Five Flavours of Betweenness

Cultural, Systemic, Paradigmatic, Ontological, Metaphysical.

In her book Responsibility and Judgement, as far back as 1975, Hannah Arendt expressed a sentiment that feels valid and pertinent almost half a century later:

“We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls that irretrievably shut off the past.”

How could that be? From what kind of vantage point could a turning point last for decades or even centuries?

The idea of permacrisis sounds like an oxymoron, because crises are supposed to come and go rather than stay indefinitely, but one person’s oxymoron is another’s playful paradox. After the great and glorious metacrisis - our multifaceted delusion - permacrisis comes second in my crisis hall of fame, becuase it precipitates freedom from crisis thinking. Permacrisis highlights the discontinuity of the world as we have known it, in which history is forged by crises that come and go, with the idea of that what we are now living with is one looooooooooooooooooooong crisis.

The Collins dictionary defines permacrisis, its 2022 word of the year, as “An extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.” The Cambridge Dictionary definition is “a long period of great difficulty, confusion or suffering that seems to have no end.” The dictionary references to ‘extended’ and ‘long’ rather than permanent are important. We are in a kind of fast changing but slow moving historical transition that might lead to collapse or might lead to transformation, or, somewhow, both. That open question is likely to be decades long in the asking and answering.

The story we are part of is not one of inexorable progress, nor is there any way back to any presumed normal, so permacrisis suggests a kind of quizzical purgatory without salvation as the near-term fate of humanity. (And yes, both ‘we’ and ‘humanity’ are contentious and problematic terms here, but I believe we can forgive ourselves for speaking on behalf of the world). In some mythologies, purgatory is a time to think about what you have done wrong, to free yourself from the patterns of habituation that got you stuck and led you astray, and that’s why permacrisis is a useful concept, because without that kind of deeper reflection we’ll never get to the importance of metacrisis and beyond it. We’ll be stuck in crisis forever.

Permacrisis is another way to think about what Anthropologists call the liminal, in which we are out of one culture but not yet quite in another, and what sociologists, particularly Gramsci, call an interregnum, in which the old is dying but the new has not yet been born. Zachary Stein frames this moment poetically in the title of his book Education in a Time Between Worlds (2019). This ‘time between worlds’ idea was latterly deepened in a Perspectiva essay Education Must Make History Again through an examination of the inspiring and under-appreciated figure of John Amos Comenius who lived between 1592 and 1670. In that ‘moment’ of Comenius’s extraordinary life, - eighty years or so - the pre-modern world of feudalism, kingdoms, and hegemonic religion had not quite died and the modern world of trade, commerce, and nation-states was just being born. Comenius’ world was in a kind of perpetual crisis in the original sense of being at a turning point, where the meaning and direction of collective life were momentarily - yet over decades - up for grabs. The same applies today, only the stakes are higher becuase economically, technologically and militarily, we now have the capacity to destroy our only home.

To offer some historical parallels of an experience of permacrisis, there is the decay and dissolution of the Roman State in the West between the 4th to 6th centuries. In that context the meta-crisis symptom was the argument over the meaning of the collapse of the Imperial system and what should succeed it as well as the relativisation of the pagan-Roman cosmology and polity and the absolutisation of the Christian-Roman alternative. The Emblematic text of the time was probably Augustine’s City of God. Then in the Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries there were arguments over the forms of mediation between the individual and God, the relativisation of Catholicism and the fragmentation of contending absolute values. There were many emblematic texts from Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, Milton, Spinoza. Then in The Scientific revolution and Enlightenment, 17th-19th centuries there was an argument over cosmic value and teleology and a gradual rendering by science and scientistic ideologies of all phenomena as contingent, historically situated, reducible and the creation of an immanent framing in which the world is encased in and interpreted by science. (*I am indebted to Perspectiva Trustee Ian Christie for his contribution to this paragraph*).

For those working for a better world, the stories we are part of today might be climate change mitigation, or reducing political polarisation, or the promise of new technologies, or an image to guide action, like doughnut economics. But these endeavours are all part of a bigger story akin to those of Rome, reformation and enlightenment, that needs to be inhabited. Until we grasp that we are in a time between worlds it is hard to see the deep structures of societal immunity to change that keep the old world on life support. Without trusting that a new world will be born it is hard to see the possibilities for radical renewal, possibilities that are neglected because they can’t be perceived within the prism of the world to which we are habituated, which is a world forged by crisis thinking. Modernity is ending. We really are in a time between worlds. The expression is not just a poetic soundbite, or a mystical status claim, though it is informed by visionaries and prophets of the evolution of consciousness like Jean Gebser and Sri Aurobindo. The idea is empirical, sociological, and compelling to those who look.

The process of undoing seems inexorable partly because capitalism is running out of frontiers, partly due to the transgression of the planet’s ecological boundaries, partly due to the impact of the internet and artificial intelligence and virtual reality on our lifeworlds, and partly because our democracies now lack viable informational ecosystems and a competent political class to inform collective debate and decisions.

But there are also signs of a new world trying to be born. Whether that’s Ukraine fighting on behalf of open societies, digital democracy in Taiwan, Joe Brewer’s bioregionalism bringing rivers back to life, female leadership in neo-anarchist Rojava, the carbon coin in The Ministry for the Future coming into real life, widespread educational renaissance through immersive technologies and ease of access to teaching, Michel Bauwens arguing for a new cosmo-local commons, progress on citizens assemblies and deliberative democracy, or Stanford’s Mark Jacobsen arguing that the whole world can be powered on renewable energy alone. The story of being between worlds is not all about death and decay. It is about dying and what has to die, but it is also about what is nascent and what wants to be born.

That notion of an extended betweenness is what I want to focus on here.

How we choose to rise to this challenge depends a great deal on our judgment about the contours or perhaps layers of the transition underway, and what role, if any, humans might have in shaping it. Just how big is the shift that is underway? In listening to discussions across civil society over the last few years I have picked up five different kinds of betweenness in play. These chosen five are neither exhaustive nor exclusive, but they are all important. We are between cultures, systems, paradigms, ontologies, and metaphysics. These shifts are all connected, and it helps to understand those connections, but it’s also useful to tease them apart. We can also think of them as the five contexts or the five transformations, or whatever best helps you sleep at night.

This is just a first sketch. In all cases, I give some kind of historical parallel and some indications of how the quality of betweenness is manifesting today, but I can imagine coming back to this framework later and adding some detail.

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The first flavour of betweenness¹ is cultural change, a shift in the individual and collective interior, and it calls for works of ‘art’ broadly conceived.

Culture is a roomy concept, and to advocate cultural change can mean many things. Some say culture is to humans as water is to fish; it is at once everywhere and fundamental and yet also somewhat intangible and imperceptible. Technically we can think of culture as inter-subjective pattern recognition, if it helps. Clearly, culture is continuing to change today, and those changes are mostly playing out online.

Debates about woke culture, laments about cultural polarisation, and battles over identity politics are salient examples, but cultural change is also about the spread of metamodern cultural artifacts or calls for existential creativity. The Inner Development Goals are an example of explicit and intentional cultural change. Campaigns based on values and frames are also in this space, for instance, Common Cause arguing for a shift towards intrinsic value.

Many important cultural shifts that feel world-changing at the time, particularly for some sections of society, don’t necessarily register in the longer perspective of humanity’s evolution. The news cycle is full of contested shifts in values and behaviour which relate to civic and civil rights, about who gets to be fully human; today in relation to trans rights for instance, in recent memory around civil rights and gay marriage, and perhaps in the future in relation to trees and rivers or robots…

Artists are the vanguards of cultural change. Today there is also a case that we are in what Margaret Mead called a ‘prefigurative culture’ in which the past is not a good guide to the future, and the young especially are in a sense 'without a world’ that they feel they can grow into, and are called upon to create the culture that makes a viable world possible. So culture is changing, and that is part of the transition story that we can all inform, but this is by no means the whole story. Culture is sometimes generative of political context, sometimes it is reflective of the technology and economy of the time, and usually it is both.

What is underway today however feels deeper than mere culture change.

The second flavour of betweenness is systems change, a shift in the collective exterior, and it calls for political work and new forms of activism.

There is a lot of loose talk about ‘changing the system’. At its most basic, a system is a set of elements in some kind of relationship with some kind of boundary and some kind of goal. You can try to ‘change the system’ in lots of ways, by adding or removing elements or changing relationships, but if the goal of the system remains in place, the system will usually find ways to accommodate and absorb such changes while carrying on. (This is ‘the H2minus challenge’ of three horizon’s thinking).

There is a field of world system dynamics that suggests the capitalistic system is in terminal decline and many believe, if only for valid ecological reasons, that the whole world system is changing or has to change. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the global capitalist system cannot survive and there will be a new world by 2050. He says it's 50/50 whether it will be better or worse, and these are “good odds”. I admire his sense of humour.

However, this kind of system change may be like the Industrial Revolution, where there are massive changes in the infrastructure and social structure of society, including some cultural changes, but not necessarily a change in worldview as such, which, in the case of the Industrial Revolution, was still basically the same enlightenment paradigm.

The shift from neoliberalism (“The state-led remaking of society on the model of the market” - Will Davies) to surveillance capitalism ("A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales”) to technofeudalism (capitalism’s assassin, creating widespread digital serfdom - Yanis Varoufakis) would be examples of systems change that is underway today with new elements and new relationships arising in the economic system, but no underlying shift in societal purpose.

Doughnut Economics is an example of a theoretical model of economic systems change, in which there are new elements in play, new relationships between the elements, and a new goal for the economic system based on thriving within social and ecological limits (though ‘thriving’ is underspecfied). However, the underlying worldview that may drive such a change or be necessary to uphold it is arguably taken for granted, and any societal, cultural, epistemological or spiritual shifts arising from ‘the doughnut’ are corollaries rather than central to the intentionality of the model.

The third flavour of betweenness is paradigm change, a shift in the collective interior and exterior, and it calls for theory building as well as imaginative and empathetic work.

A paradigm is an encompassing pattern of meaning, implicit framework or mental model that is pervasive within a culture; a paradigm reveals and obscures what can be seen and valued and measured and thought and felt. Paradigms are often specific to fields or contexts, and there are often several distinct paradigms in play, for instance in inter-disciplinary work like medical ethics, but in the context of the planet, the terms paradigm and worldview are often used interchangeably.

The contention here is that the transition underway is deep enough that it will not only fundamentally change the collective exterior (system) but it will also profoundly transform our collective interior (culture) and together these changes will shift our paradigm, worldview, and our way of knowing, in a way that is comparable to The Enlightenment or The Renaissance.

Paradigm change is ideological in nature - the aim is not to change ideas and practices as such as to change the setting and frame in which they are normalised and legitimated. Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis is the touchstone here, because clearly the world has not alighted on a single model of liberal democracy as the default way of organising society, and it seems unlikely that any single paradigm will prevail.

Liberalism appears unable to narrate its own demise and apparently lacks the self-awareness required to renew itself, Conservativism seems to have lost connection with its philosophical tradition, new technologies allow socialism to be less reliant on state planning and solve many of the market allocation problems that were its Achilles heel, but decades of individualism have led to an entrenched distrust of the collective and fear of coercion in the name of collaboration. Partly inspired by the late David Graeber, there is renewed interest in Anarchism as perhaps the only ideology that makes truly creative, convivial, and prefigurative politics possible, but it is not clear how it could build meaningful political capital or whether doing so would reveal its hidden contradictions. There is also a resurgence in nationalism, which can be more or less benign, and sadly often mutates into authoritarianism and fascism, while deep green ecologism is growing in salience for obvious reasons.

It seems highly unlikely and perhaps undesirable this flux of competing ideologies will settle into any single paradigm for the planet as a whole. Power now resides as much in hyper-agent individuals and corporations as much as it does in political movements and there is a growing recognition that we live in a multi-polar world, with multiple centres of influence and power, even if the operation of a global patent system and freedom of financial flows suggests there is one economic system.

It remains unclear if AI might help create a new paradigm, though some would say large language models are a new paradigm of sorts. At present it looks more likely to me that AI will primarily have systemic effects. The ecological case for a reduction in aggregate energy demand is very strong however, and if people and politicians somehow heed that case, it could entail a new degrowth or post-growth paradigm, which is not just about systems change, but also in shift in the meanings and purposes of collective life and related practices. For full disclosure, I am a fellow at CUSP at the University of Surrey where I am part of a ‘meanings and moral framings’ strand of inquiry alongside the role of arts and cultures, political and organisational dimensions, social and psychological understandings of the good life, which are in conversation with continual systems analysis of the macroeconomy.

There are also fields of inquiry and practice like Cosmolocalism and Bioregionalism that are paradigmatic in nature. There are signs of paradigm change across academic disciplines too, for instance, the idea that consciousness is an ontological primary rather than a mere epiphenomenon of matter is becoming more widely accepted, and there are major paradigmatic shifts underway in biology and physics relating to what life is and what time is (these paradigm shifts can lead to metaphysical shifts below).

So paradigm change is part of what we can hope for, but my impression is that we live in a world with paradigms, rather than a world that is a paradigm. To say we are in a time between worlds is to say much more than that we are between paradigms.

The fourth flavour of betweenness is ontological Change, including new kinds of intelligence, and life and scope for transmutation and even transmogrification.

Ontological change means that in addition to a shift in the collective interior and exterior, there is also a change in the individual exterior; not individual persons as such, or at least not exclusively, but the kind of stuff that things are made of - let’s say the furniture of the world. That could mean there is actually a shift underway in the kind of organism we are, perhaps similar to the shift in biological evolution when we went from single-cell organisms to multiple-cell organisms. Such a shift is ontological in the sense that there could be some rupture in our sense of what exists, and what is real; this could have technological, spiritual, or biological elements, or possibly all of them.

There are indications of the fourth between in the possibility of artificial general intelligence, various combinations of synthetic biology, gene editing, robotics, virtual reality, aspects of transhumanism, and potentially in alien life forms (if there was incontrovertible evidence of them). My friend Pat Kane once said that he didn’t think we just needed new ontologies, we needed new ontologists, and I am beginning to see what I meant.

I am not too sure what to say about ontological change, though I fear it, especially when it is severed from other changes that could or should co-arise with it. People in our network speak of ontological mutiny (Bayo Akomalafe), and generative ontologies, but my impression is that they are really speaking about metaphysics.

The fifth flvour of betweenness is metaphysical change, which is potentially about a new mind in a new world.

Metaphysics combines ontology (what exists), epistemology (how we know things), axiology (the nature of value), and cosmology (the story or meaning of the universe). Perhaps the nature of the between we are part of is cultural and systemic, and paradigmatic, and ontological, and if that’s so it may also have to be metaphysical in nature. The transformation that is underway is potentially about a shift in our structures of consciousness and our relationship to reality, such that we will soon (in evolutionary time) have ‘a new mind’ that will perceive ‘a new world’.

Our ideas of Time, Space, Causality, Freedom, and Consciousness will shift… What is happening is a shift in the type of society that we have evolved from, such that our experience of being human and being alive will be utterly different. This shift is as seismic as the fall of the Roman Empire, but is also comparable to the Axial Age of around 2,500 years ago.

In his Perspective essay mentioned earlier, Education Must Make History Again Zak Stein puts this point as follows:

“The point I am making is that during times between worlds there emerge certain ideas and thinkers that are, properly speaking, without a world. Their work is about creating a new world, by necessity… Not within the old world or the world to come, the liminal is exactly that which is the bridge and fulcrum between worlds. The focus of work in the liminal is on foundations, metaphysics, religion, and the deeper codes and sources of culture—education in its broadest sense.”

To be clear, it is not possible to just invent a new metaphysics, but that doesn’t mean a different metaphysical view can’t be ushered into being. In her paper on process metaphysics in Integral Review, Bonnitta Roy puts it like this:

“Metaphysics gets into trouble when it tries to make truth claims about the world. No true metaphysician would make such claims, because the pre-requisite of a valid metaphysics, is that it understands what underlies all truth claims, namely a cognitive-conceptual architecture, i.e., a metaphysical framework. While it may not be possible for the philosopher to reveal the contours of their framework, (in other words, think themselves out of their metaphysical box), a good metaphysician reminds themselves that there is one, beyond the horizons of their capacity to think.”

I believe the closest historical prallele we have for metaphysical change is The Axial Age. There are several meanings of axis, but pivot, fulcrum, or turning point, are particularly relevant to our current purposes. The Axial Age is a term coined by the Philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe a pivotal period of the centuries between roughly 800 and 200 years before the Common Era. Chronology is always complicated and contested but wherever you locate it in time, the defining feature of the Axial Age was transcendence in the original sense of ‘escaping inclusion’ within something; being able to relate to oneself and the world around rather than merely being completely caught up in it. A clearer sense of separation between inner and outer worlds arose; the essence of the pivot is that human consciousness ceased to be experienced largely as an outside-in matter and began to be experienced from the inside-out. At this time, many different parts of the world woke up philosophically in response to a range of shifting social and economic contexts, and our great world religions were conceived or born.

In India, Hinduism became more analytical, and Buddhism and Jainism emerged. In China, Confucianism and Taoism became operating principles, spread by travelling teachers. A clear delineation of good and evil emerged through Zoroastrianism in Persia. In the Middle East, Judaism became more reflectively humanistic, and Greek philosophy made the goal of self-knowledge explicit. In general, there was a shift in consciousness from local to universal, from mythic to mental (or mythos to logos), from tribal to transcendent, from static societal role to the journey of personal salvation. Ideas that we now take for granted arose – the individual, nature, humanity, the mind, and a monotheistic God were born. Christianity and Islam, and latterly the Enlightenment, were many centuries away, but the seeds of Eurasian civilisation as we know it were already sown.

A proper historical account is beyond our scope here, and there are many more contested details and scholarly debates about the axial age, and one particularly thorough consortium research project by archeologists and quantitative historians that questions but does not ultimately reject the validity of the term. However, the Axial Age remains the closest reference point we have for a truly profound shift in consciousness on a global scale that was co-extensive with a shifting historical context.

In a future post, I will explore what it might mean to be in a new axial age, and perhaps one without any axes. A turning point, but perhaps with no particular points on which to turn. And then what do we do?

I hope this helps to begin to flesh out the claim that we are ‘in a time between worlds’. As always, there is more to say, but I am out of time for today.

So there we are! Five flavours of betweenness. Don’t eat it all at once.

1. These ‘five betweens’ build on an extract of an interview with co-founder of Perspectiva, Tomas Björkman on Rebel Wisdom and published on Emerge. The extract contains a taxonomy of civilisational shifts, based on a talk by Jordan Hall and further thoughts of Daniel Schmachtenberger. I’m not sure how valid the taxonomy is from a historiographical viewpoint, but it seemed helpful for starting a conversation we need to have.