Alternative Editorial: The Whole Picture
“All-seeing-eye” by Winston Smith, from Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society
There’s cacophony on the front pages of our UK news pages - the kind that arises from babble, lots of confused voices competing to be heard.
In this instance, the case of an elected MP - Priti Patel - at odds with Prince Charles, King in waiting. Not - as you might have imagined from the past - an argument from the margins against the Royal Patriarchy, but the opposite. An Asian woman at the heart of government, using the full power of her office to set herself against the refugees arriving on UK shore. Opposed by the one Royal who constantly risks his own right to succession by speaking up for the planet.
Confused? You might be. We won't chase down the complexity of this particular heated discussion, except to note two things. Firstly that, lost in this argument, is Rwanda itself. On the one hand, consider the unspoken (and unspeakable) toxicity of framing this vulnerable country as a deterrent to refugees. Rwanda itself is both the scene of past genocide but also of remarkable subsequent transformation: the only country ever to have a 55% female cabinet, as an explicit strategy against violence.
Even so, it’s also a difficult place for those in flight from political persecution to land. It’s in the front line of climate change too – again largely at the hand of our own (Western) colonial past.
Secondly, let's note that despite the furore generated by this government decision, it is looking increasingly unlikely that they will be able to execute this odious policy. Fortunately for all of us, human rights legislation and the right to have a lawyer make an appeal mean that the exportation list has dropped from 150 to under 10 already, with still more appeals in the pipeline.
But where do we go with this deeply complex ideas-space? To some extent, we might be grateful that there are no simple binaries any more. Even the Daily Mail seems to trip over itself constantly. One minute they’re pro the conservative institutions, one of which is Royal Family aka The Firm. The next minute, they’re anti any interference from a Royal on anything that matters. Anti-woke yet pro vulnerable teens and women (some of the very people wokeness speaks up for). Maybe they can't see their inner contradictions.
Over the last four days we attended The Realisation Festival in St Giles, Salisbury - hosted by Perspectiva 'soul tank' with the theme: "Unlearning and Re-imagining Nature”. (We previewed it in some of our blogs this week).
The festival’s rich offer included interviews with Alastair McIntosh on 'What Brings Nature Into Being?' Madeleine Bunting on "How To Take Care' and Oliver Burkeman on 'Time Renewed'.
While the talks were richly philosophical, the workshops were practical - teaching improvisation, singing and drawing. But also conceptually challenging - 'Varieties of Transhumanism' with Mark Vernon and Tom Chatfield; 'If the soil could speak" on new approaches to farming' with Damian Hallam and Sarah Langford; Taoism, landscape and embodiment' with Xiaolu Guo.
The Alternative Global ran a session titled 'Does politics come naturally to us?" in which we imagined a new political system using the fractal design of nature. It was also the second iteration of an experiment around new forms of non-violent conflict called The Antidebate.
From the start - even from the advertising - there was a strong suggestion that Realisation would be a gathering of people who shared values but also intellectual roots, as well as the capacity to challenge themselves. So here was the tricky part: how could we generate the kind of energy needed to transform, if we were already predisposed to harmonise and find consent?
So, with the Antidebate in mind, we decided to seed the possibility of diversity beneath the radar. In short, we applied the democracy digital tool pol.is in the run up to the Festival.
For those who are familiar with pol.is (some blogs here), it’s is a deceptively simple mechanism for teasing out the differences in a community and showing them as a data map. Participants convene around a question, which is surrounded by a cloud of up to 20 initial statements, which they can either agree, disagree, pass or add their own new statement. This fourth option means that those taking part end up shaping the poll themselves. Over a few days of engagement, the real questions underlying the surface question are revealed.
Our opening question "Is War Natural?" revealed four groups that clustered around issues of power, relationship to nature and gender. A second round of statements focused down on these themes with new positions:
· Many people talk as if we should all be changing the world. But only the very powerful really have the ability to do this.
· What we think 'natural' means profoundly shapes our sense of how we should live our lives.
· In general men and women are more different in how they approach complex societal questions than we are generally prepared to admit.
As we approached the Festival we found broad consensus on the first two but a clear divide on the third question. Since we did not have metadata revealing who voted for or against this statement, we decided this was the moment we could move on from this 'cold data' (online) and move into the 'warm data' (in person) of the Antidebate at St Giles.
With 80 or so people in the room, we began with some exercises to land each individual uniquely in the space. Then we explained the nature of 'the field' we were in, as a place of cultural dynamics. For example, it’s common for participants to find themselves expressing thoughts or objections, arising from issues surfacing, that they might not later see as authentically their own. Anyone in a gathering who has ever found themselves making a crude remark that they might later disown will know what this feels like.
The process for the next two hours was mostly a play space in which new polarities were invited - but which always revealed new continuums. At every stage people had a chance to say why they had taken their position and hear from someone at the other polarity. At no point was a 'win' on the cards - this was about knowing your community (and yourself) better.
Without going through every stage of the Antidebate here (the film will be forthcoming) let's reveal that by the end we showed ourselves to be quite strongly divided but not along familiar lines. With apologies to participants who might feel this is imperfectly captured, the major groups were (in order of size):
1. Those (men and women) who believed that women thought differently from men and should, along with all previously marginalised groups, lead a new politics
2. Mostly men who believed that men should commit to putting women first and get out the way (these two groups noticeably did not come together).
3. More men who believed there should be a better balance, but without positive discrimination to achieve it (for fear of a vacuum occurring which would quickly fill with opportunist, macho males).
As a final twist, we put all the clearly opinionated people on one side of the room and invited those who could not align to any of these options to form their own group which we named 'the enigmatics'. These enigmatics then had a chance to name their own needs, giving the dominant groups a chance to recruit them on those terms.
One participant expressed his preference for poetry and art which gave the leader of the second group a chance to woo him by song. It was the kind of open, warm moment you might wish on a community otherwise riven by a class, Brexit, or refugee debate.
When we put a last question to the whole room - 'does this process make you more or less hopeful?’ - almost everyone was on the hopeful side, but with many leaning towards the middle, ambivalent. So what does this hope indicate for the future, however faint?
The central usefulness of a tool like pol.is in a democratic society is its ability to bridge old divides and open up new avenues for transformation. It starts with every citizen being encouraged and enabled to bring themselves wholly and authentically into the room. Secondly, it opens up a field of inquiry - one that has to be carefully held by the facilitators to pick up on the energy for going deeper, but also alive to anything original that deserves attention.
Everyone must be comfortable with discomfort as new possibilities for that community begin to reveal themselves. When an idea for a collective endeavour pops up, such sensitivities can give the whole group a role in realising that idea.
When we did something similar (though much less sophisticated) in the first stage of our collaboratory in Plymouth four years ago, it produced a strong call to move into practical work together. Our second session in Plymouth turned the complex weave in the Devonport hall towards the future. We asked what do we - as this diverse collection of people - want to see in this city that contains all of us, over the next ten years? This is not just dreaming, but reimagining with concrete projects capturing the new energy, in ways that might lead to a new economy. The third stage of our Plymouth process is current and ongoing: how does this get structured as a cosmolocal community agency network?
It's long overdue that voters - or citizens, or just people - had their voices heard in the political debates of our time. But first, each person has to have the space to hear themself and their community. They have to face their own fears and prejudices, then consider how they live in relationship with those around them, holding such views. It might be easy for government to intervene in this process - to throw curve balls and threats at us, simply to keep us in thrall to their power. But we should be open to the possibility that we can initiate our own, cosmolocal solutions.