Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe

Lent dives into an innovative interdisciplinary synthesis of life. Weaving together threads of insight from the biological, psychological, ecological, evolutionary, spiritual to form a rich tapestry of understanding of who we are, where we've come from and how we've fallen out of alignment with the principles of Nature. My top book of 2021!

The thing about a dominant worldview is that those who embrace its underlying assumptions often do not even consider the possibility that those assumptions may be wrong or misguided. But every now and then, a book comes along that challenges conventional wisdom in such a way as to shake people out of their “dogmatic slumber,” causing them to reevaluate their basic orientation to the world. For many readers, this may be just such a book.Having spent the greater part of 10 years researching the sources of meaning, Jeremy Lent presents an integrated worldview that challenges the Western conception of life as a reductive, radically individualistic, competitive struggle for survival. In fact, modern science paints the opposite picture: life and evolution are every bit as much about cooperation as they are about competition.Lent provides numerous examples of how cooperation has been the catalyst to virtually every major transition in the evolution of life, and that, on a deeper level, all life is fundamentally connected and interdependent. The Western mind—which often fails to recognize the limits of language to capture the full complexity of the world—focuses on artificial divisions and reductionist investigations into the material world when, more often than not, it’s the relationships between things, and in particular between people, that are far more consequential than the granular descriptions of the things themselves.The wisdom traditions of the East that have known this all along—most prominently Taoism and Zen Buddhism—offer a different way of contemplating the world that is less aggressively individualistic and more attuned to the integrated nature of all living things. While Western thinking identifies individuals based exclusively on their “conceptual consciousness”—i.e., their ability to translate and describe experience using language and abstract concepts—the Eastern mind considers the individual to be a combination of both conceptual consciousness and “animate consciousness”—the aspect of our consciousness that places us in direct contact with the world via our five senses. To understand the difference, think of the contrast between describing the experience of drinking tea using language (conceptual consciousness), for example, and the actual experience of drinking tea (animate consciousness), with all of its associated aromas, flavors, colors, sensations, and temperatures.The Eastern mind is simply more in tune with direct experience and with the dynamic, complex, and interdependent aspects of nature for which language and abstractions can only superficially capture. Whereas a Western scientist, for instance, may believe that all biological, psychological, and social phenomena ultimately reduce to the laws of particle physics, the ancient Eastern way of thinking recognizes the importance of emergent properties and relationships that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts.Because Eastern thinking is not reductive, and not solely focused on the individual in isolation from the contexts in which they live and flourish, Eastern philosophies provide a strong counterpoint to the individualistic, greedy, competitive drive for material gain and profit characteristic of the West.Of course, Western philosophy and science have contributed greatly to the improvement of human well-being through technology, medicine, specialization, and trade, and Lent does not deny this. It is undeniable that reductionist science has resulted in longer, healthier lives and greater material well-being. But this has all come at a cost: namely, the prospect of ecological collapse, massive inequities in income and wealth, and a sense of disconnection from nature and from each other.The brilliance of Lent’s book is in its integration of modern science and capitalism with an Eastern conception of interdependence and a greater conception of the common good. There is no reason—now that we know that social Darwinism and neoliberalism are misguided ideologies—that we cannot simultaneously enjoy the benefits of Western science and capitalism while also tempering them with a greater concern for the common good. In other words, there is no reason to continue to allow the “free market” to dictate our lives and our values.Lent uses an apt analogy. Markets, like fire, are useful and serve their purpose, but let them run uncontrolled and they end up destroying everything in their path. The ironic part is that we perpetually fear the creation of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and yet stand oblivious to the fact that we’ve already created it: an entity called the corporation that is given the legal rights of an individual without any of the associated social obligations. The sole concern of corporations is the maximization of profits at all costs; so when we give them free reign to accomplish this, we really shouldn’t be surprised when the environment gets destroyed, workers get exploited (while shareholders grow ever richer), and consumers get harmed.As a country, we’re obsessed with the idea of freedom, but today freedom from the “tyranny of the market” is what we should be most concerned with. The neoliberal world in which the corporation became king was a world where money and material wealth were the only goods and where cut-throat individualistic competition was the metaphor for life. With the world careening towards environmental catastrophe and growing inequality, it’s time for a new metaphor and more robust controls on corporate greed. But this cannot come from top-down central planning or control; it has to come from the bottom up—from the collective actions of individuals that recognize a deeper sense of connection to nature and to each other. This book can help get us started down this more integrated and desirable path.

The Web of Meaning is a welcome and promising book. In it Jeremy Lent spans the evolution of life and makes a link with Eastern philosophical concepts. It is rare to read something that takes such as wide-ranging universal perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of this book.Unfortunately, the second half of this books sees a considerably different perspective and its quality dips sharply. Here the author draws from highly subjective and current cultural values instead of further analysing life from a universal perspective. Perhaps the book therefore should have been published in two volumes instead.Amongst his subjective views and narrow interpretations of life in the second part he claims there is a mental hierarchy between animals and humans with humans placed on the top of it. Yet in chapter 10 he criticises man’s anthropocentrism and he does not explain this dichotomy in his thinking. Neither does he supply any evidence to his claim that humans are on the top of the evolutionary hierarchy.In the second part he frequently lashes out at men/males who he claims have for 12000 years, since the age of settlers, engaged in senseless machismo leadership domination thus creating a naive victim-perpetrator fallacy between men and women. This black and white victim-perpetrator claim is not only insulting to those women who do not feel their main quality is that of a victim but it leads to what the contemporary philosopher Dr. Svenja Flaßpöhler called a perpetuation of “penis envy”.Again, in chapter 10 he says the cause for the destruction of nature are the ignorant deeds of white Christian males who also put non white people down. Here, Lent is wholly ignoring, for example, how during the current spread of populist and hyper nationalist politics women have taken many leading roles. He further paints Western cultures as the sole reason for the destruction of and alienation from nature. Looking at the sadism with which animals are treated in Asia and Africa, such as a dog meat trade in China where dogs are tortured to death in the belief their meat tastes better if they died in agony, the destruction of the rain Forests for the benefit of corrupt and dysfunctional leaders in non-Western countries, the wide-spread absence of human rights all show that Lend maybe taking a too narrow view. Will these views really lead to a more connected world or will they cause a more divided world I wonder?

Gave this one a fair shot, though after a while 'the science' just made me cringe and I had to stop. If you love the esoteric, and want your views gently confirmed with pseudo-science and vague, generic 'wisdom' from ancient times... this might just be the book for you.

Basically a shorter rehash if his previous book