The Evolution of Zion

Jordan Roberts

Well, I am very excited to be here with all of you. Thank you for your patience during that little funness. In true doctor form, I’m going to be mostly looking at my computer, but as a doctor who tries to be a humanist, I’ll try to look up once in a while as well.

Jordan Roberts

So today I’m going to be talking with you about the evolution of Zion and So, the word itself comes from the Hebrew tsion and refers to the ancient mount where David built the city of Jerusalem and Solomon later built the first temple. It has taken on deeper meanings through thousands of years to mean the Holy Land in its entirety or the Holy of Holies in Kabbalistic tradition. And in the national hymn of the Jewish State of Israel, Hatikvah, or the Hope, we can hear the soulful longing of the exiled Jew for Zion.

Jordan Roberts

Oh, sure. The hymn helped to inspire the Zionist movement of the late 1800s, and after the atrocities committed against Jews in Europe during World War II, the movement achieved its goal of repatriation in Palestine via the newly formed United Nations. The history of the region since that controversial action of the international community of cutting up Palestine has been marred by much bloodshed and instability. Jews, Christians, Muslims, the Rastafari movement, and Mormons all reverence the idea of Zion and claim hermeneutical privilege and its true meaning.

Jordan Roberts

And here in our own backyard, we have another place called Zion that my family and I had the opportunity to visit last week. And this is a view of the Virgin River looking out from the famous Slot Canyon in the Narrows.

Jordan Roberts

So, for Mormons, the story of Zion, the plot thickens a little bit, to include the mystical figure Enoch, who we’ve already heard about a little bit today. From these verses listed here from the Bible, the Apocrypha, we gain little insight about Enoch, except that he was exceptionally righteous and he did not die, but was taken up into heaven to walk with God. The story was known in fragments to medieval Western Christendom, and it certainly informed Milton’s Paradise Lost, but it was wholly rediscovered in the Ethiopian script in the late 18th century and translated into English in 1821. And the works are attributed to Enoch and speak of his ascent into heaven, receiving the history of creation, including the war in heaven and the fall of the Watchers. A group of archangels who intermarried with humans, creating an angel-human hybrid giant race called the Nephilim. The work strongly influenced Kabbalistic angelology and probably inspired large portions of the Book of Moses and the Price Writings of Joseph Smith.

Jordan Roberts

So in these writings we are told not just about the apotheosis of Enoch, but also an entire paradisa or utopian city that was transfigured And where you’re given this beautiful, inspiring passage. And the Lord called his people Zion because they were of one heart and one mind, and they dwelt in righteousness, and there were no poor among them.

Jordan Roberts

To begin to grasp how this verse tapped into the utopian zeitgeist of Smith’s audience and inspired generations of Mormon pioneers, To cross oceans and plains to build the kingdom of God on the earth, we will first really broadly review the history of Zion utopia in scripture, myth, literature, historical experiments, mostly terrible failures. And the Mormon experience. And then we will look at how new philosophical ideas, new technologies, and transhumanist ethics inform a modern revitalization of this ancient ideal.

Jordan Roberts

So my question is: How did the city of Enoch come to be without poverty? Didn’t Jesus say, the poor you shall always have with you? So here’s my first big idea that I’d like to share with you, and that is that poverty is tantamount to the fall, that poverty is a part of the fallen condition of humanity, and that it It rose as a result of agriculture and urbanization. And I don’t have time to get into it right now. That’s in my paper. I’ll post that so you can read that. But I would propose that the rise of agriculture in cities represents the greatest punctuation in human existence and gave rise to poverty and other conditions that we associate with a fallen state.

Jordan Roberts

So many creation myths include original idyllic states that were corrupted by evil and provide a path to reclaim innocence and communion with the divine. Accounts of blessed peacetime in the Bible include the Garden of Eden from Genesis, a brief time of communal peace among the early Christians in Acts chapters 2 through 4, and the millennium after the second coming and the binding of Satan in Revelation chapters 20 through 21. And this is Hieronymus’ Garden of Earthly Delights in three parts.

Jordan Roberts

In addition to the city of Enoch, in Mormon scripture, we have the third and fourth Nephi accounts in the Book of Mormon, where we’re told of 200 years of peace and prosperity that followed the catastrophic natural disasters. And the visitation of Jesus. These chapters tell of a perfect communal society and summarize by stating, Surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God. Also prominent in these chapters is the tale of the three Nephites, who, like Enoch and John, were not to taste death, but remained behind to minister.

Jordan Roberts

And I think this points to a really interesting convergence where. The promise of immortality is sort of inextricably linked to the promise of a new heaven and a new earth and the new Jerusalem and Zion.

Jordan Roberts

So, I’m going to very briefly now kind of fly through the history of utopia in literature and philosophy. And we’re going to go through Plato’s Republic, which lays out Socrates’ vision for a perfect society, which he was kind of just casually talking about after dinner with other Athenian nobles. And then we have Aristotle’s contribution, his Politics and Poetics. Later on, St. Augustine with the City of God. I mean, these works tried to marry kind of literature and law. in imaginations about how to create a better society, both secular and holy.

Jordan Roberts

And then we have much later on the tale of King Arthur’s Camelot, which married, you know. More romantic views about honor, justice, virtue, and equality. And then Dante in his Divine Comedy, which follows the pilgrim through. Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, meshing pagan mythology and Christianity in this sort of epic ballad. And then Thomas More wrote Utopia.

Jordan Roberts

So, Utopia was written in 1516. It was inspired by Amerigo Vespucci’s accounts of the New World and based loosely on the lost continent of Atlantis. more extolled ideas of the Renaissance, humanism, a nostalgia for the classical world, showing them flourishing in his good place, which is what Utopia means. And by resurrecting this ancient longing for an ideal society, Moore softly inspired and continues to inspire dreamers and innovators alike for the next 500 years.

Jordan Roberts

So I’m going to kind of fly through this one. I had a lot of text, but I’m not going to have time to go through it. So following Moore and King Henry VIII, his patron, turned executioner, Martin Luther, John Calvin, we have the Reformation spreading across Europe. We have the beginnings of the Enlightenment with continental people like Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza. And then you have the English empiricists, John Locke, Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Lane, the Framework for Modern Science. and a great rise in the faith of the human ability to understand natural law. And it was

Jordan Roberts

Born from this enlightenment that we have during the colonization of the New World and the discovery of Aboriginal peoples and how that challenged Christianity We have the first writings about the natural order of humans, what our natural existence, our natural state. First, talking about the social contract. And in this kind of milieu, you have the birth of our own nation and the writers of our Constitution who explicitly stated that their purpose was to form a more perfect union.

Jordan Roberts

So, in this atmosphere of limitless possibility and westward expansion of Europeans in the New World, we have the first intentional societies. Emerged. And they dotted the countryside all the way from upstate New York to northern Pennsylvania and Ohio. And these consisted of both religious and secular Groups who really wanted to try living in a different way. And they experimented with all kinds of different economics and marital mores and child rearing.

Jordan Roberts

And so this is kind of what’s going on in the world at the time that Joseph Smith and his family come down from Vermont after that failed harvest in 1816, the Year Without a Summer. As economic refugees to Palmyra. And Palmyra, as we all know, part of the burned-over district of the Second Great Awakening, this family of Methodist and Unitarian roots quickly found itself caught up in and divided by this revival.

Jordan Roberts

So, we are all familiar, I think, with the story of Joseph Smith, his visions, his prayerful search for the truth, the founding of the church, its successful missionary efforts in Europe. And the new scripture that came through his revelation: the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl Great Price. And we’re familiar as well with the successive attempts to establish a self-contained, sustainable theocracy. Multiple attempts include multiple failures, as we know. First in Kirtland, Ohio, and then in Jackson County, Missouri, which was explicitly called Zion and the site of the New Jerusalem during the millennium. And then again in Nauvoo, Illinois.

Jordan Roberts

And it was during this time, actually, beginning in the Kirtland period, that Joseph Smith began to receive revelations about. What we refer to as the United Order of Enoch. This new way of living that is based on the kind of communal attitude of the early Christians. who had all things in common. We see that phrase pop up again and again in these writings and these revelations.

Jordan Roberts

So part of this system, as we know, was polygamy, the consequences of which led to Smith’s violent death. But also included in this system is a which is contained in the law of consecration is a system of kind of being assigned a stewardship and then returning the excess of your labor to a central storehouse that can be distributed to the needy. Something we call the law of consecration discussed in Doctrine and Covenants, chapter 42.

Jordan Roberts

For some reason, it’s not advancing. Okay, let me try this one more time. Any ideas? Trying to look tomorrow. And just a commentary while we’re waiting. I love this image. It has so many throwbacks to like USSR with the scythe and the P. I love that. It’s so communist. Alright. Yeah, there we go. So this is kind of a schematic of the law of consecration. Let’s see if it’ll work now. Uh what’d you do? How can I repeat it? There we go. Okay.

Jordan Roberts

So now let’s talk about. So these early experiments in communal living while under the, in the lifetime of Joseph Smith, were largely short-lived. even though it was a prerequisite at first for membership, they quickly kind of fell apart for a variety of reasons. And we didn’t really see this, the era of the order, really reach its peak until during the time of Brigham Young, Smith’s successor here in the Endermountain West. When a bunch of these new voluntary communities, no longer requisite, were established throughout the Wasatch Front, throughout the frontier. And some of the notable examples of these efforts were the Zion’s Collective Mercury. Institute, Brigham City, which operated a stock exchange company system, and Orderville, my favorite.

Jordan Roberts

So Orderville was something really, truly unique. Orderville, where a lack of morale And a sort of willingness to adopt a communal system kind of had doomed previous experiments. Orderville had these qualities in spades. They even took Smith’s vision further. They adopted uniform clothing. uniform living arrangements, a committee which oversaw everything from work to recreation, and they were very successful.

Jordan Roberts

and eventually were kind of pressured. It was external pressures which led to their demise. External pressures from both the federal government and the Edmonds Anti-Polygamy Act, as well as the central church authority, which kind of told them to To disband in an effort to reintegrate into mainstream American society after the manifesto.

Jordan Roberts

So, the vision, though, of Joseph Smith to establish Zion in the New World. Is a strong motivator for, was a strong motivator for early converts and continues to be a strong motivator for multi-generational Mormons whose ancestors participated in these experiments, like myself.

Jordan Roberts

So if I can bring it up, I have a really cool picture here of the people of Orderville. And then if one more slide, one more click. Those are my great fourth-great-grandparents, Isaac von Wagener-Carling and his sweetheart, Azaneth Elizabeth Browning of Browning machine gun fame, his daughter. or sister, can’t remember which. So, you know, I I am continued continually inspired by their legacy, by what by the the yearning that they experienced.

Jordan Roberts

And I think it’s very interesting that at the dawn of the 20th century, as Mormons were stepping back from trying to create a physical peculiar utopia, the secular world was kind of coming into its own, was maturing and thought that it could flex its muscles and try to corner the market on societal perfection. And we were part of that, you know, for the the next century. Okay, go ahead. And this one has a lot of pictures, so we’ll just go through them really quickly.

Jordan Roberts

So I’m going to move on now to the science and humanism and kind of the follies that came along with that, our ups and downs. So the scientific revolution inspired people, renewed a hope for a humanistic future. Go ahead. You know, and we had the first wide-scale rejection of large-scale inequality, leading Karl Marx in 1848 to call for workers of the world to unite. Go ahead. And his philosophy of materialism and communism came to rule a third of the world’s population in its heyday. Nothing to shake your nose at. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

Then, you know, also in the middle of the 19th century, we had Charles Darwin and his synthesis inspired by Malthus on population of the theory of natural selection. Go ahead. And it was at this point that atheism really became a force to be reckoned with. We had the Geneva Circle, the logical positivists, who kind of found their voice after. Darwin and his theories. For better or worse, he’s kind of linked to atheism and the some of the follies of the next century. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

We have the demise of the Old World Order in World War I, the rise of German Romanticism together with Nihilism, and a false understanding of Darwin’s views, which led to the movement of eugenics. And these things combined in a perfect storm to give us fascism. And go ahead. And because of the atrocities of World War II, the U. S. finally stepped in, invading and our military and political victories over fascism. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

and again over communism later have kind of introduced and maintained the current status quo, the current Global monoculture, which continues to steamroll by globalization and often by coercion. Go ahead. All right, next.

Jordan Roberts

So I’d like to, I think one of the best things that has happened in Western culture in the last 50 years is we really have stepped back from this kind of illusion that progress is always linear. And we have reflected on our folly and some of the things we have really, really gotten wrong. And one of the things that we really, really got wrong was how we treated the indigenous people of these continents. At first, we were fascinated by the savages and we wanted to civilize them, but that quickly devolved into, because of our insatiable desire for wealth and land, into their genocidal slaughter. And imprisonment, go ahead, in reservations.

Jordan Roberts

You put this right next to the brutal enslavement of millions of West Africans. And post hoc religious and pseudoscientific justifications for this. So these kinds of atrocities have been committed and continue to be committed by European powers. Because of this sort of false sense of technological and cultural evolution superiority due to some imagined biological or even divinely endowed selection. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So it’s no surprise that most modern Westerners have become very skeptical of utopian ideologies, preferring instead The counter-genre of dystopias, which were born in the early 20th century, with classics such as Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So, the atrocities of totalitarianism and dictatorships, too numerous to mention, as well as post-secular and post-religious utopianism. These failures are not limited to the West or traditional Christian societies. We also have seen recently the resurgence since the you know, the state of Iran, for example, or the modern movements of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as ISIS. So go ahead and advance a couple. So the Taliban and ISIS. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So, next big question. Why the draw? Why do we still feel compelled to follow these utopian ideologies after such terrible failures, such an abysmal track record? Go ahead. And I posit that it’s because with every success and failure the world has adapted, learned, and evolved. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So we must ask ourselves, or we may ask ourselves, is there an arc to history? And if so, does it truly bend toward justice? Experiments in other primates demonstrate that reciprocal altruism, indignation, a sense of justice do appear to have biological basis. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

The study of biological evolution has yielded clear patterns and can be predicted. Go ahead. and that accepting the fast and loose term of evolution to also mean emergence of our future society by a system of artificial selection and pressure I propose that we have a responsibility to influence our evolution according to our values and preserve human rights and the environment, and we should not wait for this to happen naturally or by some external act of God. I don’t think I’m alone here feeling that way.

Jordan Roberts

So I’m going to go really quickly now through the rest of this because this is where the meat is, and I know I’m almost out of time. So, the topic of my talk today, the evolution of Zion, I’m going to here give a little hat tip to Nathaniel Gibbons, so I’m not sure if he’s here today, but yes, last year he gave a great talk on Zion as a superorganism. And superorganisms evolved too. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So there is no pinnacle of evolution for us to sit upon. We must, we hairless apes, must content ourselves with our branch. but that does not preclude an underlying selective pressure for flourishing beyond mere stability and survival. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

Pictured here are a Bolt, go ahead one more. Are an ancient and a more modern phylogenetic tree of life? Go ahead, one more click. The arrow demonstrates our position on the tree of life. Like I said, no pinnacle, just a branch. And then on the right is the Kabbalistic tree of life, which is a network of emanations or attributes of God that are believed to underlie physical reality. This was a medieval and mystical exploration of interconnection and emergence. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So while it may be reductionist to assume that social and technological evolution yield themselves to similar oppressions and control over biological evolution, It is possible that the needed advances in our understanding and the tools necessary to monitor and influence these complex systems represent a difference of degree and not necessarily a difference of kind. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

And in scientific terms, that can be stated in terms of a Popperian or a puzzle-solving paradigm versus a cuneian or a paradigm shift paradigm. Independent cyclical kinds of huge leaps forward in the thinking. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So, an analogous paradigm, duality, can be seen in phylogenetics and cladistics. Go ahead with Gradual evolution, as shown here on the top, versus a more recent and better studied kind of evolution or speciation called punctuated equilibrium. We know that punctuated equilibrium happens. But we have also seen evidence of gradualism happen as well in different speciation events. And the real how new species evolve is probably some combination of both. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So, such small evolutionary steps must confer in order to be propagated. They must have selective advantage. Each new mutation must have some advantage in order to be carried forward. That’s a very key part of evolution. And I am proposing that with each step we have to carry with us as part of both a cost and a benefit. Respect for universal human rights, the rights of our moral subjects, and the rights of non-human conscious things. And we have to recognize, too, that those rights will evolve over time because rights are a human construct. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So evolving into Zion will change the way we live, right? And so changing the way we live involves new economic and legal systems, which are based on ecological impact. And a decentralized authority made possible via the internet. Please click.

Jordan Roberts

And such, and there are previous iterations that have tried to do this: libertarian socialism and the archology movement. Of Paulo Solari, which is pictured here, Arco Santi, an experimental community in the desert of Arizona, which I’ve visited a couple times. But these previous iterations have fallen prey to scarcity-based economic pressures because they didn’t have access to Types of technology that are coming online and getting cheaper all the time. Next.

Jordan Roberts

So, some other proposed small examples in our cultural evolution include seasteading. Mazda City and the United Arab Emirates. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

And the United Arab Emirates recently released a proposal for the first human settlement on Mars. And then we have other big long shot programs go ahead, such as generational ships like the Nauvoo. I don’t know how many of you are watching the Expanse. I love it. And then we have large scale terraforming projects Here in our own solar system, like the terraforming of Mars.

Jordan Roberts

Some tools that are coming online that are going to make this possible are those listed here: fusion reactors, desalination, and atmospheric water collectors, 3D printers, and von Neumann type. Machines, CRISPR, M-drive, and so many other things that we can’t even imagine right now. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So I think part of the economic portion of the evolution is going to be understanding that Adam Smith’s invisible hand that guides markets. It’s not invisible and it’s not a mystery. It is a connection, it’s a network of supercomputers that are contained right here in our skulls. It’s the supercomputer of everyone involved in a free market. And previous attempts to establish a centralized economic planning authority have failed because they did not have access to the needed computational power. And during the technological singularity, we will have that computational power and so much more to spare. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

The emergence of blockchain and other kinds of technologies is going to make this possible. It’s going to shed light on income inequality and it’s going to increase enfranchisement and power in a democratic fashion. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So, reducing inequality happens in one of two ways. We can either tax or we can rely on philanthropy, and it really doesn’t matter. Both ways lead to positive outcomes. We’ve seen good examples of both. And even in the Nordic states, which have long been bastions of liberal democratic socialism, they’re even now toying with the idea of a guaranteed universal income. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

So, with scarcity for resources never going away, but our paradigm and the way that we ration things can change over time. Go ahead, let’s just go through all of these real quickly. As our population ages and becomes birth control and education are going to swell the middle class, which is going to put enormous pressure on our current system, leading to scarcity and shortages. Right at the time that the human population is peaking and reaching its most drastic levels. And hopefully, we will see the emergence of some of these technologies come online in time to prevent Malthusian-type collapse. from pressures that are very real and are very much knocking on our doorsteps, such as climate change.

Jordan Roberts

With science, we may be able to help prevent these terrible catastrophes by increasing our understanding of the biology of human empathy. Go ahead. and creation of immersive simulations of another subjective experience, something I like to call atonement technology. as a form of education and enlightenment. An experience that could really drastically change another person. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

Most neuroscientists agree that human free will is either non-existent or very, very limited, but they also agree that keeping that notion alive is useful. It increases pro-social and moral behavior if we believe that we are free. And so we have to know more about this. We have to learn the biology of human anatomy. And we have to be able to create enhancements that will make pro-social and good choices easier.

Jordan Roberts

And I don’t think that this will take away our freedom to choose to be antisocial. The way I envision it working, go ahead, is more like a catalyst. It’s going to reduce the starting energy necessary. To move the reaction in the desired direction. It’s going to make being better easier. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

And such enhancements, go ahead, from an enlightenment, would be highly, highly effective within a religious context. And they point to an avenue for those more ready religions who want to adopt and adapt to these changes to become leaders. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

But a word of caution to exclusive or universal types of religions that think they have the one and only way and imagine a future of their own dominance. I would say that the future they envision is unsafe for everyone, including themselves. Go ahead.

Jordan Roberts

We have to instead reject monolithic cultures and ideals and instead embrace a more of a grand accepting very diverse community that is involved in a non-zero sum game of infinite complexity. And we have to hold that as our standard. That is Zion. That is, go ahead. the one healed whole body and mind of humanity. Go ahead.

Speaker 2

And I thank you very much for your patience. All right, hold on. There we go.