The Age of Dissonance

There are no maps for these territories.

My aim in what follows is not to attack the US government, the Israeli government, or even the UK government. I am horrified by what is unfolding in the Middle East, and I reflect more deeply on Gaza here, but I see little point in adding to the noise now.

What feels worth sharing today is my sense of dissonance. I suspect dissonance is widespread, and may even be a defining feature of our times.

Yesterday I encountered the following photograph online. I’m sorry, it’s ugly.

The smoke stems from explosions caused by bombs. What looks like flying London black cabs are actually aid packages for the civilian population being simultaneously starved, bombed, and cared for. Both deliveries, one to destroy, the other to mitigate the destruction, stem directly or indirectly from the support of the US government and/or other Western allies of the current Israeli government, who are effectively on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.

This is one of many such photos, and it corroborates cartoons (below) that have been widely shared. I have not managed to trace the sources, and these days we have to be circumspect about the veracity of images doing the rounds, but the images all came from a post by @OnlinePalEng on X/Twitter that can be found here and they capture something there is corroborating evidence for.

Dissonance arises when we see bombs and aid failing from the same sky from the same provider(s) because that notion does not accord with our maps, our logic, or our desire for the world to make sense. This point is not Gaza-specific.

There is ‘a literature’ here, as they say without irony, and it gives a range of definitions, but I think there is a post-academic or transdisciplinary case for defining dissonance broadly rather than narrowly. In all cases, it arises as a kind of ‘failure to fit’, sometimes between map and territory, sometimes between value and action, sometimes between idea and reality, sometimes between thought and feeling. Dissonance arises for instance when we try to align our thoughts, values and actions, but fail, and we feel it most acutely and consciously when we notice we have failed. Dissonance is not a pleasant feeling and discomforting is perhaps the best way to describe it, but that feeling is potentially transformative too because it’s a sign that we may be outgrowing a limiting perception of the world.

Opposites of dissonant include consonant, agreeable, and harmonious. What dissonance highlights that concepts like alienation, false consciousness and dislocation do not is the idea that our experience is defined by a lack or loss of agreement, the sense that things that should fit together do not. Our maps do not describe our territory. Dissonance is a relational idea at its heart, but the relationship in question is the most fundamental relationship of all, between the subject of experience and the object of inquiry; between ourselves and the world.

(Here’s an important aside: It is conventional to include the qualifying adjective cognitive and speak of cognitive dissonance, but that inclusion feels redundant and limiting. I find it redundant because unless we are in a musical context it’s usually clear we are talking about the dissonance in our embodied minds grappling with the world, and I find it limiting because ‘cognitive’ is a quasi-scientific term that struggles to denote more expansive human phenomena (eg aesthetic, ethical, spiritual, sociological). The word cognitive makes me think of cogs in a machine that are operative and it risks reducing the situated historical human being to a mechanism of mind. That said, I loved reading The Mind’s New Science by Howard Gardner as part of my master’s degree, while John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series shows the power of ‘cognition’ when it is properly understood.)

The idea of cognition has intellectual dignity, but the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ makes dissonance sound like one mental trait of many, while what I am highlighting here is something more like a cultural mood or societal atmosphere in a phase of historical time.

We live in an age of dissonance. The complexity and pace of events have long since eclipsed the complexity of human consciousness. Yet, social, political and professional conventions oblige us to talk and act as if we know what we are doing - that’s why the news feels so obtuse. Our predicament is not so much that things don’t make sense, but that the things we use to make sense in the public sphere - principally evidence, reason and debate– have become less reliable as guides to action (hence the antidebate). As Nora Bateson once put it to me in a personal conversation: the world is so confusing that we are confused about our confusion.

Pursuing indefinite economic growth on a finite planet is deluded rather than dissonant, but unless you have the mental acrobatic capacity of an ecomodernist, what is dissonant is seeking to indefinitely grow the economy on the one hand, and on the other hand profess to care deeply about ecological constraints. (Bruno Latour’s response to the ecomodernist manifesto is worth reading).

Today’s politicians are often dissonance merchants. The airwaves and social media feeds are full of their half-truths, soundbytes, evasions and straw-man counterattacks.

In the context of economic growth as a political imperative that constrains, let’s say ecological wisdom, this problem is deeper than it might first appear, as indicated by Tim Jackson in Post Growth (p150):

A conundrum faces us here. Those who want change tend not to be in power. Those who hold power tend not to want change. The possibilities for any kind of change depend on the distribution of power coded into the rules of the state. The mercy of the state depends inherently on its mandate. The mandate forged by western democracy is a very particular one. Political power is uncomfortably tied to the delivery of economic growth.

In other words, dissonance is baked into our ‘very peculiar’ notion of political mandate that requires us to overlook a fundamental contradiction at the heart of public life.

Dissonance can be both trivial and profound; it arises from the juxtaposition of living a seemingly normal life, taking the kids to school, and buying some bread and milk, while watching the world unravel on your smartphone. Yet it also arises from reflections on our mortality, as Will Self put it with typically dark wit in an event on Death that I chaired a decade ago:

"I face up to death but then I flip back into denial. Surely that's what it's like? I lie in bed in the small hours of the morning, absolutely terrified by the apprehension of my own dissolution...And then I go to sleep and wake up the morning and make toast.”

More generally, dissonance arises from a breakdown in the relationship between an organism and its environment, which can happen at a range of scales and speeds. Perspectiva Associate Layman Pascal captures what it’s like to live with this heightened awareness of dissonance in his wonderful 2022 essay on Apocalyptarians that includes the following paragraph:

Our ice caps are rapidly melting. There are huge reserves of greenhouse gases that will accelerate global climate destabilization if they come to the surface. Meanwhile the Amazon rainforest — still being deliberately burned — is outputting more carbon than it absorbs. Oceanographers point to simultaneous acidification of the seas and an imminent tipping point for cascading die-offs among marine species. At the very same moment, we are building artificial intelligences, self-driving cars and flying killer robots (lethal drones). Our pocket computers are monitoring us and using special algorithms that deliberately erode attention, break up social bonds and generate addictive stress. We can design the genetics of babies in laboratories. The location of nuclear weapons is getting harder to track. Natural and artificial pandemics are circulating. Deepfake technology means that “audio, video and photographic evidence” proves nothing. At least one of your online friends is a piece of software. At least one of the social groups important to you was created by a distant cybernetic troll farm that deliberately wants to radicalize you. Our democratic legislatures are unresponsive to the will of the people. Wild animals are already full of microplastics and strange hormones. Everyone is taking multiple mood-altering drugs. You can 3D print guns that can’t be detected by airport security. The tools for making bio-weapons are spreading. The most beautiful places in the world are constantly on fire. We are moving to make settlements on Mars. Computers can defeat us at all games. And, according to the Pentagon, UFOs might be back in the picture…

This is NOW.

And I bet you could add a half-dozen more things to that list…

Yet you don’t even have to be a full-blown apocalyptarian today to recognise that dissonance is a fundamental feature of modernity as it slowly unravels.

In literature, Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about dissonance and so is Heller’s Catch-22. In evolutionary theory, the Darwinian expression ‘survival of the fittest’ is often misunderstood to mean the survival of the most fit, as if it was about carrying the most coconuts or outrunning the fastest tigers. But it’s really about the survival of the most fitting; those who survive are those whose physical traits, mental models and patterns of cooperation combine to best fit their context, niche or milieu, and who are protean enough to adapt to changes in those environments through heightened awareness and skilful sense-making.

In the 21^st century, our species will struggle to survive because it will struggle to fit.

Perhaps the most pervasive source of dissonance arises in those who enjoy day-to-day life, know that the world has made extraordinary progress, and want to carry on with life as it is, and yet sense that everything has to change, and probably will. 

Ecologically we now have knowledge, which we keep at bay through unconscious grief and terror, that we are inexorably destroying our only home. As Ruth Padel put it at the RSA climate poetry night:

"I am the tragic mask. I am how you defend yourself from what it is a catastrophe to have to know."

In its complexity, magnitude and consequences, climate change in particular is an emergency unlike any we have confronted before - a collective action problem laced with dissonance. Calls for “Action!” feel hollow because nobody seems to know how to do what we have to do, and those with moral and systemic clarity who do know how we should do what we have to do, often seem politically naïve, or else lack power, or the capacity to create power, or speak to it.

Technologically, we are beyond gadgets and ever more deeply enmeshed in techno-systems and data-driven processes that shape our sense of reality and have the power to completely destroy it. The societal impact of any single one of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, crypto-currencies, 3D printing, and synthetic biology is profound. These technologies alone are likely to refashion - if not supplant - skill, work, embodiment, money, materiality, and life respectively, but combined their potential emergent properties are disorienting.

Technology should be a force for good, but we don’t live in a world of wise elders who release it gradually to keep pace with our maturity as a species. Dissonance arises from the desire to believe in technology as a shared human endeavour for the greater good, while knowing that most world-changing technologies are injected into society’s bloodstream by commercially motivated private actors conducting simultaneous unsupervised experiments on a planetary scale.

And now the good news. Or at least, a break from the bad news.

The experience of dissonance is prismatic, and not only gives us insight into the political psychology of our time but also points towards a deeper theory of existence.

As we look at our attempt to make the world fit our mind’s idea of it, we notice that that process becomes more complex over time and the human lifespan is reconceived as an unfolding bio-psycho-social-spiritual process; a non-linear but directional journey from unconscious to conscious union; from our earliest oceanic states through phases of psychological disintegration and reintegration towards transcendent states in which distinctions between self and other, mind and world begin to dissolve, but we nonetheless remain, somehow, intact.

Understanding dissonance better is therefore of foundational importance to understanding how we might respond to the challenges of our time. It seems to me that our collective experience of dissonance is the signal that Jean Gebser’s prophecy about the mental-rational function entering its deficient mode is a sound assessment of where we are. This is a world of unintelligible hyperobjects, and, as Jeremy Johnson puts it: “There are no maps for these territories”. We are therefore in constant disagreement with the world, out of accord, out of kilter.

But are we out of ideas?

I am not sure. Widespread dissonance means something is breaking down, notably the connection between our maps and the territories they are supposed to help us navigate. But it’s a deeper problem than that because it’s not as if we can easily create new maps or easily create or inhabit new territory. As my friend David Rook puts the point elegantly:

The trouble with the expression the map is not the territory is that the territory is full of maps.

We are entangled. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it: We are suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have spun.

Somehow - and I don’t know how exactly - we have to transcend and include our love of intellectual cartography. I remain committed to precision with language and quality thinking, but we also have to see that the new pattern of consciousness arising does not feel like one that will be tamed by the intellect.

And I don’t expect the emerging consciousness to be tranquil or even particularly friendly. What is coming towards us looks more like an Age of Kali than an Age of Aquarius. Our new minds will have to be equipped for a very bumpy ride indeed.

It seems to me we have to somehow listen to the dissonance around us and within us. I don’t know how exactly, but we have to listen deeply to the pulse of the universe that is beating through the dissonance, listen for the heartbeat as it were, and then do what each of us can to midwife whatever wants to be born.