How the Hippies Saved Physics

The future is rational only in hindsight. MG Taylor Axiom, 1983

Serendipity plays an interesting part in life. I recently went to Amazon's wish list to look for a birthday gift for my son, Jeff, and saw How the Hippies Saved Physics. It caught my attention, looked good so I ordered two copies.  Meanwhile, a group of us are beginning the writing of a book which we currently call 30 Years of WOW.  The story we want to write is the story of Matt and Gail Taylor's work, and more importantly the impetus that gave rise to the work and how it is becoming  a ubiquitous way of working. The story is full of time lags, other originators, and imagination writ big!

I had not read far in the book to have the entire 70's return to the forefront of my memory.  Our fashions, music, protocols and assumptions about a way of life.  I grew up in Kansas City, Mo, generally considered to be a conservative environment. Yet the 70's were in full bloom here too.  Maybe not the San Francisco scene, but the same questioning and restless searching. Where was society heading? Wasn't life meant to be richer more satisfying? Wasn't there ways to make life better for everyone? 

Sound bytes from the Hippies book:

"The hippies self-consciously opened up space again for freewheeling speculation, for the kind of spirited philosophical engagement with fundamental physics that the Cold War decades had dampened. More than most of their generation, the sought to recapture the big-picture search for meaning that had driven their heros - Einstein, Bohm, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger - and to smuggle that mode of doing physics back into their daily routine."

"The hippie counterculture sported a playful worship of youth, spontaneity, and 'authenticity.'"

"Try as we might, we cannot cleave off the goup or its activities from the 'real' physics of the day. Many of the members' activities placed them on one end of a spectrum, to be sure. But no hard -and-fast dividing line separated them from legitimate - even illustrious - science.'

Matt's course, Rebuilding the Future (1976), was about the rate of change and how to prepare for it and design our future rather than letting it happen by default.  This course, too, was full of diversity: very mainstream people, hippies, multiple ages, races, life styles. We had one thing in common, a hunger to help shape the future. 

The next 25 years, according to Matt would bring about more change than had occurred since the middle ages. Ordinary citizens would have more power than any king or queen who had ever lived.  We were each part of the future and should bring it about by design, not default.  Matt's course had us explore the cycles of the creative process, not just in our personal lives, but as a larger cycle within culture and meaning.  Culture follows science from metaphysical thought and vision, through intent, insight, building. There is basically a generation of time lag between the understanding of science working its way into mainstream thinking. This creates paradigm shifts when the old way of thinking - Cartesian, clockwork, heirarchical -  begins to die and a new paradigm is birthing.  Mostly, people took sides and had nothing to say to each other. 

My work when I joined Matt's class was in education.  The Learning Exchange, a Teacher's Center attracted some of the best and brightest teachers within a 100 mile radius of Kansas City, MO. We worked with Dean's of Education, professors, teachers at all levels, parents, and community leaders. Yet it was rare for me to find someone interested in the future. I longed for people to exchange ideas with, to perturb my own thinking about the future.  The Renascence Project offered that for me. 

This was our mode when we founded MG Taylor Corporation. How could we help educators, community leaders, rebels, and ordinary folks to give the future a try? What is it we needed to provide to unleash this dormant knowledge about the future? Matt and I were both passionate about our beliefs in Group Genius.  We had our own experiences and wanted to incorporate it into whatever we were doing. 

As the book, How the Hippies Saved Physics, indicates we were not the only ones interested in a different future.  The 70's represented a wake up call and a number of us were listening and acting on our internal beliefs. We were going against mainstream although I doubt if many of us recognized this at the time. I, for one, was simply doing what I had a passion for. It just seemed like the thing to do. 

Over the next several journals, I plan to take different aspects of our method and write about how they got incorporated into the process.  I'll be starting with:

SCAN
expertise
design of the walls and environment
working big
building trust
play
diversity

All of these concepts were developed within a context, place and time called the 70's.

An Ecology of Mind

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."
                                                           - Gregory Bateson

We are lucky here on the Mendonoma Redwood Coast, an area that covers the northern most coast of Sonoma County and the southern coast of Mendocino.  Rural, yes, but sophisticated too.  We have an incredible Art Center and community of artists. We have a small, community managed, theater capable of bringing New York Operas right into the theater.  We have no street lights, little traffic and the closest thing to a franchise are our local True Value hardware stores.  We have two radio stations, one a public one and the other capable of assisting us through potential disasters.  Our stores are unique and heavily involved in community through the arts in one way or another.  Our independent bookstore, the Four-eyed Frog serves people all over the country through its wonderful web site. Local foods are both a vocation and advocation here. 

And now, we have Nora Bateson bringing her film about her Dad, Gregory Bateson, to our theater. We who live in the midst of natural abundance and a do-it-for-ourselves economy have the pleasure of hosting Nora as she presents her film, An Ecology of Mind on July 3rd at 7pm in our Point Arena theater.  I bet those of us able to see the film on July 3rd will think a little more like nature.  I look forward to coming to knowing the Mind of Nature more fully.

Big History

"Big History assembles accounts of the past from many different disciplines into a single, coherent account of the past."  From What is Big History?, Lecture 1, The Great Courses*

The past refers to the last 13 billion years!  Several months ago, I watched Professor David Christian's TED Talk on The Big History and then I listened to Bill Gates speak of the importance for young people to engage in such a course.  A group of us decided to invest in the 48 thirty minute DVDs and listen to the lectures together, over dinner, wine and lively conversation.  For me it is a wonderful, perhaps life changing, time.  We are not yet halfway through the series but each of us is finding new meaning, new understanding. We are seeing patterns that we can not see from a close up, near term perspective. 

In a nutshell, Christian speaks of eight thresholds beginning with the Big Bang and continuing through today.  Each threshold is an extraordinary  increase in complexity, and by its nature, fragile.  Threshold five brings life to our planet.  Threshold 6, 7, and 8 include human history. We are very recent. 

Humans appear as the 7th threshold, the Paleolithic Era. Christian's working theory is that what makes us human is our unique form of adaptation "collective learning".  All living beings adapt and change but it is very slow often over millienum.  Collective learning enables us to combine, store and reuse information. 

Those of you who know me know that I like to find patterns.  I attempt to work and see at a meta level. If you go to our library, you will find books that help me see and seek patterns.  Patterns are always prevelant in my design and facilitation. 

The following two quotes are magnificent in helping me see patterns from the past unfolding today. 

"There was neither non-existence nor existence then." What we are talking about is a sort of state in which there is not quite nothing, but there's not quite something: there's "sort of a potential". --- Rigveda, the basic Hindu scriptures.

I think of paradigm shifts.  The old is crumbling, disolving; the new is forming, solidifying. We are approaching our 9th threshold and a sort of potential.  We are in a fragile moment in history.

"The evolution of multi-cellular organisms was a complex process. For such organisms to work, billions of cells had to cooperate and communicate with great precision.  It was also necessary for them to be able to communicate with each other in some way, and for each cell to know its place and role in he functioning of the organism as a whole.  These are staggering organizational challenges. However, such challenges were not entirely unprecedented, for evolution can involve cooperation as well as competition. In fact, simpler forms of cooperation that do not count as multi-cellularity had already evolved.  Even eukaryotes formed through symbiosis between distinct types of prokaryotes."

This seems to me to be the same pattern we must repeat today, but on a higher order.  Is this not our challenge today ... for billions of people to learn to cooperate and communicate with great precision? 

Is this not our next collective learning adaptation? Today's mantra for collaboration and cooperation are not fads. It is more than a current trend.  When we take a long now approach, we can see that we are being shown the easiest, most natural route to crossing Threshold 8 successfully. 

Time and work is precious today.  If you are reading this you are probably one of the people building the scafolding for the next threshold.  There always seems to be more work than we could possibly do. Still I invite you to find some friends and enroll in an awesome experience.  You can rent the course from many libraries and The Learning Company has sales for more than 80% off.  I got my set for $90, a very good investment.  And, let's get the kids enrolled. It can be a wonderful family experience!