‘Imagination is never in power’ is a wonderful opening provocation, which for the most part seems correct (although ‘rarely in power’ feels better). But, of course, we inhabit a world where different imaginaries are vying for power. The futures envisaged by the tech-oligarchs are certainly driven by science fiction imaginaries. Their worlds are cyberpunk ones of ‘network states’, corporate feudalism, transhuman fusion and roving AIs, or else more distant futures of space-colonization and post-scarcity “utopias” like Ian M Banks’ Culture, Neil Asher’s Polity or the Federation of Star Trek. The battle for the imagination is very much on.
Perversely, while d'Eaubonne’s ‘only a feminist movement is capable of saving women and Earth’ may be true, there is a desperate need to overcome all of those imaginaries where saving women and the Earth barely seem to matter at all. More important for far too many are the free flow of capital (and the imaginary of money), the maximization of personal power (and the settling of grievances) and the valorization of inhuman cognition (and the creation of AGI). Clearly we need stories that select for life over power, that promote empathy and care, that champion biophilia rather than necropolitics. So, yes, reproductive multilateralism. I’ll try and imagine that - perhaps it can be combined with Arne Naess's biospheric egalitarianism or Freya Mathews' bio-proportionality.
All well and good in theory, and certainly appealing on an emotional level. I have to wonder, however, about the biogeophysical limits (especially in regard to the energy and resources to achieve all this) and how far into ecological overshoot we already appear to be.
Thank you for this. It is an exceptional gift of care and careful thought and writing. My immediate response is one of gratitude and solidarity. I am reminded more and more that how we treat Mother Earth is how we treat ourselves and each other. We collectively do not move lovingly upon and within our Mother Earth. We move with absolute disregard for her, and even with a kind of hateful spite.
The ways our civilization teaches us are normal ways to live and move and have our being within the body of Mother Earth are life-terminating ways of being.
There is no generativity where there is no love. We have an over-supply of God-like technology which we do not understand and which we use mostly in ecocidal and genocidal ways.
The current global metacrisis is a crisis of spirit and relationship.
I am not fatalistic - nor do I despair - even though I know that the odds are that our species is already locked in to a course that will kill most of the life on planet earth within a few decades.
We currently worship and glorify narcissistic criminal sociopaths, necropolitics, and brutal torture. Rape, pillage and plunder are our core cultural paradigms.
Generativity will come - if it comes at all - through the narrow ways of tenderness, compassion, vulnerability, and presence-with rather than tyranny, indifference, armoredness, and power-over.
“Engaged surrender” is one way that I think Dougald Hine has used described what I mean when I point to the path of absolute vulnerability.
I do not despair. The Metacrisis is here to teach us that we are here to love. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else. Only love.
I trust the very body of the Universe to fold us in - come what may. We belong and are beloved eternally. That never changes. When we move away from tyranny and into tenderness, away from cruelty and into compassion, away from enmity and into empathy, away from power-over and into presence-with - that is when we become fully human and fully alive.
We are not here to build great eternal empires on earth or throughout space. We are here to love. We enter the eternal kingdom-dom of love only in each moment, as we choose to love. Someday, we - and our species - will tip over. I trust that as part of the process too.
Your writing today has inspired some strong responses. Thank you again for continuing on with your deep and persistent empathetic inquiry!
“the development of organic social systems which empower us to actively participate in the creation of our own lives. “
There is SO MUCH to unpack in the 19 words!
We have to do that unpacking using poetry, because presented in prose it quickly becomes dense and impenetrable, as a defense about becoming fractured by punctuation that creates pauses where the reader can misread the meaning of the writing by inserting the meaning we want to see, based on what we think we already know, rather than hearing the meaning that is actually being offered for our consideration, as an alternative to, and possibly an improvement upon, that which we already think we know
Let’s start with “the creation of our own lives”,
and sit with that ambition
in quiet contemplation,
until the realization slowly builds
within our own personal and private sense
of our own personal and private selves,
that this is, in fact, our essential way of being human in the world:
we each create for ourselves,
personally and privately,
our own personal and private world
in which we live our own best lives,
personally and privately,
as best we can under the circumstances then prevailing.
We create that personal and private world by choosing
from among the possibilities that are made available to us for choosing
within the social and pubic world that we all create,
together,
socially
and publicly,
by our participation
in institutions of enterprise and exchange
for putting technology,
as language for talking about practical knowledge of how the world about us works,
and how we can do the work of taking the world about us as we find it,
and changing it to be more a way we choose to make it,
into action
creating the social and public world that we all share
out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born.
We do actively participate in the creation of our own personal and private world.
But our choices are limited by what is on offer, its fitness to our purposes and its price-for-performance profile. Contrained by its practical availability to us. And also by our ability to pay.
Freedom from having to pay is a recurring theme I read in (or read into?) your presentation of an imagined future, but choice involves work and work requires energy. There is in everything a price to be paid. The real question is fairness in the ability to pay the price.
Fairness
is a design consideration
in all our
sociologies of social choosing
what you call "social systems",
but which are, in fact, human social institutions
that exist only because we, as people make them,
and support them by participating in them,
accepting their authority
to exercise agency
over the curation of the social and public world
that we all build, together,
out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born,
and out of which also, we each curate (the world “create” feels problematic here)
out of the possibilities that our public world,
curated by our social institutions,
make available to us,
from which we then can choose.
Each if these social institutions for making social choices, socially, about the shared world in which we all live, is constituted by humans - they do not exist in Nature - with agency, authority and accountability for their exercise of authority true to their agency.
We are living today within a failure of institutional accountability.
First, appreciation as always for the provocation of imagination. Second, a recommendation to readers to check out Ruha Benjamin's splendid little book, IMAGINATION: A Manifesto. Third, this piece is so timely as I wrung my hands in miserable complicity reading Francesca Albanese's special report to the UN on the economy of occupation becoming one of genocide. The inexorable intermingling of capitalism and death/war that I long not to collude with makes your imaginary vision of a multilateralism of care all the more potent.
Resonances with the (now a little old) book I am reading by Kim Stanley Robinson ‘New York 2140’
But also his early mars series, and how he imagines humans to be able to make responsible social institutions that allow for, or actively are based on, care and support.
We need these visions. We need to have faith they can be real and true, so we can walk the muddy windy rocky path towards them.
Wonderful thoughts, Rachel! Along this line I'll point out that since the US is responsible for about 25% of the historical CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, the world may eventually expect us to take in about 25% of the Climate Catastrophe Migrants (yes, this could be a thing, CCM) who can no longer live in their homeland. Karma works...
‘Imagination is never in power’ is a wonderful opening provocation, which for the most part seems correct (although ‘rarely in power’ feels better). But, of course, we inhabit a world where different imaginaries are vying for power. The futures envisaged by the tech-oligarchs are certainly driven by science fiction imaginaries. Their worlds are cyberpunk ones of ‘network states’, corporate feudalism, transhuman fusion and roving AIs, or else more distant futures of space-colonization and post-scarcity “utopias” like Ian M Banks’ Culture, Neil Asher’s Polity or the Federation of Star Trek. The battle for the imagination is very much on.
Perversely, while d'Eaubonne’s ‘only a feminist movement is capable of saving women and Earth’ may be true, there is a desperate need to overcome all of those imaginaries where saving women and the Earth barely seem to matter at all. More important for far too many are the free flow of capital (and the imaginary of money), the maximization of personal power (and the settling of grievances) and the valorization of inhuman cognition (and the creation of AGI). Clearly we need stories that select for life over power, that promote empathy and care, that champion biophilia rather than necropolitics. So, yes, reproductive multilateralism. I’ll try and imagine that - perhaps it can be combined with Arne Naess's biospheric egalitarianism or Freya Mathews' bio-proportionality.
This is a breath of fresh air and a beacon of hope. Thank you.
Yasss, I love this vision and can't wait for your book!
All well and good in theory, and certainly appealing on an emotional level. I have to wonder, however, about the biogeophysical limits (especially in regard to the energy and resources to achieve all this) and how far into ecological overshoot we already appear to be.
Thank you for this. It is an exceptional gift of care and careful thought and writing. My immediate response is one of gratitude and solidarity. I am reminded more and more that how we treat Mother Earth is how we treat ourselves and each other. We collectively do not move lovingly upon and within our Mother Earth. We move with absolute disregard for her, and even with a kind of hateful spite.
The ways our civilization teaches us are normal ways to live and move and have our being within the body of Mother Earth are life-terminating ways of being.
There is no generativity where there is no love. We have an over-supply of God-like technology which we do not understand and which we use mostly in ecocidal and genocidal ways.
The current global metacrisis is a crisis of spirit and relationship.
I am not fatalistic - nor do I despair - even though I know that the odds are that our species is already locked in to a course that will kill most of the life on planet earth within a few decades.
We currently worship and glorify narcissistic criminal sociopaths, necropolitics, and brutal torture. Rape, pillage and plunder are our core cultural paradigms.
Generativity will come - if it comes at all - through the narrow ways of tenderness, compassion, vulnerability, and presence-with rather than tyranny, indifference, armoredness, and power-over.
“Engaged surrender” is one way that I think Dougald Hine has used described what I mean when I point to the path of absolute vulnerability.
I do not despair. The Metacrisis is here to teach us that we are here to love. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else. Only love.
I trust the very body of the Universe to fold us in - come what may. We belong and are beloved eternally. That never changes. When we move away from tyranny and into tenderness, away from cruelty and into compassion, away from enmity and into empathy, away from power-over and into presence-with - that is when we become fully human and fully alive.
We are not here to build great eternal empires on earth or throughout space. We are here to love. We enter the eternal kingdom-dom of love only in each moment, as we choose to love. Someday, we - and our species - will tip over. I trust that as part of the process too.
Your writing today has inspired some strong responses. Thank you again for continuing on with your deep and persistent empathetic inquiry!
“the development of organic social systems which empower us to actively participate in the creation of our own lives. “
There is SO MUCH to unpack in the 19 words!
We have to do that unpacking using poetry, because presented in prose it quickly becomes dense and impenetrable, as a defense about becoming fractured by punctuation that creates pauses where the reader can misread the meaning of the writing by inserting the meaning we want to see, based on what we think we already know, rather than hearing the meaning that is actually being offered for our consideration, as an alternative to, and possibly an improvement upon, that which we already think we know
Let’s start with “the creation of our own lives”,
and sit with that ambition
in quiet contemplation,
until the realization slowly builds
within our own personal and private sense
of our own personal and private selves,
that this is, in fact, our essential way of being human in the world:
we each create for ourselves,
personally and privately,
our own personal and private world
in which we live our own best lives,
personally and privately,
as best we can under the circumstances then prevailing.
We create that personal and private world by choosing
from among the possibilities that are made available to us for choosing
within the social and pubic world that we all create,
together,
socially
and publicly,
by our participation
in institutions of enterprise and exchange
for putting technology,
as language for talking about practical knowledge of how the world about us works,
and how we can do the work of taking the world about us as we find it,
and changing it to be more a way we choose to make it,
into action
creating the social and public world that we all share
out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born.
We do actively participate in the creation of our own personal and private world.
But our choices are limited by what is on offer, its fitness to our purposes and its price-for-performance profile. Contrained by its practical availability to us. And also by our ability to pay.
Freedom from having to pay is a recurring theme I read in (or read into?) your presentation of an imagined future, but choice involves work and work requires energy. There is in everything a price to be paid. The real question is fairness in the ability to pay the price.
Fairness
is a design consideration
in all our
sociologies of social choosing
what you call "social systems",
but which are, in fact, human social institutions
that exist only because we, as people make them,
and support them by participating in them,
accepting their authority
to exercise agency
over the curation of the social and public world
that we all build, together,
out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born,
and out of which also, we each curate (the world “create” feels problematic here)
out of the possibilities that our public world,
curated by our social institutions,
make available to us,
from which we then can choose.
Each if these social institutions for making social choices, socially, about the shared world in which we all live, is constituted by humans - they do not exist in Nature - with agency, authority and accountability for their exercise of authority true to their agency.
We are living today within a failure of institutional accountability.
And the source of that failure
is us.
First, appreciation as always for the provocation of imagination. Second, a recommendation to readers to check out Ruha Benjamin's splendid little book, IMAGINATION: A Manifesto. Third, this piece is so timely as I wrung my hands in miserable complicity reading Francesca Albanese's special report to the UN on the economy of occupation becoming one of genocide. The inexorable intermingling of capitalism and death/war that I long not to collude with makes your imaginary vision of a multilateralism of care all the more potent.
Deep bows and thanks Rachel.
Resonances with the (now a little old) book I am reading by Kim Stanley Robinson ‘New York 2140’
But also his early mars series, and how he imagines humans to be able to make responsible social institutions that allow for, or actively are based on, care and support.
We need these visions. We need to have faith they can be real and true, so we can walk the muddy windy rocky path towards them.
Wonderful thoughts, Rachel! Along this line I'll point out that since the US is responsible for about 25% of the historical CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, the world may eventually expect us to take in about 25% of the Climate Catastrophe Migrants (yes, this could be a thing, CCM) who can no longer live in their homeland. Karma works...