Creative Piety and Neo-Utopianism

Cultivating Our Global Garden

Abstract

This essay is the third in a trilogy. In the first two essays, ‘This Is The Way The World Ends: A Philosophy of Civilization Since 1900, and A Philosophy of the Future’, Cosmos & History, 16, 2, 2020, 1-53, and ‘Thought-Shapers’, Cosmos & History, 17, 1, 2021, 1-72, we outlined a broadly and radically Kantian neo-organicist thought-shaping, world-shaping,  and life-shaping philosophy of the future. But precisely how can this neo-organicist project be realized? That’s the burning question, upon whose answer the interlinked fates of the Earth and humankind jointly depend. In what follows, by presenting and then practicing the fundamental meta-cognitive capacity we call creative piety, we sketch and then strongly recommend a near-future, neo-utopian global society that’s organized according to broadly and radically Kantian dignitarian neo-organicist principles. In so doing, we elaborate and extend Voltaire’s justly famous neo-Edenic exhortation, the final sentence of Candide, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’—we must cultivate our garden—by reformulating it as a cosmopolitan neo-utopian exhortation: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin mondial’, that is, we must cultivate our global garden.