Survival of The Most Loving
“Humanity will survive—and indeed thrive—only by embracing and cultivating the abilities needed for interdependence and unification, suggesting instead, as Bruce Lipton puts it, survival of the most loving.” — Dr. Marcy Axness
I believe that there’s a spiritual body emerging from the ecological crisis — out of necessity — because a spiritual perspective could serve as a framework to address it. It’s as if Mother Nature’s spirit, like that of a person going through a near death experience, is coming to haunt us, or better yet, carry us towards salvation.
In James Cameron’s Avatar, far from the dying image of Mother Nature many people have in their minds, she is very much alive, as the feminine deity Eywa, who animates Pandora and does nothing but maintain the balance of all life forms on the alien planet, representing a feminine care perspective.
Photo 1. The Na’vi performing a collective healing through Eywa, tree of life. Image/still from Avatar.
Beyond the “sky people”’s (humans) shameful pursuit of self-interest at Hell’s Gate is a breathtaking natural wonder, where each being living from energy that it “borrows” from others in due course “gives it back”. In this deeply interconnected world, a consumer is in no way different from a producer.
This is not a new concept in our world, but somehow we’ve separated ourselves more and more from each other. How could have we created a world in which our technology has become synonymous with consumption, development with exploitation?
Over the past month, I’ve been reading, writing and making things, asking myself, what might modern technology look like if it were instead developed through more “feminine”, “archaic” or “Eastern” spiritual sensibilities?
I then remembered a beautiful project I saw at the Istanbul Biennial last November. Ebru Kubrak’s Stitching Worlds comprises of objects like an embroidered computer which uses traditional textile techniques and a sound recorder made with yarn, a playful demonstration of how the complex technologies of today might be made from hand spinning.
Photo 2. The working embroidered computer by Ebru Kubrak. Photo from Dezeen.
Photo 3. The Yarn Recorder can play and record sounds. Photos from Dezeen.
The works each explore traditional textile techniques, such as knitting, weaving, crochet, embroidery, and how they can be adapted to produce electronic objects.
The exhibition posed the question: What if electronics emerged from more traditional textile production methods such as knitting, weaving, crochet, and embroidery? How would technology be different if craftspeople were the catalysts to the electronics industry, via textiles manufacturing?
I was particularly drawn to the idea that technology might be woven, as the act of weaving is metaphorically used to describe so many aspects of world making (e.g. ideas such as the “fabric of reality”). Even author Donna Haraway describes weaving, or “string figures” in her latest book Staying with the Trouble as a means for tentacular thinking. According to her, we are impoverished in our geometries for cognitive and analytical practice (e.g. linear thinking, conic Galilean science) and string figuring (I prefer to think of as weaving) can be used as not merely an illustration or figuring tool but as a material engagement for collaborative thinking practice.
In an interview with Dezeen, Ebru Kurbak and Irene Posch, who led the Stitching Worlds project said, "Through its mere existence, it evokes one of the many imaginable alternative histories of computing technology and stories of plausible alternatives to our present daily lives."
Funnily enough, I was listening to a podcast in which author Charles Eisenstein guested and mentions David Bohm’s book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, saying that it’s one of those books everyone loves to cite but never actually reads. Upon actually reading the first chapter, I quickly related to the way he described Western versus Eastern thinking. He writes,
To Western society, as it derives from the Greeks, measure, with all that this word implies, is the very essence of reality, or at least the key to this essence, in the East measure has now come to be regarded commonly as being in some way false and deceitful. In this view the entire structure and order of forms, proportions, and ‘ratios’ that present themselves to ordinary perception and reason are regarded as a sort of veil, covering the true reality, which cannot be perceived by the senses and of which nothing can be said or thought.
In the East the notion of measure has not played nearly so fundamental a role. Rather, in the prevailing philosophy in the Orient, the immeasurable (i.e. that which cannot be named, described, or understood through any form of reason) is regarded as the primary reality.
It is clear that the different ways the two societies have developed fit in with their different attitudes to measure. Thus, in the West, society has mainly emphasized the development of science and technology (dependent on measure) while in the East, the main emphasis has gone to religion and philosophy (which are directed ultimately toward the immeasurable).
Eisenstein goes on to describe that from a Western perspective, the ecological problem is the measure of too many carbon emissions while for the East its disconnectedness from place. According to Eisenstein, while too many greenhouse gases causing global warming is a scientific fact, it’s just a symptom of something else. The problem with modern thinking is that we’re always trying to find an enemy — something or someone to oppose — but it’s usually a distraction from what’s truly important. I wonder if the critical spirit in design helps with ecological thinking at all, or if an affirmative unitary spirit is what we need instead if we’re to achieve radical interdependence.
Over the past month, I’ve been looking into games, specifically the open-ended Minecraft. While, according to many players of the game, it stimulates creative thinking and imagination, games like Minecraft aren’t just a blank slate where players can create worlds. Players world-make within a certain framework and encoded game mechanics. As Minecraft rewards players for subverting the other inhabitants of the game world for their consumption, players participate in a larger media ecology that honors a neoliberal worldview.
I wondered, as social and environmental issues grow more dire, if it's possible to modify Minecraft's code, in what ways can we hack our real socio-economic systems and create pockets of alternative realities in which everyone can thrive?
I’m talking here, however, about a specific mode in the game that you can choose: Survival Mode. Although personally, I’ve been playing Minecraft on Creative mode, where you have an unlimited supply of building blocks, food and materials. I then began to contemplate whether Creative Mode is any better than Survival mode at all. Is it in fact more de-placing? Is playing on Creative mode nothing unlike the urban lifestyle wherein I need not worry about where a tomato comes from, how it’s made and what it takes to care for the plant that bears it? Is it merely another false illusion of unlimited resources?
Just this week I discovered that a Minecraft Earth is soon to be released in the market. I have mixed feelings about it as I haven’t fully resolved my inner conflict regarding Minecraft’s Survival versus Creative Mode. Suddenly, I don’t know where I stand. Is it good or bad? I caught myself stuck in the same dualistic thinking I’m writing to address. Maybe creating a spiritual kind of technology isn’t about how it’s made, but rather the stories it’s used to tell.
In response to this, I built a temple in Minecraft where I perform Reiki healing sessions in a private server. I’m using it to explore new ways we can care for each other, creating visceral connections across space and time.
Photo 4. Portal’s Temple. Photo from duality_.
There is a project called Crochet Coral Reef in which the artists, twins born near the great barrier reef in Australia, sought to crochet a coral reef as a model of hyperbolic space, but also as a form of meditation and a way of developing environmental awareness and conservation consciousness without the tourism. It is women’s fiber arts on the one hand, activism on the other and also intimacy with nature without proximity.
Photo 5. Crochet Coral Reef by Christine and Margaret Wertheim. Photo from Kickstarter.
In Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble, she mentions a video game called Never Alone, one among very few, that uses storytelling to put at the forefront the perspective of indigenous people. The world game involves the collaboration of indigenous people in charge of their own narratives. This one is based on a traditional Iñupiaq tale and it poses the question, “what good are old stories if they’re never told?”
Photos 6, 7 & 8. World game Never Alone.
When I think about this question, the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther comes to mind, where the audience is transported to an Afrofuturistic kingdom, tickled with ideas of what modern technology would be like if its development were instead led by the historically oppressed.
In relation to the question of what good old stories are if they’re not told, new Wakandan leaders are initiated through the spiritual realm, where wisdom and identity ties closely with ancestry. This placing of importance on spirituality and ancestral knowledge plays a large role in their system of world making.
Photo 9. Wakandan ancestral plane. Photo/still from Black Panther.
In his book Designs for the Pluriverse, one of the indigenous activists Arturo Escobar mentions says, “When we fail to have our own proposals we end up negotiating those of others. When this happens we are no longer ourselves: we are them; we become part of the system of global organized crime.”
Today, we take for granted that we consider only certain things to exist -- science dominates mainstream thought worlds while spirituality remains in the shadows. This affects us on all levels: social, cultural, political, economic and environmental.
According to author Federico Campagna, there’s no reason for one reality-system to dominate over the other, but one thing is certain: that reality affects how we do, think and imagine. He says, “If we wish to change our world, we have to change the idea of reality that underlies it.”
In his book Technic and Magic, Campagna suggests we look inward, that Magic needs no cultural propaganda because materiality need not be our reality. I think if this is the case, it loses its communal strength. Transition for Campagna means a personal shift towards a spiritual mindset, religious or otherwise.
Somehow, Campagna romanticizes the spirit; we might find solace in spirituality and religion, but how might improve our very real material conditions? In a way, this kind of spirituality is de-placing.
Where does religion fit into conviviality and the commons?
Escobar, on the other hand, explicitly detests organized religion as a destructive patriarchal system, saying only indigenous, place-based spirituality is the valid, world-making, futuring kind. He argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims, refiguring and decolonizing current design practices in favor of more collaborative and interdependent placed-based approaches. Apart from his descriptive statement about the need for designers who are “grumpy optimists”, I wish he had gone deeper into how spirituality might be activated as a force for world making.
Eisenstein, however, suggests we do both, as an internalized gift economy eventually manifests itself into social reality. Anyone who is not in the disposition to give cannot thrive in a Gift economy.
Whether personal spiritual transformation is an end in itself or something to be a catalyst for new design practices or an alternative economic system, it starts from within, and our ideal reality will not emerge if we don’t first put ourselves in the proper disposition to receive it.
In today’s Western patriarchal system, we are experiencing an atrophying of our natural intuition and compassion towards each other. Conversations turn into debates; we take for granted what is left unsaid.
What if the critical spirit we hold so dear in design is in fact holding us back from radical interdependence? Science and religion tells us that there is valid knowledge in both Eastern and Western thinking. What if a better world is one in which our common truths bind us together, rather than uniting in opposition to, say, carbon emissions.
Haraway argues that “staying with the trouble”, the title of her latest book, requires “making odd kin”, which means that we require each other in “unexpected collaboration and combinations. We can become with each other or not at all.
Eisenstein argues that sometimes it’s necessary to “live a lie to its fullest before we’re ready to take the next step into the truth.” Perhaps technology and money have developed into their present forms for a purpose. Instead of looking to admonish them wholesale, might we instead ask ourselves, how differently can we use them?
We already know what technology looks like under the reign of Western patriarchal thinking. Now, let’s imagine it’s alternative, or rather, its future, through the lens of the feminine care perspective and through the unitary spirit of radical interdependence. At the end of the day, as Donna Haraway writes in her book, “It matters what stories we tell. It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what worlds world worlds.”
References
Books
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1980.
Campagna, Federico. Technic and Magic. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
Eisenstein, Charles. Sacred Economics. Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books. 2018.
Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2018
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durnham, NC: Duke University Press. 2016.
Cultural References
Cameron, James, et al. Avatar. Beverly Hills, Calif: 20th Century Fox, 2010.
Coogler, Ryan, Joe R. Cole, Kevin Feige, Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Sterling K. Brown, Florence Kasumba, John Kani, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis, Ludwig Göransson, Kendrick Lamar, Rachel Morrison, Debbie Berman, Michael P. Shawver, Ruthe Carter, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby. Black Panther. , 2018.
Kubrak, Ebru. “Stitching Worlds”. 2014. https://www.dezeen.com/2019/01/02/ebru-kurbak-embroidered-computer-stitching-worlds-istanbul/
Upper One Games, E-Line Media. Never Alone. 2014.
Wertheim, Christine and Wertheim, Margaret. “Crochet Coral Reefs”. 1997. Institute for Figuring. https://crochetcoralreef.org/