Constellations of meaning
Have no doubts that a given set of observations and the actions that flow from them can be constellated in various ways. We are used to people asking us to take different perspectives on things, or even to use different lenses to see things. Here we want something even more relaxed, more like an optical illusion. You need to defocus, expand your mind, let go of purpose and urgency, and just be in different places where things make different sense. Know that your current clarity and insight can give way so easily to a different clarity and insight, and then to another. Cut the umbilical cord between your identity and what you believe to be true.[1]
Philip and I discussed the meanings of the meandering style these blogs have adopted. The way one thing leads to another and back to a start or a previous blog. The way there are unexpected resonances. The way synchronicities in my life and Philip’s expose the real meaning behind events many people never notice or simply dismiss.
People want to have a clear-cut logical argument that sets out the evidence for a position. I am increasingly of the view that such procedures and such writing is systematically misleading. It is what is performed in the world when the truth is to be obfuscated. And the reason the world works like this is that we need to shift our mental furniture. Logical argument and “compelling” evidence only gets you as far as a possible motivation to shift. When we tell ourselves we base our thinking on evidence we are misleading ourselves because in the real world there is plenty of evidence for overlapping and incompatible meanings. Live it!
The link between this description and spin and false news is imply that there are far more motivators and far more bullshit situations that call for obfuscation than there are situations calling for truth. The number of circumstances where making the truth plain is welcome and advantageous is becoming vanishingly small. Try that filter out on any book or film drama, and do an honest count!
We discussed fake news in https://medium.com/gentlyserious/how-to-suppress-the-truth-1f1ac8e55480
Readership reactions
There have been some more reactions from readers. They have the flavour that CICO (calories in, calories out) is simply basic physics and that if we harvest vegetables and so remove nutrients from the soil they will need replacing, which could be framed I suppose as basic chemistry. So let me reiterate what we are about here.
There are descriptions of the world that overturn our common sense creation of meanings. For Philip and I these descriptions have nearly infinite value. They allow us to construct other meanings and test out propositions that would never have crossed our minds. The more obvious and common sense a proposition, the harder it is to constellate meanings that contradict it. Which does not mean for a moment that common sense is right or wrong, just that it is in the way of proper fluid thinking.
Basic physics or basic chemistry is, well, basic. It is not sophisticated in its ability to illuminate the active, subtle world. If you are looking at the claims of a dodgy advertising claim, it may well be appropriate to dismiss it with a notion that basic physics doesn’t allow it to be true. Perhaps someone is advertising free energy or perpetual motion. But if someone has taken the trouble to stew with some different ideas for a day or a month and says “you know what, this is worth looking at with an open mind”, then to dismiss it is counter to the spirit of the exchange.[2]
I suppose if I think about the things I end up reading, they all have an edge to them. They are not magisterial textbooks or encyclopaedic tomes. They have an argument that tempts me to reject them, and the work that I do is to give them the benefit of the doubt long enough to understand a passionate point of view different to my own. We might, for example, get to explore Caliban and the Witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation by Silvia Federici who wants to say that capitalism always tends to enclose common land and enslave women, even today.
I am also on the lookout for points of view that expose basic thinking mistakes. I challenged Prof Trish Greenhalgh to give a public lecture exploring which medical beliefs would, if they were overturned, have the biggest impact on the rest of medical science. She had the grace at least to acknowledge the interest in doing so. If an awful lot rests on some proposition (call it basic physics or basic chemistry if you will) and that proposition has not had sustained scientific challenge and investigation, then in my world it is more likely to be wrong than right. Or at least there will be seriously interesting descriptions of the world that have differently constellated meanings.
In response to Caitlin Johnstone’s recent post on Medium, I Marvel, Jodi Thomas tweeted “I marvel at how every single person I meet contains a whole universe inside them that is as rich and as complex as the one inside me.” So, I need to say that I marvel at how well strangers can capture the thoughts that I struggle with.
Ideas are not abstract
I have been inspecting, breathing in, imaginatively engaging with, a small piece of land that might make a smallholding for our family. That engagement is full of the world-altering constellations of ideas that have been discussed in these blogs. But it is also full of immediate practical consequences, of likely pratfalls and embarrassing mistakes, amongst a small and tight knit community who implicitly I will be challenging. My ideas need not, in corporate-speak, to bite the road, but to actually enhance both the fertility of the soil and the immediate experience of the micro-climate. Commitment is of course first cousin to ideas worth having: commitment filters the ideas and commitment is the mother and father of new ideas worth having.
I saw a tweet by one of the heroes of the low carb revolution, Gary Fettke. He was banned from advising his surgical patients how not to lose limbs to diabetes. His mother died recently of liver disease and her doctors had her on a diet that killed her. Another person who had turned his health around on a keto diet said several members of his extended family had serious chronic conditions and that they tried to get him to eat their food, rather than accept that he had a solution to their illnesses. We treat ideas as abstract theories in order to distance ourselves from their immediate practical application, which is often life and death. Try to imagine your relatives dying from the doctor’s advice when you know what would work for them.
If you follow the keto diet crowd on Twitter there are many stories told as photos taken over five or ten years that show radical weight loss and also regained musculature and general fitness. Some of these stories get labelled as reverse aging. The point here is that there are many conventional and unconventional medicines and supplements that would like to make these claims: all you actually have to do is eat mainly meat. The medical establishment don’t comment on these anecdotes, simply because the establishment is a different tribe who can’t do these stunts.
We commented on the schismogenesis in this last week: https://medium.com/gentlyserious/false-values-driving-schismogenesis-d25b7b6c1a9b
Perhaps we should return to Allan Savory and the 40,000 elephants he had slaughtered to prevent over-grazing. He was trying to manage a situation that was out of control in a way he had the wrong idea about. His heart breaking, to him and still to us, mistake was a wrong idea, an idea about cause and effect that was both too linear and unsupported by evidence. He felt he must act[3] and has been regretting it ever since. Such ideas are better regarded as sense-making efforts, and to return to our opening injunction we must remember that there are multiple ways to make sense of any situation. It is more important to be able to play with sense-making than to go into overdrive with plans and “making it happen”.
If the response of a set of experts who feel that they own a field of knowledge is to suppress and repress alternative meanings, we know for certain that they are stuck with a single set of meanings. Of course it is awkward for any bureaucratic and institutional structure to allow its members to play with meanings that don’t have official sanction. But increasingly people write off the institution because it is incapable of listening. My relationship with GPs and the “experts” I have been referred to rests there. I cannot in all conscience deny what I know of my own body processes over the years in favour of a theory and ideas that don’t work for me. There are no obvious edges where I can say “well I trust my GP about these sorts of things and not about these other things”: you would have to have an encompassing theory in order to do that.
Meta-constellations
We have said many times that the world is not flat. There are constellations of observations that can have particular meanings for us. And there are constellations of those particular meanings that seem to belong together and give us some overarching meanings. The previous paragraph hints at these sorts of structures: how many time must a GP “fail to understand” (meaning one) before it feels as though the GP “doesn’t know” (overarching meaning). Once the overarching meaning is in place we need lots of talent at playing with different constellations to regain our ability to converse with the experts concerned.
One of my life patterns is to give people, colleagues, experts, the benefit of the doubt when I am unsure of my own understanding. When I say this, it sounds rather generous if not condescending of me because that is the meaning I am comfortable attaching to the pattern. An alternative description would be that I allow people to totally discredit and undermine themselves rather than taking responsibility for correcting a relationship as it progresses. I have had my fair share of bitter disputes and rifts that come about when I can no longer support the possibility that someone else might have a fair point. I am not proud of this.
To give an example I had a colleague who I supported and promoted and encouraged because it seemed to me she was doing good work and that the work was better when I persuaded her to trust herself and her abilities. This happened over some years. When I held an event under the auspices of the organisation she was running, the success of the event undermined her, I think, and led to her accusing me of withholding money that people had paid to attend. When I tried to get the organisation to deal with the implications of this accusation, they failed ignominiously. There were then a different set of meta-meanings in which things that I had supported and valued became poison to the relationships. Painful even now.
Some people work the other way round. They attach to meta-meanings that they choose to believe in and interpret the local events and situations within that framework. I guess we could call that dogma, a singular lack of constellating. The police apply the law even-handedly. Schools do their best to educate children. The GP understands how your body works. It seems to me that these a priori views inhibit our ability to play with meanings. If you hold any constellation dogmatically, the pain of looking at actual events and situations with any creativity is just too great. It seems to help to have a framework to bring some semblance of order into a chaotic experiential world, but these filters are a sort of death by degrees.
[1] This might be easier in some languages other than English, in the same spirit that gave rise to E-Prime, a variant of English that omits the verb ‘to be’. In French, one ‘has fear’ rather than ‘is afraid’, though this doesn’t extend beyond a handful of similar phrases. In Spanish there are two verbs for ‘to be’, roughly one that expresses identity (ser) and one that expresses current/temporary state (estar), which can give rise to great subtlety of meaning. Italian has a not dissimilar situation with the verbs essere and stare.
[2] Working as an Enterprise Business Architect, I sometimes think that almost all of the value is in having conversations. Only today someone asked whether we should worry about the different levels of a model being inconsistent, and at this point the answer is no — a conversation around the reasons for the mismatch, what might be missing, misunderstood, etc, has far more value than presenting a polished document.
[3] How often have you been in a meeting that runs along these lines: Something must be done. Here is something. Let’s do that then.
