Fluidity

                As we face what I think will be a phase of unprecedented change, I think we should take a moment to think about how we think about change.  Our orientation, born in the Enlightenment and continuing through modernity, has been to plan for change in a rational, pragmatic and systematic way.  We have tried to control the rate and scope of change by moderating its impact through laws, protocols and institutions that are fundamentally resistant to radical change.  Even our politics is built around ‘moderate’ and ‘sensible’ reform instead of revolutionary upheaval.  You could argue that for the most part that has been productive and beneficial choice.  The problem we now face is that all of that moderation and reform has papered over some fundamental flaws in the way we think about our political and social reality. 

                In the aftermath of WWII, a new world was formed.  You could argue that that world started after the first World War and gained steam in the Great Depression, or you could go back to the rise of the administrative state during the 19^th Century, but the world that we are watching fall apart before our eyes came out of the chaos of the last war.  It was marked by things like the Marshal Plan and the social programs that Western democracies put in place to create order and balance.  The programs fit the times, and it’s hard to argue that they were unsuccessful. Now, however, they look pretty shop worn and anachronistic.  They worked because the world they created was mostly a reformed continuation of the world that existed before.  That is, while the change was profound, it was really just a further iteration of what had been.  What we face now is completely different.  Doing a better job of what we’re doing won’t help if what we’re doing is the wrong thing.

                I was thinking about this in the context of an article about Quantum Theory and the multiverse.  The theory says that we are only one of an almost infinite array of possible universes or realities.  The image that is often used is that we’re a hologram or a video game, which I don’t think is a particularly useful way for us to approach the issue of unpredictable uncertainty.  Einstein was famously at odds with Bohr over the unpredictable nature of the Quantum equation, saying that “God doesn’t play dice.” Well, it turns out she does.  The uncertainty in Quantum Mechanics has an ancient counterpart in cultures that eventually evolved, through different religious roots, the practice of Buddhism.  In that practice, the material world is an illusion, including the self, and the life energy that we are all a part of is beyond our control.  Buddhism, in all its various forms, uses that insight to tune an individual and conscious release or enlightenment from the forms that tie us to our illusion of reality.  We have to find a way to think of this somewhere between the video game and Satori.

                There are going to be a lot of plans in our future, but we have to stop thinking of plans as solutions.  If democracy has a future (you watch the news and tell me what you think), we have to learn to flow to that future.  We have to learn to disengage from the formal structures we’ve used to protect us from chance, from the game of dice that we are inevitably caught up in, and open our selves up to new possibilities.  We need to existence as continual and imaginative reinvention of being.  This isn’t a problem of more, better or bigger data.  All data is always already part of a measured conclusion and not an invitation to openness.  Music, art, dance and stories are better ways to construct a communal mindfulness. 

                My sense is that this what Dewey, in his dry early 20^th Century prose, was trying to get at in his writing and thinking about art, education and democracy, which I think are inexorably intertwined.  Our own mindfulness is essential, but it will not be enough.  We have to start building schools and communities with these principles and practices at their core.  We rode rational discourse and deracinated scientific practice as far as it would go.  Can we be spiritual without withdrawal?  Can we let change happen without fear or predictability?