5 Graces — Part 1: Recovering our humanity for a post-coronavirus world

Peter Bruegel the Elder: The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

The ground has shifted. The world looks and feels quite different than it did only six months ago. In this moment of great confusion, something new and momentous is arriving.

The voices of the old mainstream are still yearning for a return to ‘normal’. A political party leaflet that arrived in my letterbox a week ago says “we must save jobs and get the economy growing again.” But a new mainstream is forming — one that knows that many jobs won’t be saved, and that economic growth is less important than survival and wellbeing. Seldom have the tired habits of oppositional politics, or the sorcery of demagogues, seemed less useful or relevant than they do just now.

What’s come up instead— first with the pandemic, and now with Black Lives Matter and its excoriation of history — is a growing recognition that what matters most is how we are with each other. (And as well as with each other human, with each other entity on the planet we inhabit). So now we must turn from our seething beliefs and imaginings to face the most basic aspect of our lives: the practicalities of noticing and relating — of recognising the rich complexities of ordinary life, and then dealing with the entanglements of ourselves and other people in the onrush of our everyday encounters.

But our difficulty here is a challenge, like water for fish, that is invisible to us — because we swim in it all the time and because it pervades every aspect of our conduct. As living, breathing creatures we possess a rich repertoire of bodily capabilities for making sense of and relating with sensitivity and acuity to the world around us: yet our educational and social practices suppress most of these capabilities, confining us instead to a narrow, crippled version of our humanity.

Our sense of ourselves as the world’s dominant species blinds us from seeing how stunted our abilities have become. For example, a viral pandemic bursts upon us as an unprecedented and unimaginable calamity rather than as a repeated pattern of global history with discoverable traces in our ancestral memories. But now — as a check to our grand narrative of human accomplishment — it’s triggering a yearning for a profound reorientation in the way we do things in the world.

What follows is my contribution to this yearning, in three parts. In Part 1: Recovering Our Humanity for a Post-Coronavirus World (below), I start with an account of our self-prescribed diminishment and its devastating consequences. I try to tease apart what is so hard to grasp: our shrunken human behaviours and their exclusionary effects. In Part 2: A New Beginning for Education and Learning, I lay out the story of a twenty-year journey of discovery that lays the foundations for a new set of educational and re-educational practices that can start to re-awaken what has been put to sleep. Finally, in Part 3: Jumping Together into a New River, I offer a work programme for groups that changes the way we deal with one another in our everyday lives as a basis for a new approach to learning, together with some proposals for collaborative research and development. So to bypass the story of getting there and go straight to the invitation, click here.

Towards the end of 2019, I published some of the background to this story in a six-part essay, Microattunement: a Pattern Language to Wake Up Our Humanity. That essay was provoked by my colleague Richard Bartlett’s ground-breaking proposal for a fractal view of human organizing that he called Microsolidarity.

Then as I recognised a number of things missing from that story, I began this document as a sequel to Microattunement. But in the telling it’s become a bigger statement for these new times, as a proposal for a new approach to human relating, self-understanding, belonging and collaboration, and for lifelong education and training. It owes debts to many forebears and fellow-explorers — wherever possible mentioned here — and so in various ways its radical character is not really original.

My hope is that it might be able to be recognised less as something new, than as something that has always been understood, deep down — perhaps even before there were words with which to say it.

Recognising our shrunken mode of human existence

We’ve seen modern man — individualized, rational, reflective and critical — as the epitome of human development. Modernity can be understood as a long trajectory, starting with scripture and Greek philosophy. Yet the longer history of life on earth reveals that in several ways, humans have become reduced versions of their former selves.

This conclusion will be hard to understand and to accept. It’s not an argument to be found in mainstream discourse, in academia, or even in the scuttlebutt of social media. But looking long and hard at the evidence, it seems inescapable.

Here’s the backdrop for this conclusion, in a nutshell:

• Over the last two millennia almost all peoples have established written languages and have moved towards literacy and numeracy;
• There has been an explosion of written recorded materials that have steadily become accessible to all;
• Written accounts of human experience have sought to supplant oral traditions with the certainties of science;
• Verbal, written and analytical fluency have become the most prized accomplishments of education and the principal basis for success in mainstream public life.

The rise of literacy and science has laid bare the private lives of fundamental particles and the transgressions of the cosmos, un-wilded the world’s wildlife, produced boots on the moon, weapons that can lay waste to the planet, nations of a billion people, factories and supply chains that entangle the world, a maelstrom of interventions that promote health and survival, and has enabled instant communication and increasing surveillance everywhere. Today’s world is unrecognizable from its pre-literate origins.

But along the way, many human capabilities and behaviours have also been transformed. They include:

• memory. Pre-literate societies had powerful memories. Without writing, human experience was transmitmentatited orally, in songs and stories. Rhythm, assonance and repetition, in sounds, gestures and movements, helped people to remember things and to pass them down the generations.
• attention spans. In oral societies, epic stories might take days to unfold. People were accustomed to long periods of attentive listening and participation as clans and gatherings.
• ancestry. The present and future were rooted in a deep sense of the past. The lessons of history in the stories of ancestors were continually present and remembered.
• connection to place. Aspects of landscape and location were endowed with meanings that invited awareness, recognition, appreciation and understanding of the natural world, and a settled sense of belonging to locality.
• physical awareness. Survival in a pre-industrial world meant living in and on the land in tune with local inhabitants and circumstances. The best teacher was the body with its multiple capacities of sight, sound, voice, touch, mood and sensitivity to circumstance.
• recognition and acceptance of difference. Co-dependent and interdependent communal life, with time-honoured divisions and patterns of labour, encouraged a natural association of distinctive talents and bodily capabilities with particular tasks and activities.
• group synergy. Many activities were collaborative rather than solitary. In shared activities people could bring their recognised differences together to make an unmerged unity that was greater than the sum of its parts

All these characteristics have been traced by anthropologists and ethnologists and are still visible among indigenous societies and their descendants today. They are listed here not to idealize early humans, but to be able to recognise how our faculties and our relational sensitivities have been influenced and altered, emphasising some capabilities and de-emphasizing others, over thousands of years of human existence.

So how has literacy and modernization changed us?

1. Disconnection. Literacy began a long process of encouraging separation from the real world and from lived experience. This effect was famously foreseen by Socrates from his time much closer to the world of orality, nearly 2500 years ago. Text — increasingly available in variety and quantity unimaginable even a century before our own — is now the go-to medium for recorded experience, knowledge, storytelling, news, opinion and communication. Text is a disembodied medium that demands absorption. It’s hard to read (or write) with divided attention. When you’re with text you’re not with anything or anyone else. Instead you’re in the world of the author. As you are with this piece.
2. Individualism. The notion of the atomised, self-enquiring and self-determining individual is a relatively recent invention, showing up powerfully in the philosophical explorations of René Descartes around 400 years ago. In the wake of Descartes’ assertion of individual choice and decision-making capacity, philosophy, education and public policy all have become focused on the individual as the unit of analysis and concern. What individualism does is to invite a preoccupation with self that draws a person’s attention away from others and the world. In a society of competing individuals, the cultivation, articulation and maintenance of selfhood and identity becomes an important task — something that consumes significant mental and emotional energy. Institutions in most domains now claim individualized values like personal freedom and autonomy as inalienable human rights — however unattainable or inappropriate they are in practice.
3. Aboutness. Literacy has encouraged mentalization and conceptualization. With the help of the written word, we can form and exchange elaborate models and theories of the world. Moreover, the perspective of science and discovery positions the individual as separate from the object of study. We talk ‘about’ the world and its events and circumstances as something ‘over there’ that we are distant from and can consider objectively. Such a posture of detachment reinforces our mentalization and at the same time suppresses the importance of our own physical engagement with the world and the effect it has on ourselves. ‘Aboutness’ talk is depersonalized, analytical and unemotional. It favours a lofty tone, and often uses the passive voice to give the author or speaker an air of elevated authority and certainty.
4. Opinionizing. Alone among his contemporaries, Kierkegaard saw the rise of printed newspapers in the early 1800’s as a misfortune because, he explained, it would give people the opportunity to form opinions about happenings far distant from themselves to which they would have no personal commitment. Empty opinions would preoccupy people and distract them from their immediate surroundings and responsibilities. Today we imagine that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” on any matter. Entire industries have been built to promote the formation and opposition of opinions about any subject or anyone who does or says anything. Like selfhood, this activity absorbs precious mental and emotional energy at the cost of physical presence and attention to the living world of our everyday being. When people meet, a reflex action can be to exchange opinions — often dead, overbaked statements — rather than glimpses of their own, local, live experiences, from which the possibility of fresh insights can arise. The suppression of authentic personal experience in favour of hearsay and rumour is a striking feature of modern times. And with the rise of social media, opinionizing rapidly condenses into fantasies of socially toxic and and divisive conspiracies.
5. Education as mental fluency. The three ‘r’s — reading, riting and rithmetic — have been the foundation of schooling since Victorian times. The core of our educational practices remains the cultivation of our mental capacities: our logic and reason, our verbal and written expression, and our analytical abilities. We admire quick, confident and persuasive talk. We evaluate, stream and reward learners according to their intellectual prowess. Our physical and artistic capacities are channelled into subordinate domains. In our individualized, competitive institutions of learning, our relational abilities are largely irrelevant and overlooked. We notice and reward learners as team members on the sports field, but seldom in the classroom. In this way, intellectual dominance and verbal capability become instruments of power and authority.
6. Detachment from the body. Our physicality — all of the manifest dimensionality of our physical, relational selves — is studied as an object of curiosity, but without any practical engagement with its capacities. By seeing it as an object, we mentalize our body and dismiss it from our conscious awareness. In contrast to their view of our orderly, rational mental selves, the Victorians saw our bodies as disturbing and uncontrollable — the potential sites of unfathomable weakness and breakdown. And even for the Greeks, the body was ‘base’ and the head was above and precedent (air over earth). We retain echoes of this mistrust and even disgust in our sense of our bodies as objects beneath the gaze of our higher mental selves. More recently we have channelled objectification into instrumentalization. Now we are seeing our bodies as manifestations of social acceptance, and we push, prod and sculpt them at the gym and the cosmetic surgery to attempt to make them conform to some idealized fantasy. In everyday discourse, our bodies are simply containers for our minds.

What I’m describing here is a long-term, systematic retreat from presence and engagement with the complexities and spontaneous possibilities of the physical world, in favour of living in our heads and reliance on our entrained and compartmentalized imaginations. By this means we have reduced ourselves to a shrunken version of our original humanity, dwelling in a shadow world of surging thoughts and assumptions that afford us only a heavily filtered and shrouded experience of the real world.

Our diminishment in this way has serious consequences for our survival. For example, we no longer trust the rich and multilayered evidence of our senses in our everyday encounters. As human animals, we have the capacity to read one another in finely nuanced judgements of voice, gesture and mood to divine the other’s intentions, and respond accordingly. We don’t even need to hear another person’s words to know what they are about and how best to proceed. But living in our heads as we do, we no longer heed what our bodies are telling us. Instead we often resort to stereotypes and fantasies of identity such as differences of skin colour, clothing, religion or accent — to determine our responses. Because we no longer trust our own judgement, we have lost our capacity to trust others.

Such crippled habits of behaviour help to explain why right-wing hate groups are on the rise around the world, and the shocking and tragic deaths of innocent US African-Americans at the hands of white law-enforcement agencies that has propelled Black Lives Matter into a worldwide movement. They also explain our indifference to global warming and our resort to antagonism and argument in place of action. A society whose responsive capacities have been stifled becomes a petri dish for fear and hatred. Without the capacity for careful and caring acts of relationship, we become trapped in bubbles of uncomprehending isolation and anxiety.

Barack Obama, May 10 2020: ‘What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well.’

This is the global challenge that we now face. Yet there’s no single entity or moment in history to blame for our predicament. All of the institutions and structures of our present human world are combining to reinforce our habits of human diminishment. So it’ll be a big job to shake them off and devise a new path forward.

Forward to: 5 Graces — Part 2: A new beginning for education and learning

• In this next part I set out an approach to education and learning considered as a practice of improving human responsiveness. Responsiveness is explained as a spectrum of interconnected capabilities in two dimensions — first physical, and then relational. I give examples from group interaction — the focus of the proposed learning approach — for each element of both dimensions. Finally I suggest that our individually distinctive ways of being in the world — our phenomenological differences — can become the touchstone for human synergy and collaboration.

And lastly to: 5 Graces — Part 3: Jumping together into a new river

• Tyson Yunkaporta and the yarns he tells in his book Sand Talk are the inspiration for a proposed set of patterns — I’m calling them Five Graces — that weave distinctive physical and relational orientations into linked capabilities that give strength and power to any group endeavour. I set out a work programme called Entangled Bodies that reveals and liberates these under-developed capabilities, and then I invite collaboration and experimentation with groups of people who feel ready to work with us in building a new learning practice aimed at developing what my friend John Shotter described as ‘poised resourcefulness’.