The Pocket Compass that Points to a Livable Future

The world today faces challenges at a scale that is incomparable to the past. Environmental and peace activists have been ringing the alarm bells on issues of violence and injustice for decades. Now, with 24-hour news cycles, (mis)information overload and the echo chambers of social media, those bells can hardly be heard amongst the unbearable noise. Burying one's head in the sand has increasing appeal, even just to get a moment's silence. Economic necessities and contending priorities consume our time and energy. With so much going on, it can be difficult to think. Yet this is precisely what we need to do: think. We need to think about how we think.

Thus begins a new book demystifying the same powerful, hidden axis of thinking as this blog. It's by far the closest thing in topic and approach that I've found yet... except that it's an insanely expensive academic textbook aimed at post-graduate peace studies scholars rather than a casual, free (you're welcome!) website/newsletter aimed at anyone with curiosity.

I strongly believe the two overarching directions of how we think about things deserve to be more widely known and used than the far less coherent "left" and "right" directions of describing politics. As readers of this blog know, those two directions are (1) as separate, mechanistic, and reducible to static self-contained essences or (2) as dynamically relational processes inseparable from holistic context. It's past time for regular folks to know that the first way of thinking about things is an approximate and simplified mental map while the latter points to the actual territory of reality, just like the Earth may seem approximately flat and constant but is actually round with moving tectonic plates. I think the static-process or map-territory axis belongs in boardrooms and airport kiosk self-help books and grade school curricula, not gatekept inside grad school humanities departments (who are great, to be clear!) behind intimidating philosophical prerequisites. Nevertheless, I welcome this pricey treatise as a good step toward such belonging. Its arrival offers a good opportunity to validate and refine many of the concepts here.

Authored by Juliet Bennett, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, Reimagining Peace through Process Philosophy: An Integrative Transformation to Address the Global Systemic Crisis (Palgrave McMillan, 2025) wears its ambition on its somewhat clunky title. It's an ambition I and many others share: doing something meaningful about <gestures around at everything>. The climate crisis, the extinction crisis, the inequality and economic precarity crisis, social fragmentation, political instability, exploitation, fascism... not competing issues so much as facets of the same megaproblem. Like me and so many others, Bennett diagnoses a root cause of this metastasizing crisis as hegemonic modes of thought and their false premises about ourselves and our world. She calls these modes static thinking and details how their assumptions are embedded in worldviews, paradigms, systems, and actions that result in crisis conditions. These modes contrast with process thinking, which offers pathways out of crisis. Bennett's static-process framework is pretty much exactly the same as this blog's axis between substance metaphysics or "map-metaphysics" and process-relational thinking. She further draws out contrasts between their respective "abstract/context, closed/open, isolating/relational, passive/generative and one/multidimensional" orientations very coherently across a bunch of topics, including but not limited to philosophy proper.

Bennett agrees that everyone has some sort of metaphysics, in the sense of a baseline set of assumptions about existence. She concurs that it's necessary to surface and critique our metaphysical frameworks so that they serve us rather than us unwittingly serving them. As an introductory illustration, Bennett likewise walks through thinking about a solid object using static thinking and process thinking. In her case, it's a wood table. Static thinking about the table starts and ends with pre-defined spatial, temporal, and relational boundaries. "Through a static lens, the table is a self-contained object, reducible to legs, a tabletop and screws. These table parts are reducible to inert material atoms. The value is the financial cost of its replacement. Extracted from temporal and relational contexts, the table is treated as unchanging." There is some reality to this view, but it misses much that matters.

Through a process lens, the table is a temporal expression of processes including the growth of a seed into a tree, nurtured by cyclical planetary and solar system processes; it is a pattern of relative stability even as it is on a path to transformation by decay or otherwise. The table is a participant in relationships, a node in a web of interconnection with its craftspeople, users, dent-causing objects, color-fading sunlight. Its existence in space and time takes other things into account, which can be seen as a sort of basic proto-subjectivity of experience with no spooky dualistic "mind" necessary. Even its molecules are "societies of subatomic relational-events vibrating in relation to each other." When static thinking is nested within this process lens, its relevance line-drawing around what "really" "matters" becomes more visibly a matter of agency and responsibility. The process lens broadens and deepens the understanding of the table and encourages, for example, sustainable sourcing and beneficial reuse.

Consistent with process thought's skepticism of either-or binaries, Bennett emphasizes that the wider process lens doesn't simply erase or replace the narrower static view so much as contextualize its partial and approximate truths. The cost of replacement, for example, remains an aspect of the table's process-relational reality, and the table does stay basically unchanging in the temporal and spatial scales most relevant to day-to-day living. With respect to the relationship between the two kinds of thinking, I was pleased to see Bennett draw from the cognitive neuroscience research compiled by Iain McGilchrist on the strikingly close correspondence between the two directions of metaphysics and the two brain hemispheres' respective processing styles, which I wrote about previously. Under McGilchrist's model (which is still debated, and that's ok because it's not load-bearing for the map-territory model), optimal brain functioning entails iteratively bringing the left hemisphere's static, isolating abstractions into the right hemisphere's more holistic attention. When the left takes primacy instead, it can't incorporate and therefore dismisses the broader scope of the right. Neuroscience and history show the results are bad news.

Abstracting objects from their relational and temporal context can admittedly deliver profound insights into ways of manipulating that "thing" within set boundaries. But those insights vary in relevance and are sometimes unhelpful when the object is returned to its context."

Left-brained static modes of thought and the cultures they shape are currently holding back whole-brained process-relational ones, with devastating consequences. "When a theory or belief is conceived as absolute truth (including the absolute rejection of all truth), it is a form of static thinking. When a theory or belief reduces life or social issues to 'nothing but' a single dimension—be it inert atoms, competition for survival, class warfare, patriarchy and so on, it is a form of static thinking." Static map-metaphysics assumptions are also reflected in views that see nature as machine- or algorithm-like or supernaturally predetermined. They promote fatalism. Process thinking revives a grounded optimism and invites participatory action based on the ontological facts that the future is not yet written and that every action and reaction makes some difference to the future's co-creation. It's a tremendously reassuring outlook for our dark times, especially backed by so much converging evidentiary support. Cognitively, we all already contain the potential for process thinking. It's mostly a matter of awareness and practice.

Inspired by "big history," Bennett offers a fascinating "History of Ideas" timeline roughly aligning dozens of mostly Euro-Western thinkers' and intellectual movements' overall emphases along a static-process continuum. (Interpretations of) Moses and Jesus are placed near the middle (!) along with Newton, Darwin, Marx, and deconstructive postmodernism. Representatives of process thought run from Hindu and Indigenous traditions, Lau-Tzu and Siddhartha Gautama, and Heraclitus and Anaximander, up through Spinoza, Goethe, Polanyi, and quantum physics, to contemporary ecological economics and other integrative interdisciplinary fields. Static-dominant thought representatives include Zoroastrianism, John Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, utilitarians, logical positivists, totalitarian communism, and Milton Friedman. Not on the table of ideas, but elsewhere mentioned as static exemplars, are scientism, religious fundamentalism, and nihilism. Plato (at least later work) and Aristotle are slotted in between the most static side and the mid-line. Bennet understandably spends a fair amount of time contextualizing the model within process-relationality, including its provisionality, its blurred boundaries, and the contextually situated uniqueness and complexity of each philosophy that no model could capture.

For the remainder of this section, I'm going to riff on Bennett's analysis of ideas and politics from a current U.S. perspective—with ICE gestapo dimwits violently disappearing and trafficking my neighbors and tear-gassing nearby schools, cheered on by most Republicans and all Republican politicians, while Chicagoans rise up in solidarity to defend one another from the invasion.

Specifically, I want to push back on folding fascism evenly into the static lineup. While this can be partly attributed to the admitted constraints of the simplifying table format, the pattern repeats elsewhere. Her chapter on how process thinking can incorporate the best lessons of "left" and "right" politics while transcending both sticky categorizations also puts a rosy, rather credulous gloss on "right-wing" political values. She somewhat conflates them with support for markets and merit over economic central planning—though she does acknowledge in a footnote that Trumpism challenges that popular perception. Bennett discusses fascism and communism as equally bad, if mirrored, versions of totalitarianism taking "left" and "right" too far to the extremes.

However, it matters that right-wing authoritarianism through the ages is the most metaphysically committed of all ideologies to epistemic closure, false-nostalgic idealism, essentialism, conformity, divisive othering, zero sum competition, black-and-white dichotomies and "natural" dominance hierarchies, which flow directly if not inevitably from static map-metaphysics' (mis)understanding of how the world works. It also matters that in 2025, we can see how few American conservatives believe in anything but right-wing authoritarianism and its map-metaphysics order (and associated gender anxieties). All right-wing conservatism ever truly wanted to conserve, it turns out, was hierarchical false reality. In my view, fascism thus anchors the most static and wrong-est pole of the map-territory axis, from which everything and everyone else departs in an at least marginally less static-dominant, less map-stuck, less wrong direction. That's great, because it means that knowing and loving aspects of our process-relational territory unites a huge national and global majority in a shared anti-fascist direction. Even when we love different aspects, there's organizing potential there.

I keep harping on this because people urgently need to update their priors to understand what we're up against and how to respond. Recalcitrant MAGAs and other right-wingers live inside their mental maps. For them it's not a thought tendency but an all-encompassing metaphysics, the way they understand reality and themselves. And they have laminated their maps against the territory ever getting in and changing their assumptions. They've severed their connections to feedback from reality, even interpreting directly observable material impacts through whatever lens their hierarchical authorities tell them to. They can't take in information that immigration or clean energy benefit them, because economic concerns, free markets, yadda yadda yadda were only ever a pretense for their culture-war-that's-really-a-reality-war, where they're fighting on the side of smothering the messy territory with their map.

This understanding should shape our priorities and efforts. Reconnecting can't be forced on opponents of process-relational reality, nor even inspired by open dialogue with anyone from outside their map. Their identities and false realities are too well defended. You can see this play out on X, the former Twitter now owned by the fascist half-trillionaire Elon Musk, where fascism is endemic and infecting former non-fascists too. The rare exceptions like former neo-Nazi Adrianne Black show how worthwhile but how difficult escaping from echo chambers is. For the most part, good faith, non-zero-sum dialogue across the boundary of the echo chamber isn't a comprehensible concept in their map-world, and treating their views with respect mainly normalizes and entrenches them. They even consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods. It sucks, for sure. Especially when this describes family and old friends. But people this walled-off from shared reality are also a minority. What the less map-stuck majority can do is organize around our overlapping relational values to take power away from fascists who threaten them; use our power to restructure media monopolies and replace toxic information environments to weaken echo chamber structures; and make reconnecting to co-creating the future welcoming and irresistibly appealing. Open dialogue is definitely part of that co-creative vision but there must be enforced standards for good faith participation and accountability for harms.

Given that process thought can incorporate static thought (reductionist science, individual rights, appropriately strong boundaries, etc.) but not vice versa, the most "extreme" commitment to context-awareness, openness, relationality, responsible exercise of agency, and multi-dimensional thinking might just amount to wisdom. While not synonymous with "the left," it's also obviously woke and thoroughly pro-diversity, equity, and inclusion. Extreme commitment to pre-determined, sharply divided, hierarchically ordered, one-dimensional binaries and abstractions that ignore systems and suppress context and relationality, though? That just makes you an ignorant asshole, and at worst a solipsistic fascist of one flavor or another.

At least communism pushes back against some aspects of extreme static thought like class hierarchy and individualistic zero sum competition, and so is less extremely on the static fringe of the continuum. And where would we be without the commies' alliance in the fight against fascism eighty-some years ago? One can see communism's many harms and failures as resulting largely from the extent to which it remained still too stuck in static map-metaphysics modes of thought and action such as dogmatism, structural determinism, one-dimensional class reductionism, rigid dichotomizing, abrupt revolutionary system changeover, and context-flattening top-down control. Measured on the fundamental map-territory axis rather than the much more arbitrary and historically contingent right-left axis, communism (and liberal-hating purity-leftism) isn't nearly radical enough of a departure from extractive capitalism and colonialism.

In fairness, leftists are correct to accuse centrism and incrementalism of falling far short as well. But iterative cultivation of pluralistic belonging, participatory multi-level democracy, and social-ecological economics that uses market tools in regenerative ways is no mushy middle path. Such cultivation work is the most radically transformative path toward regenerative, flourishing, liberated coexistence on Earth. That's at the same time as it's the most realistic (not easy!), inclusive, accessible, and durable one. People could join this cause under almost any additional labels they wanted: leftist, liberal, reasonable moderate, old school conservative, whatever. It would be an unruly coalition with extremely annoying comrades. Yet it would shift the whole metaphysical foundation of society onto less brittle ground. Maybe it already is.

Enfolding static thought into process-relational context is all well and good to the extent feasible. Yet process-relational reality does simply prove some static conclusions wrong and some orientations too often harmful. I think history suggests it's also valuable to have a clear enemy to unite against, especially when that enemy is not a group of other people but the wrongness of the map-metaphysics exclusion of process-relational reality that's the engine for fascism and demolition of social and planetary systems on which we all depend. Bennett rightly cautions against "dualistic process thinking" that would dismiss all products of static thought like generalizing models and tables (like the handy ones throughout Bennett's book), reductionist statistics, and top-down power. Indeed, there are important things to learn from fascism, at arm's length. Even so, I think one can avoid dichotomizing while also being skeptical about "nesting" or "encompassing" any static map-world thinking not undertaken in service of process-relational reality and regenerative goals. Left-brained map-metaphysics has a tendency to take over like a cancer or infection if it's too loosely leashed. Critical ignoring is part of good process-relational epistemology, and punching Nazis rather than dialoguing with them is part of good process-relational political hygiene.

Most of Reimagining Peace through Process Philosophy is taken up by chapters on practical applications of the static-process framework to the global systemic crisis, starting with a focus on the rapid heating of Earth's climate due to greenhouse gases. That is, after all, the greatest threat to peace and any other positive goals.

Concerted collective action to reduce greenhouse gases in tight timeframes calls for an ambitious and inspiring vision of what is possible, and for new stories, experiences and relationships that can motivate personal actions and decision-making towards that vision.

Bennett provides a thorough and empirically rigorous overview of multifaceted climate problems, their roots in static thinking, and the multi-dimensional solutions that process-relational thinking can facilitate. These solutions integrate diverse viewpoints to transcend tired oppositions like top-down versus bottom-up, individual versus corporate responsibility, technological versus socio-political change, inside versus outside the system, and market-based versus regulatory approaches. Because political economy is so central to the causes of the crisis, climate solutions must entail political and economic transformations, which are fleshed out in subsequent chapters.

My main quibble with the climate chapter is that, comparable to the fascism discussion above (and of course there's massive overlap between climate villains and fascists), Bennett doesn't much distinguish between climate denying dupes and their manipulators. The former might be still reachable via good-faith dialogue. The latter, though, aren't "ignor[ing] the connections between their own long-term wellbeing and the health of the planet"; they're defining their wellbeing map-wise as dominating others and the planet. They'd rather kill the Earth than respect and share it, even if it means less profit. Like with fascists, I believe in defeating them and holding them accountable rather than counterproductively dialoguing. Polarization isn't bad in all circumstances; sometimes, it's clarifying. But hey, I'm not a peace scholar.

I've already touched on Bennett's political chapter, but its strongest points leave "left" and "right" behind and address concretely what's needed for a process approach to democracy. Citing philosopher John Dewey, who was writing in another time of rising fascism in 1939, Bennett explains that democracy involves cultivating internal modes of thought, moving to embodied day-to-day working together with others in community, holding onto openness and a faith in democracy's possibility. I was reminded of political analyst Jamelle Bouie's frequent refrain on the need for civic virtue. On a more structural level, "facilitating the participation of social actors in co-creating a sustainable future involves a level of equality of status (as equal citizens) and limits to wealth inequality (due to the derailing effect inequality has on democracy)." "The new political narrative detailed in this chapter is embedded in a co-creative cosmological narrative [of] the self as a participant in the story of the universe."

The corresponding economic paradigm must be similarly embedded. "The basic premise is that abstract theories of neoclassical economics (reflecting hegemonic static thinking) are to be nested in social, ecological and historical contexts (applying encompassing process thinking)." Contextual economics resonates more closely with social democracy and demand-side or Keynesian economics, but goes much further in its contribution toward building a regenerative future. While my previous writing on process-relational economics discussed themes drawn from dozens of approaches, Bennett chooses to focus primarily on Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics framework as an exemplar of a process economic paradigm. Despite this slight difference in focus, the static-process and map-territory framework conclusions on economics match up. Bennett covers a lot of ground with respect to mainstream economics' incompleteness and the diverse better solutions available, including issues of households and commons, shareholder primacy, and the godawful shittiness (my terms, haha) of GDP growth as an aspirational measure. Ultimately, capitalist economics leaves out way too much that is foundational. Its narrowly-bounded, mechanistic abstractions must be broadened and deepened within layered, multi-dimensional environmental-social-temporal contexts in a new paradigm. We need to shift economics, and the structures and systems it heavily shapes, from static-thinking Homo economicus to people as relational processes enmeshed in other relational processes.

The book concludes by integrating all the prior threads into a high-level practical program for building a regenerative future. The roots of our global unraveling of social-planetary systems are found in hegemonic static thinking, and as the saying goes (misattributed to Einstein, though he'd probably agree): we can't solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. It will take interweaving inner changes, individual and community behavioral changes, cultural changes, and structural and systemic changes to bring us from degenerative crisis to regenerative coexistence. A change in one of these dimensions "creates ripples that impact and support aligning changes in other dimensions."

However, the inner dimension is central. As systems theorist Donella Meadows pointed out, this is a leverage point where intervention can totally transform systems. Although people resist challenges to their metaphysical and paradigm-level assumptions harder than they resist any other kind of change, when they can be changed, the new way of seeing can click fast. Bennett chiefly roots the inner appeal of process metaphysics in how useful and hope-giving it is. This blog applauds that and also tries to show how empirically reliable the process-relationality of the world is in the light of increasingly convergent evidence from disparate domains of human inquiry. I suspect that for lots of folks, "neutral" topics like physics, biology, cognitive science, etc. might be able to evade some of our reflexive defenses and smuggle in ways to unstick from map-metaphysics like a Trojan horse for good. I also find these kinds of lenses on process-relational reality a nice break from thinking directly about the global systemic crisis all the time, even though they're still contributing to addressing that crisis. And hot damn don't we all need a break? But I certainly understand why Bennett didn't indulge such topic-roaming in her already wide ranging and ambitious book.

Now, reading stuff I already agree with so much is nice and validating, but disagreements can be more interesting. In addition to the above quibbles on politics and climate, I perceived an overall vibe of Euro-Western defaultness. At the most general level, Bennett's analysis is grounded in the terminology-heavy metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and the Anglophone process philosophers, often (panentheistic) Christian theologians, who followed him. (Even among Euro-Western process-relational philosophies, I personally prefer Karen Barad's agential realism, but I don't think selecting among process-relational philosophies matters nearly so much as being aligned in that general direction.) Bennett's Acknowledgements section rightly states that "Indigenous Peoples in Australia and other places have practiced what I consider to be more advanced modes of process thinking and process metaphysics than what I develop and draw from in this book." Alas, the main text largely does not explore this important fact, mentioning these modes only occasionally.

While specificity does add value and depth, nesting Euro-Western culture's toddler-steps into process metaphysics more clearly within the much larger context of robust Indigenous, African, and Eastern process-relational traditions would have strengthened the book's analysis and conclusions. Among other benefits, it would help encourage among the book's primarily Euro-Western audience the intellectual and cultural humility necessary for process-relational reality-based knowing. Other cultural perspectives shouldn't be backgrounded or occasional add-ons, but central. Popular thinkers like Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech Clan), and Thích Nhât Hạnh (Vietnamese Thiên/Zen Buddhist) show that the static-process framework is not that novel.

Ultimately, though, any differences are swamped by the magnificent alignment offered by the shared static-process or map-territory framework. That's a feature of process-relational alignment in general: differences tend to be more constructive because they don't threaten a single reality-defining map. It has been challenging to select highlights from this book and keep this post to a somewhat reasonable length. I wish the book were more accessible so I could recommend it to folks outside academia. Instead, I'll just recommend that you subscribe to this here blog/newsletter.

Like the book's back cover says, "within process philosophy is a compass that can help us address the most urgent social and environmental issues of our time. However, too few people are aware of process thinking and its potential." Having read this far, you're already one of the few. You can now use this portable tool to apply process thinking and the map-territory framework anywhere, anytime, especially if you're feeling stuck. That's pretty convenient.

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