This post is the third in a short series on what brings us together to conclude Sunday. In last Monday’s post, I asked the question, what kind of country memories do you make? The second half of Wednesday’s questions asked what kind of faith can perpetuate that memory. Today’s article will focus on belonging together without losing yourself. Sunday turns into excellence, a way to honor distinction without ignoring equality.
We like to think of ourselves as individuals, but that takes some nerve, given how many microbes, habits, memories, appetites, borrowed ideas, and dead ancestors are involved.
“I’ve Gotta Be Me” is America’s favorite lyric. “Whether I’m right or wrong,” but reality complicates that pronoun.
in star trek The Borg announces its fear to the universe with the line, “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” Victims lose their freedom, agency, and will. Like the demonic “Legion” of Mark’s Gospel [*]Borg represents the self that is overwhelmed by “the majority.”
The individual disappears.
Not all groups self-destruct. We, like many other animals, experience ourselves as individuals. Science reveals that we are also collective entities, more similar to a colony of bees than we usually imagine.
john penberthy’s To be a bee or not to be a bee? It won a loyal readership as an understated spiritual allegory. The film, currently available in 11 languages, follows worker bees who feel that life is about more than production, routine, and collective busyness. The book turns a humorous premise into a fable about self-awareness, generosity, and inner freedom. We are built for efficiency, appetite, and more than our assigned roles.
Bernard Mandeville was an 18th century Anglo-Dutch writer best known for: fable of the beesused the beehive as a satirical metaphor for social life and argued that private self-interest could produce public good. It begins with a “hive of complaints”, a bee colony thrives on the “vice” of its members, but then declines when they become honest and virtuous. This book influenced later economic and social thought and anticipated later themes related to markets, specialization, and unintended social consequences.
Penberthy’s fable of the little bee goes in almost the opposite direction. Ask whether usefulness, productivity, and social cooperation are enough.
Mandeville’s Hive exposes society’s hidden dealings. Penberthy Bees believes there may be more to life than bargains.
Once science enters the nest, this question becomes even more interesting. Recent research into the microbiome, the “holobiont,” and collective behavior has made defining personality more difficult than conventional wisdom assumes. Derek Skillings, a philosopher of science who leads a Templeton-funded project on collective behavior, explains that microbes have shaped all large living things and that they play a key role in plant and animal life.
Just as bees belong to hives, so too do we belong to hives: our bodies, our brains, our microbiomes, and our social worlds. Individuality and a sense of belonging mutually deepen.
Panpsychism takes this issue further. Bees, bodies, brains, and microbiomes challenge our notions of individuality. panpsychism It challenges our very concept of consciousness. It holds that consciousness, or at least some rudimentary form of experience, is not limited to humans or animals, but somehow belongs to the fabric of reality.
That idea is old. The early Greek philosopher Thales believed that the “soul” is interwoven throughout the universe. His famous words: “All things are full of God.” From a different angle, St. Paul imagined creation groaning, hopeful, waiting to be released.
Animism, in its various forms, similarly treated the world as a living thing with existence, subjectivity, and address. Stones, rivers, trees, and stars were not dead things onto which humans projected meaning. They belonged to a world where humans did not need to add meaning.
The Scientific Revolution not only disproved that old vision; It also disciplined Western thought away from it. By separating subjects from objects and treating nature increasingly as a mechanism, modern science has narrowed the scope of what can be taken seriously as “alive,” “conscious,” or internal.
Still, the doubts did not go away. William James gave panpsychism a serious philosophical hearing, and some 20th century physicists, disturbed by the role of observation in quantum theory, once again raised questions about mind, matter, and what was considered simply an “objective” world.
Today’s resurgence of panpsychism raises the question of whether the mind is not something that just happened to exist in a supposedly dead universe, but rather something primordial, pervasive, and deepened by life.
David Bentley Hart’s argument is close to this, but not the same argument. His target is the modern mechanistic assumption that consciousness can be explained as a product of matter, understood as completely external, inert, and without an interior.
If consciousness exists, he suggests, it might be less strange to think that the mind somehow belongs to the depths of reality than to imagine it emerging from a totality of matter that initially excluded it from view. Panpsychists may say that “matter has a mind,” but Hart’s stronger claim is that matter itself exists in the mind.
The popular imagination, as well as hasty readings of science and philosophy, have long treated religion and God as “supernatural,” separating the spiritual from the physical, as if reality were divided into two realms that sometimes overlap.
But it’s not the only way, or even the deepest way, to understand the problem. In much older religious and philosophical thought, the spirit is located elsewhere. It is not some ghostly supplement added to the world from the outside.
That is the depth of the world itself.
However controversial the resurgence of panpsychic thinking may be, it may feel more like a resurgence than a novelty. A line from TS Eliot comes to mind. “All your explorations will end / You will arrive where you started / And you will know the place for the first time.”
Ancient animism and modern physics are not the same thing, and we should not be forced to agree with them easily. Yet both challenge the same modern confidence that reality is “out there,” silent, external, and dead until the mind examines it.
The world may be stranger than that.
Matter may be the name we give to a mystery when we think we have explained it.
“If they were at peace, the stones would soon cry out.”
― Luke 19:40
notes and reading
[*] Devil’s “Legion”—In Mark’s Gospel (chapter 5), “legions” is a general term for the numerous evil spirits possessing humans in the area of the Gerasenes. When Jesus asks the unclean spirit its name, it replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many,” symbolizing its overwhelming destructive power.
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Edited by Joshua M. Moritz and Robert John Russell. Divine Providence and the Randomness of Nature: Scientific and Theological Perspectives (2019). I learned a lot from both authors. Moritz has taught philosophy at the University of San Francisco, theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, and theology and science at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. Mr. Russell is a physicist and theologian, founding director of the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, and a minister of the United Church of Christ. That’s how much we have in common.
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For readers who want more background: John Penberthy’s article To be a bee or not to be a bee? (2007) is a fable about a humble bee. bernard mandeville’s fable of the bees (1714) gives an old social satire. william james principles of psychology (1890) Panpsychism is one of the classic modern hearings. philip goff’s Galileo’s mistake (2019) offer a clear contemporary defense. and David Bentley Hart’s You Are God: About Nature and the Supernatural (2022) challenges the habit of treating nature as a self-sufficient order set in opposition to God.
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Raymond Tallis “against panpsychism” current philosophy (August/September 2017).
Tallis, a physician and philosopher, has himself criticized reductionist explanations of the mind, arguing that panpsychism does not actually explain consciousness. It spreads mystery all around. Even if all matter has some simple form of experience, we need to explain how those simple forms become a single conscious self.
> The argument can turn upside down. If panpsychism has difficulty explaining how simple forms of experience combine to form a single conscious self, materialism faces difficulties of its own. After removing the inner world of matter, we must explain how consciousness appears in the first place. This is where Hart’s argument, discussed above, becomes relevant.
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victoria nelson secret life of dolls (2001). Modern Western culture formally stopped believing that objects had spiritual powers, and then spent the next few centuries reproducing that belief through dolls, puppets, automata, cyborgs, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. We have simply given old impulses a new hiding place. AI is not Nelson’s subject, but it may be the newest and most compelling. Big Brother is finally accepted by his family.
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“Flickering Enlightenment” — Elian Glaser ion (May 28, 2026). Glaser argues that the Enlightenment, attacked from the left and right, can only be defended by drawing on its best inheritance: enduring criticism. She has written extensively on modern propaganda, false authenticity, astroturf politics, and cyberutopianism. Among other books, she has written to protect elitism / Elitism: A progressive defense (2020).
purple goddess
martyrs of memory
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
