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Yes, one can find fault with the models that I mentioned. As is the case with a great many things, the devil is in the details. Bringing a more democratically relational alternative economic system that’s geared to humanistic values and environmental concerns into concrete existence will be a process of working out the details, of experimenting with actualizing different possibilities, “eternal objects” in Whiteheadian language. The way that it would play out is not that we would have a complete and perfect vision that we would simply actualize and then live happily ever after. Rather, we would undertake an ongoing process of change, experimentation, and evolution. This, by the way, is also the way that we came to have modern capitalism and liberal democracy. The 18th and 19th-century forefathers of people living in capitalist and liberal democratic societies didn’t start out with exactly what we now have and call capitalism and “democracy”; rather, capitalism and “democracy” have gradually come to take their current form, and are still in flux. And just as despite several centuries of evolution capitalism is still a flawed system, an alternative humanistic-relational system will also be flawed and never perfected. We shouldn’t expect it to be, or insist that it be problem-free. And it doesn’t need to be problem-free and paradisal, only better than what we currently have. Better in the sense of more universally empowering, more geared to universalizing human flouring, and less destructive. It should be remembered that it’s not as though we now have a system that’s indefectible, both in the sense of being flawless and in the sense of being indefinitely sustainable, and we would be switching from that to a more defect-ridden system. Rather, we would be exchanging one imperfect system for another, but for one that despite its imperfections would be preferable because it would be more participatory, in the sense that workingpeople would participate more in economic decision-making, in controlling the elements of their society’s economy (through a combination of both more direct and delegative democracy), and in enjoyment of the prosperity that their productive activity creates. Again, the details of concretely realizing such a system will be problematic, and we’ll never get it entirely right, but we arguably can devise something better than what we’ve got, than a capitalist system in which the dynamics of capital and the interests of business elites dominate life, increasingly precarize the lives of workingpeople in rich countries, outright immiserate the populations of low-income countries for the benefit of the rich countries, and dictate the suicidal destruction of the ecosphere.

In short, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and our modern system of capitalism wasn’t built in a day, and what takes its place won’t be built in a day either, and won’t be built from a pre-conceived blueprint, it will take shape through a historical process. Capitalism has been a historical process, of trial and error, which of course hasn’t been able to rid itself of error, including what are proving to be damning and fatal errors; and what supplants capitalism will also be a historical process of trial and error, and won’t be able to rid itself of all of its errors either, but its errors weighed against those of capitalism will make it preferable to capitalism for workingpeople and everyone who’s concerned about social and ecological justice. (And to bring in Cobb’s emphasis in one of the readings on bottom-up development, the historical process of materializing an alternative form of economy structured to better distribute economic security and prosperity to everyone should be mostly a grassroots and an organically developing process, not a top-down proposition. This is how we’ll arrive at an authentic social-ism, a society whose orientation is to our social-relational existence and socially supported human flourishing, as opposed to stereotypical state socialism [which, btw, can just as aptly be characterized as state capitalism].)

(Btw, the idea that those of us who would like to trade capitalism in for a more humanistic-relational-participatory paradigm are guilty of naively claiming to have a perfect, utopian solution for the problems and pathologies of capitalism which would actually fall short of perfection, which would predictably suffer from some flaws, and that therefore the hope of a humanistic-relational-participatory economic form of life can be dismissed on the grounds that it will not be as nirvanic as advertised, is what’s called the perfect solution or nirvana fallacy—attributing a claim to possess a perfect solution to the interlocutor with whom one is disagreeing and proceeding to argue against that straw-man perfect solution. I’m not saying that you’re not guilty of this, so please don’t take offense that I bring up the perfect solution fallacy, I only do so because it’s so frequently encountered by those of us who try to envision an alternative to capitalism. And it’s certainly a fallacy in my case, since I fully realize that what I would replace capitalism with won’t be a perfect solution for everything that’s wrong with capitalism or the human condition.)

Thanks for your reply Kent. The observation that “it is equally if no more airy to imagine organizing today’s society without some version of capitalism” is one that opponents of capitalism hear quite often. It’s repeated so often that it’s difficult to not feel like we’re arguing against common sense. But that reminds me of David Griffin’s distinction between “soft-core” and “hard-core” common sense. To my mind the inescapability of capitalism falls into the category of soft-core common sense, common sense beliefs that are actually merely conventional “wisdom”, beliefs that convincingly feel like common sense because they’re so pervasively common. I’m sure that opponents of slavery had to contend with the same challenge of overcoming soft-core common sense. After all, until quite recently slavery had been a universal and perennial fixture of the human condition. It seems that from the dawn of “civilization”, for the last ten thousand or so years, there has always been slavery, so arguing against slavery must have seemed to be flying in the face of common sense. But here we are today, living in a world in which slavery is for the most part a thing of the past. Sure, it can still be found here and there; human trafficking, for instance, is slavery, but it’s universally condemned, and can only be practiced clandestinely.

This is a pretty radical in the sense of unprecedented change that would have seemed completely unrealistic not that many generations ago. The unprecedented isn’t necessarily impossible. I think that this is one of the perspectives that process metaphysics supports. According to Whiteheadian ontology the fundamental nature of reality is creativity, a creative process which although often, although in the case of elementary actual entities it merely repeats the past, is a process and drive toward novelty—certainly in the case of high-grade actual entities and societies like human actual entities and societies. So I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of human beings eventually realizing an unprecedentedly novel uncapitalistic form of life.

Capitalism, btw, is itself another example of the possibility of radical change. Today capitalism is paradoxically staunchly supported by “conservatives”, but, as Dr. Ford pointed out in the session, although merchants and people buying and selling, and trading, and whatnot has been around for a long time capitalism in the modern sense of corporations and stock markets and business elites running the show is quite new in human history. And I would add that when it was emerging capitalism, and its classical liberal ideology, were forces for radical change, were highly destructive of traditional forms of life and status quos (which is why many 18th and 19th-century conservatives were anti capitalism and liberalism, Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization is an interesting read). So capitalism ironically can actually serve as an argument agaist the soft-core common sense that would have us believe that it’s impossible to evolve beyond capitalism.

As for alternative models, well, they’re out there. For instance, the psychologist Erich Fromm wrote a great book back in the 50s (The Sane Society), which critiques capitalism, its adverse effects on human well-being, from a humanistic perspective, and which also contains a vision of a different, more democratic form of economy. And there’s the parecon model that’s been worked out by the economists Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert (you might want to check out the Wikipedia article). There’s also Riane Eisler’s partnership model. In my view a more relational, participatory (in the sense that we all get to participate in economic decision-making, power, and well-being, not just in the work of the economy), democratized, and humane economic system, one in which humanistic and ecological values rather than the dynamics of capital and the interests of business elites are in the driverse seat, is conceivable and indeed possible—if the climate crisis doesn’t take our species out first.

Regarding the compatibility of process philosophy and Marxism, there’s a great book by a philosophy professor named Anne Pomeroy, Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism, which in my opinion does a brilliant job of making a case that not only are Marxism and Whiteheadian ontology compatible, but that a synthesis of Marx’s thought and process ontology would furnish a better ontology for Marxism than its orthodox dialectical materialism.

Here’s a link to the Google Books page for the book:
Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism

You make some excellent, insightful points. Thank you.

Yes, this is the essence of my case against capitalism. Its unsoundness boils down to its excessive focusing of life on the all-consuming objective of capital accumulation, which spiritually impoverishes life, and drives capitalists to practice an exploitative MO that’s destructive of the moral fabric of society, human well-being, and the health of the planet’s ecosphere.

Yes, there’s no question that the culture of capitalism is pervasively infectious across the spectrum of religions, at one end contaminating New-Age spirituality with egregious commercialism; and at the other assimilating mainline churches such as PCUSA by the lure of the “capitalistic approach” that you describe; and of course assimilating the faithful all along the spectrum to live more by the values of our money-fetishizing and consumerist culture than by ethical and spiritual values. The most extreme examples of the pervasive influence of capitalism are of course the so-called prosperity gospel, and the religious right’s staunch support of the capitalist system. I find the pro-capitalism of conservatives to be especially perverse, since they’re so critical of the moral decay of our society and yet can’t see capitalism’s glaring role in it—a very dangerous ideological blind spot. I hold the perspective that our civilization is indeed in moral and spiritual decline, but contra conservative declinists this isn’t due to our falling away from belief in the Bible and the Ten Commandments and traditional values and norms. Rather, our civilization’s moral and spiritual decay is due to our being oriented away from fundamental existential insights and intuitions, virtues and values such as a sense of our interrelatedness, a sense of compassion and empathy. And what’s orienting us away from these insights and virtues is the colonization and domination of life by our capitalist economic system’s drive for accumulation; in other words, its economism (as Cobb terms it), its reduction of life to wealth accumulation and economics. And of course also the ethos of selfish individualism and materialism that the capitalist system inescapably breeds. The ethical Ten Commandments at best sometimes functioned as an aid for socializing people to attune their lives to pro-social virtues, but it’s misplaced concreteness to make them out to be what makes human beings good. It’s the existential insights and sensibilities (the prehension, i.e. internal, felt sense of connectedness, and the intrinsic value of all human beings) which underlie the Ten Commandments and pro-social virtues that are the fons et origo of human goodness, and which are what capitalism vitiates, and what we need to reorient our lives to. Sorry for going off on a tangent. In any case, I agree with you that the Protestant churches and the spirit of capitalism are too bound up with one another, as Weber pointed out long ago.

Thanks for sharing this conversation. The paragraph about Daoism and Vedanta was especially interesting. Btw, I can certainly empathize with Dr. Long being laid up due to viral bronchitis, I had a bout of it about the same time that he did and although also in my case not Covid-related it was nevertheless a terrible experience.

“Conceptual capitalism”? Should I understand by that term the sound and workable socioeconomic system that capitalism should be in theory, the theory of its ivory-tower free-marketarian proponents? Or might I understand it to refer to a theory of capitalism that admits of the possibility that capitalism is a deeply flawed system fated to always evolve into something like the actually-existing capitalism that materially precarizes and immiserates, and spiritually impoverishes a great many human beings? Sure, free-marketarians have a version of conceptual capitalism that lets it off the hook for the empirical ills of real-world capitalism, but is it realistic or notional? Is it realistic to think that it could ever be possible to have an economic system in which economic power is controlled by self-interested private players that doesn’t end up seriously deviating from free-market theory, that doesn’t come to be dominated by economic elites who don’t play the game of capitalism according to Hoyle or Hayek? I suppose that one could imagine such a capitalism, but would it really be any less chimerical than, say, a Roman Empire that doesn’t produce a Nero and a Caligula, or a Nazism that doesn’t end in war and genocide? If conceptual capitalism is capitalism done right, and beautifully free of wrongs, then on what basis are we to presuppose that bringing such a vision of capitalism down from the realm of airy theorizing to earth is doable? There’s certainly no historical support for such a claim.

In any case, I would argue that the free market and capitalism have always been a bait and switch scam. We’re told that our economy is a free market economy, which is ipso facto supposed to be a good thing because the euphemism “free market” has the word “free” in it, and freedom is always supposed to be good. But what we actually get is capitalism, a system in which a minority of economic elites overaccumulate most of the economic wealth and power and use it to rig the system, including our formally but not always actually democratic system of representative government, ensuring better representation for themselves than for the rest of us. Freedom for a few individuals to become oligarchs (funny how that term is routinely and selectively used to describe Russian capitalist elites but not their Western counterparts) whose overempowerment means the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of average wage-earning citizens; freedom that doesn’t include FDR’s third and fourth “essential human freedoms”, freedom from want, and freedom from fear (which includes economic insecurity) is arguably not the good kind of freedom. A free market system that inherently and from the get-go degenerates into a capitalist system that doesn’t uphold all of the essential human freedoms, and that subjects us to the economico-political dominance of robber barons, and nowadays the billionaire class, in my view is most definitely a lousy deal. A humanistic and relational, more ecologically-minded and sustainable new deal, new paradigm is urgently needed.

But unfortunately in the United States today staunchly pro-capitalist Republicans, and conventional (non-Bernie Sanders-type) Democrats whose modern liberalism still includes too much of classical liberalism’s free-marketarianism obstinately stand in the way of the green and thoroughly social-relational paradigm shift we need. For a few decades in the 20th-century the power establishment tried to make American capitalism more viable with a combination of Keynesian economics, regulation, properly high taxes for the ultra-rich, and welfare programs to neutralize the problem that the poor might present for capitalism, but then beginning in the 1970s it had had enough of that and the empire (of Big Capital) struck back, as it were, in the form of a neoliberal backlash, beginning with deregulation under Carter, and then Reaganism and Thatcherism, and a bit later Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism and welfare “reform” that hurt the well-being of millions of families. We’ve continued on that course and now, when we’re experiencing a climate crisis that’s well on its way to a mass extinction scenario that will include our own extinction, when replacing late capitalism with a more humanistic and ecologically sound model is existentially imperative, literally a matter of our survival, we’re not politically in a place to be able to do it. We’re more caught up in distracting and unproductively polarizing culture war issues. But I’m not prepared to abandon all hope, there’s also a growing relational and ecological consciousness that may eventually force some of the change that’s needed. The question is do we have enough time.

Excellent and incisive questions. Thank you so much. I don’t know if I can adequately answer any of them but I’ll share some thoughts on each of them.

(1) The historian Michael Sonenscher, who has written a book titled Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word, says about capitalism “Although it is still quite hard to define, it remains quite easy to see.” What I see that to my mind constitutes capitalism is a system geared for a division of labor and power in which workingpeople no longer own and control the tools that they need and use to produce goods and sustain their existence in the material world. A system in which the means of producing goods and the livlihood of workers is instead owned by a relatively small class of people who consequently are able to exercise literally the power of life and death (this isn’t hyperbolic) over workers, the power to control their access to the means of reproducing their lives. This power then, without the capitalist literally cracking a whip like the owner of chattel slaves, coerces workers to submit themselves to laboring for a capitalist employer. A worker might sometimes be free in the sense that she can choose to submit to laboring for capitalist B rather than capitalist A, but in either case she’s coerced into submitting to performing a productive activity for the benefit of a capitalist employer. Her freedom then is somewhat illusory, it amounts to the freedom to make a Hobson’s choice. “Hobson’s choice” is defined as “a free choice in which only one thing is actually offered”. In this case the one thing that’s actually offered to workers under capitalism is working for someone else who owns the means of production, who controls capital, i.e. a capitalist. This empowers capitalists to perpetrate the classic sins of capitalism: to appropriate much of the value created by the labor of workers, to exploit workers; to instrumentalize workingpeople, to reduce them to work-performing objects; to commodify working-class human beings, to reduce them to their economic value in the capitalist scheme of things; to dominate workingpeople, who find themselves spending their days in the dictatorship of the workplace, and who outside of the workplace find themselves living in a polity largely controlled by the money-power of economic elites. Actually-existing capitalism then can be defined as the system of domination, exploitation, and dehumanization that issues from the control of capital and the factors of production by private parties. Sonenscher makes a distinction between capitalism and the division of power that leads to a system of domination, exploitation, and dehumanization. He argues that technically “‘capitalism’ referred initially to war finance and public debt” and that the system we’ve grown and today call capitalism didn’t grow from that, that it grew from the division of labor and power. I disagree, to my mind there’s no problem with calling our system capitalism and erasing the distinction that Sonescher makes between capitalism and the division of power that originates its iniquities.

I would also argue that capitalism is capital-ism, a system dominated by the nature, fundamental drive, and internal logic of capital. I would argue that capital is a process of and drive for the production and accumulation of more capital, which inexorably drives the behavior of capitalists, and all of the signature evils of capitalism: the overaccumultion and concentration of economic wealth; overproduction, which also entails the overproduction of pollution and greenhouse gases, something the importance of which we’re now coming to realize perhaps too late; what economists term imperfect competition, anti-competitive practices, and the growth of monopolies; all manner of undesirable externalities; exploitation of workers; a rising cost of living for consumers; the recurrent economic crises and catastrophes of capitalism, the “business cycle’s” inevitable recessions and depressions; materialism, consumerism, and a shallow values orientation that orients us away from real fulfillment and authentic eudaimonia, and toward selfishness and diminished ethicality; a profound subversion and falsification of democracy, et al. Capitalism then can also be defined as a system that’s in the grip of the dynamics of capital, and that produces the above and other negatives.

Well then, capital is not just physical things. Capital is a thing, such as the means of production; and also a social relationship, a relation of production and power in which workingpeople are subordinated to the lords of the means of production; and also the process of the production and accumulation of capital. Capitalism is a system that orders all of the above in a way that excessively benefits capitalists, and harms the well-being of workers. To refer back to the Sonenscher quote, this is what I see when I take a critical look at capitalism, and so this is what capitalism means in my parlance—not some either neutral or idealized image of what capitalism might or should be, but which capitalism empirically doesn’t resemble and historically hasn’t ever conformed to.

(2) I would argue that there isn’t such a thing as a real-world “neutrally-defined” capitalism. Certainly conventional economists and free-market fundamentalists have their neutral and positive concepts of capitalism, but I hold the perspective that there was never a historical example of a “neutral” or decent capitalism; a prelapsarian capitalism, as it were, before capitalists began to sin and corrupt capitalism into what we have today. Rather, capitalism was a peccant system from its inception. As for the question of greed, yes I did use the word once in my post (I suppose I was going for a cheap rhyme); however, in my view the root of much of the badness of capitalism is not greed, the subjective greed of individual capitalists, but rather the capitalist system’s inherent and defining drive for accumulation. Greed is a part of the human condition, but capitalism’s insatiable and destructively competitive drive for accumulation is endemic to it, not human nature.

(3) How do we actually go about bringing off the paradigm shift from capitalism to a humanistic-relational socioeconomic form of life? As you say, it’s complicated. In my view the transformation of social relations, economic and political structures, and consciousness are all interrelated and necessary.

Again, thank you for some challenging questions. They all certainly need to be dealt with by anti-capitalist folks like myself.

You’re very welcome.

You’re welcome. I would note that there are some significant differences between the process metaphysics of the Aztecs and Whitehead, but Aztec philosophy is definitely in the family of process philosophies.

In my view the Whiteheadian process ontology of creative interrelationality furnishes (to paraphrase Whitehead) a coherent, logical, necessary ethic by which every element of our conduct can be guided and ethically evaluated. From the process perspective ethical conduct or morally good behavior could be defined as any exercise of our agency that respects and constructively instantiates the interrelatedness and intercreatedness of all actual entities. Any expression of our personal portion of the power of causal efficacy that promotes creativity, and the creative nisus and process toward value realization and richness of experience. And relating to fellow actual entities in a fashion that recognizes their intrinsic embodiment of creativity and value. I think that we have here, in such a Whiteheadian ethic, what I would term an ultimistic basis for caring and compassion, which to my mind is the essence of morality.

Your reply got me thinking about the whole human nature argument for capitalism, and against the viability of some of the more social-relational alternative economic paradigms that have been envisioned. I’ll just share a few thoughts on those questions. First, I would say that from a Whiteheadian perspective human nature is fundamentally the social and self-creative process of a human actual entity. It’s a process that involves choosing among different anthropological eternal objects, different potential forms of definiteness for our humanity, alternative ways of being human. And the possibilities that we choose are largely historically and socially conditioned. The force of the past, of the world that we’re born into will to some extent predispose us to a particular version of our humanity. 10th-century Norway’s Ola Nordmann was a violent, pillaging Viking. 21st-century Norway’s Ola Nordmann is a member of one of the most nonviolent, humane societies on the planet and is likely to reflect its values and culture. But yes, although human nature is a range of possibilities that cultures and individuals select among there are some core commonalities, such as sociality and community, love, the desire for well-being, the desire to be treated justly, etc. But even universal human commonalities can take different forms. Human beings don’t have a uniform, substantial and fixed nature. I would venture to say that this is the Whiteheadian view. At any rate, the nature of modern asocial and atomized Americans who don’t know their neighbors, and relate to others primarily in their economic roles and not as human beings, is certainly not human nature. I’m not that well read in evolutionary psychology, but I think it’s safe to say that from an evolutionary psychology perspective human beings evolved to be much more relational than many of us in this country are today. Which is all to say that I don’t buy the human nature argument against the possibility of a form of economic life that’s geared for nondominationist and nonexploitationist relationality.

No, I don’t think that we’re locked by a hard-wired human nature into some form of capitalism. I don’t think that all cultures throughout history have been on a capitalist spectrum, so to speak; that human beings have always been on the path to modern American-style private enterprise with its greed is good ethos. If human beings in pre-modern and traditional societies look like “elemental” capitalists, proto-capitalists to us it’s arguably because of the lens we’re viewing them through. I agree with the following quote from the description of Ellen Wood’s classic on the origin of capitalism: “Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the relationship between humans and nature.”

Our modern worldview is so permeated by classical liberalism, by its emphasis on individualism and autonomy, “enlightened self-interest”, and the laissez-faire principle, that it’s difficult to appreciate how much more relational and communal human beings have been for most of their history and prehistory than contemporary Homo capitalisticus is. An ecological civilization, grounded in a social-relational ontology, would actually be a return to human norms, it’s capitalism that’s at odds with human norms and pathological. But you’re right, these are questions to explore in the next course on process thought and economics.

Here’s a link for Ellen Wood’s book:
The Origin of Capitalism

A commendable post, with a commendable aim at debunking ignorant and Islamophobic misconceptions about Muslims and their faith. The only bit that I would take issue with are your last few words:”… are not fundamentalist and would be open to Process thought.”. That could be taken to imply that opposition to process thought is a fundamentalist idiosyncrasy, but unfortunately there are many nonfundamentalist, mainstream theists—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish—whose minds are also not very receptive to process theology. I would instead identify the sources of the difficulty that conventional theists have with taking process theology onboard to be: (1) supernaturalism; and (2) omnipotence. The real stumbling block for them is their belief that God is necessarily to be equated with a traditionally all-powerful being who somehow exists outside of existence. The process notion of a divinity who is a fellow actual entity, i.e. who shares the same fundamental metaphysical nature as the rest of us; and who shares power with the rest of the actual entities that populate the universe, and whose power is persuasive not controlling is something they aren’t able to assimilate. They’re not fundamentalists, or theological bigots, they’re just too steeped in traditional theism. And the idea of an almighty God who can supernaturally protect them from adversity gives them a sense of security that they’re loathe to let go of.

Thank you for some thought-provoking questions. They all merit a substantive answer, but I’m currently impaired by a severe cold and non-stop cough so I apologize in advance if my answers are less substantive than they should be.

(1) Griffin wrote about identist and differential pluralism in his essay “Religious Pluralism: Generic, Identist, and Deep”, in a book that he edited, titled Deep Religious Pluralism (Steve Odin is also a contributor to that book).

(2) I’m opposed to identist pluralism, the kind of pluralism that claims that the world’s religions can be homogenized, on two grounds. First, because I think that that claim is untrue. I subscribe to the ultimist pluralism of Cobb and Griffin, the view that religious ultimacy is not monopolized by a single ultimate reality, such as God, but rather comprises multiple creative co-ultimates. This is a perspective found in the process tradition that goes all the way back to Whitehead, who posited creativity and God as equiprimordial ultimates. Personally, I agree with the process philosopher Jorge Nobo, that ultimate reality includes the creative interrelational process of concrescence and transition, sentience, the extensive continuum (aka a Whiteheadian version of Plato’s Receptacle), Whitehead’s eternal objects, the multiplicity of actual entities that is the cosmos, and God. I think that we find different concepts of ultimate reality in different faiths, and different understandings of transcendence or salvation largely because different families of religion are working with intuitions of different elements of this multiplex of metaphysical ultimacy. This means that boiling religions and ultimate religious realities down to a single, universal spirituality would simply be wrong, at odds with the reality of ultimist pluralism.

I’m also not a fan of identist pluralism because it would potentially undermine appreciation of the creative diversity of the world’s religions. And also because to my mind it’s, even if unwittingly and benignly, spiritually imperialistic, so to speak. The folks who say “Well, all religions really believe in the same supreme being or ultimate reality” usually have a particular favored concept of ultimate reality in mind, to which they assimilate everything from Yahweh to the Tao. Some New Agers, for instance, often come across as envisioning a benevolent colonization of spiritual diversity by their pantheistic concept of the divine. And of course traditional Christian theists believe that the other world religions are all grasping in the dark for the biblical God and need to see the same light as Baptists or Lutherans. Any global syncretistic religion, even if it included ingredients of all of the great religions, would be no different, it would still be someone’s preferred construct. This would be fine as an addition to the world’s religious diversity, but not as a replacement for diversity. As a replacement for diversity it would amount to imperialism and colonization.

(3) I certainly agree that elective affinities are also possible between process and various indigenous traditions. (Process Thought and the Hopi Universe)

(4) As for how the process movement and indigenous spiritualities might enrich each other, the only way that would be in keeping with the spirit of the process movement would be for it to engage a creative process of cultivating mutually educational relationships with those who preserve indigenous wisdom heritages.