In previous moments of cultural change, philosophy has expressed a visionary imagination and come forward to articulate the transformation of tribe into polis (Plato and Aristotle), or kingdom into republic (Locke and Jefferson). Now as we shift from a world of conflicting nation-states to a biospheric and globally noetic polity, we need to have an understanding of world civilization that is not based on the war between Osama bin Laden's eighth-century vision of Islamist jihad and Bush's eighteenth-century neocon ideology of market economics and American military expansion.

A reimagination of world civilization is called for, one that is not captured by the single academic discipline of economics but is expressive of a new culture in which consciousness matters simply because consciousness is the material condition of the universe in which humanity is seeking adult membership.