🌎 So What Does It Take To Be Planetary?
We need the feeling of radical participation, not the false ecstasy of escape.
“The map is not the territory, but some maps do help us to find our way home; and yet, home is precisely the place where we no longer need maps.”
– William Irwin Thompson, “The Four Cultural Ecologies of the West”
Preamble
Happy Earth Day!
This essay is Part Two in a series on what it will take for humankind to see itself as part of a single more-than-human entity, emerging from, participating in—and as—the biosphere. Standard disclaimer for new readers:
The TL;DR on Part One, “The Underview Effect”, is that trying to mass-produce planetary culture—for instance, by sending celebrities and philanthropists into space so they can come back and inspire the rest of us—is based on a demonstrably false theory of change.
By analogy to other peak experiences like those induced by psychedelics, we can see how these efforts misunderstand complex systems by applying “top-down” behavioral engineering principles to bottom-up cultural change; don’t hold a proper container for integration; and crucially, by leveraging The Overview Effect as a consumer experience, risk producing precisely the opposite of the desired goal (namely, dissolving our sense of separation and reconstituting selfhood as an emergent pattern in fields of interdependent co-arising).But I do a better job of saying all this here.
Today we turn to the question we left hanging: If launching influencers into orbit is insufficient to get us collectively “back home,” what is?
Fundamental shifts like this are rarely easy, quick, or pleasant.
As I’m sure you’ll notice, I don’t use AI to write and edit. This takes forever, especially with kids…as it should. So please—if you like thoughtful, deeply-researched long-form writing and would like to cast your vote for more—consider becoming a paid member:
One last thing: I wanted to hit “send” on Earth Day, so what you’re getting is a messy draft I cut in half. It doesn’t lead you through a clean trajectory of arguments. It leaves you hanging at the end. The next few thousand words need more time to ferment.
Because I’m riffing on ecology, community, and open-ended processes, I hope your feedback will inform the next piece in this series. I am not a lone romantic poet and you’re not a mute and passive reader soaking up my finished work. It takes a village.
Part Three explores how our increasingly complex and precarious society drives the transformation into planetary culture—and in particular, how rupture and collapse provide more openings for us to recognize our place as its custodians. There is no one path forward, but the “metacrisis” is a “metaopportunity” for each of us to find our own way to participate in enabling better futures.
Let’s make that soil together—maybe on a members hangout call. (Our next one will be on May 2 at 2 pm MDT. More info soon!)
Okay, on with the show.
Representation Isn’t Intimate Enough
What does it mean to be planetary? I draw my understanding from historian William Irwin Thompson’s work on the cultural evolution of consciousness. His book Imaginary Landscape describes how in our transition between “cultural ecologies,” from civilization to planetization, the self of industrial modernity’s preoccupation with representation becomes the self of planetary culture’s concern with participation.
This is a story of collapse and the concurrent growth of something richer and more intimate—the contrapuntal motion of an end and a beginning all at once. I’ll do my best to figure them together.
From a citizen’s perspective, democratic voting was a step up from the relative lack of agency experienced by subjects under autocratic rule, but when the cadence of decision-making accelerates from the crawl of legislative sessions to the blitzkrieg of an always-on digital society, we start to crave direct engagement with the means by which decision spaces are defined. Print gets superseded by operatic medium of film and then film is superseded by MMORPGs, because each interface provides more axes of participation. Voting gives way to protest and protest gives way to open civics. Open model weights feel like a one-way conversation when we could have open source and actually engage, collectively and in real-time, with how our infrastructure works. Agency isn’t just a matter of the timescales that couple sensorimotor feedback loops and whether we can respond to stimuli quickly enough; it is also a matter of the degrees of freedom through which we can effect that response.
But in service of convenience and simplicity, the interfaces we designed to navigate this century’s many-layered decision landscapes now utterly fail to provide adequate representations of its complexity (a point to which I’ll return below). The same accelerating pace enabling us to comment on live-streamed political debates and prompt entire virtual realities with speech abstracts a forest’s complex flows of energy and matter into dollar values and the richness of an interpersonal encounter into text.
The result is that we have a highly variable environment full of surprising “externalities,” but totally impoverished “controllability”—not godlike dominion, but our understanding of the relationships between inputs and outputs, and the consequences of our actions.
A quote frequently misattributed to psychologist Carl Jung puts this in simple terms:
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
We can’t participate in what we can’t perceive.
Today we have personalized “for you” news feeds, but no say in the news feed ranking algorithm itself. The feeds themselves are linear, squeezing high-dimensional and richly structured information spaces through a straw and leaving us with none of the depth perception or original range of movement we had in the physical environments to which our brains adapted over the course of more than half a billion years.
Humans have the stereoscopic vision and advanced spatial cognition of keystone predators, but the same “shortest distance between two points” thinking that served us as endurance hunters has cut out most of the picture. As I’ve already said, instrumentalizing space tourism in order to effect mass cultural transformation is a symptom of the same hypertrophic “left-brain” thinking that ignores “right-brain” pattern recognition, peripheral awareness, and the assignment of subjectivity to the masses that Big Tech regards as sociobehavioral engineering objects.
But this is understandable when we regard this kind of thinking as a strategic adaptation to the dimensional collapse of “high-entropy” primordial wilderness into the industrial economy’s “low-entropy” factory floor:
Notice how many more ways there are to participate in forests. Notice how the factory invites a yearning for more agency—how it is actually a factory for that desire.
The same collapse-as-opening is evident everywhere in our built environments. Yes, we have some say in whether people “like us” enter political office, but money does most of the talking when it comes to what they do. Our institutions all depend on metrics in order to coordinate behavior at scale, stripping context to enhance legibility and thereby over-indexing us to strategies that win out in the short term. Reliance on global supply chains and monocrop agriculture for food looks equivalent to reliance on the petrodollar as a universal reserve currency looks equivalent to reliance on opaque algorithmic recommendation for the news we need to participate as citizens: we live in a high-dimensional space but we are foraging in one dimension.
Economist Robin Hanson articulates this plainly:
The same is true for each of us as it is true for all of us. This is what happens when we pixelate the self, reducing a fluid interference pattern of countless interacting causes to the bins of age, class, gender, race, geography, and buying habits. Demographics are useful fictions when they help us to identify shared stake, but they have become the tools by which our predatory egregores divide and conquer. Surveillance capitalism can only optimize per-person extracted value to the extent we are legible to these systems, and our own drive to be legible to ourselves and one another—to fit in—makes us easy prey for systems that know us better than we know ourselves. In planetary culture, the representation of a fixed identity—and the attempted actualization of its values—becomes the latest version of the kill traps into which Paleolithic people drove herds of bison.
But this paranoid perspective eventually gives way to metanoia: to seeing predator and prey—and every other binary—as paired transient occurrences within a unitary cosmic gesture.
Or to put it another way: the self is a kind of battle plan, and as the famous maxim by 19th-century Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder goes:
“No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”
In modernity, the rules and roles imposed by premodern belief systems become objects, a new artistic medium for self-authoring egos engaged in a process of discovering their essence and reshaping institutions accordingly. In what comes next, the modern self becomes a work of co-improvisatory art—not an essential or authentic “me” but one of countless focal points in a self-aware fabric of relationships. Whether or not our systems represent this more nuanced state of being, representation alone is insufficient for those systems to afford us conscious participation in its flux of becoming.
No matter how fast, rich, or high-dimensional, representation isn’t intimate enough.
“I want to be a part of it: New York, New York!”
– Fred Ebb
For that you need more than maps. You need recipes. The problem with recipes, though, is that you need ingredients. Civilization has made some of them extremely hard to find. And as context re-invades the modern world, we discover new ingredients for which no recipes exist.
Becoming The Self-And-Other
Driving this change is our new sensitivity to what we might call “the civilizational unconscious”: our growing sense of embeddedness in and inextricability from supply chains, disease transmission networks, climate, global pollution, and the “other” we find staring back at us through “alien” cultures and identities, as well as nonhuman organic and machine intelligences. Echoing psychologist Robert Kegan’s description of “Stage Five” consciousness as that which recognizes self and other co-arising in constant dialogue, William Irwin Thompson sees the political entities of planetary culture as “enantiomorphic,” or inherently bound up as twins in the mutual creation of otherness. There is no “away” from nuclear fallout or microplastics, only a deepening encounter with everything the tidy garden of closed-system selfhood neglects because it’s metabolically cheaper to ignore this kind of “full-cost” accounting.
Which is, incidentally, why I have some empathy for this age’s abundant binary, zero-sum thinking and profit-over-people-and-planet strategies. If we view the brain as a free-energy minimizing organ of active inference, then it will always “choose” to get by on the simplest possible representations it can.
One of my all-time favorite explainer graphics comes from Professor of Mathematical Modelling Alain Goriely, which shows the tradeoffs involved in model size and computational time vs. what he calls “insight”—the ability to compress everything into the fewest possible variables. Aim for the richest, most consilient models and getting anything actionable out of them takes longer than you need. Aim for the smallest, most efficient models and you gain understanding of “universal laws” by taking out a loan on real-world complexity, breeding exceptions to your rules:
Given a safe and reliable environment, we become much more tolerant of complexity. Well-cared-for human infants have effectively “all the time in the world” to tinker, play with their food, and develop empowering causal models instead of favoring the approach of optimization through reinforcement learning. As demonstrated by psychologists Eunice Yiu, Alison Gopnik, and their colleagues, children favor greater variability in their environments than adults, who tend more toward being able to “game” systems after learning controllable input/output mappings. A good childhood means being able to make low-cost mistakes and trade immediate reward for robust causal models, generalizable learning they can apply to new experiences.
But adults navigate a world of higher stakes. When our best institutions—including academia, monastic living, diplomacy, and the family—work as advertised, they support exploratory play, open-ended inquiry, and non-violent conflict resolution. They give us leisure and the luxury of entertaining questions without easy answers. On the other hand, when you meet a stranger in a dark alley, you don’t have time to break bread, develop context, and get to know the ominous shadow as a unique person. The cost of misplaced trust is great. Your ancestors survived by erring on the side of false positives when something rustled in the tall grass nearby, and deliberation is expensive. So it’s easier to fight or flee.
When lossy, inflexible models hold up well enough, it’s easy to discard even abundant evidence to the contrary, especially “if [your] salary depends on [you] not understanding it”:
But what I read in Thompson’s vision of planetary culture is that its birth through crisis and the collapse of modern sense-making frameworks means that more and more people’s salary will depend on understanding it. Or, at least, he saw that the Jungian shadow exists not just for individuals but also for entire cultures, and the passage from one cultural ecology to the next is isomorphic to the process of psychological individuation through integration. In order to become planetary, we will have to take David Bowie’s advice to “turn and face the strange” and reclaim the monstrous as a vital member of our family.
Various thinkers, including Alan Kay, Danny Hillis, Douglas Adams, and Kevin Kelly, have articulated variants on “You only notice technology when it breaks down.” Kelly in particular qualifies technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet”—but the assumption that this “yet” one day arrives as a fixed achievement becomes obviously wrong in an age of cascading supply chain failures.
When we can not assume and ignore the bedrock of representational democracy, journalism, accreditation, and even public utilities, we end up in the paradox of being both the child who suddenly has to grow up and the adult who can only respond to crisis by becoming more childlike.
We can see this playing out in how people like Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs are trying to re-think society-state relations and foster the emergence of new institutions capable of real-time adaptation to the new condition of constant shocks:
This process plays out in the microcosm, too. One of Thompson’s many brilliant observations, drawing on biologist Lynn Margulis’s work on major evolutionary transitions through what she called “symbiogenesis,” was that war is a kind of mating—a dance of cultural recombination in which both sides take on each other’s characteristics and join in novel structures. Just as your own nucleated cells are “holobionts” made from different species of bacteria that fought each other to a standstill until they became conjoined as anatomically distinct but reproductively coupled organelles, each new cultural ecology begins in the reciprocal projection of evil and culminates in the form of a new “meta-individual”: World War II sends Henry Ford’s assembly line to Germany, German physicists and engineers to The United States, and begins the decades-long process by which off-shored industrial production results in the re-invasion of Asian electronics, popular culture, and other consumer goods. The U.S. “won the space race” thanks to Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun, developed the atom bomb with the help of (dismayed) German-born Albert Einstein, and soon became utterly dependent on Chinese and Japanese imports. By 1980, what looked like a decisive victory of the West was already becoming apparent as a turbulent flow and counterflow in a new cultural ecology better described by quantum mechanics and complexity science than ballistics.
In this process of emergence, the disowned unconscious first becomes conscious through evil as the “annunciation of the next level of order”, perceived as chaos before noise becomes signal in a more capacious and inclusive self. As Thompson puts it in “The Four Cultural Ecologies of the West”:
Unconsciously, the world is one, for global pollution spells out a dark integration that does not honor the rational boundaries of the nation-states. And so, industrial nation-states in their fullest development have contributed to their own end. Collectivization, then, must mean that the future is some sort of collective consciousness in which the completely individuated and conscious ego becomes surrounded by the permeable membrane of an ecology of Mind and not by the wall of civilization.
Crucially, we don’t erase the individual but rediscover it in situ—a shift in thinking from the potted plant to permaculture, in which rational science and other modern institutions persist “within” rather than “beyond” their jurisdictions. There is no escape from who you are, nor from philosopher Jean-Paul Satre’s “hell” of other people. But the self and world arise together — you’re every bit as dependent on the biosphere in a spaceship or a bunker as you are so the recipe for loving self and world includes everything you think of as pollution:
The world view of humanity in the [modern era] was of objects separated in space. The world view of humanity in the [next] cultural ecology (as experienced by astronauts, such as Rusty Schweickart, or mystics, such as David Spangler) is of presences in an interpenetrating field. How, then, do we live with this knowledge? If pollution, evil, noise, and paranoia are expressions of presences that won’t go away, how do we deal with them?
Industrial civilization never seems to learn, from DDT or thalidomide, plutonium or dioxin: catastrophe is not an accidental by-product of an otherwise good system of progress and control; catastrophe is an ecology’s response to being treated in an industrial manner.
Precisely because pollution cannot go away, we must generate only those kinds of pollution we can live with. Precisely because enemies won’t go away, for the fundamentalists’ process of inciting hate only creates enemies without end, we have no choice but to love our enemies.
But even what we think of pollution isn’t static and eternal. Nothing ever goes away, really; it only ever changes shape. If we wish to “rid ourselves” of toxic chemicals, we must change their shape — and the only way to do that is by changing who we are, evolving new metabolisms that allow us to absorb and work with them. This is exactly what we see in the examples of plastivorous bacteria, radiotrophic fungi, and Buddhist Tonglen meditation practice. We can’t escape the trauma caused by toxic relationships, but we can metabolize them in a deeper, more cohesive story that gives thanks to enemies as teachers and as vital elements of who we are.
So what does it take to be planetary? The same experimental working-with Indigenous cultures use to neutralize the phytotoxins of cassava, cycad fruit, and nardoo ferns. The same experimental working-with that started in an extinction-level atmospheric pollution event caused by photosynthetic bacteria and turned deadly oxygen into the keystone of glycolysis. The recipe is pantry cooking.
Cooking with Love…and Terror
For Thompson, every cultural ecology comes with a characteristic good and evil, based on its limits of cognition and radius of care. For the feudal empire this pair manifests as (good) “obedience to law” and (evil) “revolt against authority.” For the industrial nation-state, it is (good) “understanding of doctrine” and (evil) “ecstatic escape or transcendence.”
The characteristic good of the planetary cultural ecology is “universal compassion.” Its evil is “collectivization through terror”. We don’t get one without the other:
Negation is a form of emphasis [and] what we can see from the cultural movements from one historical level to another is that evil plays a role in the process of manifestation…this evil is the signal of emergence to the next level of historical order.
Thinking in terms of either-or distinctions like “us and them”, instead of the inescapable co-occurrence of apparent opposites, has had a good run. It’s a great strategy if you’re lucky enough to live in a fairly stable world. If you don’t live long enough to see the consequences, you can take profits on the value innovation “creates” by off-shoring the costs illegible to your revenue model, or taking a loan on future soil and human health to increase “productivity” by turning rain forests into cattle farms.
But thriving in this new world — or through any similar transition between seemingly-stable sense-making regimes — means learning to see every strategy (including extractive capitalism and hyperindividuality) as appropriate in certain contexts, and developing the capacity to listen and respond to a rapidly-changing environment. If the study of complexity has taught us anything, it is that “more is different” and we need to hold multiple mutually-irreducible explanatory frameworks as we balance life at the human scale with new knowledge of, and responsibility to, the bigger picture.
The delicate maneuver we are called into here is recognizing what appears to us as evil and its acknowledging its place within a greater cosmos than we can perceive:
🦠 The Future Is Disgusting
An excerpt from my maybe-never-to-be-published How To Live In The Future.
As every set of paired antitheses resolves within the immanent-transcendent whole appearing as the herald of another era, nemeses are written into myth together; warring faiths combine their efforts to create economies; and everything you loathe today is indispensably a part of who you are, in truth, and who you could become if you survive and live receptive to the gnarly lessons of reflection offered up to you by love.
After a few years immersing myself in complex systems studies, I learned to phrase this in more formal scientific language:
When I imagine forward into futures, all of them but the worst are noisy places: highly interactive, densely woven, layered, and syntactical — and as in any web of chatter, lots of lossy transfers, errors, and the patterns of intelligences too bizarre or fast or vast for anyone to notice are registered as noise.
These two statements — “the future is disgusting” and “the future is noisy” — are equivalent. From our position in the present, time runs “downhill” along a gradient of entropy production. Living systems organize themselves to make use of this entropy wherever possible, but navigate with models trained on past environments. The evolution of intelligence is, at least in part, a story of how life learns to internalize the vast complexity of everything by making more efficient encodings. This works well enough, but Reality is always and forever in excess of our understanding: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” As we increase our own complexity, we add to the complexity of the region of It All we can perceive. And because cognition always operates within metabolic limits, we can never see it all, and therefore we cannot be sure — Miguel Fuentes proved this mathematically! — that “randomness” exists in any absolute sense. The best we can do is admit we either do or do not see a pattern. And as any pair of parent-child musical tastes will tell you, “noise” is in the eye of the beholder. So, while certainty is out of the question, it sure seems like Eric Wargo’s radical hypothesis is right, and noise is “merely” future information.
If evil is the annunciation of the next level of order, then we help midwife planetary culture by accepting there are battles to be fought but “victory” means adding a dimension to our world models — one from we can see both an existential conflict and the internal workings of a greater sensibility.
But it’s a greater sensibility that preserves and cultivates difference at the human and ecological levels. The evolution of multicellularity became the platform for differentiated tissues and provided new niches for the radiating diversification of microbes. Cities not only standardized human behavior but also fostered countless new forms of institutions, labor, and identity. And the planetary being we glimpse through The Overview Effect is not a vision of ultimate unity, but of the atmosphere as a porous container for diversity, and an efflorescence of life set against but held within the awesome and terrible darkness of space. As Thompson repeatedly stresses (as well as his close colleague and fellow member of Lindisfarne, the poet Wendell Berry), efforts to “oversee” this invariably arise from a failure to hold both views together and degrade into the kind of technocratic managerial thinking that produces the worst horrors of the planetary age:
What [Gregory] Bateson’s philosophy can teach us about out battles between good and evil is that ‘the difference that makes a difference’ is difference itself. Evil is the destruction of differences; good is the creation of ever new differences.
Evil works through collectivization, not individuation, with the unit crushed into the uniform, the culture crushed into a cult. This is the difference that makes a difference between…a tall-grass prairie and the animal concentration camp of a feed lot in Kansas.
Even trying to reproduce The Overview Effect at scale—the desire to turn one’s own experience of interbeing into a cultural movement that reshapes our world for the better—is just more technocracy in miniature:
Because the good works through the unique and not the uniform, it is not possible to standardize it through time. Each moment and historical situation is unique, and so the good repeated in an inappropriate situation can become evil.
In other words, becoming planetary starts at home. There is no universal protocol. For some it comes from seeing Earth from space. For some—as I’ll expand on in Part Three—it comes from living through an earthquake. One thing these two experiences have in common is a kind of breaking-open, a direct encounter with Reality that overwhelms us, tables our abstractions, breaks the walls between the self and world that we erect to manage or ignore our insecurity.
The bad news is, awakening evades intent—to paraphrase Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, enlightenment is an accident, but practice makes us accident-prone. The good news is, civilization is the practice of producing accidents—and at this point in history, there is no escape from them.
But standing on the cusp of transformation, catastrophe and eucatastrophe are indistinguishable. Some accidents—the origin of life, the flash of insight, or the moment that you meet your future spouse—are good. This is the stuff of art. Bob Ross found The Joy of Painting by reminding us that there are no mistakes in painting. I’m a painter who embraces challenging surprises.
Elsewhere in his work, Bill Thompson notes that in each new cultural evolution of consciousness “We slay with technology and save the victim with art.” I’m up at 1:00 A.M. on Earth Day asking myself, “How will we ‘save the victims’ of the modern self, civilization, and the planet? How will we make them ‘happy little accidents’?”
That’s next.
This piece draws on decades of study and practice across a wide swath of science, art, and wisdom traditions. For a glimpse at my inspirations, explore my reading list and public record of inquiry-based dialogues.
I coach and consult teams and individuals navigating transformation and/or seeking to disrupt their own stuck thinking. Reach out if you’d like to work together.
Mate, a brilliant attempt (essay in its truest form). I do not have the capacity at the minute to give wholesomely back in the form of useful feedback (I will aim to do that later). Instead I’ll simply say, thank you for being you and doing what you do.
Hell yeah! I've always found planetary awareness happens in those little moments of "same same but different" when traveling to a far away place, and somehow finding things to giggle about with a friendly village dude