Last weekend I took part in ‘Regathering’ – an event held deep in a wood just north of Bath. Think yurts, compost loos with a view, outdoor cooking, roundhouse for meetings, yoga – as well as connection, sharing of ideas, experiences, feelings, concerns and theories.
I came along for the day and, after we’d all walked over to a lake to go swimming, I talked to the group about complexity and what is suggests about facing the poly/metacrisis. Two themes in particular landed: the conditions for resilience, and a discussion on tipping points and collapse.
Resilience: For communities or ecologies to be resilient, the science of complexity illustrates that they need (a) diversity, (b) reflexive interconnection between elements and (c) the ability to exchange energy and resources with the wider context. In human terms, this is reciprocity and the embrace of difference in all its guises. Maintaining, strengthening and re-establishing this ground of relationship – building trust, caring, supporting – is vital to be able to face and adapt to a turbulent world. People spoke of their loneliness and feelings of helplessness as they took note of the huge shifts arising environmentally, economically and politically. As David Olusoga said last week in a talk in Frome (the town in Somerset where I live), we have had more social and political change in the last six months than in the last decade.
Building community, fellow feeling and connection, as well as strengthening resilience, creates a milieu in which people, in their own unique ways, can take action. Something Vaclav Havel writes about in The Power of the Powerless is that ‘letting one hundred flowers bloom’ (he didn’t actually use that phrase, but that was the gist), making people feel able to find their personal ways to act, can be at least as effective in creating change than more coordinated, more political action. Equally, this pre-political stage, as Havel called it, also sets the scene for more collective intent.
Judith Butler, speaking recently about her new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, made a similar powerful point to the audience. She insisted that it is not enough to be exercised about your particular issue of identity, but to look upstream from that and recognise and pay attention to its underlying roots – the need to be safe to be who you are. Thus, she urged her listeners, we have to create the conditions where others with different issues – age, neurodiversity, race, disability, concern for the environment – are equally safe to be themselves. We must create community and kinship. We should both attend to what matters to us but not lose sight of the need to do this in a way that honours and supports others focused on other issues.
Understanding lock-in, tipping points and collapse
The science of complexity illustrates not only how resilience is created, but how it is lost. Loss of diversity and loss of the ability to flex and shift relationships leads, initially, to the dominance of certain elements and the ‘setting in stone’ of certain patterns of exchange. Then, as the powerful get more powerful, they are able to ‘kill off’ other competing options, and lock in certain sets of relationship and ways of doing thing and effectively exclude any other options. This is not just a feature of the social world; Buzz Holling describes how this process happens in forests. And what this leads to – this lock-in of the winning people and groups and ways of operating – is that resilience diminishes. There may come a time when a tipping point is reached and collapse ensues, at least in part.
Hope?
This sounds pretty depressing, but the science of complexity also emphasises that we never know – that when things look dire, when it looks like nothing can change positively, things may yet shift in unexpected ways. History shows that sometimes social or environmental systems or ways of operating that looked invincible do collapse – sometime wholesale, sometimes not entirely. And this can allow the new to emerge – think slavery, apartheid, the exit of Assad from Syria. So, there is always hope.
And what if hope isn’t as important as we think? During my talk on the hill, by the lake, I spoke about active fatalism, an idea introduced by Clive Hamilton. Hamilton pointed to The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus, in which Camus tells the allegorical story of a town cut off due to an outbreak of the plague. He describes how various citizens behave – some selfishly hoarding food, others making merry in the belief that the end was nigh. But the doctor, who knew more than anyone how little hope there was, continued to work tirelessly to help the sick. This is what Hamilton means by active fatalism – despair, accept then continue to act with integrity, with the future, each other, the planet in mind.
And if things become even worse, then those resourced by regathering, by strengthening connection and resource, will be more able to play a part in the ensuing chaos, to help build anew.
Final thought
One of the organisers of the weekend, speaking of the youngest participant there, said this:
“it was wonderful to hear her moving from pessimism / fatalism to ‘active fatalism’ – she’s starting to see there’s work worth doing regardless of the outcome.”
I was delighted to hear that. It reinforces me in the belief that theory and ideas matter. That my speaking of and writing about the complexity worldview, is, in its own way, a form of activism.