We have to clear and clean up our minds
The third chapter of the Open Conspiracy book
Why now? Why have we awakened now to the need to live our lives in a new way and to remake governing and governance – the way we manage human affairs? Wells’s awakening came from WWI. During the last couple of decades, the increase in natural and man-made disasters, war and the impending doom of the climate crisis, provide cause for awakening and agency for activism. Wells’s response was to seek knowledge in science.
“Human thought is … confused by the imperfection of words and symbols it employs. .. Through symbols, man has… come to considerable mastery over his universe. But every step has involved entanglement with these symbols …. They were at once helpful and dangerous and misleading. … All through the later middle ages there were great disputes about the use of words and symbols… On the one side were the Realists, who were so called because they believed that… names were more real than facts… and on the other side were the Nominalists,… who thought there might be some sort of catch in verbal processes and .. worked their way towards verification by experiment…. Experimental science.. has given our world all these immense powers and possibilities that tempt and threaten it today (pp 16-17)”.
Wells dived into science, brought himself to the state of the art in numerous fields and wrote prolifically about the subjects that he thought should inform the awakening he had in mind: “The science of life” [9] and “The work, wealth and happiness of mankind” [10] offered encyclopaedic coverage of the state of the art in the historical and life sciences after the First World War.
“Re-educating oneself.. is only the beginning of the task before the awakening of the Open Conspirator…. It was the Great War first brought home to me how ignorant I was… I did not know… history in such a fashion as to be able to explain how the Great War came about or what ought to come out of it. .. I set myself.. to make a summary of all history and get some sort of map to more serviceable conclusions about the political state of mankind. This summary I made was The Outline of History [8] … (I)ts main theme is the growth of intercommunication and human communities and their rules and conflicts… And even as I completed the outline… I realized that I did not know enough about the life in my body”. (pp 18-20)
The pattern of awakening, because of some kind of shock, and seeking to know - that produces a need to connect our perceptions of the external world with our understanding of our inner-selves - is very common. A catch – drawing on Wells’s discussion of nominalists and realists - is that the distinction between internal and external is challenging as everything is mediated by senses, narratives and the biology of our brain. Bolte Taylor [1] talks about the different characters of the two hemispheres of the human brain: the right one that deals with the present moment and connects us with the world, and the left one that creates stories and timelines and gives us separation from the world and identity.
For Wells, and for most western thinkers, knowledge is associated with the functions of the left hemisphere of the brain. It is something that we acquire when we separate and abstract ourselves from the world around us. In contrast, indigenous epistemologies outside the western mainstream see knowledge as relational [3] [4] residing at least to some degree in the right hemisphere.
Accordingly, a variety of concepts of “clearing and cleaning-up our minds” have been proposed over the years. To Wells’s “scientific” approach one can juxtapose Carlos Castaneda’s search for total relational awareness, through abandoning one’s internal dialogue [2] . The Dark Mountain project seeking to understand human civilization as a threat to itself, talk about “uncentring our minds” [3]. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira [6] proposes a process of preparing for the psychological consequences of hospicing modernity.
“Modernity is a single story of progress, development, human evolution and civilization that is omnipresent. Modernity is full of paradoxes: of war and humanitarian support, of ongoing colonialism and reconciliation, of imperialism and education, of poverty creation and alleviation, of exponential growth and sustainability…. Modernity …. has grown old and is facing its end. Learning to offer palliative care to modernity dying … is not something modernity itself can teach us to do. … most people will not willingly let go of the enjoyments and securities afforded by modernity… However, our collective unconscious knows that ..(these).. cannot be endlessly sustained” (Machado de Oliveira pp xix-xx)
The paradoxes are central in her awakening. In her words
“the insight that the sense of separation and superiority implanted by modernity is a social disease in all of us, that requires collective healing….. Hopefully, one day, … the lessons of our collective failure to interrupt violence will become part of what reframes how we approach our human predicament. … insist on asking “what if”:
What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic contagious divisions are preventable social diseases?
What if the texts, education and … organization we revere have carried and spread the disease, but also contain the medicine that can heal it?
What if learning to activate this medicine requires coming to terms with our violent histories,.. learning to see the world through the eyes of others, and facing humanity .. in its full complexity, affliction and imperfection?...…
What is collective healing will be made possible precisely by facing – together – the end of the world as we know it?” (pp xxii-xxiii)
External shocks - experiences, information, knowledge, trauma, contradictions etc – can awaken people and strengthen their agency, or numb and confuse them and lead them to submission [5]. Individual and collectives reactions vary. The World Economic Forum proposes personal agency as a cure for climate anxiety. Rupert Read argues that collective action is often hampered by “soft denial” of the extent of collective failure and the gravity of the predicament. In a way, modernity will die, whether we treat it nicely or not, the argument goes. What is, then, the point in “clearing and cleaning up our minds”?
Knowledge and action are not always in congruence. Sometimes we use our knowledge of history to avoid the mistakes of the past and sometimes we use it as a blueprint to re-act those mistakes. Just like Machado de Oliveira I hope that we will learn to abandon the sense superiority and separation, and exchange the violence for a peaceful, respectful and sustainable existence. However, both separation and violence are very strongly embedded in humanity as well as in nature. And there are those who instead of clearing and cleaning up their minds, prefer to use separation and violence to get what they want, even when this is the Nobel Peace Prize.
References
[1] Bolte Taylor, J (2006) My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, Lulu Press, North Carolina
2] Castaneda, C (1968) The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, The University of California Press
[3] Ghosh, A (2021) The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, University of Chicago Press
[4] Gould, R K, D E Martinez, K R Hoelting (2023). Exploring Indigenous relationality to inform the relational turn in sustainability science. Ecosystems and People, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2023.2229452
[5] Klein, N (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Knopf Canada, Toronto
[6] Machado de Oliveira V (2021) Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley CA
[7] The Dark Mountain Project et al / eds (2017) Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont
[8] Wells, H G (1920) The Outline of History, Barnes & Noble, New York (2004 edition)
[9] Wells, H G, J Huxley, and G P Wells (1929) The science of life, The Waverley Publishing Company Ltd, London
[10] Wells, H G (1932) “The work, wealth and happiness of mankind, William Heinemann ltd, London
