Collective Wisdom in the West

Liam Kavanagh is an embodied cognitive scientist, deeply influenced by Zen, who directs research at Life Itself, a community of people for a wiser, weller world. Past work in development economics convinced him that recognising and unlearning ideology is the most important step towards imagining futures worth creating. He helps create opportunities for this by organising residential learning communities, dialogues between Science and Zen, and contemplative activist groups

In this important and timely book, dense with insight, Liam succeeds where many others have failed, to not only accurately diagnose the root causes of the brokenness that so many of us intuit at the heart of Western scientific materialism, but to indicate the path towards a remedy. Courageously and compassionately teasing apart the roots of our attachments to reason, individuality and equality - notions we would often prefer to take as read, so painful are they to explore - Liam skilfully navigates the reefs and shoals of our reactivity, creating a space for real understanding and a new turning of the wheel of cultural evolution. In this work, Liam models the solution he proposes, by drawing in equal measure on wisdom arising from his own direct, first person meditative investigation, balanced by intellectual rigour and a thorough grasp of developments in neuroscience, psychology and the history and philosophy of science.Brother Phap Linh, Dharma Teacher, Plum Village Zen MonasteryLiam Kavanagh mobilises brilliantly the insight that attaching to one's sectional or intersectional identity is precisely what wisdom traditions across the world have warned against doing since they began. Such wisdom traditions have earned wide respect in diverse cultures for a reason; Kavanagh extends one's sense of why they are needed. 'Identity politics', whether of the Left or the Right, is a receipt for unwisdom, a guarantor of resentment, anger, incivility and unsatisfactoriness in life; while the path beyond it is a path of freedom. This is a brave and important book for our time, a time when we direly need to find the wisdom to overcome such identities and divisions, and find each other, freely and together.Professor Rupert Read, former UK national spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and author of Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy