The East Has A Philosophy For The Future

Ever since James Lovelock conceived of his Gaia theory — that the planet is one self-regulating organism, which the Anthropocene Age of human dominance is destabilizing — the world has been looking for a philosophy that fits this dawning realization.

The human-centered materialist progress of Enlightenment rationality opened up the space of personal autonomy and freedom from necessity as never before. But it also ravaged nature as a resource to feed industrialized desire and fragmented human communities through the cult of the individual.

To mend that breach with nature and others, what departure will take us in another direction? Won’t algorithms spun from the same philosophical thread lock us even more so into the same trajectory encoded into artificial intelligence, the step function of our next leap forward?