Alternative Editorial: Not Knowing
The crises deepen. Nato steps up the European war even as Brexit breaks the international rule-based-order. US and UK make it harder to reach our climate targets. Women's rights (and dignity) take a further step backwards. The global economy tanks as Britain leads the way there. Covid makes a comeback. More of these (horror) stories available hourly on our mainstream news!
At the same time, new forms take shape - not directly in response to the crises, but maybe despite them (for more, see this blog from the last few days). Regenerative economies begin to solidify in autonomous networks of cosmolocal practitioners. Solar energy begins to change the odds for planetary survival. New food resources appear in the poorest of urban settings. Explicitly feminist technology begins to generate psychologically integrated apps. Life extension begins to become available to everyone. For thousands of points of departure to a viable future, read our archive here.
Yet no-one knows for sure what is in store for us. In fact not-knowing has become a badge of integrity in some of the most positive arenas of activity. So much so that, if anyone expresses any clarity around what is emerging, they are routinely derided as fanciful. If their vision is hopeful, it’s called Pollyanna-ish - a (notably female) mindset that presents a smiling face to the worst possible scenarios.
Not-knowing is, of course, logical and defensible. Jonathan Rowson's Editorial for The Alternative in September 2021 set the frame by reminding us that we can never know the true conditions in which we’re attempting to make change happen. We don't even know who the 'we' is when invoking a better world. Our hopes are always built on assumptions of solidarity or collectivity that we cannot easily test.
Another twist on that stance is the call to remain humble in the face of any systemic challenge - let alone one that implies the future of humanity. Writer, academic and spiritual activist Alistair McIntosh enthralled his audience at the Realisation Festival by holding humility at the core of any strong response to calamity. Reminding us that each of us is only one 7.96 billionth of the global population, he took the load off any individual being able to make the difference we need. As a life long Quaker, Alistair nevertheless invited us to connect to the sacred and trust the deeper intentions of a Universal intelligence beyond ours.
Environmentalist Ed Gillespie and social entrepreneur Dougald Hine explore this further in their podcast The Great Humbling. The question they pose is:
How will they look in hindsight, these times we're living through? Is this a midlife crisis on the road to the Star Trek future, or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? With Covid-19 calling into question the ways we have been living, Ed Gillespie and Dougald Hine set out to explore what it means to be humbled.
But, as Rowson would say, who is the 'we' that accepts humbling? Is it the whole of human civilisation till now, extracting resources from the Earth without noticing its depletion? Or which progressed competitively rather than co-operatively, so that whole system flourishing was impossible? Who is it that needs humbling, exactly: the whole human race, or just the leaders of global civilisation till now - including the architects of our prevailing socio-economic-political system?
These are impossible questions to answer, as Otto Scharmer points out in the work of his Presencing Institute (PI). The very people to whom we might point as responsible, might also be the ones to lead the way into more holistic futures. We know the future only by building it. As Scharmer says:
The second great Myth is that leadership is about individuals. In fact, leadership is a distributed or collective capacity in a system, not just something that individuals do. Leadership is about the capacity of the whole system to sense and actualize the future that wants to emerge.
At the same time, the PI’s recent global U-Lab process - which witnessed 2000 people in 90 different countries coordinate the prototyping of future social systems - deliberately invited feminine, indigenous and previously excluded groups and speakers to take part. We already know that a different outcome is unlikely to come from the same input.
What is the impact of all this un-knowing, second-guessing and disassociating from ambitious goals: this step-back from direct agency? Does it help us face the future in deeper, more complex ways? Promote a new kind of homeostasis - a stronger balancing that allows a greater response-ability? Or does it disempower us by disconnecting us, in newly fiendish ways from our natural resources? Might it be fashionable but weak - paving the way for the old kind of surrender to unfathomable greater powers?
But maybe there is a kind of not knowing we don't explore enough, when facing the relentless progress of multiple crises. In a recent conversation with a young colleague, we shared plans about the weekend ahead. He was about to undergo the Iron Man challenge - a tougher than average triathlon: a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride and a marathon 26.22-mile run, raced in that order. It is widely considered one of the most difficult one-day sporting events in the world.
When asked whether he expected to finish, he said “I don't know”. He'd only ever tried half of each of those distances. The best he could do was to prepare his body for a quick recovery from injury, to have enough friends to support on the day and to train his mind. The champion of the course, he mentioned, is a woman. Her story is that women are better mentally capable of overriding pain barriers.
So how did that feel - not knowing what was going to happen? Wasn't he nervous (we wondered silently) of pushing himself beyond his body's limits, doing irreparable damage? But no. "I'm excited”, he said. “Excited to find out what my body is capable of."
This is the 'not knowing' of human potential, leaning into possibility and daring. Where can this be found in the world of regenerative practice? For sure this is the aspirations of Bounce Beyond - the clue is in the name - and other systems convenors like ourselves. Any overview of how small, grassroots projects can be part of transnational, regenerative developments - what we call cosmolocalism - will release that kind of energy.
Others might include Project Drawdown and Andrew Simms' Rapid Transition Alliance. Both of them work steadily with NGOs and civil society - as well as government when possible - to remind us that the solutions to our environmental crisis, at least, are already available.Yet all of these find themselves working mostly with others who share their values and are committed to their causes. We need that excitement to spread to a much wider world, where people know and care less. Their activist buzz has to meet the crises where they hit the ground (or the high street).
In that sense, the world of technological innovation is the most buzzing and ambitious. As mentioned above, the promise of radical health improvement, labour saving artificial intelligence, super-smart governance and new forms of currency to unlock hidden social potential all beckon towards a vital future. And yet, and yet: the downsides of the technological revolution to date are all too obvious and show few signs of abating. Hence, radical technology’s reputation in the mainstream press is ambiguous at best and, most commonly, fear inducing.
So let's actively imagine a beautiful convergence - where the regenerative world meets the technologically enhanced future. That would bring two very different energies into a powerful and vital relationship. Logic and history tell us is that we can't possibly know what might happen next - would we go faster or slower, for example? Let’s at least dare to believe it's worth trying. Let’s be excited about what the wholistic story of human potential might achieve.