ABSTRACT
We are on the cusp of a remarkable moment in human history, where metaphysics becomes a matter of public policy. Technology could make it possible to live in a virtual world indistinguishable from what we used to call reality. But technical solutions can only take us part of the way forward today. We have reached the limits of our pursuit of infinity and will be driven back to perennial questions of reason, character, and restraint. To develop this point, I turn to nature in the sense of Paul Shepard’s Nature and Madness (1982). Shepard argues that our consciousness evolved in concert with the natural world, and sanity and satisfaction lies in being attentive to its rhythms. For millennia this environment consisted of small social groups living in constant contact with nature. This was destroyed in the blink of an eye. Since the mid-19th century, changes have come in a flash: electric lights, indoor plumbing, instantaneous communication at a distance, the growth of mega-cities. The point isn’t that our recent inventions are bad, but we haven’t co-evolved with these innovations. Our bodies and minds are anachronisms, out of sync with the world we’ve built. It’s left our moral life out of joint. I explore an alternative to a culture thoroughly dominated by science and technology, one that strives for maturity and attends to the natural rhythms of nature.
