I am starting this journey. Here I will share my notes.
The Culture of the Anthropocene
Anthropocene: it is human activity that is now pushing the planet to the sixth mass extinction.
As emissions increase, we continue to destroy the essential sinks that counteract these.
The biomass of humans and livestock far surpasses that of wild mammals and birds. Most of this mass we slaughter for food, using 77% of agricultural land to provide 18% of calorie supply.
The immense cost of progress has not come to the benefit of all.
Culture is not your friend.
Culture is the normative values and belief systems that coordinate human activity. Culture determines how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. The culture of the anthropocene creates systems of meaning inherently dualistic.
Culture it both constructed and emergent, visible and invisible.
Let’s develop a way to critically asses our cultural systems and find ways to evolve them beyond anthropocentrism.
Fragile societies, not resilient:
- ethnocentric
- humanist
- rationalist
- even pluralistic
Egocentric conception of the self opposed to interbeing and relational. Greedy, excessive and selfish nature. This is wetiko.
Cartesian dualistic logics must always exclude a devalued other. Who counts as human? Separation from nature in order to exploit it. Legitimized ecocide, imperialism, and slavery. Written rational language of the oppressor over oral traditions.
We categorize things as we try to makes sense of the world. We often become overly focused on keeping those containers separate. We forget we made the categories, and start to think of them as universal, absolute, and predetermined.
Culture is not always evolutionary, there is no neat, tidy progressive narrative pointing to greater refinement, complexity, etc.
Any cultural mode holds implicit understandings of what constitutes Self, including the absence of Self or relationality as Self. Through this lens of Self are moral judgements, truth claims, value determinations, ontological lenses and theoretical models of reality.
The archetypal development trajectory of the dominant anthropocentric culture will continue to recreate the fundamental error of separation of self vrs other and from nature until we hack the dominant conception of Self-Other construct.
There is a rich tradition of counter narratives in epistemologies of the Global South, including social movements and indigenous communities, that share a trans-personal sense of the Self that is in radical relationality to both the human and the more-than-human worlds, the seen and the unseen realms. They share a life-centric approach based on kinship, with the living world; reciprocity, generosity, regeneration, consent, dialogue, and solidarity.
Animism → seeing the world and its constitutive parts as living, relational and dialogic. More and more seen as empirically accurate.
Post-humanism → thinking/feeling beyond human gaze, care and concern. It centers life in all forms.
Buen vivir → the subject of wellbeing is not the individual, but the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation.
Ubuntu → I am who I am through you.
Interbeing goes beyond interdependence into a radical re-definition of Self through Other.
Part of the cultural evolutionary process requires an understanding of the deep logic, narratives, cultural codes and belief systems of the dominant system; researching and synthesizing life-centric alternatives, especially those rooted in Earth-centric, symbiotic cultures, and testing and iterating new/emerging/ancient narratives in realtime, to expose, disrupt and shift cultural assumptions to create new/ancient/emerging narrative spaces for possibility, transformation and justice.
Genealogical processes of cultural systems:
- language
- speech
- representation
- self-identity
- myth
- belief system
- cultural identity
The creation of Self within the dominant cultural context is the genesis of our conception of history. Things are born, they subsist, and then die; all phenomena that this Self experiences are imprinted with this metaphysical form of space, time and causality.
Narratives are the principal manifestation of culture.
What we believe to be our reality is that subconscious interpretation of the sensations of our body through our own narrative frames.
Culture hack methodology
- Assumption 1: we can gain deeper insight into human behavior by analyzing the narratives that drive them.
- Assumption 2: through the intentional and deliberate reframing of these narratives, we can bring about changes in our belief systems and actions.
- Assumption 3: to dismantle systems of inequality and oppression, we need to change narratives.
Narratives are interpretative social structures that frame our experience and function to bring meaning to everyday reality, guiding our actions and decisions.
If we are not aware of the multiple layers that make up narrative forms, we are blind to what is driving our thoughts, beliefs and behaviors.
Narrative forms are complex, adaptive, evolutionary, living systems. They drive how we collectively make sense of our reality.
Narrative spaces are models of the relationships between narrative forms within a timeframe.
Narrative form principles
- A material layer that is clearly visible and measurable. Most often narrative analysts look for evidence in media. Also collect data through ethnographic methods.
- Virtual layers that are not visible or measurable and influence the material layer. All material expressions of a narrative form are the result of a virtual cultural process. It is not always easy to decipher how they are connected.
- Genealogies, through cycles that move between material and virtual. The layers are interconnected, interdependent, and mutually support each other.
- Emergent, complex, and in flux. A social assemblage. Cannot be reduced to any single set factors.
The material layer consists of a actions and expression, from the narrative form itself and from other narrative forms within the space.
The virtual layer is a transcription of everything happening in the material layer into cognition:
- sensation: first use 5 senses to transcribe non-representational data, like light, heat, sound, into understandable bits of information or symbols.
- conception: second, these perceptions are placed within a structure of meaning, concepts.
- intention: finally, concepts are placed in broader structures of meaning related to self and social awareness. Intentions emerge guiding decisions and actions.
Narrative form sensation happens through multiple human bodies in connected networks.
Narratives allow for collective sense making.
Frames: subconscious narrative structures to immediately make sense of the world. More than linguistic. They integrate all the other levels of the narrative form into one coherent view.
By clearly defining and understanding dominant frames we can understand the larger semantic structure.
Metaphors: the basis of the frames we use. We often do not question primary metaphors.
Ideological constructs: multiple frames into larger structured relationships, coordinated through a system of justification.
Truth constructs: representation of the core beliefs that bind the narrative form together.
These parts are deeply interwoven and entangled.
The way we understand the world determines how we act in the world.
Cultural evolution
The development and transmission of symbolic thought, values, norms and ethical imperatives among humans shape their behavior and impact their evolutionary trajectory. Inheritance of genotypes and symbotypes or cultural traits have led tho the emergence of new forms of cooperation and coordination.
Post-anthropocentric: criticizing species hierarchy and decentering the human.
Progress is against life and against people.
The humanist ideology rejected the deities of our collective animist mythologies in favor of a new system of pragmatism, individualism and self-determinacy; that instills a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values. These values emphasize human agency, freedom and a misplaced notion of absolute morality, and became the emblem of colonial and imperial force, rooted in the demotion of the other. Man is defined in what he is not: female, black, poor, heretic, etc.
This was reinforced by the enlightenment, and has become the dominant force behind progress. This cultural code frames the world as merely a resource for human endeavor, wetiko, a mind virus of consumption, blind to the interdependence and contingency of human life.
Narrative environments
Habitats in which a certain species of narrative forms may live and flourish. Narratives are the very substance of our social reality.
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Disciplinary: high degree of coherence and low empathy field. The means by which state gains power over society through enclosure. The factory, hospital, school, and asylum.
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Control: modulated freedom that gives the illusion of liberty.
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Dialogic: deep diversity and cultural resilience, many heterogeneous viewpoints, people strive to find shared values.
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Communitarian: high levels of coherence and interdependence. Local resilient communities that work together to preserve life and thrive together.
Narrative environments with high level of resilience ideally move between dialogic and communitarian as needed.
All these are anthropocentric and are contributing to a breakdown of the systems that sustain life.
The current movement of transition requires understanding the world as entangled and animistic, as mutually caused. We see nature as something we are, not as something to save.
- Interbeing: post-anthropocentric and pre-dualistic (before any conception of separation). Similar to panarchic, diversity+homogeneity. One of the characteristics of syntropic systems.
Onto-shift: a fundamental shift in how we view and understand the world. The new ontology is non-anthropocentric, a life-centric way of being.
Systems entropy: lack of order or predictability, gradual decline and chaos.
Systems syntropy: energy concentration, order, organization and life.
Cultural evolution is the shift from entropic to syntropic narrative environments through a widening definition of identity, an animistic and quantum wiew of Self.
Do you want to be or interbe?
Culture hack method
- Ask the correct questions to develop a point of view.
- Listen to the narrative space.
- Understand the key insights of the narrative forms.
- Reframe the deep logics, beliefs and assumptions.
- Hack the narratives we want to shift.
Our ultimate goal is to change the dominant culture and shift the beliefs that create, sustain, and perpetuate the Anthropocene.
1. Ask
Collectively ask the correct questions to develop a point of view statement. A statement that outlines the context and goals of the narrative intervention you want to engage in.
Bring together the stakeholders of the narrative intervention in a collective exercise to more deeply understand them. We are not erasing individual narratives, we must find the unifying thread and find the commonality that shows how interconnected we are. Create a sufficient common identity that people are willing to join.
Guides
- only together we all know everything.
- people are experts in their lives. Local knowledge is legitimate.
- the problem is the problem. The person or community is never the problem. The problems to which we respond have their origin in structural inequality.
- we are not neutral. We want to contribute to stories that recognize the dignity of people and communities.
- identity is a collective achievement.
- identities are multi-historian.
- document knowledge to transcend the moment.
- create links to help enable the worlds we want to see.
Questions
- who are you? with emphasis on the project team and the stakeholders. Skills, capacities, geographic location, demographics… In what way will this impact the stakeholders?
- what is the motivation? why is is important to you as a collective? what facts determine the scope?
- what is the desired outcome? what can be the impact of the intervention? what does success look like?
- how will you create the change you desire? List of actions in light of the common goal.
- how can we represent the different voices?
Take your time because it will be your compass and guide.