Metacrisis 101

An emergent undergraduate discipline to live within and beyond the Academy.

Waking up this morning took a moment as I needed to parse my dream state a little more carefully into the dim lit bedroom under gray and cloudy skies. There was much to do in the dream space, and as I set aside the dream for waking reality I had to be a bit conscientious of what I was holding onto in which aspect of my experience.

One of the broad themes I remember most clearly was an effort to develop and set up an undergraduate program majoring in metacrisis studies. That’s not something I’m waking on in working reality just yet and I needed to push the task onto a back burner to lean into the emerging day.

Fortunately I have this little corner of writing so the subject does have a little thread to bridge the two worlds.

My liminal state had been starting to assemble a reading/media list for the course, and I imagine this is as good a place as any to continue making a little sense of that.

One of my favorite articles on the subject is from the gentleman Jonathan Rowson, a piece titled “Prefixing the World.”

While Jonathan’s contention in the article is that we should choose our prefix for our modern crisis carefully, I would amend that slightly. While I agree the real substance of our concern is the metacrisis object, I do think it’s fair to begin our engagements and conversations on the matter with a nod to the emergent surface features that result from that underlying dynamic.

The way I tend to consider the subject, the metacrisis is more the water we are swimming in and thus takes a new order of looking in order to bring it into view. Doing this is an act of foregrounding context, not the first go to for most of us in our natural flows of understanding. For the most part we tend to relate first to the objects in thought, and only sometimes to the patterns giving rise to those particular objects.

For me, this is explanatory of how we come to be in this predicament; there are a variety of conceived identity of what it means to be human, many of them evolutionary/developmental in nature. As our species has grown and evolved, so too has our context, and most particularly the dynamic interface of that inherent tension. The metacrisis is not some sin from above or below, nor some accidental meteorite streaking into view, rather it is an emergent property of this living global system of which we have become so catalytic a part.

The surface symptoms of this emergent condition have come to be known as “the polycrisis.” The World Economic Forum describes this as a condition where our environmental, economic, societal, geopolitical, and technological local/global crisis conditions “interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” This is a convoluted complex of near existential concerns that does not subject itself well to a siloed approach to addressing these matters one at a time.

These five broad domains can be broken down into discrete issue concerns, such as the state of American politics, any number of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), or any other acute concern which may find it to the front of our hearts in one moment or another.

While it is useful and important that we as individuals and collectives of individuals address our efforts of care to those things most salient to us, it is also important to recognize that such a distributed approach is likely a piecemeal response failing to account for a larger strategic insight of our natural metacrisis condition.

“Emergence,” is a popular construct among many sophisticated circles and indeed there is much faith placed in emergence as a ground for hope. Not, I think, unjustly so. Again, however…

Considered from a certain perspectival scale, the cosmos itself certainly appears to follow a neutral, but elegant pattern of emergence… Fundamental elements twisting together into more complex structures, giving rise to stars and planets and water and life and, to be a bit cliché, eventually opera.

But that is not the whole story, this is not a linear progression, but a fractal one with infinitely diminishing divergent ends.. To draw on the Hindu description of things, this is only the Brahma aspect, a universal creative force giving rise to novelty, beauty, and majesty. We can also recall dear Vishnu, the God of preservation and sustaining, that grace which allows us to persist to the point of metacrisis. In the full accounting however we must remember also the role of Shiva the destroyer.

Like Edison’s hundredth lightbulb, for every emergent marvel of enduring success, there are countless evolutionary prototypes decomposing on the cutting room floor. While, again, faith in the emergent principal is not misplaced, a Sufi quote comes to mind as well, “trust in God, but tether your camel.”

This, I think is the point of distinction. While we can bring ourselves to the threshold of concern by identifying a polycrisis and its concurrent complex threat landscape, just as we can raise the alarm for American political decay, or the urgent need to solve the UN SDG’s, approaching this as a problem frame is a kin to the idiomatic shuffling of the deck chairs.

As prodigious as the human species has been (nearly quadrupling our population in the past 70 years, to say nothing of longer-term reflections,) there is nothing that explicitly sets us apart from an uncountable number of experiments in species and culture no longer with us today. To imagine that our past performance is a predictor of future success is a failure of context consideration.

Responding to surface conditions is a natural skill, a gift of our reactionary animal nature, a capacity that serves a relatively wide scope of contextual challenge and opportunity.

As we have discovered, however, there is also that profound gift of a certain evolutionary threshold where we find both the capacity and the rewards of looking inward, looking at our looking, our identity, our meaning making, and our determinations of underlying value.

In the simplest of terms this expresses itself in the forward march of progress, agriculture, the conquest of nations, self-improvement and self-development. In more nuanced light this appears as cultural conventions of deep harmony with natural law, piercing the veil of Maya, illumination, enlightenment, self-realization, gnosis, devekut, maʿrifa, and no doubt countless other embodiments of perennial wisdom.

While this approach has been profoundly useful for various bands, nations, and individuals, we find ourselves today called to transcend this illusion of separation. While there may (or may not) be some legitimate contention with the idea of the Anthropocene, there can be no doubt that our species has, in the past few centuries moved from being present globally to a global presence. This is a new natural social economic condition, defined by our prior “success,” and defining of our future capacities to endure.

This means that the object of introspection, the individual, band, or nature, becomes subservient, nearly a constituent of a much larger global species (and likely greater) object of consideration when determining inward and outward and the commensurate introspection.

We can no longer consider flourishing simply on “our own” terms, but must recognize a new whole being, Gaia at minimum, accounting for the possibility of successful perseverance into the majestic, graceful, and mysterious marvel of life and all that it contains. We must undertake a global introspection that does not cut us apart from ourselves, excluding one geography, another religion, or even species from that internal dynamic nature that might be served to express itself more fully.

The crisis we find ourselves within today is not a conventional problem/opportunity to be resolved, but rather an initiatory moment. Acknowledging change in relative reality as a paradoxical constant, I’m reminded of what I believe is a Sufi quote, perhaps from Rumi:

“Being who you are means not being who you’ve been.”

In conventional initiation there is an certain body of recognized authorities that take the initiate through the journey, providing the necessary elements and ritual conditions, and defining the boundaries of a successful or a failed “crossing over.” In our human world today, this body is not easily recognized by the modern mind that so easily places itself “above” all other creation.

In any initiatory movement, there is always the element of grace. This sets initiation apart from graduation, where the latter can be obtained one stage at a time over concerted effort and development, the former requires transformation at a deeper level, it requires help from beyond the boundaries of self. For us today, we must seek that grace in the company and wisdom of our elder siblings, we must seek that grace in the presence and bodies of our floral, faunal, microbiota, and fungal cousins, we must seek that grace in the care for our elemental kin, the sky, the water, the landscapes, and the heavens beyond.

While this represents a rather wide context relative to our conventional view, there lies nonetheless within, the still nested and simple elements of work and play and care for ourselves and one another. In the bridge from our modern selves to something more fit for harmonic flourishing and endurance.

How do we nurture and care for the emergence of this new professional intelligence, this new “trans systemic” wisdom discipline, a formal new domain of inquiry that bridges the ancient, the present, and the necessary future if we wish to flourish more deeply, more fully, and much longer than we have?

If I were organizing such an undergraduate degree, I would certainly include the aforementioned article by our friend Jonathan, and undoubtedly the brief interview film of him from the camera lens and mind of Katie Teague.

I would include this playlist of video content from just last year, centered largely around conversations in Sweden. As well as further in-depth interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger hosted by the earnest and well-intentioned Mr. Hagans.

A necessary complement to these modern retrospective, would also compel the study of a variety of wisdom traditions, primarily those broad cultural views having to do with indigenous knowledge systems, not limited to, but definitely such as those from Mrs. Wall Kimmerer, Mr. Yunkaporta, Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, PhD, and others.

This list is incomplete, narrowly sourced, and subject to a much more comprehensive wisdom review, but it is my humble offering to begin.