Oh to be Young....

A brief introduction to The Realisation Fellowship and prefigurative culture

Thank you to everyone who has offered positive feedback on my inquiry into The Threeness of the World, which I will return to shortly.

Today, I am taking a break from preparing to record an online course to introduce a new Perspectiva initiative called The Realisation Fellowship, expressly designed for young people aged 18-35. I also share a few words about the challenge of being young and the enigma of what Margaret Mead called prefigurative culture.

The fellowship experience begins with a funded place at The Realisation Festival at the end of June where this year we are blessed with the presence of Vanessa Andreotti and Sarah Wilson, amongst others and tickets are already almost sold out. We have set aside about twenty places for younger people; those awarded the Fellowship receive the cost of their festival ticket and participation in a year-long programme of collaborative inquiry with other recipients, which you can read about on Perspectiva’s Substack (Please subscribe there, too. The overlap with my substack is only c10%).

In announcing an initiative for young people, I thought I’d say a few words about why Perspectiva is doing this.

Someone I know well. Siva Thambisetty from LSE talked about her experience working on the Oceans Treaty at the UN at the Realisation Festival in 2024

At the risk of over-generalising, most people born and raised in capitalist democracies in the sixties, seventies and eighties experienced a relatively optimistic world. While they did have to contend with the Cold War, they could reasonably expect to become wealthier than their parents, had no particular ecological concerns, and often saw their ways of life as something other parts of the world would aspire to. For them (us) the challenge was to download the societal code, individuate from it just enough to feel sane and successful, and hope the world becomes safer and more prosperous; something that did briefly seem to be occurring around the turn of the millennium. In recent years, it has felt to these people as if the stable world we took as a given is becoming unstable.

This experience means that our framing of what is happening is that there is a sudden seismic problem to be solved (eg ‘the meta-crisis’) so that we can ‘get back to normal’ in some way. In contrast, and again at the risk of over-generalising, people born and raised in capitalist democracies after about 1990 (perhaps starting to become aware of the news around 2001 when the Twin Towers came down) have been brought up as digital natives in an ecologically compromised world with economies that are not serving the common good, where exponential technological change is capable of radically altering society at the whims of a billionaire class, and gerontocratic leaders keep getting elected by telling stories that people need to believe in, even if they speak to a world gone by that is not coming back. And war is somehow always looming.

It is in that kind of world, which is figuratively and often literally on fire, that the young have to conceive a future for themselves, even though the society they are supposed to adapt to appears delusional and necrotic. It can feel to those who have never known the world that their elders think of as normal and worth preserving as if their challenge is not to adapt to society or to individuate from it, but rather to create a new world, and yet this seems impossible because they are disempowered and dependent on the old one. This is what Bonnitta Roy means when she says the young today somehow have to “individuate themselves from the whole world.”

There is also a poignant line in Margaret Mead’s book on the generation gap called Culture and Commitment:

Even very recently, the elders could say: “You know, I have been young and you never have been old.” But today’s young people can reply: “You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be.

A little later, Mead adds:

Young people everywhere share a kind of experience that none of the elders ever had or will have. Conversely, the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. The break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.

These are words from a book published in 1970(!). The disjunct between generations is arguably much greater today. The word ‘commitment’ in the book title is important because the critical question is what we should reasonably expect younger people to commit to today and why.

Mead suggests there are three main ways to characterise the relationship between generations that are reflected in methods of cultural transmission. Postfigurative cultures are strongly past-oriented, including ancestor worship, looking to the past for guidance. Configurative cultures are more present-oriented; cultural transmission is mostly between contemporaries, often arising after a postfigurative culture breaks down (for instance, in a post-war or post-revolutionary scenario). Mead argues that configurative cultures are mostly transitional, typically immigration related, and part of a larger evolution of a new kind of culture that she called prefigurative. Prefigurative culture is future-oriented, and cultural transmission is at least partly from youth to elders. Mead predicted (back in the early seventies!) that in the new culture emerging, the young are just as likely as anyone else to figure out what to do.

This might seem banal at first blush, because to say ‘the children are our future’ is a cliché (and a song lyric). However, there is something deeper and darker afoot, and it’s not about children or parents. The point is not so much that younger people understand the world better, but rather that they are often, as Mead puts it, ‘without a world’. As Perspectiva colleague Ivo Mensch said, “collectively we are living a life that no longer exists”. Mead contends that the younger generations grasp that acutely but often lack the resources and power to do anything about it.

The young are called upon both to individuate within a dying culture and to create a new culture that makes a viable world possible. This point can be developed in a range of ways. For instance, many are arguing for a reappraisal of indigenous cultures as ways of being in the world that are more profoundly connected to land and where perception, customs, and rituals are inherently ecological. And yet, indigenous cultures are often post-figurative, with three generations living in more or less ‘the same world’, and it is hard to fathom what that means in the context of exponential technology and changes in social norms.

The question is how to give young people - who rightly despair but remain hopeful - a better chance to forge a path that is not about serving capital or reconstituting a dysfunctional society but rather about creative, meaningful work that shapes the world in a prefigurative way.

There is only so much a small charity like ours can do, and we have tried a few things already, but The Realisation Fellowship is at attempt, in festival language to ‘make real’, to make manifest an idea that we feel is ours to do.

So do sign up if you are under 35. And if you’re not, please help get the word out.

Get it OOT! Get that word right OOT o the hoose…get it down the stream in a canoe, kick it up the hill and follow it with a headband and a rucksack, then over the skies in a helicopter, then DOON, doon again, on to and over the waves to France on a hovercraft, and keep moving; pack it in a box and playing as background music in all the saunas in Sweden; get it swishing in the bellies of the whales surrounding The Faroe Islands, give it to the Americans as respite from their planetary civil war, get it heard in the prayers at The Saint Sophia in Kyiv, let it be silent in Hiroshima and Gaza but then come back and get the Italians talking about it with their arms, wake people from the siestas in Spain to tell them - but run away fast after you do. Above all, get the word out. Tell the furtive neighbour, the unemployed baker, the restless candlemaker, the wayward undertaker… But let it be known. Send it to every inbox, city, town, village and hamlet; everyone must know. Oot, I say. OOT!

Please forgive the Friday fever. I’m off for a swim.

Bye for noo.

Jonathan.