Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist and philosopher-poet of the quantum realm, says “the world is made up of networks of kisses not of stones.” What he means by this is that all the world is interaction—at every level; from the most infinitesimal to the infinite, we are in an ongoing dynamic interplay of relating. Systems continually systeming.
This truth is quite something to contemplate, especially from the perspective of apparently solid, fleshy human bodies who can only perceive things within a narrow space-time scale. We are aspects of an astonishing evolving dancing universe—vibrant and alive with matter and energy in space-time. We contain, and form, multitudes.
Like all life on our planet, we are complex adaptive systems, from our cells, to our individual bodies, to our collective groups and human societies, to our local ecosystems, to the whole of Earth’s biosphere. We are systems nested within systems; relational organisms all the way down.
There is nothing outside of relating. Even when we think we are not relating, we are. We look and are looked at. We speak and are spoken to. We touch and are touched. We act and react. We hold others—living and dead—in our thoughts and hearts and bodies. We are birthed and cared for and taught and influenced. We eat food bought at a store, delivered by drivers, from growers who had their hands in the soil, with the mycelium and the microbes and the worms. We are affected by the nervous systems of those around us. We read books, watch films, play music. Our work is with, for, and to others. We love and fight and converse and argue. We are comforted and we are hurt. We dwell in a web of relationships and reciprocity, with other humans and with the more-than-human world.
Though there are those who would like to deny it, we cannot exist independently of our context and environment. We are completely reliant on, and shaped by, the interactions and relationships we have with each other and the world around us. Self-sufficiency is an impossibility; the myth of the self-made man is an adolescent delusion; self-reliance is a dangerous conceit. Without interaction—the transfer of matter and energy between us and what isn’t us—we would quite literally die. We are interdependent, not independent. This is an indisputable fact, not a partisan political opinion. We are each other’s habitats.
So, given this fundamental truth, it seems self-evident that for each of us to flourish, we are best served by a habitat that is conducive to flourishing. Life does not flourish in a barren or hostile environment, no matter how hard it tries. We cannot escape these basic facts of existence. We are in symbiotic relationship with everyone and everything around us. We may try to master new knowledge and build more complex technologies to extend our capacities and reach, in a desire for more certainty and more control, but even these lead to new interdependencies, to new outcomes, to new incapacities, to new uncertainties. We may compartmentalise the parts of ourselves and others who do not fit with our ideal of how-things-should-be, but they are still there even when we attempt to exile them. There is no “out there.” We cannot escape the conditions of life. We are life.
We desperately need a new politics that works with the realities of our living world, rather than hubristically trying to master it. And what so many of us do not realise, due to our socio-cultural blindspots, is that this “new” is not new at all but already here, carried lovingly by elders and wisdom-holders around the globe over millennia, often at huge consequence to themselves. It is time to slow down, quieten down, and listen to those who’ve been silenced in the heady Enlightenment rush of Eurocentric humanism and scientific fundamentalism and empire-building. Because the logic that is currently dominant in the world is not the sophisticated one we’ve been taught to believe it is. It is just the dominant one, and what is dominant is not the same as what is best (as we see and feel around us everyday and everywhere).
This dominant logic has claimed for itself the power to define and judge the world’s reality. It is a logic that has been imposed, top-down and often violently, by the victors in a global game of Risk. And it is a logic that believes itself to be the universal set for all knowing—that there is nothing outside of its masterful reach. Knowledge is only understood as legitimate if it meets its man-made criteria. Anything else is derided, exiled, suppressed. It means that we are in the grip of circular reasoning, and if the assumptions of this logic are faulty, then we are building on shaky ground indeed. And this should concern us all, because we’re currently staking our lives and our planet on it.
This logic is based in abstraction—disembodied thinking—and decontextualisation. We have been taught to isolate things in order to understand them, but we forgot that was just a cognitive shortcut, a step along the way to make our thinking easier, and we lost our way back to the whole. The dominant logic is disconnected from the material living world, attempting to universalise mental models of the world dreamed up by powerful, predominantly white, men with all their imperfections and biases and blindspots. These reductionist mental models have then been used as the foundations on which subsequent knowledge is built, and through vectors of colonisation, imperialism, globalisation, and hyper-connectivity, imposed on everyone else. The narrowness of human experience that contributed to this body of orthodox knowledge has created a butterfly effect of illogic that over time has proliferated the gaps between disembodied, disconnected models and grounded holistic truth.
We have come to hubristically believe that our models of the world are the world itself. We then create the world—through our systems, laws, technologies, structures, institutions—from the models we have dreamed up.
We need to ground ourselves again by submitting this simplistic human-centric system of logic to the more capacious, ecosystemic, and holistic logic of the living world. Let it be guided, rather than be in charge. There are pockets of scientists and academics within Western knowledge systems who are beginning to do this (usually as a result of engagement with other worldviews), but their progress is slow because of the dominance of the normative status quo. And the voices of those who have always understood this have continued to be seen as primitive and unsophisticated, and positioned reluctantly as a kind of fascinating but inconsequential adjunct to canonical accounts of the world.
It’s time to reach for humility, not continue to double down on an adolescent mistake. Humans can only understand things on human terms and at human scales using human logic (our technology is, of course, based on our own logic). It is completely laughable to suggest we can know and control everything. That is what education actually has the potential to teach us, if we allow it.
Our dominant ways of being-in-the-world are conditioned by a monocultural collective cognitive bias, that Daniel Kahneman terms WYSIATI—What You See Is All There Is. Via the Great Chain of Being, we have been indoctrinated into the cult of Mind over Matter; a belief that we, with our “superior” human intelligence, are capable of grasping what is so much greater than us. And those who can understand the ridiculousness of this premise—for whom this cognitive bias produces cognitive dissonance—are othered and belittled for their divergence from this enforced normativity. I prefer to think of this as WISIATI—What I See Is All There Is—the idea that there is one monocultural perspective on reality that everyone should adhere to, and it is that of the powerful white men of the Global North.
This enforced human-centric monoculturalism is hurting all of us, including those who are enforcing it. It leads us to believe that we can split the world up (physically and metaphysically) into mutually exclusive parts (including knowledge disciplines) and that working on each of those parts in isolation will produce solutions to the entangled messy reality of an interdependent world. Not only do we split the world into parts, but we judge some of those parts to have more value, more relevance, and more significance than other parts to addressing global challenges. It is the biggest act of arrogance and self-sabotage imaginable.
I think we need to let go of our acculturated Western need to be the One Who Comes Up With The Answer and stop using up all the global resources trying to invent new ways of fixing the problems using the methods that caused them. Instead, what if we asked our elders to guide us, and then put that parts-based expertise in service of this wisdom that comes from what is greater than us. What if we understood that we’ve made a categorical error and what we thought of as “primitive” is in fact more sophisticated than we have the capacity to understand.
What I know from exploring systemic intelligence from the outside-in (scholarship and research and listening to those who have holistic wisdom) and the inside-out (embodiment and lived experience) is that complex adaptive systems are not like controlled mechanical systems; they are self-organising, dynamic, non-linear, emergent, with feedback loops that continue to produce evolution and learning. Complex adaptive systems exhibit patterns of behaviour and also spontaneous unpredictable outcomes (what Nassim Nicolas Taleb calls a “black swan”). They are constantly diversifying and are not controllable. Yet we are continuing to act as though we, and the world of which we are a part, are fixed mechanical systems that can be subject to control and engineering. And when that control does not work, we just try harder, place more controls in place, insist we know what we are doing. And continue to produce more unintended consequences that require yet more engineering.
It is time to take stock of the tools we are relying on. They are the wrong tools for this job of life. We need to be guided by the holistic wisdom of our elders, and put our specialised parts-based tools to new uses under their guidance.
We need a politics that works with living processes, that is constitutionally based on immersive ecosystemic life, not distanced mechanical abstraction. Because without a foundation that is based in reality rather than our idea of reality, we will get further and further off-track.
Toitū Te Tiriti!