THIS PIECE IS THE FIRST OF A SET OF ESSAYS we’re publishing as part of the COHERE+ project, exploring tools, methods, and ideas within the field of paradigmatic social change. It has its origins in a seven-part series that Jonathan Rowson wrote in 2022 in which he offered ‘some shared premises for an incipient field’, and provided his perspective on Emerge’s ‘philosophical, historical and strategic context’.

This new essay below has been brought into being through a form of bricolage rather than traditional editing, as a means of making sense of how these ideas pertain to the inquiry motivating COHERE+, and to offer readers another way into understanding the field of social change.

- Leigh Biddlecome, editor

In the late 2010s, we noticed that across Northern Europe many people working in a diverse range of fields – in media, education, enterprise, technology, arts and politics – shared an emerging sensibility that went beyond these particular fields and highlighted connections between them.

The sensibility has historical, philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, political and spiritual aspects. It’s about sensing, as my colleague Ivo Mensch puts it, that collectively we are living a life that no longer exists. The world of the Bretton Woods settlement, the UN Declaration of Human Rights and our framework of nation states, the rule of law and purportedly reliable market mechanisms appear to be unable to adapt – at a fundamental level of design, values, coordination and mandate – to the new internet-mediated information system it has created, the ecological strain it has generated, and the levels of inequality and concentration of financial power it has permitted.

We are therefore all caught up in a gradual but quickening transition into a different kind of world that is ominous in many ways – ecological collapse and fascism loom large – but it is still fundamentally up for grabs. We should expect the unexpected, and the unrecognisable, and the unfathomable, without assuming it is all bad, and doing what we can to ensure it isn’t. We decided to try to give this kind of sensibility a socio-digital home, and the main point of the Emerge project since its inception in 2018 has been to help a nascent field of inquiry and practice to find itself, know itself and fulfil its potential.

Different parts of the network are in different stages of that process. In this essay, I offer some background reading to help the network know itself better, by sharing my sense of the philosophical basis of the underlying affinities that connect its different elements. Speaking for Emerge in particular, we face a social and strategic challenge to cooperate in creating the intellectual, imaginative and institutional capacity to become better known and valued by the world we profess to serve. More broadly, we also see these connecting affinities as a means of orienting the broader field of social change in Europe and beyond. 

                  

A few words about Emerge for the uninitiated

The Emerge project was initiated in 2018 by The Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm, the Co-Creation Loft in Berlin and Perspectiva in London. Emerge is a word (image and brand), a website (www.whatisemering.com), a network (by loose affiliations and on Mighty Networks), and a series of gatherings (Berlin in 2018 and 2021, Kyiv in 2019, Austin in 2022, and several local smaller ones).

Emerge has European origins and you can think of me as its Scottish uncle. I’m a philosopher, chess grandmaster and Director of Perspectiva – an urgent one-hundred-year project designed to understand the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice, and one of Emerge’s founding organisations. While my colleague Tomas Bjorkman is the source energy of Emerge, for past several years I’ve had overall strategic and operational responsibility for the project. I’m an adoptive parent who cares about the baby and I have skin in the game, so I can speak for Emerge. However, the coming essay is best read as my personal view and not as canonical, definitive or restrictive.

Emergence, contingency and interdependence

We are inspired by the way the meaning of emergence highlights the possibility of a different intentional stance towards the world; one that is grounded in receptivity, intuition and subtlety rather than ideology, reason and force. We (and yes, it might be an impossible we) are informed by the scale of the meta-crisis and we are not politically naïve. Some call it a spiritual perspective in the sense that it’s less about imposing our wills than listening deeply to what we appear to be called upon to be and do. 

The challenge for each of us is to accept the reality of our contingency and interdependence, while also taking responsibility for our uniqueness and autonomy. All over the world, networks and organisations are rising up to explore uncharted intellectual, spiritual or cultural terrain that invites ways of being, thinking, and doing and building new forms of institutional praxis and political capital around them. Such initiatives are at the heart of our Emerge network.                                                   

Emerge’s animating question – what is emerging? – orients our attention and will, because what is emerging is both good and bad, probabilistic, and we are caught up in it and to an extent responsible for it. Desirable forms of collective life might well emerge from the sum of ideas and practices that are already in play, but they may need help to find each other. More to the point, that appreciation and cross-pollination is precisely the kind of vitality that is obscured by a top-down rational diagnosis that re-presents the present as if it was a puzzle to be solved rather than a reality to be lived. We are generally advised to seek the signal in the noise, and that makes us feel clever, but I agree with Bonnitta Roy that the noise matters too, because that is where we can discern the promise of the future.

So here are some feelings I have noticed recently amidst the noise, glimpses of events that my intuition tells me are worth attending to as indicative of what is emerging. I felt moved by the humour of the Ukrainian social media campaign that raised millions to send Putin to planet Jupiter – because it was not just funny but also effective, showed mastery of the social media form, and felt post-tragic and exquisitely human. If humans have a future, we need humour to get us there. I feel reassured by Audrey Tang’s leadership on digital democracy in Taiwan because I know ‘Tech’ does not have to be defined by sociopathic libertarian billionaires, but it’s good to be reminded. I feel admiration for Joe Brewer walking-the-talk of Bioregional community regeneration in Barichara in Columbia where he’s attempting to bring a river back to life. I feel curiosity towards the self-organising female leadership and political innovation that is well established in Rojava, Kurdistan, because there’s lots of chatter about why we need ‘the feminine’ and here’s an example that does not collapse in cliché, if only because it’s happening in a militarised zone. I felt surprised that the oil state of Oman, no less, is investing in a massive hydrogen transition because they didn’t have to. I felt inspiration watching Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, speaking with authority, gravitas and passion at COP26, imploring delegates to “try, try harder” as if she was momentarily leader of the world. 

I share these impressions from mainstream news stories because Emerge exists partly to find agile network responses to developments like these. We are – or at least could be – the field that has what it takes to perceive the connections between perspectives that offer hope and renewal; and we could be the field that accelerates how related forms of social, spiritual and political practice can be brought into being. However, those connections need some collective intentionality to tease out, and institutional tenacity to maintain, which is why I think supporting the creation of this field is so important.     

                                                    

Look at what connects and separates people, counsels the I Ching. People in the Emerge network are separated by politics, temperament, philosophy, age, values, priorities, luck, means, profile, and much more, and it is a challenge to articulate what connects us. In Dispatches from a Time between Worlds I suggest we share a perception of context that is broadly metamodern in nature, though that terminology is optional.

From the attentional commons to ayahuasca, from Bildung to bioregionalism, from citizen’s assemblies to cosmo-localism, from dialogos to DAOs, from electrification to emergence (and I could go on) – we are witnesses and participants in putative wellsprings of renewal. Whether you seek to win at GameB, charm the technocrats with your Inner Development Goals, bamboozle robots with neo-romantic longing, charm with your beguiling talk of temporics and imaginal causality, avert existential risk with your non-rivalrous dynamics, redesign the economy with a peer-to-peer commons, schmooze with hyperobjects, be ironically sincere with your serious play, get high on sensemaking, die into a dark renaissance, or tweet from your farm like a doomer optimist – we all share a fundamental sense of the co-arising of endings and beginnings. 

And what we seem to share is many flavours of the same conviction. We know we need to respond to the challenges of our times from a broadly post-conventional perspective, with an appetite for philosophical, social and spiritual innovation that is commensurate with the challenges of our times. But many of us are sensing that it’s long past time to get real in a literal and figurative sense. We live in a world of power, money, politics and violence, and the clock is ticking. The playful allusions above speak to an incipient network that is coming out of its honeymoon period, but has yet to fight the good fight together, yet to know itself well enough to hear its own voice, feel its tempo, establish its own kind of power. Yet what kind of power do we have and what kind should we seek? 

Asking ‘what is emerging?’ is a good start, but it risks keeping us trapped in the social reverie of projective identification, in which people help each other to feel good about their work, while the outside world remains untouched. The biologist Ilya Prigogine indicates that this feeling can arise when there is too much connectivity and not enough discerning separation, which tends to lead to conformity rather than originality in gatherings, but there is also something more like the narcissism of small differences at play when it comes to trying to work together, leading to unproductive rivalries. This is part of the deeper challenge of reckoning with our ‘impossible we’ that Emerge seeks to encourage.

                                       

The point of Emerge as I see it is that it is a contribution to field creation. Our collective intention should be to create a field worthy of the challenges of our times. One that knows its own character and potential so that it can also become better known to the world beyond it. 

Mapping this emerging field was already underway through several initiatives, and was part of the initial phase of work of COHERE+. There is now a time-sensitive challenge for the latent capacity and insight we have available in our network to become known, sought out, and trusted by the world beyond it. 

Unlike networks known only to themselves, fields have a more tangible ontology and status by virtue of being socially known and nameable to others outside the field. Fields like ‘tech’, ‘politics’, ‘education’ are too numerous to list; they are fuzzy-edged, entwined and cross-pollinating, but nonetheless they organise the social world in people’s minds and have real world effects.

The perception of fields matters to media old and new because they need to be able to contextualise and organise their stories. Fields also matter to funders big and small, because they help to make sense of impact and make it easier for investors and philanthropists to collaborate through their support for a field (and not just an individual or organisation). There is a growing ‘strong field methodology’ in fundraising highlighted, for instance, by The Bridgespan group. Fields are generally characterised by shared goals, but since goals evolve and are not always straightforward to specify, there are also matters of shared identity, of standards of practice, of a knowledge base, of leadership and grassroots activity, and of support funding and supporting policy.

I view these conceptual parameters as a helpful start, but the field that Emerge is part of is different and we’ll need to create our own. We comprise people moving beyond their fields, our sense of being ‘between worlds’ is fundamental, and that means identities might be relatively fluid and plural, that standards of practice might be both conventional and experimental, that our knowledge base might be diffuse and shifting fast, that we have many forms of leadership but perhaps not yet any ‘grassroots’ as such; and it is not clear yet exactly how we connect with funding and policy. We might say that means we are not a field, but I think it means the field needs creating.