This was of interest to me because in a recent seminar I've just discussed a drawing of mine called 'Rock-Climbers'.  A mass of people are climbing crags; they are all attached to one another in some way or other.  They all relate.  So your essay chimes well with my ideas.
 
What is 'transfigurality'?
 
I guess your explanations are what I'd define as humanist?  One of my explanations of ‘Rock-climbers’ is that it demonstrates  a system, the 'body of  Christ' as Christians call it, seen as a system.  A system of interrelating, in the picture each person is in physical contact with another. ie

 4Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.’ Romans 12:3-5 (New International Version.Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society Zondervan)

Of course, this begins with the statement, ‘3 Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you’.  This drawing, I think in retrospect, is in accordance with this; this is my theological reflection on it.  Not all can, as one of the figures is doing, support several at once (as does our Dean!)  The child, the infirm, the deformed, cannot physically support others; yet they also have their place ‘in the team’.  During the seminar two people mentioned ‘Arthur’.  I don't know whether you saw it, about the value of the disabled.  Popular television might name and categorise some in the team as ‘the weakest link’, yet this quote asserts value for all human souls.
Are these views in keeping with yours?
 
Best,
Christine
-----Original Message-----
From: "Alan Rayner (BU)" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:04:34 +0100
Subject: Re: The Simplistic Nature of Favouritism - and How It Produces 'Junk' (fwd)

Following up on this, I have written the attached short essay.

Warmest

Alan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Rayner" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 11:30 AM
Subject: The Simplistic Nature of Favouritism - and How It Produces 'Junk'
(fwd)


> Dear All,
>
> I have just sent the following (now slightly revised) message to the
> inclusional research discussion group.
>
> I feel it may have much relevance to how really to understand the
> difference between natural educational inclusion and unnatural selection.
>
> Perhaps we need to let go of the junk thinking that lures us into
> rubbishing ourselves and one another!
>
> Warmest
>
> Alan
>
>
> ------------ Forwarded Message ------------
> Date: 10 April 2008 08:38 +0100
> From: "Alan Rayner (BU)" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: The Simplistic Nature of Favouritism - and How It Produces 'Junk'
>
>
> Dear All,
>
> Ted Lumley's impassioned missive regarding the relation between the notion
> of 'Junk DNA' and prevalent ideas about 'junk people' draws attention to
> what I think is the most fundamental social, psychological and
> environmental implication of inclusionality:
>
> In a continually evolving energy flow, there is no such thing as 'junk'.
> Neither is there any such thing as individual 'perfection' in isolation
> from others.
>
> The very idea of 'junk' arises from the kind of favouritism evident in
> Darwin's description of 'natural selection' as 'the preservation of
> favoured races in the struggle for life'.
>
> Such favouritism is the product of rationalistic exclusion, most
> fundamentally of all the exclusion of 'space' from 'matter', such that
> only
> the latter 'counts', as in the discreteness/discontinuity embedded in the
> simplistic foundations of classical and modern mathematics and objectivist
> science. It produces a very partial, postscriptive and prescriptive view
> of
> history and evolution in which only the 'big hitters' count and there is
> no
> play in the system for improvisational co-creativity. It leads inexorably
> to eugenics and the motivations for fascism. It alienates the loving
> influence of receptive spatial context that makes evolution possible in
> the
> first place. It negates negativity in a misogynistic 'false positivism'
> that denies our natural source.
>
> This is why it is so crucial for us to develop and communicate the kinds
> of
> mathematics and physics based on transfigurality, and evolutionary
> understanding based on natural inclusion, that can help us out of the fix
> of producing more and more junk by objective definition.
>
> Everest isn't the only mountain in the Himalayas. The Great White isn't
> the
> only fish in the sea. The solute isn't alone in the solution. Alone, stuck
> on top of the pyramidal adaptive peaks of their ascendent architecture,
> they are going nowhere fast.
>
> The simplisticity of favouritism not only produces junk, it is junk! And
> our rationalistic modern human culture of perversely discontinuous flow is
> full of it!
>
> Warmest
>
>
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> send
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>
> ---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
>

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