Origins
When I was 16 years old, I was given a taste of cultural disorientation when my family moved from the suburbs to the country. I was taken away from the friends I had known and the (mostly frivolous in retrospect) activities I was used to. I found myself with plenty of alone time in a naturally beautiful landscape of forests and fields, a peninsula situated on the northern most reaches of the Chesapeake Bay.
I remember the moment when, keenly feeling the need to reorient myself, I decided to consciously find an anchor that could not be taken away. I needed a place to stand from which I could look out on the universe, a stable perspective and I needed a compass so that no matter how far I travelled into that universe, I could find my way home again.
I vaguely realized that religion provided that perspective for a great many people but felt no inclination (at that time) to go in that direction. So, I set out to create my own “philosophy of life.” It never occurred to me that I might find exactly what I needed in any of the philosophies, created by minds far greater than my own, that have informed and guided people since the beginning of written history. This was something I had to do for myself.
In this task I had two principles, a confidence in the scientific method, as best I understood it, and a deep seated belief, or maybe an intuition would be a better term, that everything in the universe is connected to everything else. If you consider a thing out of its context, try to grasp what it is in isolation, your understanding of it can never be complete.
My excitement about what science can reveal began as a preschooler when my mother brought home a picture book about dinosaurs. I am not sure when I latched on to the “connectedness principle,” but this expresses it beautifully:
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
So began a life-time habit of fitting the pieces together, building what I now realize is a model of reality. The 4-year Great Books curriculum at St, John’s College in Annapolis was a perfect nurturing environment for this project. I was a bit out of step with most of the other students though, who appeared to be focused on learning what the great minds who wrote the books thought about life, the universe and everything, while I was focused on finding out what I thought about these things, a subtle but profound difference.
If you have ever put together a large jigsaw puzzle, imagine a puzzle that contains an image of the entire universe as it may encompassed by the human mind. But you don’t have a copy of that image on the box the pieces came in to guide you. You put the pieces together one-by-one and it takes a lifetime. The borders, the bounding box comes together first, then islands of fitted pieces emerge, then some of the islands come together to form larger islands, then one by one, the islands find their home, anchored to the frame. Gradually you begin to discern the entire image.
For me, the bounding box, the borders, were epistemological, how do we know what we know, what can we say about the relationship between our notions of the world and reality itself, and what is the scope of what is knowable by human minds?
As the larger structures, the islands came together, I recognized coherent theories about the major areas of human concern and endeavor, always grounded in a slowly evolving understanding of what kind of beings we humans are. But as it turned out in the later stages, as the islands began to merge, I found, as often as not, that I had to rotate them this way or that to make them fit together and into the frame. I realized that I had been looking at some subjects off axis, maybe orthogonal or even upside down compared to how they ended up. All my notions of the pillars of civilization, art, science, religion, education, politics, commerce, were all transformed into something other than what they had appeared to be and not just to me, but from what I could see, to everyone else as well.
There were still plenty of pieces lying on the table and blank spaces yet to be filled, and there always will be, but the day came when I could grasp the whole for the first time. When I consider the individual pieces of this puzzle, there are very few about which I can say, this is my work. I was merely the curator of ideas created in the minds of others. Every book I read, every person I have ever known, contributed something. But it is quite a diverse collection, and they have come together to create something unique. I had found the perspective I was looking for, but it was a lonely one.
A New Vision
When I stand back and consider the picture that has come together for me, I see that everything there is grounded in the human perspective, it is a theory of human nature as much as it is of nature itself. Good theories are recognized by how well they do two things. First, they give insight into why things are the way they are and how they came to be that way. Second, they allow you to imagine how they could be different and predict what will happen if you change things up.
What I see about the way things are, is that humans have created an environment for themselves that has so diverged from the one where our fundamental nature formed – that we have lost touch with what we are. We feel as if we are strangers in our own land, even though we are its architects. Yet to change things too, is in our nature, that is the paradox of the human condition. Whenever people decide to “go back to nature,” a perennial solution to “civilization and it’s discontents” they mostly don’t care for it. When we lived as animals, life was hard and short and today most people would far rather spend time on the psychologist’s couch than see their children eaten by cave bears.
From these realizations arises a compelling question. Is it possible to change the environment we have created for ourselves in such a way that we could still enjoy the fruits of civilization and technology yet still experience life as nature intended? It would require that many if not all, of the pillars of civilization would have to be re-envisioned, redesigned and reassembled to create an environment that better accords with the fundamental human needs that those institutions were intended to serve in the first place.
I think the answer to the question is yes, because as is often the case, the question arose from the fact that I was already looking at an answer, a new vison, nothing less than a new architectural style for human civilizations. But visions cry out to be made real and if getting to the vision was the work of a lifetime, turning it into an architecture is another. Still, one must begin, I call this vision the New Atlantis.
