Summary: I start this podcast with a nod to a movie that I think qualifies as a work of integral art: Interstellar. It’s director Christopher Nolan’s latest film, a big-budget science fiction epic starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain.<br> Most science fiction is bound by scientific materialism, or scientism, the belief that, in integral terms, the seemingly interior aspects of reality are just expressions of the exterior aspects. In this view, consciousness is seen as a throw-off of the synaptic activity of the brain, free will is a delusion that gets us out of bed in the morning, and love is a mélange of chemicals and emotions that tricks us into mating and forming pair bonds.<br> This is the prevailing “religion” of modernism, taken on faith by most of academia, the media and the rising (and welcome) ranks of atheists. It is the philosophical basis for artificial intelligence and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity, which posits that sufficient material complexity will create consciousness. It is epitomized by the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, created first by Carl Sagan in 1980 and reprised last year by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which we explored with Ken Wilber at the last Integral Living Room (you can listen to some of our discussions <a href="http://www.integrallivingroom.com/the-conversation-so-far/" target="_blank">here</a>).<br> Integralists may be friendly to scientism, recognizing that it serves as a corrective to millennia of magic and myth where humanity was in the thrall of spirits, gods and God. But we also recognize that scientific materialism, like all religions, is itself limited by what it cannot or will not see: the domains of reality that feature novelty-out-of-nothing, enthusiasm, identity, mutuality and love.<br> In other words, the dimensions of reality that are non-material but no less real than material reality. In this more integral view love is as real as a rock.<br> I believe that we are today witnessing the crescendo of scientism in our culture and the beginning of a serious challenge to its supremacy, a theme I feature often in my work.<br> Interstellar is an example of this trend. It is a story told from all four quadrants, where love is explicitly seen as force in the universe. As Anne Hathaway’s character Dr. Amelia Brand says in a voice Nolan clearly wants us to hear:<br> Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful, it has to mean something… Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.<br> David Brooks also writes appreciatively about Interstellar for the same reasons in his column, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/opinion/david-brooks-interstellar-love-and-gravity.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Love and Gravity</a>, in the New York Times (11/20). As always, Brooks skates close to an integral understanding that love and intelligence are fundamental features of the universe and are present all the way down to the subatomic world.<br> But this isn’t an explicitly religious movie. “Interstellar” is important because amid all the culture wars between science and faith and science and the humanities, the movie illustrates the real symbiosis between these realms.<br> …in the era of quantum entanglement and relativity, everything looks emergent and interconnected. Life looks less like a machine and more like endlessly complex patterns of waves and particles. Vast social engineering projects look less promising, because of the complexity, but webs of loving and meaningful relationships can do amazing good.<br> As the poet Christian Wiman wrote in his masterpiece, “My Bright Abyss,” “If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication.
