Here’s the latest episode from our weekly Friday morning spot on Burlington, Vermont’s “Howie Rose Show”:

 

Right-click here to download mp3.

And here are some thoughts about the show:

One benefit of our Burlington Radio Show on Friday mornings is that we are starting to bring out and make objective the strands of postmodern culture that shape our ideas, values, and actions, but that we aren’t necessarily aware of. One of these maxims that came out on last Friday’s call was our dependence on balance as a guiding principle–and how diametrically opposed balance and evolution can be.

We spoke about two of the sacred balancing cows of our generation:  the balancing of masculine and feminine energy and the quest to balance humanity with our collective impact on the earth. The all too familiar idea is that the world has gotten out of balance due to our over emphasis on industry, consumerism, masculinity, and other modern sins. Now we need to (continue to) restore the balance by bringing in the opposite of those energies–local economy, living simply, femininity, and others.

That the world is suffering from ecological and cultural disasters is not in doubt. Thank God that movements to protect the environment, bring equality, respect cultures and peoples have become part of our value set! These are all movements that I have been part of, as most of us have, to some degree or another. I remember long nights sorting waste in my college’s Physical Plant to determine how many pounds of recyclables were getting tossed by careless college brats. Ahhh, the crusade against the non-recycling hold-outs was a Holy War and I was Earth’s knight in shining armor. With my Nalgene full of superiority juice, my friends and I would snatch discarded plastic bottles out of the trash cans and pile them into the recycling bins, glaring with contempt at the evil sinners–our dorm room neighbors–who we condemned as consciously plotting to destroy the world.

The desire to push back against the problems created by the previous generation’s stunning scientific, economic, and political development was very strong. But that structure of pushing back against progress, (in its own context, modernism IS progressive, least we forget), is in danger of getting in the way now that we are poised to move into a new stage of creative explosion. In this conversation, we are talking about aligning with the universe’s creative energy, as ourselves, a leap forward that will throw anyone off balance. I wonder if it isn’t the knee-jerk attachment to balance in life that is holding us to our postmodern moorings. Perhaps we need to speak about the fact that moving forward into a new value-sphere doesn’t mean giving up the good postmodern values– they will always be part of us. It means giving up our attachment to them, at the expense of adopting new ones.

We are talking about what comes next. As Diane so aptly put on the show (see audio, above), we are talking about the move from postmodern to an evolutionary worldview, not from modern to postmodern.

Looking forward to more!