New reality [4]: a decade of transformation
Three years after the announcement of the UN Decade of Transformation, what could it feel like?
“Amid all the doom-laden exhortations to change our ways, let us remember that we are striving to create a more beautiful world, and not sustain, with growing sacrifice, the current one.
We are not just seeking to survive.
We are not just facing doom; we are facing a glorious possibility.
We are offering people not a world of less, not a world of sacrifice, not a world where you are just going to have to enjoy less and suffer more — no, we are offering a world of more beauty, more joy, more connection, more love, more fulfilment, more exuberance, more leisure, more music, more dancing, and more celebration.
The most inspiring glimpses you’ve ever had about what life can be — this is what we are offering.”
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein, 2013
“Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
What is transformation?
For who?
How?
Where?
When?
Is transformation simply being able to ask new questions?
Life is always transforming.
Transforming between different states of energy and matter.
Will this be a transformation away from separation?
Away from humans being somehow separate from other living systems on this planet?
“We have imagined that we are a unit-of-survival and we have to see to our own survival, and we imagine that the unit-of survival is the separate individual or a separate species, whereas in reality, through the history of evolution it is the individual-plus-the-environment, the species-plus-the-environment, for they are essentially symbiotic.”
Gregory Bateson quoted in Towards a Healing of the Self and the World, Joanna Macy, 1994
A species somehow able to pursue growth indefinitely
when all other species are limited to the physical realities of
their interdependence with all other living systems.
Really?
No one is anything without everyone,
nothing is anything without everything.
the chair does not say
what the leaves, the river, the birds,
art holds open, whole
Is the accumulation of money not merely an abstraction of the human mind? An abstraction that some are able to hold more closely than others. And for this to be rewarded.
An abstraction based on the elimination of the vitality of life.
An abstraction that relies on the objectification and commodification of life.
An abstraction that denies the cycles of life
and applies our understanding of physics to biology?
Applies notions of linear, mechanistic causality
to complex, adaptive living systems?
Is this not a delusion?
A delusion of the illusion of control?
Why are some forms of perception treated as disorders and other forms of perception treated as virtuous, as conveying power, as being pathways to notions of success?
What is the love of money?
Why is existing to nourish the vitality of the relationships between living systems of no apparent value, whereas the elimination of that vitality is — codified in notions such as gross domestic product, profit, earnings, income — considered to be of the highest value?
This approach to value, this shared belief amongst many
who are able to maintain the delusions of the illusions of control,
and exist within the constructed prison of perceptions acceptable
for the perpetuation of prevailing relative power structures,
does it make sense?
“When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the codes of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental diseases.”
Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren (1930) in Essays in Persuasion, John Maynard Keynes, 1963
Counting and accounting for the conversion of life into objects is
our dominant form of storytelling about how we make sense of
the choices that we collectively make about our existence together
as part of the living systems of our planet.
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind.
The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
Overstory, Richard Powers, 2019
Accountants are the storytellers of our prevailing power structures.
Their choices matter and our choice to permit their choices to matter matters.
“Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
There is no life that is not in community,
When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
to make money from each other’ or ‘This is a community’?
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.”
Choruses from “The Rock” (excerpt), T.S. Eliot, 1934
Which information to include, which information to exclude?
What creates value, what does not?
What is value?
Are we all comfortable with the choices?
Are we all comfortable with the stories that we are told about the choices?
Is caring, loving and kindness less valuable to our species
than the production of material objects that rely for their existence
on the disruption of the relationships between living systems
of which we are a part of the larger circle?
These choices are transformations. They are transformations of life.
We have always been living in decades of transformation.
Why and how will this Decade of Transformation be different?
Will we reach backwards into the future?
Will we release ourselves from the belief systems that constrain our possibilities?
Can we open the doors to the prisions we have constructed to constrain our empathy for other life?
“A human being is part of the whole — called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.”
Letter to a Rabbi, Albert Einstein, 1950
Feeling our way forward, in time.
We can be beautiful, we can be powerful, we can be destructive.
We are a species capable of immense love, immense compassion, immense courage.
We live together, all of us, on our single beautiful Earth.
We are all different, we are all very complex and there is great beauty in that complexity, in those differences.
But we are always fragile and vulnerable,
and at the mercy of that which nourishes and feeds us.
As humans on planet Earth, we burn brightly. Too brightly.
Every candle has its extinction limit. The point at which it consumes all that gives it life, and it goes out. We are approaching our extinction limit, and we will go out.
Why? What do we value? We value money.
Not nature. Not other species. Not even ourselves.
We have agreed to pretend that the price we pay is less than the cost to nature, to ourselves. And this has been going on for centuries, but most significantly for the past forty years or so. During our lifetime.
So, perhaps it is now time for us to make some big changes.
But how do we do this?
We can start by changing our mindset, our narrative
from one of ‘separation-from-nature’ to ‘interdependence-with-and participation-in-nature’, from ‘scarcity-and-competition’ to ‘abundance-and-relationships’, and embrace love and respect for all life.
“Love is our natural condition, and it is the denial of love that requires all our rational efforts, but what for, when life is so much better in love than in aggression?
Love needs not be learned, it can be allowed to be, or it can be denied, but needs not to be learned, because it is our biological fundament and the only basis for the conservation of our human beingness as well as our well-being.
Love is not a virtue, indeed love is nothing special, it is only the fundament of our human existence as the kind of primates that we are as human beings. At difference from love, aggression needs to be cultivated or it fades away as we meet each other in the simplicity of our humanness.”
Biology of Love, Humberto Maturana & Gerda Verden-Zoller, 1996
Secondly, we can view the threat as imminent now.
The future of consequences is not off in the distance. It is now.
We are living it, we are living it in nature, right now.
And every time we buy something.
Every time we invest in something.
Every decision we make.
We can ask questions.
We can ask questions
of our governments,
of our pension funds,
of our banks,
of the companies that provide us with goods and services.
We can ask questions of others.
And we can ask questions of ourselves.
We can ask questions.
We can be kind, and we can have courage.
We only have one candle. One beautiful Earth.
And if all of us, all the time,
for every decision we make,
stand up with courage and ask questions.. be the Stranger.. then big things can happen, transformations maybe.
We are able to keep our candle burning, but will we?
We are in a moment where the threads that have held us so tightly in the existing systems are starting to come loose, they are melting right before our eyes. What was important only weeks or months ago is not important anymore. The idea that our economy was separate from health which was separate from education, and that these things were separate, and our institutions could be adjusted… that has all changed.
The economy, education, health, identity, and culture had their own buckets and now all those buckets have holes and they are merging.
We feel the fragility and limitations of our current systems in new ways and we are left feeling more vulnerable. The way we perceive and talk about our current situation matters and shapes our responses.
Our economy, law, technology, politics, science, education and health systems cannot feel the life that is breathing us, nor can they understand the complexity of life as we face the many multi-order consequences and non-linear, cascading effects of the multiple, interdependent crises now with us. Our systems and their solutions have been isolated and siloed, and now so are we in a very real way. We are now living, all of us, in the chrysalis of the goo of the melted and merged systems now with unprecedented possibilities before us to form and be formed in new ways that prioritise the essential over the non-essential, in both the short-term and local contexts as well as the wider contexts beyond the pandemic, beyond the climate crisis, beyond… [1]
Is this the transformation in the Decade of Transformation?
Feeling our way into the future by facing the past, feeling our stories into our dreams?
[31: 25.08.2020]
the liminal
when all things seem possible
the blurring of night and day
as confusion reigns
comfortably within
exploring where
there are no edges
only love
“It takes strong nerves to question the very fabric of society.”
21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari, 2017
We have allowed some to agree on the rules of our game.
We have collectively agreed to pretend that the market price is far below the full cost of our human activities and our resource conversion decisions.
The Extinction Differential is the gap between the price determined by the market and the full cost determined by natural systems.
Rules decided by humans can be changed.
Rules decided by nature cannot.
It is now time for us to close the Extinction Differential before nature exercises her right to foreclose on the debt accumulated by our species. Or is it?
“An increase of 1.5 degrees is the maximum the planet can tolerate; should temperatures increase further beyond 2030, we will face even more droughts, floods, extreme heat, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people; the likely demise of the most vulnerable populations — and at worst, the extinction of humankind altogether.”
Global Trends to 2030: Challenges and Choices for Europe, ESPAS, 2019
>>> Choose courage, choose care, choose love <<<
“Humanity as a whole is facing imminent climate chaos and the breakdown of ecosystems functions vital to the survival of our species and many others. We will not find the solutions to these problems by continuing to base our thinking on the same erroneous assumptions about the nature of self and world that created them in the first place. We need a new way of thinking, a new consciousness, a new cultural story; only then will we be able to get the questions right, seeing more clearly what underlying needs have to be met. If we jump into action without deeper questioning, we are likely to treat symptoms rather than causes. This will prolong and deepen the crisis rather than solve it.
Humanity is facing the terminal crisis of an outdated worldview. This crisis manifests itself in many different ways, for example as an outdated economic and monetary system that is not fit for purpose on an overpopulated planet with dwindling non-renewable resources. In communities everywhere we can witness social breakdown as a result of rising inequality and the cult of competitive individualism. We are facing a crisis of governance as many of the world’s largest economies are no longer defined by national or cultural identity and have become corporations seeking to maximise short-term profit by externalising collateral damage. We continue to be challenged by a crisis of religious extremism and war, as we tend to pay more attention to our differences rather than our common humanity and common fate on a planet in crisis.
We will have to redefine how we see ourselves and our relationships to each other and to the rest of the community of life on Earth. Only by changing our cultural narrative can we transform our vision of the future; and heal our relationship with life as a whole. Like a fever that peaks and breaks just before the patient begins to recover, the multiple crises don’t have to be regarded as something entirely negative.
We can reframe them as a ‘good crisis’ if we heed the clear signs that change, and transformation are now inevitable and already on their way and come to see converging crises as creative challenges to grow up and evolve to planetary consciousness (sic: colsciousness).”
Designing Regenerative Cultures, Daniel Christian Wahl, 2016
Infinite growth is incompatible with survival; it is time to deal with it.
We are possibly going extinct soon, most of us may be here at or near the end.
We urgently need to reconsider our relationships with…
… nature
… soils
… oceans
… time
… uncertainty
… responsibility
… education
… others
… ourselves
… health
… love
… care
… …
Incomplete information.
Incomplete value attribution.
Incomplete incentives.
We continue to make decision that are not in our interest.
We must change how we account for human activities.
We must change the stories we tell ourselves about human progress.
We need to shift from managing conventional hazards to improving our understanding of the dynamic interactions and systemic nature of risk, of existential risks.
We must develop the capabilities for transcontextual understanding and decision-making based on feeling into the complex, adaptive living systems in which we exist.
We must close the Extinction Differential fast.
We must end the contradictions between the patterns of civilisation and the patterns of nature.
We must get the pricing right.
The price of everything, and of nothing.
“It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely, that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the ‘natural’ world, not the human one; that those two are distinct and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology that it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
None of this is true.”
The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, 2018
“I have found that inviting people to consider collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable and extinction as possible, has not led to apathy or depression. Instead, in a supportive environment, where we have enjoyed community with each other, celebrating ancestors and enjoying nature before then looking at this information and possible framings for it, something positive happens. I have witnessed a shedding of concern for conforming to the status quo, and a new creativity about what to focus on going forward. Despite that, a certain discombobulation occurs and remains over time as one tries to find a way forward in a society where such perspectives are uncommon. Continued sharing about the implications as we transition our work and lives is valuable.”
Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, Jem Bendell, 2018
“Systemic risks might be easy to mitigate early on. However, failure or even intentional ignorance to capture the role of underlying drivers of systemic risk will allow small risks to grow into major problems, increasing the opportunity for failed interventions and missed opportunities. Developing and implementing multidisciplinary approaches to identify and act on precursor signals and systems anomalies are critical to minimising or avoiding discontinuities in complex systems.”
United Nations Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDRR, 2019
“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962
The financial and economic systems are not fit-for-purpose.
We need to aim for a system that includes all information that decision makers require to feel empowered and to have a strong sense of agency and a sense of humility-in-confusion.
This includes:
1. Looking at the underlying assumptions behind the accounting, reporting, disclosure and valuation approaches used in the financial and economic systems
2. Working to improve how the landscape of risk is understood and integrated into governance, regulatory, and stewardship/ fiduciary duties of both private and public sector activities and investments
3. Adopting new/ old ways of valuing prevention and avoidance, and adopting the precautionary principle, and nourishing the vitality of the relationships within living systems rather than eliminating it
4. Taking a regenerative systems perspective to rethink the value of different human activities and processes that convert natural resources into financial wealth and economic indicators.
The understanding of the failure of the rules of the game is gathering momentum.
There is an opportunity now to enable measurement, reporting and disclosure of systems health, including interdependencies and amplifications across and between systems, with long time horizons to improve decision making and balance the credits and debits at a planetary system scale.
But what is measurement?
Can it ever be absolute?
Is is not always relative and in relationship?
“It is essential to view economic and ecological issues as tightly interrelated and recognise that our global economic system must be adjusted to the requirements of an era in which the risks engendered by centuries of neglect have reached a point of extreme danger and the costs of adjustment must be borne by present and succeeding generations.”
The Stiglitz Report, UN Commission of Financial Experts, 2010
The deep plumbing of the financial and economic systems continues to encode (and reward) the absence of responsibility for the full impacts and consequences of decisions made.
The invisibility of inter-relationality and interdependence between all living systems and the invisibility of the systemic nature of risk results in a mispricing of risk, a mispricing of human activity and a misallocation of capital and human effort, and ultimately an acceleration of the extinction of our species and the unwinding of the wider web of life on Earth.
The increasing certainty of now in-motion near-term financial and economic (and societal) collapse on a regional or even global scale creates the conditions for a deep exploration of what emerges through and beyond the metacrisis.
With timeframes now understood to be in months and years, not decades and centuries, the window is open right now to make visible, and test, and feel into economic models, policy reforms and financial systems mechanisms to support thriving, healthy human and other species’ populations in the difficult transitional decade(s) ahead.
Is this what the Decade of Transformation will be? Can be?
“Hope lives in the very fact that as living beings we are wired for relationship. Our humanity is only possible to express in relationship to other human beings. We exude warm data in our eyes, our smiles, our verbal and non-verbal conversations and in the importance we accord to being in relationships with others at the personal, family, community levels and in local, national, and global contexts. We also have the capacity to tap into ancient wisdom to add to our store of warm data and the capabilities that get unleashed when I see you in me and me in you.
Our well-being and that of our planet is possible only if we permit ourselves to perceive and embrace the rich expression of who we are as living human communities to find a way, in relationship.
This will require warmth and rigorous attention to relational integrity above the anxiety to control.”
Finding a Way, Ramphela Mamphele and Nora Bateson, 2020
not yet
[227: 23.05.2022]
Waving within
the soils of a time
not yet
Sage, raspberries, ants
connecting me
not yet
Seeing the unpainted
side of the wall that doesn’t divide
not yet
And we chase
the rolling stone
not yet
Spaciousness within
us-two communicating
not yet
Soon
not yet
Soon
really soon
This is the 4th in the New Reality series and was published as we approach three years since the declaration of the UN Decade of Transformation. It is offered as a meadow of questions and musings to hopefully inspire more questions about the stories that we live with, the stories we are conditioned to live with and the stories that may be possible if we are in relationship differently.
The 3rd essay in the New Reality series published in July 2023 is “New reality: thresholds matter, be gentle” and is available here: https://medium.com/@scott42195/new-reality-thresholds-matter-be-gentle-2816c5f3fd93
The 2nd essay in the New Reality series published in October 2022 is “New Reality: New way of life with no way back, but perhaps a way forward?” and is available here: https://medium.com/p/1d0735750b2d
The 1st essay in the New Reality series published in June 2022 is “New Reality: Hysteresis, Perceptions and Spaciousness” and is available here: https://medium.com/@scott42195/new-reality-hysteresis-perceptions-spaciousness-afd4091a8f44
Bibliography
Bateson 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Bendell 2018. Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. University of Cumbria. https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/4166/
Carson 1962. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin.
Eisenstein 2013. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. North Atlantic Books.
Eliot 1934. The Rock. Faber & Faber.
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System 2019. Global Trends to 2030: Challenges and Choices for Europe. European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/assets/epsc/pages/espas/index.html
Harari 2017. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Penguin Random House.
Keynes 1963. Essays in Persuasion. W. W. Norton & Co.
Macy 1994. “Towards a Healing of the Self and the World” in Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology (edited by Merchant). Humanity Books.
Mamphele and Bateson 2020. Finding a Way: Will Peoples’ Responses to the Emergencies of the Coming Decades be Warm? Or Cold? Medium. https://norabateson.medium.com/finding-a-way-3582b2e0c6a3
Maturana and Verden-Zoller 1996. Biology of Love. Focus Heilpadagogik, Ernst Reinhardt.
Powers 2019. Overstory. W. W. Norton & Co.
United Nations Commission of Financial Experts 2010. The Stiglitz Report: Reforming the International Monetary and Financial Systems in the Wake of the Global Crisis. The New Press.
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction 2019. United Nations Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2019. United Nations. https://gar.undrr.org/report-2019.html
Wahl 2016. Designing Regenerative Cultures. Triarchy Press.
Wallace-Wells 2018. The Uninhabitable Earth. Allen Lane.
End note
[1] Combination of contributors from the Certified Warm Data and People Need People Host community across the world
