BEGINS TO LOOK LIKE HOME

Re any conjectured anthropomorphic sense that the Universe could possess: A pronoiac attitude--that the Universe is at least benign, and not actively malefic--seems to me a good one to have, if no less for the "fact" that surely there is power in positive thinking. I know; it assumes that the Universe is an active force that has teleologic, purposeful design (and not just a random occurrence with random events).

In these matters, I was profoundly influenced by R. Buckminister Fuller, ca. 1970, even attending campus meetings at the University of Kentucky, where I was fortunate enough to have attended a lecture by Bucky himself. I was thoroughly atheistic at the time, until reading Fuller's writings in which he speaks of the "cosmic intellectual integrity at work in the design of Universe." Fuller was a design scientist (otherwise an architect and mathematician by training, and an inventor by vocation) who thought about "design science" both mundane and cosmic.

Starting from the position that Universe has an undeniable overall design based on fundamental design principles that are endlessly repeated and never abrogated, it is appropriate, I believe, to postulate that humans are integrally part of the "design integrity."

When speaking of "God," Fuller said this many times: "God is a verb, not a noun, whether proper or improper." So, that's where I stand: the term "god" is not useful except to replace in a shorthand way the reality of the active, ongoing design integrity of Universe.

If one wants to reify "design integrity" into "Design Integrity," as I do, then cosmic processes begin to have an active, benign design. True, Universe does not "care," but Universe continually designs itself using its always-existing principles of design integrity, even at the level of an individual human who exists and develops within these design principles.

Fuller says humans are "magnificently successful products of design in a Universe the complexity and intricacy of whose design integrity utterly transcends human comprehension, let alone popularly acceptable descriptions of 'divine design'." Yet, that design (or Design) includes, I believe, the development of Homo sapiens sapiens and human consciousness as successful, "designed" events in a non-neutral (even "friendly") Universe where we are integrally designed to belong.

It begins to look and feel like Home.         

WHERE WE GOING, CAPTAIN?

Those of us who became part of the wave of vegetarian life-style change, ca. 1970, understood that a meat-centered diet was unsustainable and that eventually many millions more would have a non-meat-centered diet thrust upon them by circumstances beyond their control. Those circumstances are coming to fruition today. Witness the upsurge in interactive prices of food and fuel. It is now clear to everyone that the two are intertwined and have planetary ramifications.

With huge increases in population--both here in the U.S. (the Pew Research Center projects that the U.S. will reach 438 million by 2050) and world-around (the U.N. projects 9.1 billion by 2050)--the food-and-energy nexus is now a life-and-death issue for several billion people and for the health of the Planet.

Also, with rapid and continuing globalization (the world acting as a single place), it seems to me that the world is increasingly OVER-DETERMINED (resulting from multiple and reinforcing causes) to the utmost degree. Our dietary and energy-use habits now have planetary impact. Buckminster Fuller, in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, convinced many of us 38 years ago.

The concept of over-determinancy should persuade that each of us is sitting in the captain's chair. With our hands firmly on the controls, where will each of us guide the Ship?