A Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 10 of 50)

[This is Part 10 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 9 here.]

Our meaning crisis has been our portal into our broader system of crises known here as a metacrisis, as well as the system of action-centers known as a metarevolution. This section will get more specific about the particularities of complexity, such that the reader will gain an appreciation for how this manifesto is about all of the urgent political and social issues of our day, however distant it might seem that we are from those topics. We have not felt the need to call out specific governments or political-economic systems as dysfunctional; yet, it is worth saying here that we are indeed pointing out their dysfunction. Previously, this was done by putting a spotlight on meaninglessness and nihilistic metaphysics, which can find their way into social norms, institutions, laws, and much more that we deal with on a daily basis. This section will reveal yet more dysfunction, but from the perspective of complexity science. This book is metarevolutionary, because it is about your country and your government and your politicians, but it is also about all future instantiations of these. The reader is trusted to make these connections, and know that innumerable political manifestos may be written using metarevolutionary principles.

Thus, the rest of this book will deal with two things: The way out of our meaning crisis, and the evolution of action into greater complexity and consciousness; the former is exemplary of why we must move in the direction of the latter—thus we are venturing into our metacrisis as metarevolutionaries. 

It would require the space of many books to fully due justice to the subject of complexity, so it is our hope that this overview will help begin to shift the reader’s attention to the general patterns of complex systems, and thus appreciate what makes a metacrisis and a metarevolution different from a crisis or revolution. It is the theme of this book that action itself evolves towards complexity, and that when things seem hopeless, it is because the complexity of our crises has run ahead of our systems of action: The metarevolutionary orientation renews hope via action directed at the transformation and complexification of action.

So let us keep our eyes on our meaning crisis while broadening the view to include our whole metacrisis. One goal of metarevolutionaries is to understand which crises tend to propagate or exacerbate other crises within a metacrisis. Our meaning crisis will continue to be a poignant lens through which to see more general features of any metacrisis. This is because, as metarevolutionaries, we are interested in the differences between deep and shallow crises. Within a metacrisis, a deep crisis has more (and stronger) connections than a shallow one. In other words, we understand value (and thus meaning) to be the most basic feature of reality, and for this reason it is most like a body to which other crises are limbs—thus we are focused on the rediscovery and renewal of meaning, as this change has the deepest implications for every other area of our metacrisis.

Further, we claim that a metacrisis is a complex system of crises, and that the effectiveness of any action within that system depends, too, on complexity. It is not enough to be oriented towards deep rather than shallow crises. In short, if the problem is more complex than the problem-solvers, the problem generally gets worse. Thus, metarevolutionaries are oriented towards action which increases the complexity, consciousness, and coherence of humans and other centers of action.

The significance of a complex-system-informed worldview is that it lights a path for metarevolutionaries seeking to address our litany of crises, such as the meaning crisis we have just discussed. So, in this section, we will primarily concern ourselves with the patterns and features of a metacrisis as a complex system of crises. Through the lens of our meaning crisis, we aim to demonstrate metarevolutionary principles applicable to the resolution of all crises. Key to this discussion are the “basic units” of these systems. Some of these will be familiar (as in atoms as units of matter), while others are largely lost in today’s worldviews and need to be recovered. Most importantly, we must show a coherent hierarchy of these units—for a supremacy of atoms (or matter or energy) is a common feature of relatively recent scientific worldviews which aim to be materialist and reductionist—i.e. to explain everything without resorting to anything metaphysical. This attempt, however well-meaning, is one of the faces of nihilism in its denial of the Good—which, as Value per se, has an absolute dimension which these worldviews do not acknowledge as real. 

As such, the most common units of the materialistic worldview will need to be contextualized in a less-familiar unit which reconciles the best of today’s science with our metaphysical optimism. In other words, the materialist-reductionist’s units are, in the end, all units of Action (i.e. quantitative units of actuality), while the metaphysician’s unit is a unit of Value (i.e. a qualitative unit of possibility). The former is ontologically subservient to the latter; action (or power) is an expression of the Good, and not the other way around. A recovery of meaning and an end to the zombie apocalypse is thus a reversal from the commonly-held position that value is a mere expression of relative preference (and therefore the exertion of power—the power to be a self-authenticating source of meaning). 

Part of the early scientific worldview, from its incubation in a world full of traditional, religious metaphysics, was a mechanistic and reductionist view of reality which implied that what we now call complex systems were just like machines with simple collections of parts. The latest theories of systems and complexity can help carry us into uncharted territory which includes but transcends the scientific and mythological-religious worldviews.

Edgar Morin: “[In complexity,] we touch on substrata shared by biology and anthropology… Such a theory allows us to reveal the relation between the physical universe and the biological universe, and ensures communication between all parts of what we call reality.”

Ervin Laszlo: “In view of parallel developments in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and economics, many branches of the contemporary sciences became, in Warren Weaver’s phrase, ‘science of organized complexity’.”

Metamodern and complex-system-informed worldviews are needed to mend our relationship with (and within) complex systems. As we build our understanding of complexity in the present sections of this book, it will become clear why it is so important to see both our metacrisis and metarevolution as complex systems. In short, to navigate a complex system of crises, we must come together in the complexification of action—a core feature of metarevolution. Complexity is, among other things, the antidote to one-sided, dangerous ideologies. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between a revolution and a metarevolution is that the former is more directed at problems—and the latter, at problem-solvers.

Ervin Laszlo: “We cannot expect to satisfy all the requirements attaching to a worldview in reference to science alone, without also drawing on the insights of religion and the values of humanism… The new systems view can provide the clues, the metaphors, the orientations, and even the detailed models for solving critical problems on this precious but increasingly crowded and exploited planet.”

Patrick Harpur: “Ignoring complexity is a feature of ideologies in general, and indeed the main reason for their success. Their simple and literalistic perspective promises freedom from doubt, ambiguity, difficulty. They concentrate on a single image which embodies their partial side of the truth so strikingly that it numbs the disciple’s imagination and closes it to other possibilities.”

Daniel Schmachtenberger: “[To give an example,] the 2D view of the cylinder is a circle from one perspective and a rectangle from another. Both are true ‘slices’ of the reality of the cylinder; neither alone give a clear sense of the higher dimensional shape’s reality… The key insight is recognizing these differing perspectives as orthogonal to each other rather than opposite… The recognition of orthogonality…gives us the cylinder, recognizes both lower dimensional perspectives as 100% true from their limited vantage point, and forces the recognition that a congruent picture is possible but requires a fundamentally more complex kind of perspective... Our perception of existential paradoxes often comes from exactly this kind of process: believing in false dichotomies through reducing reality to conceptual slices that are true but partial to the point of actually requiring a seemingly mutually exclusive perspective to explain the full phenomena.”

A complex-system-informed worldview is of staggering importance: neither metacrisis or metarevolution can be understood without it. Indeed, we can’t understand our own minds without it. To restate an earlier point: This pair of concepts rely on a foundational understanding of “systems thinking” and how it differs from the analytical-reductionist mode of thinking applied to complicated (but not complex) systems. 

Jonathan Rowson: “Chess taught me that you need to see the whole position in all its reverberating dynamism to make good moves, but also that it is impossible to think about everything at once… We will struggle to address [the issues] without a more concerted effort to see how they co-arise and co-constitute each other. And we will never do that if we start from a vantage point that sees each problem as a discrete issue, ciphered off to be analyzed by a distinct discipline… A chess position can be thought of as a system… Systems thinking is a form of perception above all, imbued with understanding that wholes have properties that do not exist in the sum of their parts, and that everything is connected to a greater or lesser extent… While any given chess position is best thought of as a complicated system, the game in motion is best thought of as a complex system, partly because human systems are influencing and influenced by what is happening.”

Throughout the rest of this section, we will explore the basic units of complex systems, their features and behaviors, and uncover how and why these systems evolve. By the end, we will have the tools we need to become metarevolutionary.