Authentic listening to real individuals

I was once staying in a friend’s house in France, on holiday. My carefully chosen reading was World Turned Inside Out by Tom Cheetham. Also staying at the house were a married couple, both senior schoolteachers. They wanted to know what the book was about, and were unimpressed, verging on scathing, when I couldn’t tell them. In their world something that could not be articulated was not worth spending time on. The book is about Islamic Mysticism and the magnum opus by Henri Corbin Alone with the Alone. From my perspective the very inexpressibility of thought patterns and practices in quotidien English was the point.

We could equally talk about the work and writings of Temple Grandin, a severely autistic woman in the US who has had a dramatic effect on how animals are handled. People are bemused and impressed by insights and results from a pattern of thinking that is inaccessible to most. Or we could speak of Greta Thunberg who even as an autistic child could take on the sleazy power players of our world and own them.

I have long remarked in myself a difference in thinking when my body is in ketosis. Apparently our brains go into ketosis after six or eight hours of not eating: for most people, every night. The expression “sleep on it” may point to a solving of problems in a different thinking mode. People also report a more spiritual thinking style when in a deep fast.

The ancient world had a practice called incubation. To heal a city an envoy would bring back a law from the spirit world. Incubation consisted of a fast of several days in a dark cave with a guide to navigate the spirit world. I love the image of getting as far from normal and conventional thinking as possible.

A feature here is to avoid what is expected by others. Which does absolutely not mean that this is individual and heroic. Thinking shared among minds, developed jointly, is uniquely powerful. I am not a crossword person, but I used to sit beside my elderly mother to do The Times jumbo crossword, and just by my sitting there she could do clues which otherwise defeated her.

As the level and sophistication of narrative control in our society becomes ever greater, our need to make sense independently of the commentariat becomes daily greater. It doesn’t matter what the content is, we need fresh air.

Bateson and Laing

Gregory Bateson spent several years developing a systematic family therapy, looking to analyse conversations in dysfunctional families to see where the dysfunction was located. In such family systems there is generally a person who is perceived to be the problem: they are not! And from that insight it is generally concluded that it is always the mother: it is not. Actually analysing the patterns of communication is intractable if it is done rigorously.

We see here, neatly wrapped, that in a family we may be wrapped in a system of communication that does not allow the structural situation we are in to be understood. We cannot assume that the self-assessments of people’s family situations can withstand sympathetic evaluation against other accounts. Some of the roots of diverse thinking surely lie in these compelling but irreconcilable accounts.

R.D. Laing1 has the same pattern but looking at people diagnosed with severe mental illness. His question is always whether madness lies in these individuals or in their enclosing society. He was able to show that in alternative residential social settings the symptoms exhibited by the “mental illness” were strongly modified and ameliorated. We cannot assume that extreme and vexing symptoms belong to the person showing them.2

Getting away from function

There is a long history of people wanting to assign characteristics and functions to areas of the brain — from phrenology on. And we need to be aware of the strong current of eugenics right through the last century and into this one: inferior people with inferior brains. I liked a recent tweet saying how odd it is that intelligent people think that they know more and can make better decisions when the first thing intelligence shows us is that we don’t know.

We can move from the dysfunction all about us to the notion of dysregulation. There is a clear and measurable distinction between brains that are regulated as designed and which are working in a coherent pattern, and brains that are more chaotic in their active connections and can be said to be dysregulated. We don’t have to talk about content or function to understand dissociated patterns of thinking, that may produce unwanted or distressing symptoms. This is not a value judgment: it is a description of a state which may also be self-reported.

In a recent talk by Lilianne Mujica Parodi she shows how the speed and effectiveness of messages between different brain regions is affected by whether the cells are fuelled by ketones (fast) or glucose (slow). We can glimpse that how our thinking feels may indeed reflect how the internal regulation is working. Without any loss of individuality or diversity, with no sense of normative thinking I am able to think my thoughts or our thoughts more or less clearly.

So, the quality and clarity of our mental processes is very much an aspect of our metabolic health. That should not be controversial or a surprise, but we all tend to gaslight people for their perceived divergence from our norms. It would be wonderful to be able to value people for the clarity of their different responses to the world around us. The tendency of people in power to define difference from their views as problematic, criminal, and ill is itself so sick.

Meeting our cultures

If a colleague of mine with ADHD has trouble getting to meetings on time, whose problem is that? Does it show that she can’t meet expectations of punctuality and is thus deficient or defective? Or does it show that our notions of meeting are so inflexible that they risk excluding some people they really need to include? When you think what a colossal waste of time most meetings are, it is far from obvious how to go about answering such questions. If we can only run corporate life by the clock, who would know what we lose?3

Rebecca Solnit in her wonderful Field Guide to Getting Lost talks about ways of losing ourselves physically and literally. On a field trip to the far north of Norway I was walking in wilderness using a map made by the USAF in WW2. I came across a whole deep valley and chain of lakes missing from the map! Navigating the terrain with no guide from map or person was indeed liberating, even formative. We need to drop our props. The world says we stay safe by knowing where we are: but do we really know where our maps lead?

John Raven’s research in many countries round the world found the parents of schoolchildren all had as their top priority that the next generation should think better than their own. And there are precisely no education systems with this as a goal.

Our dominant culture wants to compare individuals’ ability to think. This person is better than that person at maths. This person is more creative than that one. First let us say that Gregory Bateson as an anthropologist said there is no way we can use our own categories, such as economy and culture, to describe newly contacted tribes. (Spoiler: no-one listened.) Then let’s say that some unlikely candidates have turned out to be maths geniuses or revolutionary artists. If I want to say that Alice is better than Brian in some way that says lots about me and very little about them. And although there is sometime a nod in the direction of collective wisdom, it is always secondary.

In The Dawn of Everything Graeber and Wengrow have essentially an endless list of our prejudices about the past and the evidence that those prejudices are ill-founded. The nature of our mistakes are summed up in the term “primitive”. We don’t allow the notion that other cultures were more sophisticated than ours in many, many ways. I think there are modern studies showing how nationality is a key determinant in whether researchers can get their papers published in the best journals.

Compelling insights

There is a disgustingly non-PC joke about an Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman going to the guillotine. For the Englishman the guillotine fails and he is freed. The Scotsman, too. The the Irishman says “wait, I think I can see what the problem is”. Sometimes we have insights that are never going to work in our interests but are still compelling. If we celebrate diversity of thinking this is going to happen much more often.

I recall a story about a transatlantic flight in an aircraft with a jet engine in the tail. A shard from the engine severed all the controls to the aircraft tail. The aircraft was stable but no-one knew how to land it. There was time available to get ideas from the best pilots and their simulators around the world, but in the denouement the pilot discovered for himself how to crash land without killing everyone. In a polycrisis world, who knows what we are relying on people to be able to do.

What allows compelling insights to come to fruition? How can your unique style of creative tension and my irreverence towards official narratives come to something together? My sense is that there is a gentleness and fierceness of spirit, an uncompromising but loving patience that we might see in Wendell Berry for instance that is its own truth. The truths that we need must be lived. It cannot be about what other people should do.

Angels and archangels

At the age of four, in the nursery nativity, I intoned “Don’t be afraid Mary, you are going to have a baby”, apparently gruff even then. Mary’s defining quality in being able to hear Gabriel was complete humility. We wouldn’t be able to see an angel if we met one because their intelligence transcends ours. I would link this to the practice of incubation described above.

It is vexing to try and find language for a humble openness to what we do not and cannot know. The opening vignette above describes how people close themselves to anything that can upturn their understanding of the world. My own struggles here on a Welsh hill smallholding are to understand what abundance is possible when I circumvent shoddy agricultural practices. Just as we all struggle to find the health that is possible for us when we avoid damaging myths and downright lies about food and pharmaceutical products.

The angels of course know what is possible for us, and how full or wonders that can be. And the higher angels know how society can be healed too. We have failed to learn from societies that have done it better. We have told ourselves that sickness and disability accompany ageing. We have despoiled the natural world in the name of profit (!) and cheap food. And we cannot find the humility to hear the angels and what they might want to say.

Gentle people are asking what labels do. If you have a label of ADHD or PTSD or major depression, does that help me to hear you and you to make your points and contributions? We have normalised oppression and violence: sensibilities towards that need to be heard. Equally we need to hear of joy and find it for ourselves. The drab and the uniform drag us down. The quirky, the unconventional and the downright weird may yet save us. After all, it’s the ‘unreasonable’ person who changes the world.4

1 Fun facts: The house in east London that Gandhi stayed in in 1931 late housed Laing’s experimental setup. One of Laing’s great achievements was to die while playing tennis in the south of France: what a way to go for a rebel.

2 The ORSC Systemic Coaching people talk about ‘voices of the system’ and how when a perceived-as-problematic member of a group is got rid of, another member of the group will often start voicing the same concerns, though perhaps more skillfully.

3 It’d be remiss not to mention James Scott’s notion of legibility, a kind of running by the clock that loses a great deal.

4 Shaw, of course. “The reasonable man (sic) adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”