Alternative Editorial: No Straight Line To The Future
Anyone who has ever been absorbed in Ursula LeGuin’s novel The DIspossesed is likely to have been left wondering why humans find it so hard to flourish. (See here for a summary of the plot, although not necessary for this editorial).
Briefly: the novel’s central character, Shevek, travels between two planets which reviewers agree are broadly capitalist versus anarcho-socialist. Neither planet is successful or appealing, for different reasons: the first for the inequality that capitalism generates and the second, for the lack of resources that predisposes communities to put survival above relationships or joy.
Against the obstacles presented by each planet’s ideology, Shevek exercises his free will, pursuing his personal ambition to find a scientific formula for unifying time. Whether his ultimate achievement has any purchase on either planet is left hanging.
While we marvel at LeGuin’s skill in revealing dynamics between individuals and groups in the grips of competing ideologies - and the ‘new planet’ Urres is an radical experiment - a deep yearning for more joy is an ever-present undercurrent on both.
That LeGuin’s book was widely celebrated as ‘ambiguously utopian’ somewhat dates it. Almost fifty years later, we may see the depiction of ‘alternative’ human societies that put feelings low down the list of social priorities as barely credible. Indeed, it has been directly contradicted by the culture of the internet which some might say is driven by affect, needs and passions.
Indeed, our current vision of a future ecocivilisation - the integration of the needs of people, community and planet - depends highly on our ‘waking up’ to each other. Not only to the demands of identity, but to our deep and complex interdependency as living beings. Each of us constantly responding to a desire to 'be more', even as our relationships appear increasingly complex.
Add to that our growing understanding of each person’s unique contribution to a rapidly unfolding collective intelligence, whether at community or planetary level. The future, it seems, was always hard to predict.
What LeGuin’s book illustrates is Einstein’s old adage that ‘you can’t fix problems with the same level of thinking as created them’. Problems are the symptoms of any dysfunctional society: different cultures give rise to different problems. Each problem carries the properties of that culture. If you start any attempt to build utopia with the primary goal of solving those problems, you are likely to reconstruct the conditions that gave rise to them. They cannot shed their properties on command.
For example, inequality arising in a society that is deeply disconnected, cannot be fixed by rights to equality while remaining disconnected: new problems arise, often of a similar nature. This is the difference between conflict resolution and conflict transformation: the first invites alternatives using the language and terms of the conflicts being addressed. The second seeks a different reality within which those problems do not arise. For example, a fight between two boys in a community changes when they are in a football team together.
Even so, it is hard to activate a genuinely alternative style of thinking. Some go about it with a commitment to ‘unlearning’ - calling out the insufficiency of critique that is super-confident of its own certainty. For example, we noticed recently a few pieces on the difference between complicated and complex thinking. This from 'psychonaut' Alexander Beiner:
Imagine a grandfather clock full of bees. The thousands of bees in the hive create a complex intelligence that’s more than the sum of its parts. The clock is made of hundreds of intricate elements, but as they tick away, they don’t create anything other than what they are. The hive can adapt to change, the clock can’t. Take one bee out of the hive and it will keep going; take a single cog out of the clock and it stops dead.
The clock and the hive represent two different kinds of systems we encounter every day: complicated systems and complex systems respectively. When we’re trying to make sense of the world, we are making sense while embedded in something vastly complex, mysterious and beautiful. An ever-changing reality that has within its countless complicated systems, from political and economic structures to the machines we use every day. A world of overlapping hives and clocks, filled with billions of people with their own desires and motivations.
Much of my work over the last few years has been based on the insight that the cognitive and emotional tools we use to make sense of each of these different types of systems, one alive and adaptive, the other closed and mechanical, are not the same. And yet, as Daniel Schmachtenberger and others have pointed out, we’re often trying to solve complex problems as if they’re complicated. A lot of the crises we’re facing collectively, and our inability to build the kind of social systems that can help us move forward, are powered by that confusion.
Others - often women or contributors from other cultures - pepper the dominant discourse with unfamiliar ways of being, suggesting whole new realities available to the public space. Take this from Minna Salami, in her introduction to her Advaya course on Sensuous Knowledge starting in July (text is abbreviated, and see this week’s blog for the video):
Imagine that reality is a sandbox: everything is in this sandbox. A little girl builds three sandcastles and is building a fourth when a little boy comes along and starts building too. Before she has finished, he has built 19 sandcastles and declares himself 'the winner'. More than that, he declares his achievement - the thing he could quantify and measure -as reality. That's what we live in right now and that perception is how we are connected to power.
Yet the sandcastles are not the sandbox - there is so much more. There is the fact of children playing, the feelings and emotions of their relationship, the textures of the sand and what happens when you mix it with water, sounds, experiences - an infinite number of things. The sandbox is reality, not the sandcastles. Yet, without a connection to power, this more wholistic view is marginalised - hidden even - and we are left confused.
Minna goes on to describe a reality that arises from the whole sandbox - one that acknowledges emotion, dynamics, narrative, relationship and so much more. We might describe this as an alternative ontology, a different way of understanding being and reality. An ontology that gives us great access to the possibilities of conflict transformation as described above, and will be core thinking in the future.
When we started “The Alternative UK” (as it was then called) we were pushing away from the dysfunctional system, revealed in its extremity by Jo Cox MP’s murder. But over the six years of system convening we became The Alternative Global. And recently we’ve been much more informed by multiple forms of intelligence and agency from all over the globe.
This appears in local communities through the phenomenon of cosmolocalism. More than new 'ideas', the embracing of multiple ontologies will help us to 'unlearn' quicker. This will make us open to partnership with others, producing transformative responses to the multiple crises we find ourselves in.
For example, hunger appears in the UK as a symptom of a disconnected and unequal society. Within the Indian/Sikh community (ref), service to others is at the core of belief and behaviour so people - rich and poor - remain more easily connected and hunger is much less prevalent. This BBC story on the Amritsar temple was amazing. This was not a poor situation that changed through every person being nudged to behave differently. But a different belief system that was acting consistently within its own culture.
The UK's multicultural past has created the conditions for such ‘alternative’ thinking to appear in different parts of the UK naturally - see here for the impact of the Windrush generation. But it’s not easy to take hold and develop. Immy Kaur (who talks about the role of her Sikh upbringing here) and her vision for Civic Square, for example, is radically egalitarian, but hard to sustain. Maybe because it is trying to arise in a non-Sikh context: seeking to be funded by bodies who are stamped with the values of the old system.
Maybe what is needed is not so much diversity and inclusion - the assimilation and integration of multiple cultures within the UK. But instead, a deliberate and active cosmolocalism – a process that would disrupt our settled states and open up our creativity.
We may need unpredicted interventions in our familiar discourse from different parts of the world – ones that discomfort us, yet awaken our curiosity. Maybe activating and accelerating a yearning to be more than we have been until now.