The Relationality Revolution
Many of us tremble with anxiety, looking for someone, somewhere, to blame as we realise that climate change is real; our houses may become uninsurable; our lives choked with information pollution by conspiracy thinking, fake news and AI generated fake imagery and voices. Where we live in a two-speed economy of asset-wealthy elites and an increasingly impoverished-workforce majority, which is feeding rage and community fracturing. And most worryingly of all—a move towards ethno-nationalism and a new brand of authoritarianism among young men.
The paradigm shift to relationality offers us a way through this conundrum, a way to heal our broken and anxious spirits, and find the meaningful connections within our communities that so many of us yearn for.
In a world where we have traded beauty for commodity, the human is expendable. The prophetic voice cannot be heard over the din of television news punditry. Science and technology have emptied our souls and convenience is the measure of progress. Productivity is the measure of human worth. [This is a] deep crisis for many Australians – not just a bad patch of high prices that will pass, but a moment of terrible realisation that the kind of life they have taken for granted may not be available any more (Stan Grant, ‘Into the Silent Funeral’, The Saturday Paper, 2024)
We need to change the way we think about our place in the world, to recover the timeless wisdom of the ancients and marry it to the power of modern science and technology within a paradigm of relationality, rather than extractive wealth creation for the few. As journalist Anna Klien warns in an article in The Monthly, we need to pay attention to Oliver Sacks’ worries about the impact of the world of the tech-bros on our psyches and on the bonds between parents and their children, between people, “the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture”. Klien warns: Big Other (the Tech Bros) poaches our behavior for surplus and leaves behind all the meaning lodged in our bodies, our brains, and our beating hearts, not unlike the monstrous slaughter of elephants for ivory. Forget the cliché that if it’s free, “You are the product.” You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The “product” derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life. Yes, the pioneers and settlers spoke of, and continue to speak of, pushing open new territory. And for a long time now – too long – they’ve confused themselves not only as being pioneers and settlers on the digital frontier, but as creators, their codes laying down the formations of a frontier into otherwise empty space. That is, areas of our lives not yet mediated, or commercialised, by online activity.
As Klien notes: ‘Empty space. Terra nullius. Nobody’s land. Well, we’ve been here before.’
Circularity
The rhythms of nature, the pervasive cycle of life and death, the monthly cycle of we women’s menses that allows for the fertilisation of life within our wombs and the moon and its relationship to ocean tides, the cycle of seasonal changes that mark the progression of the sun in its relationship to Earth, the winds and ocean currents—all speak to the essential circularity of life. There is no such thing as ‘waste’ in the circularity of life. Death is food that sustains life for some, or humus that feeds the soil.
As reported by Bega Circular Valley, currently the world is only 9% circular in its use of resources. This means 91% of the resources are being used for a single purpose or are being wastefully consumed. Left unabated, this linear resource-use mindset is resulting in economic and environmental losses and creating social tensions.
The answer? Transitioning our production, agricultural and social systems to a circular socio-economic community. This is now underway in Australia, championed by Circular Australia.
We also face a growing challenge with e-waste. A new study, in Nature Computational Science, has estimated generative AI could generate up to 2.3 million tonnes of electronic waste (also called e-waste) per year by 2030. The 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022 would fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks, roughly enough trucks to form a bumper-to-bumper line encircling the equator. Meanwhile, ever-larger data centres are coming online, with $US36 billion invested in AI infrastructure globally in 2023. Relatively simple “circular economy strategies” would have a major effect on e-waste generation, the researchers found.
Circular Precincts Under Development in Australia
Source: Circular Australia & Aurecon, September 2024
Bega Circular Valley
Bega Circular Valley is one example that expresses the relationality paradigm shift. Its vision is for Bega to be a lighthouse model for regional Australia, a model for how economic, environmental and social resilience can thrive—an innovation hub with diversified industry activities, a mixed farming program that supports biodiversity and is dealing with climate change through carbon neutrality and zero waste to landfill, and is admired by residents and visitors. A place that attracts tourists, students, entrepreneurs and investors to experience and participate in this uniquely circular valley.
Storytellers are required to be part of this innovation in circularity, enabling our artists, filmmakers, musicians, performers and writers to help our communities chart and celebrate this relationality way of being, thinking and doing. Directly addressing the loneliness epidemic in our community where one in three people say they suffer from loneliness, an experience that is most acute among the 18-24 year old population, followed by the 45-54 year old population—the very people we rely on to sustain our communities. All are looking for meaningful connections within their communities (State of the Nation Report, 2023).
Relationality, Networks and Systems Thinking
Relationality, as an ancient/new way of being, thinking and doing, asks us to experience ourselves as part of the entangled nature of our world, of complex, connected, ecosystems and gender and family relationships that defy easy single categorisation. It is a distinct paradigm shift, sensing our intimate connectivity in networks of networks in our collective worldview, as we search for a way to respond to the intersecting crises of modernity engulfing our world.
The idea of networks is well established in our Internet-connected lives, but we are still to truly embrace and experience how we are relationally embedded in our networks of networks, within nature, our communities and our wider cosmos.
To understand what’s at stake we need to come to grips with the legacy of the mechanistic thinking that sits at the heart of modern culture, anchored in Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which reframed the world as a mathematical machine that could be known, mapped, controlled and put to use for humans, who, ‘made in God’s image’, were given dominion over the Earth and all its creatures (Genesis V.26.1). This shift to mechanistic thinking underlies the development of modern economics from Burke and Hobbes to John Locke and all the way to the neo-liberalism of the free market orthodoxy of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, which underpinned the political strategies of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. Protection of private property and the promotion of individual effort (including the corporation as a ‘legal individual’) was now the recipe for producing ‘social good’.
Despite the obvious failing of its ‘trickle down’ theory for wealth distribution, and the political chaos it has unleashed across democratic nations, it remains the dominant economic theory among mainstream economists today.
This mechanistic thinking must now give way to the insights of complexity theory, an interdisciplinary understanding of reality as composed of complex open systems with emergent properties and transformational potential through self-organisation. The idea of ‘separability’—by which we modern humans have come to see ourselves as profoundly separate from the natural world, rather than intrinsically part of it, and who abrogated to ourselves the quality of intelligence, while regarding the rest of nature regarded as dumb or mute—can no longer be sustained.
We are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light. The 40 trillion-odd microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us. Like the fungi that live within plants, they protect us from disease. They guide the development of our bodies and immune systems and influence our behaviour… Learning more about these associations changes our experience of our own bodies and the places we inhabit. We are ecosystems that span boundaries and transgress categories. Our selves emerge from a complex tangle of relationships only now becoming known (Sheldrake, 2020).
The search is on for a new economics, with NENA and The New Economics Foundation, to name but a few of the think thanks, including Forum New Economy all hard at work. This will not be easy. Powerful vested interests are aligned with the colonisation of our minds by the seductions of techno-capitalism.
Since WWII, through neo-economic imperialism and globalisation, under the so-called international rules-based world order, individualist consumerism has been promoted relentlessly through the entertainment-techno-industrial- complex, which sits at the heart of modernity. Never have we been more connected via the Internet and social media. But across the world we find ourselves in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, not just among the aged, but also among young people. We are finding it hard to experience and taste the relationality of our lives, including our relationship with our inner selves and bodies, and with our neighbours, friends and families—as sensate beings embedded in the world.
Cognitive Dissonance
Our increasing levels of community anxiety and anger arise from our cognitive dissonance in a world where hyper-individualism still rules. Vanessa de Oliviera (Hospicing Modernity, 2021) reminds us that we must always bracket modernity with coloniality because it cannot exist without expropriation, extraction and ecocides, as substantiated by economic, political and historical data. Yet it imposes a mode of representation that claims both benevolence and universality for itself, while denying its violence and unsustainability, stranding we children of modernity in a mind-fog of psychic confusion—of cognitive dissonance.
Newton’s Principia Mathematica seemed to reveal a world that could be known as a mathematical ‘machine’ rather than a ‘divine’ creation. The technological revolutions that this unleashed, from the 18th century industrial revolution onwards, led to a reductionist world view whereby the whole could be reduced to the sum of its parts. This is reflected in a proliferation of academic knowledge specialisations: a world of separate, knowable ‘things’ that can be controlled and re-arranged at will—from the organisation of human labour in factories to atoms in nuclear reactors, to DNA genomes in life forms. Now we find our human emotions and behaviour digitally captured, reduced to data that can be mined to target consumerism for profit maximisation; our beliefs and political affiliations for political power and control.
Divisive populism is the ‘peasants revolt’ of the 21st century—sweeping across the US and Europe, promising to upend the ambitions of democratic liberalism aligned with extractivist capitalism—a pact made with the devil of individualistic human greed and pride. As a result, untrammelled narcissism is now pervasive.
Mesmerised by the proliferation of increasing material wealth and labour-saving convenience, we lost touch with the timeless wisdom of the ancients as the highest form of knowledge. Instead, we reduced knowledge to a factor of production in the ‘knowledge economy’. Most of our best minds are caught up in the trap of greed and pride, seeking to maximise their personal wealth and fame—as financial wizards, tech entrepreneurs, medical superstars, engineering geniuses building the world’s tallest buildings, the longest bridges, the world’s deadliest weapons of destruction, the most productive mines no matter how remote the location and impact on its local people. As chemists giving us plastics, fertilisers and pesticides that now pollute our soils and waters, bio-engineers producing designer pets and breeding stock, and now designer babies—while dreaming of offering eternal life, defeating death in all its forms. And most recently, space scientists dreaming of conquering the last frontier—colonising space—as a new domain for mining, tourism or even human settlement, while the space junk circling the Earth blankets our evening sky.
As the great Sanskrit scholar, Samdhong Rinpoche noted way back in 2006:
- The crisis we see in the external environment is basically a greater inner crisis. It is basically the crisis of the human mind.
- Modern civilisation suffers from unmanaged conflict of the mind. Humanity has significantly enlarged its knowledge and know-how, but has failed to acquire a corresponding degree of wisdom.
- Madness is the inability to discriminate between what is harmful and what is not. And I think that, in this regard, modern people have gone insane.
Rediscovering Timeless Wisdom
Now, as we face the progressive destruction of the bio-regional viability of our world, we are rediscovering that ancient truth. The world is not made of distinct ‘things’ but processes that flow, change and adapt across space and time.
While the second law of thermodynamics describes the incessant forces of dissolution, complexity theory demonstrates that the forces of order and self-organisation apply to the creation of living systems. The story of life reveals a deep, inner creativity that is woven in to the very fabric of nature (Waldrop, 1992), with many levels of organisation—an ever-changing system poised at the edge of chaos. Where tipping points can collapse whole systems. The whole is indeed bigger than the sum of its parts. The property of emergence and self-organisation have challenged our strong cultural tendency to knowledge specialisation. ‘Reality’ has revealed itself as vast, amorphous, and ever-changing; unable to be nailed down.
We are now being called to recover an ancient understanding of the web of life, learning how to read nature as a text of seasonal variation through the behaviour of plants, animals, insects and the movement of stars and planets in the night sky. Learning how to listen to the voices of the natural world speaking in languages other than the human tongue. It is only now, in the 21st century that we have learned humility. We are cycling back to this timeless knowledge that has been held in the ancient stories of the Songlines of Aboriginal Australia and other First Nations knowledge systems in the Americas and the Arctic. As the women of NE Arnhem Land remind us, even the word ‘songlines’ leads us astray. Instead we should think of song spirals, that speak to our co-becoming with Country and all its symbiotic mysteries.
Because we think in metaphors rather than abstractions when we search for meaning, when Science talks to us in ‘facts’ and abstract models, it fails to reach our hearts. For this we need the immersive storytelling powers of the arts.
The relationality paradigm draws on both the eco-spiritual-systems perspective of First Nations knowledge systems that have survived colonisation, and the sciences of ecology and complex systems theory that are challenging the utility of the way in which modernity organises knowledge into distinct disciplines and organisational structures, based on a strongly dualistic view of reality that trap us in silo-thinking.
This duality is expressed in numerous ways: mind/matter; science/religion; male/female; human/non-human (species), linked to the entrenched dualistic Cartesian logic of Western thinking. This is being superseded by philosophical phenomenology and posthumanist approaches, the flow-logic of Chinese Daoism, and Eastern Buddhist notions about the interdependent origination of all phenomena arising from the indivisible union of open potentiality (emptiness) and appearance (both cognitive and materially). While physics and Western philosophy maps this, it is the ancient Asian philosophies and spiritual practices, and the mythopoetic ceremonial knowledges of First Nations knowledges that allow to us to discover this in our inner experience and make it ‘real’.
Lessons from the Surrealist Revolution
Alexander Howard of the University of Sydney suggests that a century ago, French writer André Breton published a manifesto that would go on to become one of the most influential artistic texts of the 20th century, with Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism launching a movement that transformed not only visual art, but also literature, theatre and film. He asserts that surrealism drew on developments in psychology to herald a revolutionary new way of doing, seeing and being. It is, as art critic Jonathan Jones once noted, “the only modern movement that changed the way we talk and think about life” (The Conversation, 15 October 2024)
In heralding a ‘revolutionary new way of doing, seeing and being’ surrealism sought to subvert the dominance of rationality over imagination and the dream-state. However, while drawing on the insights of Freudian and Jungian psychology, surrealism nevertheless remained firmly grounded in the ‘white culture’ of European cultural thought, which Europeans had been exporting to the rest of the world via 19th century imperialism. Despite the widespread move to independence among former colonies in Asia and Africa after WWII, continuing economic neo-imperialism in the form of the consumer-driven growth imperative, firmly established consumerist hyper-individualist ‘white culture’ and its extractivist ethos, as globally normative. The surrealist promise of an emancipated imagination was captured and enslaved by the neo-liberal art market of ‘white culture’.
Arts in the Relationality Revolution
Where the surrealists attempted to escape the limitation of abstract rationality, rejecting traditional modes of understanding and embracing the unconscious, to upend the established order of things, relationality instead invites us to map and experience a relational world of intrinsic entanglement—from fungi’s mycelium network beneath our feet to the play between the sun, moon and earth in the rhythms of daily and season variations, and the intimacy of breath. Relationality invites us, not to abandon linguistic rationality, but to bracket it with the mythopoetic, the storytelling world of metaphorical imagery, which is capable of encoding entire realms of thought and feeling.
The paradigm shift to relationality, as a revolutionary ancient/new way of ‘being, thinking and doing’, seeks to subvert the normative hegemony of ‘white’ culture, which operates via its institutions that encode private property, hierarchy, separability, and abstract categorisation; its value system that privileges individualism, competition, wealth, fame and inequality; and its pretence at valuing social justice, freedom and equality in the name of human rights.
Rather than insights from psychology about the nature of the subconscious and unconscious dimensions of the human mind, relationality draws on First Nations knowledge systems and art practices to subvert the normative assumptions of ‘white modernity’. It asserts a relationality ethos that overcomes human exceptionalism, and enables us to regain our kinship with the entirety of the natural world as thoroughly animated. Alive with multiple ‘voices’ beyond human languages, infused with a spiritual agency, which is available to us as living beings. In so doing it seeks to undermine the logic of extractivism that underpins dominant economic thinking, including its latest manifestation in the data mining of human emotions and behaviour patterns.
We follow in the footsteps of André Breton: “From where we stand, while tipping our hats to Karl Marx, we maintain that the activity of interpreting the world must continue to be linked with the activity of changing the world.”
For this change to escape the ability of consumer capitalism to co-opt all in its way, this changing of the world must take deep root in our ontology, our way of seeing reality, and in our epistemology, the very way we come to organise knowledge.
When Yuval Harari asks why the exponential growth of information and knowledge have not been matched by any growth in wisdom, he points to this core idea of relationality: “Wisdom is much older than human history. It is elemental, the foundation of organic life, created not by an infallible God, but by the evolutionary processes of ecological systems over four billion years.” (p.404).
In this age of the exponential growth of information and its systemisation into bodies of knowledge, we also confront the limits of such knowledge. In his BBC podcast series on The Long History of Ignorance, Rory Stewart concludes with an episode delving into the idea of ‘wisdom’, concludes that there is a ‘knowing’ that lies beyond what can be quantified, named and categorised, as attested in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. For this he turns to Daoism, which states the ‘dao that can be known is not the dao’. In the Buddhist Dzogchen tradition this is rendered: ‘The non-seeing is the seeing indeed’.
Like surrealism, relationality is a philosophical stance that seeks to radically rethink experience and existence, our way of being in the world. And from this different way of being, we discover different ways of knowing and thinking. We begin to discover how to free ourselves from the mania of wanting to make all the unknown known, to ‘trap’ all phenomena and experience in language categories, like butterflies pinned to the paper in the botanists’ labs. Where the sense of wonder that initially drew the botanists to butterflies is so frequently lost in the utilitarian applications of their knowledge.
The surrealists sought to use automatism and the idea of the ‘marvellous’ as ways to access deeper truths, free from the constraints of rationality, which they believed had long dominated Western thought. Instead, practitioners of relationality seek to learn how to listen with their hearts to the deeper voices of our world beyond we humans, to embrace the Indigenous idea of ‘dadirri’—inner deep listening and quiet still awareness, which Nauiyu Elder, Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, considers the greatest gift that Aboriginal people can give the rest of Australia.
Like André Breton, relationality honours and includes the dream-state. We acknowledge that dreams can be full of symbolic messages from our inner knowingness, talking to us in imagery. We have but to learn how to ask these dream messengers what they are trying to tell us. We agree with Breton’s concern that ‘under the pretence of civilisation and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; that forbidden is any kind of search for truth, which is not in conformance with accepted practices.’
However, while Breton and his surrealists attempted to reconcile the waking state and the dream state into a surreality, we explorers of relationality reconcile both within a wider kinship with all of the sensate world.
This, of course, becomes doubly difficult in this age of ‘conspiracy’ thinking, ‘fake news’ and AI manipulated imagery and voice. What, other than extreme rationality, can cut through the fog of this increasing blanket of information pollution. Especially when via our ‘smart’ technology we have become data resources for those that seek to enslave us through data mining that tracks our emotional and behavioural traces in the digital realm.
But we would argue that this growing blanket of information pollution arises precisely because we have lost our capacity for relationality to the individualised, extractivist logic that lies at the heart of modern rationalism and its transactional, utilitarian nature. And that this loss is fuelling rage and panic that drives us ever further away from the joys of relationality.
It is time to find ways to embrace the Relationality Revolution.
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