Overview

Early Voices of Conscious Evolution is a unique anthology that brings to light a lesser-recognized yet critical dimension of human cultural and social history, opening a perspective that helps put today's dynamics into a broader and more empowering context. The period spanning the late 19th and early 20th century was a time of unprecedented change driven by the Industrial Revolution, by reactions to the effects of industrialization and technology, by then-new evolutionary theory, and by the emergence of new sciences such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics. Liberation and integration became the driving forces of social dynamics on a planetary scale. Some observers recognized that an epochal shift in social and cultural consciousness was occurring, including a new awareness that society and culture could be evolved consciously, and in a direction more supportive of human development, democracy, peace, and a sustainable relationship with the natural world. Early Voices of Conscious Evolution illustrates this growing awareness through 138 painstakingly curated passages drawn from the works of more than 120 thinkers and social actors living through the Industrial Revolution and Progressive Eras, specifically from 1866 through 1939. Many of the passages became readily accessible only recently, thanks to the digitization of older books and journals.

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Matthew Shapiro is an independent researcher, theorist, writer, and community organizer with a longstanding interest in our collective capacity for dialogue, participatory democracy, and the participatory design of social systems. He has more than three decades of experience in working to bridge theories of participatory democracy and design with practice at the neighborhood level and in the arenas of education, community engagement, and local governance. This work drew the attention and support of leading thinkers, including virologist Jonas Salk, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and participatory design pioneer Bela H. Banathy. A former teacher, he founded an innovative community-based charter school, where he taught the middle school group. He then went through the doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction at Boise State University, where his focus was on the barriers to systemic change in education. Published works include numerous critical research reports, workbooks to assist in public participation in educational design, and articles and book chapters spanning the social sciences. These include articles in The Eastern Anthropologist and World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, and invited chapters in Dialogue as a Means of Collective Communication and other books.A native of Brooklyn, New York, he has called Boise, Idaho home for the past thirty years.

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