They chose Berkeley Square. This is in Mayfair, a global centre for hedge funds, offshore capital and the super rich. So the peaceful occupation of a green space at its heart had obvious symbolism. But the square has other resonances too. It features in a song that almost everybody in Britain knows. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, composed in 1938 and made famous in 1940 by Vera Lynn, is a love song associated, in the imagined national story, with a moment of extreme crisis and danger. Further, the nightingale is totemic for those concerned about wildlife. This species, celebrated for more than two thousand years for its beautiful song, is in catastrophic decline in Britain. (Populations are relatively robust elsewhere for now.)

On display in the square, and speaking to a troubled history, was a painting by the artist ATM of a nightingale on the tail fin of a Wellington bomber. In May 1942 the BBC discontinued its annual broadcast of nightingale song when it was feared that the drone of bombers passing overhead might forewarn the Nazi military. The painting will be featured in a new film The Last Song of the Nightingale.

“To understand nature we have to love it,”  Sam Lee, a folk singer and member of The Nest Collective, told a crowd of two to four thousand. He conveyed greetings and support from Sarah Darwin, a botanist and great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, who works in Berlin — a city where nightingales are thriving to the extent that their songs, which can be so loud as to break EU law, are an annoyance to some Berliners.

Lee led the crowd in practice runs of an old French round about the nightingale, and an adapted version of Lynn’s schmaltzy, seductive hit, later reprised with a string band. If it wasn’t a folk song before, Lee later said, it is now. Lee also highlighted Let Nature Sing, a campaign by the RSPB to get a track of pure birdsong including the nightingale to number one in the UK charts. The song can be streamed or downloaded here.

An Extinction Rebellion organiser reflected on the significance of the evening of meditation, song and poetry. “Nightingales sing loudest when it is darkest,” she said, “and this is the darkest moment for humanity. We come together not in fear but in hope and love.” There was praise for the Metropolitan Police — “the most light-handed police force in the world.”

The composer Cosmo Sheldrake joined Sam Lee in a performance of Children of Darkness.  Sheldrake then mustered all those assembled into tranches to sing the names of disappeared species on different notes. The dissonant but arresting ecophony that this produced was followed by two minutes of silence. The event continued with songs and poems in small and larger groups, coming together again for a last sing.

Alongside the global youth climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion has commanded significant attention over the last few weeks even as horrors dominate the news cycle. In response, some politicians and others in positions of power have said they recognise the need for change.  There is talk of a Green New Deal. The Scottish and Welsh governments have declared a climate emergency, and the Labour party  wants the UK to do the same. According to a poll by Greenpeace, 76% of people in Britain say that they would cast their vote differently to protect the planet.  What follows in practice remains to be seen. The climate and anti-extinction movements themselves are evolving. One thing seems sure: those present in Berkeley Square on Monday night showed that love, music and story can play a vital role in our possible futures.

Caspar Henderson is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings and an Associate at Perpsectiva

Photo by Hugh Warwick

I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to be arrested this week. That feels like such an odd thing to write. I’ve been on plenty of marches and done years of NGO lobbying, but I’ve never been involved in direct action protest before. By the time this post goes up on Perspectiva’s blog, I will be blocking a road somewhere in the middle of London, possibly with many thousands of other people who are heeding Extinction Rebellion’s call to fill the streets until the government acknowledges the climate and ecological crises we are in. By the time you read this, some of my hitherto law-abiding friends and neighbours might already have been arrested.

It’s not because it’s a complicated decision that I haven’t decided yet. The tactics, about which Extinction Rebellion is open, are very simple. There are three options to bring change, they say. There’s the kind of campaigning – lobbying, petitions, letters, meetings, marches – that for decades has failed to reduce carbon emissions and the rate of destruction of nonhuman species and habitats. I did many years of that sort of campaigning and became depressed about its limitations: that it can slowly change individual laws and policies but not make the necessary systemic shifts. At the other extreme there’s violent revolution, which as everybody knows does not end well. And then, as a third option, there’s mass nonviolent civil disobedience, which is what Extinction Rebellion is proposing.

If a small proportion of the population – 3.5% according to the research into previous nonviolent resistance movements that Extinction Rebellion is leaning on – rises up in nonviolent civil disobedience, change can happen. There are many things to say about the differences between the civil rights movement, in which people were mobilising and standing up against already-existing omnipresent threats to their lives, and the type of environmental and climate activism in developed countries where privileged and often white people are still only starting to realise that what feels like a looming existential threat to them has long been an existential threat to communities of colour and other less privileged people.

But as an alternative to the grinding work of policy campaigning or the disaster of violence, the XR route makes sense to me. It’s the first time an activist proposition has made sense for a long time, and it does so more because I know the other two won’t work, than because I’m particularly convinced that this route will: we clearly have to try it. My indecision about my arrestability is really quite boringly practical. We have small children, no extended family living nearby, my husband and I both work part-time in order to share earning and childcare duties, and if I end up having to travel three hours to London to attend court – or worse – when my husband needs to be away for work, we’re kind of stuck. We have reciprocal relationships with kind neighbours, but I wouldn’t want to impose my energetic three year old on any of them, nor deprive him of the company of those he knows best, for too long.

So in this dilemma I find myself weighing up two impossible-to-compare scenarios. The practicalities of childcare to cover a night in a police cell and court dates, against the possibility of halting the extinction of human and nonhuman life on earth. That’s what climate change and mass extinction do, once you take them seriously: they make everything else seem utterly ridiculous. And yet even as we’re trying to protect life in the future, we cannot entirely forget the life that we are living; I cannot leave a three and a six year old without care. Luckily there are many options for support I can give to others who are going to get themselves arrested, even if I don’t, so I will find a way to join in.

Activism is all about dilemmas. It puts its participants in dilemmas about how far to go, as I am currently experiencing. It puts its opponents in dilemmas about how to respond. The police next week will have to decide whether to let Extinction Rebellion bring London traffic to a standstill, allowing us to achieve our aims, or arrest us to clear us out, which will also allow us to achieve our aims.

Activism puts its audience, too, in dilemmas about whether to join in. I know people who are deeply worried by our ecological emergency, yet who cannot bring themselves to participate in Extinction Rebellion: they can’t see themselves behaving or looking ‘like that.’ The journalist and author Jamie Bartlett was talking about this unappealing side of activism in his book Radicals; the American activist and writers Jonathan Smucker despaired, in his recent book Hegemony How-To, of the clubhouse mentality which puts outsiders off.

I’ve been working on a project with Perspectiva called Beyond Activism and will be publishing a book at the end of this year, and a chapter of it online soon. We’re not beyond activism because it’s not needed: quite the opposite, in such a time of ecological and political breakdown. But I am hoping to get beyond some of the ways that we commonly think about activism. I’m starting from this observation that activists, by behaving as activists, can help to inoculate non-activists against wanting to take part, and am investigating what might be going on in the unconscious aspects of these interactions.

At the core of the Gandhian nonviolence that inspires Extinction Rebellion is the proposition that you can oppose and resist a system without dehumanising your opponents. Extinction Rebellion, a decentralised movement in which anyone can organise actions as long as they stick to the principles, is insistent on not blaming and shaming. Only by observing this principle can we avoid creating an ‘other’ on whom we end up projecting the unwanted, unacknowledged, perhaps less attractive parts of ourselves, since that route, as psychotherapists recognise, has always been the path to conflict. In Gandhi’s words, ‘It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself.[1]

I have enjoyed holding and working with this idea since joining my local XR group, after years of feeling that my activist calling was to call out the ‘bastards’ who were running the companies and banks and tax havens I was investigating as an NGO campaigner and journalist. But even within Extinction Rebellion’s principles and values, we still find ourselves inevitably in positions of opposition across a divide: the divide being, in this case, the banner that we are holding in front of us on a roadblock.

My local group engaged in some deep soul-searching after holding up the traffic in Exeter last month and experiencing utter fury from motorists. We might have been nonviolent in our words and thoughts, but the people held up at several junctions certainly weren’t. So we are still wondering about the possibility of finding common ground in such oppositional situations, common ground on which we can all share our experience of being frightened humans who are worried for the future. No doubt we will be continuing these discussions somewhere on a blocked road next week. Perhaps we will see you there.

Anthea Lawson leads Perspectiva’s Beyond Activism programme

[1] Fischer, Louis (ed.), The Essential Gandhi: An anthology of his writings on his life, work and ideas, Vintage, 1962, p87

In a recent article for New Statesman magazine, Richard Smyth suggested that modern writing on nature is haunted by the ghosts of fascism. In support of his case he cited various pieces of evidence including the fact that in a 2018 poll to choose the UK’s favourite nature book gave second place to Tarka the Otter (1927) by Henry Williamson — a ruralist, naturalist, naive and solitary who was also a fervent admirer or Adolf Hitler and Oswald Mosley.  Smyth suggested that such things are particularly troubling at a time when eco-fascism in the form endorsed by the Christchurch mass murderer Brenton Tarrant is on the march.

How one should consider the relationship between a love of nature and environmentalism on the one hand, and far-right ideology on the other? This is a question I touch on with care for at least two reasons. Firstly, because the emotions are often supercharged. Secondly, because a comment I made welcoming a version of Smyth’s article published in New Humanist last year may have ended a friendship.

Paul Kingsnorth, the author and co-founder of the Dark Mountain literary movement, had published a response to the film Arcadia. The film itself had been well received by some (see, for example, this review) though I had thought it poor and confused. I found Paul Kingsnorth’s response (which has been removed from the web) no better. Indeed, I agreed with someone who said its mythic vision of England read like something from the literary wing of UKIP. This was awkward because I have known and liked Paul for a long time, and admire some of his work. I have, however, had misgivings about aspects of the Dark Mountain manifesto, drawing as it does on the vision of the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who despaired for — or of — humanity.

That said, I also find things to disagree with in Smyth’s article. I won’t go into them all here, but here’s one:

the environmental activist George Monbiot has astutely adopted a quotation from Byron in the process of promoting a “rewilding” agenda in UK environmentalism: “I love not man the less, but nature more.” But (as so often) he is rowing somewhat against the current.

Again, I should be careful. George is a longtime friend. It’s not that he is not astute. He is — except for the time he persisted in trying to learn to play the penny whistle. It is, rather, that I would not put his choice of Byron’s line down to astuteness, or at least not primarily to that. My observation is that George is driven, firstly, by deep love for life and the living world, and is passionately committed to social justice. He has risked his life on behalf of oppressed people, and has applied his remarkable abilities and almost superhuman energy to trying to help protect what he loves.

I also disagree that George is rowing against the current, at least in terms of what I know as environmentalism — if by that one means those who take seriously the warnings from scientists and other experts who say that many of changes wrought by humanity on the living world are cause for serious concern and action.

There is plenty of scope to disagree over what should be the priorities in responding to pollution, climate change and ecosystem destruction. And it’s true that much of what we can reasonably term environmentalism — and the nature writing that is a source of energy and inspiration to some in that movement — is often rowing against the current of a political and economic system in which we live. But George is not rowing against the current of environmentalism. To continue with the metaphor in a slightly corny way, he may push the boat the further out than others, and it is possible (though in my view quite rare) that he gets waylaid in a side stream; but the contributions that he and others make to environmentalism are serious and useful, worthy of scrutiny and debate. A recent example is a proposal for ‘Natural Climate Solutions,’  which argues that ecological restoration has pivotal role to play in an effective response to rapid climate change.

Richard Smyth writes that “it might not be that nature writing, or ardent environmentalism more broadly, is in itself uniquely or even unusually vulnerable to fascism.” I would argue that the nature writing and environmentalism that I know is more likely to inoculate against tendencies that can lead to fascism.

Consider, first, the tenets and characteristics of fascism. There is disagreement about these, but one can do worse than start with a list compiled in 1995 by the author and cultural theorist Umberto Eco:

The cult of tradition
The rejection of modernism
The cult of action for action’s sake
Disagreement is seen as treason
Fear of difference
Appeal to a frustrated middle class
Obsession with a plot
An enemy who is at once too strong and too weak
Life is permanent warfare
Contempt for the weak
Everybody is educated to become a hero
Machismo
Selective populism
Newspeak

It could be interesting and useful to take these properties one by one and explore the extent to which any have found voice in various parts of environmental movements — multifarious and flawed as those have sometimes been. I am not going to do that here.  (I am well aware of some of the limits of this piece.) But I will assert that they are pretty much the opposite of any characteristics of an environmentalism worth the name, which recognises and welcomes the need for change, which places a very high value on truth (especially scientific truth), which is passionate about social justice for all, which stresses the centrality of non-violence, which is open to uncertainty and delights in diversity, which thinks ecologically, and embraces restraint, humility and good relation. These are qualities we find in the greatest nature writing, from Henry David Thoreau onwards. They are present in the work of contemporary British nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane. And it is these qualities, I believe, which one finds in movements such a Sunrise in the United States, in Extinction Rebellion in the UK and beyond, and in the school strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg internationally. Consider, for example the voices in Matthew Green’s FT profile  ‘Extinction Rebellion: inside the new climate resistance‘.

This is not to say there are no dangers. Numbness, learned helplessness and neurotic distraction characterise our culture, and creep inside almost all of us at times — a mildew of the soul, or a raging infection. There is a strain of despair, misanthropy or quietism among some who call or have called themselves environmentalists. David Wallace-Wells has written well about some of this in his essential book The Uninhabitable Earth. And those negative reactions are not ungrounded. As individuals, many of us are, as the researcher Sarah Stein Lubrano has observed, “slow-moving tragedies who know it; who recognise…our failures to live bravely, intentionally, in line with our deepest hopes and values as some part of us wishes we could.” And so too it often is with us collectively, entangled as we are in multiple follies and illusions. We are failing beings who fuck things up.

There is every prospect that we will fail to address the challenges of climate change and ecosystem degradation. The coming shocks, compounded with other factors, may well, as they accelerate, profoundly disrupt and destabilise societies and political systems, fanning the flames of extremism, tribalism, tyranny, a hyper-surveillance state and other phenomena that are painful to imagine or as yet beyond imagination.

The thing is, life does not have to be that way.

Caspar Henderson is an Associate at Perspectiva, and the author of A New Map of Wonders

Image: nature scene attributed to Adolf Hitler via BBC

What are some of the demands that your model make of us as individuals?

One of the seven ways to think I set out in Doughnut Economics is to rethink who we are.  Mainstream economics depict us very specifically as ‘rational economic man’. If he were drawn in a picture, he’d be a man, without dependents, standing alone with money in his hand, ego in his heart, a calculator in his head and nature at his feet. He hates work, he loves luxury and he knows the price of everything. These are implicit assumptions that are written into the heart of the model of ‘man’ at the heart of economics. It was modelled first by John Stuart Mill, then by William Stanley Jevons. Jevons followed Newtonian thinking: if I can understand the movement of an atom then I can understand the movement of apples and planets too. If I can model one human then I can aggregate its behaviour to understand society. So it’s rooted in a reductionist, atomised understanding.

economic models are performative. The more that students learn about them, the more they come to say they value self-interest and competitiveness above altruism and collaboration.

The fascinating thing I learned is that these models are performative. The more that students learn about these models in their studies, the more they come to say they value self-interest and competitiveness above altruism and collaboration. So who we tell ourselves we are shapes who we become. This means there’s a huge moral responsibility for any academic discipline that claims to tell us who we are, because it actually changes who we become.

Taking that as a starting point, mainstream economics says, ‘welcome to economics: here is the market!’ It foregrounds the market as the centre of action and every impact that falls outside of its contracts is classed as an externality (and the language used here is a whole other problem…). When we foreground the market, it means that people show up in the economy either as ‘labour’ when they’re in production mode, or ‘consumer’ when they’re in purchasing model. If you add a banking system people show up either as ‘creditor’ or ‘debtor’. And the characteristics or attributes that have been celebrated in those who perform well in the market sphere go back to Adam Smith, who noted that the butcher, brewer and baker provide our dinner out of self interest, not out of benevolence (he quietly forgot his mum’s benevolence in making his dinner — but that’s another feminist story).  The characteristics, values and attributes seen as effective in the market are those placed at the centre of humanity’s model in economics.

What I tried to do in Doughnut Economics is say, hang on, the economy is embedded in society, which is in turn embedded in the living world! The economy is the social sphere in which we produce and distribute goods and services to meet our wants and needs. And there are four fundamental forms of provisioning: yes, there’s the market, but there’s also the state, the household, and the commons. Who we show up as in each of those four realms of provisioning is very different.

In the market we are labourer and consumer, creditor and debtor. In relation to the state we may show up as citizen or resident, service user and taxpayer, as public servant, and as voter or protestor. Very different attributes, and social skills are called upon to engage well in this relationship.  In the household we show up as parent, as partner, as neighbour, as child. In the commons we may show up as co-creator, collaborator, steward. And these latter ways of naming ourselves are ones that, if you did a Google search, have taken off in the last decade: ‘lets co-create!’  So we’re rediscovering and inventing a language to describe a form of economic engagement that has been massively neglected. Its return and enrichment now is in large part thanks to Elinor Ostrom’s work and the rise of the digital commons.

What is ‘economic intersectionality’?

People increasingly talk about the concept of ‘intersectionality’ – the specific experience that arises at the intersection of identities. A black woman’s experience of life, for example, is distinctly different from the experience of a white woman and a black man combined. Building on this concept, I like to talk about ‘economic intersectionality’ because everyday we weave together our multiple economic roles. This morning I’ve already been parent and partner. I’m about to go work and be ‘labour.’  I’ll be buying something at lunchtime so I’ll be a customer. I may also be a citizen if I join a protest this afternoon, or simply use a public service. And I might play the role of sharer and steward if I help out in the neighbourhood garden this evening.

We weave these identities together all the time but we rarely name them. I think it’s really valuable to name them, and ask ourselves what are the skills and attributes that would enable us to do each one well. What it means to be a good collaborator and co-creator demands a completely different set of skills and values than those valued in the market place. It’s the difference between playing the board game ‘Monopoly’, which celebrates the individual’s triumph over all, versus the far better board-game ‘Pandemic’, in which all players collaborate as a team for a common purpose.

So this is partly about helping us understand the different roles we bring to economic interactions?

Yes, the multiple identities we bring to our economic relationships, because all of these roles – in relation to the market, the state, the household and the commons – all of them are economic roles. But mainstream economics tends to overemphasise market relations and their attributes: competition, self-interest, one-upmanship. Whereas in life we are far more social, collaborative, and reciprocal – and so we desperately need to name, nurture and improve those skills.

Mainstream economics tends to overemphasise market relations and their attributes: competition, self-interest, one-upmanship. Whereas in life we are far more social, collaborative, and reciprocal

So here’s the question: what are the values, the assumptions and the skills that would enable us to be more effective in relation to the state, the household, and the commons?  Thinking about our family relationships, we all know we can do that better. We can think about our relationship to the state – and I am loving seeing the young climate strikers realise their voice and power by going on strike.  As for the commons: what kind of structures do we need? What forms of creative commons licensing are needed such that people can collaborate? And what are the skills and values that enable people to co-create and collaborate while feeling recognised, valued and fulfilled, even though they may be earning considerably less money than they would in a profit-centred enterprise.

What are some of the things that lead people in that direction?

The first thing to do is provide shared purpose in an enterprise. There’s a really nice RSA animate by Dan Pink about Drive. He says that sometimes when you pay people more they screw up the task. Money doesn’t motivate us in the very narrow way that economic theory tells us it’s going to. Pink says you need to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, so they can actually focus on the purpose. Money is not necessarily what drives and motivates us. That’s why many nurses and teachers are offended when the government offers performance-related pay. They respond by saying, if you think I’m going to try to do a better job of teaching kids in order to earn 10% more money, you totally misunderstand my motivations – you offend me. That’s the mistake of applying rational economic man’s motivations to people who have chosen to work in the space of public service.

What are the strengths and the limits of ‘Doughnut Economics’ as a metaphor?

Let me articulate it first what it is in order to critique it. I tend to offer the Doughnut as a compass for human prosperity in the 21st century: how do we meet the needs of all people within the means of the planet? And then the shape of it: it’s a pair of concentric circles which invoke balance, wholeness, holism and natural resilience.  The 20th century was dominated by the metaphor of progress as growth — the endless growth curve.  It seems to make sense because we are happy to think, ‘Hey, my kids are growing, the garden’s growing!’  So growth seems good.  But if I told you my friend went to the doctor and was told she had ‘a growth’, why would you already feel differently about that? It’s because we know there’s another end to this metaphor.  Growth is a wonderful healthy phase of life, but in nature things eventually grow up so they can mature and thrive. We deeply understand within our bodies that if something in the body doesn’t stop growing it becomes a threat to the health of the whole.

We can move from this analogy of bodily health to planetary health.  The Doughnut as an image says well-being lies as a balance between the social and ecological boundaries. There’s dynamism to it, but also a healthy balance.

As to the limits of the metaphor, first of all let me talk about how I defined the inside of the Doughnut, the social foundation. I simply crowd-sourced the social priorities agreed by the world’s governments in the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. That doesn’t mean they’re exactly right: they include gender equality, for example, but they don’t include racial equality. And they’re individualistic because they are derived from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which human rights were articulated in a very individualised way: do you have enough food, water, housing, healthcare? But there’s no focus on whether people have enough community or social support. So the SDGs lacks community, culture, racial equality and more. That doesn’t undermine the Doughnut itself because I used the SDG priorities as the most up-to-date statement of what humanity agrees are the claims of all people, but the content of the social foundation can keep evolving.

Now go to the outside of the doughnut, which is made up of nine planetary boundaries. And there’s evolving science here, some of it contested. My view is that we’re like archaeologists just beginning to brush away the dust. We certainly don’t have the full picture but its’s fast getting clearer, so let’s keep on going and refine this. It’s giving us a faint but truer depiction of human wellbeing, rather than a more precise but false one such as we had in the last century. So planetary boundary science is continually evolving. The real problem is that we needed this science fifty years ago because we’re at serious risk of going over the Earth-system’s tipping points just as we begin to see them.

we’re like archaeologists just beginning to brush away the dust. We certainly don’t have the full picture but its’s fast getting clearer, so let’s keep on going and refine this.

Another limitation is that the planetary boundaries are, by definition, set at a global scale. I’m working with a great team at the moment to create an equivalent city-level model, for use by the most ambitious cities in the C40 programme – those that want to go beyond being ‘low carbon’ to being ‘thriving’ cities. In redesigning the Doughnut for the city level, you can’t just take the planetary model and scale it down.  As Elinor Ostrom said, we need polycentric governance [pdf]. The critical support systems at the planetary scale are different from those relevant at nation, city or district scale. Nevertheless, despite these limitations I think they Doughnut metaphor has proven itself as useful for now.

Some people say the concept can be critiqued because it’s anthropocentric. True, it is. It puts human needs at the centre and the rest of the living world is in the biodiversity boundary. Some conservationists have suggested bringing the needs of all other species into the middle alongside humans. I like that challenge: if humanity sat around the table with all living species and said let’s draw up something like the Doughnut but for all of us – what would it look like?

One of my favourite lines is “All the models are wrong but some are useful.”

Some people say, how do you know the Doughnut can exist? By the time you meet all human needs is there any planet left?  Doesn’t the inner ring overlap with the outer ring?  It’s a question no one can yet prove either way. I think it very much depends not just on population but also on inequality, governance, technology, a sense of sufficiency and what people think they need.

But yes, maybe the Doughnut model will be a relic in 20 years time, seeming just as flawed as the old economics I am criticising today. To me it’s a staging post on the way to greater paradigm shift. One of my favourite quotes is from the statistician George Box: “all the models are wrong but some are useful.”

We have to ask, useful to whom? But also what does ‘useful’ mean? Well, it depends on the values you hold, the goals you have, and the context you believe we face.  And my experience is that something very powerful happens when people feel that there is a set of values and a goal that they had, but which they hadn’t seen articulated or drawn or described or named, and they find a framework that makes it visible. And with Doughnut Economics they often say, ‘yes, this is what I have been trying to do! I’ve just never seen it drawn or spoken before.’ And it galvanises their purpose.

Can we talk about other capacities and limits of other metaphors you’ve used in association with the Doughnut?

First there is the move from linear industrial processes to circular – though I tend to call them ‘cyclical.’  I think this is a very powerful metaphor. ‘There’s no such thing as waste, just a resource in the wrong place’ is a really important way of reframing our relation to, for example, carbon dioxide or plastics. Such biomimetic thinking is, I think, really valuable. Of course there are limits to this too because there are some things in nature we will not want to mimic, depending on our values and purpose.

As well as the linear to cyclical shift, there is the move from centralised to distributed technologies – and here there is an unprecedented opportunity. Think about the core technologies of how we generate energy, make things, communicate, and share knowledge . In the 20th century these were centralised. Energy was produced by an oil rig or a coal mine. Goods were produced in big factories. Communication passed through a switchboard, knowledge held in patents.  In the 21st century we have the chance to move to a system that is distributed by design. Energy can come from renewable energy networks. We can make things on desktop 3-D printers, communicate through the Internet’s distributed networks, and share knowledge open source in the creative commons.

The World Wide Web was supposed to be for everyone, as Tim Berners-Lee put it, but instead we have ‘surveillance capitalism‘

Yes, with any distributed network the question remains: who owns it, how’s it controlled, how’s it used?  There’s nothing inherent in networks that means you have to end up with surveillance capitalism.  Other iterations are possible. We should not give up on the possibilities inherent in network technologies: there are many other ways of using them and we’ve only just begun.

What does the metaphor of the network replace?

We have inherited an economy that’s highly divisive — characterised by the 1% — so we need to go from divisive and degenerative to distributive and regenerative economies. The way I think about it is we have an opportunity to not merely redistribute incomes through taxes, but to look deeper and ask, what are the sources of wealth creation, to ask who owns the technology, the land, the housing, the capacity to create and share ideas, the capacity to make things? And because of these networked near-zero-marginal cost technologies, it is possible for the first time in human history to reconnect labour with the means of production. This is partly why I don’t use the word ‘capitalism’, because that’s part of the definition of capitalism, and this completely turns the possibilities on their head. Hence I think in terms of going beyond redistributing incomes to pre-distributing the sources of wealth creation.

Now, is that a metaphor?  Going back to ecological thinking, let’s consider a leaf.  In a leaf there’s a fractal network of veins, some much bigger than others.  There’s a nice diagram you might be familiar with between efficiency and resilience of a network. It’s basically an upside-down U curve , but it shows that if something is extremely distributed it risks becoming deeply inefficient — in a flat hierarchy you can’t get things done quickly if you have to build consensus. But at the opposite extreme, if a system becomes too streamlined it also becomes brittle and fragile. There’s a healthy balance somewhere in the middle, and maybe leaves have found it.  By analogy, maybe we can we find that right balance of relationships in the 21st century economy.

This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on 1 March 2019

Image credits: Leaf – Jon Sullivan (public domain); economic identities – Kate Raworth; efficiency/resilience – Peter Harper

I recently spoke to Jamie Bristow, Director of The Mindfulness Initiative, a charitable policy institute which works with politicians in the UK and internationally to explore the case for mindfulness-based programmes across a range of spheres of public policy – in health contexts, in schools, in the criminal justice system and in workplaces. I’ve been working with Jamie recently to make the case, in a policy context, for thinking about training our capacity to pay attention to our present-moment experience of mind and body as more than just a fix for specific policy issues; to think of mindfulness more holistically as a fouundational capacity to support our development, quite broadly, as human beings.

In my recent interview with Jamie, though, we reflect back on how all of this started: through an eight-week mindfulness teaching programme for politicians in the British Parliament, which was first run in 2013. Over 200 politicians – MPs and Members of the House of Lords – have taken the course. Jamie tells me how, running these courses, they found that politicians started practicing mindfulness for personal benefit—to focus better, for example, or to deal better with stress —but quickly moved into thinking about the kinds of benefits that the practice of mindfulness could have at the wider level of society. What’s more, there emerged interest in how mindfulness could have a positive impact on the political process itself, by recognising that what matters in the business of debating policies, agreeing on legislation, and so on is not just the ‘what’, but the ‘how’.

“Mindfulness, it seems, might help elected official to disagree better”, he tells me. You can read in full here.

Dan Nixon leads Perspectiva’s initiative on ‘Paying Attention’

Image of storm clouds: cjohnson7 via wikimedia. Creative Commons

I think you’ve got to find the right kind of hope — the hope that goes beyond facile positivity — and look more deeply at what it would mean to find a political programme that made sense of where people actually are, what their daily lives are like, and from that build some kind of vision… of how we live together over the next, ten twenty or one hundred years. Emotions are a good place to start when looking at that endeavour….But it may help to slightly shift the register to speak about emotions in democracy for a second.

In political theory democracy is usually seen as having three main elements. The first is the source of power:  the people as such. The level above that is the world of policy, where the agents and the activists operate: the world of Westminster, Whitehall and to some extent the media. And then you have the orienting goal or vision of society as a whole, which at the moment is principally GDP: Gross Domestic Product, economic growth (although there are challenges to that).

What you have in democracy is a movement between these three realms, between the people as a whole, often assumed to be undifferentiated, static, constant — just ‘the people.’ (‘The will of the people’ is assumed to be one monolithic thing, even though that’s clearly that’s not the case.)  The politics happens at the middle layer. Should we raise interest rates a tiny bit or not? What is the right target for climate change? How much inequality is tolerable? But the bigger problem is, what the hell are we trying to do? What is the overarching purpose of society, and can people feel that at an individual level? Can you get from the emotional, cultural level up through the policy and level to the level of vision and purpose and meaning level? That’s the democratic challenge writ large

And why begin with emotions? It’s because emotions are the front line between you and reality. We can name them as anger, fear and sadness, and so forth. But actually they are your experience of the world. Emotion more broadly conceived is not just about about status, identity fear resentment sometimes that can drive political outcomes. It’s also your felt sense of being a human being. That’s the foundation we have for politics. The challenge for me is, politics today is all at the middle layer. It’s all about what they’re saying in Westminster, the latest white paper. But I think political hope lies in realising that the other two are not constants, but variables. There’s a variable in how human beings develop, and there is a variable in our overarching vision for what society is trying to achieve. And if we can shift the register in those two, then what we should do, who we should vote for, how we should organise society becomes clearer.

The shorthand for democracy is often given as ‘of the people, for the people by the people.’ Let’s add an adjective to see how it sounds: ‘of the emotional people, for the emotional people, by the emotional people.’ And if you push that a little further and say, ‘of the emotions, for the emotions, by the emotions’ then  you start to get a feeling for what’s going on — the morass of reflexes and responses and feelings that are actually driving this thing as a whole.

So I think you can have a lot of fun with that. If we actually had an intelligent politics what would the right adjectives be? At the moment it seems something like ‘of the emotional people, by the clever people, for the rich people,’ but we can play with that and use different variables. For me the hope lies in recognising those different things — the overarching vision, the emotional source — and spending more time on those and a bit less on the technocratic tinkering in the middle.

Image via BBC

I come at the question of hope from the perspective that truly total devastation is possible and something close to that is where we are heading now — David Wallace-Wells 

by Caspar Henderson

On the edges of a world map made around 1300 and now kept in Hereford cathedral there are beasts, monsters, semi-humans, and humans with strange ways. The lynx sees through walls and grows a valuable carbuncle in its secret parts. The manticore has a triple row of teeth in a man’s face, a lion’s body, a scorpion’s tail and the voice of a siren. Semi-humans such as the Phanesii, a bat-like people with enormous drooping ears, live in Asia, as do the Spopodes, who have horses’ feet. The Gangines of India live on the scent of apples of the forest and die instantly if they perceive any other smell. The Arimaspians fight with griffins for diamonds. Fully human but utterly foreign, and terrifying, are the Scythians: they love war, drink the blood of their enemies from gushing wounds, and make cups from their skulls. The Hyperboreans, by contrast, are the happiest race of men: they live without quarrelling and without sickness for as long as they like, and only when they are tired of living do they throw themselves from a promontory into the sea.

I’ve recounted these details a number of times when presenting a book about wonder, imagination and change. But another detail on the map that I largely overlooked when writing the book has been coming to mind more often of late. Close to the centre of the map, on the island of Crete, is a representation of a labyrinth.

Labyrinths seem to have a hold on the human imagination across time and place. The earliest known representation, carved on a piece of mammoth ivory in a tomb in Siberia, is seven thousand years old. Others appear in cultures all over the world, from Mexico to India, and remain popular with artists and the public today. Their meanings are diverse. For the Hopi, a labyrinth-like symbol called ‘mother and child’ symbolises both the tribe’s emergence from mother Earth at the beginning of time as well as the everyday wonder of childbirth. In the ancient Mediterranean world, labyrinths were sometimes placed over doorways to turn away, confuse or trap evil spirits. The Cretan labyrinth of Greek myth, built by the master craftsman Daedalus, is the hiding place of the Minotaur, a monster half-human and half bull which threatens a terrible plague upon the people unless it is regularly fed youths and maidens —until, finally, the hero Theseus penetrates the labyrinth and kills it, retracing his path with a thread gifted him by Ariadne.

In the medieval Christian world, by contrast, labyrinths were sometimes associated with resurrection and salvation — more mandala than maze. A fine example some 13 metres across was set into the floor of Chartres cathedral about a hundred years before the Hereford map. It offered a path for clerics to dance along at Easter, and for pilgrims to trace their way in symbolic pilgrimage to the holy land. The labyrinth drawn on the Hereford map looks very like the one at Chartres, and does not show the Minotaur.

What, if anything, to make of these various associations and seemingly inconsistent meanings? In The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey, Paul Broks writes that

the universal fascination with the image of the labyrinth suggests some fundamental psychological significance, that perhaps it holds the power to captivate and transform the mind in some way. It’s been suggested, for example, that threading the spirals of a labyrinth works to loosen the grip of rational, analytical, ‘left-brain’ styles of thinking, thereby opening the mind to more intuitive, spiritual, ‘right-brain’ modes of experience and the imaginal reality of ghosts and gods.

And, Broks continues, the labyrinth may be linked to the sense of consciousness, or ‘soul.’ For Carl Jung it was an image of the psyche, its winding path symbolising the process of individuation towards psychological wholeness and authenticity. And yet there was a shadow side: beset with traps and terrors, the way might descend beneath the surface of conscious self to the secret chambers of the unconscious. If we are to achieve wholeness, Broks interprets Jung as saying, we must summon the courage to endure the darkness and dread of the Minotaur — the monster at the centre, requiring a blood sacrifice.

The meanings attributed to this ancient symbol, then, are complex and various. On the one hand regeneration, wholeness, selfhood; on the other, a trap or a lair for something with the power to destroy.

I think this ambiguity may be why the labyrinth on the Hereford map has been catching my eye of late. It is reminder that what sustains and connects us can also trap and destroy us. This would appear to be the case with social media in thrall to what Soshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism — under which, she argues, the individual’s right to a future tense and right to sanctuary are threatened (see The Attention Trap). It’s also the case with the factors behind the environmental crisis.

As noted in a recent post on Inside Out, news about the environment in any given week can be profoundly disturbing. To take a handful in recent days, it was reported that even if greenhouse gas emissions are cut sufficiently to limit global warming to 1.5ºC, a third of the glaciers in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will melt by 2100, threatening the water supply for billions of people. (Already, there are indications that the 1.5ºC threshold will temporarily surpassed between now and 2023.) Meanwhile, Antarctic glaciers are melting more rapidly than previously thought, potentially adding to sea level rise. [1] A collapse in insect populations appears to be worldwide, with potentially huge knock-on consequences for the the web of life and for human food supply. A synthesis report concludes that damage to land, soil, air, water and animal populations alongside climate change is creating catastrophic global risk. [2] “No matter how quickly we take action, and no matter how aggressively, the goal of a stable climate is functionally out of reach by any conventional method.” writes David Wallace Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth, which is published this month (extract here).

And there appear to be many ways in which actions are moving in precisely the wrong direction. So while the world’s largest wind farm is planned for North Sea,  British taxpayers are offering generous relief to oil and gas companies. Meanwhile, BP has  more than doubled its profits, and fossil fuel production looks set to keep booming. A  ‘Green New Deal’ in the United States that would radically reduce emissions may look like sense to some — as Jedediah Britton-Purdy writes, this is what realistic environmental policy looks like —  but many facts on the ground point another way. “Even as concerns about global warming grow,” notes The Economist, “energy firms are planning to increase fossil-fuel production. None more than ExxonMobil.”

How to think and feel? What to do? Some gallows humour may be in order. There comes to mind a classic from The Onion: ‘The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change Report Sitting In University Archive.  The satire is hilarious and horrible — and feels horribly true if, like me, you were ‘there’ in however small a way in the early 1990s. But setting that sort of thing aside, the path forward does look likely be circuitous and full of delays, dangers and defeats.

A philosophical thread that some may find useful comes in Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky , which was published in October 2018 and was recently recommended by Annie Proulx. I am struck in particular by Zwicky’s contribution, ‘A Ship from Delos’. In this short essay, she reflects on how the Socratic virtues — more precisely ‘excellences’ — of awareness, courage, self-control, justice, compassion and contemplative practice can help shape one’s inner reflection and outward action.

In Zwicky’s telling, awareness — “knowing what’s what” — needs to be coupled with humility regarding what one knows. “We must,” she writes, “look at the world openly and see it, and one’s own actions, for what they are: gestures that vanish into the air like music. We must keep our reactions to this recognition — especially the reaction of fear — balanced by exercising the other virtues.” Hope is essential, she argues, and “however much destruction is coming ‘being’ will still be here; beauty will still be here…the Earth is prodigious.”

The importance of courage in the face of cataclysmic change is obvious, notes Zwicky, but she adds that “humility…is the foundation of courage as well as wisdom: it frees one to see the truth.” As for self-control — “a virtue we appear to severely lack” — she argues that joy and delight rather than a sense of deprivation can attend its genuine exercise. Self-control can be “not so much denial as melting away of the need for certain forms of comfort and distraction. It [can be] an embrace of simplicity.”

When it comes to justice, the key point for Zwicky is not so much John Rawl’s conception of fairness — the fair distribution of goods, fair legal procedure, and so on — vital though that is to decent human life. Rather, she argues, one should reflect upon Plato’s concept of justice as “interior harmony” or “right-ordering” of the soul, produced by “self-sustaining interdependence of awareness, humility, courage and self-control.” And this approach can have real bite, she says, because it is an attempt to respond to the common intuition that moral gestures matter even if they do not have a noticeable impact on the state of the world. “You know when you’re in the presence of someone who is acting from a direct perception of the good…There’s nothing rote, or cowed, or obsequious about it. Such action is overwhelmingly — breathtakingly, beautifully — free.”

The final excellences on Zwicky’s list are compassion and contemplative practice. The matter of compassion is well addressed elsewhere. [3]  On contemplative practice, Zwicky writes that it occurs when

we attend to the real, physical world, its immense and intricate workings, its subtlety; its power, its harshness, and its enormous beauty. We attend to the miracle of it, that there is something — this here, now — rather than nothing….We attend to the world’s extraordinary surprise, its refusal to quit, the weed flowering in tar, the way beauty and brokenness so often go together.

Zwicky focuses on the inner state, but she is not advocating quietism. I am sure I am far from alone in seeing the good and the free at work in young activists like Greta Thunberg and thousands of other children, as well as adults, supporting radical action, including a school strike on 15 February the day I post this, and again in March.

Facing up to and dealing with bad actors is vital, but it is not enough. As Charles Taylor, among others, identifies, righteous indignation can itself be a trap. [4]  The environmental crisis is a wicked problem, and most of us are implicated in it by the basic privileges our societies have afforded us. (For something more like a true outsider’s perspective, consider the viewpoint of the Ashaninca, who see white people as vampires who occasionally come up to their world to capture their women and children and extract the fat from their bodies, which we turn into a fine oil to run our machines and aeroplanes.) But it is not impossible that the appetite and ingenuity that have delivered so much well-being by means that are ultimately destructive can be turned to good ends. And this brings me back to the labyrinth.

Pablo Picasso once said, “If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur.” In his Minotauromachy of 1935, the Minotaur reaches his arm out to block the light from a little girl’s candle.  And in this etching (which contains, among other things, a strange fore-shadowing of Guernica just two years later) the girl is entirely unafraid; the monster, apparently, scared to be seen. But, notes Tim Laing-Smith, “he is also, as the viewer can hardly fail to notice, beautiful.”

To make a more beautiful human labyrinth in a larger non-human world we will need (among other things) to think about re-integration and what Rowan Williams calls “stories of lives that communicate a sense of what being at home in the environment looks like.” As Adam Nicolson has recently suggested, the challenge may not so much be one of re-wilding as ‘re-culturing’: a re-integration of human and natural richness. “We know, as well as we know anything, that human beings can grow and change for the better,” writes Jonathan Rowson. “And it’s no longer optional.” Perhaps, as David Wallace-Wells writes, “it’s not too late. In fact, it never will be.”

Caspar Henderson is an Associate at Perspectiva

Footnotes

[1]  There is room for caution and reasonable doubt about the rate of change. Tamsin Edwards writes:  “we find that rapid collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet is much less likely than previously suggested. But, as one would expect from the words ‘collapse’ and ‘less likely’ being in the same sentence, it is not a simple story. It is one of caution, of weighing up the evidence, and of holding two apparently contradictory possible futures in mind: with collapse, or without. It is a story with layers of good and bad.”

[2] Again, room for caution. For example, Mark Lynas questions at least one claim in the IPPR report, that since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires sevenfold: “This cannot possibly be right. Scientific literature does not support this at all.” he writes. But, he stresses, “this is not to belittle the rest of the report, which I think it valuable. But these kinds of climate disaster figures are thrown around too often without good sourcing. Too easy then for climate sceptics to accuse us of crying wolf, undermining the rest of the conclusions.”

[3]  On compassion see, for instance, this perspective from Veronica Mary Rolf:

Will a contemplative practice transform the world? Not immediately. But it will transform us. Our love will go deeper, our patience will grow stronger, and our service will become more authentic and productive. We will be able to feel compassion for those who challenge us, and keep our balance in situations that threaten to undermine us.

[4]  “…indignation comes to be fuelled by hatred for those who support and connive with [the] injustices; and this in turn is fed by our sense of superiority that we are not like these instruments and accomplices of evil. Soon we are blinded by the havoc we wreak around us. Our picture of the world has safely located all evil outside of us...” A Secular Age (2007)

Image of Minotauromachy via wikiart

Position: Deputy Director

(Job titles are funny things. We need a senior and experienced person to help us build the organisation, but could adapt the job title to better suit the candidate if desired.)

Context: Since its inception in 2016 Perspectiva has built intellectual foundations, clarified its strategic purposes, raised funds from a small and growing portfolio of trusts and foundations, and experimented with a handful of pilot projects and events. We are now at an exciting phase of development, seeking an exceptional person to help build, lead, consolidate, promote and manage the organisation.

Our next phase of development will include the creation of a book publishing arm, the development of a distinctive Perspectiva participatory process for social inquiry, public events, the management of existing projects and the creation of new ones. Our organisational form is also likely to become more complex, with several strategic partnerships in Europe and the USA emerging. This new role will involve dynamically handling that growing complexity with sound operations, warm and honest relationships and entrepreneurial flair.

The right candidate will help to ensure that Perspective grows at the right pace, taking advantage of the increasing number of opportunities that are arising for us, but without overreaching. We joke that Perspectiva is an urgent one hundred year project, and it would help if the person we recruit ‘gets’ the joke.

Person: In addition to proven leadership, operational, and strategic skills, the ideal candidate would also have a strong affinity for Perspectiva’s work, including a keen intellect, excellent written and spoken communication qualities, comfort with complexity and ambiguity, networking judgment, and good entrepreneurial instincts.

Indicative Capacities and Responsibilities (E=essential ie evidence of experience required. D=desirable ie evidence of aptitude required):

Demonstrated capacity to work with Director, Trustees, Researchers, Associates and Advisors to:

• Understand, develop and communicate Perspectiva’s vision and purpose. (E)
• Proven capacity to help manage existing Perspectiva projects and relationships and develop new ones. (E)
• Build a physical and networked presence that makes sense of Perspectiva’s current initiatives, which might entail finding suitable premises in London. (E)
• Play a leading role in the overall organising fundraising effort, helping team members to turn insights into good funding proposals, including one’s own. (E)
• Oversee and manage Perspectiva’s operational and financial commitments, including charity commission compliance. (E)
• Develop operational processes aligned with a small and growing organisation. (E)
• Capacity to listen deeply, and excellent spoken and written communication. (E)
• Cultivate/strengthen relationships with strategic partners in the US and Europe including occasional travel. (E)
• Innovative ideas to diversify the funding model and build financial resilience. (D)
• Oversee the improvement of online communications, including the redesign and updating of our website, existing social media strategies and discerning use of our mailing list. (D)
• Investigate how we might model a good internship programme. (D)
• Seek out funding and partnership opportunities and show entrepreneurial flair in taking them. (D)
• Develop their own creative projects aligned with our current strategic purposes. (D)

Location: For the last two years we have had office space in Shoreditch, central London, but unfortunately the co-working facility will soon no longer be available and we are currently in the process of finding a new home. We are very flexible with working arrangements in general, but we would welcome somebody to develop our on-the-ground presence.

Contract and Salary: We will offer competitive remuneration for the right candidate, depending on experience. The anticipated range for this role is between £45-55,000 pro-rata, but we are eager to hear from anybody interested in the role, even if they consider themselves ‘too junior’ or ‘too senior’ to apply. We are still a relatively small organisation, so while the role specification is an accurate reflection of our current needs and aspirations, we are ready to be surprised by a different interpretation of what we need most and why.

Job Type and Duration: Initially this is a one year contract at 0.6 or 0.8 FTE. We would like this to be a longer term or permanent role, and there are good funding opportunities arising  that would allow this to happen. We would like the candidate to start as soon as possible and ideally not later than early May 2019, but if an otherwise excellent candidate can only start later we will seriously consider the possibility.

Application: Please take a look at the materials on our website (bearing in mind it needs updating) and the two-page description of Perspectiva below which is a better reflection of our current thinking and plans. To apply, in the first instance, please send a CV and covering letter to [email protected] copying in [email protected] We will try to reply to everybody, and hope to arrange to meet the candidates who seem most promising. Our deadline is Monday 4^th March at 9am and we anticipate interviews will take place within three weeks of that time.

***

Brief Overview of Perspectiva:

Why? (Critique and vision)

This is an age of dissonance, in which we struggle to make sense of the world. Our challenges are complex and interconnected, but our understanding is often simplistic and fragmented. The most fundamental source of our dissonance lies in knowing that we have made extraordinary progress, and that there is much to be grateful for, and yet sensing that everything has to change.

Many are enjoying the fruits of economic and technological progress, but the ecological and spiritual foundations of our shared life are neglected, and cannot replenish themselves without our discerning attention and imagination. There has been no adequate planetary response to the preeminent challenge of our time – climate collapse – and perhaps cannot be, unless there is a change in consciousness at scale; an epistemic and existential reorientation in our shared sense of meaning, purpose and value. Liberalism as an ideology is no longer hegemonic and appears to be exhausted, hollowed out and rudderless, but no compelling alternative has emerged. Democracy may be dying; it is acutely vulnerable to the misuse of technology and the erosion of civic space. Financial capitalism is driving socially corrosive inequality. Culture is increasingly a matter of private entertainment to be bought rather than character formation for shared societal ends. And yet, we still use the language of ‘left and right’, ‘public opinion’, ‘economic growth’, ‘consumer choice’ as if these reflected unassailable realities rather than desiccated remains of a worldview in its twilight years.

Our crisis is a meta crisis lying within, between and beyond the materialist perspectives from which we view our current challenges; we construct problems in ways that confound our capacity to address their root causes. Our task is to enrich and expand worldviews through better ways of perceiving and knowing reality. The collective challenge of our time is therefore spiritual renewal, but clarifying what that means and what follows for society requires sustained intellectual leadership, evolving participatory processes, and enduring network nodes; which is why we gave Perspectiva institutional form.

What? (Intellectual foundations)

Our response to dissonance is to value and cultivate spiritual sensibility – a disposition towards reality characterised by awareness of the fullness of life and experienced through simultaneous intimations of aliveness, goodness, understanding and meaning. Those glimpses of wholeness and integration have a texture that is at once emotional, ethical, epistemic and existential – the feeling of being alive, the conviction that something matters, the intuition that the world makes sense, and the experience that life is meaningful respectively. This perspective is grounded in three related philosophical ideas:

1. A map of reality as an evolving process, humans as bio-psycho-social-spiritual beings and societies as collective acts of the imagination (systems, souls and society).
2. A commitment to socially embedded spiritual and epistemic development (Bildung).
3. An understanding of how we might address systemic challenges like climate collapse and democratic breakdown from their widest, deepest and fullest perspective (social imaginaries). 

How? (Developing an applied philosophy of education)

Our work involves developing an applied philosophy of education that describes and illustrates how we can develop our inner lives to help us respond discerningly to the growing complexity of the world:

1. Publishing platform. Perspectiva Press will focus on short books (10-40,000 words) about developing expert generalists for 21^st century challenges.
2. Innovative facilitation. Perspectiva Process will work with rooms of people with shared concern but diverse perspectives; e.g. through metaphor design, constellations inquiry and improvisation.
3. Cultural inquiry. Perspectiva Projects will initiate public conversations through written and audio-visual outputs, and events

Who? (Twelve tribes of transformation)

Clusters of networks are seeking to develop new ways of living and working at scale. Each cluster focusses on a particular active ingredient that is important for societal transformation. We seek to reach, involve, influence, learn from, and support organisations operating within and between these domains (the single line descriptions here are distillations of a larger body of work).

1. Attention Finders (attention)

Many recognise that the quality and direction our attention is a cultural and political battleground.

2. Wounded Activists (will)

We have never had greater need of effective activism, but we need to transform the practice.

3. Technology Heretics (technology)

Many who look to the future don’t particularly like what they see.

4. Wise Businesses (purpose)

Many profit-making organisations seek to do work that helps to reorient the world.

5. Media Ecologists (truth)

We need financially sound media forms that improve online and offline conversations.

6. Reflexive Investors (finance)

In commerce and philanthropy, money signals the direction of travel and thereby creates it.

7. Renegade Scholars (epistemology)

Untethering Intellectuals. “The world has problems, universities have departments” – Garry Brewer.

8. Political Revisionists (ideology)

Many seek to revive virtue development across traditions to create a politics of the common good.

9. Cultural Democrats (civic virtue)

Many are refashioning qualities of citizenship, passionate disinterest and constructive disagreement.

10. Integral Facilitators (process)

Many seek to unlock the emergent properties of groups through experimental forms of inquiry.

11. Metamodern Pioneers (integration)

Many are imagining the future by integrating pre-modern, modern and post-modern perspectives.

12. The Spiritually Capacious (love)

Many know that we can build a more loving world, but only through a fuller understanding of power.

Where and When?

London-Europe-World. This is an urgent 100 year project. We aim to evolve into a hybrid form of academic research institute, spiritual retreat centre and campaigning organisation; combining the best of, for instance, Harvard University, Schumacher College, Esalen Institute and Amnesty International.

Early funders:

Fetzer Institute, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, SFCT, Friends Provident Foundation.

Key texts:

Spiritualise: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges, by Jonathan Rowson.

The Market Myth, by Tomas Bjorkman.

“Is the image of a beetle hopelessly attempting to have sex with an empty beer bottle the perfect metaphor for the state of humanity?” The rhetorical question is posed by Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes. In Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0, they note than an Ig Nobel Prize (for achievements that first make people laugh then make them think) was awarded for the finding that male Australian jewel beetles are more attracted to brightly coloured, stubby beer bottles than to their female counterparts. In fact, the males find the bottles so attractive that they ignore the females altogether and keep trying to copulate with stubbies until they die in the hot sun or are eaten by ants.

This unfortunate series of events is an example of what is known as an evolutionary trap: adaptive instincts turn maladaptive when exposed to magnified and more attractive versions of an evolved stimulus. Birds, fish, and insects can all fall into it, and in Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose, Deirdre Barrett argues that humans are no less fallible: junk food, pornography, or likes on social media can be artificial triggers that addict us and hijack our agency.

You don’t have to buy into simplistic biological determinism to recognise that humans have weaknesses. In his Pensées, published in 1670, Blaise Pascal wrote:

We do not rest satisfied with the present…So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists….

Writing in 2015, Matthew Crawford identified a tendency to become distracted as a major challenge of our times, calling it an obesity of the mind.

Many of us observe compulsive behaviour, dissatisfaction and distraction in others, or experience them ourselves. I’ve had an issue with Twitter, on occasion finding myself logging on dozens of times in a single day without even realising I am doing so. What is going on? I can see the positive sides. Twitter enables me to interact with people I like or find interesting, and find news, analysis and ideas which I value for (I believe) good reasons. But the negatives are clear too. I’m always wanting to know if anyone has noticed me. And there are endless ‘goodies’ I’m hungry for but cannot digest: I read or bookmark far more than I have capacity to absorb or use. Big chunks of time disappear and I’m left feeling a dull sense of guilt and quiet desperation. I am confronted with my own akrasia — that is, a state in which one lacks self-control or acts against one’s better judgment.

I was interested, therefore, when a clever, accomplished and kind friend (incredibly, I have at least one) lent me a copy of Digitial Minimalism by Cal Newport, which will be published in February. Newport wants to help people overcome excessive use of social media. His approach is, I think, worth a little time and attention.

Newport thinks it would be unrealistic and ill-advised for most people to give up digital tools completely. Using them for work and essential personal matters such as childcare is fine. The point, rather, is “digital decluttering.” He advises that for thirty days you stop using social media and other apps for all non-essential purposes, and turn towards “intentional analog activities” — that is, do stuff in the real world that provides you with a sense of meaning. After the thirty days, you can reintroduction Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or whatever back into your life, but now with a sense of self-control that you gained during their absence.

This sounds like advice from a lifestyle column, albeit quite a sensible one, but there is more to it than that. For the bigger point, which Newport nails early in the book, and which for me is the clincher, is that the real issue is “not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.”

There is, of course, nothing especially new in this insight. But I find it helpful, somehow, to have it framed as Newport frames it, especially when the framing comes along with a recommendation for change that I can actually manage. I found myself cutting back sharply on Twitter right after having read his book, and already feel better for it.

Power — both economic and political — is at the heart of this. Akrasia is derived from the Greek akratos: ’without power’ — in other words, the negation of such limited and fragile powers and liberties as we have in our supposed democracy (in Greek dēmokratía). As Newport observes, we should not blame only ourselves if we become addicted to our phones and tablets: “People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy but because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.”

There is, of course, already an array of insightful analysis of the challenges out there, as well as constructive and thoughtful recommendations for how to address them. Perpsectiva’s attention initiative is among them. Another is Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy by James Williams (which is freely available online). And The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff looks to be especially relevant. In a critical but informative and largely positive review in The New York Times, Jacob Silverman describes it as “a rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding.”  In The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nicholas Carr writes that “like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, [Zuboff’s] book challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate.”

Imagining anew is not easy.  Established patterns of thought, reinforced as they are by established power structures and technologies, are hard to shift — a point well made by Mark Curtis in a long interview published in The Economist in December.  To blame everything on ‘capitalism’ is not new, and may be to succumb to outrage porn, changing nothing. For starters, capitalism itself may not necessarily be monolithic. Its Chinese incarnation has different characteristics from its Western one and, as George Soros warns, poses different dangers. Further, it’s not impossible that enterprise with a focus on purpose as described by Mariana Mazzucato and others could be a vital part of solution to challenges such as a rapid green energy transition.

In any case, I will continue to log on to Twitter and other social media— with, I trust, more control and intention — as part of my small daily struggle to connect, to become more aware, and to act rightfully. I hope you will too.

Caspar Henderson is an associate at Perspectiva

Image of Australian Jewel beetles and their stubby friend via Perthnow

Revelations about the speed of climate change took off at a gallop in the first weeks of 2019. A new study has determined that the rate of ice loss in Greenland has increased fourfold since 2003. “The research,” noted The Guardian, “provides fresh evidence of the dangers posed to vulnerable coastal places as diverse as Miami, Shanghai, Bangladesh and various Pacific islands. ”  And, observed The New York Times, the new study “is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative.” Just a few days before, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is losing six times more mass than it was four decades ago.

And there’s more. Another new study published this month has found that the oceans are warming far faster than earlier estimates. This will contribute to further sea level rise and likely cause major changes in ocean chemistry and ecology.

Keeping up and making sense of all this is as challenging as ever. In about 2010, Timothy Morton the critic coined the term ‘hyperobject’ to describe matters that are so big and far reaching that they elude our metaphorical and conceptual lexicon. He had climate change in mind, and the term may have its uses. But, I think, it is vital to try to appreciate what is changing and what is being lost in very specific, non-generalised ways: to pay attention to the details. And in this regard, another kind of work published this month is helpful. Dahr Jamal’s The End of Ice (excerpted here) is directed at the general reader, and it is worth slowing down a little to read. Jamal writes:

Modern life has compressed time and space. You can traverse the globe in a matter of hours, or gain information in nanoseconds. The price for this, along with everything we want, on demand, all the time, is a total disconnection from the planet that sustains our lives.

As a result of this disconnection we fail to appreciate that:

swathes of the natural world are, in the blink of a geological eye, falling into oblivion.

Jamal’s aim is to help his readers to see and feel  rapid change and loss in some of the places he loves best, which in his case are the glaciers and high mountains where he has spent much of his life. Other artist and authors are trying to do this too. Two fine examples are Nancy Campbell’s fine  The Library of Ice and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, which will be published in May, and which includes some of the most transcendent and powerful writing about Greenland in recent years.

Back in 2014 the philosopher Thomas Metzinger wrote that the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming “seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species.” He predicted that during the next decades “we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings.”  The view would seem to accord with the track record: since 2005 total global greenhouse-gas emissions have most closely tracked the worse case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But the show is not over. Responding at Perspectiva Jonathan Rowson has observed

Failing is not the same as failed, and it is sometimes wise to accept limitations, yet there is hope in Metzinger’s premise — “the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species”. Those abilities of our species are not fixed. We know, as well as we know anything, that human beings can grow and change for the better. We also know that is deeply rewarding but difficult.

Metzinger would surely agree. In an essay published on Aeon around this time of year in 2018 he wrote

The real challenge is not climate change as such; the true problems humankind must confront are the inbuilt features of our very own minds, such as systematic rationality and empathy deficits, self-deception, and the extreme vulnerability of the inner mechanisms creating mental autonomy.

Vital to building any mechanisms for mental autonomy is regaining control over one’s sense of attention. Perspectiva Associate Dan Nixon argues (on Aeon and InsideOut ) that:

most effective of all… is simply to return to an embodied, exploratory mode of attention, just for a moment or two, as often as we can throughout the day. Watching our breath, say, with no agenda. In an age of fast-paced technologies and instant hits, that might sound a little … underwhelming. But there can be beauty and wonder in the unadorned act of ‘experiencing’

And it can be possible to bring greater attention and awareness to what one shares in community and action with others. In a post on the importance of reconciliation, the geographer Jem Bendell writes:

I envision seeing whole neighbourhoods and camps of people spontaneously singing and dancing together of their pure joy of experiencing all sensations of life, both during and between working together on useful tasks. Not because they are singing from habit, custom, obligation, or recreation, but because they are so connected to the wonder of experiencing life while serving life.

In The End of Ice, Dahr Jamal celebrates the approach of someone half a world away:

I am heartened by people like my friend Karina Miotto in Brazil, who has devoted her entire life to protecting the Amazon. Each time a report is published about increased deforestation in her beloved rainforest, I watch Karina become consumed in grief. But each time, she goes deeper within herself and her community, further strengthening her love for that portion of the planet where she lives, and repurposes herself into her next action to protect the Amazon. I find solace in the fact that there are millions of others like Karina, particularly among the younger generations, who have drawn their lines around their respective portions of the planet closest to their hearts and are making their stands.

In the struggle to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change, or adapt to them, the wisdom and courage of those we love, and others we may never know, could be our greatest resource.

Caspar Henderson @casparhenderson is an Associate at Perspectiva

Image: Cyanometer of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Alexander von Humboldt. Credit Kirsten Carlson. Source Amusing Planet