Restoring Human Nature: announcing a Collaboration with Darcia Narvaez, PhD- Developer of the Evolved Nest

I am very happy to let this community of readers know that I am collaborating with Darcia Narvaez, PhD, Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, Developer of the Evolved Nest, author of Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality, and one of my intellectual heroes, on the creation of a new book provisionally titled Restoring Human Nature: A Relational Neuro Ontology of the Ancestral Future.¹

Encountering Darcia’s work in 2013 led to a tectonic shift in the orientation of our work, and eventually the re-naming of the firm that I lead. When we met it was called Applied Mindfulness, and we conceptualized our work as being focused on the application of mindfulness in everyday life. In the immediate wake of my encounter with Darcia, her Triune Ethics Theory, and the Evolved Nest, the focus of our work shifted from applying mindfulness to creating the proper contexts to foster the awakening of our innate connection biology. This more ancestral orientation toward human flourishing connected to our deep ancestral baseline in safety and connection undergirded the re-naming of the firm to Hearth Science, and corresponded with a fundamental reconceptualization of what we were doing.

From my first encounters with her work, Darcia has been able to systematize and explain intuitions that I had held, but been unable to organize into a coherent understanding or worldview. Her 2014 masterwork, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality, quietly up-ended several hundred years of understanding in the field of moral reasoning by building a careful and deeply researched case for the idea of a bottom-up morality that is accreted through embodied experience of ‘nestedness’ in contexts conducive to human thriving, or conversely undermined by under-care.

Rather than regarding morality as something constructed top-down through models of logic, Darcia felt and understood that morality emerges from the deepest strata of our human experience. The way that modernity has deviated from our ancestral context of safety and connection has given rise to moralities emerging from people who do not feel at ease in their own bodies, safe in their own skins, or connected to and perceptive of earthways, and are therefore locked in their cognitive representations of life. Her careful and meticulously researched and documented arguments suddenly called into question a several hundred year history of thinking about morality, dating back to the likes of moral philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Her insights also point very clearly at what is going to need to transform if we are going to create human societies that are able to care for themselves, one another, and the Living World.

In this book, Darcia and I will seek to create a practical map for helping humans RESTORE OUR DEEPEST NATURES. We view this as an emergent collaboration, seeking to leverage our respective areas of expertise and move into a dialogue that extends beyond what either of us understands individually.

We are calling it, at this moment, a neuro ontology– because what we are inquiring into are the neurobiological, neurophysiological, and neuro-cultural substrates of being and interbeing.

The book is available for preorder through Metalabel in two versions. A FIRST EDITION will include the hardcover book, and a COLLECTOR’S EDITION will include the book itself, and the videos of our conversations that form the backbone of the book (the manuscript is being revised out of these conversations).

This project is part of Mycelium, an underground artist/scientist collaborative to support collective flourishing. Proceeds will fund book creation and production, be shared with the collective itself, and distributed between myself and Darcia, where hers will be remitted to EvolvedNest.org

1. It is possible that we will make the subtitle a little bit simpler…;)