An Imagined Order

                Languaging, Maturana said, is a way of bringing a world into being that we share with others and not a way of describing the world as it already exists.  In his book, Sapiens, Harari calls these new creations “imagined orders.”  We find ourselves in one of those moments where the imagined order has broken down and a new one has not yet emerged to take its place.  Times like these are always fraught with anxiety and uncertainty.  We tend to think of the Renaissance as this glorious flowering of art and invention, but for the people who lived it, it was hell.  In the rear-view mirror, imagined orders look stable, even inevitable, but in the moment of their creation they seem anything but.

                We stand at moment of great wealth and power – the greatest the world has ever known.  Mad men and idiots have the power to destroy the planet.  Fossil fuel robber barons are threating our survival trying to extract the last drop of oil the way a junkie frantically craves the last drop of their fix.  The greatest power of the last century is caught in a Dadaist travesty of noise and decay.  But amidst the chaos and cacophony a new story is starting to take shape.  It is currently being told in small tribal pieces, but a quilt of meaning is starting to slowly take shape.  Its successful creation is anything but certain.  We may not make it.  Much is stacked against it.

                It will be a difficult story to tell.  It won’t have something like the Edict of Milan to mark a clear distinction between past and future.  It won’t be the product of elites leading the masses.  It likely won’t produce constitutions and legal codes.  It won’t revolve around a central power.  It won’t be run by men.  The languaging of this new order will be localized and fragile until it becomes as strong as the root system of the grasslands.  It is a story that embraces contradiction and paradox over certainty and uniformity.  It will not be written by AI bots.  If it is to be written at all, it has to allow new voices and new ways of being to gradually build the resilience and strength to be heard.

                Some are already calling it a failure.  They say we need truth and order, forgetting that the truth and order they refer to was written in the blood of those oppressed by the old order.  We will have to be tolerant.  We will have to learn how to be still.  We have to learn to respect chaos – the thing the Egyptians and Greeks feared the most.  We have to learn how to recognize when we are wrong, and we have to learn to recognize each other.  It will have to start small and stay flexible and contingent.  We can all play a part – we can all be a witness.

                I hear the imperfect cords of this new harmony in Black Lives Matter and in #MeToo.  They have in common the demand that the silenced be heard, that the invisible be seen.  They challenge the old order’s habit of assigning moral clarity to a privileged few.  They broaden the scope and add to the range of the narrative.  They are a long way from being perfect.  The key will be if all of these new singers can recognize the choir.  Their stories need each other.  Right now, that isn’t happening, and it would be foolish to expect it to so soon in the process.  There is a long way to go.

                Can we learn how to equal without being alike?  The language and concepts of the old order will not help.  If we don’t escape the language of the old order it will pull us back in to the same contradictions and limitations it took so long to finally see and resist.  Can we embrace both science and poetry as essential and not fall into the desert of another false Enlightenment?  We are, as Beckett once said, “between a death and a difficult birth.”  This is going to require another leap in consciousness that involves more than a priesthood or professorate.  In the process we may even rediscover and redefine what it means to be ‘human.’  Like anybody getting ready for a life-changing move, it’s time to sort through the attic and decide what to throw away.

                This is all going to seem very frustrating and illusory until it suddenly seems inevitable and natural – until we can’t remember ever not thinking this way.  I don’t expect to be there when that happens.  This is a long road.  But I can lend whatever energy I have left to telling and listening to the stories we have to tell, to put the children to sleep and keep watch in the night.