Panoptic Interlude II
An update.
This essay is part of the second phase of The Magical Flower of Winter, a project that now turns its focus from outlining a metamodern view of reality as a whole, towards the metacrisis. The thread that links these two phases is how the former can be considered an attempt at providing a world view that may better help us deal with the latter. The first phase can best be accessed through its introduction:
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I can envision an alternative to civilization as it is currently conceived and constituted. This alternative, which could not be imposed but would have to emerge slowly and organically, should allow humanity to thrive in reasonable numbers on a limited planet for millennia to come. But it would require a fundamental change in the ethos of civilization - to wit, the deliberate renunciation of greatness in favor of simplicity, frugality, and fraternity. For the pursuit of greatness is always a manifestation of hubris, and hubris is always punished by nemesis. Whether human beings are capable of such sagacity and self-restraint is a question only the future can answer.
William Ophuls - Immoderate Greatness
My aim with the next few essays is to outline a perspective on how to approach the metacrisis in ways that acknowledge its interconnectedness, complexity and depth. This perspective also connects to the considerations presented in my previous essays. In order to provide this in a precise, temperate manner I experience that a great deal of care has to be put into how I disentangle and present the different parts of my perspective, a perspective that itself is growing and in flux as I continue to explore this space and learn more. This process takes time, but I would like to provide a snapshot of this process as it currently stands. This snapshot may have the qualities of a mind dump, and for that I apologize. Thank you to all my supportive readers for their patience.
In the previous essay I began to provide a framework for thinking about the challenges we face in terms of wicked loops. In life, society and reality we act so as to realize our designs, but these designs come out of our world views, which are only ever approximations to reality, and thus limited. Limitations and dissonances in our world views lead to limited designs, designs that are local, short-term and/or narrow in their context. On an individual level, cognitive traps and biases can lead us to double down on erroneous elements in our world view when faced with contrary evidence. In landscapes of cooperation and competition multipolar traps arise out of the sum of limited designs (both limited designs of the landscape and of pursuits within the landscape), causing us to sacrifice our values. Exemplifying and illustrating in greater detail how these wicked loops work will be an important exercise, because they operate at every level of society, and crises in everything from education to energy can be sourced to one or several of them. Understanding these traps and wicked loops and how they arise is a crucial step towards avoiding and escaping them. This kind of understanding will highlight the need for a combination of radical changes in world view, how we act and design, and how we approach regulation and coordination. Underlying all of these is our approach to upbringing, education and enculturation, for the only way we radically change our world is by changing ourselves.
It is, on the holistic view of reality, an inescapable epistemological consequence that our world views and designs will forever be limited, because they do not approximate a reality set in stone, but one that changes due to our interaction with it, one that recedes when we approach it. This does not imply that we cannot do better in our designs, or that we cannot become more in touch with the presuppositions and elements of our world views so as to improve the processes by which we shape and update these. One part of how to approach doing this is doing design that is holistic, system-oriented and value-oriented (axiological), not only in professional settings, but in all settings in which we act. On this I am much inspired by the work of The Consilience Project, in particular their articles on the value-ladenness of technology and the immature conception of progress and its need for development. Aki Järvinen of Unexamined Technology offers another interesting perspective on technology design. Another part of how we approach all this is how we can work on improving sensemaking, our individual and collective efforts at making sense of the processes and events we are part of in life, society and reality. This is also one of the goals of The Consilience Project, but the trend of improving public sensemaking is thankfully on the rise elsewhere as well, and as some examples of contemporary efforts towards achieving this I can mention and recommend the work of Nate Hagens of The Great Simplification, Henrik Karlsson of Escaping Flatland, Dan Williams of Conspicuous Cognition and Gurwinder of The Prism.
A third part, one that is quickly forgotten in our world of growing epistemic immediacy, of images, representations and maps, is the dispositions and capacities we through culture and education forge in ourselves and each other: virtues. In a society that approaches everything by routine, analysis and algorithm, the irreducible is for obvious reasons neglected, and virtues are exactly that: irreducible. One of the greatest stumbles of our age has been the tendency towards hyper-rationalism, conceiving of all of reality as a consequence of mechanism, rationalizable and reducible, while mechanism has been an abstraction all along, a consequence of a particular way of conceiving of reality and not the reverse. In doing so we push the irreducible, the ontic, to the margins of our world views, and this dissonance between how we think of reality and how reality works, how it is fundamentally experiential, is an imbalance I believe is at the heart of the metacrisis. Only in changing our world views through questioning how we think about and do upbringing, education and culture can I see a long-term and systematic remedy to this imbalance.
This perspective on the nature of reality, and mechanism vs experience links to the contemporary discourse around AI. As an accelerating technology, AI is strongly related to the metacrisis in how it can and already is accelerating our current crises through its needs for energy and materials, and its impact on everything from art and education to sensemaking and innovation. As a weapons race, AI further impacts the socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape. That AI will have revolutionary consequences is hard to doubt, but are we viewing these consequences from a perspective centered on human well-being or an immature idea of progress? Are we wise in letting free accelerating technologies when we face so many challenges that require deceleration?
An increasing amount of people central to the AI space are warning about the potential for AI to become “sentient” or “conscious”, and the question then arises of their moral status. As I have argued previously, the proposal that AI can become “sentient” or “conscious” depends on the prevalent idea that consciousness is mechanical or reducible to computation, an idea that is hard to uphold given the perspective of mechanism and computation as abstraction, as models of reality, but not reality as we experience it. There is much more to be said here (and much that I have already said), not only on the question of consciousness and the nature of reality, but on the nature of language and meaning and what the effects are when we start using words that get their meaning from human and social contexts (like “thinking”, “conscious”, “moral”) in artificial contexts. I believe there is good reason to be clear in our distinguishing machine-thinking and human-thinking, for the very collapse of our language into a single term covering two vastly different contexts are undoubtedly part of what may fool us into thinking that these machines of statistics and sophisticated imitation are anything like humans. This demonstrates another wicked loop, now due to the transparent nature language has in our thinking about the world. Language is not some faultless representation of a reality of objects of undoubtable reference and meaning, but a social technology that works holistically and itself is part of shaping how we experience and think about the world.
…what we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series of predecessors...
…one way to elucidate the relationship between virtues on the one hand and a morality of laws on the other is to consider what would be involved in any age in founding a community to achieve a common project, to bring about some good recognized as their shared good by all those engaging in the project.
Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue
In looking at the range of proposed approaches to the metacrisis, one can categorize and organize them in many ways. One instructional way to do this is by Schmachtenberger (See the series of conversations Bend, not Break from Hagen’s podcast The Great Simplification), wherein he organizes approaches, or theories of change, along two axes. The first concerns the time-horizon of the approach, whether it is short-term (triage), medium-term (transition) or long-term. Short-term approaches are typically non-systemic and in-paradigm, medium-term approaches are systemic and in-paradigm, while long-term approaches are radically systemic and paradigm-transcending. The other axis concerns which level(s) of societal organization or structure the approach aims at, and one proposal is here Marvin Harris’ societal division of infrastructure, structure and superstructure. Infrastructure can be thought of as technologies, materials and energy, structure as systems of governance and economy, and superstructure as culture. This division is of course an abstraction, as all of them interconnect, co-exist and co-create each other. Within such a framework one may come to several realizations. One is that technological innovation, degrowth policies or social transformation cannot on their own achieve the kinds of change required in approaching the metacrisis, as on their own they only aim at parts of the societal division and time horizon. This speaks to how easily we are trapped by the ideals and activities of modern life to not think of these issues holistically, because so many of the contemporary debates zoom in and trap themselves within singular issues, separated from the larger context. This takes us back to the issue of epistemic immediacy, the tunnel vision we seem to automatically fall into, and how we divide up the world in so many parts we forget they are of one whole. This also takes us to the issue of normalization, of shifting baseline syndrome, whereby the drastic changes to our world become invisible to us through our world view only ever being limited and shifting with the world. We view the past through the lens of the present, a lens that is not without its distorting effects.
All this speaks to the need for an ecology of approaches, an ecosystem of solutions and initiatives that cut across temporal and structural dimensions. These need to be coordinated in some way. Coordination can be top-down, bottom-up, or a hierarchical mixture. Top-down coordination is hard without planetary governance. Bottom-up coordination requires transformation in education, sensemaking, culture, values and so on. This quickly leads us to the realization that not only do we require an ecology of solutions, but we also require an ecology of coordination. We can call this the coordination problem of the metacrisis, which is really a meta-problem, as it is a challenge that itself must be resolved from a mixture of top-down and bottom-up approaches. I think we will find that the surest, most lasting way to impact our ability to achieve this is, once again, forging those capacities that “enable us to respond in creative and imaginative ways to new challenges”, which is Julia Annas characterization of the virtues. I see this as another argument for the central role of how we think about and do upbringing, education and enculturation, because it seems very clear to me that resolutions to the metacrisis cannot be lasting and long-term unless we figure out our own balance in reality, and how this balance relates to virtuous living. This cannot be routinized and prescribed, but has to flow forth from us in how we think and act naturally, effortlessly.
It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.
Aristotle - The Nicomachean Ethics
Of course, the way of virtuous living is not an exclusively greek invention, but part of the perennial philosophy. The Tao Te Ching says “(Those who) possessed in highest degree the attributes (of the Tao) did not seek to show them, and therefore they possessed them (in fullest measure). (Those who) possessed in a lower degree these attributes (sought how) not to lose them, and therefore they did not possess them (in fullest measure).” In the Bhagavad Gita we can read “He who in action sees inaction and action in inaction—he is wise among men; he is a yogin, and he has accomplished all his work. Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of works, ever content without any kind of dependence, he does nothing though he is ever engaged in work.” To me, these statements speak to a way of virtue, of forging a capacity of tapping into an experience that is free from our abstractions and reductions of reality, an experience of reality that presences us in the that-ness of being, an experience that is ontic, not epistemic. How do we embed these teachings in our approach to upbringing, education and enculturation, teachings that are unfathomable to the rationalistic mind, thus incommensurable with most approaches to public schooling? Given both the vagueness and plurality of meanings of the concept “religion”, I find it necessary to point out that the goal here is not some return to an unsecularized society of worship and outdated mythologies, but about reintegrating ideas, concepts and ways of living that modernity forgot about, ways that are essential to what it means to be human, and what it means to be social animals that depend on each other for shared purpose, telos and meaning.
As Michael Strong puts it: “If we want to improve the human condition for all, especially the least well off, we need to support the creation of educational subcultures that systematically develop impulse control within a social and moral environment that is fully united in support of the virtues needed to transcend impulsive hedonism.” In a similar vein, as Henrik Karlsson perceptively asks in a recent essay, can we scale cultures that support learning? And further, I would ask, can we scale cultures that support virtuous living, value-oriented design and holistic ways of relating to our experience, each other and reality? How can we create and gather around new educational, value-oriented stories and myths fit for our age and our predicament?
There is a growing consensus that what is required in approaching the metacrisis is a systematic transformation of our economies, cultures and politics. These carry with them transformations of a similar scope in infrastructure: our use and relationship to technology, materials and energy. How our infrastructure is manifested is intimately bound up with the structure and superstructure of our society. Much of the metacrisis stems from the very interconnectedness of all of these, yet we struggle with treating them as a whole. What economy, culture and politics further exemplify is the collective nature of these challenges: all three are organizational, relational, collective. What our inability to effect rapid transformation in these speaks to are the pervasiveness of the traps we are currently in with respect to them. The current dominant manifestations of economy, culture and politics are such that they work against efficient transformation: their manifestations are trapping us. That despite our wanting a culture and society in balance and having worked for this for decades, we find ourselves on the same self-destructive trajectories, should be an ample indication that our form of society itself is a trap. Effecting collective change, the only remedy to such traps, seem, unsurprisingly, to be through disruptive collective action. But what kind of disruptive collective action can break through the power of the economic and political elite without being misunderstood and condemned in the process? There is a space here for rethinking the democratic processes we run our societies by, and especially whether it isn’t time for a more citizen-centric direct democracy, rather than the representative democracy which may no longer serve us as well in the age of polycrisis, political polarization and social technologies.
So, what kind of education, what kind of thinking is necessary to break up this vicious circle? What action will put an end to the increase of problems in all our activities? Is there any movement of thought, in any direction, that can free man from this manner of living, the reformation of which always needs further reform? In other words, is there an action which is not born of reaction? I think there is a way of life in which there is not this process of reformation breeding further misery, and that way may be called religious. The truly religious person is not concerned with reform, he is not concerned with merely producing a change in the social order; on the contrary, he is seeking what is true, and that very search has a transforming effect on society. That is why education must be principally concerned with helping the student to seek out truth or God, and not merely preparing him to fit into the pattern of a given society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti - Think On These Things
While I realize this exposition may seem chaotic, and I cannot but agree as I certainly experience it as chaotic much of the time, I hope to have provided some semblance of an intelligible snapshot of what my thoughts are currently caught up in, and where my work is headed. These ideas are what I want to start to unfold in more detail in the upcoming essays, whenever the time is right for them. In lieu of absolute truths, ultimate theories or universal laws, whether in the natural or human sciences, what we need to realize and work for are truths, theories and laws in line with our context, our world, our time. I take this to be one of the hallmarks of a holistic philosophy, that we must let go of the effort to try to find the ultimate solution, but rather identify the approaches that will serve our context, our world, our time, with the understanding that reality will change, and our approaches with them. We are immersedin the world, and I think we are better served by trying to work with the threads that connect us to our past and our peers, rather than try to sever them in the hopes of achieving a God’s eye view.
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References
Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent Virtue. Oxford University Press.
Aristotle (2004). The Nicomachean Ethics. Penguin Classics.
Khrishnamurti, J. (1964). Think On These Things. Harper and Row.
MacIntyre, A. (1982). After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press.
Ophuls, W. (2012). Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail. CreateSpace.