The Baby Boom generation consists of those born from 1946 to 1964, which happens to coincide for most part with those born with Pluto in Leo which ran from 1939 to 1956 and part of 1957.

So this generation, my generation, like Leo, likes to make a big splash, likes to be the center of attention. The boomers came into their own in the ’60s, made money during the ’80s and began redefining retirement (and resisting death) in the 2010s.

In Carl Payne Tobey’s astrology, Leo represents the 1st house. The sign of “Look at me, world, here I am.”

And that’s certainly what the Boomer generation has been and continues to be about.

Pluto was in Leo from 1939 to 1956 (and also January to August 1957), the first time since 1700. During this 17-year period there arose (perhaps for the first time in the general population) the consciousness of and the will to create and direct one’s own play or destiny.
Pluto in Leo: all about Leo Pluto – Fine Art Astrology Book

–Mike Zonta, BB editor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kairos (Ancient Greek: καιρός) is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment.^[1] The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, while the latter signifies a proper or opportune time for action. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.^[2] Kairos also means weather in Modern Greek. The plural, καιροί (kairoi (Ancient and Modern Greek)) means the times. Kairos is a term, idea, and practice that has been applied in several fields including classical rhetoric, modern rhetoric, digital media, Christian theology, and science.

Origins

In Onians’s 1951 etymological studies of the word, he traces the primary root back to the ancient Greek association with both archery and weaving. In archery, kairos denotes the moment in which an arrow may be fired with sufficient force to penetrate a target. In weaving, kairos denotes the moment in which the shuttle could be passed through threads on the loom.^[3] Similarly enough, E.C White published a work called Kaironomia, where he talks about this same concept. White describes it as,“long, tunnel-like aperture through which the archer’s arrow has to pass,” and “when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being woven”.^[4] Both examples are a show of an exact choice needed to be made.

In the literature of the classical period, writers and orators used kairos to specify moments when the opportune action was made, often through metaphors involving archery and one’s ability to aim and fire at the exact right time on-target. For example, in The Suppliants, a drama written by Euripides, Adrastus describes the ability to influence and change another person’s mind by “aiming their bow beyond the kairos.” Kairos in general was formulated as a tool to explain and understand the interposition of humans for their actions and the due consequences.^[5]

Kairos is also an alternate spelling of the minor Greek deity Caerus, the god of luck and opportunity.^[6]

In classical rhetoric

In rhetoric, kairos is “a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved.”^[7]

Kairos was central to the Sophists, who stressed the rhetor’s ability to adapt to and take advantage of changing, contingent circumstances. In Panathenaicus, Isocrates writes that educated people are those “who manage well the circumstances which they encounter day by day, and who possess a judgment which is accurate in meeting occasions as they arise and rarely misses the expedient course of action”.

Kairos is also very important in Aristotle‘s scheme of rhetoric. Kairos is, for Aristotle, the time and space context in which the proof will be delivered. Kairos stands alongside other contextual elements of rhetoric: The Audience, which is the psychological and emotional makeup of those who will receive the proof; and To Prepon, which is the style with which the orator clothes the proof.

In Ancient Greece, “kairos” was utilized by both of the two main schools of thought in the field of rhetoric. The competing schools were that of the Sophists, and that of their opposition, led by individuals such as Aristotle and Plato. Sophism approached rhetoric as an art form. Members of the school would travel around Greece teaching citizens about the art of rhetoric and successful discourse. In his article “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric”, John Poulakos defines rhetoric from a Sophistic perspective as follows: “Rhetoric is the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible.”^[8] Aristotle and Plato, on the other hand, viewed Sophistic rhetoric as a tool used to manipulate others, and criticized those who taught it.

Kairos fits into the Sophistic scheme of rhetoric in conjunction with the ideas of prepon and dynaton. These two terms combined with kairos are their keys to successful rhetoric. As stated by Poulakos, Prepon deals with the notion that “what is said must conform to both audience and occasion.”^[8] Dynaton has to do with the idea of the possible, or what the speaker is attempting to convince the audience of. Kairos in the Sophistic context is based on the thought that speech must happen at a certain time in order for it to be most effective. If rhetoric is to be meaningful and successful, it must be presented at the right moment, or else it will not have the same impact on the members of the audience.

Aristotle and his followers also discuss the importance of kairos in their teachings. In his Rhetoric, one of the ways that Aristotle uses the idea of kairos is in reference to the specificity of each rhetorical situation. Aristotle believed that each rhetorical situation was different, and therefore different rhetorical devices needed to be applied at that point in time. One of the most well known parts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is when he discusses the roles of pathos, ethos, and logos. Aristotle ties kairos to these concepts, claiming that there are times in each rhetorical situation when one needs to be utilized over the others.^[9]

Kairos has classically been defined as a concept that focused on “‘the uniquely timely, the spontaneous, the radically particular.'”^[10] Ancient Pythagoreans thought Kairos to be one of the most fundamental laws of the universe. Kairos was said to piece together the dualistic ways of the entire universe. Empedocles was the philosopher who connected kairos to the principle of opposites and harmony. It then became the principle of conflict and resolution and was thus inserted as a concept for rhetoric.^[11]

Modern rhetorical definition

In his article “Critical-Rhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of Rhetoric,” Aaron Hess submits a definition of kairos for the present day that bridges the two classical applications. Hess addresses Poulakos’s view that, “In short, kairos dictates that what is said must be said at the right time.”^[8] He also suggests that in addition to timeliness kairos considers appropriateness. According to Hess, kairos can either be understood as, “the decorum or propriety of any given moment and speech act, implying a reliance on the given or known”, or as “the opportune, spontaneous, or timely.”^[12] Although these two ideas of kairos might seem conflicting, Hess says that they offer a more extensive understanding of the term. Furthermore, they encourage creativity, which is necessary to adapt to unforeseen obstacles and opinions that can alter the opportune or appropriate moment, i.e. kairos. Being able to recognize the propriety of a situation while having the ability to adapt one’s rhetoric allows taking advantage of kairos to be successful. Hess’s updated definition of kairos concludes that along with taking advantage of the timeliness and appropriateness of a situation, the term also implies being knowledgeable of and involved in the environment where the situation is taking place in order to benefit fully from seizing the opportune moment.

Hess’s conflicting perspective on kairos is exemplified by the disagreement between Lloyd F. Bitzer and Richard E. Vatz about the rhetorical situation. Bitzer argues that rhetorical situations exist independent of human perspective; a situation invites discourse. He discusses the feeling of a missed opportunity to speak (kairos) and the tendency to later create a speech in response to that unseized moment.^[13] However, Vatz counters Bitzer’s view by claiming that a situation is made rhetorical by the perception of its interpreter and the way which they choose to respond to it, whether with discourse or not. It is the rhetor’s responsibility to give an event meaning through linguistic depiction.^[14] Bitzer’s and Vatz’s perspectives add depth to Hess’s ideas that kairos is concerned with both timeliness and appropriateness. On one hand, Bitzer’s argument supports Hess’s claim that kairos is spontaneous, and one must be able to recognize the situation as opportune in order to take advantage of it. On the other hand, Vatz’s idea that the rhetor is responsible reinforces Hess’s suggestion of the need to be knowledgeable and involved in the surrounding environment in order to fully profit from the situation.

According to Bitzer, Kairos is composed of exigence, audience, and constraints. Exigence is the inherent pressure to do something about a situation immediately, with the action required depending on the situation. The audience are the listeners who the rhetor is attempting to persuade. Constraints are the external factors that challenges the rhetors ability to influence, such as the audience’s personal beliefs and motivations.^[15]

Additionally, factors such as cultural background, previous social experiences, and current mood, can influence the capacity to see and understand the correct and opportune moment of action.^[15]

Thus, the difficulty of using kairos in a modern rhetorical setting is understanding and working within its constraints, while also carefully considering unexpected situations and encounters that arise, in order to present one’s rhetorical argument as naturally as possible.^[15]

‘Kairos’ modern English definition is vague. There is no one word in today’s English language that completely encompasses the definition of kairos, similar to that of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. In his article “The Ethics of Argument: Rereading Kairos and Making Sense in a Timely Fashion,” Michael Harker says, “Like the ‘points’ on the rhetorical triangle, the meaning of kairos is not definitive but rather a starting point for grasping the whole of an argument.”^[16] Kairos’ inclusion in modern composition has not been implicitly made, but there are undertones. Various components of kairos are included in modern composition and have made profound effects on modern composition theory.^[17]‘

Kairos’ purpose in modern rhetoric is mostly focused on the placement of logos, pathos, and ethos. Kairos is used as a “starting point” in modern rhetoric. Kelly Pender’s article “‘Kairos’ and the Subject of Expressive Discourse” states the inclusion of kairos within discourse “would try to shift the focus of personal writing from the writer’s experiences and emotions to a broader perspective that explicitly concentrates on the rhetorical situation…”^[18] Kairos is an expressive inclusion within the overall subject of discourse, and one that has an effect on the entire rhetoric.

In Christian theology

In the New Testament, “kairos” means “the appointed time in the purpose of God,” the time when God acts (e.g. Mark 1:15: the kairos is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand). “Kairos” (used 86 times in the New Testament)^[19] refers to an opportune time, a “moment” or a “season” such as “harvest time,” ^[20] whereas “chronos” (used 54 times)^[21] refers to a specific amount of time, such as a day or an hour (e.g. Acts 13:18 and 27:9). Jesus makes a distinction in John 7:6 between “His” time and “His brothers‘” time: paradoxically, it is “always” (Greek: πάντοτε) his brothers’ time. In the context, they can go to Jerusalem any time they wish.

In the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches, before the Divine Liturgy begins, the Deacon exclaims to the Priest, ‘Καιρὸς τοῦ ποιῆσαι τῷ Κυρίῳ’ (Kairos tou poiēsai tō Kyriō), i.e. “It is time [kairos] for the Lord to act”, indicating that the time of the Liturgy is an intersection with Eternity.

In The Interpretation of History, neo-orthodox Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich made prominent use of the term. For him, the kairoi are those crises in history (see Christian existentialism) which create an opportunity for, and indeed demand, an existential decision by the human subject – the coming of Christ being the prime example (compare Karl Barth‘s use of Geschichte as opposed to Historie). In the Kairos Document, an example of liberation theology in South Africa under apartheid, the term kairos is used to denote “the appointed time,” “the crucial time” into which the document or text is spoken.

In science

In Hippocrates’ (460-357 B.C.E) major theoretical treatises on the nature of medical science and methodology, the term “kairos” is used within the first line. Hippocrates is generally accepted as the father of medicine, but his contribution to the discourse of science is less discussed. While “kairos” most often refers to “the right time,” Hippocrates also used the term when referencing experimentation. Using this term allowed him to “express the variable components of medical practice more accurately.” Here the word refers more to proportion, the mean, and the implicit sense of right measure.

Hippocrates most famous quote about kairos is “every kairos is a chronos, but not every chronos is a kairos.” ^[22]

In A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy by Stephen Paul Witte, Neil Nakadate, Roger Dennis Cherry also discusses the art of kairos in the field of science. Citing John Swales, the essay notes that the introduction sections of scientific research articles are nothing more than the construction of openings. This idea derives from the spatial aspect of kairos, or the creation of “an opening,” which can be created by writers and discovered by readers. This opening is the opportune time, or kairos. Swales created what he called the “create a research space” model, wherein kairos, or an opening, was constructed. It consisted of four rhetorical moves. 1.) establishing the field. 2.) summarizing previous research. 3.) preparing for present research, and 4.) introducing the present research. The third step is one where a gap in previous research is indicated, thus creating the need for more information. The writer constructs a need, and an opening. Because kairos emphasizes change, it is an important aspect of science. Not all scientific research can be presented at the same time or in the same way, but creating an opening makes it possible to construct the right time.^[23]

This can easily be related back to Hippocrates statement that not every opening is an opportunity. Yet, in science, the message can be adapted in such a way that chronos becomes kairos.

The idea can also be expressed in the words of Carolyn M. Glasshoff who wrote that, specifically in the field of scientific writing, “any text must be influenced by the kairos that exists both before the text is created and during the presentation. In addition, each text helps create a new kairos for texts that come after.” ^[24]

In digital media

The historical context of the definition of kairos may make the concept appear outdated. However, the relevancy of kairos is at its peak as the world has rapidly transformed into a society dependent on digital technology. In order to recognize how kairos can be applied to online media and the challenges that occur as a result, a broad definition of the term is required. One definition makes the application of kairos to digital media easy to recognize, as it states kairos can be referred to as particular moment in which success is achieved when an opening is pursued with force.^[25] This definition prompts a main issue within the application of kairos to online content: if timing is crucial to the message of communication that is being received, how can we communicate effectively online, where anything can be published at any time?

The difficulty with modern rhetoric in the digital space is that the audience is less easily influenced by the rhetor. As such, it is difficult for rhetors to utilize kairos to the best of their abilities. Due to the nature of which modern audiences in the electronic age consume media, it is highly possible that they are multi-tasking, with their attention divided among multiple sources. This difficulty is compounded with the fact that this audience can consume discourse at different times, in different places, and through varying mediums. As a result, the audience is able to assign encountered discourse at various levels of personal priority. With this, they are able to discern which discourse they think is vital or interesting, and discard those they deem trivial or unworthy of their attention.^[6]

There are also multiple external factors that lead to the difficulty in using kairos in a modern setting. Since computer hardware, software, and even the underlying operating system all differ between people, it is difficult for the orator to take account for every permutation possible. Couple this with the lack of a true shared community online, since such virtual “cloakroom communities” are only temporary, and the difficulties in using kairos in the digital age becomes painfully clear.^[6]

Some scholars studying kairos in the modern digital sphere argue that the aspects of body/ identity, distribution/ circulation, access/ accessibility, interaction, and economics are handled differently in an online setting and therefore messages that are sent digitally need to be altered to fit the new circumstances. In order to reach online audiences effectively, scholars suggest that context of the information’s use, which includes considerations of legal, health-related, disciplinary, and political factors paired with smart rhetorical thinking can solve the issue of miscommunicated messages distributed on online forums.^[26]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos

NONFICTION

By Megan O’Grady

• Published Jan. 26, 2021 Updated Feb. 1, 2021 (NYTimes.com)

THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY
Childhood, Youth, Dependency
By Tove Ditlevsen

“I know every person has their own truth,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in “Childhood,” the first volume of her beautiful and fearless memoirs. “Fortunately, things are set up so that you can keep quiet about the truths in your heart; but the cruel, gray facts are written in the school records and in the history of the world.”

That the Danish author (1917-76) was famous in her own country by her 20s, writing a major body of work that includes 11 books of poetry, seven novels and four story collections, doesn’t mean that expressing those truths came easily. The facts of her early life in a rough corner of Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district were gray and often cruel enough: Hitler was rising to power, her father lost his job, Ditlevsen’s education ended with middle school. Her comely, mercurial mother mocked her desire to be a poet, telling her that “everything written in books is a lie.” The best she could hope for was marriage to “a stable skilled worker who comes right home with his weekly paycheck and doesn’t drink.”

But as the author-to-be went about her housework, “long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul like a protective membrane. … When these light waves of words streamed through me, I knew that my mother couldn’t do anything else to me because she had stopped being important to me. My mother knew it, too, and her eyes would fill with cold hostility.”

Ditlevsen’s memoirs, now published in a single volume titled “The Copenhagen Trilogy,” originally appeared in Danish as separate books: “Childhood” and “Youth” in 1967; the astonishing third, “Dependency,” in 1971. Read together, they form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor’s bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn’t just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality — the chapters have the quality of just-written diary entries, fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman — but that it exists at all. It’s a bit like discovering that Lila and Lenú, the fictional heroines of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, were real. Ditlevesen’s Istedgade Street is every bit as pungent (and perilous) as Ferrante’s stradone.

[ “The Copehnagen Trilogy” was one of our most anticipated titles of January. See the full list. ]

Why, exactly, it has taken so long for Ditlevsen to come to the wider attention of Anglophone readers is a question that summons a certain deja vu. We ask it whenever singular voices are “discovered,” such as the Brazilian modernist Clarice Lispector, or the brilliant Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo, or the prolific American short story author Lucia Berlin. The very framing of the question — “discovered” by whom? — points to the degree of whim and bias at play when the literary establishment considers which writers to translate, whom to grant cultural authority and a place in the collective consciousness.

One thinks also of Edna O’Brien, or Jean Rhys, women who craved a different scale of existence than what the history of the world had countenanced, never mind the stakes for gifted, sensitive girls with no money. Like O’Brien and Rhys, Ditlevsen wanted love, children, art, a home — “to be the painting and the painter,” as the portraitist Alice Neel put it — and paid a price in radical isolation, though she was rarely alone, her doomed vivacity a siren song for certain men. She died by her own hand at 58, and fell out of favor as a “popular” writer, that descriptor employed to dispatch successful women from critical history. But a younger generation of writers, including Dorthe Nors, who has described Ditlevsen as “the Billie Holiday of poetry” for the accessibility of her complexity, has found in her the kind of literary foremother she might have longed for herself — a woman who traveled to the edges of all the rocky outcroppings and reported back with a rueful honesty and a bracing lack of vanity.

It seems right, then, that Ditlevsen’s own mother figures so prominently early in these memoirs, her love for her daughter perceptible, if barely, through the twisted scrim of her own thwartedness. Young Tove can already read and write on her first day of school, and the principal rebukes her mother for teaching her too early. “My mother moves a little bit away from me and says faintly, ‘She learned it by herself, it’s not our fault,’” Ditlevsen writes. “I look up at her and understand many things at once. She is smaller than other adult women, younger than other mothers, and there’s a world outside my street that she fears. And whenever we both fear it together, she will stab me in the back.” Her mother’s hands, she notes with distaste, smell of dish soap.Image

Ditlevsen’s faceted truths tend to cut in more than one way — a jab in the heart, a slash to the throat. The confirmation party her mother throws to usher her, at 14, into the working ranks is another set piece of tenderly wrapped horror. The trap of filial piety isn’t lost on Ditlevsen, but escaping a fate of low expectations and lower-paying jobs is never as simple as recognizing their cruel, gray facts. At first, she plays this for bruising comedy, recounting a stint as a nanny to a small boy who tells her, “You have to do everything I say or else I’ll shoot you.” When she finally earns enough money to rent that essential room of her own in which to write, it is in a flophouse run by a blowsy Nazi who blasts Hitler’s speeches on the radio but complains about the clatter of Ditlevsen’s typewriter.

By her early 20s, Ditlevsen has married her first editor, a stout, impotent man three decades her senior who prints her work in his small literary journal, a spin on the “stable skilled worker” her mother imagined as her destiny. (Ditlevsen publishes her first book of poetry, “Girl Soul,” in 1939, her truth-telling landing her a devoted readership.) But nothing in her memoirs’ first two volumes quite prepares you for what’s to come. Her third marriage, to a sociopathic doctor who injects her regularly with Demerol — “the name sounds like birdsong” — nearly kills her. It does kill, for years, her urge to write, the protective membrane of words that has accompanied her since childhood dissolving into chemical oblivion. So unsparingly abject is her rendering of addiction — I frequently found myself having to pause, finger in book, and take a breath — that an episode involving Evelyn Waugh, whom she charms at a literary party before being dragged off humiliatingly by her lunatic husband, has an almost leavening effect.

In the annihilated aftermath of her third divorce, the words return, and Ditlevsen publishes, in 1968, her great novel, “The Faces.” Republished in Britain this year, it captures the dissociated mental state of a children’s author, Lise, who hallucinates voices and faces, the latter — disembodied, floating, often those of children — inspiring the book’s singular prose. “Some of them, especially girls, had had to live out their mother’s childhood while their own lay hidden in a secret drawer,” Lise explains. “Their voices would break out of them like pus from a sore, and the sound would frighten them, just like when they discovered that someone had been reading their diary, even though it was locked up among the junk and old toys from the time they had worn the discarded face of a 4-year-old. That face would stare up at them from among the tops and crippled dolls with innocent, astonished glass eyes.”

As the paranoid Lise grows convinced that her husband is plotting to induce her to commit suicide, the voices ratchet up, accusing her of various offenses: of being an inattentive wife, an inconstant mother, a solipsistic writer. “You’ve never seen anything but yourself in the whole world,” she envisions her beloved daughter, Hanne, admonishing her. That madness can be more incisive than the rational is the novel’s resonant irony, one that still lands. So, of course, does the crime of female subjectivity, of believing oneself a worthy literary subject, capacious enough to contain multitudes.

A half-century later, all of it — her extraordinary clarity and imperfect femininity, her unstinting account of the struggle to reconcile art and life — still lands. The construct of memoir (and its stylish young cousin, autofiction) involves the organizing filter of retrospection, lending the impression that life is a continuous narrative reel of action and consequence, of meanings to be universalized. Ditlevsen’s refusal to present her failings as steps on the path to some mythical plane of self-awareness reminds me of how potent the form can be when stripped of that pretense. Only at the conclusion of her memoirs, where we find her as she was when she wrote them — clinging to scraps of herself, a stranger to her children, gingerly returning to the page, the hunger lingering in her veins — did I really understand what occasioned these rare and indelible texts: the desire to be rid, finally, of her shame. Ditlevsen’s voice, diffident and funny, dead-on about her own mistakes, is a welcome addition to that canon of women who showed us their secret faces so that we might wear our own.

• © 2021 The New York Times Company

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

Overcoming the limits of being human

Issue 95, 17th February 2021 (iai.tv)

Mark Alan Walker 

| Professor of Philosophy at New Mexico State University who has written extensively about the ethics of using technology to enhance human capabilities.1,382 wordsRead time: approx. 7 mins

Are some important questions simply un-answerable by humans due to the type of biological beings we are? Philosophers such as Kant thought so. But humanity’s thirst for knowledge makes us unhappy with not knowing. In an age where person-engineering technologies such as Crispr and Neuralink are becoming a reality, enhancing our biology might illuminate the answers to some of life’s deepest questions writes Mark Walker.

Today we are at the cusp of our most profound crisis—what I call the “über crisis”. The antecedents of this crisis can be traced back at least to Heraclitus, one of the early Greek philosophers, who wrote,

“The wisest man will appear an ape in relation to God, both in wisdom and beauty and everything else.”

Heraclitus offers an early formulation of what I call ‘noetic skepticism’. When applied to any species, noetic skepticism says that there are biological limits to its ability to grasp important truths. If Heraclitus is correct, Homo sapiens are permanently cut off from important truths. So, if we want to discover all those important truths, we will have to change our biology. A perilous thought for sure, but history is replete with stories of humans taking great risks for sake of greater knowledge: Pandora’s box, the tree of knowledge, and the travails of Dr. Faust.

Noetic skepticism was a prominent part of philosophical discussion until relatively recently. For example, in the dialectic between Kant and Hegel in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Since then, interest has waned. Perhaps this decline is due to the rise of secular culture. After all, Kant offered God as his primary example of a noetic being: a being who stands to us in intelligence and wisdom as we do to apes. Once we rid ourselves of God, so this line of thought goes, we can reject noetic skepticism. But Noetic skepticism is the worry that the biological limitations of our understanding put important truths out of reach, not the worry that some other being is in possession of such truths. Noetic skepticism applies to chimps; there are important truths a chimp cannot grasp. Whether or not humans exist does not change this fact about chimps’ grasp of the world. The same is true of humans and the existence of God.

Person-engineering technologies will make it possible to accomplish in a matter of years what evolution would take thousands of millennia to achieve.

The über crisis is the question of whether to create noetic beings: we have, or very soon will have, person-engineering technologies that could be used to this end. These technologies will make it possible to accomplish in a matter of years what evolution would take thousands of millennia to achieve. Here are four emerging person-engineering technologies with this potential:

1. Genetic Engineering: We currently have the technology to genetically engineer the homeobox genes of human zygotes to create descendants with much larger brains. This was demonstrated a couple of decades ago with frog zygotes.
2. Advanced Pharmacology: Injecting adults with proteins that restart the rapid neurogenesis of our youth could be used to greatly increase the brain mass of adult humans.
3. Advanced Computing Technology: Computer hardware inexorably becomes more efficient and cheaper. Computers can drive cars and beat us at chess. There is a clear trajectory to a future where computers can outthink us in every domain.
4. Cyborg Technology: Researchers are in the early stages of exploring the possibility of marrying computing hardware with human brains.

Let me add a few qualifications. First, no single application of any of these technologies will lead to the creation of noetic beings. Rather, we should expect a rapid feedback loop. For example, if we genetically engineer descendants who are 10% more intelligent, they will be even better at person-engineering, and so will create descendants who are even smarter, and so on. Modelling with a new generation every 25 years, this would mean a doubling of intelligence in under 200 years. My prediction is that, if genetic engineering is directed to increasing intelligence, the gains would be much larger and the length between ‘generations’ much shorter.

Second, my claim is that one of these technologies – or a similar one I am not aware of – will make radical person-engineering possible. Some of the technologies I have mentioned might prove unworkable.

Richard Morgan, Nicky Ashwell and Anders Sandberg ask where technology will lead the human race.

Third, I do not claim that scientists and technologists are purposely working towards creating noetic beings today. If anything, the opposite seems true: we might stumble blindly into a future of radical person-engineering because we are developing dual-use technologies. Genetic engineering techniques are currently used to make crops disease resistant. This technology can be repurposed to experiment in enhancing human intelligence. The techniques used to stimulate neogenesis to create new beta cells for diabetic patients might be applied to neogenesis of neurons. Without a conscious push to create noetic beings, rapidly developing technologies could be easily adapted for person-engineering.

A common reaction to the possibility of creating noetic beings is to dismiss it as fantasy. This rhetorical move is not grounded in good evidence. Nothing in current science, particularly evolutionary biology, suggests that the creation of noetic beings is impossible. Indeed, evolutionary theory suggests that smart money should bet on the possibility of noetic beings. In part, this is an extrapolation from the relatively recent and rapid rise of intelligence on this planet, which suggests that large gains are still possible. Some very small differences in DNA have provided some of the largest leaps in intelligence: the genetic difference between a mouse and a rat is ten times the difference between humans and chimps. Everything points to a continuing trend: small differences in biology make huge differences in intelligence.

This would be a true ‘über transformation’, for there is no parallel in human history for this sort of change. And this is saying something, since the last 10,000 years have witnessed massive transformations of human society from small nomadic hunting and gathering tribes to our global technical civilization. Think of the revolutions in human life wrought by the inventions of agriculture, cities, gunpowder, antibiotics, and computers. The potential radical change of creating noetic beings overshadows all these combined.

The potential radical change of creating noetic beings overshadows all of the revolutions in human life combined.

I have not yet said whether we ought to create noetic beings. But the lure of knowledge is very strong, as evidenced in our constant quest for technology, and, historically, attempts to curb its development have failed miserably.

Bioconservatives, of course, council against any such project. Like all conservatives, they recoil in horror at the prospect of radical, transformative change. However, at the policy level, the Bioconservatives’ position itself requires profound change. Specifically, it necessitates a global ban on person-engineering technologies directed at creating noetic beings. Agreeing and enforcing such an international prohibition would be exceedingly difficult.

Further, the dual-use of technology makes it particularly hard to control. For example, banning CRISPR technology would also ban it as a cure for genetic disease. But if it is permitted for therapeutic uses, it will be exceedingly difficult to stop it being used for enhancement. As well as this, the cost of these technologies is rapidly falling; they will quickly be in reach of large number of people. Today here are many biohackers with small genetic labs in their homes, performing experiments that would have taken the resources of a large university only a few decades ago. Controlling these technologies is going to be very hard.

Transhumanists tend to applaud the possibility of creating noetic beings, at least in principle. But they must face several questions, the most obvious is the fate of humans in a world with noetic beings. Others are who should control person-engineering technology, and how should the potential benefits and harms be distributed.

Bioconservatism and Transhumanism is the split which underlies the über crisis of this century. Both envisioned futures are transformative. One requires a unified global response to control person-engineer technologies and would involve draconian changes in governance. The other is a future in which noetic beings take Homo sapiens’ crown as the smartest beings on the planet. Both are very different from what many people imagine. Indeed, there lies much of the problem of noetic skepticism: we are as incapable of imagining our future as our ape-ancestors were of imagining the world today.

Mark Alan Walker
Issue 95, 17th February 2021

Inside Edition February 14, 2019 It’s an unlikely Oscar contender. Marshall Curry’s “A Night at the Garden” has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. The film, entirely comprised of archival footage, shows a 1939 rally of American Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The rally drew 20,000 people on the eve of World War II. “The lesson of the film,” Curry told InsideEdition.com, is that “we are vulnerable to leaders who will stir us up against each other.”

(A Facebook version of this video was submitted by Suzanne Deakins, H.W., M.)

SUNDAY MEETING 2/21/2021 The Hidden power in Mythology What is Mythology and why is it important for me? Richard Hartnett, H.W., M.  11:00 am Pacific/Noon Mountain/1:00 Central/2:00 Eastern https://us02web.zoom.us/j/332275676   This Sunday Richard Hartnett will begin an ongoing series on “The reinterpretation of Judieo-Christian Mythology”.  Richard has been a student of myth his whole life, and has written two books on the relevance of Greek Mythology for Modern society. Now to introduce his next book called, “Return to Paradise”, Richard will begin the series of talks about developing new perspectives on our Christian myths. These talks are presented by contribution. Everyone from fundamentalists to atheists are welcome! One tap mobile+16699006833,,579891643# US (San Jose)+13462487799,,579891643# US (Houston)Dial by your location        +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)        +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)        +1 301 715 8592 US        +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)        +1 929 205 6099 US (New York)        +1 253 215 8782 USMeeting ID: 579 891 643Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abtcyLDACK

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Marianne Williamson Dr. Cornel West joins Marianne Williamson for a conversation on morality, justice and politics. Follow Dr. Cornel West on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/CornelWest​ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcornelwest​ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brothercorn…​ Dr. West’s website: http://CornelWest.com​ Listen to Dr. West’s podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…​ Watch Dr. West’s podcast: https://www.youtube.com/c/thetightrop…​ Follow Marianne on Social Media Twitter: https://twitter.com/marwilliamson​ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/williamsonma…​ Instagram: https://instagram.com/mariannewilliamson​ Website: marianne.com

God of the Oppressed

by James H. Cone 

God of the Oppressed remains a landmark in the development of Black Theology—the first effort to present a systematic theology drawing fully on the resources of African-American religion and culture. Responding to the criticism that his previous books drew too heavily on Euro-American definitions of theology, James Cone went back to his experience of the black church in Bearden, Arkansas, the tradition of the Spirituals and black folklore, and the black history of struggle and survival, to construct a new approach to the gospel. In his reflections on God, Jesus, suffering, and liberation, Cone relates the gospel message to the experience of the black community. But a wider theme of the book is the role that social and historical context plays in framing the questions we address to God, as well as the mode of the answers provided. Revised, including a new introduction by Cone, God of the Oppressed remains invaluable for scholars, students, clergy, and everyone concerned with vital, contemporary God-Talk.

(Goodreads.com)

Jesus and the Disinherited

by Howard Thurman, Vincent Harding (Foreword) 

In this classic theological treatise, the acclaimed theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1900–81) demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus is a partner in the pain of the oppressed and the example of His life offers a solution to ending the descent into moral nihilism. Hatred does not empower—it decays. Only through self-love and love of one another can God’s justice prevail.

(Goodreads.com)