Post-Conventional Imperatives

Beyond despair, growthism, rationalism, exploitation, and tribalism.

This week I’m giving recorded lectures for an introductory course that details the field of inquiry and practice I am part of, and have played a small part in shaping. I cannot muster an original post this week, but I do have something worth sharing, and it has been on my mind a lot recently, namley the notion of being ‘post-conventional’. There is a technical meaning to this term in developmental models, but I tend to reach for it in a more figurative way, to make sense of the field of inquiry and practice I am part of. Fortunately, I have already written about this, but it is tucked away inside a hyperlink in a dark corner of the internet, so I thought I’d bring it out into the light here, with a short introduction and a foonote. I hope to get back to the threeness of the world next week.

Thanks for being here.

Jonathan.

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It has been said that a convention is just an excuse to stand in line for things you didn’t know you wanted until you saw the line. Certainly, conventional wisdom is often more conventional than wise. Convention relates to con-vening, coming together, and stems from repetition, predictability, assembly and agreement. Wisdom, on the other hand, is often spectacularly particular. Wise action arises from a heightened sensitivity to context and is often deliberately subversive of convention. My PhD thesis was about wisdom, but today’s post is on convention and what it means to try to get beyond it.¹

Convention is a constraint, but it is a friend, not an enemy. Convention is held mostly by Horizon One in the Three Horizons model. While many long for the innovation of the second horizon and the vision of the third, we also need the stability and reliability of the first - the arena of normal life, where we manage things and keep the status quo afloat. There is no wisdom in burning everything down and we would miss conventions if they were gone. Convention allows for a more-or-less predictable life, and it’s implicated in theories of ‘predictive processing’ as the basis of normal cognition - we can only function within a more-or-less reliable and predictable world. Convention can even be ritualistic and help us remain attentive to the miracle of everyday life - for instance in how we greet each other, and make each other tea.

And yet, and yet, the pervasive sense that the world is somehow stuck remains, and it can feel like convention holds us captive in ways that need to be better disclosed. I’ve felt this way for a while, and so, while making the case - What’s the point of the Realisation Festival? - in 2021, I began to sketch out the main contours of what I grandly called ‘the post-conventional imperative’.

Perspectiva doesn’t talk much of the post-conventional imperative (or sometimes the post-conventional aesthetic) these days because there are so many conceptual structures and buzzwords around that it helps to be selective (We also have 'Five Questions for the Future', for instance). Even so, this section from the essay is not a bad encapsulation of the socio-spiritual coordinates of what is sometimes called ‘the liminal web’ and why the term post-conventional helps to locate it, even if other terms like ‘metamodern’ or ‘sensemaking’ might better help to characterise it. From memory, what follows was informed by input from Mark Vernon, Minna Salami, and probably others too.

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The team of Realisation Festival organisers is varied, and we have different ways of expressing the purposes of the festival. One of the main ways to describe the purpose that works for me is that about helping participants to begin to collectively experience and grapple with what we think of as ‘the post-conventional imperative’, and provide a supportive atmosphere to consider how to bring that experience to bear in shaping our networks and communities beyond and between festivals. The post-conventional imperative is about the necessity and urgency of collectively reimagining who we are and what life is for, with five main points of emphasis:

• Post-tragic (hope on the other side of despair)

• Post-growth (reconceiving societal purpose)

• Post-rational (ways of knowing beyond intellectual limits)

• Post-exploitation (reflective on the uses and abuses of power)

• Post-tribal (togetherness in the context of power and love)

In a little more detail:

The Post-Tragic sensibility was explored in recent Realisation satellite event for Perspectiva, featuring Mariana Partington and Zak Stein. One way to think of it is as ‘a station of the self ’ in which we move from pre-tragic (all is well, every problem can be solved) through tragic (all is lost, life is dark and despair abounds) towards post-tragic in which we transcend and include tragedy into a fuller and richer and ultimately more real and meaningful view of life. Why contend with tragedy at all? Because tragedy is the meaning and mattering of life. The more life matters, the more vulnerable we are to tragedy. The concept applies beyond the self to society as a whole. The pandemic wrought tragedy in abundance, the enduring emergency of climate change is tragic and widespread human addiction and distraction through surveillance capitalism is tragic because – individually and collectively - we urgently need to concentrate on what truly matters and how we should therefore live.

The Post-Growth imperative is about finding a sound social and ecological basis for enduring prosperity so that as many people as possible can live what Roberto Unger calls ‘larger lives’. Post-growth thinking is about reconceiving the purpose of the macroeconomy, but at a personal level it is about thinking of related features of life including ourselves as consumers, whether we work too hard, what time and wellbeing means to us, and what we care about most. In this sense post-growth thinking is not so much economic or political as meta-economic and meta-political, it opens up discussions about underlying societal purposes and what kinds of viable futures we might look forward to creating together. There are many thinkers in this space already, but Professor Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey is one of them – he is aware of the relevance of Bildung in this context and invited me to write the essay on the relationship between Bildung and Sustainable Prosperity. There is still a place for economic growth in specific places and circumstances, and there are other ways to grow that matter, but to be ‘post-growth’ is part of facing up to where we are in 2021 when we have already transgressed several ecological and social boundary conditions that destabilise the world.

The Post-rational inclination is about recognising the limits of the intellectual function in its ability to grasp what is happening in the world today, while also respecting ways of knowing that are not antithetical to reason, but attempt to work alongside it, including insight and intuition and imagination and various forms of somatic and metaphorical and relational ways of knowing. We are now in a world of what Timothy Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’ that are both everywhere in principle and nowhere in particular, and these include climate change, artificial intelligence, and the pandemic. Our contexts and complexity and technologies and degrees of interdependence are such that we are caught up in a world that even the most knowledgeable and wisest people cannot in principle understand. As we all try to figure out the perennial question ‘what should I do?’ the sources for that answer will not be purely rational, which is partly why the festival speaks of ‘beauty, imagination and calling’ – alternative touchstones to orient ourselves towards meaning and purpose.

The need to be post-exploitation refers to a reckoning with history, with power, with class, with race, with patriarchy, with colonialism, and with coercion of all forms. The long history of St Giles House includes both slavery (for example the first Earl had plantations in the Bahamas and in South Carolina until about 1713) and the abolition of slavery (the seventh Earl, along with William Wilberforce, was a strong proponent of the abolition of slavery and other social reforms in the nineteenth century). Slavery is the rawest and most brutal form of exploitation, and enforced servitude is still widespread today in many forms. The Realisation Festival is committed to a meaningful and genuine reckoning with how colonial history still informs the present. We believe that this discussion is an essential part of the unlearning and reimagining that informs the gathering. For instance, exploitation can be relatively subtle and includes conscious and unconscious bias against people of colour; it also includes the unpaid mental, emotional and domestic labour undertaken mostly by women that is often taken for granted. To consider exploitation systemically, Roberto Unger’s definition of a progressive is helpful: “someone who wants to see society reorganised, part-by-part and step-by-step, so that ordinary men and women have a better chance to live a larger life’. By larger life he means a “a life of greater intensity, of greater scope, and of greater capability’.

The post-tribal injunction is about recognising the problem of political polarisation and epistemic filter bubbles and facing up to the fact that humans cannot continue to be tribal but nonetheless have to be. This perspective implicates technology and the underlying business models of social media, but it is also about our complicity in that and opportunities to create alternatives. There is a deep and adaptive human need to belong, and belonging is meaningless unless it is somehow circumscribed, for instance by place or people or purpose. And yet, it is equally true that we need to expand our circles of belonging more than ever, perhaps to encompass the whole globe of eight or so billion people. And we have to try to do so in a way that is not warm and fuzzy but ultimately lame, and that means not being naïve about competing commitments, power imbalances, competitive pressures, incommensurate values and other features of life that inevitably undermine collaboration. We need a kind of post-tribal tribalism that recognises ‘We work’ is one of the most fundamental challenges of our time. It is hoped that by combining an aristocratic context alongside a set of democratic imperatives, the post-tribal challenge will be a particularly intriguing part of the setting. In all these cases, ‘post’ is mostly about transcending and including rather than opposition as such.

And of course, these five perspectives mutually inform each other. The post-tragic disposition naturally gives rise to an acceptance of limits that informs the post-growth imperative, which in turn depends upon forms of social imagination that arise from post-rational ways of knowing and give rise to the desire for forms of life that are post-exploitation and which create cultural and institutional possibilities that make it more likely we can become post-tribal. The post-conventional imperative is, in a sense the unlearning aspect of the festival, to help make way for the reimagining which has beauty at its heart.

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Perspectiva offers a Realisation Fellowship to support about twenty people aged 18-35 to come to the festival engage in a year-long inquiry informed by the shared experienced. This project is currently unfunded, and supported by our core funds. If you would like to contribute to support ingit, please let me know by emailing jonathan (at) perspectiva (dot co) (dot uk).

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1. Jonathan Reams of Integral Review wrote a summary of my thesis here, and interviewed me about it here. I am a little embarrassed by my thesis now, which is as it should be - I take that as a good sign. I am also proud of it because it was an intense effort, and formative. The challenge of writing about 100,000 coherent words is no joke. PhDs are a kind of initiation, an epistemic apprenticeship that shapes your relationship to knowledge forever.

I have never published my PhD, but I dip into it a lot and still hope, nearly twenty years later, that I can bring more of it into the public arena. I pursued it at Bristol University (while living in London) where I was funded by The ESRC, and I began - as a precondition of the funding - with the equivalent of an MSc in Social Science Research Methods Training in 2004. I did it at The Graduate School of Education, which, at the time, was the kind of postmodern hotbed that Jordan Peterson, for instance, would hate. But Bristol was the top education department in the UK at the time, and I learned and experienced a lot there, not least from Dave and Noemi, who let me stay with them while I was in town.

The work I proposed to do did not fit within a single discipline, and it was not about ‘education’ in the schools and teaching sense, so I often felt misplaced. I can see now that the thesis was an attempt to create a metatheory of wisdom scholarship, but at the time, I was just following my nose. I was supervised by the Theoretical Psychologist and Buddhist Guy Claxton - and he is why I went to Bristol - Guy has remained a big influence on my thought. There was some additional oversight of Tim Bond, and the thesis was examined by David Perkins from Harvard, while Sociologist Roger Dale was the internal examiner. A highlight of the experience was Jane Speedy’s pink pen all over a document I submitted for my upgrade after the first year - she was the first to insist that I call upon more female sources, and it had a lasting impression. I submitted the thesis in 2008, the day Barack Obama was elected.