Resistance, revolution, and reclaiming the unknown
Maybe it’s true: our culture is more divided than ever, our dominant systems have no breaks, and we’re teetering on civilisational collapse.
Twice in the history of the West—in ancient Greece and then in Rome—a civilization started out with a fruitful harmony of left and right, but as it overreached itself, it moved toward the left hemisphere’s take on the world and then collapsed. The same trajectory is now being pursued for a third time. After the miraculous outpouring of creativity in the arts, science, society, and philosophy that we call the Renaissance, our civilization has, since the Enlightenment, moved further and further to the left, drunk on the belief that it knows everything and can fix everything. We are like sleepwalkers ambling toward the abyss.
Iain McGilchrist, Resist the Machine Apocalypse
And maybe it’s true, too, that our culture is waking up: a compassionate revolution of community-feeling, a rejection of geopolitical tropes, and a swell of attention and energy directed toward the interdependent, relational, and IRL.
There are some things that should not be for sale. Beyond global politics and business, beyond our personal insults, beyond the place where "you are wrong, and I am right".... the revolution now is to honor a more alive world of relationships, and in doing so to honor life. Communication matters, both verbal and non-verbal. Sit by a fire side by side, sing, hold babies, walk slowly as you assist the elders, grow, cook, and eat beautiful food together.
The need to create time for analog human to human communication cannot be underestimated now. There will be no community without first communing.
Nora Bateson, Communication is Sacred
I’m about to suggest there is reason for hope; that a Resistance and a Revolution there may well be.
Those are big claims so before I go on, a fair-handed disclaimer: I have a vested interest in humanity, and in hope. I prefer to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the possible, not probable. My preference is part cope and part worldview1. In other words I am a zealous neo-romantic, in a season of practice not scholarship, writing a selective publication on “a beautiful re-bundling — the chance to put the pieces of our lives and societies back together in more artful, soulful, humane ways”.
And before I go on, a prod the other way: what if the desire to make accurate predictions about The World — to be not-wrong — is precisely what prevents you being carried into life, into being right in unforeseen ways?
Hope
I see a will to know by experience. A willingness to experiment with sincerity, curiosity, and openness. I see a vibrant milieu that has earnestly adopted ‘touching grass’. That encourages freeing your ass so your mind will follow, daring to let love be the answer, fucking around and finding out, sabbaticals, experiments in somatics and healing, meeting mutuals.
I see a will to know in relation. A fertile lab of social fabric experiments — summer camps for grown-ups, community living rooms, praxis hubs filled with pragmatic utopians, a culture that shares gathering tips, guilds and pods and squads, neo-villages, non-denominational churches, a boon of residencies and festivals.
And I not only see this, I feel this — I know by experience and in relation. As a participant in this subculture, I’ve come alive, with my own mid-pandemic awakening to the collective2.
Is this not a communal revolution, in honoring a more alive world of relationships, per Bateson?
Is this not a right hemisphere pendulum swing resistance, infant as it might be, akin to what McGilchrist calls for?
What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God. Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive. The resonance we enjoy in a real relationship with a sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life.
Iain McGilchrist, Resist the Machine Apocalypse
Knowing by getting lost
“Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive” — yes, and it’s worth spending time with this. The cradle of resonance is the unknown.
What would a culture look like that generated and supported such encounters? One that reclaimed a relationship with the unknown?
We’d hear a lot about letting go, loss, and rest. We’d see social rituals for grieving, wintering, and surrender. We’d see a sophistication for confusion, an understanding of solitary and inner experience as an ebb to a flow within shared experience, rather than as an alienation and isolation from communal feeling.
We’d see nested, interdependent, ineffable cycles of a process like3:
What would it feel like, to find resonance in such a burgeoning culture?
CONFUSION
There's a moment when you realise you're lost.
Proper lost — not the slight confusion of misplacing your keys or being so sure, wrongly, that you’ve met a stranger before, but the desperate falling akimbo into the maw of the unknown.
"Chicken or fish?" the waiter asks you, and you invent a preference you suppose you had, once. Maybe you don't know who you are anymore, and doubt you ever really knew. Perhaps there's a quivering static where gut instinct once was. Maybe the world has revealed itself, as suddenly and unequivocally as a landscape lit-up by lightning, fundamentally absurd and arbitrary. It makes no sense.
Lost. Out of space and time. Tumbling under roiling surf, hoping for a rasp of sand or a brighter side, to know what's down or up. Tumbling inside, into memory and fear, where your senses and stories cavort, confabulating, fabulating.
INSIGHT
There’s a moment when confusion collapses into insight.
Sometimes this insight is eureka!, the Vision, the crystalline flash of future-present. But what’s required is usually aha, the Letting Go4, the serene bath of illusion, futures, and suffering dissolved.
Eureka or Aha, you've shifted from unknown unknown to known unknown — there's a thing-ness, a shape, to your confusion (even if only as an object in negation; not that.)
What do you know, really, at this point? Perhaps not much. Probably not what to do, exactly. But you’ve shifted between two distinct points, and one can begin to navigate with two points. Two points is validation enough that you’re not crazy (anymore). Two points is spatial enough that you might know pretty well how you ended up here. Maybe your mind eases up on the restless scavenger hunts into the past.
You’re lost, still. But you've snapped into it — back into time and space, into something what it’s like to be you. Fear makes way for anxiety, fascination, or even excitement.
RESONANCE
There's a moment when you realise you're not alone.
There are others who've felt a confusion like yours, who have had insights which echo yours in felt-sense if not form. They get you and they’re patient. Though hodgepodge and fringe, the collection of these others and insights starts making sense. This is still the known unknown, but the knowledge is shared — relational, branching, contextual, memetic, harmonic. So too is the unknown, and it turns out that not knowing, together, ain’t so bad.
You stop talking about flukes and coincidences and start talking about confluence and serendipity, and it's not just a semantic turn — it’s something you’ve understood in your bones and being as much as your mind. You’ve directly experienced the pull of collective effervescence or the sacred, as surely as you’ve felt the pull of a river current. You can recognise without exchanging many words the others who’ve felt it too.
LORE
There’s a moment when you know you’re onto something.
You’re on a sure path to the resolution of your original confusion5. The ways by which you and your group navigate become sophisticated and patterned; a logic is apparent. There’s skill and beauty in your wayfinding.
You’re alive. There’s a fertile culture of ideas, stories, and memes. Your group attracts other groups, of similar vibe but independent origin. People say things like magnetic and mycelium and emergence, and it's not just a vernacular turn, it’s an attempt to describe the phenomena of collective and transcendent experience.
The known becomes known.
Is this wisdom?
No, this is just a framework.
And yes, in that it tells the story of systemic individual and collective transformation, through the unknown, with right hemisphere intelligence, towards togetherness.
In a context of extreme individualism and isolation, the wise direction must be towards togetherness. In a context of left-hemisphere-dominant systems, environments, and tropes, the wise direction must be towards right-hemispheric knowing.
Is this enlightenment?
Tyler asked a good question.
Taking ‘waking up” broadly: yes, sort of. Again, it’s relative and directional: the cultivation of awareness seated in togetherness, compassion, the greater-than, the numinous, seems the right direction, at least. I think this process describes well the spiral dynamic of encounters with the unknown giving birth to a rich web of encounters with one another.
Taking enlightenment technically: I’m not sure? I do see a higher than average rate of individual wakings up, and I suppose that creates a supportive environment for more waking up. I can see the argument that a shift in consciousness from individual-egoic to group-egoic could be steps on the right path, or rather steps toward grippy mob or clique identity.
Is this the answer?
I want to emphasise what I’m not saying. I am not saying this diagram is a winning prescription, that there’s an evident code of belief and behaviour to commit to and decontextualise and replicate. I’m not saying twitter subculture is pointed in the right direction, or that the civilisational odds are good.
I suppose that picking the right bandwagon to jump on matters, though not as much as fostering a culture that makes a lot of bandwagons. I suppose that coherent stories and structures matter, though not as much as avoiding dogma contra dogma brinkmanship, as much as returning to direct experience, to the earth, babies, breath, fireside. I suppose that the consolidation of power and politic in collective structures can be transformative, though not at the expense the irreducible process of individual transformation via relation.
Is this moment in time a fluke?
Maybe.
There’s a chance that a confluence of environmental factors, with the pandemic lockdowns as the climax, was the giant shake of the snow globe that afforded us a glut of shared experience.
With global synchrony and the internet communication layer, we’ve shared the confusion of living in lockdown, shared the insights about how we are living and what’s broken, and shared a resonance in how we might like to re-bundle our lives now. In pockets, there’s a lore of optimistic experimentation. And yet, maybe it’ll just be one trip around my quadrants: the snow will settle, the globe will return to its status quo.
But what if?
The telltale sign of a waking up culture, of a Resistance or Revolution worth its salt, then, would be witnessed in its rich and sustained relation with the unknown — in its seasonality and rhythm of known/unknown, self/other. (The well-trodden alternative is Lore → dogma.6)
I witness, gratefully, at this moment, a beautiful Resonance and Lore, a sense of independently originated subcultures, of nested groupings of vibe-simpatico organisms. I am alive and it is spring. I hope it is the first of many.
The cope: I have a talent for despair. I would rather supplement too much hope than too little. The philosophy: I favor Goethe (Thomas Carlyle translation): “When we take people,’ thou wouldst say, ‘merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be improved.” Here’s the original in German. Here’s a delightful riff by Viktor Frankl.
I wrote about it in this post: “Three gong strikes. I cannot unhear or unfeel them. And so what I’m impelled to do now, how I want to be, is consciously and fundamentally relational. The locus of meaning, of creative drive, has shifted towards Us away from I.”
You can substitute my framework for your favourites — the Hero’s Journey, redemption and forgiveness, Dark Night of the Soul, the Ramayana. I chose mine to emphasise the individual/collective — the dance between self/other, shared/solitary, which is the activity of meaning, “the primary human motion, irreducible”, per Robert Kegan in The Evolving Self. I admit, too, “to wondering if our attraction is not of some force ‘bigger than both of us’, a kind of species sympathy which we do not share so much as it shares us”. I wonder if this species sympathy is something like the will to resonance, in McGilchrist’s articulation.
I equate the Aha, Letting Go, to Rob Burbea’s conception of insight. From Seeing that Frees: ”For now, let us take as a loose definition of insight: any realization, understanding, or way of seeing things that brings, to any degree, a dissolution of, or a decrease in, dukkha. We should, right away, draw attention to a few of the immediate implications of such a definition, and in doing so we can also clarify more what is meant here. First, insight defined thus is not, in itself, a certain experience that we need to attain. Extraordinary experiences may, to be sure, be important at times but they are not what actually frees. Nor is insight simply ‘being mindful and watching the show’, without any effect on, or input into, the fabrication or dissolution of the experience of dukkha. Just knowing, for example, that dukkha, grasping, or reactivity is present is hardly ever enough to free us from it even in that moment. And it certainly will not be enough to exhaust or eradicate the latent tendencies of craving and aversion. What is needed is an understanding that cuts or melts something or other more fundamental on which that dukkha relies, thus eradicating, or at least diminishing, that dukkha.”
and most likely, you’re happy to let the path unfold, to make the path by walking.
