The 18th century Enlightenment offers insights for our global crises in the 21st century
Thomas Paine makes sense today
As we face massive climate change, humanity is at a historic global tipping point between autocracy or democracy. Will we be ruled by kings or laws? Paine’s ideas in Common Sense offer reasonable hope for our urgent evolution in these times that try our souls.
Common Sense voiced in plain terms the big ideas of the Enlightenment. Rejecting centuries of despotism under kings, Enlightenment writers like Locke and Rousseau and Paine mapped out the rational basis for freedom and democracy. Their views on natural rights and natural law inspired the American Revolution, French Revolution and most revolutions ever since around the world.
For healing our planet and maturing into sensible liberty today, we need hope, rooted in reason, giving us the courage and faith to do the inner and outer work of personal and global transformation.
More than one billion global thinkers live on earth, the book documents. As climate reality bites in the years ahead, it makes global sense that people with global minds are getting better organized. The emergent global sense movement is already working to create a future that works. What happens next is up to us.
“Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight most often, are within“
THOMAS PAINE
Changing what makes sense
The way we make sense of life on earth shapes our daily reality. Changing how we make sense of life changes our lives and our world.
We can choose to be aware of our universal oneness and natural unity on earth. Such a global sensibility shifts our sense-making model. We reason from the premise all life is interconnected or one. The preset mindset of global thinking shifts our choices and our societies.
We live in a rare pivotal age. Globalization and climate upheavals are disrupting civilizations worldwide. Massive waves of change are hitting us as hard as the shift from agrarian to industrial societies. Life on earth will never be the same. Future shock stuns many of us. Life changes faster than we can cope.
Making Global Sense may help shift how we make sense of life on earth.
Imagine humanity making global sense of life as a commonplace awareness of our planetary unity, our oneness, our interdependence, our connectivity, our coherence (said in any lingo). A global sense of life as one leads us to balance freedom and responsibility in the world and in ourselves. We enjoy both liberty and safety. Mindful self rule guided by global sense sustains freedom and democracy.
In scary times that test one’s faith and will to carry on, culminating decades of work, I wrote a book to offer reasonable grounds for feeling hope we can create a better future. I’m doing my part to help build the critical mass for a quantum leap of humanity into world enlightenment.