How I made friends with reality

Aside from recalling the rhetoric accompanying the launch of Sputnik — "Finally, we are free from our bonds to Mother Earth!" — Arendt parses the Graeco/Roman classifications of "Work," which comes out of the head and is associated with men, and "Labor," which is identified with Nature and devalued, as are the people who perform or undergo labor. Just in case you were wondering why so few women and people of color populate the workplaces of Silicon Valley and boardrooms across the country.

Rianne's advocacy of a partnership society rather than a dominance society relies greatly on the work of Maria Gambutis, the archaeologist whose discoveries upended the traditional view of the Stone Age civilization of ancient Crete, and whose interpretation of her findings opened the door to the question which has animated all my work since reading it 1989: "What if 'the way things are' isn't 'the way things are?'" Or, more hyperbolically, "What if everything you thought was true turned out not to be?" However it's said, this book liberated me from the same old/same old and allowed me to think creatively and independently about who we are and how we got here.

Reading this book was like throwing open a window in my head, letting in a burst of fresh air and revealing a universe that looked more like my life. The science Gleick writes about is as exciting as the scientists, who speak in a language that can only be described as poetic. This book completely turned me into a science lover.

For the past 20 years, I have been thinking, writing and talking about the shift from Newton's Universe, based on Newtonian physics, to Emily's Universe, which incorporates the insights and values gleaned from the newer sciences of quantum physics, chaos theory and complexity theory. The drawback is that I'm not a physicist or a scientist of any kind. So imagine my astonishment to discover an actual scientist — in this case a biologist — who is talking about the same transition from a dessicated, Thanatos-identified (not to say hyper-masculinized) universe, to a messy universe teeming with life. As Weber himself puts it: a shift "from the Enlightenment to the Enlivenment." Yum!

Aside from its other virtues, this book poses a question which has become for me the central challenge to humanity today: "Suppose the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: 'I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own "level best." I offer you the chance of being part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of cooperative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to take the risk?'"