Emergence

“On the whole, the ‘subduing of the wilderness,’ most agreed, was the foundation for future profit.”

– Andrea Wulf in The Invention of Nature

Countering the super-specialization and reductio ad absurdum of the end of the modern era is emergence. Like the thesis and antithesis construct created by Hegel and extolled by Walt Whitman, it inspires us to reverse our fragmentation by “putting the pieces together” in a new way that could enable survival of life on earth—including ourselves. The Santa Fe Institute has taken the view that emergence is creativity; Rabbi Irwin Kula and others call it boundary crossing.

In archaeology, emergence is taking the form of uniting history, archaeology, and poetry, as in the Neil Price book Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. In nature writing, Jennifer Ackerman unites the passion of a bird fancier with emerging, contextualized ornithology. It is an exciting time to engage the world in context, on the human scale, free of “scientism” or bias toward the status quo. It is a good time to emulate Humboldt, Thoreau, and Leiberg. It is a good time to read books by Jack Nisbet, such as The Dreamer and the Doctor.

With emergence, we have the conceptual framework we need to choose life, and to change our deathly ways. By altering our views, frames, and constructs to accord with principles that dissolve arbitrary intellectual boundaries, and by returning our species to awareness of our place in the sacred body of life, we can recover our full humanity and emerge from the tunnel of modernity into the Eden from which we continue to exile ourselves. We can recognize that it is life as a whole—not any one part of it—that has evolved to realize an earthly immortality.