Some context for this first post of 2023:

My daughter Nini is now about as old as I was when we started this, and her daughter Rey about as old as she was then. Both she and her little sister Adi have celebrated Holly Days for their whole lives. So now, as an old man in the dusk of my life, I find I am coming to this process with a longer view. Nini replied to a post I made reminiscing about my dad, Nesdon Sr. nee Ned, wishing she could have known him. In fact, having lost him when I was just a boy, I too wish I had gotten to know him better. I miss so many other folk with whom I shared so much since I lost him , who all have shuffled, more often stumbled, off this mortal coil. I miss them dearly, and pity them for the life they are missing, but most of all I mourn the loss of their unique perspectives and histories. This now feels like it is for Rey and Adi’s children who will never meet me, like I am crafting my own ghost to haunt them with a history of my unique perspective.

This intergenerational spiritual space is a bit of a prayer by me that they too will be drawn to the joy, excitement, and inescapable terror of an examined life, that through these words, preserved here (thank you Brewster!!) my progeny may be able to feel my love for them, hear my voice, and add their own unique perspective to the grand tale of we proud apes. 

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So, today, on the first day of Holly Days, I consider Unity.

At the outset of this project I ended my rant promoting a nature-centered spirituality saying:

“But today, whether on the Salisbury plain, in the deserts of Canaan or on the banks of the Indus, we can look directly into one another’s eyes; we can concretely witness the hopes and spirits of all our diverse kin. We should no longer abide the xenophobes who wish to divide us so they may commandeer our spirits.”

It was a recognition of how the then newly emerging digital network’s would be able to bring any and all of us face to face. I felt it would lead to increased empathy and therefore unity, but these fractured times suggest that I was extremely naive. Sadly this vastly expanded ability to virtually connect to one another has mostly resulted in too many of us just spitting in each other’s faces. Such lashing out is a common response to fear and anger, and I also didn’t foresee how much fear-and-anger stoking would be broadly exploited by attention-economy algorithms. Together these phenomena feel like they’ve led us to the brink of catastrophe.

Catastrophe, or at least crisis and destruction, is the key prediction for our current moment based on the Strauss-Howe’s generational theory. It suggests we are entering a period the authors describe as a disruptive “fourth turning” period, the result of a generation spawned in a time of unraveling and thereby primed for violent upheaval. They posit an 80-100 year cycle passing through four 20-25 year generational turnings.

Surprisingly, this also aligns with Chizhevsky’s heliobiology which posits a 22 year cycle of human excitability synced with sunspot cycles. Both theories are based on historical cultural upheavals, and while neither theory is well respected or supported, both are tantalizing, and both underline the obvious cyclicity of human history. Whether these hypotheses seek to explain the same real phenomena, which may have some other actual cause, they happen to be aligned in this moment, with both a solar maximum and generational transition approaching together soon. Both of these theories have described highly plausible mechanisms, and the thought that they are separate, valid, and overlapping effects kind of terrifies me. Whatever is coming for whatever reason, no doubt we are in the thick of it, with the fracture of our culture and politics deeper and more acute, with disunity that feels worse than at any time in my life. But how bad will it get? From climate tipping points, WW3, the end of democracy, another American civil war, to AI apocalypse, prophets of all stripes are cassandraing up a storm.

Homeostasis is almost the definition of living. Living things undoubtedly manage to maintain their internal and even external states within the bounds that they require to stay alive. The exact mechanisms by which these controls are managed are vague once we leave the realm of intracellular biochemistry, but Lovelock’s Daisyworld simulations make it clear there are possible ways for us to collectively manage our exterior world to maximize our safety. It may be a teleological illusion, but I’ve always held a certain faith that solutions will emerge as we humans collaborate to promote our own self interests. For all the catastrophes that have befallen our beleaguered biosphere, we have always seemed to dodge and weave and come out on top. The earth remains uniquely habitable by a vast array of beings, and we humans, for all our painful history and scary current events, demonstrably live in a golden age with danger, death, destruction, and misery at an all time low.

This has me believing, or at least hoping, that we may manage to weather this fourth turning (or whatever the fuck is emerging) without the extent of the bloody crises that have characterized the process in the past. I wonder if the digital availability of the horrors we can too easily witness, but which actually have little physical impact on our own distant lives, may traumatize us in the same way other fourth turnings have traumatized their inhabitants. I wonder if the heightened fear and anger we all experience in the face of virtual hatred, threats, and cruelty could be enough, even without a mountain of corpses, to serve as the crisis that resets the cycle and allows us to reach Howe’s first turning: the recovery high on the other side. 

The tragic outbursts of actual bloody violence in this period are certainly being felt more intensely in this hyper-connected environment than they may have been in the past when folks were not bombarded with these constant lurid updates. Despite the unquestionable evil of some of the events that led to the racial uprisings of 2020, they are actually fairly minor compared to the history of previous racial violence in America such as the Tulsa Race Massacre or the widespread and disgustingly popular history of lynching, particularly in the post-civil-war south. While the 1200 dead on October 7th, and the thousands more in retaliation since, are certainly a horror, they are nothing compared to the tens of millions lost in the last fourth turning. While virtual contact has not yet led to the empathy I had anticipated, and has instead seemed to heighten and magnify our conflicts, I’m wondering and hoping if it might possibly also lead to and magnify stronger push back — an intensified immune reaction if you will — stimulating homeostatic forces to rebalance a system out of equilibrium. 

There are some hopeful signs. There’s the story of Silverton, Colorado where demographic and our typical political divisions had led to extreme conflict, rife with death and bomb threats, leading to the community becoming ungovernable and threatening the small town’s very existence. But before any significant actual violence could erupt, Community Builders (the urban planning consultancy group that the Silverton Trustees had hired to help draft a master plan for the town well before the conflict had escalated) began to try to mediate between the factions. Using the simple and widely accepted process of a face-to-face search for common ground, the town’s temperature fell, and the opponents managed to bury the hatchet and move forward. Community Builders have facilitated similar processes in other communities, which it’s pretty clear could be successful in many others if given a chance. There are lots of other examples of deep political rifts being healed, certainly European unification and our closeness with both our former enemies Germany and Japan, as well as the ending of generational hostilities between Ireland and England, Greece and Turkey, and in South Africa, and the Balkans.

There’s certainly no consensus on how we might change the incentives baked into the online structure that has emerged, but I remain hopeful that we may find enough common ground to finally mandate changes in the design of the algorithms that are heightening division, reverse course and promote similar systems of reconciliation. Even less consensus on how the heal schisms between the left right, red blue, or hardest of all, crescent star and cross, but as hard as it may be to imagine, we have in fact crossed wider gulfs. I’m still hopeful that being able to see so easily across them will eventually help us find our common ground and enter a saeculum of recovery.

Happy Holly Days