Race Versus Cultural Intelligence: The Agent Arena Relationship

In this third episode of a riveting series, Dr. John Vervaeke and Greg Thomas dive into the intersection of music, culture, democracy, and race. Through the philosophical lens of blues, jazz, and cultural intelligence, they explore the profound implications and existential impulses within our society. The discussion shifts to the complexities of race, stereotypes, and the pitfalls of categorization, showcasing nuanced perspectives on racialization. Thomas's insights into leadership and improvisation, balanced with Vervaeke's academic insights, bring a multi-dimensional exploration of identity, culture, and human nature. Finally, both experts call for a mindful approach, emphasizing listening, understanding, and moving away from harmful ideologies. This episode transcends political boundaries and offers fresh perspectives on complex issues.

Resources:

Culture vs Race: American Identity Hangs in the Balance | Political Extremists vs. The Middle Path: Why I Remain a Radical Moderate | Deracialization Now - Part One | Deracialization Now - Part Two | From Race to Culture to Cosmos - Greg Thomas

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education - Danielle Allen

Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison - James M. Albrecht 

Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis - John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic

The Interpretation of Cultures - Clifford Geertz 

The Quest for a Spiritual Home: Conference Warmup | John Vervaeke, Jonathan Pageau & Paul VanderKlay

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison - Ralph Ellison

Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism) - Sheena Michele Mason 

The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race - Carlos Hoyt

Cultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos course

How Culture Works - Paul Bohannan 

Virtue of doubt | William Cunningham | TEDxUTSC

Bright Future Network

Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview - Audrey Smedley

JRS EP143 John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

JRS EP 161 Greg Thomas on Untangling the Gordian Knot of Race

Shownotes

00:00:00 - Introduction and Discussion Overview
00:02:40 - Philosophical Implications of Blues and Jazz
00:05:00 - Existentialist Impulse of the Blues
00:09:14 - Four Principles of Jazz Leadership Project
00:13:15 - Pragmatist Pluralism and Democracy
00:17:25 - "Agent Arena Relationship" and Cultural Intelligence
00:20:00 - Concept of Niche Construction in Culture
00:26:47 - Culture, Race, and Ralph Ellison's Perspective
00:30:55 - Historical Impact on Collective Memory
00:38:46 - Colorblindness and Societal Interactions
00:41:40 - Recontexting and Cultural Innovation
00:47:40 - Music as Psychotechnology and Collective Interaction
00:53:00 - Five Steps of Racialization
00:58:12 - Addressing Stereotypes and Essentialization
01:01:01 - Necessity of Slow Thinking in Understanding Human Nature
01:07:40 - Understanding Identity in Cultural Terms
01:09:57 - Moving from Understanding to Action
01:13:20 - Emphasizing Good Faith and Sophistication in Discourse
01:19:00 - Solutions from Participation, Power, and Wisdom
01:22:40 - Importance of Language and Racial Identity Separation

[erlinae]

My heart is filled with joy.
I am a body a culture, not a bi-racial agent
I gone through the meaning crisis five times because it’s so rich. I prayed that John would lean in to this matter and here it is. I appreciative to now know Greg Thomas, l will follow him as well.
John, 10, 000 blessing be yours for leading us forward. Greg, a leader on to his own standing
Please get this work to our political arena ❤

[metamormonism]

It’s a breath of fresh air to hear nuanced conversation on this hyper relevant topic

[KalebPeters]

Wow, thank you both 🙏

This may be my favourite run of Voices with Vervaeke ever! Greg is just wonderful, and it was so cool for me as a jazz musician hearing his expansion on the tradition as a secular-spiritual ecology of practices.

I eagerly await episode 4!!

[idatong]

Thank you both for this conversation on cultural intelligence. I love how you both have a continuous and open talk about this subject of race. The ultimate truth is that there's only one race - human race, with many different cultures. I hope, that can be emphasized the most. Thank you so much for your passionate work.

[leonstenutz]

Wonderful! Brazilians have a word for a particular form of the blues -- 3:40 -- 'saudade'.

Saudade is a heartfelt kind of nostalgia, a sweet/sour, happy/sad yearning, craving for a person, moment, place or thing past, absent or missing. The Afrobraziliam spirit is strong in this way of being which deeply inForms certain currents of brazilian music, literature, culture ...

[dalibofurnell]

Thank you John and Greg ❤ Bless you both, I hope this conversation can expand, extend, equip, enhance and elevate. It definitely has a way to go, right now it is like a seed, and the care being shown in the handling of that seed is good, and I encourage you to plant it into good soil so that you can let it grow whilst you continue, so that by the time you circle back around there is something more to tend to, that is both rooted and growing and may all this eventually become the garden from which a beautiful melody sings in harmony with any one who enters it x keep well

[Wrath]

Maybe one of the best videos I've seen this year. Worded viewpoints I have aligned myself to over many years incredibly well.

[jasonscholl]

A wonderful pair. Excellent interactions. Thank you John and Greg. 👍 😎

[MDSaunders]

Greg and John, I am loving this series! Thank you for your commitments to furthering science, art, and community.

[Pppanos]

An excellent presentation and video, both in content and format.
For some reason I was reminded of Diogenes and his efforts to make people realise how unexamined their behaviour and thoughts are. People seem so entrenched in their world view that they need to be shocked out of it in a manner that only a Cynic like Diogenes could maybe achieve.
Greg makes a great and thorough argument, the question remains how to get people in the state of aporia that will encourage them to consider the argument in good faith

[UpCycleClub]

Indeed, this is such a great series. Kudos to both of you 👏

[gunterappoldt]

Interesting talk, again, thanks. Reminded me not only of Clifford Geertz, and Athony Giddens (to name only two of the "elder semesters"), but also the "father of academic phenomenology", Edmund Husserl, who spoke of the "transcendental self" - as well as a somehow related voice from the "axial age", that is, the one of Master Zhuang Zhou (莊子, or 莊周), who, in the chapter "Discussing All Things" (齊物論) spoke - among other thinings - of "forgetting one-self" (via proto-zenish "calmly sitting"), "using ritual as [ideally a useful] fram[ing tool]", and "metamorphoses" (i.e., namely the famous "Dream of the Butterfly"). All seems part of a kind of philosophia perennis (of homo sapiens sapiens, experiencing and reflecting on his/her "being-thrown-ness" [Martin Heidegger]), with special regard to Immanuel Kant´s famous fourfold "anthropological magic square", as articulated in the form of these four (as old master Kant felt them to be) basic questions: a) What can one know? b) What can one do? c) What may one hope for? d) What [does it mean to] be human?

[bobwilkinsonguitar]

Review in the Rearview. Language is a delight when used so lucidly

[Alex-htoq]

I think there is more to be unpacked on this idea of whether or not the notion of “colour blindness” is indicative of a virtue or not. It used to be a sign of someone being able to look at another as holistically as possible without thinking of them in terms of racial forms, but nowadays we have the following rebuttal.

By ignoring the racial aspects that a person faces in their day to day lives, trying to constantly think of them as a whole makes it difficult and nigh on impossible to fix race based issues. What’s more, to clarify the agent-arena relationship - to use your language - in culture and civil democracy has to be done with a degree of racial consciousness.

But now it’s becoming increasingly prevalent to think only in terms of race, and the whole has been forgotten since there are indeed so many aspects of an African-American livelihood which is explained by racial inequities. To gesture towards a solution, I turn to a notion in Buddhism that there is both no such thing as the self, and yet the majority of Buddhist practice will come through understanding and working to renunciate aspects of the self to assist in the apophatic acclimation to nirvana; this process I believe should be used as a model for combatting racism. Thinking of the “self”, race in this sense, but realising the meta-goal which is to fix those issues and return to that kind of colour-blindness, as we have integrated the possibility for ignorance in that approach.

[UNOwenWasMe]

You decided to make your thumbnail relevant and descriptive of the subject matter at hand
Love to see it, very nice

[lukeydzbecx]

Legendary, thank you for the excellent content.

[ericorwoll]

In population genetics PCA analysis reliably comes up with the traditionally recognized 5 or 6 continental groups, and the genetic variation between these groups is not just related to skin color but to cognitive strategies and metabolic processes as well (I don't want a bone marrow transplant from someone of the same culture, but of the same race, preferably someone as closely related as possible). These major genetic clusters are predictably distributed in geographical clines, but that doesn't mean the identifiable clusters aren't scientifically significant. Using your example, the fact that yellow blends into orange doesn't mean that color isn't real. Race is a very good predictor of all sorts of important measurable properties, from IQ to personality traits to levels of aggression, impulse control and agency. People are free to make racial classifications an integral part of their cultures, they are free to value what makes them biologically distinct from other groups. More genetically homogenous societies tend to have higher levels of social trust and people's demonstrated preference on average is to associate with those who are more closely related genetically, even within the same racial group people tend to make friends with those who are genetically more similar. You can't stop people from valuing genetic relatedness in others, it's something that evolution has selected for and will continue to select for. The populations that are higher in positive and negative ethnocentrism will be the ones that stick around as identifiable populations.

[vagabondcaleb]

Wait...So is the archetype of "The Cathedral" "The Frame" AKA The Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey?...Wow this was a BEAUTIFUL conversation.

[_ARCATEC_]

In discussions about human diversity, it's important to accurately use the term 'race.' Historically, 'race' inaccurately categorized human variations based on superficial traits. It's noteworthy that in the past, different humanoids coexisted on the planet, but currently, there's only one race of humans—Homo sapiens. This linguistic distinction underscores the importance of using accurate language and highlights the mischaracterization that 'race' has historically entailed."
The concept of different human races, as historically understood, has often been based on visible physical traits. However, advances in genetics and our understanding of human ancestry have shown that the genetic variation within humanity is continuous rather than discreetly separable into distinct racial categories.

It's important to recognize that while variations in traits exist among different populations due to geographical and environmental factors, these differences don't indicate separate races. Genetic diversity exists within all populations of humans, and the differences between individuals within the same population are often greater than the differences between populations.

The recognition that all humans belong to the same race, Homo sapiens, is fundamental to our understanding of human evolution and genetics. This viewpoint promotes inclusivity and understanding by emphasizing our shared ancestry and interconnectedness.

[MusicMissionary]

You know what I'd like to hear about, is what changes interaction with black culture has had on white culture. It's a lot of what makes us American as opposed to European. Our conception of music _definitely_ changed.