 Welcome everyone. We will start with our amazing supporter Rob Johnson. Rob will talk a little bit, make an introduction for us and I will make a brief introduction of Rob Johnson for who does not know him. Rob Johnson is the president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, INET, which he co-founded with George Soros, William Genway and James Balvely in 2009. From the outset, the founders envision INET as a globally-engaged network that could lead the evolution of economic thought toward the interests of people and the planet. Please, Rob, thank you for joining us again for supporting us in this initiative and the floor is yours. You can now make your initial commentaries. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Mariana and I want to welcome our speakers here today. I'll let you introduce them in a few moments as each of them speaks, but they're each, how do I say, extraordinarily well-suited to the challenge that Pope Francis has given to us with his question, what place does the current economic system give to uselessness, that is to beauty? Now, I never really, I got my head stirred a little bit because I never thought beauty and uselessness were somehow mutually exclusive or what have you and I, somebody just from my house started cringing, oh well, sorry if there was background noise, but I think that we are in a very, very difficult time. I gave a talk last night in New York and I cited Marvin Gaye, who begins his famous song, What's Going On, by saying we've got to bring some love in here today. And he speaks of that in the first two stanzas, but in the third he says, we got to bring some understanding here today. But what I found very, very profound, I grew up in Detroit, so I'm a Marvin Gaye fan, but is that he starts with love and then goes to understanding. Once we've healed the divisions and regained trust, we can explore together for the common good. But in the turmoil that we are experiencing right now, there is a great deal of tension. And Mary Evelyn is a Confucian scholar. I've been very involved in China and seeing the US-China split, seeing the Pope's concern about many things has moved me a great deal. And I'll cite to you all, there's a website called China Heritage run by a man named Barme. And he's got a tribute called the Invisible Republic of the Spirit. In the Invisible Republic of the Spirit, which was written by a man named Stephens Weig in a biography of Roman Roland, who was very concerned at a similarly turbulent time between the World Wars and on the cusp of World War II, he continued to, what I'll say, play a leadership role. But his biographer, as Weig said, the Invisible Republic of the Spirit, the Universal Fatherland, has been established among the races and among the nations. Its frontiers are open to all who dwell therein. It's only laws that of brotherhood. These are old days, brother and sisterhood now. It's only enemies, our hatred and arrogance between nations. Whoever makes his home with this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is an heir, not of one people, but of all peoples. Henceforth, he is an indweller in all his tongues and in all countries in the universal past and the universal future. What concerns me in this turbulent time is that we, to bring some love in here today, we need artistic language. Literal scientific rituals are like armor. CG Young wrote a great deal late in his life after his feeling culpable for misunderstanding the extent of what would, what you might call blossom in Nazi Germany. And in his, I guess it was his 10th volume of his collected works, he wrote, called Civilization in Transition. And he talked a great deal about the unconscious self and the unconscious collective and all the ways in which we deceive ourselves. We create what he called shadows. There's an artist in 1945 named Robin George Collingwood. He wrote a book called The Principles of Art. And I'll conclude before handing it to all of you who are going to explore beauty, a comment that he made that I think is quite germane to the challenge we face today. The artist must prophesize not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts. His business as an artist is to speak out, to make a clean breast, but what he has to utter is not as individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets. As spokesperson of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart. And by failing in this knowledge, a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils which come from that ignorance, the poet as prophet suggests no remedy because he's already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness. I think that Pope Francis is a beacon moving us towards that invisible republic of the spirit, appealing to beauty, appealing to arts in a very elliptical way. But I look forward to your exploration because I think that this is the pathway towards bringing some love and bringing some understanding here today. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Thank you for this amazing introduction. Before I invite our speakers, I'd like just to make a summary. Why are we here? For who does not know, during the Young Scholars Initiative in 2020, in the beginning of the pandemic, a partnership between the INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Scholars of Correntes, made possible the intervention of his Holiness Pope Francis, who proposed to the young scholars a free economy questions. Why assign members, the Young Scholars Initiative members, together with the economy of Francesco members, deeply inspired by those questions, decided to organize a series of webinars to discuss each one of these questions. Today we are here to discuss the third question of Pope Francis, and I'd like to remind you about this third question. Pope Francis asks us, what place does the current economic system give to uselessness that ends to beauty? Now, to start with our speakers, I would like to invite Professor Mary Evelyn Tucker. I will make a brief introduction of her. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at the Yale University, together with her husband, John Ellen Green. Professor Tucker teaches in the Joint Master Program in Religion and Ecology at Yale, between the School of the Environment and Divinity School. She also has an appointment at Yale's Department of Religion Studies, and she has altered and edited close to 20 volumes, as has published hundreds of articles. She is pioneer in the field of religion and ecology. Thank you very much, Professor Tucker, for coming. I would like to open the floor for you now. Thank you so much, Mariana and Rob, and all the organizers of this series. I'm delighted to know about this work. I did a little googling and searching and learned a great deal, and I'm very, very happy to be together with a colleague, John Fullerton, and a new colleague, Doris Summer. I admire their work enormously. So I wrote something as I was thinking about this, and that's what I'm going to share with you, because I just spent a week up on the Long Island Sound on a point out into the sound where you could see the water and the sky in three directions. It was so magnificent. And I want to use this as a grounding for discussing beauty. So everything here on this place, this point, is beautiful. Water and sky, rocks and stones, roses and hydrangeas, egrets and osprey, beaches with nesting plovers protected by humans, bird song and wave song. How can one measure this beauty? How can one capture the sounds, the smell of salt water, the clarity of the air? How can one convey the beauty of sunrise and sunset? The full moon rising in the southeast overcome water. How can one ever measure such beauty or value it in the market? This is a beauty beyond naming fully or even depicting in painting or poetry, Turner's paintings of the sea, or Monet's impressions of water lilies come close. But without doubt, we can acknowledge there is a grandeur here, along with a simplicity that eludes full description. It's the spirit that Rob spoke about that's calling us. And why is that? Didn't the romantic poets try to imagine that feeling of the sublime for Wordsworth, a presence moving through things? For Keats, a thing of beauty is a joy forever. For Shelley, love and beauty and delight, there is no doubt, no change. For Blake, everything is beautiful in its own way. What then is this presence within things that calls us to be present, to sunrise and sunset, to climb mountains, sit by a lake, swim in a stream? The beauty of nature calls to each of us, whether city dwellers or country dwellers. Why? Because we arose out of these incredible processes and are intimately connected to them, the processes of nature have shaped us, formed our bodies and minds, infused our soul with inspiration and joy. From the great flaring forth at the beginning of time, to the arising of the first atoms and molecules, to the first cells 4 billion years ago and multicellular life 2 billion years ago, to plants, to animals, to humans. This is a long journey out of which we are birthed. We are just becoming aware of the 14 billion year unfolding of our lives and future lives. The map is being drawn ever since Darwin's book arose 150 years ago, Origin of Species. Human consciousness is only beginning to become aware that we have come out of 9 billion years of universe evolution and 4.6 billion years of Earth's evolution. This is indeed a sacred universe. We are late in the story as hominids, Homo erectus 1.5 million years ago, but Homo sapiens only 200,000 years ago. We're still trying to earn our last name as wisdom keepers, as sentient beings, beauty loving Homo sapiens. Our sentience is aligned with that of the more than human world, plants and animals. Our community building is similar to that of the forest world, roots communicating and protecting life. So our question is, can we listen to plants? Can we understand or stand under trees to witness the exchange of life giving processes as you are doing in the economy of Francisco? What form of economics would this become? To dwell in our home is the meaning of economics. To live in the face of mystery and the unknown. To bow to beauty and say, this is what I value. This is what I will protect. This is what future generations deserve to inherit. This is the path forward toward a future that is not simply sustainable but flourishing. For there is no genuine future without seeds and soil, flowers and grasses, vegetables and fruits, rivers and lakes, trees and forests. Is this not the great community of life that surrounds us, feeds us and body and soul nurtures us in mind and spirit? Without it, we are simply Homo economicus with eyes only on markets and profit. With beauty, we are filled with possibility of creativity that gives birth to music and song, dance and drama and art. So the question before us is, what is the intrinsic value of beauty, not utilitarian? Dostoevsky said, beauty will save the world. But Solzhenitskin said, he asked, who will save beauty? It is up to us. The time is now. Let us plant the seeds and gather the flowers today and all the days of our life and it is emerging because we have regenerative capitalism, regenerative economics, regenerative business and the work that John is doing and others. We have new education, regenerative education in what Doris is doing. We have regenerative agriculture. We have regenerative medicine, planetary health. These are fields that are pointing us in this direction. So let me conclude with a passage from Thomas Berry, my teacher, who passed away in 2009 and 1,000 people honored him in a memorial in New York. This is from this book called Evening Thoughts. And he says, because he was the one who said, we need a new story of this journey of the universe, a life story that will inspire the transformation of our time. And he says, this was in 2000 at a meeting at the UN in New York. He says, tonight as we look up at the evening sky with the stars emerging against the fading background of the sunset, we think of the mythic foundations of our future. We need to engage in a shared dream experience. The experiences that we have spoken of, as we look up at the starry sky at night and as in the morning, we see the landscape revealed as the sun dawns over the earth. These experiences reveal a physical world, but also a more profound world that cannot be bought with money, cannot be manufactured with technology, cannot be listed on the stock market, cannot be made in the chemical laboratory, cannot be reproduced with all our genetic engineering, cannot be sent by email or social media. These experiences require only that we follow the deepest feelings of the human soul. What we look for is no longer the pox Romana, the peace of imperial Rome, nor is it simply the pox Humana, the peace among humans, but the pox Gaia, the peace of earth and every being on the earth. This is the original and final piece, the peace granted by whatever power it is that brings our world into being. Within the universe, the planet earth with all its wonder is the place for the meeting of the divine and human. And that is what Pope Francis calls us to in Laudato Si, as well. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Professor Tucker. I'm very touchy for this word. I think I say for everybody, I speak for everybody now. Thanks for remembering us. One thing that Pope Francis always says that everything is connected. So this beauty that comes from this connection of the human being with nature, with our common home, it's where the beauty is. Thank you for remembering this important part of what we are doing here. Well, now I would like to invite Professor Doris Sommer. I will also make a brief presentation. She's the director of the cultural agencies initiative at Harvard University and Ira and Jill Williams, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and also of African and African American Studies. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, especially through pre-tests in Boston public schools throughout Latin America and beyond. She also has a BA from New Jersey's Douglas College for Women and a PAD for Rogers University. I don't know if I say it right. Thank you Doris for joining us today and the floor is yours now. Thank you very much. I'm sorry Doris if you can unmute your microphone. I'm sorry. Okay thank you. I'll repeat my very sincere thanks for this invitation, for the opportunity to talk in an interdisciplinary setting about beauty. I want to follow Professor Tucker's words and also Professor Johnson to see that the Pope is including what looks useless as a major theme along with economics and politics is a measure of his creativity and and acuity because if we need change in the world, change is made by shifting paradigms and people who know how to shift paradigms are called artists, whether they're engineers or politicians or business people. When Friedrich Schiller says during the French Revolution that the only way humanly to respond to violence is through creativity so that one avoids more violence when it doesn't get into the spiral, he's counting on each of us to exercise what he calls the drive to be creative, to be creative and surprising and he calls that he coins a word in German, he calls it the Spielkrieg, the drive to be playful and creative and that word stuck in German and I want to appropriate it for English. I think the play drive is a faculty that that we all can cultivate and it has to do with the appreciation that Professor Tucker talked about and also about the work of the artist that I would like to add What is beauty for a humanist? It's the ability to think in disinterested ways because if something is useless we evaluate it not because it will make us rich or famous or smart but because it's worth thinking about simply for the pleasure of it and that's why Emanuel Kant wrote an entire critique on aesthetic judgment not because he was particularly interested in aesthetics but he was interested in free judgment. How does one become an enlightened subject without developing that faculty? Standing back not having any particular economic or intellectual or social or even moral interest in what one is thinking about but simply allowing beauty to distract us enough to want to think about something and to think with other people and this is this is the political beauty of Kant's aesthetics and I'm reading him through Hannah Arendt because beauty stops us and surprises us and engages us without interest we don't know how to think about it we're floating and he says that is the condition of the modern subject we're not sure about new laws that will have to legislate new economic policies new tastes that will develop we don't know we float for a while and because we're floating there are no preconceived concepts we're free and lost and therefore we have to talk to other people aesthetics is the basis of free sociability for Kant if we don't have sociability how do we think about collaboration about democracy about loving people so this is the charm of Kant's aesthetics it seems useless and precisely because of that it can ignite faculties that we have not developed the faculty of disinterest and of sociability across classes across genders across races because none of us has a particular particular economic or or social or moral interest in a flower in the sky that that professor Tucker described but it stops us and we want to think about it together okay that's that's Kant's third critique so Arendt says look I wrote a book on Kant's political philosophy and all of us know that he never wrote one it would have been dangerous for a liberal to write in the German monarchy so he wasn't stupid he didn't want to end his life in jail instead of writing a political philosophy he wrote the aesthetics which does the work of politics all right now everything else I want to say is just a footnote on Kantian aesthetics but it does the work of politics that levels the playing ground it makes us want to talk to each other want to learn from each other want to construct a concept together that will make sense of our shared experience the experience comes first the theory comes later if we start with concepts we're already trapped if we start with surprise we're open and that's what beauty does that's what the useless does so let me let me just say a couple of words about this one of Kant's great disciples I already mentioned Friedrich Schiller always a revolutionary and then when he saw the French Revolution become a terror his heart was broken and that's when he sat down to write what what response to the terror letters on the aesthetic education of math and he says I bet you don't think this is urgent he said it is because if you continue to respond to terror in conventional ways you just spiral down the way that Foucault warned us you should respond to terror with so charming a surprise that your enemy will stop and say what was that and want to talk to you art is the bulwark against what he called savagery on one side where you don't want to think and barbarism on the other where you think you're so smart you don't have to listen to other people where reason is the only trap so barbarism is a trap on the other side of savagery you have to be in the middle flexible allow yourself to be surprised and to listen another um disciple we're all disciples of Kant in uh in the world of uh humanities but another disciple I want to feature um is Friedrich as um Victor Shklovsky a Russian formalist uh in 1917 what was he doing he was writing an essay that everyone in in our field has seen it's called art as technique I like the Spanish translation art as artifice because it lays out exactly that art is man made and it's man made for the purpose of surprising jolting um and um and I think that uh that that theme already came up uh with Professor Johnson's comments uh it art irritates it makes you rethink things how are we going to change paradigms if we don't allow ourselves uh to be jolted and what Shklovsky said is uh wonderful because he says you get jolted out of habit when the world becomes habitual how much can you intervene in how much do you care about you listen to news about the war in Ukraine and the first uh news is devastating the second one is predictable the third one you already know and you don't care intensely anymore it's art that can refresh your perception make the perception difficult this is this is the charm of Shklovsky's article he says art is not about making communication easy it's about making communication difficult so you have to stop and think about and ask people and so uh the difficulty revives your investment in the world it makes you care about the world and and uh sometimes I prefer Spanish sometimes I prefer English I love the verb in English to care to care for it means both to love and to be responsible so with Shklovsky's short 10 page article I can circulate it you can find it uh you get the message that aesthetics is about caring for the world because it makes the world a challenge all right so I I don't know how much time I have I wrote more notes for myself uh but I maybe I can just say that with these theories cultural agents makes the the work practical by actually learning from artists about practical protocols we can think theoretically and write uh interesting books uh for each other but how do we make these innovations land in practical programs well we follow protocols the way artists do an artist doesn't just think about ideas an artist lands so the person who made paulo fredes pedagogy of the oppressed practical um contribution is the theater artist Augusto Bois who wrote theater of the oppressed he said and and then he got elected talk about uh the the political effectiveness he got elected uh councilman to Rio de Janeiro only one of 130 councilmen but he he uh recruited two uh good lawyers went to the street and did theater of the oppressed which means find a group that's having a problem get them to stage that problem as a tragedy and then everyone else on the street intervenes as spec actors there are no spectators in the world respect actors we take responsibility so each one of us spec actors figures out a way out of the tragedy gets on stage changes the script sees that that works sits down another person comes in tries another thing it's workshopping ideas in on the ground and Bois with this artistic practice based on fredes pedagogy uh got 13 laws passed six of them were passed at the national level and one that I remember I can look up more one is um is defense of uh victims uh of uh witnesses of violent crimes that was not a law in brazil before so it's this kind of artistic practice that can generate entire communities to co-create uh without participatory arts it's very hard to ground good ideas like love like co-creation like um the shared budgeting when you make things into participatory arts practices we have a chance to make good on good ideas uh i'll end there I'm so grateful to Professor Tucker for mentioning uh the pretext protocol because that's the version of a classroom teacher who learns from Bois from fredes from Jacques Roncier who's not a minor political theorist who featured the ignorant school master as the way forward don't bring people towards emancipation simply recognize that everyone is emancipated the children know how to ask questions how to play and how to work our problems with each other okay if you bring people there you're still in the lead so um this version of uh of uh collaborative and um adaptive leadership uh is written very boldly into Roncier's book on pedagogy I'll I'll just stop there and um and look forward to conversations with you I I want to hear other people now thank you so much thank you very much Professor Selmer thanks for uh highlighting that art and beauty as an important instrument of co-creation collaboration critical thinking caring uh I think that this is very important for us uh that we are trying to build a new economy economy with so as Pope Francis uh also asked us I also like to thank you for sitting Paulo Freire that we Brazilians are very proud of and now I'd like to follow with uh dear uh Joan Fullerton uh I will also make a brief um presentation he's a non-conventional economist impact investor writer and some have said have said philosopher building on and integrating the work of many he's the architect of regenerative economics first conceived in his uh 2015 booklet regenerative capitalism how universal patterns and principle will shape the new economy after a successful 20-year career on Wall Street where he was managing director of what he calls the old GP Morgan Joan founded the capital institute in 2010 where he's work reflects the rising evolutionary shifts in consciousness for from modern age thinking to integral age thinking the capital institute is dedicated to the bold reimagination of economics and finance in service to life guided by the universal patterns and principles that describe how all healthy living systems that sustain themselves in the real world actually work the promise of regenerative economics and finance is to unlock the profound and presently unseen potential that is the source of our future prosperity and the reason for hope in our troubled times thank you very much uh Fullerton for coming for joining us today the floor is yours now thank you Mariana um I guess I didn't send you the short bio I apologize um first of all it's it's it's a true privilege to be participating today I want to thank you Rob for inviting me and boy two two wonderful shareings by uh two two professors that I would love to spend time in your classes I I'm not a professor I'm a I'm a I'm a former banker and Doris the the the phrase you used about being freed and lost explains nicely the decade between when I left JP Morgan and when I founded capital institute so so I suppose I am a budding artist that that spent 10 years free and lost and in many ways still like all of us I think a bit lost but what I'd like to share um is a uh a few reflections on the the thinking that I've been developing and um uh I'm just pulling up some notes here sorry um and and of course this question is is obviously meant to be provocative it certainly stops you in your tracks it's uncomfortable uh in that sense it's a a creative question and the first thing um that I have to say and this probably doesn't even need to be said is that there is no place for usefulness and beauty in our current economic system and I would challenge you to even find the word beauty in an economics textbook and the second thing that came up for me as I reflected on the question is a beautiful turn of phrase that Wendell Berry wrote Wendell Berry is unrelated to my knowledge uh to Thomas Berry that Mary Evelyn spoke of but um he's a he's a brilliant poet and man of letters and agrarian philosopher um and he said there are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places so how have we come to this place where most of humanity innately values beauty of all kinds and yet the dominant operating system that governs our lives I would argue our economic system is devoid of even any reference to beauty and I think the answer to that question is willful ignorance rooted in a worldview and and both Mary Evelyn and Doris have spoken about paradigms um as I said I think we have willful ignorance rooted in a worldview that is how we think how we see the world which in turn has trapped us in an addiction let me explain a little bit what I mean the worldview is mechanism uh we the the the assumption is we live in a clockwork universe as discovered by Isaac Newton we are um obsessed with Cartesian logic the reductionism the reductionist method of the scientific uh of our scientific process for figuring out what's complicated and of course the scientific revolution has brought us great progress but as Wes Jackson has warned us uh there is nothing wrong with the reductionist method so long as we don't confuse the method for how the world actually works and it turns out there's a vast difference between what is complicated such as putting the man putting a man on the moon or a cell phone and what is complex such as our living planet a forest a human being or the global economy what is not well known and this is part of the research I've done after I went in my search for um you know a possible solution to this crisis we find ourselves in what's not well known is that neoclassical economics uh which is still the theory upon which we run the world whether we have a more neoliberal conservative free market orientation or a more democratic socialist you know government uh heavier government involvement version of of economy um all of these are built on neoclassical economics theory and the foundation of neoclassical economics is Newtonian physics and a set of patently false assumptions that the early neoclassical economists use to apply Newtonian physics laws to a theory of economics and on top of that we layered over statistical methods to address uncertainty that are not compatible with the nature of complexity um and and and the field of economics it's isolated from the real sciences of of physics which is now quantum physics of chemistry including the geochemical systems and processes that that govern our our planet uh and biology and specifically ecology which of course shares the same Greek root as economy so one could say that the theory we use to run the global economy now the dominant operating system for all of humanity is ignorant in fact you could say it's bankrupt how else could a Nobel Prize and by the way the Nobel Prize in economics is actually not a genuine Nobel Prize because Mr. Nobel understood that science or that economics was not actually a science so there's a there's a prize uh created by the Swedish central bank in honor of Alfred Nobel but it's it's considered a Nobel Prize certainly within the field and my question is how else could a Nobel Prize be awarded to an academic in an economist in 2018 2018 is not that long ago whose work on climate change suggested that the optimal target for global warming was three and a half degrees Celsius because anything lower would cost too much and that furthermore he said that um uh global warming wouldn't impact manufacturing that much because manufacturing happens indoors I mean it's it's literally stunning to think that that that type of thinking that ignorance was awarded the highest prize uh in economics so I'd like to refer now to one of the sentences in Laudato Si and I think this is the call that we need to heed at this moment uh Pope Francis wrote we urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge and I think it was Doris talking about transdisciplinary conversations we need it again we need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge including economics in the service of a more integral and integrating vision now when I read Laudato Si um I literally started crying because um I had put out this working paper or booklet literally a month earlier and um and I went through reading Laudato Si and underlining the sentences and the freight and this you know the paragraphs that related to the eight principles of regenerative economics of living systems that um uh that describe how a regenerative economy needed to be grounded and so my my work and my my work the work that I'm promoting is um uh highly aligned with Laudato Si in a way that um uh really made me quite emotional and um so so for me the response to that call from Pope Francis is that we need an economics uh that that for lack of a different term I'm calling regenerative economics and regenerative is an important word it's literally the process of how uh living systems work if they if if our bodies were not regenerating as we're having this conversation we wouldn't be able to have this conversation so how do we reintegrate beauty into our economics and think of economics as both science and art and I would suggest of course life is beautiful nature is beautiful as Mary Evelyn beautifully described and I'm fortunate to live not too far down the road on Long Island Sound and Fisher's Island Sound and and the Atlantic Ocean from where she described and life is the result of this regenerative process and we can describe this regenerative process not with laws the way we describe physical laws but with patterns and principles think of them as first principles so imagine if we choose to begin reconstructing our economics on the foundation of these first principles and on the foundation of these patterns that exist in all life this is the promise of regenerative economics now why is this so hard to do I would suggest it's that we are addicted to success to growth to wealth and power to fame all derived from our extractive system but like all addictions what we truly yearn for is to dampen the fear and the pain of our lower consciousness energy and awaken to a higher consciousness again consistent with what Doris and Mary Evelyn have already spoken about so the key here is that we yearn for a spiritual spark to make meaning of our lives and so the challenge of rethinking economics is at its core a spiritual challenge thank you and look forward to the conversation thank you John Fullerton for joining us and for highlighting especially the that we need to understand the economic system also as a complex system and also unfortunately how the economic theory is far behind the disunderstanding understanding phenomena like climate change and many others in a complex way so your proposal of regenerative economics seems very interesting in on this path also thanks for sharing your impressions about Lauda to see I think that here in this group we have many people closely related to to Lauda to see I changed my career because of it I decided to work with climate change and economics after reading Lauda to see in the beginning of my master and I think that other people here also have a closer closer relationship with these in Ciclica well now we will open for you in the audience for question to our speakers we will have a small question and answer section I would like to invite you okay we have already Patrick but also if you want if you feel comfortable to speak open your microphone in your camera and raise your hands on reactions so we will call you if you don't feel comfortable you can write on the chat and I can read for the speakers so please Patrick the floor is yours yeah so thanks a lot to all of the speakers absolutely terrific that that's yeah just brilliant and that stage I might actually also announce is kind of part of the organizing team that I will be writing a book based on the three questions that came out from from the Pope so it's with the German publisher which is kind of like the biggest German progressive publisher West End for Lauda came out of a discussion so yeah it's not just that kind of little essay that we write but it's it has a lot of logic players so to say and I would like to address well actually two questions to John the first one being you said that uselessness doesn't play any role in our economic system which was my first thought when I read that question too but then when you mentioned you know you've been working in finance and so on so forth one thought that I had was doesn't uselessness actually play a really big role in finance if we think about how useless actually a lot of the kind of like financial like financialized capitalism actually is so I would like to hear your thoughts on that and then secondly because you touched upon a few points which I wrote down also for my book so I was just wondering if at some point towards the end of the year maybe or so we could just have a little conversation about some of the themes that I want to outline so that's the second question it would be it would be great if I could have your thoughts in there I'm sorry I was just laughing so hard about your first comment I missed the second question well it was basically just a request whether you might be able to find some I don't know half an hour in your schedule at some point yeah yeah some of the things that you raise more in depth because it's relevant to me but I'm not sure and it's that relevant to the audience well that's easy the answer to that is yes and and in response to your first question it's it reminds me of a famous statement that Paul Volker made the former and deceased but but chairman of the Federal Reserve I think he said this after the financial crisis where he said the the last significant meaningful and useful innovation that come out of Wall Street was the cash machine so you know you know it's a provocative statement though and and really at the heart of my work it's not just that there is a lot of useless activity in our financial system but there's actually a tremendous amount of toxic and destructive activity and I'm actually not even talking about the the the reckless greed and and irresponsible behavior we have somehow confused means and ends and think that the the day-to-day activity of the global capital markets is like ordained by God and needs to be the way it is and we don't have the courage to question what has become essentially the you know the means the confusion of means and ends and and I'll just use that as a quick example of why I think it's so critical to get clear on first principles one principle in living systems is this idea of right relationship or symbiosis or mutualism and if you think about the global capital markets we've disintermediated we've separated the relationship between what we call owners they're not owners they're just shareholders who own a security and and and global enterprises and so we we don't have not only do we not have a right relationship in the sense of the the quaker meaning of that term but we don't even have any relationship and so but we think of that as normal and we think of secondary trading as a business and so we have this massive casino that has all kinds of destructive consequences and we think we're going to change that by creating more transparency about environmental social and governance metrics in companies when in fact we need to reconnect ownership and the responsibility as as professor summer talked about that comes with ownership we need to reconnect that with enterprise and and you only see that issue if you get first clear on first principles of how living systems actually work so it's a long answer to a very punchy comment you made Patrick. Thanks John. Before calling Jay I'd like to open to the other speakers if you want to make any comment about the question feel free if not we call Jay for the next question. Okay so Jay please the floor is yours. Hi everybody thank you so much for this great contribution to this webinar series and I think to what is actually required for us to start the conversation about why we're here as as young scholars as human beings is to to this planet because I think there's so many concerns that we're we're grappling with and I think a lot of us are searching for the right footing to attest my bunny rabbits have bitten through my internet cable so I'm on a very weak hot spot at the moment so I hope you can still hear me. So I want to maybe start the question a quick reflection on the falling point. John you said something that struck me which is to start with the first principles and try reframing them but I think this might be in slight contradiction with what Doris said which is we have to start with experience first and concepts come later so I'm wondering so this is just the way we also think about it in a wise eye to some degree like can we solve a rational paradigm with more rationality that's my question first like this is something where we have taken to some extreme the rationality we currently have with big tech just taking this question further and further and data science now emerging with big data and all these these phenomena now are sort of taking these two extremes we're trying to find meaning and and more and I think we're just becoming more entrapped in the same sort of dynamics of this rational these rational dynamics if you want to keep it at that level and I think what what you're hinting at is actually an interplay between rationality and and emotional intelligence or emotional experience the the spiritual that we've all been alluding to so I'm wondering how we can actually I think the stories that were told today by all the speakers I was really struck this was a really a real highlight to my to my week maybe even to my year so far to hear all your the way you expressed it and I think I've been hearing art and other arts forms of expression to be allowed and encouraged this brings me back to what actually Rob always does and what where I think from the very beginning was actually trying to allow for more forms of expression to be not just at our disposal but actively encouraged the first the first thing that I experienced when I walked into an IIT conference in 2012 which was also the inception of the young scholars initiative was a bunch of art there was there was an art exhibition there were collaborations there was an artist in the room interacting with with the with the participants and this stimulated all the senses this uh this was the aesthetic that we was mentioned earlier as well and I think we have to without without even specifying it this was a leading by example this was leading with experience of how people are brought together how the senses stay fresh to the problems and not become desensitized so I'm I'm trying to just an offer and reflection maybe a way of how do we actually bring this sentiment that was expressed in this exact in this conversation back to the community and actually into an everyday experience that we want to bring back to the education to how people do their work on it in an everyday level this has to be a centeredness that we have to have in everything we do um because this is how we are connected to the problems um so I guess my my provocation my question is to all of the speakers to sort of say where how do we actually build exactly the sensitivity that you have now acquired in your life and offer this opportunity to start a young career with these experiences with this with this groundedness um that all of us in young scholars are actually intuitively searching uh many many people are searching I think a lot of us are lost we're actually there's there's the emergence of yoga and eastern philosophy and all these other things are sort of a trend but I think we're not yet fully there to sort of at the foundations as John was saying as rethink our first principles it's sort of a it's top it's on top of it it's not really rethinking the foundations so I think these are reflections not a direct question but I'm trying to sort of advance the conversation for us to sort of see how we can uh be in this between the inductive uh and the the rational how does this actually work we might uh the danger that I'm seeing or that I'm I'm I'm also encountering is that we might not be taken seriously with uh in the curse of current paradigm by suffering uh with the current institutions that value only certain types of knowledge and certain types of uh certain types of approaches if you can articulate this in a rational way that this is a this is an intuitive way so I'm I'm struggling a little bit but how this shifts the narrative if we can't get a collective experience to shift it uh for everyone um so yeah I'll leave it at that but I want to just say thank you and I'm looking forward to your reflections on on this sort of uh longer thought that I had about all of your contributions if I may I'd like to uh start yes um thank you so much for the reflection Jay uh you bring up for me the difference between first principles and reason what Kant did in his third critique was rescue judgment from reason his first two books were about reason scientific reason which he called uh pure reason and social reason which he called practical reason right and everyone thought he was done but he as an old man and then they told him oh you're senile you don't know what you're talking about anymore as an old man he said there's an important piece that we've left out and that is judgment judgment is a faculty it's not a principle it's a muscle that we have allowed to acrophy and so when John picked up that um artists allowed themselves to float a bit it's because we don't have a principle yet we don't have a concept yet and we allow our experience and our conversations with other people to co-construct that concept but even to do that the faculty is collaborative it's imagination it's the spiltry so Kant begins from faculties and not from principle and I think that's his major contribution that we leave out when we think that the Enlightenment is only about reason so I you know I'm a professor I could talk for longer but I'll stop um I might jump in and then John you can wind it up uh uh so yes very very thoughtful thank you um Jay so as a humanist as a student of world religions for 10 years in graduate school with some of the best scholars at Columbia and elsewhere um and as someone deeply devoted to the humanities and literature and the arts and drama and so on but as someone who's worked within secular academia my whole life um you know including doing conferences at Harvard on the world's religions being at Yale at the School of the Environment uh you know I think this is a hugely important issue but you know what I love about Rob and his beginning is um the daring and creativity I mean there was I don't mean to be too self-referential here but I want to be encouraging in this way there was no field of religion and ecology 25 years ago and to do three years of conferences at Harvard was brutal brutal and the scientists don't fully understand it still but all religions are based in the great cycles of nature and that's what gives inspiration or you take Tai Chi or Chi Gong and they're reflecting the movements of the natural world yoga positions do as well and we have become de removed from all of these dynamics of nature that's what I was trying to say and you know there's books now on this there's there's practices on it but the other part so what I'm saying is courage maybe a partner who you love and can do this with John Grimm is fantastic his specialties indigenous traditions we've had enormous experiences all over the world and the revival of indigenous ways of knowing is one of the most helpful signs we have traditional environmental knowledge is now being integrated to scientific knowledge for regeneration of fisheries of forests of all kinds of things the regeneration of culture in Hawaii with the Hokulea navigational techniques is non-parrel and all through the Pacific region what that has created check it out Hokulea and they did this with indigenous knowledge so that is extraordinary the rights of nature of rivers and things like in New Zealand but I wanted to just underscore what I was also trying to say with with this journey of the universe Thomas Berry said in 1978 we need a new story that brings us together because story ignites our imagination and sparks our dreams and the dream that we have been living with is the American dream which from my view has gone mad has has gone astray because it's all about materialism more and more bigger and better so from materialism we've lost why does matter matter why does this complexification with greater consciousness and sentience in the process but that sentience is distributed throughout with animals and plants and so on why have we lost sight of that with such a materialist worldview because the dream drives the action but that dream is unraveling and why do we now have some of the best work in animal behavior talking about communication consciousness songs of whales etc and why do we have this explosion of work on forests and roots communicating we did three seminars here at Yale on forests and the new knowledge about forests over a thousand people signed up for each one of them Yale has never seen a webinar like that okay because that kind of knowledge is penetrating the ivory towered walls and silos why because your generation understands it gets it can be flexible can be nimble and if you are brave and you do fusion of knowledge you can do this because the older generation is all nervous still about their grants and their CVs and so on but this is penetrating I can say it's absolutely penetrating so trust your intuition that this is a living regenerative earth systems and once we embrace that and it's it's this is the best of science the best of indigenous tradition symbiosis of Lynn Margolis and James Lovelock with the Gaia hypothesis Lynn Margolis was rejected for symbiosis and now that is absolutely embraced so sorry to go on for a long time but pragmatism is what drives Americans and principles are left so far behind but pragmatism leads to burnout and to a lack of this deep spiritual grounding that we're talking about principles will be the regenerative sensibility of how we're aligned with these processes and that's the great extraordinary power of what Pope Francis is also offering so sorry to go on at some length but your question provoked all of that I'm tempted not to add to it but I don't see another hand so I'll jump in really briefly Jay again thank you for that I agree with you the this is not an intellectual exercise and I in the short time that I shared my story I you know I did refer to a 10-year hiatus it literally was 10 years and it was very painful and and I felt very lost and and my pathway to this idea came through a synchronicity speaking of the universe speaking I had written a my first kind of coming out of the closet paper to try to make sense of this I wrote a paper called the relevance of Schumacher in the 21st century and someone sent it to a guy called Alan Savry sitting in Zimbabwe and he sent me an email saying he saw a you know finance person who seemed to understand holistic thinking and Alan Savry introduced me to what he calls holistic plan grazing which we don't need to get into but it's essentially biomimicry applied to the large landscapes of grasslands and I learned through that experience I actually invested in a company we created a company together to put this idea into practice and so I learned by doing and experienced that and then my imagination said well it's this holistic thinking can work on a system called a ranch and a ranch is a living system and if the economy is a living system then why can't this same approach be extended and applied to the entire global economy and that was that was a crazy idea but that's where it was rooted it wasn't rooted because I went to study something called regenerative economics at Yale or Harvard or anywhere else it didn't exist so the other comment I would say about you know experiential learning and storytelling if you go to our website we've documented 50 stories of what we see as the emergent regenerative economy most of them are small grassrootsy kind of things but the cool thing is that once you see the world through this regenerative lens you see the regenerative economy everywhere emergent you know a farmer's market is the regenerative economy it's just that we call it a quaint little farmer's market but that's the regenerative economy and so for for young people who feel lost you know my my my advice to you not advice my my encouragement to you is to understand that you know we're in an epical change between the modern age and what many are calling the integral age I'll go out on the limb and call it the regenerative age because I don't think we get to the integral age if we don't pass through the regenerative age but it's meant to feel uncomfortable of course it's uncomfortable but my own experience was to you know trust my instinct you know my instinct is what caused me to leave Morgan and and and I believe all of our instincts are calling us in this right direction and we just have to have the courage to listen to them as opposed to default to the logical part of our brain saying I need to do this because I need to be successful or I need to make a living or I need to do this and I'm not belittling it at all I have three kids who are right in the thick of this challenge myself but I would just encourage us all to to to get comfortable in the discomfort because that's the moment that we happen to live in