The famous Canadian media guru, Marshall McLuhan, when commenting on Buckminster Fuller’s seminal 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, said, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.” Like so many of his insightful comments, McLuhan managed to encapsulate a complex and comprehensive understanding in a few simple words.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Passenger or CrewAll posts by Ray Grigg
The Quadra Project: The War Years
The 20th century did not begin well. After the warm-ups of the Crimean and Boer Wars, Europe stumbled into World War I in 1914, a fatal combination of hubris and stupidity that killed about 17 million people. The trauma inspired an unflinching examination of the dark recesses of the human psyche in an effort to understand what happened. Dada, the mindless artistic expression of absurdity, was not a satisfactory answer. The philosophical loneliness of existentialism was arguably a nihilistic consequence of the monumental blunder of the First World War—a loss of any remnant of idealism and collective human wisdom.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: The War Years
The Quadra Project: Eco-Morality
The global environmental crisis is creating a paradigm shift in human consciousness that will change the moral tenor of everything we think and do for the foreseeable future—not just for decades, but for centuries as we become the de facto regulators of our planet’s climate. As the media guru Marshall McLuhan noted, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.”
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Eco-Morality
The Quadra Project: losing our minds
Just when we need our entire minds, we seem to be losing them. This is the considered opinion of Johann Hari, a British-Swiss writer and journalist, writing in a Guardian Weekly feature, “Focus (If You Still Can)” (Jan. 7, 2022).
It’s not that we’re losing all our minds, just about 20%, according to studies. This is a critical amount considering that we’re confronting some of the most serious threats to our survival in the history of human civilization, and the capabilities we need to make crucially important decisions are precisely the ones being compromised.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: losing our minds
The Quadra Project: Being us
Our environmental problems are the result of a fundamental disconnection between our understanding of reality and what it seems to be. In other words, we are discovering that the world doesn’t work the way we have thought it works, and that we now have to make major adjustments in how we individually and collectively behave.
Of course, we have always been doing this, both as individuals and as cultures. Our personal experiences, registered through consciousness, adjust our basic sense of reality, and cultures are always undergoing similar changes. Fundamentally new understandings totally remake us. As the media guru, Marshall McLuhan, said in one his intriguingly aphoristic reversals, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.” Consider history.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Being us