The Daily Evolver

With all the attention on the war and pestilence within trailing-edge cultures around the world, it’s easy to miss what is happening on the leading edge, as developed cultures move deeper into post-modernity (green altitude). This week’s Daily Evolver Live tours a few stories that show how we are creating a more safe, peaceful, reliable, fair and sensitive world.

This week Jeff takes a look at the Ebola crisis and how an integral view can help us relate and respond. He explores the function of fear and a time honored way that it can be transmuted into real helpfulness. The second half of the podcast is a conversation with Steve McIntosh, who is bringing an integral sensibility to the problem of political polarization in America, through his foundation the Institute for Cultural Evolution.

This week Jeff shares some evolutionary insights and encounters he had on his few weeks of hiatus. He starts with a personal story of his own development regarding communion with animals. He also examines a common sticking point for liberals, exemplified by a widely noted public argument between Bill Maher, Sam Harris and Ben Affleck regarding Islamic violence and Islamophobia.

Human beings are memory machines, for better or for worse. There is an autobiographical narrative that is alive inside all of us, and just as individual memories seem to create me, memories in the morphogenetic field create the collective culture of my family, my society. Most people are familiar with the effects that major trauma like car accidents, sexual abuse and so on, can have on a person. But our sense of self is also formed by the “little 't' traumas”, the small humiliations.

Ken Wilber is my hero. I mean that quite literally because Ken rescued me from a life of confusion, fear and frustration as I tried to make sense of our crazy, mixed up world. Ken’s insights organized life on Planet Earth from a disjointed mess into an elegant whole.

In a week that has featured an appalling display of the trailing edge of consciousness development -- the ISIS beheadings -- Jeff starts by highlighting a new, more encouraging emergent that is arising on humanity’s leading edge. It’s called being nice. Also, a good week for the Obama Doctrine?

In the vision of a future economy the motto is to think globally and act locally. Eco-localization refers to local production and consumption imbued with an awareness of how one’s actions may impact other communities. This includes global trade between local economies (hence the word “glocalization”), which means you don't import things that can be made locally but you may still share culture and “perhaps even have bananas in Hungary,” Szandra says.

This week Jeff looks at a new model of autocratic modernity that is gaining traction particularly among developing countries with weak histories of democracy, such as Russia and China. With the economically and politically stumbling West no longer held up an the inevitable example, we can see the appeal -- and even some of the intelligence -- behind this rising brand of development without liberalism.

The many crises of the world, most prominently the war in Israel and Gaza, evoke important questions for those of us who are not directly involved. What can we do about the suffering? What are we supposed to feel and think? How are we to relate and respond? This week Jeff explores aspects of the interior spaces of integral consciousness, especially those we experience in the face of suffering.

But first he looks at a significant new work of integral art: the movie Boyhood.

The two global hot spots this week are, once again, Ukraine, where Russian separatists have shot down a passenger jet from Amsterdam, killing 300 people, and Israel/Gaza, where longstanding tensions have flared into a new intifada. What do these conflicts have in common and how can integral consciousness help us understand them more deeply?