Cultural evolution science has gotten pretty good at describing how cultures change, spread, and persist.

What it doesn't yet have — at least not in integrated form — is a theory of cultural formation at the substrate level: how culture gets patterned into individual nervous systems in the first place, and what it takes to deliberately, precisely re-pattern in the direction of human and biospheric flourishing rather than the kind of craziness we’re all experiencing in the world we encounter in everyday life.

That's the gap I’m working to fill and express through suggesting the vision of what a LivingArtsWisdom (by any name) could be.

The synthesis draws on many wellsprings: interpersonal neurobiology (Dan Siegel), niche construction theory, 4E cognition, Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration, social baseline theory (Jim Coan), trauma studies, and aesthetic theory — among many other lineages — to build what I'd call a substrate-level formation theory: an account of the conditions under which nervous systems actually undergo durable reorientation toward prosociality and ecological coherence.

This isn't therapeutic in the narrow clinical sense, and it isn't humanistic in the vague motivational sense. It's attempting to be rigorous — to say something specific and falsifiable about what has to happen, at what level, for cultural transmission to work in a direction the evidence suggests humanity urgently needs.

I'm in active dialogue with researchers working adjacent pieces of this puzzle. I’m always open to creative dialogue.

And this is not just a theory but something I practice in everyday life. I am energized when I can share it with other people and it lights them up, too.