büchter, T., Eichler, A., Steib, N., Binder, K., Böcherer-Linder, K., Krauss, S., & Vogel, M. (2022). How to Train Novices in Bayesian Reasoning. Mathematics, 10(9), 1558. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10091558
[17] Lin, H. (2022). Bayesian Epistemology. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
[18] Norman, A. (2021). Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. Harper Wave. https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780063003002/mental-immunity
[19] Hume, D. (1902). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (L. A. Selby-Bigge, Ed.; Second). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9662/pg9662.txt
[20] Jackman, S. (2009). The Foundations of Bayesian Inference. In Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences. John Wiley & Sons.
[21] Hajek, A., & Lin, H. (2017). A Tale of Two Epistemologies? Res Philosophica, 94(2), 207–232. http://dx.doi.org/10.11612/resphil.1540
[22] Oreskes, N. (2019). Why Trust Science? Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179001/why-trust-science
[23] Kipling, R. (1902). Just So Stories (D. Reed & D. Widger, Eds.). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2781/2781-h/2781-h.htm
[24] Whewell, W. (1847). The philosophy of the inductive sciences, founded upon their history. London J.W. Parker. http://archive.org/details/philosophyinduc00goog

The Evolutionary Philosophy Circle I’ve started with David Sloan Wilson’s ProSocial World is just about to start our fourth “generation” of activity (which is sort of like a semester), so I wanted to finish recapping what we’ve done so far. As I said in the last two posts, we first took a whirlwind tour of the different branches of philosophy in generation 1 to see how the theory of evolution affects them all. Then, in generation 2, we took a look at another holistic worldview (Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy) to see how it differs from the worldview we are building with evolutionary philosophy. For generation 3, we dove deeper into one branch of philosophy to further develop our thinking there. We looked at the philosopher Andy Norman’s new theory of mental immunity, which attempts to improve epistemology (the norms around what should count as good knowledge production) by arguing for a new way of looking at ideas and our mental processes that deal with them.

Back in January of 2022, I reviewed Andy’s book that introduced this idea — Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. I found it so interesting that I devoted two long blog posts to covering it. (See here and here.) I wasn’t alone in this interest either. Andy had many, many discussions about his book during the publicity tours he did for it, and he also organized a symposium in the online magazine This View of Life (now a part of ProSocial World) to gather thoughts about his book from a variety of philosophers and scientists. Andy and I agreed to invite all of these essay writers to discuss their thoughts with our Evolutionary Philosophy Circle, and that constituted our third generation of activity. After 14 weeks of deep readings and discussions, I put together a list of links and summaries for all of the essays we considered, which you can see below.

Please note that if you are interested in watching the recorded discussions that we had about these essays, you can find links for those by joining our Circle. Our fourth generation of activity will follow this format of organized essays and discussions around a general topic (this time featuring evolutionary ethics) so now’s a great time to join in for that! Anyway, on to the summaries for generation three:
 
Week 1

• Speaker — Andy Norman
• Article — The Science of Mental Immunity Has Arrived
• Summary — Minds have immune systems. Mounting evidence and novel arguments suggest this claim is quite literally true. Evolved systems have to defend themselves against internal and external threats. The body’s immune system is an evolved solution to this problem. Evolutionary theory predicts that comparable systems will be found at many different levels of selection. Look for such systems and you can find them at work protecting cells, organs, and bodies, nations, cultures, ideologies, religions, and minds. These entities have “immune systems” too. The mind’s immune system—its capacity to ward off problematic information—is implemented somehow in the brain. We can all benefit from “cognitive immunotherapies”: evidence-based interventions designed to boost and modulate mental immune response.

 
Week 2

• Speaker — David Sloan Wilson
• Article — Cultural Immune Systems as Parts of Cultural Superorganisms
• Summary — The concept of ‘organism’ must be expanded to include groups as organisms. When we do this, the concepts of both ‘mental’ and ‘immunity’ can be seen in a new light. Two key concepts for the purposes of this essay are multilevel selection (MLS) and major evolutionary transitions (MET). Today, every entity that biologists call an organism is regarded as a MET. From a multilevel perspective, the word “mental” cannot be restricted to individual cognition. Human moral systems make great sense from this perspective. Deviant behaviors are defined as cheating—a form of cancer—and punished. Foreign beliefs are tagged and removed, like infectious diseases. This does not distinguish fact from fiction. Instead, all beliefs and practices with fitness value (the survival and reproduction of the group) are distinguished from all beliefs and practices that pose a threat to fitness. Regardless of the past and present, there is an urgent need for a moral system that defines “us” as the whole earth, including the biosphere in addition to humans.

 
Week 3

• Speaker — David Samson
• Article — A Tribalism Vaccine
• Summary — In my book Our Tribal Future, I offer an operational definition of a tribe, which is: a meta-group – an intersubjective belief network – that uses symbols as tokens of identity signaling membership in a coalition. The ‘Tribe Drive’ leverages our species' capacity to create and transmit memes in a way that allows individuals, with no prior interaction, to see strangers as trustworthy. Religion, language, music, ritual, consumer behavior, clothing, and food can all emit such signals. Humanity had a new way to bootstrap cooperation, but the feature contained a bug. All humans today have inherited identity protective cognition — the tendency to unconsciously dismiss evidence that does not reflect the beliefs that predominate in our own groups. Tribalism is the belief that different identity-based coalitions possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another. To vaccinate the world from the tribalism virus, we need herd immunity of people who hold metabelief as their sacred value pegged to a single “community of inquiry” tribal identity. This is what I call a Metatribe. The syringe delivery system for the tribalism vaccine needs to leverage humanity's penchant for social norm creation and regulation to facilitate its spread. Historically, tribal creeds have served this purpose. What then, is an effective Metatribal creed for the long-awaited tribalism vaccine?
  
  I am a member of Team Human.
  Our creed is that beliefs can change in light of evidence.
  We are a community of inquiry where beliefs are deemed reasonable if they can withstand reasonable challenges to their veracity.
  We are the Metatribe.

Week 4

• Speaker — Ian Robertson
• Article — Mental Immunity, The Group Mind, and Existential Fear
• Summary — As a highly social species, humans have an evolved tendency to favor the ‘in-group.’ This trait significantly impacts our immunity, or lack of it, to false or harmful information. The emerging science of cognitive immunology must take full account of this fact. 'Minimal groups' have no purpose, past, or future. Real groups have a purpose – family protection, soccer team victory, religious dominance, or national prestige — they have long histories, rationales that usually involve trying to get a competitive advantage over other groups, and they have a strong sense of continuity into the future. Even in ‘minimal groups’ people allocate rewards to their ingroup and impose sanctions on the outgroup, even when the overall costs and benefits of their group-favoring choices are to everyone’s detriment! There appears to be a primitive drive in the human mind to define oneself in a group instantly and then automatically favor that group at the expense of an outgroup. Feeling bad about oneself makes people more tribal. It’s as if in compensation, the collective ego of the ingroup offers some protection. The fear of our extinction seems especially potent. One theory to explain this goes by the rather forbidding name of Terror Management Theory. The core idea of terror management theory is that we work hard to gain self-esteem and support for our worldview so as to ward off existential anxiety and that work pays off. It can be hard for millions of people to feel part of a group, but one surefire way of making that happen is to remind them of their mortality through fear and threat.

 
Week 5

• Speaker — Barry Mauer
• Article — Bad Ideas Recruit the Mind’s Immune System to Protect Themselves
• Summary — Some bad ideas get past a mind’s defenses and then hijack the mind’s immune system. This process is similar to what happens with metastatic cancer, which spreads from one location in the body to a distant one. Metastatic cancer “flips” elements of the body’s immune system, recruiting them to defend tumors and attack the body. When bad ideas hijack the mind’s immune system, these bad ideas become resistant to correction and the mind becomes susceptible to more bad ideas. Bad ideas spread in the mind and can eventually take it over. A pathological belief is one that “is likely to be false, to produce unnecessary harm, and to be held with conviction and tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is likely false and will produce unnecessary harm.” A group with a hijacked mental immune system is a cult; in a cult, the group’s mental immune system is altered to protect the group’s bad ideas at the expense of the group’s wellbeing, the wellbeing of its members, and of those around it. Institutions such as schools and journalism play outsized roles in enhancing or corrupting the mental immune systems of individual people and of groups.

 
Week 6

• Speaker — Steije Hofhuis
• Article — Witch-Hunting: A Lethal Cultural “Virus”?
• Summary — Historians are traditionally dismissive of comparisons between the evolution of living nature and history. History is thought to be far too complex and capricious to be captured in general principles. But what if we take the aforementioned comparisons seriously? Viruses are known to be extremely well adapted to reproduce within their environment. They make people cough and sneeze, for example, which enables them to infect others through the air. It appears like an intelligent design, but in fact, it was only a blind Darwinian process that did the manufacturing: variants that were accidentally adapted were cumulatively preserved in repeated rounds of selection. Biologists call this “design without a designer.” “The implementation of witchcraft persecutions spread contagiously, but any politically coordinated effort with that direct intent was conspicuously lacking.” It was a cultural design without a designer. The question of what function ideas such as the witches’ sabbath, flying witches, or child witches had for the people involved, or for their communities, does not necessarily bring us any further. For them, it was often harmful. But when we look at it from the reproductive angle of the witch-hunting phenomenon itself, all of it makes perfect functional sense. These cultural variants were ingeniously adapted to make this cultural “virus” spread.

 
Week 7

• Speaker — Ed Gibney
• Article — Evolving My View on Mental Immunity
• Summary — The actions of the so-called mental immune system may just be part of a larger, more generalizable function of the brain. When our minds swarm with doubts, it may be easier to think of this as problem-solving for our predictive worldview, rather than the actions of some kind of neuronal version of white blood cells. That way, the swarming of reinforcements that I personally experienced can also be explained by the same mechanism. This seems more parsimonious. Inoculation theorists have shown that exposure to weakened information threats will tend to “inoculate” a mind against more formidable versions of those same threats. But perhaps this isn’t inoculating a mind against bad ideas so much as scaffolding a worldview in another rigid direction. If I’m right, then mind inoculation will only work if it is received from a trusted source. Even if the weakened idea is a “bad” one, whenever we perceive the inoculation as coming from “them” then the inoculation should not work as intended. In fact, don’t we see this all the time with the sharing, belief, and disbelief of ideas among friends, foes, and relatives? Andy’s definition of mental immunology is, “The mind’s wherewithal for warding off bad ideas.” That’s just a very broad description of a wide-ranging function. We could easily adopt this and still say that the brain can perform this function using general mechanisms, even if there isn’t a specifically evolved mental immune system, like there is for bodily immune systems. If so, how can we highlight this metaphor’s similarities without brushing over the differences and leading people astray? Perhaps making a clear list of the differences between bodily immunity and cognitive immunity may actually help with getting past some resistance to this project.

 
Week 8

• Speaker — Steve Gilbert
• Article — Changing A Belief Means Changing How You Feel: The Role of Emotions in Cognitive Immunology
• Summary — Psychotherapists have long known, and science has now confirmed, that there is no thought without feeling. All thought is affect-laden and important personal beliefs very much so. Changing your mind does indeed mean changing how you feel, especially so for beliefs, which are more emotion-sensitive than knowledge. Thus, changing a salient belief, toxic or otherwise, is often too heavy a lift for reason alone. Feelings “may be experienced as internal evidence for beliefs which rivals the power of external evidence from the environment” and may be given more weight than reason and evidence. Feelings also guide attention. Donovan Schaefer discusses this in the context of cogency theory: “To say an argument is cogent doesn’t mean, exactly, that it’s true. It means it appeals, or it’s compelling.” So, what might this look like in practice? Client-centered therapy centers on active (i.e., reflective) listening, empathy, and clarification of content and affect. Cognitive therapy focuses on how thoughts and beliefs cause feelings and how modifying thoughts can change feeling-states. My subsequent career as a psychotherapist taught me that both approaches are more powerful when combined than either alone. This review of the role of emotion in belief suggests that debunking may be more effective if intervention begins with a relaxation exercise, followed by an empathic conversation centered on the person’s feelings about their beliefs, next an elicitation of commitment to the values of open-mindedness and evidentiary belief, and lastly a presentation of disconfirming evidence and reasoned argument.  All too often, the cart is put before the horse.

 
Week 9

• Speaker — Melanie Trecek-King
• Article — Teach Skills, Not Facts
• Summary — Why are nearly all undergraduate students, regardless of major, required to take science? The obvious answer seemed to be to foster science literacy and critical thinking … but what does that mean? Science is so much more than a bunch of facts to memorize. It’s a process. It’s a way of learning about the world, of trying to get closer to the truth by subjecting explanations to testing and critically scrutinizing the evidence. It’s not just what we know; it’s how we know. Basically, science is good thinking. To equip students with the skills necessary to evaluate claims, I provide them with a toolkit, appropriately summarized by the acronym FLOATERS. This stands for Falsifiability, Logic, Objectivity, Alternative explanations, Tentative conclusions, Evidence, and Replicability. Another of the most important lessons for students is about the limits of perception and memory. We often fail to recognize that our perceptions are subjective and highly biased and that our memories are flawed and unreliable. After students have a better appreciation of how flawed their thinking can be and the importance of skepticism, we turn to information literacy. It’s important that students recognize the limits of their knowledge and learn how to be good consumers of information more broadly. Science literacy is about more than memorizing facts. Instead of teaching students what to think, a good science education teaches them how to think.

 
Week 10 — RESCHEDULED DUE TO ILLNESS
 
Week 11

• Speaker — Zafir Ivanov
• Article — Reframing Mental Immunity
• Summary — I think with a slight reframing of this idea we will have a more accurate diagnosis of susceptibility to infodemics, which can lead to better treatment outcomes. The immune system is a layered system of defence. The innate immune system includes physical barriers such as the skin and mucous membranes lining the digestive and respiratory tracts as well as an immediate nonspecific smothering response by defensive cells. Beyond the innate defences comes the adaptive or acquired immune system where antibodies are custom made to the invader. Mark Sheller proposed the behavioural immune system, in which aspects of our behaviour aids in the prevention of infection to the point where it makes sense to think of these behaviours as a first line of defence of the immune system. Karen Shanker and her colleagues realized that behaviours associated with avoiding and combating infection affects not just the individual but also the group. They suggested broadening the behavioural immune system to the inclusive behavioural immune system. I think this is what our response to threatening ideas is built on. I propose that we stop referring to the mind having an immune system of its own and instead reframe this as the mind's contribution to our overall immune system. With this slight reframing we can avoid talk of metaphor and focus on more accurately understanding our various responses to harmful information. I also have many concerns about inoculation theory and think this needs to be reframed as well. My main concern is that inoculation theory requires no modification to be weaponized. Instead, generalizable tools that work with almost all ideas are not custom-made vaccines to specific viral ideas, they are much more like broad-spectrum antivirals. I think our efforts are best focused on developing new and refining existing tools with reduced weaponizability as a design criterion. Tools that are simple with obvious benefits that are likely to gain wide acceptance. Tools such as the New Socratic Method, Reason’s Fulcrum, Scout Mindset, the Pro-Truth Pledge, and Intuitive Bayesian Reasoning all have an antiviral effect.

 
 
Week 12

• Speaker — Luke Johnson
• Article — Paradigms in the Cognitive Sciences
• Summary — In his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn developed a philosophy of science that has since influenced many an intellectual through the idiomatization of the phrase “paradigm shift.” In Chapter 2 of Structure, Kuhn introduces the criteria for something to serve as a paradigm: it must be “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity… [and] sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” Counterinstances to existing paradigms are viewed as anomalies until sufficient evidence and “extraordinary research” lead to paradigm shifts as a result of new theories that account for these “anomalies.” Essentially invented by Andy Norman, PhD, a philosopher of science, Cognitive Immunology is most extensively articulated in his book, Mental Immunity. But is Cognitive Immunology a distinct field of science, and if so, how? Or is it a pre-paradigm school of thought? What crisis is cognitive immunology addressing and what paradigm or paradigms it is challenging? Science communicators, public health officials, and educators have struggled to address the crisis of misinformation with the application of existing science. Cognitive Immunology seems to be addressing the failure of other cognitive sciences to provide solutions to the ideological polarization, extremism, and culture war of our time. Only time will tell if cognitive immunology spurs a scientific revolution, to what degree it influences human progress, and how it fits into the history of science.

 
Week 13

• Speaker — Maarten Boudry
• Article — Are Some False Beliefs Good For You?
• Summary — We all entertain some false beliefs about the world and about ourselves. Being totally deluded about reality is probably a bad idea, but who could object against some “little follies”, a few judicious falsehoods to sugar-coat the harshness of reality? To phrase the discussion in cognitive immunology terms, we have to look for misbeliefs that are mutualists – a relationship in which the host benefits from the “intruder” – rather than parasites, which only harm their host. Once you’ve done the hard work and weighed the costs and benefits of different follies, it’s time to embrace the most salubrious ones. But of course, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just flip a switch in your brain and decide to believe something. In order to find out which misbeliefs are beneficial and which are harmful, you have to investigate the attendant benefits and downsides. But once you’ve done that, you are no longer in a position to embrace your favorite misbelief, which means that you’re also unable to reap its advantages. Is there any way out of this paradox? For my part, I’m not so sure. Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief? Reality, as the writer Philip K. Dick argued, is that which, after you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. At the end of the day, would you not prefer to know the truth, warts and all?

 
Week 14

• Speaker — Andy Norman
• Article — Do Minds Have Immune Systems?
• Summary — Do minds have immune systems? In this paper, we remove several obstacles to deciding this question in a rigorously scientific way. First, we show why the scientific community needs to take up the question. Then, we give the hypothesis a name: the Mental Immune Systems Thesis (or MIST) is the claim that minds do in fact have immune systems. It’s tempting to dismiss this claim as “mere metaphor” – and many do – but that stance turns out to be indefensible. It is at best a well-intentioned stopgap: one that postpones a pivotal reckoning. So how to settle the question? Above all, we need clarity about the meaning of “immune system.” To that end, we examine candidate definitions, nominate one, and show why it makes sense to embrace that definition. We then consider an evolutionary argument for MIST: mental immune systems, so defined, didn’t just evolve, they had to evolve – to protect minded creatures from informational threats. We then detail some of MIST’s testable implications and summarize the extant empirical evidence. Finally, we discuss the prospects of cognitive immunology, a research program that (1) posits mental immune systems and (2) proceeds to examine and explain how they work. MIST, we conclude, is a hypothesis that deserves serious scientific development.

 
Other Essays in the Mental Immunity Series on This View of Life

• The Analogy of/and Inoculation Theory to Mental Immunity by Josh Compton and Sander van der Linden
• The Many Faces of Cognitive Immunology by Stephan Lewandowsky
• Building Mental Immunity by Nele Strynckx

 
Post-Generation Comments and Questions

• Questions for the MIST by Ed Gibney
• Do minds have immune systems? The title question from Andy’s latest paper cannot be answered without more clarification of the MIST. In particular, a definition of the general abstract label “immune systems” needs to be settled upon, a definition of the particular abstract label of a “mental immune system” needs to be agreed upon, and definitions of the component parts of this system such as “mental inoculation”, “mental parasite”, and “mental vaccines” all need to be developed and confirmed. Until the clarification of each of these terms occurs, the answer remains “no” for each and every one of them because new scientific theories remain guilty until proven innocent. Once this philosophical work of defining terms is complete, there are still two options going forward. The first may be to say yes, all of these philosophical definitions are logically consistent and by definition it is obvious or demonstrable that they all exist. This would create a philosophical argument for looking at the world in a particular way using a particular set of words. The second and more difficult option is to define all of these terms in such a way that they create falsifiable and empirically verifiable predictions. This would create a scientific argument that only remains to be tested in order to either be accepted into consensus, refined, or rejected.

​ABSTRACT

The purpose of this report is to examine the very well documented worldview of Ken Wilber, which has been developing over the last several decades in the many volumes that he has written about his Integral Philosophy. We started our analysis using a framework for worldviews that looks at a person’s positions in the six main branches of philosophy. These positions can also be tied together by a unifying narrative that can be either explicit or implicit. Once we documented all of these elements of Wilber’s worldview, we attempted to analyze it using the three criteria that David Sloan Wilson listed in his essay titled “Evaluating Narratives of Conscious Evolution.” 1. Is the narrative psychologically and emotionally motivating? 2. What does the narrative cause people to do? 3. How well does the narrative comport with current scientific knowledge? In the end, there were serious and substantial points of agreement with Wilber’s worldview that have made our overall efforts worthwhile. However, we believe there are several points in Wilber’s worldview that make our shared goals difficult to reach together. The vision of ProSocial World (PW) is: “To unleash the power of science and inquiry to help us notice what’s within us and between us, to create a more harmonious world for everyone around us.” Some vocal critics in the Integral movement have asked Ken Wilber to update his views based on the latest in evolutionary science. We can only add to that request since Integral Spirituality’s stated goals of understanding life and creating a world that works for all are laudable indeed and deserve as accurate and motivating a worldview as possible.

​I’ve mentioned in quite a few different posts now that I’ve been working to create an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle (EPC) on a platform that has been built by ProSocial World. PW is an NGO that was co-founded by the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson who is famous for championing the idea of group selection, so in keeping with that, this PW platform gives tools to groups to help them cooperate better and make meaningful change in the world. One of the common ways these groups act is via 12-week “sprint sessions” that are modeled after Robert Shaffer’s 100-day Rapid Results programs. This also aligns with the length of a semester at a university, but we speak of them in evolutionary terms so we call them “generations” in order to emphasize that they are something that can be varied, selected, and retained as they hopefully improve over the lifetime of the group.
 
For our generation 1, we spent several weeks going over ProSocial methods (which I discussed previously in theory, and in practice) and we also had an amazing talk from David Edmonds (author of a recent book about the Vienna Circle) about why Vienna and why discussion circles work so well. After that, we had 7 events over 6 weeks, which gave us a brief survey of how evolution impacts different branches of philosophy. We recorded videos of these events and hosted online chats about them on our members-only platform. And while anyone who joins ProSocial can see these recordings in full and engage in the online conversation with our members (currently about 50 people), I also wanted to share a summary of these talks here. That will help old members to remember what we’ve done, new members to catch up, and prospective members to decide whether or not to join. We’ve completed three such generations on very different topics (and are about to start a fourth), so I’ll share similar summaries for other generations in future posts.
 
The seven talks we hosted were:
 

1. “Evolutionary Metaphysics — How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy” by Ed Gibney
2. “Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
3. “Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
4. “Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
5. “Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
6. An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
7. “Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst

 
These were a really wonderful way to kick things off. They built a lot of momentum for the group and I’m excited to share their main ideas with you now. Enjoy!
 
 
1. “Evolutionary Metaphysics” by Ed Gibney
This talk was the first in a series organized by the EPC about how evolution can affect all branches of philosophy. For metaphysics, Ed began by arguing that after examining the most famous philosophical thought experiments in history, he felt that, “The hypothesis of a physical universe survives.” This position of physicalism/naturalism was recently supported by the stoic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci in his essay “Metaphysics dissolved. Because who needs it?” In that essay, Massimo claims that the job of philosophers should be to synthesize all of the natural knowledge we have, rather than spend time speculating about what else might be out there.
 
Within this school of thought, Ed shared a favorite paper of his from Dan Dennett which shows how evolution ought to shape this synthesis of what exists. The paper was drawn from the book How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations For Naturalism, which was published in 2017. Dan's paper—“Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism”—was the first entry in this edited collection. Ed shared 9 key passages from this paper, including these 3 quotes:
 

• “Ever since Socrates…the idea of clear sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy [but] Darwin showed us that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes.”
• “In particular, the demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.”
• “There are other philosophical puzzles that can benefit, I suspect, from exploring the no-longer-forbidden territory opened up by Darwin's critique of essentialism. … We can perhaps begin to reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts from more modest ingredients.”

 
These quotes clearly show how the naturalist view within metaphysics ought to be mindful of the gradual emergence of phenomena in nature. But this, of course, has not been the case in the long history of philosophy. And so, there is much work now to be done in many areas.
 
Ed then gave several examples from his own work that show how “this view of life” has impacted the philosophy he writes. These included essays about the meaning of life, what good is (ethics), what harm is (politics), how consciousness and free will evolved, and how knowledge (epistemology) is evolving as well.These examples all show how important the evolutionary view of the world is and how it can continue to help us make significant changes to the way philosophy is done.
 
 
2. “Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by noting how the arts include what we traditionally think of in this sphere—music, dance, painting, sculpture, storytelling—but they should also include rituals and religion as a collection of inspiring activities organized around the sacred. What’s important to consider here is Durkheim’s definition of religion: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things…which unite in one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”
 
Arts like these have long been considered puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Why are they fitness enhancing? Do these traits exist because of mismatch, spandrels, drift, or as by-products? Or as a sexual display? David has weighed in on this debate by writing about art (including religion) as a group-level cultural adaptation.
 
To David, multilevel cultural evolution provides a new theoretical foundation for group-level functionalism. The study of the arts as group-level cultural adaptations is more general than just the study of religion, though.Other good examples include works from: Ellen Dissanayake, Kathryn Coe, William McNeill, Steven Brown, Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll. Far from “cheesecake of the mind”, the arts are “vital organs” in the “anatomy and physiology” of cultures that act as “superorganisms”. David finished his brief talk by sharing some good examples of how people are acting on this: the Science to Narrative Chain, StoryAction, New Stories, Story Commons, and InsightShare.
 
 
3. “Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
Natalie’s talk took a look at how art has helped advance human thinking in general and about evolution in particular. She did this be examining how art has helped to depict aspects of the evolution of life and how then these depictions have evolved over time. These depictions are part of the cosmologies of an evolutionary philosophy, where Natalie defined cosmologies as the parts of worldviews concerning the nature of matter, space, and time, and what has happened over the course of natural history.
 
Nathalie shared four major western cosmologies. The first one was from the Ancient Greeks, which has roots all the way back to the neolithic and the origin of agricultural societies. Typical diagrams from this worldview include wheels of time and chains of being. An example of that is the zodiac. A second cosmology is that of the Romans and the Judeo-Christians. These relied on scales of nature, presenting concepts of chronologies and different categories of pedigrees. But later, with the rise of classical physics, natural history, and the origin of scientific thinking, we see the third cosmology where linear diagrams are changed into more precise timelines and phylogenetic trees. Finally, today, in the fourth cosmology, these views are being changed into networks.
 
Nathalie presented more details on all of these, looking into the different kinds of artwork that have been introduced and from the three elements that define a cosmology: matter, space, and time. Wheels of time, for example, adhere to a circular notion of time The Romans and the Judeo-Christians introduced a linear notion of time. Classical physics saw the introduction of evolutionary trees which introduce a multi-linear notion of time. And modern physics in evolutionary biology today questions the very existence of time or whether it is multi-dimensional.
 
In conclusion, Nathalie said that art enables us to depict worldviews, and there is a back and forth where art influences science and science influences art. And therefore, it's very important to choose the right images to convey the right messages, especially when you look into scientific illustrations of evolution.
 
 
4. “Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
Andy began by noting how the roots of philosophy started 2500 years ago with the intentional search for wisdom. Since then, there have been notable successes but we've largely failed to create a human population that is significantly wiser. And the discipline of philosophy has mostly lost sight of its original objective. However, a new form of epistemology that draws from the biological sciences might help. A colloquial way of talking about epistemology is “how do we sort bad ideas from good ideas”. This simple description shows the relevance of this project to what's going on in the world today since there are a lot of people who are learning fake facts online and who are really having trouble distinguishing between sense and nonsense.
 
Andy described some current cultural assumptions that are causing this “epistemological crisis”. For example, our view that we “have” ideas, as if they were separable from us and we alone have agency over choosing which ones we believe. This discounts the view of ideas as something like bugs or germs that (without intention) can replicate and multiply all on their own. We also tend to regard ourselves as “entitled to our opinions”. This stresses our cognitive rights to the exclusion of our cognitive responsibilities. And since a right is something that you're not supposed to interfere with, and critical thinking does in fact interfere with belief, there's a very short path to seeing critical thinking as trampling on one’s rights. This kind of culture excuses closed-mindedness and ideological rigidity, making us even more vulnerable to infectious nonsense.
 
Andy then laid out what an alternative might look like, which he called his mental immunity framework. On this view, minds are actually infection-prone colonies of ideas. Mind infections are common. Cognitive contagion is real. But the good news is that our minds actually have immune systems that work to ward off mistaken information. It’s an observable fact that some minds ward off bad ideas better than others, so we need to scientifically understand why some minds are relatively immune to such things and other minds are more susceptible.
 
Some research about this has emerged from the last 70 years of studying “inoculation theory”. Just as white blood cells swarm an injury, something similar happens when information that people feel is threatening comes along. Their minds generate antibodies and the antibodies of the mind are doubts. When doubts swarm to the scene of a new piece of information that you find distressing, dangerous, challenging, or upsetting, that's your mind's immune system in action. And Andy envisions a world where we develop cognitive immunotherapies to protect vulnerable minds and make humanity substantially wiser and more prone to engage in things that promote our collective flourishing.
 
 
5. “Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by sharing a memorable quote from the British philosopher Simon Blackburn. David had asked him to define morality as you would in an introductory philosophy course and Simon said, “I think at its simplest, it's a system whereby we put pressure on ourselves and others to conform to certain kinds of behaviors.” So, David noted, there are two sides to morality—one more coercive (pressure on others) and the second more gentle and humane (pressure on ourselves). And this is exactly what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective. Moral systems are somehow designed for the good of the group (defined as within the moral circle). There's a compulsory component and there's a voluntary component.
 
From a multi-level perspective, this social control has the effect of suppressing within-group selection where cheaters and free-riders can prosper. Instead, between-group selection becomes the dominant evolutionary force. That's the definition of a major transition and it explains just about everything that's distinctively human (for example how violence is 100 times more likely in chimp societies compared to human ones). And these two dimensions of morality must go together—the compulsory dimension makes it safe to express the voluntary dimension. Without the compulsory dimension, the voluntary dimension would be too easily exploited. That accounts for the two faces of morality.
 
Turning to religion, David noted two major definitions. One is from Durkheim, which is all about moral communities. He called religion, “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.” The second definition, of course, is a central belief in supernatural agents. But these definitions are orthogonal to each other. It's possible to imagine evolutionary pluses or minuses for each of them. David then went through several examples of examining religions through this evolutionary lens, all of which showed how religions have adapted to function in their particular ecologies. And in the same way that different cells of our body have the same genes but are differentially expressed, David has produced research that shows how different congregations within the same broad religion can exhibit very different behaviors by means of differential activation of different passages in the Bible.
 
David finished his sketch of morality by noting the “universal elements of spirituality” that were named by a Catholic and Hindu contemplative named Wayne Teasdale. These are key to a subgroup of ProSocial World called ProSocial Spirituality and they may show how a vital part of spirituality comes from both recognizing the individual as part of something larger than itself and also a willingness to subordinate one's self-interest to a higher good. This straightforwardly makes sense as the psychology of an individual within a group organism and it may just be how we are programmed to think in situations where we are functioning in the context of a highly cooperative group.
 
 
6. An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
"Examined Lives" sessions are conversational and meant to produce "mosaics" of individual viewpoints, so that when viewed collectively they yield a greater understanding. These sessions usually start off with a brief five-minute introduction on a topic followed by a few thought-provoking open-ended questions just to kind of get the ball rolling. Then a few follow-up questions can be inserted from time to time just to help refocus, redirect, or re-energize the discussion.
 
The topic for this session was broadly about the science of evolution, but the conversation mostly revolved around the ideas of what "biophilosophy" or "evolutionary philosophy" are as opposed to the "philosophy of biology" or the "philosophy of evolution". The latter (Philosophy of X) brings philosophical tools to a field to help clarify thinking there. The general consensus in this meeting, however, was that this group brings learning from the science of evolution to classic philosophical questions. This fits the format of X Philosophy, which in this case is Evolutionary Philosophy.
 
Many other points were raised about the implications of this. By tying ourselves to the science of evolution, we seem to tie ourselves to a metaphysics of naturalism which considers evidence received by the senses. Just like evolutionary psychology, this can be thought of as a lens or approach. Noting “Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning”—where absolute ignorance replaces absolute wisdom as the starting point for the universe—has all sorts of philosophical implications. Being aware of the proximate vs. ultimate distinction from evolution can help clear up confusion in other fields. The universal mechanisms in evolution of variation, selection, and retention can be fruitfully applied to many problems. This is different than mere “change” which is sometimes implied by casual usage of the word evolution. Tinbergen’s four questions (function, mechanism, phylogeny, and ontogeny), which is a standard tool in evolution to understand the entirety of a biological phenomenon, also provides a comprehensive framework for many issues in philosophy. The field of evolution is the properly large umbrella under which other sciences and philosophical subdisciplines can fit. In fact, the concept of evolution can even be applied beyond the realm of biology, which only considers living organisms. The gradualist view of life that comes from considering evolution is something very different than the essentialist view of life that came from the Vienna Circle studying physics. It helps cross the fuzzy boundary between life and non-life. Understanding the “major evolutionary transitions” that life has gone through sheds a lot of light on why the world is the way it is, where it might go next, and how it might do so.
 
 
7. “Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst
JW sketched the contours of an understanding of organizations and institutions as “major evolutionary transitions.” And at the same time he tried to give an idea of how this might improve social science theory. He noted that one famous question in economics is simply “Why do firms exist?” In fact, Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this topic. But it was largely in contrast to markets. Markets are efficient, so why then would firms exist? Oliver Williamson won another Nobel Prize in economics for this topic, also framing the question of why firms exist as an alternative to the market. So, this runs very deep in the field.
 
However, where might we go if we ask this question from an evolutionary explanation? We can start with Tinbergen's four questions. There are both proximate and ultimate explanations. And within the ultimate explanations there's a functional explanation and a phylogenetic explanation. So, “Why do firms exist?” This calls for us to develop a functional explanation complemented by a phylogenetic historical evolutionary explanation. (Perhaps a Nobel Prize is waiting for this.)
 
Another question to consider is how could or should we think of firms? Firms are in some sense higher-level collective entities so if you start with individuals that are competing, then something like a firm is an organized unit of individuals. In this sense, it is a collective entity, a higher level of organization. That quickly brings one to the so-called major evolutionary transitions (MET) and for JW there is a very close resemblance between these METs as discussed by Smith and Szathmary and our understanding of firms. This, then, also brings in the topics of multi-level selection as well as social dilemmas and collective action problems. So, the evolutionary lens brings a rich set of questions to consider.
 
JW went into further detail about each of these questions and concepts. And for social scientists this involves a new quote-unquote language. The participants in this session may be familiar with this language, but for JW, there is much work to be done in his field to spread this kind of thinking. And this brings in even broader topics such as moral psychology (studying how individuals react in collective action problems), and politics (how governance is accomplished both within firms and also across firms within societies).