Emergence

On 'Being the Change'

Winter Solstice Sunrise, Central Victoria. 2024

Audio Version

The world needs to change. Radically and soon. You, me, anyone likely to read this post. And all the billions of people in the majority world who have adopted the dream of modernity, (however awkwardly it sits upon them), who are surging hopefully toward a life that can never be. Them too.

I’m not going to make that argument. We all know. We all know that we have to change. The interesting thing for me today is that we can’t. We live in a kind of mental paralysis, trapped by our patterns of thought, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what our World is.

Of course, we will change.

In the end. When the hard boundaries of various bio-physical limits really start to bite us.

Hello?

They are already biting. Fire. Flood. Drought. The Armageddon of coral reefs. The Cost-of-Living. Pandemics. Not feeling it yet?

You will.

How can we change? Why is it so hard?

It is not unusual for people in my circles to talk of ‘emergence’. ‘Emergence’, a phenomenon of complex systems where change in structure and behaviour happens suddenly, in a non-linear and unpredictable way. Emergence gives us ripples in windblown sand; murmurations of birds; cyclones. Possibly consciousness. Probably life itself.

Human societies are complex systems (and themselves incidents of emergence), and when enough people adopt new perspectives, new rules, the system can change. When we look at history, we are looking at just such processes. Tension builds through some new technology, source of wealth, invasion, disease or usurpation. Some realignment of ‘rules’ and possibilities, and quite suddenly a new pattern of organisation and power emerges. Some of these new structures last longer than others. Some survive long enough to dominate, accreting powerful infrastructures of coercion that extend their tenure well beyond utility. The Roman Empire is one example. Capitalism, another. Capitalism, once a vibrant creative/destructive force (for better or worse), that emerged through a reformation (dissolution?) of the relations of responsibility and obligation between landowning classes and the peasantry in Western Europe, and fuelled by the spoils of adventure-colonialism has come to feel immovable, eternal, but it is well past its use-by date. Capitalism, having destroyed the New World, the Old World and every other world, is now a tired old trope with just enough energy and vitality to lead us over the cliff.

How shall we change? One at a time? In fits and starts? All together in some sudden (and perhaps graceful) realignment of values and material circumstance? It is, of course, all three. In a world of eight billion people, change happens as a system and whilst no individual action is sufficient, every individual action is necessary. Change when it comes will be driven by (probably dramatic) changes in our material realities and opportunities, a realignment of our understandings of risk and security and a change in our sense of the ‘rules’.

We wait for emergence. We scan the horizon and the news daily for the change that will herald our New Beginning. But in the meantime, we keep on doing the same old stuff. We go to work. We build McMansions with double garages. We pay the mortgage. We send our kids to school. We seek security within the bounds permitted by the dying system, and in so doing, we shore up that system. We bend our backs and row steadfastly for the cliff. What else can we do?

But emergence happens at the chaotic edge of the system. Never at the centre. I shall go out on a limb and say that no-one working to pay the mortgage ever participated in the birth of a new system. They were too busy shoring up the old. Clamouring for a job. A better job. Economic growth. Security.

Security and emergence do not go together. When you are focussed on security, emergence looks like an emergency.

Actually, such emergencies are erupting quietly all over the world. There’s one going on in me virtually all the time now. And if there’s one in you too, then maybe we should talk?

Here’s another thing: Emergence, by its very nature, is not just unpredictable, but virtually unimaginable. If you can imagine it, it’s probably not emergence. Though on another day I might suggest that Gaia has her plans, and communicates her vision to those of us who will listen through the dreamspace, the imaginal realm. After all, we are not silos, islands unto ourselves. We are of Gaia, ripples in the sentient cosmic river. Or following Jung, we are connected to a rhizome that both holds and (potentially) yields to us everything that ever was (and perhaps ever will be). In that way of thinking, emergence is not a solely, or even mainly, human affair.

On such days, I feel hope.

I’m asking you (and me) to position ourselves as catalysts in the transformation of the world into something we probably cannot even imagine. (The fact that capitalism was once a shiny new emergence might give us pause).

What if you took me seriously? What might it look like? How might we even start?

Complex systems operate according to rules, whether these are explicit or not. Change some rules and the system will change (just not necessarily in a predictable or linear way). The main rules that govern the system of human society are biophysical and (outside the fever-dreams of those with technological, managerial mindsets) out of our control, but there are also human values that we might have just a little control over – if we can wrest them back from the bad actors of consumerist advertising and malicious political manipulation. And from our own fears and love of comfort.

What we value has a way of shaping our behaviours. Our behaviours have a way of shaping the system. The World.

What are the values we need? We might start by asking ourselves where our world might be in ten thousand years if our current ‘progress’ were to (miraculously) continue? Techno-utopia is fiction. Techno-dystopia is not. We are living it. We are early adopters. What would be left of the ‘natural’ world, of our fellow creatures? Is this a world you would want to live in? As Cat Stevens asked all those decades ago: “Where do the children play?” In the event of that dismal miracle, the system will not even be one of techno-dystopia, but techno-feudalism (also in nascent form now), a world of artificial intelligence and mind control, devoid of anything we care about today. Probably not even children.

What then are the values that have brought us into this pickle? And what are their counterparts that we would need to build a future worth living in?

Ego centrality.

Our ecological predicament grows out of the Western conception of the self. The western self, in its shadowy depths is set apart from the world, alien to all and beholden to none. It is the only source of meaning and the only thing we can trust. Indeed, the only proof that we exist at all: Cogito, ergo sum (Descartes). That self is fragile and fearful, connected to nothing and so held by nothing. Death looms as a cruel and final blow that emphasises not meaning, but futility. The Western self inevitably, inexorably, manifests its shadow in the destruction of the World.

A self that is worthy of a future would, as is the case with many indigenous cultures, be much greater than the person. That self would extend beyond the physical body, to encompass family, non-human kin and the broader environment, including a sense of the sacred. It would in a sense be ‘co-dependent’ – embodying the African concept of Ubuntu (I am because you are). The healthy self would see death as integral to the processes of life. Death would be both a return to source and a making way for new life: a creative act in the great dance of being.

Human chauvinism

The disconnected human self gives itself airs. Raised (by ourselves) above all other life forms, we regard all things as being placed for our use and benefit. We visit unspeakable suffering upon vast numbers of animals. We destroy entire ecosystems for our own advancement. We poison our world for comfort and convenience. For the disconnected human, only humans matter, and me more than you. We are very good at derogating each other to ‘human animal’ status when we stand to gain.

By contrast, humans worthy of a future would see all creatures, indeed all things, as kin. Some may be killed and eaten – as is natural in the World – but only within right relationship that respects the essential nature of the animal through all its life, that respects deeply the life that is taken, and is grateful for the sustenance that results. The relationship with animals and ecosystem would be sacred. These relationships would be at times instrumental – humans have to eat and be warm and sheltered too – but these functional elements would be moderated and contained by a sense of sacred kinship.

Linear time

For the contemporary western self, time is a linear phenomenon. Time rushes on, threatening to leave us behind. We see our too-short lives mapped out before us, and time is running out. Time, like everything else, is scarce. Time carries its toxic corollaries: the need for speed. The need for machines to speed our labours. The need to be the best. The opportunity to sell that most intimate part of ourselves – our brief allotted time – in exchange for stuff, or status or just survival in a world that, as it stands, will not fulfill our needs in any other way. Always discontented, we colonise the future as our forebears colonised continents: remorselessly. One of the most useful definitions I have found of modernity comes from Dugald Hine, who says that we moderns live mainly in the future. Always anticipating, always planning, never present to the here and now. We borrow to buy houses, and then spend a lifetime in meaningless work paying down the debt. We sell our lives in pursuit of security – control of the future. We destroy the present on the promise that tomorrow will be so much better. In thrall to the story of progress, we lay our planet and our children down before objectively ludicrous ideas like endless economic growth that we are assured will secure a prosperous and (always) exciting future.

By contrast, a healthy people might perceive time very differently – again, as is the case with a great many indigenous cultures. Australian Aboriginal cultures understand time as a superficially linear phenomenon underlayed by an ‘everywhen’, where every moment that has ever, or will ever exist, lies pregnant in simultaneous becoming. This thinking is primarily relevant to the Dreaming, describing how Creation Ancestors who did their thing in the ‘past’ are doing that same thing right now, and will be doing it for ever. Time, all moments of time, have an immanence.

Such thinking has a way of slowing you down. Your role on this Earth is not to achieve this or that. It is to be. Time ceases to be an ‘arrow’, and the fruits of time – such as technological change – lose their currency. It is to experience the beauty of the World in every moment to the deepest possible degree. By moving ourselves out of a breathless relationship to a scarce commodity, we can become present, and see that the world as ‘created’ is perfect, and that no agitated fiddling by humans is going to make it better. (Though we do have some urgent repairs to effect). In this state, we can love the world as she is, and stop making plans for her betterment.

Four Dimensions?

The contemporary Western mind sees four dimensions. Three of geography and one of duration. Physics might suspect a few more, but these hardly impact on our everyday lives. The world we live in is everyday, it is material. And that is all there is.

In a 2024 album of music “Warrangu; River Story”, Gamilleroi Rapper and sound artist Dobby walks with an un-named Elder by a river. We hear their footsteps and almost feel the trees about them. The elder explains that the Old People lived not in four dimensions but six. What were the other two? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that one was life: not as a peculiar (emergent) phenomenon of the world, but a fundamental property of the Cosmos. The second, I think is the sacred: not as an interesting (emergent) phenomenon of human brains, but as a fundamental field underlying the structure of the Cosmos. That is a world that simply bristles with meaning. And ethics. What if we lived in awareness and sympathy with those dimensional fields?

I am quite aware that I have just described, not just how to fail in contemporary society, but also how to be judged mentally aberrant in contemporary society. I have described some deep values that inform the rules of capitalist/consumer society. If everyone follows these rules, so long as the resources hold out and the biophysical system does not tip into chaos, then we get what we have: a way of life that is rapacious, yet deeply unsatisfying. Future focused, but cannibalising that future. Full of hope and bravado, but deeply depressed.

In his monumental 2023 work, The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist suggests that the contemporary Western mind, and the society it has brought into being, has much in common with the brain disorder schizophrenia, wherein intellect dominates and replaces intuition, the brain dominates and replaces instinct, thought replaces feeling, demand for proof overwhelms trust in impressions, and representation is more important than presence (and much more)  (P.329).

He writes: “The Swiss psychopathologist Roland Kuhn saw, at the heart of psychosis, ‘an inauthentic materialisation, technicalisation and mechanisation of everything’. That suggests that there is an imbalance verging on mental illness in our current society, since these are some of its most prominent characteristics” (329).

We have to step away from this tired old system. We have to take our energy and creativity as far away from this crazy system as we can. We have to find, or perhaps build, or perhaps re-build, a new metaphysics. And we have to live it, and tend it and let it grow and shape us. We have to make for the chaotic margins and make our lives there. There is no certainty that what you or I do can do will cause a new world to burst forth from the ruins of the old. There is no certainty that what we do will count one jot. Unless, of course, we choose the ‘sensible’ path and stay with the program. But it’s possible you don’t want to make that sort of impact.

Where do you find the ‘margins’ in this colonised and controlled world? The way there is not shown on any map.

They are where life is struggling to reclaim the ruins.

They are where love counts.

They are in the deep reaches of your imagination and your heart.

They are in the garden and the forest.

You can feel your way there. It’s not far. You can walk.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

I will meet you there. And there, we will dance. It is not safe. It is not comfortable.

It is life.