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November 1. Earlier this week my friend Davis stayed a few nights with me. He asked me about spirituality, and I gave him a definition, something about rejecting philosophical materialism without following the centrally controlled beliefs of a religion. I asked what "spirituality" means to him, and he struggled to define it without using the word "spiritual".

So now I'm wondering, when people talk about spirituality, what exactly are they talking about? If I had more time, I'd make a survey with hundreds of questions and give it to thousands of hippies. If I wanted to make them look stupid, I would ask questions to trick them into muddling the word up with culture and politics: What's more spiritual, a Prius or a Hummer? But if I wanted to understand them, I would ask for stories about the most spiritual and anti-spiritual parts of their lives. Then I might be able to analyze out some definitions, like "the feeling of engaging with a living universe" or "the yearning to be part of a larger story" or "absence of stress".

Underlying all of this, I think "spirituality" is how people refer to the gap between human nature and modern society. Our ancestors lived in close-knit extended families, imbedded in the spectacular complexity of wild ecosystems, viewing reality itself as full of awareness and intention. Now we grow up in neurotic nuclear families, work in office cubes, our closest engagement with nature is mowing the lawn, and we view consciousness as an accident in a mindless billiard-ball universe.

So how do we bridge the gap? This is such a hard question that almost everyone goes astray. We correctly observe that our society is fucked up, and then we get seduced by incorrect but beautiful stories about why it's fucked up and what we can do about it. As industrial civilization continues to decline, I expect all kinds of movements to appear, from exploitative cults, to unrealistic utopian crusades, to patient realignments of human culture, all of them feeding off the energy of people who are economically vulnerable and desperate to feel like they're part of a story. Eventually several of these movements will stabilize into dominant belief systems, and beyond that I'm not sure.

I don't think we're going to return to forager-hunter tribes, because there will be other options that we like better. Soon it will be easier to change human nature to fit society, than change society to fit human nature. But I don't think we can just do anything we want. I believe in a conscious universe, beyond humanity, beyond biology, even beyond physics, into which post-human nature and post-human society must ultimately fit. We're either going to change ourselves to extinction, or change ourselves to fit this universe through a new interface that we cannot yet imagine.

November 2-4. In a Reddit thread about reality glitches, I made this post about White Rabbit, and how I'm sure I used to hear "feed your head" three times at the end, but now, in every version I can find, I only hear it twice. I'm not the only one. In the replies, Velinus finds two videos where the printed lyrics have it three times, and a few readers remember the same thing. Robert has no memory either way, but reports:

After you mentioned White Rabbit I decided to look up the lyrics online. All the lyrics I found on the major lyrics sites have the line "feed your head" repeated twice. I lost interest at this point and decided to get back to my work.

Now, there's a UNIX program called fortune. It basically just displays random quotations pulled from a database when it's run. I had set up our development server so that it runs when I log into the system. So, what should appear when I log in? The lyrics to White Rabbit with the "feed your head" line repeated 3 times!

And now, this is the top postcard on this weekend's PostSecret.

November 6-8. There's a famous quote from Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the world." I don't want to get into the question of what Gandhi thought it meant, but under a strict literal interpretation, it is usually bad advice. For example, if the change you want to see is more people smoking pot, then you should smoke pot rather than work for legalization. Or if you're straight, and you want to see legal gay marriage, there's nothing you can do, and even if you're gay the best you can do is move to a state where it's legal and get married.

If it's possible to change the world through the political system, then doing so is always more powerful than changing personally. Seattle has a law now that stores have to charge you for bags. Because some people fought to change the law instead of just bringing their own bags, tens of thousands of shoppers who do not care about bag waste are now bringing their own bags.

It's only when you can't change the world, or can change it only very slowly, that "be the change" becomes good advice. Instead of getting upset that the whole world isn't the way you want it, you can be content that you're changing your little part of the world.

Now, if you want to salvage "be the change you want to see," you can interpret it more broadly. So a straight person can support gay marriage by publicly supporting and encouraging gay couples. Rick Steves has done more than anyone else to get marijuana legalized in Washington State, even though (if we believe him) he doesn't use it himself.

So you can change the world with your behavior, even if you're not personally doing the thing that people will be doing in the world you're aiming for. This gets interesting when you apply it to issues where you could do the thing personally, but don't. For example, if you want people to eat less meat, you don't have to be vegetarian. I'm not joking! If you think I'm joking, it's because political action has fallen so deeply under the shadow of puritanism. You can communicate the horror of factory farms and the inefficiency of grain-fed animals, while still eating meat yourself. You can fly around the world on jet planes giving lectures about climate change. I'm still not joking! You can be a primitivist on the internet. You can kick out a Niketown window with a Nike shoe! And you're not doing anything wrong, you're not a hypocrite, unless you tell other people they're immoral for doing what you're doing.

Any movement that allows itself to be framed in terms of moral purity is doomed. If ending the exploitation of animals is about personally avoiding guilt, then anyone who speaks for animals can be dismissed as a fraud if they wear leather, or eat honey, or step on a bug. If reversing climate change is about reducing personal consumption, then the end of that path is to kill yourself.

To escape this trap, it's not enough for social movements to avoid puritanism -- they must aggressively fight it, and carefully present themselves as completely tactical. And for personal action, there's a good rule in this Ribbonfarm post from this Bruce Sterling speech: don't do anything your dead great grandfather can do better than you. I would say: Do things that an alive person can do better than a dead person.

November 13. I've been meaning to write about Sarah Hrdy's book Mothers and Others. Here's a decent summary: Is Babysitting the Ultimate Source of Our Ability to Understand Each Other?

Hrdy starts with the observation that humans are nicer to each other than any other large primate, even bonobos. She looks at a bunch of explanations, and eventually argues that at some point in our history (for complicated reasons I won't get into) mothers started sharing the duties of raising children with other family members, especially maternal grandmothers. This led to a higher survival rate for children who learned to read the emotions of many potential caregivers, which led to a higher genetic potential for empathy.

Hrdy's book is mostly a lot of scaffolding to support several rockets that blast off in the final chapter. One shocker goes like this: for hundreds of thousands of years, it was easier for humans to get emotional support than food. So any child that did not have a rich and healthy emotional environment, also would not have had enough food, and would have died. But in civilization, it's normal for kids to be emotionally neglected and still survive to adulthood. This could explain increasing mental illness, depression, emotional detachment, and other problems of modernity.