Alternative Editorial: Emerging in Berlin
Our editorial this week comes from Berlin where we were taking part in the Emerge gathering – where human tech (our internal inquiry) meets digital tech (our external connectivity) to face the difficult future.
The tone was clearly set with the opening words of Emerge Director, Anna Katharina Schaffner:
It feels very special that we are all able to meet here, in person, in these dark difficult times. We are here to strengthen our community, to meet and connect and to gain insights and to make the network visible to itself.
We are also here to grapple with the ‘we’ question. Jonathan Rowson has put so beautifully in his essay on ‘The Impossible We,’ (blogged here) suggesting that it is time we reverse the usual ground /figure dynamic when we talk about global action problems.
The question we want to grapple with over the next two days is not so much “what can WE do” (although that matters too), but who is this we that we keep invoking. Who exactly is this we that is supposed to save us from all the complex, interrelated problems of the Anthropocene? Does it exist, can it exist, can we at least create the right conditions for its emergence, or are we doomed simply to wrestle with its many shadows until we go extinct?
Even the climate crisis has not brought us closer together. If anything, we are more fractured and polarised than ever before. This is also true of our own social change space. While we share many hopes, we haven’t at all yet managed to establish scalable protocols and platforms and projects. We, too, mainly move in our own filter bubbles, married quite firmly to our own theories of change, to our brands, worldviews and communities.
And it is understandable, and human, and this is why it is so complex. There are good reasons why many of us are immune to or very suspicious about the idea of bigger we’s – some of those reasons are historical, some cultural, some psychological, some economic. We may fear the very real horrors of collectivist political regimes (and Berlin is of course a good place to remember them).
Bigger ‘we’s absolutely have the capacity to turn dark. At a deeper psychological level, we may fear the loss of our identity and boundaries in a greater collective, the undoing of our hard-earned individuation. We may simply depend on our own brands, organisations and offerings economically, or be deeply, even existentially convinced of the rightness of our own theories of social change.
It is very hard for us even to begin to imagine ways of being beyond I, Me, Mine – ways that combine the best of communitarian, relational modes with the best that individualist culture has to offer. Is it possible to form a transindividual ‘we’ that is capable of cohesive action-taking but that not only respects but thrives on difference, that grows strong because of difference? How might that be possible in practical terms? And especially if we don’t want to use the oldest and most effective trick in the book for we-building – scapegoating.
Rene Girard had much to say on that and his analysis still feels very alive to me. In the past and in the present, strong collectives usually form around a common enemy, concrete or abstract. Might it be possible instead to bond over concrete projects, shared positive visions, the power of attraction? Or at least a shared concern about the future?
This inquiry cannot just remain abstract. We need to wrestle with it not just cognitively but we need to feel into it, experience it, visualize it, and do something with it. Therefore our two days will move from imagining we to presencing we to discussions about action-taking . The arc of the gathering will cover head, heart and hand approaches, all of which we feel are vital.
And lastly, this Gathering is not just a shared exploration, but also an experiment. We are assembled here together in one space, more than 200 highly agentic, passion-driven, experienced people from very different walks of life who bring a plurality of perspectives and very different kinds of knowledge.
We are also a fantastic case study. So whilst being passionately entangled in and engaged with our collective inquiry, let’s also observe it at times. Can we hold and celebrate our diversity without fragmenting? Will something emerge from these two days that we have together now, and if yes, what might it be? Let’s find out, in the spirit of serious play.
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It’s certainly too early to come to any conclusions about what was achieved over those two days – a fuller review will come. Suffice to say the interplay between imagining, prescencing and action were carefully explored. While each of these foci draw different practitioners, the crowd in Berlin moved willingly – even if often uncomfortably - between them. They contain different expressions of a shared, strong desire to move forward towards a future that feels properly responsive to environmental collapse.
Familiar binaries – between men and women, between more organised and self-organising ways of working, between older and younger perspectives – prompted invitations to bring our inner skeptic into the room and ask the difficult questions. Over two short days, polarities stretched into continuums along which many of the participants could find new comfort zones.
From the perspective of AUK, it was encouraging to get a very warm welcome for our presentation on Activating Possibility, in which we introduced the CAN concept, the case for a new media system and began to bring the idea of a parallel polis into the picture. Having the chance to meet face to face with some of the technical wizards who could make such a vision a reality was invaluable.
Watch this space.