Attunement and Providence: A Casebook of Ecosystematic Thinking

With vivid examples throughout, Attunement and Providence cultivates ecosystematic thinking across the science/culture divide. Examples and case studies drawn from cosmology, evolution, mathematics, physics, literature, visual art and the writing process help build the deep conceptual groundwork for political anti-nihilism and radical democracy.

Starting with the idea that complexity is primordial, residing in the nonlinear loops by which systems and their environments shape and are shaped by each other, the book explores the kinship of systems and how meaning inheres in the way things matter to each other—as opposed to being something humans make in an otherwise meaningless universe. Conscious meaning-making participates in a world already held together by meaning.

To understand systems involves attributing agency more democratically by practicing the Down Style (understanding entities as concatenations of impersonal forces) along with the Up Style (recognizing the livingthinglikeness of all systems) and by engaging ecologies as entities and vice versa. We are ill-served by the loaded metaphor of “laws of nature”: physics is better understood as how the universe is attuned. The leading feature of the evolved ensemble of attunements (aka. laws of nature) is not inviolable rigidity but ongoing and open generativity in enabling new forms of complex order (such as biology, sentience, language) to emerge. The concept of providence recognizes our sustainably attuned and generative universe as one in which we are at home. Attunement and Providence works to weave what is most fundamental to our ongoing existence—ecosystematicity—through our knowledges, worldviews, and religions.