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You’re very welcome. He’s also written a longer book on tianxia, titled All Under Heaven, which is also an English translation of the word. Here’s a link to the Google Books page for that one:

All Under Heaven

One excellent exemplar of an ethically better economic form of life, in my opinion, is some of the kibbutzim (there are different models). The attachment is for an excellent article on the kibbutzim. It’s a rather pricy article so I’m providing it for anyone who’s interested in learning more about one concrete example that we can learn a good bit from.

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Good critical thinking again Kent, but I have to disagree with your characterization of alternativists, and the conclusion you arrive at about mainstreamers. First, it’s kind of a bleak picture you paint of people who are trying to opt out of the rat race. And it paints remaining in the rat race as merely the sensible thing to do. To my mind that’s highly questionable, and your description of folks who are trying to embrace an alternative form of life as still dependent on other folks who are a part of capitalist society’s mainstream only illustrates the difficulty if not impossibility of completely escaping from what I call the global Babylonian captivity of life within the economic, social, political, cultural, and ideological matrix of capitalism. It’s simply not possible to be a purist about opting out of capitalism. But in my book anyone who tries to deserves some credit. As for their dishonesty, do they really “lay it on thick” or are they just positive about their lifestyle to a degree that their struggles and lack of economic success seems to discredit when its viewed through the lens that capitalism has conditioned us to wear? And I would argue that being an urban workingclass person involves plenty of “fuss”, adversity, challenges, and quality of life-impairing stress. Remaining a mainstream urban salaried worker or wage-earner is hardly just the result of making a rational choice to avoid “fuss”.

Elaborating on Dr. Ford’s explanation of the sense in which God is Creator in process theology I would add that according to Whitehead’s cosmology the universe wasn’t actually created; rather, the arising of actual occasions of experiential and relational creativity; a multiplicity and nexus of these actual entities, either with the level of organization and complexity of a cosmos, or lacking such organization and complexity and in a state of chaos, is an unoriginated (causa sui) and ever-ongoing metaphysical state of affairs and process. There was never a pre-cosmogonic, pre-creation state of affairs when there was no world, or makings of a world. Therefore God can’t very well be a creator ex nihilo as God is in traditional theism. The creative universe is always the case, its creativity is always underway, and God merely participates, collaborates in it, God doesn’t precede, originate, or monopolize it. God is the “aboriginal” instance of, and integral and indispensable to the creativity of the universe, of all of the subsequent actual entities who populate it, but not the whole ball game of creativity, not the Creator in the classic sense. Rather than supernaturally bringing entities into existence out of nothingness, God’s role in creativity involves inspiring the intrinsic creativity of all finite actual entities, and preserving the value that they realize. God is more the muse and memory of the creative universe than its maker.

Alas people have been culturally programmed, so to speak, with TINA (there is no alternative) closed-mindedness. They’re okay with disgruntlement about the state of the economy or various adverse economic realities, and with directing disgruntlement at the government, but they stop short of any deep criticism of capitalism, and automatically go into TINA mode if anyone advocates envisioning an alternative and dumping capitalism. As a part of our TINA programming a great many of us have been successfully socially soft-wired to let capitalism off the hook by instead putting various scapegoats on the hook for a poorly performing economy: government, immigration, or even ourselves—one theory of the economy’s troubles, such as inflation, that one sometimes hears coming out of the mouths of working-class people is that workingpeople have been too greedy for high wages, that their success at obtaining a high wage is why the economy is ailing; never mind that this theory isn’t supported by the reality of poor wage growth and income inequality, it’s still an explanation that some wage-earners as well as bosses subscribe to. Many of us now also blame neoliberalism, but seem to abstract neoliberalism from capitalism and think of it as a source of economic troubles that doesn’t reflect on the nature of capitalism, when in reality neoliberalism is the unfettering of capitalism, and the economic troubles that it leads to are what you get with the deregulated capitalism advocated by free-market fundamentalists. And of course our TINA indoctrination includes our being educated to always promptly equate any more socially just and universal well-being-oriented alternative to capitalism with the defunct and discredited, bogeyman Soviet model of authoritarian and overly centralized state “socialism” (which was actually state capitalism). Never mind that that isn’t a model that most of us advocate adopting; and never mind the reality that most of its evils were due not to Marxist philosophy but to the historical baggage and pre-existing political cultures inherited by the societies that adopted that model, and to the fact that it was more of a program for rapid and ruthless modernization than an actual model for socialism, as soon as someone advocates a more democratized form of economic life they run into the TINA wall and get criticized for wanting to inflict authoritarian socialism upon Americans. This is more than annoying, it’s a huge component of why we’re stuck, why there isn’t a great movement afoot to move beyond capitalism before we self-destruct with it and do in much of the life on earth with capitalism-driven climate change. Whether the scales will fall from the eyes of enough of us in time for us to save humankind is seriously in question, and populism offers no hope since it has been shaped by big business-funded, ideologically pro-capitalist movement conservatism.

Thank you. I’m happy that you’re participating in this one too. I appreciate that your mode of engagement is suffused with an all too uncommon spirit of pleasantness and kindness.

It’s a great book, full of insight that’s still highly relevant today.

I can relate Rolla.

Whitehead’s metaphysics, and a morality based on it doesn’t, in my view, deny the reality that we live in a world in which relationality sometimes takes, and needs to take the form of “domination”. For instance, we humans needed to get the upper hand with and dominate the Covid-19 virus. And someone being attacked by a homicidal maniac is entitled to physically overcome and dominate his assailant as a matter of self-defense and survival. To my mind there’s nothing in Whitehead’s conceptuality that morally criminalizes this, so to speak, and that requires total submission to viruses and violent attackers. In fact it’s quite impossible to go through life without perpetrating some “domination”. A beaver dominates its habitat by building a damn. A farmer dominates the land by planting and diverting water to irrigate it. When you take a walk you have a big and fatally dominating presence to the insects in your path whom you inadvertently step on. This is also a part of being in a relational world. I think that what a Whiteheadian ethic advocates is practicing something like what Hindus term ahimsa, nonharm—under which rubric I would include nondomination and noncoercion—to the greatest extent that’s possible and reasonable. Why did I throw in “reasonable”? Well, ahimsa or nonharmfulness can be taken too far, for instance I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect people to be suicidally pacifistic and submit to a violent attacker, or to require of ourselves that we go to the extremes of some Jains to avoid killing insects. Rather, I would argue that coming to terms with the ethical implications and requirements of the relational and pancreativist ontology of the world involves coming to terms with the nonexistence of absolute autonomy; the impossibility of always avoiding infringing on the autonomy of other entities, of never adversely impacting their self-creativity, including in ways that constitute domination; and the ethical responsibility as human actual entities with high-grade human mentalities to be mindful and respectful of the intrinsic creativity of other entities, and within reason and when feasible to refrain from violating their right to creative self-determination and fulfillment, and even to facilitate and aid it. We certainly should never dominate others out of a competitive or greedy desire for more than the measure of well-being that we need, or merely for the sake of enjoying power and dominance. I have in mind here capitalists who dominate the lives of workers and consumers, and the planet’s other life forms to accumulate billions of dollars more than they need to have a flourishing life, and who enjoy lording their economic power over the rest of us. In short, a process-relational morality isn’t simplistic, and the question of domination isn’t a simple one. When I speak critically about domination I have certain unjustifiable and unnecessarily destructive forms of domination in mind, I’m not categorically condemning all instances of domination.

(And on a light, or maybe not so light note, you mentioned ChatGBT. Yes, now we can look forward to the day when we won’t know if our lawyer or doctor had the brains to make it through law or med school or used an AI app to write his papers and pass his exams. I wonder what a post on the fine points of Whiteheadian metaphysics written by ChatGBT would look like. Lol. And here’s another, more chilling thought for you, when BCI, brain-computer interfact technology is perfected and a “direct communication pathway” between the brain and a computer chip of device is possible something like ChatGBT can then be implanted in people’s brains and do their thinking for them, or articulate their thoughts for them. Someone with this technology in his or her head will initiate a thought on something and ChatGBT will then kick in, take over and articulate what s/he would like to say. People won’t even have to be able to speak or think for themselves. It will be the ultimate in the dumbing down of human beings that was first feared back in the 70s when calculators came along and raised the concern that children would depend on them and not learn to do math in their heads. People will depend on ChatGBT-like implants and not learn to think. They’ll be thoroughly dumbed down, but sound smart. And the corporation that manufactures the implants may program them so that they won’t help people to form or articulate anti-capitalist thoughts, thoughts that are critical of the status quo and ruling class. They may function to subtly shape thinking in a direction that’s nonthreatening to the power structure of society.)

Good questions Kent. In my view ego per se isn’t something evil or pathological to be eradicated. Our raison d’etre, from a Whiteheadian perspective, is after all creative self-actualization, realizing our individual actual entity-hood to the fullest. Of course that’s accomplished in a social-relational fashion, we’re all interconstituted and our existence is also just as fundamentally about contributing value to the constitution of others, but nevertheless our telos includes our self-actualization. This involves and necessitates some measure of individualism and self-interest. The misfire that I refer to is egoism. By that term I denote the kind of overriding or solipsistic self-interest that disregards others, their intrinsic value, their interests, needs, feelings, well-being, and suffering; that violates the rights and dignity of others. And dominative egoism, the will to exercise the power-over type of power, to coercively and oppressively control others for one’s own benefit. Usually when I speak of egoism critically I try to clarify this by using qualifiers with it such as “excessive”, “overriding”, and “dominative”, etc.

As for “imposition”, when Nobo speaks of “actively imposing” he’s referring to actual entities actively ingressing their creativity into other actual entities. The classical understanding of the process of transition is that it just involves a forming actual entity prehending, objectifying the feelings of past, perished actual entities. Nobo’s view was that perished actual entities aren’t dead and actually actively contribute energy and determination to other actual entities. They’re characterized not just by a nisus to self-actualize but also to actively express “dative force”, “experiential power”. “Imposition” then is an ingression of one’s input, of determination into the process of creative self-determination of others, not an aggression of overriding or denying the self-determination of others. It’s self-expressive, self-assertive but not dominative or controlling. Of course sometimes human actual entities do need to be a bit controlling with each other. A parent, for instance, has to exercise some measure of control over children for their safety and healthy development. But this kind of legitimate caring control never involves disregarding the intrinsic value of, or seeks to utterly and completely deny the self-determination of those on the receiving end of it. When control does involve disrespecting the intrinsic value of others, when it does become about completely overriding and negating their self-determination, then we’re again talking about dominative egoism and its evil propensities.

In any case, this is my personal, Nobo-influenced take on ego and egoism in a nutshell.

Thank you for some excellent questions. I have a Whiteheadian theory of the ultimate, ontological origin of egoism. I thus far haven’t come across it in my reading of process philosophy, but I’ve formulated it based on my understanding of process ontology and in particular the concept of actual entities. According to the interpretation of the concept that I subscribe to, an actual entity is an instance of a relational process of self-creativity, and active self-contribution (of causal efficacy and determination and value to subsequent actual occasions—here my thinking is influenced by Jorge Nobo and diverges a bit from the classical doctrine of actual entities). Its fundamental nisus or drive is a drive for creative self-actualization, and for the “ecstatic” (Henning’s word for the self-transcending) expression of creative power. This drive for self-actualization is susceptible to perversion into a drive for atomic self-interest and dominative self-assertion. The actual entity’s innate impetus to express creative power, to “actively impose” (Nobo’s and Henning’s description) itself in other actual entities can misfire and become a will to dominative, power-over power. Here then we have the essence of egoism, rooted in a malfunctioning or missing of the mark of actual entities (yes, my use of the expression “missing the mark” is meant to hint that this error that an actual entity can succumb to, and egoism are also the essence of “sin”). The complexity of high-grade human actual entities, of our human agential subjectivity, means a greater capacity and potential for such a miscarriage of our basic ontology. Substantialism and our misontology, i.e. our superficial misperception of ourselves as separate substantial selves for whom it seems to make rational sense to operate in a selfish fashion, comes into play in bringing about such a wrong turn into egoism.

Egoism then ultimately traces back to our very ontology, but another aspect of our ontology also ensures that secondary factors, such as being socialized to a capitalist society, will come into play. That is, our fundamental ontology is social-relational, we’re social creatures whose self-creativity is greatly conditioned by the input that we receive from others, from our society and culture. And so naturally if the ethos of our society is one of economic individualism we’re going to be more likely to suffer from egoism. So no, capitalism isn’t the sole or ultimate cause of egoism, but it’s a huge contributing factor for human beings who’ve been brought up in a capitalist environment and values orientation. Capitalism is a system and a culture that legitimates, promotes and ramps up egoism. Capitalism then is both an expression and a secondary cause of egoism, greed, dominationism, and related destructive proclivities. Capitalism isn’t the fons et origo or the whole of the problem that is late capitalist civilization, but it’s very much a part, a very integral part of the problem and until we dump capitalism we’re not going to be able to realize a society that embodies our best values.

Ditto.

When I look at actually-existing, real-world capitalism I’m afraid that I honestly don’t see a multidimensional system, so to speak, an economic system that fundamentally concerns itself with all of the dimensions and ideal possibilities of our humanity. I don’t observe an economic system that’s keen on undergirding a society that promotes our flourishing in the various dimensions of our humanity; our actualization of the full spectrum of enriching self-creative possibilities of human beings, our mental, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual possibilities. What I behold is, rather, a system that’s geared for the misplaced concreteness of economism, for separating and concentrating on the economic dimension of life as if it’s the whole of life, as if it’s all that we should be focused on. This is a system and a misplaced concreteness that’s tragically impoverishing, mentally, aesthetically, morally, and spiritually, of life; and which drives much of the injustice, economic, social, and racial injustice, in the world. It’s a misplaced concreteness that shrinks the human experience, and motivates the inhumanity of human beings to their fellow human beings. I would argue that what you take to be my falling prey to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is actually my zeroing in on the capitalist system’s structural error of misplaced concreteness. That is, what may look like my error of misplaced concreteness merely reflects the one-dimensionality of capitalism. It’s this one-dimensionality that I deplore, and choose to focus on because it’s so socially and ecologically catastrophic, morally and spiritually ruinous, and humanly tragic.

(My anti-capitalism, btw, is not as black-and-white or hard-line as it might seem. I, and many critics of capitalism, acknowledge that capitalism indeed has its good points. Even Karl Marx acknowledged that, and was a great fan of the positive changes that he credited capitalism with effecting. However, he and I, and quite a few others, are of the view that the pros of capitalism fail to outweigh its considerable cons. In our eyes its inherent existential and ethical negatives are just too great and damning for it to be redeemed by its unintentional pluses, and so all things about it considered, we find it to be an abhorrent system, and we entertain the hope of humanity eventually evolving something better.)

On a light note, I love that you used the word “grokked”. It’s a word that I’ve often wanted to use ever since reading Stranger in a Strange Land but don’t, even though it’s in Merriam-Webster, because I’m afraid that it’s too obscure. Kudos.

Whatever change the capitalist system undergoes as a result of technological transformations and progress won’t do away with the asymmetrical power relations, the class and dominator structure of capitalist society. I believe it was John who commented in last week’s session that the perennial and ultimate problem throughout history, which capitalism has continued in its own way, is the dominator orientation of males, and the structures of domination that they build into their societies and economic systems. This is also the view of an author I rather like, Riane Eisler (you might also wish to look into her partnership model). I suppose that I like her because I always held the same view long before I read her. So I would say that we won’t really get a society geared for universal empowerment and eudaimonia merely through the evolution of capitalism, because its dominant elites will adapt and always use their power and dominance to ensure the perpetuation of their power and dominance in one form or another. Only a movement and paradigm that actually aims at a form of life that isn’t merely old dominationism in new wineskins, so to speak; a paradigm shift to genuinely democratic social and economic relations is going to going to do the trick. No modification of capitalism will.