We live in a world of microcosms. People get Ph.D’s by focusing on a sliver of a narrow topic and claiming it as their own. My hat goes off to visionary futurist John Renesch, who with The Great Growing Up has gone galloping in the opposite direction. This is a high-level, macrocosmic, big-picture book. It summarizes and pulls together meta-trends, drawing on the wisdom of numerous big thinkers in the process. Through this intelligent aggregating process, Renesch helps us see the forest that so many of us miss so often for the trees.
Renesch’s book is courageous because it takes chutzpah to take such a high-level view of things: it doesn’t earn you points in the marketplace or, unless you’ve got an endowed chair at a university, in the world of ideas. Yet his is a crucially important undertaking, in no small measure because when we climb the mountain and take the broad view, what emerges is the potential for a positive future that contradicts the depressing certainties of the fatalists and catastrophists whose views rule the media roost these days. This is why I call the book “inspiring.”
As for “provocative,” that’s because Renesch challenges us over and over again to re-visit our baseline assumptions. (Thanks, John, I needed that!)
With this book, John Renesch has done us, and the world, an important service.
