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Thank you for the kind feedback.

There was a period, which lasted for decades, when process thought was for the most part process theology, a school of thought within the tradition of American liberal theology. Whitehead’s Process and Reality was of course a work of philosophy, but it came out when Anglo-American philosophy was taking its analytic and linguistic turn, and that turn meant that academic philosophers turned their backs on Whitehead’s work in metaphysics. They also were biased against his metaphysics because it included God. Theologians, on the other hand, took up and developed his thought precisely because it supported theism, and theism without supernaturalism and dualism. And so for quite a while process thought was theologically oriented. This is no longer the case, process thought and the process movement has burgeoned into process philosophy, process psychology, process ecology, process physics, process economics, et al. There are even process thinkers writing on hip-hop culture from a process perspective (Dr. Jon Gill). So I would say that the process community—the work of the Cobb Institute is a case in point—is already introducing the process perspective into all of the fields and walks of life that it needs to be introduced into in order to make an impact on the mainstream conversation about important issues such as climate change and envisioning/evolving a post-capitalist economy. Process thought is also being promoted and is growing in popularity in China, where I’m sure it’s taken a secular form capable of appealing to those with little or no interest in its theological dimension. The process community is indeed already taking the kind of wide-ranging approach to disseminating process thought that it needs to take to make a difference, it just needs to keep up its good work and hopefully process thought will catch on in a bigger way and find its way into the political conversation on existential issues.

In my view the divine lure away from a valorization of dominative power—dominative power over other human beings, and over economic wealth, and over nature—is multidimensional.

It includes a dimension of the lure and nudging of science (promoted by God even if resisted by some theists) toward the scientific insight that our well-being is ultimately and immediately dependent on the well-being of the earth, and that it’s therefore folly to think that we can continue to dominate and despoil the earth without experiencing self-destructive ecological blowback. Another related dimension involves God working with our rationality to help us to get to a place where it’s simply recognized as rational to be just and ecologically responsible.

It also includes a dimension of the lure toward a social justice consciousness that will aim us as individuals, and as a society, and as a global community toward the abolition of harmful systems of domination, such as patriarchy, nationalism, racism, and capitalism. This dimension in the largely post-Christian West is largely secular, but nevertheless reflects what some of us take to be the liberationist values of God: negative freedom, which includes freedom from the economic dominance of capitalist elites, not the classical liberal “freedom” to be a dominating capitalist who deprives working-class folks of freedom; positive freedom, defined as the freedom to achieve creative self-actualization, the actualization of the best self-creative and existential possibilities (“eternal objects” in Whiteheadian language) of human beings; universalized and democratized economic empowerment that reflects the equal intrinsic value of all human beings and makes their optimal self-actualization possible; and respect and liberation for diversity, the creative universe being an ongoing production of novelty and diversity, novelty and diversity which contributes to and enriches God’s experience. I hold the process theological perspective that God is most definitely luring human beings toward these liberationist values, human beings who are spiritual and also human beings involved in completely secular social movements. Secular social justice movements then are another key way that people are being moved toward caring for each other and for Creation (since a justice consciousness has overlap with an ecological consciousness).

And another vehicle for the divine lure is of course spirituality. Human beings are also being lured toward a kind of spirituality that emphasizes the intrinsic value of all actual entities, and interdependence.

All of the above is contributing to helping a humanity that is engrossed in drives and behaviors such as domination, exploitation, and accumulation to see and enact God’s lure (despite often failing to identify it as God’s lure) toward communal relationality with each other, and the rest of life on the planet. The vehicles and vectors helping to carry God’s “call forward” into our consciousness, the means of getting people to orientate their lives by divine lures then are many and various. To my mind identifying those means isn’t really a challenge, what they are isn’t the question; the question, rather, is, at the aggressive rate that we’re courting a catastrophic climate change scenario will humankind collectively be drawn in a better direction by divine lures in time? Hopefully we will be.

All spot-on thoughts.

The attached book should be of help.

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I certainly can’t argue with your observation about “the art of managing differentiation and interconnectedness”. For a great many people living together in a community in which they’re challenged to actualize a high degree of interactivity and interconnectivity, to thoroughly share their lives rather than being atomized and unabashedly egoistc individuals, and doing so without an authoritarian structure to discipline them to do so would be a challenge that they wouldn’t be up for. But that’s due more to our being acculturated for an atomized and selfish existence than it is to human nature. In fact, throughout most of human history, and in most societies most human beings have existed in a pretty communal fashion. Their communities may not all have been examples of full-on communalism, and in many cases were too hierarchical for my taste, but their way of life and economic production was quite relational and communitarian. This is historical, empirical proof that real community is in the realm of possibility for human beings. After human beings have grown up in real communities, and been acculturated for interdependence for, say three or four generations, the communal form of life would come naturally rather than as a challenge to most of our descendants. And it would also help a great deal if such communities didn’t exist in and have to contend with a larger capitalist society whose economic dynamics and cultural dominance are impossible to escape being undermined by.

You’re very welcome.

Thanks for the article, and the Amazon link. Btw, I read the reviews of the book and agree with the following which I’ll copy & paste from the review of a reader who goes by the initial G:
“In the first chapter, he [the author] states, ‘As the first non-Western global hegemon in five centuries, China is confronting the international community with a potential rupture in its centuries-long discourse over human rights.’ Let’s stop for a moment and consider the brutal colonialism and exploitation practiced by Britain and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. Let’s also look at war crimes committed by the US in places like Korea and Vietnam, or the bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, or the civilian death toll after the invasion of Iraq. The idea that the West has any moral authority when it comes to human rights is absurd.” Well said G, I’ll just say ditto.

I’ll just copy & paste the section on the extensive continuum in John Cobb’s Whitehead Word Book, he nutshells Whitehead on space better and more succinctly than I could:

“The ‘extensive continuum’ is Whitehead’s name for what most physicists call ‘space-time.’ Whitehead’s reason for using a different technical term is that when we say space-time we bring with us the connotations that those terms have borne for centuries, whereas he thinks that we need a more fundamental re-thinking. Space-time could be understood as having an existence independent of occasions in which, then, occasions come into being. Whitehead rejects that idea. Einstein’s space-time has physical properties such as curvature. Whitehead’s extensive continuum as potential rather than actual is too abstract to have such properties. His thinking about this is informed by his work on geometry, and is not easy for those not versed in the mathematics fully to appreciate. In Part Four of Process and Reality Whitehead develops definitions of the geometrical elements from the characteristics of extensive connection. Extensive relations pervade our experience.

Actual occasions can be analyzed coordinately into their prehensions or genetically into the phases of concrescence. But they cannot be physically divided into these or any other parts. This means that what is actual is not a continuum. It is composed of actual occasions each of which has definite extension.

Nevertheless, these are ‘extensively connected.’ These extensive connections are not actualities, but they are potentialities realized by the actual occasions. These potentialities are not atomic in the way the actual occasions that realize them are. On the contrary they constitute a continuum. This is the extensive continuum. The existence of the extensive continuum depends on the existence of the actual occasions, but given their actuality, the extensive continuum constitutes a restriction on all future occasions as well. They must exist in extensive connection to the present and past occasions and to one another.

The world we know is four-dimensional. However, this form of dimensionality is a contingent feature. Perhaps dimensionality as such is contingent. What is necessary to the extensive continuum is only that all occasions be extensively related.

This necessity of extensive relations implies also that the continuum can be analyzed into regions each of which has the characteristic of extensiveness and extensive relatedness to all other regions. Since we are dealing with a continuum no one division is more appropriate than any other. However, in point of fact, the actual occasions actualize the continuum in particular ways. Each has its “standpoint” within it. Many characteristics of an actual occasion depend upon its regional standpoint. For example, this standpoint determines just which occasions it prehends. The extensive continuum as such is not affected by the presence or absence of actual occasions.

Past, present, and future are not characteristics of the extensive continuum as such. They are defined in terms of prehensive relationships. The ‘past’ of any occasion is everything that has causal efficacy for it. The ‘future’ is constituted by those occasions that will be causally affected by it. The ‘contemporary’ world is made up of all the occasions that are neither causally effective in the occasion in question nor causally affected by it. That is, contemporaries are occasions that do not affect one another. Thus temporal characteristics belong to actual occasions as a result of their prehensions and are not an independent feature of the extensive continuum.

Geometry is the study of regions. The relation of these regions to those actualized by occasions does not enter into geometry. But whatever is learned about such regions by geometry applies to the regional standpoints of actual occasions and, therefore, to the occasions themselves. In Part Four of Process and Reality, Whitehead develops the principles of geometry out of his study of the relation of regions. His definitions of terms are very exact. At only a few points does his mathematical work in Part Four impinge on the remainder of the book. It would serve no useful purpose to repeat his definitions in this glossary.

The indifference of the extensive continuum to which regions within it become the standpoints of actual occasions, points to an additional role of the initial aim. In every moment the past leaves open the exact way in which new occasions will actualize the extensive continuum. Exactly which regions will be the standpoints of actual occasions is indeterminate. Yet such determination cannot be left to the decision of the new occasions. The standpoint determines exactly what is included in the actual world of the occasion. Neither the actual world nor the new occasion can determine that. Whitehead proposes that this is determined by the primordial ordering of pure potentials, that is, the primordial nature of God through the initial aim of each occasion.”

Whitehead Word Book

(I would note that a quite brilliant Whiteheadian philosopher, Jorge Luis Nobo, has a different understanding of the extensive continuum. According to Nobo there are actually two versions of the extensive continuum to be found in Whitehead, a derived extensive continuum, one that depends on actual entities (the standard understanding of the extensive continuum sketched by Cobb in the above excerpt); and also a nonderived, receptacular extensive continuum. His magnum opus is Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity.)

I’m glad that my reply was helpful. I’ll just add a bit more. In the words of Whitehead: “… in all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents …” Whitehead is stating the obvious here, that in every theory of reality, philosophical, scientific, or religious, there necessarily has to be an ultimate, i.e. a reality which is a given, an irreducible ground; a reality which simply is, which isn’t preexisted and created by something else because it’s a metaphysically fundamental cause. For the philosopher Thales this reality was water. For modern philosophers and scientists who subscribe to physicalism it’s the physicist’s universe, a universe that comprises only what the science of physics studies: matter, energy, forces, physical laws, space-time, et al. For traditional theists it’s a supernatural God. In their theology God is simply a given, there’s nothing more ultimate that creates, or accounts for the existence, of God. For Whitehead ultimate reality is creativity. Different Whiteheadians have different takes on what exactly Whiteheadian creativity is. The standard interpretation is that creativity is actual occasions, the self-creativity, i.e. process of concrescence, that’s internal to and that characterizes all actual occasions; that is, it’s their common creative MO or nature. On this view, found in seminal Whiteheadians such as Leclerc, Hartshorne, and Christian, creativity doesn’t transcend individual actual entities. But there are process thinkers who think otherwise, such as William Garland, John Wilcox, Andre Cloots, Jorge Nobo, and Joseph Bracken. For Cloots in addition to being the concrescent process of individual actual occasions, creativity is also a “transcending activity”. For Garland it’s the concrescent creativity of actual entities + creativity acting as a “receptacle”. For Wilcox it’s an explicitly monistic process which is still only actual in its individual instances, but which transcends them. For Nobo it’s what he terms the existential matrix, which comprises creativeness, entensiveness (envisagement, sentience), and extensiveness (the extensive continuum reconceived as receptacle); and it possesses what amounts to a kind of agency that transcends individual actual occasions (a view very much at odds with the standard interpretation). But in any case, or interpretation, for Whitehead creativity, creativity producing a universe, is ultimate and eternal. This means that there was no absolute beginning or creation of the universe. God then is demiurgically (not that Whitehead’s God should be equated with Plato’s Demiurge), but not originatively creative like the classical God.

“If that’s such a great way to live, how is it that so few people end up doing it, even if such a cooperative is available for new members?” Another good question Kent. One answer is that all societies and cultures are geared to getting their members to just go with the flow of the mainstream. Even in modern liberal democracies with their ethos of atomizing individualism we’re thoroughly socialized to be conformists in many ways, and to uncritically conform our lives to the dominant economic paradigm that has many of us performing jobs that we don’t find fulfilling for an inadequate wage and an exploitative corporate employer. And also the social nature of human beings makes us inherently prone to mimetic desire, inclined to desire and do what others desire and do. This guarantees that alternativists, people who desire a way of life that isn’t what their neighbors and peers desire, that isn’t the norm will always be in the minority. I think that it would be a mistake to assume that most people don’t wish to try an alternative form of life simply because of the alleged cons, or lack of appeal of the various alternative forms of life currently on offer. Social and psychological explanations also need to be taken into account. Contra what neoclassical economists would have us believe, human beings aren’t actually Homo economicus, we don’t make exclusively rational choices. Rather, human beings are Homo psychologicus (yes, that’s a real term), here’s a partial description of Homo psychologicus from 21st Century Political Science: A Reference Handbook:

“Humans are boundedly rational actors

Not all conceivable alternatives are fully considered.

The decision maker selects that alternative that ‘will do’ (in other words, the actor satisfices instead of maximizing utility).

Group and broader social pressures may lead decision makers to behave in nonrational ways, even contrary to their beliefs and values”

I think that we have here some key reasons why a great many of us fail to consider or to opt for what might be a rationally preferable alternative economic lifestyle.

Because it’s not well known I’ll also add a few words about Marx’s insight on the adverse impact of industrial capitalism on the planet’s ecological well-being. He didn’t speak about “ecology” because the word wasn’t in use yet, he wrote about “metabolism”, “metabolic” relations”, and what subsequent Marxist thinkers have termed the “metabolic rift”. He observed that prior to modern industrial capitalism human production and consumption actually returned waste to the earth that it could metabolize and benefit from, such as animal and human bodily waste that became manure. But the mechanized capitalist mode of production relocates human beings into urban centers of production and so metabolizable waste doesn’t get returned to the earth where resources were extracted; and it overproduces waste that isn’t metabolizable, that doesn’t do good things for the earth, much of it being quite toxic. He saw that not only does capitalist production involve the alienation of workers from their own labor and creativity, which they have to sell away to capitalists for a wage; and from their fellow human beings thanks to exploitation and competition; it also alienates human beings from taking part in the metabolic balance of the earth, it removes us into an artificial world that revolves around the interests and dynamics of capital, creating a “metabolic rift” between human beings and their economies and the rest of nature. He recognized that modern capitalism wrecks the metabolic health of the planet, or as we would say today, its ecological health. So contrary to a popular misconception, Marx had an ecological critique of capitalism, one which was consistent and interwoven with the rest of his critique.

Thank you for saying here that you find Marx to be an ally. As someone who also finds some value in Marx, and whose worldview is spiritual I’d just like to say a few slightly off-topic words to try to debunk the common misconception that Marxism and a crude anti-religious, anti-spiritual materialism necessarily always go hand in hand. Marx’s materialism, btw, was not a crude mechanistic materialism, for him materialism was essentially historical materialism, which he never generalized into a metaphysical theory. His materialism was also a social ontology, which according to process philosopher Anne Pomeroy is quite compatible with Whiteheadian process-relational ontology. And his basic orientation was humanistic and eudaimonistic, heavily influenced by the eudaimonism of Aristotle (he was well read in Greek philosophy, his doctoral dissertation was about the Democritean and Epicurean concepts of nature; and, btw, Fromm edited a nice volume of his early humanist writings), and very compatible with a process spirituality. In any case, as for Marxism and religion, Marxism is by no means the hardcore enemy of faith that some try to portray it to be. Marx’s criticism of religion, that its otherworldliness and pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die-ism is counterproductive to improving the human condition, and that religion often functions as ideology that protects unjust power structures, is of course valid, but is not true of all religion, and has no bearing on the ultimate questions and concerns at the heart of religion, and one can therefore subscribe to it without being a categorical religion basher and an atheist. One can admit the negatives of religion without simplistically reducing religion to them. Marx in fact also recognized religion’s positive side. He saw that religion can also be a vehicle for protest against unjust social conditions. That’s actually what he was getting at in the passage in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy where he famously, or infamously, describes religion as an “opium of the people”. It’s also an interesting factoid that Marx’s partner Engels had an interest in religion that wasn’t entirely negative. And of course since their day many Marxists have recognized the positive aspects and possibilities of religion. What’s more, many religionists have found much value in Marxism. For instance, some liberal Christians have found value in Marxism. Some liberation theologians have thoroughly integrated Marxist social and economic theory with their faith. And the Dalai Lama has described himself as a Marxist. So then no, one needn’t be a secularist to have a Marxist dimension to one’s thought. I’m in some good company in this regard with folks such as the Dalai Lama and Gustavo Gutiérrez.

It’s also the essence of my vision of a preferable alternative socioeconomic form of life.

Yes, it is an old article, and in the intervening decades between its publication and today the kibbutzim have fallen on hard times. But that’s due to the impossibility of their being completely unaffected by the national and global economy. To quote from a different article: “When Israel’s stock markets crashed in 1983, most Kibbutzim found themselves buried in debt that they would never be able to repay.” This, not an inherent unviability, was the beginning of their undoing. However, some kibbutzim that are still more than just nominally kibbutzim, that still endeavor to actualize their socio-ethical principles, still exist. One that you might be particularrly interested in is Samar. It’s been described as an anarcho-communist kibbutz, because although its members collectively create their well-being they’re free to make all of their personal choices (to exercise the kind of freedom that Whiteheadian ontology endorses) rather than being “micromanaged” by a committee. Here’s a link to an article that’s only a few years old:
Free-Range Kids, Anarchist Kibbutz Style