The Song of Three Prophets: A Warning Still Unheeded

This essay is the tenth in my Pursuit of Ecological Wisdom series, tracing voices across centuries and cultures that remind us: to live wisely is to live within relationship.

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For three centuries, prophets have warned of the same wound in Western thought: the severing of human life from its relational roots. Each sang their warning. Each was heard. None were heeded. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury warned against reducing humans to isolated calculating machines. William Blake prophesied that mechanistic thinking would forge mental manacles stronger than iron chains. Geoffrey Vickers observed that pursuing goals while ignoring relationships would destabilise the very systems we depend upon.

Each prophet was heard. Their works were published, discussed, even celebrated. Yet their central warning went unheeded. Today, as artificial intelligence threatens to amplify our disconnection from relational reality to cosmic scales, and as libertarian philosophies promise escape from all constraints through technology, their song grows more urgent. We stand at the culmination of the very trajectory they warned against.

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Shaftesbury: The Forgotten Moral Sense (1671-1713)

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, wrote as Thomas Hobbes’s vision of humanity was reshaping European thought. Hobbes had portrayed humans as isolated individuals driven by appetite and aversion, locked in a war of all against all, requiring the absolute sovereign’s power to prevent mutual destruction. This wasn’t merely political philosophy—it was an ontological claim about human nature itself.

Shaftesbury recognised this as both false and dangerous. In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), he argued that humans possess an innate moral sense arising from our fundamentally social nature. We don’t calculate moral outcomes like machines processing inputs; we perceive harmony and discord in human relations as naturally as we perceive beauty or ugliness in art.

“The passion of fear,” Shaftesbury wrote, “may be justly called the mother of superstition; but enthusiasm, which is the passion of love, misapplied to wrong objects, is the parent of whatever is sublime in human passions.” He saw that reducing human motivation to fear and self-interest wouldn’t describe reality—it would create it. Teach people they’re isolated calculators, design institutions assuming pure self-interest, and you manufacture the very brutishness you claim to control.

His prophecy was precise: societies that forget their relational foundation, that treat moral sense as mere sentiment rather than perception of real harmonies, would create escalating cycles of competition and conflict. The “state of nature” Hobbes feared wasn’t our original condition but our destination if we accepted his assumptions.

Shaftesbury’s warning went unheeded. Economics embraced the model of homo economicus—the rational calculator maximising utility. Political theory accepted interest group competition as fundamental. Even ethics became calculation: utilitarian pleasure-pain accounting replacing the perception of relational harmonies. We built a civilisation on the assumption that we’re exactly what Shaftesbury warned we’d become if we believed Hobbes.

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Blake: The Chains of Single Vision (1757-1827)

William Blake lived through the first industrial revolution, watching Shaftesbury’s prophecy materialise in smoke and steel. But Blake saw deeper: the physical mills and factories were merely symptoms. The true horror was the mechanisation of consciousness itself—what he called “single vision and Newton’s sleep.”

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), Blake didn’t attack science but scientism—the reduction of reality to mechanism. Newton’s equations described motion accurately, but when extended into a complete worldview, they became what Blake called “mind-forged manacles.” These mental chains were more binding than physical ones because the prisoners couldn’t even see them.

Blake’s alternative wasn’t romantic irrationalism but “fourfold vision”—the capacity to perceive multiple dimensions of reality simultaneously:

“Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!”

Single vision sees only material mechanisms. Twofold vision adds meaning and relation. Threefold brings creative imagination. Fourfold perceives the infinite in everything—what Blake called “eternity in an hour.” This isn’t mystical escapism but expanded perception of what’s actually there.

Blake’s prophecy extended beyond his era: “A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage.” He saw that caging life—whether birds, humans, or consciousness itself—violates something fundamental in reality’s structure. The “dark Satanic Mills” weren’t just factories but ways of thinking that process life into product, relation into resource, meaning into mechanism.

His warning was explicit: accepting single vision would create a world where “The atoms of Democritus / And the Newton’s particles of light” would become “sands upon the Red Sea shore / Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright”—an endless desert of disconnected particles where the promised land of integrated vision once stood.

Today’s “dark Satanic Mills” are algorithmic, processing human attention and relationship into engagement metrics and advertising revenue. Blake’s warning about mental mechanisation proves more prescient than his images of physical industry. We’ve built machines that don’t just manufacture products but manufacture consciousness itself, shaping how billions think, feel, and relate.

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Vickers: Stability in the Rocking Boat. (1894-1982)

Sir Geoffrey Vickers lived long enough to see both prophets’ warnings manifest in two world wars and the emergence of cybernetic control systems. As a soldier, civil servant, and systems theorist, he witnessed firsthand how goal-seeking behaviour divorced from relational awareness creates the instability it claims to solve.

In Freedom in a Rocking Boat (1970), Vickers identified the lethal misconception at Western civilisation’s heart: “The meaning of stability is likely to remain obscured in Western cultures until they rediscover the fact that life consists in experiencing relations, rather than in seeking goals or ‘ends’.”

This wasn’t abstract philosophy but practical observation. Vickers had seen how the Treaty of Versailles, focused on the goal of punishing Germany, destroyed the relational fabric that might have prevented World War II. He’d watched economic policies aimed at growth destroy the social and ecological relationships that make life worth living. He observed corporations optimising for shareholder value while devastating the communities and ecosystems they depend upon.

Vickers distinguished between two modes of regulation. Goal-seeking systems pursue targets: a thermostat maintaining temperature, an economy maximising GDP, a person pursuing happiness. Relationship-maintaining systems preserve balances: an ecosystem maintaining diversity, a culture preserving traditions while adapting to change, a person maintaining friendships through seasons of life.

The West, Vickers argued, had become obsessed with goal-seeking while forgetting relationship-maintenance. We optimise parts while destroying wholes, achieve targets while collapsing systems, win battles while losing wars. The stability we seek through control eludes us precisely because we’re seeking it rather than maintaining the relationships that generate it.

His prophecy was stark: societies that treat human systems as goal-seeking machines rather than relationship-maintaining ecologies will generate accelerating instability. Each intervention to achieve a goal will disturb relationships, requiring more intervention, creating more disturbance, until the system either collapses or transforms.

Vickers wrote before climate change became undeniable, before social media fragmented public discourse, before artificial intelligence threatened to escape human control entirely. Yet he diagnosed precisely the pattern driving all these crises: the systematic prioritisation of goals over relationships, of ends over means, of achievement over sustainability.

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The Unheeded Song

These three prophets sang variations of the same song across three centuries. Each identified how Western thought was severing itself from relational reality. Each warned of specific consequences. Each was proven correct. Yet the song remains unheeded.

We celebrate Shaftesbury as a philosopher while our economics assumes purely self-interested actors and our politics operates through zero-sum competition. We revere Blake as a visionary poet while building ever more sophisticated systems of single vision—now algorithmic, processing human complexity into behavioural predictions and engagement metrics. We cite Vickers on systems thinking while doubling down on goal-optimisation, creating “key performance indicators” and “objective functions” that destroy the relationships they claim to improve.

The current libertarian moment, exemplified by Peter Thiel’s explicit agenda to escape politics through technology, represents the complete inversion of all three warnings. Against Shaftesbury’s moral sense arising from social embeddedness, libertarianism pursues absolute individual autonomy. Against Blake’s fourfold vision integrating matter and meaning, it seeks to upload consciousness to machines. Against Vickers’ relationship-maintenance, it pursues the ultimate goal: escaping Earth’s relational constraints entirely through seasteading, space colonisation, or digital transcendence.

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The Song Continues

Yet the prophets’ song continues in new voices. Indigenous peoples maintain worldviews where relationship, not resource extraction, defines reality. Contemplative traditions preserve technologies for consciousness to recognise its embeddedness rather than separation. Ecological movements work to rebuild human systems that enhance rather than destroy the relationships sustaining life.

The question isn’t whether the song will prove true—each prophet’s warnings have already manifested. The question is whether we’ll finally hear it. Will we recognize that our escalating crises—ecological, social, psychological, spiritual—all stem from the same source: severing ourselves from relational reality? Will we understand that symbolic consciousness, for all its power, becomes destructive when it forgets its foundation in relationship?

The three prophets didn’t counsel abandoning reason, science, or technology. They warned against mistaking our models for reality, our goals for life’s purpose, our separation for truth. They sang of integration: Shaftesbury’s reason harmonized with moral sense, Blake’s vision wedding heaven and hell, Vickers’ freedom found within the rocking boat’s constraints.

Their song offers not retreat but transformation. Not the abandonment of human achievement but its reintegration with relational reality. Not less intelligence but more—the kind that recognises relationship as primary, goals as secondary, and stability as emerging from maintained connections rather than achieved targets.

The prophets sang their warning. History validated their prophecy. The question now is whether we have ears to hear, hearts to understand, and courage to change course before relationship-maintaining systems—ecological, social, psychological—enforce the constraints we’ve refused to honour. The song continues. The choice remains ours.

Which voice do you hear most clearly in our time—and how might you answer it?

Terry Cooke-Davies, with assistance from Claude from Anthropic AI and Aiden Cinnamon Tea from the GTDF collective.
24^th September 2025

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The song of Shaftesbury, Blake, and Vickers belongs to a longer lineage of ecological wisdom—voices that insist relationship is the ground of reality, not an afterthought. To place them alongside Indigenous teachings, contemplative traditions, and ecological science is not to collapse their differences but to hear their harmonies. Each, in their own way, reminds us that wisdom is not the accumulation of insight but the perception of patterns that keep life alive. In listening again to these prophets, we practice a discipline of remembering: that our task is not to invent a future ex nihilo, but to recover and renew the wisdom that has always been offered, and too often ignored. This tenth essay in the series stands as another echo in that ongoing pursuit—a reminder that ecological wisdom does not arrive once and for all, but keeps singing until we learn how to join the chorus.