Jim Garrison
Wisdom and Civilization

Sunday, 4 - 5:30 PM
Golden Gate Room

Ours is a time of extreme duress. Economic disruption, ecological instability, social alienation, and political incompetence are converging to produce an almost universal sense of unease about whether our systems of governance can maintain any sense of institutional normalcy or moral integrity. Highly paradoxically, it is during times of extreme chaos, when fundamentalist minds believe we are actually witnessing the apocalyptic end of the world, that the spirit of wisdom finds her voice with the most daring authenticity and subtle potency. It is precisely at the moment when all seems to be eroding into an abyss of destruction and nowhere one looks does the center seem to hold, that wisdom begins to flow as a new ordering principle of creation, a new way of relating with one another and a new way to envision the world. The old world is indeed dying but not, as some might think, at the hands of an angry God. The old is dying because something newer, more fundamentally humane is arising in its place.

This lecture will explore this highly paradoxical reality of wisdom at a time of apocalypse with particular focus on the unprecedented emergence of what Paul Ray calls a new wisdom culture, one comprised of a growing number of people who find themselves breaking out of the old value systems and embracing a more humane, more global view of themselves and the world. We will examine the history of how wisdom has emerged during times of acute societal distress, starting with the experience of ancient Jewry during their apocalyptic period in the several centuries BCE, discussing the experience of Europe during the Black Death of the fourteenth century, and then spending the preponderance of the time examining the emergence of the new wisdom culture in our day.

James Garrison, PhD, Philosophical Theology, Cambridge University, M.T.S., Christology and World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. He is the president of Wisdom University and the author of six books in the field of philosophical theology including Civilization and the Transformation of Power and America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power? Garrison founded and serves as President of the Gorbachev Foundation/USA and the State of the World Forum, both San Francisco based non-profit institutions created to establish a global network of leaders dedicated to creating a more sustainable global civilization.