Flirting with Modernity(4)

Can the past, present, and future be friends?

Greetings from St Giles House in Dorset, where The Realisation Festival begins later today. I’ve been enjoying the peace here for the last few days. There was one particularly blissful moment under the setting sun in the outdoor hot tub that will stay with me. I was savouring some rare solitude, the sound and sensation of optimally heated sloshing water in the tub, and then, when still, the company of the silence with backing vocals from the gurgling stream nearby. I was glad to be held captive by the surrounding foliage and fields as if imbibing nature’s welcome. At that moment I noticed, for the first time in months, that I am alive, and, because of everything, unbelievably blessed to be so.

This afternoon there will be 150 people travelling in, setting up tents, banging down pegs, asking logistical questions, and introducing themselves to each other. There will be small talk, smiles and laughter to allay the ambient social anxiety as people shift from the world outside to their temporary shared arena. A little later there will be dinner, and a Cèilidh (dance), but before that we assemble people to contend with frequently asked questions and say a few words about what’s ahead. Like every year since 2021, I will give a short 5-10 minute speech offering my account of what the festival is about, but every year it comes out a little different, and this year I’m looking for a new way to say the same thing.

Realisation is a festival about getting real, becoming real and making real. It’s a festival for the soul, about unlearning and reimagining, and that it’s a form of experiential education distantly inspired by Bildung. All of this remains true, but I need a new way to enliven it.

I feel torn these days between curation and creation. In public fora of various kinds, including Substack, part of me wants to offer conceptual and operational scaffolding to allow people to locate and orient themselves, but part of me wants to entirely surrender to the moment and say what feels most alive in heart and mind regardless of any audience. I noticed this tension in a recent conversation with Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective that will be online next week. I had planned to ease the watching audience into the inquiry space with some general reflections on the backgrounds of Vanessa and Sharon and their work together and what it might mean to say that modernity is ending, but Vanessa was eager simply to get straight into the inquiry, allow the world to eavesdrop, and go with the flow of what was between us, beginning with something she had noticed that morning. It was a fascinating inquiry that moved between philosophy, politics, technology, education and it felt alive - things were said that would not have been said through a mere performance for an audience. Maybe it’s ok that many will have been confused or perplexed and turned away. The question: what is this conversation? - that was not answered by anything other than the conversation itself. Perhaps that is how it is supposed to be. On Saturday, I’ll carry on this conversation with Sharon Stein at the festival, and latterly Indra Adnan and Roc Sanders will join us.

It is not easy to locate the heart of the inquiry. The festival has many other highlights including improvisation, Sarah Wilson’s new book on collapse, Martin Shaw’s stories, a range of workshops, music jamming sessions, small group inquiries, etc. My main personal responsibility is for the overall framing and, this year, for the saturday morning session, and to me they feel closely related.

From past-to-present-to-future the Saturday session with Vanessa and Sharon is about reckoning with coloniality as an integral feature of what makes modernity possible. The gradual collapse of the modern world we seem to be experiencing and anticipating is therefore a reckoning with all the features of history we have edited out to make normal life seem normal, rather than a product of denaturing nature, compulsive extraction, disavowed violence, systematic dispossession and casual subjugation. And yet, as I write these words I feel I am performing someone else’s script. And that may be part of the inquiry, because I was formed to accept the modern world as a given, and intellectually pay lip service to the harm done along the way, but not yet really feel it, and not therefore be able to transform through that realisation. I don’t think the injunction is for me to introject intergenerational guilt, but merely to notice that what we have been encultured to see as normal in the global north is part of a very different story from the global south. Maturing into a wise planetary species requires us to experience these perspectives in a way that affords scope for a deeper reckoning, and, in ways that cannot be anticipated before that happens, more discerning action than is possible without it. This process is articulated in Hospicing Modernity and rendered into practices and frameworks and action protocals in Outgrowing Modernity.

From future-to-present-to-past it’s about the way ecological collapse and artificial intelligence will shape the future, how our current mindsets and assumptions shape AI, and why those mentalities are as they are, and how they might be otherwise if we better reckon with our history. While learning statistics for my Phd there was an expression: “Rubbish in, rubbish out!”. This mantra was designed to encourage us to input our data for our statistical models accurately so that our results had validity. Analogously, if you approach AI at a surface level and merely ask for the outputs of its ‘thought’ (mostly predictive text, a search enginges on steroids, and a sycophantic programming to please you) you will perpetuate the problem of presumed normality and get your own kind of thought patterns back - the future will be nothing but the regurgitation of the past. However, if you can engage with the AI in a more epistemically agile way, a reflective subject-to-reflective subject way, it might be different. If you can articulate the underlying assumptions that inform your query, and ask how the information you seek might be different with different worldviews underpinning them, you are no longer captured by the past being perpetuated into the future with the same underlying worldviews, but beginning to try to co-create a different vision of the future. This process is articulated well in Burnout from Humans and it’s a whole new sphere of inquiry, and it feels urgent to understand whether there is promise in this approach and how we might do it better.

And yet, all of this is so very immanent and terrestial. Many come to the festival not for analysis, but to tend to matters of soul and spirit. I have only understood recently that the heart is always present, while the mind is invariably in the past or the future, and this is partly why ‘putting the mind in the heart’ is the practice challenge I care most about at the moment. The world looks different when it is seen through the heart as an organ of perception, but it is not easy to get there. It’s a deep perceptual shift that is currently beyond me. I glimpse it sometimes, but I am not there.

So my challenge is more prosaic. How to stay in the heart when the present is spilling over with the great reckoning and the future enters into us for the great imagining. When we can reach back hundreds or even thousands of years and yet strain to see even five years ahead, what becomes of the needs of the present moment? When history is baked in, and the future is ours to shape, what does it mean to be here, now?

If I could sum up my inquiry in a single question, then, it would be this:

How can the past, present, and future be friends?

I think I’ll start to answer that by going for a walk. As the saying goes, and the dining room of The Riding House here illustrates so well: one step at a time.