A Spiritual Metacrisis | Jonathan Rowson

My guest today is Jonathan Rowson. Jonathan is the co-founder and Chief Executive of Perspectiva. A London-based charity that describes itself as "A collective of expert generalists working on an urgent one-hundred-year project to understand the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice". 

He was Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts from 2009-2016, where he authored a range of influential research reports on behavior change, climate change, and spirituality, and curated and chaired public events. In 2018 he was awarded an Open Society Fellowship to apply his philosophical and strategic approach to challenges faced by the human rights movement. 

Jonathan holds a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University and did his post-graduate work in theoretical psychology at Harvard and Bristol Universities, including a Ph.D. on what it means to become wiser.

He is also a chess Grandmaster and was the British Chess Champion for three consecutive years from 2004-2006 and worked as part of former World Champion Viswanathan Anand's analytical team in 2008. He is the author of five books, including most recently The Moves that Matter – A Grandmaster on the Game of Life which was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. 

Jonathan’s Links & Resources:

Perspectiva

Substack

Twitter 

Prefixing the World by Jonathan Rowson

Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation by Jonathan Rowson

Living in the Metacrisis with Jonathan Rowson short film by Katie Teague 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Chess by Jonathan Rowson

The Moves that Matter – A Grandmaster on the Game of Life by Jonathan Rowson

Other Books, Articles, Videos Mentioned:

Education is the Metacrisis by Zak Stein

The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger

The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future by Milbank and Pabst

Rowan Williams Review of The Politics of Virtue

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World by Timothy Morton

Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm by Cynthia Bourgeault

Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism by Nate Hagens

The Great Simplification podcast hosted by Nate Hagens

The Politics of Waking Up by Indra Adnan

Zoom Conversations vs In-Person: Brain Activity Tells a Different Tale