Languaging a New Order

                I’ve been writing about Maturana’s use of the word languaging as the way humans, all humans, bring forth a world they share and maintain with other people.  Harari calls these worlds an ‘imagined order.’  We all live in one of these imagined orders, and by living in them we change them.  The story we tell ourselves to create the imagined order is subject to the same process of autopoiesis that our material presence in the world is.  Just as we are always conserving the essential structural couplings that keep us alive while simultaneously adapting them, we do the same thing with the imagined order.  It seems reasonable to assume, that at some point the imagined order has been stretched and pulled so much that it loses its elasticity.  At that point, a new order has to emerge that sustains the balance and integrity of ourselves and our environment.  A new order could have disastrous consequences and end the society and individuals that follow it, or it could usher in a new and dynamic period that is energized by new possibilities obscured by the old order.  My contention is that we are at one of those crossroads. 

                We are living on the fumes of the Enlightenment, an imagined order that privileged freedom, democracy and most of all reason.  It was assumed that humans were essentially rational, and that by using that rationality they fashion a world of participatory governance and personal freedom.  For a while, it was a roaring success.  The great democracies of the world and the great advancements of science social policy were a clear advancement, a better imagined order, than the religious chaos of kings and princes fighting over the allegiance of their subjects.  Over the last two and a half centuries, the concepts of freedom and democracy evolved and became more inclusive.  In America, a democracy of oligarchs was pushed and expanded to become a much more inclusive and dynamic form of democracy.  Personal freedoms expanded to include greater economic, sexual and social options.  But over time, the autopoietic push and pull of these adaptations has hollowed out the ideas of the Enlightenment.

                Freedom is easy to understand in relationship to a tyrannical king or a despotic church, but what does it really mean today?  Absent the countervailing influence of order or duty, freedom becomes a toxic example of extreme uncoupling.  Democracy started out as a limited experiment for the few before morphing into enfranchisement of the many, but we can already see how the pursuit of power is trying to limit participation and access.  Perhaps most fundamentally, reason went from a universal tenet to a situational privilege.  As Derrida pointed out, reason depends on who is talking and where you stand in relationship to them.  As a result, the words that use to coordinate behaviors in our world now lack the power to do so.  We keep trotting out the same phasing only to confronted by people using the same language to point in a completely different direction.  We struggle to realign and sharpen what we mean, but perhaps, we should face the fact that we need a new story.

                In the American and French revolutions it was a new class of actors that lead the move to a new way of thinking about the imagined order.  They, in turn, were constantly pushed by new groups of people who wanted a new version of the story, one that included them and their desires.  We live in a moment where a mentally limited president uses the trappings of ‘America’ to induce racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic hatred.  The only people I see capable of telling a story consistent with what Lincoln called our ‘better angels’ are young women and people of color.  They are the most energized and inclusive voices on the stage, but they need to turn their languaging toward a new horizon.  It is too late to save this order; a new one must be created.  If democracy has a future it has to be an economic and environmental concept and not just a political one.  If freedom is going to be redeemed, it has to be in the context of social and environmental consciousness.  Capitalism can’t be saved.  They have a lot of work ahead of them.  May God bless them.