One Year Closer to the New Florence

Looking back, looking ahead

In our first year together on Substack, we haven’t come up with a manifesto for the New Florence. I suspect we will do so sometime in 2025. In this first year, we explored elements on our way toward a New Florence.

There are seven elements involved in forging our way toward the New Florence — and I suppose this forms the outline of a manifesto:

First, I believe that across all belief systems, human goodness and the good life (and good relationships and a good community or society) are all about having pure motives toward other people. Thinking about, communicating with, and acting toward each other with pure motives. Certainly that has to be the cornerstone for any ideal community. Motives are essential, and this will be a recurring topic.

Second, I think it helps each of us throughout our youth and adulthood to be as clear as we can be of our view of the Field and of consciousness — which my polls showed almost all of us New Florence readers believe in — and, among my fellow theists who believe in the afterlife and the soul, for each of us to also be as clear as possible of our views of Deity, the afterlife, and the soul. And to deepen our awareness and even experience what we believe in with our intellects. In an ideal community, in my view, we are able to share our metaphysical views free of any contentiousness — and even help each other clarify our views. We can be spiritually useful to each other without agreeing. This is why I did the polls about metaphysics, and there will be more in 2024.

Third, matching up our best understanding of essential science with our metaphysical views enriches our lives even more. Relying on four centuries of scientific progress, I offered a new nontheistic Creation Story in May and a new theistic Creation Story — to help you customize your own Creation Story. I’ll do a “real-time” version of this — a day-to-day view of Creation — in 2024.

Fourth, culture. The New Florence is very much about excellence in cultural works. Most of my posts and our discussions are about culture.

My own bias, as you know, is toward the cultural works of Europe from the 1200s to the 1700s — from Dante to Mozart, with da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Shakespeare, and many others in between — followed by the great age of the novel from the 1790s to the 1910s: my four favorites are Austen, Balzac, Eliot, and Dickens, and I see why others see greatness in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and James. We’ll continue to explore excellent cultural works in 2024, including my favorite poet, Walt Whitman, and my favorite 20th Century novelist, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Fifth, the meaning of historical tragedies. We discovered with the tragic farce of the First World War and the abominations of Fascism and Communism that there was something profoundly insufficient within the consciousnesses / souls of those of us who inhabit Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian civilization. Our faith and metaphysical views and spiritual experiences, our views of science and Creation, and our cultural works — however advanced they had been — had failed to save us from the cataclysm of the 20th Century. We’ll continue to explore the psychospiritual dimensions of authoritarianism in 2024 and 2025.

What was missing that sent our civilization off the tracks in the 20th Century?

I’d say (sixth) a deep commitment to democracy and human freedom and human rights — and a willingness to sacrifice for them — was missing. You can’t have an ideal nation or community without those, and I’ll be writing more about them in 2024 and 2025.

But (seventh), in my view, what was most insufficient in 20th Century life were missing pieces of understanding of human nature that modern psychology had largely filled in by the 1990s.

You know two of my favorites: Otto Rank and Abraham Maslow. They will both keep reappearing.

Next year I’ll add three more: Roberto Assagioli, Arthur Janov, and especially Stanislav Grof, who laid out for us the whole transpersonal territory into which human consciousness can enter.

Maslow was the leading thinker in Third Force psychology, Janov pioneered depth psychology, and Rank, Assagioli, and Grof are my three favored thinkers in Fourth Force psychology. Clearly I think these three fields of psychology are essential to building more ideal lives in the 21st Century.

Finally, psychology began to offer us the information we need so that each of us can customize his or her own model of human development across the lifespan. Most importantly, our social development — and thus we can not only see how to be a better friend, relative, and neighbor at each stage of life, but we can see how to help other people do so as well. This lies at the heart of the New Florence, and so it will become a major focus of our New Florence discussions after we explore what depth psychology and Fourth Force (transpersonal) psychology have to offer us.

To my fellow Christians, I would add that I firmly believe we can integrate all of this into our Christian worldview — and that our souls and our lives and our communities will all be profoundly fuller and richer for doing so.

Not quite a manifesto. But you can see where we’re headed. All I can do is share my discoveries, and I hope you’ll continue to share yours. I’ll continue to share my discoveries in nonfiction pieces. And I’ll continue to share my discoveries in stories from my novels. The five novels together will ultimately track one family of spiritually earnest psychologists (who love cultural excellence) across five generations and across one century from the 1910s to the 2010s.

I appreciate you weaving your insights into these glimpses of the New Florence — in our community via the comments sections after each post. And I’ve learned so much by the many polls you’ve responded to.

You help define our direction, far more than you realize, by liking or not liking posts. I tend to remove my posts that don’t get at least ten likes, and I tend to write more about topics that get a lot of views and likes. Through comments, poll responses, and likes, you’re very much shaping where we’re going.

I’m learning more from you than you’re learning from me. The first year has been extraordinary. But the best is yet to come.

Thank you for being on this journey as we share stories and insights that can take us closer and closer to the New Florence. If we Boomers and Xers don’t ever quite arrive there, perhaps many Millennials and Zoomers will.

All my best,

Mike