At the Edge of Thinking
Tomorrow’s event:
Quarantine and Community: An Exploration w/ Sara Ness. September 1st @ 6:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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August 31, 2020
These missives, and The Stoa generally, have lately felt like some high place of observation in the borderlands between a fiery, restless What-Is and shapeless No-Where. There's this graceful dance between the heat of the urgent now and all the dream-like, chimerical possibilities of what-ought, and I'm appreciative to be able to view it from this Stoa.
I woke up with this email in my inbox, which was a reply to my letter yesterday. I appreciate the poetic grasping; it is really nice getting these perceptual glimpses of what The Stoa is from others. It may sound egoic saying this but I do sense The Stoa is at the edge of thinking in the noosphere.
Compared to the philosophical isms that are studied in academia, memetic tribes are “philosophies in the wild” that are captivating minds. These are philosophies that are alive, active, and have mass. If you want to know what is influencing the noosphere, and what ideologies are gunning for the metanarrative, it is prudent to put down the textbook and keep an eye on the memes.
The Stoa is a digital campfire for all these memetic tribes—with their unique reality tunnels—to temporarily warm their hearts with friendly dialogue, before they head back to their meme wars. I was talking to Raine Rivera about this after John Robb’s session today and we sensed (or hoped) that The Stoa can continue to avoid getting sucked into the culture war.
It has been successful at avoiding it thus far and our conclusion as to why was threefold:
1) The inherent code-switching in how The Stoa is marketed. More than a few people have been saying event titles are inaccessible. This is partly strategic. In a Letter exchange with Jason Snyder I wrote about something I called “perspectival pidginism”: the ability to create ad hoc perspectival “languages” by borrowing active terminology from multiple memetic tribes.
If you have a sensitivity to the “sacred values” of the tribes, and what terms “trigger” them, then you can be sensitive and strategic in what language you use, and you can do this without losing propositional integrity. AllSides has a culture war dictionary, which shows multiple meanings of controversial terms. This is a good start but a sensitivity to all the different memetic tribal terms is needed to code-switch in an authentically clever and effective way.
2) The centrality of the in-person aspect of The Stoa. From my experience of doing hundreds of in-person sessions in Toronto, people tend to be nice to each other if you frame and facilitate the space well. You need enough hot-edges so people know that being an asshole will not be tolerated, but you also need enough openness to allow for emergent conversations to take place.
Most culture war noise is because of this devil's cocktail that consists of our current social media ecology, the attention economy, and political memetic operations from state and non-state actors. If you do not identify with or rely on a specific social media platform then you remove the problem.
3) The Stoa’s kumbaya “let us all feel each other's hearts and get into communitas” vibe. While I am no pollyanna hippie, I do think intersubjectivity practices are key in ameliorating culture war tensions. There are so many good practices out there for this: Circling, Empathy Circles, Restorative Circles, Insight Dialogue, etc. I am optimistic that with the right conversational design, and with a memeable name, a practice could organically spread, nudging memetic tribes to become embodied tribes.
Maybe it will be the anti-debates, or maybe it will be something else. I sense the simpler the better. I really like Byron Katie’s “The Work.” It is such a cleanly elegant technique to help reframe one’s thoughts. Can something like this be developed but for conversational practices?
As long as The Stoa maintains its foundation of unknowingness, and does not collapse under memetic tribal pressure, I sense it will continue to be at the edge. It feels right being at the edge.
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