How To Live Through Interesting Times
Recent writings locate the source of our megacrises in map-metaphysics and point ways forward.
Hi! It's been a while since I've updated this blog. But a few recent articles kicked my butt back into gear by reminding me how much more awesome the world could be if more people became aware of hidden metaphysical assumptions about how the world works, and the handy trick anyone can use to sort which ones do and don't align with reality. I wanted to give these articles more than a cursory list-of-links treatment and diffract them together through that handy lens of basic comparative metaphysics, to see what patterns emerge from their combined strengths and weaknesses. The result is is a surprisingly robust, reassuring, and gratitude-inspiring guide for living through challenging times.
Metaphysics describes what things, in the broadest possible sense, are: what kinds of things constitute existence, and how we can know. Metaphysical foundations are often deeply buried underneath conscious awareness, let alone discussion, but different ones have vastly different consequences for how people and cultures operate. Helpfully, the countless possible answers to the core questions of metaphysics can largely be organized along a single gradient. The theory of this blog is that spreading awareness of this basic comparative metaphysics model, enabling translation across diverse and otherwise siloed domains and worldviews, would be a transformative upstream intervention for a lot of problems at once.
Here's a quick refresher, or intro for new readers:
One direction of this gradient thinks of things as fundamentally separate entities or substances, defined and made real by their most static, determinate, and context-independent attributes or essences; relations and change are secondary. The other direction sees things as processes, given definition and reality through dynamic relations that are primary and irreducible; things are relatively distinguishable and stabilized, sure, but not separable from context or the flow of time. The former direction pins things down to a simplified and control-oriented human map; the latter is closer to reality's complex process-relational territory, a world of diverse participatory co-creation. The former still dominates Euro-Western patriarchal thought traditions, leading to their individualism, essentialism, universal idealism, mechanistic and computational core metaphors, extractive hierarchy, binary zero-sum thinking, and so on. However, the latter is re-emerging as a way to demonstrably get things less wrong in every domain of human knowledge and activity, including science.
You can put this basic, map-territory comparative metaphysics framework into practice anywhere. Let's start big with an article taking a multi-millennia perspective. It's a longer piece and I have to skip over a fair amount to distill it here in a couple of paragraphs, but, well, here's my best shot.
Otto Scharmer
We are living through a major depletion of the foundational relationships and shared sensemaking from which social systems emerge. Author Otto Scharmer attributes this depletion to an underlying epistemic (i.e., way of knowing) monoculture being accelerated by AI. "It manifests in a single, computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects." In other words, the currently dominating way of knowing is stuck at the map-end of the comparative metaphysics spectrum. This has civilization-scale consequences reflected in the shift from the stable Holocene geological era to the Anthropocene. As a result, we find ourselves at a threshold that demands a shift in our form of knowing.
Scharmer finds parallels in another time about two and a half thousand years ago when rupture led to radical questioning and widespread shifts in metaphysics: the so-called Axial Age. The idea of an Axial Age is a rather useful, if controversial one. Coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers around 1949, it tries to loosely capture the idea of roughly simultaneous worldview turns around 600-300 BCE or thereabouts. Across vast swaths of Eurasia facing civilizational turmoil and jarring inter-cultural contact, "local, myth-based traditions could no longer hold the weight of human experience." As a result, answers to big questions shifted from embedded narratives to reflective analyses, and major religions and philosophies were born. In the words of Britannica, "representative thinkers [like Laozi, Buddha, Plato, and Zoroaster] saw themselves as postulating solutions to life’s questions and problems not only for themselves or even for their cultures but for humankind as a whole." Scharmer frames this as the opening of a "vertical axis" linking individual human interiority with universal transcendent ideals, a development that turned out to have some pretty major tradeoffs continuing into modernity. A new Axial Age must learn to synthesize this more vertical, autonomous individuality and abstraction with a more horizontal, interdependent relationality and diverse particularities. There are strong but unmentioned echoes here of the cognitive science work of Iain McGilchrist, which I've blogged about previously, and which demonstrates that these are the modes of the left and right brain hemispheres respectively.
The primary shortfalls of Scharmer's article, in my view, result from an unfortunate sidelining of the Indigenous and other perspectives that have long criticized the Euro-Western "single, computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects," for centuries before the current AI moment. In other words, the article somewhat fails to take its own advice to consider more diverse ways of knowing. The first "Axial Age" may well have been an (eventually, retrospectively) identifiable phenomenon across swaths of Eurasia, but Indigenous societies there and elsewhere didn't simply miss out on "new kinds of questions [breaking] through" like "What does it mean to be human? How shall we live? What is our place in the larger order of things?" According to many contemporary Indigenous writers worldwide drawing on both current science and longstanding traditional knowledges, it's more that most Indigenous cultures intentionally cultivated different, more process-relational—and reality-based!—answers to those questions. And they continue to do so. Not incidentally, this is part of why the LandBack movement is not only a but the realistic approach to governance in colonized areas of the world like the Americas.
Here's what stays with me from this flawed but fascinating piece through a lens that sees the world as process-relational. I love the ambition of seeing the present long moment as part of a new Axial Age that is in evidence already, not so much a sharp discontinuity as a next step from where dominant Eurasian cultures have been heading for centuries. I love the punchy reimagining of where our core institutions can and must go to achieve this. I especially love the nod to nonlinear systems theory and the truth that local pockets of coherence in the cracks of crumbling institutions can interconnect and shift an entire system to a higher state. I'm honored to know a lot of people doing that work of building and interconnecting local solutions that prove what's possible, being good ancestors to future generations who will look back at what we chose to do with the interesting times that we've been given.
Next, riffing on those nonlinear systems, let's check out an interview in Atmos magazine with ecosystem restoration, biodiversity, and climate scientist Tom Crowther. His new book Nature's Echo is all about feedback loops, the self-reinforcing patterns that formed the universe and that Crowther argues "can also drive our planet towards regeneration, if we can only allow them to."
Atmos
Feedback loops have a doomy reputation for pushing us toward climate collapse tipping points: for example, "the more carbon we emit, the warmer soils get. So they release more carbon, which makes it warmer, so they release more carbon, so it gets warmer." But self-reinforcing "snowball effects" and tipping points can apply just as well to the unraveling of bad things and the cultivation and weaving-together of good things. In fact, if small acts of regeneration build enough momentum, they can become downright unstoppable systems of transformative change and global recovery.
It's helpful, maybe, to think of systems thinking in general as a partial way of operationalizing process-relational metaphysics. In fact, when the interviewer asks Crowther to illustrate what a feedback loop might look like around a small pro-environmental action like installing a small solar system, Crowther dives right into practical comparative metaphysics:
The first thing is recognizing that you are inseparable from nature. The little loops you are creating are not separate from the rest of the system. In the book, I talk a lot about how it is impossible to delineate you from the rest of the natural world—not just philosophically, but scientifically, too. You are inseparable from the loops that give rise to you. It is a very Western concept that we are fixed entities. Many cultures have a more process-based understanding of how we interact with the rest of the world. We are an area where nature is humaning. We are not a distinct entity.
When you realize that, you realize your actions, whether you want them to or not, are contributing to feedback loops. If you find a regenerative solution that you enjoy doing, the individual action itself will likely have a proportional contribution. But the joy you get out of it will make you intrinsically more motivated to do it again. In the process of doing it again, you will probably gain more joy, which might incentivize you to do it again. That process will also feed into all the people around you who see how much joy you are getting from it.... [I]f you are seen to be loving this spectacular thing that is enriching your life, those around you can’t help but feed into that process.
Again, I'm honored to work with people contributing to feedback loops in which the many benefits of clean energy are, despite setbacks, still inspiring more clean energy and snowballing into transformative changes in our energy system and beyond. And again, I think a shift in metaphysics to a greater appreciation of the world's provably interdependent process-relationality would be an especially great thing to snowball, and a lot of smart people agree. (I haven't read Nature's Echo, but Elizabeth Sawin makes similar points in her very readable systems thinking manual Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World, a personal favorite which I can heartily recommend. It pays about equal attention to self-reinforcing and self-limiting feedback loops, as well as other practical elements of system dynamics; I might have appreciated more of that breadth in this interview.)
Finally, I want to highlight a gorgeous and practical ode to pluralistic ways of being and letting your freak flag fly, by activist-organizer Scot Nakagawa on his excellent blog The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook. It's also short and really worth reading in full.
Scot Nakagawa
For those who didn't click through and read, Nakagawa uses and perhaps stretches a long metaphor of springs feeding into a river. "As they bubble up, every spring tastes of the ground it came through. Limestone, granite, iron, peat - the water carries the particular country through which it traveled." The river gathers the springs without erasing them. More concretely, unique individuality can flourish without individualism in process-relational contexts where interdependence across difference is recognized, and where human and biological diversity is valued for contributing to communal wellbeing and vice versa. Against this reality, Nakagawa writes, authoritarianism is the impossible dream of a single controlled source and static waters. Authoritarianism's root metaphysics of separateness and stasis subjugates diverse particularities beneath zero-sum competition for monolithic ideals. Authoritarians gain power not just by capping springs' uniqueness but convincing us to cap ourselves by obeying in advance. Diverse pluralism, then, is strategy towards transformation.
Let your water taste, loudly and unmistakably, of the exact strange ground you rose through - your people, your loves, your art, your faith, your particular and unrepeatable way of being alive. Not because it’s brave, though it is. Because it is the actual mechanism. The river has never been fed by people who made themselves generic in order to be useful. The river is fed by springs that refused. Your particularity is not a luxury to be set aside for the duration of the emergency. Your particularity is the emergency response.
I'm vicariously proud to say there are echoes here of my amazing friend Nate Nichols' commencement speech at my alma mater DePauw University last month! As AI further flattens social reality into computations and averages, it is context-embedded human uniqueness that retains irreducible value. Maybe this regenerative message is snowballing.
I have a couple tiny quibbles here with Nakagawa here, though I grant it was probably worth sacrificing these nuances for a more elegant piece of writing. One is that I think it's vital that the pluralism narrative can operate in much the same way at the level of collective communities and cultures, not just individual particularities. It's a fractal sort of pattern repetition at a different scale, one of getting connected and aligned in a shared direction without merging together into a singular dominant way of being. In a process-relational world full of interdependent feedback loops, every scale matters to every other, even the ones that are too large or small for day-to-day human perception. The second is that not all particular and unrepeatable ways of being alive are good; fascist individuals and cultures, for example, can't be allowed limitless toleration if a pluralistically tolerant and reality-based society is to endure. Across every scale, though, basic comparative metaphysics is a shareable compass that can help translate across many very different ways of being, sort out the incompatible degenerative ones, and keep the rest contributing in the less-wrong direction together.
All three of these works, and countless others, locate the core of our current social-political-economic-ecological-climate megacrisis in the dominant way of flattening and freezing things into a single top-down perspective in which disconnection and essentialism are considered more real and rational than systems, relationships, and open-ended creative agency. All also find hope and motivation in the potentially transformative impact of shifting this metaphysical perspective to a more process-relational one, starting with the individual level and snowballing from there into local pockets of coherence, broader institutions, and ultimately entire cultures.
Guided by modern knowledge's airtight confirmation of process-relational reality, our next Axial Age could synthesize the current Age's universalism with the local embeddedness that was intellectually spurned at that other shift so long ago. It could embrace a world of many worlds, with diverse perspectives able to leverage a lowest-common-denominator of process-relational thinking to move in a shared direction of interdependent coexistence and regeneration. It's not unrealistic if it's the most reality-based way of being there could possibly be, right? The destination illuminates the nonlinear, pluralistic pathways from here to there. As an editor's introduction to the first article above notes:
The observant reader will surely note how far all of this is from the dominant zeitgeist of bitter polarization in both culture and politics, the backtracking on climate commitments, the waging of hard-power wars and the acceleration toward superintelligence with few guardrails in place. Yet it is precisely these extreme conditions that are fueling the search for a new way of seeing and organizing the world. It is in the nature of an axial shift that it arises in opposition to the present order.
And if we don't fix up our metaphysical foundations, everything else we try to rebuild on top will continue to be fragile and inadequate to meet the moment. So let's try, hey?
With process-relational perspective, the proliferation of articles like these strikes me as evidence that Axial Age-level transformation of society into something better is still possible and worth working for. This, to me, is where hope is found: between the knowledge that thinking like this is out there making a difference, and the unknowability of how the complex system dynamics and feedback loops will play out with the particular combination of agency and chance that co-creates history. That open future means that everything we do, and how we do it, matters.