Ep240 - Humanity's Long Journey Home: We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
04/11/17 • 133 min
About a month ago, Hunter was on Chris Ryan's Tangentially Speaking podcast. (It's episode 234 if you're interested.) I can't speak for Chris but I had a really great time. Some people on Twitter enjoyed the convo too. Someone even said they were happy that I'd finally found my soulmate. I was disappointed that my soulmate would be a married DUDE...but Twitter don't lie!
And so, Chris and I scheduled a second conversation. Two plus hours later my faith in the wisdom of crowds is greater than it has ever been. Chris not only is my soulmate but he succeeded in bringing me to the point of tears. Legitimately, my eyes made water. Chris Ryan extracted my cultural confession from me.
One of the patterns that Chris drew out in this conversation is that so much of humanity's cutting edge thinking rests on looking back to how Hunter-Gatherers lived to see what lessons we can learn from them. In short, humanity is trying to return to what it knew before.
This is the nature of the Hero's Journey. A hero leaves the tribe and sets out on a quest to find something or solve some problem for the tribe. In the oldest sense, they leave the security of the village to hunt and gather to bring food back for the tribe. In so doing, they risk their lives and face trials from nature, plants and animals. Eventually, the face the ordeal that requires them to draw on all they've learned. If they succeed, they return to the village with their prize.
A long time ago, humanity set out on an epic hero's journey. Something was missing from village life. What was it? That's actually a quite tough question. Life for hunter-gatherers is remarkably good. And yet, set out we did. We engaged in agriculture. We enslaved each other. We built great Empires and those Empires fought great wars. Religious and cultural movements swept across the globe. And now, with all we've achieved in our mastery over the natural world, many of us find ourselves looking back with longing to a time of strong communities and social belonging. We want to go back home.
However, as Chris and I discuss in this podcast, we cannot turn back yet. For first, we must face the ordeal. What is that ordeal? The fear of our own mortality. And that, ladies and gentlemen, has been the ordeal all along. We have built great pyramids and statues. We have conquered vast Empires. We have created great works of art. And all of it has crumbled away. Shortly after the British Museum acquired a piece of a great broken statue of Ramesses II, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Ozymandias about the vanity of thinking that any monument to your own greatness would last.
Since time immemorial, mankind has sought the elixir of life and the fountain of youth in the hopes that we would cheat death. And now, there are those among us who believe they will cheat death forever. Men like Ray Kurzweil believe that through the magic of technology we will achieve immortality. And perhaps, we will. But what is it that we want. What do we hunger for? Why as our technology rushes forward do we find ourselves looking back?
Chris is fond of a quote from T.S. Eliot "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." That is the hero's journey. And perhaps man's hero's journey is not a straight line up and up forever. Perhaps in some sense it is one great circle. Whatever great technologies and elixirs we find, perhaps it will not be enough for us to have it. The great joy of the reward that we have hunted and gathered is in returning to share it with the tribe. And that is what we have lost. We have lost community. The challenge of Mixed Mental Arts is to evolve a culture that draws on the best of all times and places. Some of those places we left a long time ago.
Chris' favorite quote has a special resonance for me. Robert McNamara quotes it in the Fog of War. For all his explorations and great statistical knowledge, McNamara in the end found solace in the words of a poet who talked about returning home. And that is very much my own experience. I have now wandered widely through the science. But all of those explorations have brought me to where I started. I have had to rediscover a sense of childlike wonder, of curiosity and of a desire for the sort of community that existed 10,000 years ago before the rise of agriculture. Can we have it all? I think we can. And I'm sure as heck willing to devote my life to trying.
Chris reminds me in this podcast that Robert McNamara's middle name was "Strange." Robert "Strange" McNamara. And that's fitting. Life is strange. It just gets curiouser and curiouser once you leave your culture behind. And I'm excited to see how deep the rabbit hole goes...even if when I reach the bottom I find I come back out on top.
"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive w...
About a month ago, Hunter was on Chris Ryan's Tangentially Speaking podcast. (It's episode 234 if you're interested.) I can't speak for Chris but I had a really great time. Some people on Twitter enjoyed the convo too. Someone even said they were happy that I'd finally found my soulmate. I was disappointed that my soulmate would be a married DUDE...but Twitter don't lie!
And so, Chris and I scheduled a second conversation. Two plus hours later my faith in the wisdom of crowds is greater than it has ever been. Chris not only is my soulmate but he succeeded in bringing me to the point of tears. Legitimately, my eyes made water. Chris Ryan extracted my cultural confession from me.
One of the patterns that Chris drew out in this conversation is that so much of humanity's cutting edge thinking rests on looking back to how Hunter-Gatherers lived to see what lessons we can learn from them. In short, humanity is trying to return to what it knew before.
This is the nature of the Hero's Journey. A hero leaves the tribe and sets out on a quest to find something or solve some problem for the tribe. In the oldest sense, they leave the security of the village to hunt and gather to bring food back for the tribe. In so doing, they risk their lives and face trials from nature, plants and animals. Eventually, the face the ordeal that requires them to draw on all they've learned. If they succeed, they return to the village with their prize.
A long time ago, humanity set out on an epic hero's journey. Something was missing from village life. What was it? That's actually a quite tough question. Life for hunter-gatherers is remarkably good. And yet, set out we did. We engaged in agriculture. We enslaved each other. We built great Empires and those Empires fought great wars. Religious and cultural movements swept across the globe. And now, with all we've achieved in our mastery over the natural world, many of us find ourselves looking back with longing to a time of strong communities and social belonging. We want to go back home.
However, as Chris and I discuss in this podcast, we cannot turn back yet. For first, we must face the ordeal. What is that ordeal? The fear of our own mortality. And that, ladies and gentlemen, has been the ordeal all along. We have built great pyramids and statues. We have conquered vast Empires. We have created great works of art. And all of it has crumbled away. Shortly after the British Museum acquired a piece of a great broken statue of Ramesses II, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Ozymandias about the vanity of thinking that any monument to your own greatness would last.
Since time immemorial, mankind has sought the elixir of life and the fountain of youth in the hopes that we would cheat death. And now, there are those among us who believe they will cheat death forever. Men like Ray Kurzweil believe that through the magic of technology we will achieve immortality. And perhaps, we will. But what is it that we want. What do we hunger for? Why as our technology rushes forward do we find ourselves looking back?
Chris is fond of a quote from T.S. Eliot "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." That is the hero's journey. And perhaps man's hero's journey is not a straight line up and up forever. Perhaps in some sense it is one great circle. Whatever great technologies and elixirs we find, perhaps it will not be enough for us to have it. The great joy of the reward that we have hunted and gathered is in returning to share it with the tribe. And that is what we have lost. We have lost community. The challenge of Mixed Mental Arts is to evolve a culture that draws on the best of all times and places. Some of those places we left a long time ago.
Chris' favorite quote has a special resonance for me. Robert McNamara quotes it in the Fog of War. For all his explorations and great statistical knowledge, McNamara in the end found solace in the words of a poet who talked about returning home. And that is very much my own experience. I have now wandered widely through the science. But all of those explorations have brought me to where I started. I have had to rediscover a sense of childlike wonder, of curiosity and of a desire for the sort of community that existed 10,000 years ago before the rise of agriculture. Can we have it all? I think we can. And I'm sure as heck willing to devote my life to trying.
Chris reminds me in this podcast that Robert McNamara's middle name was "Strange." Robert "Strange" McNamara. And that's fitting. Life is strange. It just gets curiouser and curiouser once you leave your culture behind. And I'm excited to see how deep the rabbit hole goes...even if when I reach the bottom I find I come back out on top.
"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive w...
Previous Episode
Ep239 - Culture Matters: The Netherlands: The Country Of Polders, Directness And Pragmatism
Mitch Evers is a Dutch university student who grew up in the south of the Netherlands. When Hunter first claimed that Donald Trump was culturally Dutch, it triggered Mitch's patriotic duty to attempt to save his country's reputation in the eyes of the Mixed Mental Arts community, which led to his involvement in the project.
Little does Mitch know that Hunter "The Shitty Dutchman" Maats would be reading his post in a terrible Dutch accent. Will the Dutch King revoke Hunter's passport based on this or will they practice gedogen and simply turn a blind eye? Probably the latter. Some things just aren't worth fighting over. You can find Mitch on Twitter at @kipislekkerME.Next Episode
Ep242 - Meet Your Fellow Mixed Mental Artists: Cate Fogarty
Cate Fogarty and I met a few months ago when I gave a talk at Second City about how to communicate across America's red/blue cultural divide. Why did Cate and I connect after that talk? Because
Cate is a Cultural Mutt. She has moved between enough cultures in her life to know how powerfully culture shapes our thinking and how it both binds us into groups and blinds us to the fact that we don't always see the world so clearly. Cate also came up with the idea of the cultural confession so it's only fitting that Cate should be the first person to officially give her cultural confession on the podcast.
In the evolving improv game that is Mixed Mental Arts, Cate and I have now been feeding off each other for a couple of months. As we move this from being the Bryan Callen (and Hunter Maats show), I thought it was important to introduce the other people who are getting involved and to make it clear why their contributions are so vital.
And here is where Cate's strengths come to the fore. She has been taking my 5000-word blogposts, extracting the core concepts and then rewriting the idea in her own words into under 500-word #knowledgebombs. She's now got a team of people helping her do that. If you want in on that, you should tweet her at @cateclysmic or you can find her at the Mixed Mental Arts FB group.
You can read her #TheDunbarNumber #knowledgebomb here: http://mixedmentalarts.co/thedunbarnumber/
And you can read her #GrowthMindset #knowledgebomb here: http://mixedmentalarts.co/growthmindset/
However, there's at least one more way in which Cate's voice is essential. We're aware that until now Mixed Mental Arts has been a bit of a sausage party. Not only that, it has been a white sausage party. There's nothing wrong with weisswurst (German white sausages) but we need some variety. That's what makes idea sex great. Lots of different ideas being thrown into the mix and we let those ideas make looooooove and see what comes out.
There's a topic that Cate and Katie O and I have been talking about for months behind the scenes: sexism. Uh oh! Just the word gets everyone breaking out in hives. Even as Cate explained to me many of her female friends. Still, Mixed Mental Arts is about talking about the elephants in the room. So, we do that. There's nothing humans (especially a #basketofreasonables) can't figure out when we talk it out. So, consider this the first step of many into that conversation and towards diversity of perspective in every sense in the dojo. That will be the real mark of what makes Mixed Mental Arts different. When we can talk anything out productively and make progress, that will really set us apart from the crowd.
You can share your own cultural confession here (http://mixedmentalarts.co/submit-your-cultural-confession/).
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