 I am very excited to be here with all of you thank you for your patience during that funness and true doctor form I'm gonna be mostly looking at my computer but as a doctor who tries to be a humanist I'll try to look up once in a while as well okay so today I'm going to be talking with you about the evolution of Zion and so the word itself comes from the Hebrew Zion and refers to the ancient Mount where David built the city of Jerusalem and Solomon later built the first temple it has taken on deeper meanings through thousands of years to mean the holy land in its entirety or the holy of holies and Kabbalistic tradition and in the national hymn of the Jewish state of Israel Hattikva or the hope we can hear the soulful longing of the exiled Jew for Zion oh sure the hymn helped to inspire the Zionist movement of the late 1800s and after the atrocities committed against Jews in Europe during World War two the movement achieved its goal of repatriation and Palestine via the newly formed United Nations the history of the region since that controversial action of the national international community of cutting up Palestine has been marred by a much bloodshed and instability Jews Christians Muslims the Rastafari movement and Mormons all reverence the idea of Zion and claim hermeneutical privilege in its true meaning and here in our own backyard we have another place called Zion that my family and I had the opportunity to visit last week and this is a view of the Virgin River looking out from the famous slot Canyon the Narrows so for Mormons the story of Zion the plot thickens a little bit to include the mystical figure Enoch who we've already heard about a little bit today from these verses listed here from the Bible the apocrypha we gain little insight about Enoch except that he was exceptionally righteous and he did not die but was taken up into heaven to walk with God the story was known in fragments to medieval Western Christendom and it certainly informed Milton's Paradise Lost but it was wholly rediscovered in Ethiopian script in the late 18th century and translated into English in 1821 and the works are attributed to Enoch and speak of his ascent into heaven receiving the history of creation including the war in heaven and the fall of the watchers a group of archangels who intermarried with humans creating a angel human hybrid giant race called the Nephilim the work strongly influenced Kabbalistic angelology and probably inspired large portions of the Book of Moses and the price writings of Joseph Smith so in these writings we are told not just about the apotheosis of Enoch but also entire paradisiacal or utopian city that was transfigured and where you're given this beautiful inspiring passage and the Lord called his people Zion because they were of one heart and one mind and they dwelt in righteousness and there were no poor among them to begin to grasp how this verse tapped into the utopian zeitgeist of Smith's audience and inspired generations of Mormon pioneers to cross oceans and planes to build the kingdom of God on the earth we will first really broadly review the history of Zion utopia in scripture myth literature historical experience mostly terrible failures and the Mormon experience and then we will look at how new philosophical ideas new technologies and transhumanist ethics inform a modern revitalization of this ancient ideal so my question is how did the city of Enoch come to be without poverty didn't Jesus say the poor you shall always have with you so here's my first big idea that I'd like to share with you and that is that poverty is tantamount to the fall that poverty is a part of the fallen condition of humanity and that it it rose as a result of agriculture and urbanization I and I don't have time to get into it right now that's in my paper so I'll post that so you can read that but I would propose that the rise of agriculture in cities represents the greatest punctuation in human existence and gave rise to poverty and other conditions that we associate with a fallen state so many creation myths include original idealic states that were corrupted by evil and provide a path to reclaim innocence and communion with the divine accounts of blessed peacetime in the Bible include the Garden of Eden from Genesis a brief time of communal peace among the early Christians and acts chapters two through four and the Millennium after the second coming and the binding of Satan and revelations chapters to 20 through 21 and this is Hieronymus's Garden of Earthly Delights in three parts in addition to the city of Enoch in Mormon scripture we have the third and fourth Nephi accounts in the Book of Mormon where we're told of 200 years of peace and prosperity that followed the catastrophic natural disasters and the visitation of Jesus these chapters tell of a perfect communal society and summarized by stating surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God also prominent in these chapters is the tale of the three Nephites who like Enoch and John were not to taste death but remained behind to minister and I think this points to a really interesting convergence where the promise of immortality is sort of inextricably linked to the promise of a new heaven and a new earth and the new Jerusalem and Zion so I'm going to very briefly now kind of fly through the history of utopia in literature and philosophy and we're going to go through Plato's Republic which is a lays out the Socrates's vision for a perfect society which he was kind of just you know casually talking about after dinner with other Athenian nobles and then we and then we have Aristotle's contribution his politics and poetics later on St. Augustine with the city of God I mean these works tried to marry kind of literature and law in imaginations about how to create a better society both secular and holy and then we have much later on the tale of King Arthur's Camelot which married you know more romantic views about honor justice virtue and equality and then Dante and his divine comedy which follows the pilgrim through hell purgatory and paradise meshing pagan mythology and Christianity in this sort of epic ballad and then Thomas Moore wrote utopia so utopia was written in 1516 it was inspired by Amerigo Vespucci's accounts of the New World and based loosely on the lost continent of Atlantis more extolled ideas of the Renaissance humanism a nostalgia for the classical world showing them flourishing in his good place which is what utopia means and by resurrecting this ancient longing for an ideal society more softly inspired and continues to inspire dreamers and innovators alike for the next 500 years so I'm gonna kind of fly through this one I had a lot of text but I'm not gonna have time to go through it so following Moore and King Henry VIII his patron turned executioner Martin Luther John Calvin we have the reformation spreading across Europe we have the beginnings of the Enlightenment with continental people like Descartes live in Espinoza and then you have the English empiricist John Locke Francis Bacon Sir Isaac Newton laying the framework for modern science and a great rise in the faith of the human ability to understand natural law and it was born from this Enlightenment that we have during the colonization of the New World and the discovery of Aboriginal peoples and how that challenged Christianity we have the first writings about the natural order of humans of what our natural existence our natural state talk first talking about the social contract and in this kind of milieu you have the birth of our own nation and the writers of our Constitution who explicitly stated that their purpose was to form a more perfect union so in this atmosphere of limitless possibility and westward expansion of Europeans in the New World we have the first intentional societies that emerged and they dotted the countryside all the way from upstate New York to northern Pennsylvania and Ohio and these consisted of both religious and secular groups who really wanted to try living in a different way and they experimented with all kinds of different economics and marital moors and child rearing and so this is kind of the what's going on in the world at the time that Joseph Smith and his family come down from Vermont after that failed harvest in 1816 year without a summer as economic refugees to Palmyra and Palmyra as we all know part of the burned over district of the second grade awakening this family of Methodist and Unitarian roots quickly found itself caught up in and divided by this revival so we are all familiar I think with the story of Joseph Smith his visions his prayerful search for the truth founding of the church its successful missionary efforts in Europe and the new scripture that came through his revelation of Mormon the Doctrine and Covenants the pro great price and we're familiar as well with the successive attempts to establish a self-contained sustainable theocracy multiple attempts includes multiple failure failures as we know first in Kurtland Ohio and then in Jackson County Missouri which was explicitly called Zion and the site of the new Jerusalem during the millennium and then again in Navu Illinois and it was during this time actually beginning in the Kirtland period that Joseph Smith began began to receive revelations about what we refer to as the United Order of Enoch this new way of living that is based on the kind of communal attitude of the early Christians who had all things in common we see that phrase pop up again and again in these writings and these revelations so part of this system as we know was polygamy the consequences of which led to Smith's violent death but also included in this system is a which is contained in the law of consecration is a system of kind of being assigned to stewardship and then returning the excess of your labor to a central storehouse that can be distributed to the needy something we call the law of consecration discussed in Doctrine and Covenants chapter 42 for some reason it's not advancing any ideas and just a commentary while we're waiting I love this image it has so many throwbacks to like USSR with the side of the P I love that so communist all right yeah there we go so this is kind of a schematic of the law of consecration let's see if it'll work now what'd you do how can I repeat it there we go okay so now let's talk about so these early experiments in communal living while under the in the lifetime of Joseph Smith were largely short lived even though it was a prerequisite at first for membership they quickly kind of fell apart for a variety of reasons and we didn't really see this the era of the order really reach its peak until during the time of Brigham Young Smith's successor here in the Endermount West when a bunch of these new voluntary communities no longer requisite were established throughout the Wasatch Front throughout the front here and some of the notable examples of these efforts were the Zion's collective Mercantile Institute Brigham City which operated a stock exchange company system and Orderville my favorite so Orderville was something really truly unique Orderville where where a lack of morale and a sort of willingness to adopt a communal system kind of had doomed previous experiments order will have these qualities and spades they even took Smith's vision further they adopted uniform clothing uniform living arrangements as a committee which oversaw everything from work to recreation and they were very successful and eventually were kind of pressured it was external pressures which led to their demise external pressures from both the federal government in the Edmunds anti polygamy Act as well as the central church authority which kind of told them to to disband in an effort to reintegrate into mainstream American society after the manifesto so the vision though of Joseph Smith to establish design in the new world is a strong motivator for was a strong motivation for early converts and continues to be a strong motivator for multi-generational Mormons whose ancestors participated in these experiments like myself so if I can bring it up I have a really cool picture here of the the people of Orderville and then if one more slide those are my great fourth great-grandparents Isaac von Wagner Carling and his sweetheart as an Elizabeth Browning of Browning machine gun fame her his daughter or sister can't remember which so you know I am continued continually inspired by their legacy by what by the yearning that they experienced and I think it's very interesting that at the dawn of the 20th century as Mormons were stepping back from trying to create a physical peculiar utopia the secular world was kind of coming into its own was maturing and and thought that it could flexes muscles and try to corner the market on societal perfection and we were part of that you know for the the next century okay go ahead and this one has a lot of pictures so we'll just go through them really quickly so I'm going to move on now to the science and humanism and how kind of the follies that came along with that are ups and downs so the scientific revolution inspired people renewed a hope for a humanistic future go ahead you know and we had the first wide scale rejection of large scale inequality leading Karl Marx in 1848 to call for workers of the world to unite go ahead and his philosophy of materialism and communism came to rule a third of the world's population and it's heyday nothing to shake your nose at go ahead then you know also in the middle of the 19th century we had Charles Darwin and his synthesis inspired by Malthus on population of his theory of natural selection go ahead and this was at this point the atheism really became a force to be reckoned with we had the Geneva circle the logical positivists who kind of found their voice after Darwin and his theories for better or worse he's kind of linked to atheism and some of the follies of the next century go ahead we have the demise of the old world order in World War one the rise of German romanticism together with nihilism and a false understanding of Darwin's views which led to the movement of eugenics and these things combined in a perfect storm to give us fascism and go ahead and you know because of the atrocities of World War two the U.S. finally stepped in invading and our military and political victories over fascism go ahead and again over communism later have kind of introduced and maintained the current status quo the current global monoculture which continues to steamroll by globalization and often by coercion go ahead all right next so I'd like to I think one of the best things that has happened in Western culture in the last 50 years is we really have stepped back from this kind of illusion that progress is always linear and we have reflected on our folly and some of the things we have really really gotten wrong and one of the things that we really really got wrong was how we treated the indigenous people of these continents at first we were fascinated by the savages and we wanted to civilize them but that quickly devolved into because of our insatiable desire for wealth and land into their genocidal slaughter and imprisonment go ahead in reservations you put this right next to the brutal enslavement of millions of West Africans and post hoc religious and pseudoscientific justifications for this so these kinds of atrocities were have been committed and continue to be committed by European powers because of this sort of false sense of technological and cultural evolution superiority due to some imagined biological or even divinely endowed selection go ahead so it's no surprise that most modern Westerners have become very skeptical of utopian ideologies preferring instead the counter genre of dystopias which were born in the early 20th century with classics such as Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 go ahead so the atrocities of totalitarianism and dictatorships numerous too numerous to mention as well as post secular and post religious utopianism these these failures are not limited to the West or traditional Christian societies we also have seen recently the resurgence since the the you know the state of Iran for example or the modern movements of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as ISIS um so go ahead and advance a couple so the Taliban and ISIS go ahead so next big question why the draw why do why do we still feel compelled to follow these utopian ideologies after such terrible failures such an abysmal track record go ahead and I posit that it's because with every success and failure the world has adapted learned and evolved go ahead so we must ask ourselves or we may ask ourselves is there an arc to history and if so does it truly bend toward justice um experiments and other primates demonstrate that reciprocal altruism indignation a sense of justice do appear to have biological basis go ahead um the study of biological evolution he has yielded clear patterns um and can be predicted go ahead and that accepting the fast and loose term of evolution to also mean emergence of our future society by a system of artificial selection and pressure I propose that we have a responsibility to influence our evolution according to our values and preserve human rights and the environment and we should not wait for this to happen naturally or by some external act of god I don't think I'm alone here feeling that way um so I'm going to go really quickly now through the rest of this because this is where the meat is and I know I'm almost out of time um so the topic of my my talk today the evolution of Zion I'm going to here give a little hat zip to Nathaniel Gibbons so I'm not sure if he's here today but yes last year he gave a great talk on Zion as super organism and super organisms evolved to go ahead um so there is no pinnacle of evolution for us to sit upon um we must we hairless apes must content ourselves with our branch but that does not preclude an underlying selective pressure for flourishing beyond mere stability and survival um go ahead pictured here are um bolt go ahead one more are an ancient and a more modern phylogenetic tree of life um go ahead one more click the arrow demonstrates our position on the tree of life like I said no pinnacle just a branch and then on the right um is the cabalistic tree of life which is a network of emanations or attributes of god that are believed to under life physical reality this was a medieval and mystical exploration of interconnection and emergence go ahead so while it may be reductionist to assume that social and technological evolution yield themselves to similar prescience and control over biological evolution it is possible that the needed advances in our understanding and the tools necessary to monitor and influence these complex systems represent a difference of degree and not necessarily a difference of kind go ahead and in scientific terms that is that can be stated in terms of a paparian or a puzzle solving paradigm versus a cunean or a paradigm shift um paradigm with independent um cyclical kinds of huge leaps forward in the thinking go ahead so an analogous paradigm duality can be seen in phylogenetics and claudistics um go ahead with gradual evolution as shown here on the top versus a more more recent and better studied um kind of evolution or speciation called punctuated equilibrium we know that punctuated punctuated equilibrium happens um but we have also seen evidence of gradualism happen as well in different speciation events and the real how new species evolve is probably some combination of both go ahead so such small evolutionary steps must confer in order to be propagated they must have selective advantage each new mutation must have some advantage in order to be carried forward that's a a very key part of evolution and I I am proposing that with each step we have to carry with us as part of both a cost and a benefit um respect for universal human rights the rights of our moral subjects and the rights of non-human conscious things and then we have to recognize too that those rights will evolve over time because rights are a human construct go ahead so evolving into Zion will will change the way we live right and so changing the way we live involves new economic and legal systems which are based on ecological impact and a decentralized authority made possible via the internet please click um and such and pre there are previous iterations that have tried to do this um libertarian socialism and the archaeology movement of Paulo Solari which is pictured here Arcosanti an experimental community in the desert of Arizona which I've visited a couple times but these previous iterations have fallen prey to scarcity-based economic pressures because they didn't have access to the types of technology that are coming online and getting cheaper all the time next um so some other proposed small examples in our cultural evolution include um sea steady Mazder city in the united arab emirates go ahead um and the united arab emirates recently released proposal for the first human settlement on mars and then we have other big long shot programs go ahead such as generational ships like the navu how many of you are watching the expanse i love it and then we have large-scale um terraforming projects here in our own solar system like the terraforming of mars um some tools that are coming online that are going to make this possible are are those listed here fusion reactors desalination and atmospheric water collectors three printers and von Neumann type machines crisper m drive and so many other things that we can't even imagine right now go ahead so i think part of the economic portion of the evolution is going to be understanding that adam smith's invisible hand that guides markets is not a you know it's not invisible and it's not a mystery it is a it's a connection it's a network of super computers that are contained right here in our skulls it's the supercomputer of everyone involved in a free market and previous attempts to to establish a centralized economic planning authority have failed because they did not have access to the the the needed computational power and during the technological singularity we will have that tech we will have that computational power and so much more to spare go ahead the emergence of blockchain um and other kinds of technologies is going to make this possible it's going to shed light on income inequality um and it's going to increase infranchisement and power in a democratic fashion go ahead um so reducing inequality happens in one of two ways we can either tax or we can rely on philanthropy and it really doesn't matter both ways lead to positive outcomes we've seen good examples of both and um even in the nordic states which have long been bastions of liberal democratic socialism they're even now toying with the idea of a guaranteed universal income go ahead so with scarcity for resources never going away but our paradigm and the way that we ration things can change over time go ahead let's just go through all of these real quickly as our population ages and becomes um birth control and education are going to swell the middle class which is going to put enormous pressure on our current system leading to scarcity and shortages right at the time that human population is peaking and reaching its most drastic levels and hopefully we will see the emergence of some of these these technologies come online in time to prevent Malthusian type collapse from pressures that are very real and are very much knocking on our doorsteps such as climate change um with science we may be able to help prevent these terrible catastrophes by increasing our understanding of the biology of human empathy go ahead and creation of immersive simulations of another subjective experience something i like to call atonement technology um i as a as a form of education and enlightenment so it an experience that could really drastically change another person go ahead most neuroscientists agree that human free will is either non-existent or very very limited but they also agree that keeping that notion alive is useful it increases pro-social and moral behavior if we believe that we are free and so we have to learn we have to know more about this we have to learn the biology of human anatomy and we have to be able to create enhancements that will make pro-social and good choices easier and i don't think that this will take away our freedom to choose to be anti-social the way i envision it working go ahead is more like a catalyst it's going to reduce the starting energy necessary to move the reaction in the desired direction it's going to make being better easier go ahead and such enhancements go ahead from an enlightenment would be highly highly effective within a religious context and they point to an avenue for those more ready religions who want to adopt and adapt to these changes to become leaders go ahead but a word of caution to exclusive or universal types of religions that think they have the one and only way and imagine a future of their own dominance i would say that the future they envision is unsafe for everyone including themselves go ahead we have to instead reject monolithic cultures and ideals and instead embrace a more of a grand accepting very diverse community that is involved in a non-serosome game of infinite complexity and we have to hold that as our standard that is Zion that is go ahead the one healed whole body and mind of humanity go ahead and i thank you very much for your patience and all right