Many mystical philosophers are taking a “wait-and-see” attitude. This is reasonable because we live in an age of faddism where uncooked or half-baked ideas are shouted as loudly as any other idea.

Materialists have a habit of coopting alternative science notions. So many new age thinkers try to coopt spirituality with the notion of an imminent God that is consistent with materialist metaphysics. Examples are the deep ecology movement, feminist spirituality, the so-called holographic paradigm, and so forth. This is what Wilber objects to, mainly.

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An Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama,

            During president Clinton’s election campaign, the very effective slogan, ”It’s the Economy, Stupid” was coined.   Your slogan, “Change that you can believe in”, although perhaps not as provocative as Clinton’s, was not so entirely bad either.  It worked, didn’t it?  Even so, I think the phrase “It’s the worldview, stupid! ” would have been more relevant.  Please hear me out.

 Now that you are at the helm of the country and have started to institute changes, your changes more and more seem to be a mixed bag of ideas.  Almost everybody that voted for you and still supports you, feels a little unsure if he or she can believe in all of the changes you have begun.  In some of them,yes; but in others, we are not so sure. 

Speaking specifically, the required changes needed are about meaning and values. When you were campaigning, you got that one right Mr. president! When you put programs forward in favor of the middle class, universal health care, education, or green economy, you are unambiguously siding with meaning and values. No confusion there.  But when you side with programs for bailing out the financial investment banks like AIG, are you supporting meaning and values?  

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Dear President Obama, Just a few months ago you ran on a platform of change; real change you said, change in which we can believe. Well, how many changes have you made which can be considered real? Something so real that it can be believed in ? Something so real that it might inspire us to make a few changes ourselves?

Oh, yes, Mr. President, everybody in a position of leadership knows that we Americans need to change. Without making changes in our cynical, wasteful and extravagant lifestyle, the problems we face today in America and the world cannot be solved. But you can help by showing us your resolve to make changes.

We have become cynical, Mr. President. Today, we have hardly any ideas, philosophy, or principles to believe in; no convictions to guide our lives and enable us to make real changes. How did it get this way? There have always been materialist among us with their hedonism and epicurean philosophy of eat, drink, and be merry, but their influence was limited. Then starting in the nineteen fifties, there came the scientific materialists, and with the discovery of the DNA’s double helix structure scientists became emboldened to challenge faith in unprecedented ways. First came the assertion that we can understand life itself starting from molecules. We will synthesize life in the laboratory, they said, and show that no vital force is necessary, and certainly no God to make little green apples.

Then came high energy physics and their extravagnt claim of, “Show us the money for high energy machines, and we will show you the elementary particles that are the building blocks of all things. And knowing that, we will investigate biology and psychology from first principles. Nothing will be out of reach of our mathematical savvy.”

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