The Antidebate and the Metacrisis

Why I believe the method is not just interesting but also important.

Even if you accept that the antidebate is interesting, it’s not clear whether it’s important. You can and should read on without pausing, but everything I am about to say will be easier to appreciate if you have watched two short videos by Katie Teague.

The first is called Living in the Metacrisis:

In that video, I define the metacrisis as follows:

The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.

The second video, which came out on Tuesday, is called The Antidebate: Experiments in the Art of Sensemaking for a World Gone Slightly Mad.

The antidebate is Protean and evolving, so I am reluctant to define it too narrowly, but we decided we needed a short description of the antidebate to share early in the video to help people orient themselves, and we struggled to get it right. I wanted both to give a thick and full description and explain what it’s for, for instance: “The Antidebate is a process of collective inquiry that works with intellect, emotion, and movement. The aim is to strengthen democratic dispositions through the shared experience of pluralism, curiosity, empathy, imagination, resistance and resolve.”

Too much! But then when I took things away, it often felt like too little.

In the spirit of the antidebate being a beloved mongrel of many breeds and many parents, the filmmaker Katie Teague shared my attempts and asked her friend Sandra Wells (who had watched an advanced cut of the video): “How would you put all this if you were a normal person?” And when the following description came back I decided to accept it as a gift:

The Antidebate is an intentional process of inquiry and discovery that disrupts our tendency toward polarization and invites a new form of democratic discourse.

I have noticed people are hungry for more details though, and a good friend asked me which elements of the process are essential - a good question. I said at least four, all of which are mentioned in the video: the question bomb, tableauing, swarming, and the enigmatics. There are other important elements too though, including a three-person seated practice of listening, speaking, and observing in turns; and our last antidebate featured Michael Bready setting the scene by playing the piano to establish the value of dissonance and consonance co-arising.

Our full description of the process is in draft form at the end of our book manuscript and it takes up almost ten thousand words to describe and justify. There are typically three acts over three hours and they are characterized by a focus on coherence (within the self, between the group, and on the question) confusion (arising from divergent views, varying assumptions, conflicted feelings, etc), and commitment (moral and political resolve, even in the context of ambiguity and doubt. We are keen to husband the process for a little longer so that people can start doing the antidebate for themselves, which is clearly the entelechy for this method. However, for the social diffusion of innovation to work, we have to ensure the integrity of the process is well established, and we need to clarify and communicate the necessary and sufficient conditions that make an antidebate an antidebate, rather than just a bunch of people doing stuff in a room.

Beyond seeking clarity, the most pointed early feedback so far has been about the process being ineffectual against two particular takes on the metacrisis that appear to be different from my own. The first, in Nate Hagens’s terms, is that we are energy blind, and our deepest problem is weaning ourselves off fossil fuels (especially oil) to safeguard the viability of our habitat without such a momentous socio-economic crash that widespread war (which is also typically bad for the climate!) becomes inevitable. If that’s the real problem, how does the antidebate help? A related critique is that the antidebate has no answer to the problems of Moloch, namely the negative outcomes that arise when the pursuit of self-interest and self-defence makes everyone increasingly and inexorably worse off - a problem compounded by exponential technologies in the hands of hyper-agents.

My first response is to concede wholeheartedly that the antidebate is not a panacea. By itself, it doesn’t directly change the underlying generator functions of civilizational collapse for over eight billion people. But then, what does? Part of the challenge is precisely that mature democracies lack adequate forms of discourse to even begin to contend with the precarious and vexed nature of our predicament, never mind act upon it, and much of that sclerosis and inertia relates to relatively passive, pliant, and distracted populations who are not trained in collective inquiry and nor does their appetite for it find an outlet. A related problem is the loss of collective agency as a countervailing force to the state or the market. At its best, the antidebate seeks to address both those issues. When it does that in a relatively modest way with small groups, that’s a small achievement in itself, and if it becomes socially conventional while retaining its subversive edge, it might become transformative.

The second point, on Moloch, is to question the premise and to remind people that Moloch needs therapy. I am only partly joking. The point is not so much to refute the game theoretic analysis that says we are inexorably screwed from within its parameters, but rather to question the validity of the framing. The answer to Moloch is, ultimately, love, and deep down Moloch knows that. I’ll explain this point in more detail in my next post on Moloch in Therapy. The antidebate does not solve the problem of civilisational logic directly, but it does disclose it, and it helps us to experience it. If part of the Moloch problem is that we are stuck, and that we can’t help ourselves, the promise of the antidebate is to make us less stuck, and thereby more able to help ourselves.

If that seems oblique, I can make the case for the antidebate on the home turf of Perspectiva’s ten premises about the state of the world, and what we are called to do about it. The full post is here, but the top lines are in the slide below:

These ten premises are best thought of as provocations. They are not axioms and they are likely to change, but they do help to inform Perspectiva’s current activities, including the antidebate as follows:

• It is because we are in a time between new worlds(1) that prefigurative culture(4) to bring forth the next world is a kind of imperative, and the antidebate is a form of prefigurative culture.

• It is because collapse is inevitable and transformation is possible(2) that we need applied aesthetic, moral, and civic education (Bildung) to create practices of transformation(6), and develop praxis that is profoundly collective and deeply personal (9). The antidebate is a kind of ritualized enactive Bildung that speaks to all these aims.

• It is because we can and must act in three different kinds of reality(3) that the monoculture of debate needs to evolve into something more like the multi-modal and epistemically plural antidebate, if only because that is the requisite context for sensibilities to arise that will allow us to change context and not be defined and limited by them (8).

• It is because a post-conventional sensibility is arising(4) that we need to support it, nourish it, and invite it into the public sphere in a spirit of serious play.

• It is because we are getting in our own way(5) and in a sense ‘stuck’ on the major issues of our time that we need practices like the antidebate that disclose our collective immunities to change, and give us some embodied and relational perspective on what it might feel like to be shaken out of it.

• And while it would be a stretch to say the antidebate helps us to create a new metaphysics(7) it is in principle a practice that could allow us to explore our response to metaphysical issues. The practice does deal with space, time, flow, causation, and consciousness for a start…

• Finally, while we have tempered the previously prominent role of conflict in the antidebate, and seek for it to be mostly a convivial process, it is nonetheless designed to help individuals and groups contend with their shadows. For instance, the process of moral and political commitment in swarming is about finding strength to overcome resistance(10).

All of which is to say, a case can be made that the antidebate is not merely interesting, but also, at least potentially, important.

Please keep the feedback coming!