The Astonishing Postcard & Other Enigmas

An assortment of early summer musings before I take a break.

Jul 19, 2024

Maybe it’s the heat, the longing for rest, the weirding of the world, or the need to make amends with my muse, but I’m all essayed-out.

To essay is to try, but today the skill of crafting 600-2000 or so coherent words that I have honed over the last few decades feels like misplaced professionalism, a pretence of coherence when I am all over the place.1

So before I take a break, I’ll share some random curiosities - from the relatively personal to the relatively political. Any resemblance to another ******* essay is purely circumstantial.

For the record, I love essays.

But not today.

Thank you cards

I have volunteered as a chess teacher at 8 am on Friday mornings at my sons’ primary school for a decade now. As a chess Grandmaster, I could professionalize the offer and no doubt charge handsomely, but I prefer to keep it free and relatively informal. So many volunteers did that for me when I was growing up in a way that changed my life for the better, so it feels like giving back.2

There are moments on Thursday evenings when I am weary of work or family or news and looking forward to an easy end of the week and I think “Oh s*** it’s chess club in the morning”. But after scrambling to get to the school, supervising the games and giving a short lesson I feel blessed. It is a privilege to have an arena where I can be a useful adult, to give a little of what I know, and to inform and maybe inspire some tender minds in the process. I hear from parents of several children who have been through the club many years later that they are still playing. Chess is a gift that keeps giving.

The point of volunteering is to give of yourself freely and wholeheartedly for the intrinsic rewards of the activity rather than for what you get in return. That’s why small reciprocal gestures become so meaningful. In that context, a school teacher offering a cup of coffee is not a payment or a reward, but a gesture of solidaristic appreciation, for briefly being one of them. And when parents send their children to the last club of the term - today - with a thank you card, it is not just gratitude but a totem of recognition, the joy of being seen, and a communal blessing from people you have never met but somehow feel you know.

Postcards

Earlier this week I received my first postcard for several years (this week has been a bonanza for cards).

It was sent by my friend and Perspectiva associate Dan Nixon who had read my post on Prismatic Peace and then found himself following a trail from the Give Peace a Chance song to Yoko Ono to an exhibition at The Tate Modern where her work on peace features. Dan had the presence of mind and commitment to do the things that used to seem easy to us but now seem like impossible hurdles like choosing the postcard, buying a stamp and walking to a postbox. Only then can you place the card in the box, know your task has been fulfilled, and feel worthy of being a Jedi.

The message was simple enough, but the card itself was the real message and a joy to receive. The experience of gratitude and gladness on receiving it made me feel I should start sending postcards again. I used to send postcards regularly while travelling as a professional chess player. I once sent my then-future wife Siva a completely blank postcard saying it was the gift of pure potentiality. She wasn’t impressed.

Perhaps Perspectiva should buck the digital trend and start communicating with postcards. Maybe postcards are the analogue answer to tweets. Long funding reports could be shared as postcard ‘threads’ one sent each day after the other. The next time someone says: “That meeting could have been an email” you should ask: “Ah, maybe, but could it have been a postcard?”

Postcards stand out today because of the effort and relative inconvenience it takes to find, write, and send them. The inconvenience is important.

Are meaning and convenience inversely correlated?

Many people have mentioned hearing me on ‘Oliver Burkemann’s Inconvenient Truth’ which is playing for the second time on BBC Radio 4 (nobody noticed the first time. Praise is fickle like that). I feature in several episodes and try to help Oliver build his case that we lose a lot through our love of convenience. I can recommend listening to the series if you’re in the UK or buying it online if you’re elsewhere. The essence of the argument (highly simplified) is that meaning and convenience might be in some sense antithetical because meaning arises through overcoming struggle and the time we invest in things. When you factor in internal resistance, social pressure and objective difficulty, the easier it is to do something, the less meaningful it feels.

International Relations

I’ve been happy to partner in various ways with the UCL Global Governance Institute, where I gave a lecture on Perspectiva in Ten Premises last year. They recently arranged a conversation between me and Professor Craig Murphy from Wellesley College and The Harvard Institute of Advanced Study. Craig had encountered my Prefixing the World essay and he chimed with some of its main ideas and shared some of his papers to indicate why. I soon found myself reading about the soul-searching within the discipline of International relations(IR).

What is IR ultimately about? It used to be about war, and it’s certainly about power, but there is a growing convergence on ‘the polycrisis’ as the shared object of inquiry. This is close to my wheelhouse, so the question is how IR would be different if they started focussing on the metacrisis instead. In reading Craig’s papers, I saw in IR an unsuspected academic home or at least an interesting place for me to visit. The conversation was curated and hosted by Dr. Tom Pegram and will be of interest to anyone thinking through the philosophical foundations of international governance.

Planetary Governance

But maybe ‘international’ is part of the problem, because the nation-state is perhaps the quintessential modern institution and as modernity struggles to survive itself the nation-state is arguably too big for the small problems and too small for the big problems.

Last Thursday I was invited by UCL to attend a discussion with Jonathan Blake, one of the co-authors of an exciting new book called Children of a Modest Star. The point of the book is to contend with the idea that our existing international institutions are mostly not geared to addressing planetary challenges like pandemics and ecological emergencies. Instead, they are geared to represent the interests of national states in international forums. This is no small problem, and no small hurdle to overcome.

On Tuesday I had to make my apologies due to other work commitments, but I ordered the book and am already enjoying it. The authors lay out a vision for ‘planetary subsidiarity’ that is excellent third-horizon thinking.

I have written about planetization before and I believe ‘the planetary’ is an important idea to get our heads around. I also think there is an important connection between perceiving the planetary and thinking ecologically, and why that conjunction leads some to feel - understandably but not entirely helpfully - that ‘the whole world’ is their arena (someone please remind me to write about this).

Here is how the authors put it in their introduction, which is freely available online.

The reigning structure of multilevel governance is no longer adequate to the challenges of our current age, an age that some scholars have come to refer to as the Planetary. The concept of the Planetary is one that has emerged over the last several decades from the work of scientists, especially Earth system scientists and biologists, as well as philosophers, particularly philosophers of science. At the heart of the idea of the Planetary is a holistic vision of the planet as consisting of an almost infinitely complex interlaced and nested array of dynamically interacting biological, chemical, energetic, and geological systems. This concept, in turn, is informed by new knowledge of the place and role of human beings within this vast system. At the macrocosmic scale, we now know that human activity is deeply interconnected with atmospheric chemistry and Earth’s climate and geology; at the microcosmic scale, discoveries about the human microbiome have revealed our deep entanglement with bacteria and other microorganisms, one that affects our very mental states, that supposed hallmark of human distinctiveness and autonomy.

I would add that the idea of the planetary also has spiritual dimensions, for instance in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin contends that a key characteristic of planetisation is the creation and recognition of The Noosphere - the collective consciousness of humankind.

At a purely terminological level, ‘planetary’ is useful because ‘global’ has become too closely associated with globalisation and ‘globalist’ as a pejorative term, which relates to the growing relevance of the post-liberal critique.

Liberalism and The Metacrisis

The relationship between liberalism and the metacrisis is a big part of the first half of my conversation with Craig above, and it’s part of the intellectual pedigree of the idea of metacrisis that I feel is not given enough attention. There appears to be little connection between the metacrisis as it is discussed online, and the academic origins of the term, for instance as it is used by Milbank and Pabst in their book, The Politics of Virtue (2016).

As you can see from their contents page, they are ‘all-in’ on the metacrisis.

(The next page on Contents includes ‘The metacrisis of nations’ with ‘CommonWealth, Culture and Covenant’ as the alternative.)

Ever since reading It Was Not Supposed to End this Way by Mann, I have been struck by what Daniel Gortz calls ‘the loss of liberal innocence’. Mann puts it like this:

‘Growth, progress, consensus, reason, reasonableness, equilibrium: none of this can be depended upon at present. Even liberalism’s conception of what it means for something to go wrong, the promised finitude of the moment of crisis, does not work anymore… All of which is to say that the reality management system by which history is assembled for Spaceship Earth’s most privileged passengers has failed, and those passengers do not know what to think or do because the categories that are supposed to make sense of experience are increasingly inadequate. The tragedy of liberalism is its inability to narrate the end of progress’. Yet this is the impossible task asked of the Anthropocene.

I am a default liberal, not in the UK sense of Liberal Democrat or the US sense of not being a Conservative or even the political theoretic sense of loving John Stuart Mill; but just in the sense of being a more or less normal guy living a more or less free life in a more or less peaceful and prosperous place. So I don’t mean to demonise liberalism, to which I owe the quality of my life and which I also know has many schools and flavours.

It’s just that at some point I came to realise the world’s main problems did not stem so much from the mutant strain of liberalism known as neoliberalism, defined by Will Davies as “the state-led remaking of society on the model of the market” and I think it was also Will who called it “the disenchantment of politics by economics”. Neoliberalism has become the target of choice in progressive circles, for instance by George Monbiot but I believe the deeper truth is that much that is wrong with the world today arose because of the fundamentals of liberalism as such, particularly lack of self-awareness of its own shadow and its complicity.

Climate change happened on liberalism’s watch. The connection is highlighted in an editorial by Cambridge University Press and in a recent book by Christopher Shaw. I flesh out the broader point in my Open Letter to the Human Rights Movement but it manifests in various ways. I don’t agree with everything Patrick Deneen says by any means, but I enjoyed his book Why Liberalism Failed, and I like his line: “Liberalism failed because it succeeded”. For instance, by emphasising individual freedom, we risk becoming less free because there are fewer meditating institutions to protect us from the market, by emphasising the importance of privacy we have undermined some of the forms of social solidarity that protect personhood, and by emphasising what we are free from, we lose sight of what we are free for.

Most liberals, myself included, disavow these troubling thoughts. I believe that’s because our relationship with reality is founded on much less than the whole truth. People like me are generally too willing to delude ourselves about our innocence. That’s partly why I call the metacrisis a multi-faceted delusion.

And I believe such disavowal of some aspects of reality may be a feature rather than a bug of any operative ideology.

Ideological Externalities

I’ve been enjoying Substack Notes, which has been like a social media harbour in the sad tempest of Twitter becoming X (thereby losing almost all of its charm).

A few days ago I posted this on Notes:

The conservative disavows injustice.
The liberal disavows delusion.
The socialist disavows coercion.
The feminist disavows shadow.
The libertarian disavows origin.
The anarchist disavows authority.
The fascist disavows complexity.
Ideology is always a kind of collective unconscious pretending.

The concept of disavowal is important and I explore it in my report on climate change from back in the day. Disavowal is a particular kind of denial that speaks to the idea of both knowing and choosing not to know something at the same time.

Disavowals are like externalities. Externalities are all the things implied by a model that are ignored by the model. The classic externality in economics is pollution, which was not priced in at all until recently, but there are other externalities relating to social costs. In the interview with Craig, I coin the term ‘ideological externalities’, which relates to the disavowals above.

I believe all ideologies are strategies of disavowal.

The Understandable Madness of Economic Growth.
I am not yet sure what to say about the US Presidential Election, the new UK government, the situation in Ukraine or Gaza or the shocking 4-5 year prison sentences given to UK climate protestors for merely planning a disruption, so let me end on a lighter note.
The new Labour Government in the UK has made economic growth its priority. I have argued before why it’s an understandable madness for rich countries to pursue economic growth because growth in theory makes people richer and provides more money for public services (understandable) but invariably depends upon increasing levels of energy from fossil fuels (madness) and a closer look at decoupling suggests ‘green growth’ is mostly wishful thinking. The point of ‘the fun’ in The Flip, The Formation, and The Fun is that we need to ‘throw a better party’ than consumerism, and a commensurate vision to move us beyond the fixation with economic growth. Few things help loosen fixations like humour, so I hope you enjoy the following short video which captures the spirit of ‘ideology as disavowal’ quite well.

My younger son Vishnu finishes school for the summer on Tuesday and I will be taking some time off to be as present as possible for family over the summer. I imagine I will write something here before September, but it’s hard to predict, and things will be slower. When I come back, I plan to share a review of Vanessa Machado De Oliviera’s book Hospicing Modernity, share my delight in discovering Cynthia Bourgealt’s spiritual teachings, let you know if there has been any more exciting postcard action, and more generally keep you posted with the Joyous Struggle.

And remember. New Subscribers are the best. But paid subscribers are even better.

Bye for noo,

Jonathan.

The Joyous Struggle is a labour of love, but it’s still labour. All new subscribers are warmly welcomed but paid subscribers are particularly good for morale, and I hear they get front-row seats in heaven.

A query for writers. I deleted this line here, thinking it ‘a darling’. Did I make the right decision? “The will to write an essay is no longer sitting at the front of the class with his hand up, but now at the back of the class wearing sunglasses and headphones and looking at disparate phenomena out the window.”

Thank you, Stan Murray, Mike Wilson, Daphne Russell, Mr. Rusell, Richard James, John Glendinning, Donald Holmes, Mark Condie, Paul Motwani and all the others who have their time so generously.