The Methuselah papers – Elder regions & deep time, living economy & tools for conviviality

Goodbye universe, hello locations

Plurality & particularity, evolution & legacy

Above: The Dalit movement in post-revolutionary Nepal | The Buddha’s eyes in a stupa in Kathmandu

There’s a long-ish road ahead in this blog, so a bit of mapping is in order. A dear friend who read the opening paper was concerned: about repetition, about overwhelm for a reader; perhaps about claiming too much for an individual’s contribution; and certainly about a programmatic tendency. These are all good things to pay attention to, as a series of writings gets under way.

I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. So there’s a lot to rework, retrieve, re-weave, reassess, regenerate from (composting); and the landscape is large and complex. The traditions that I participate in and draw inspiration and insight from have been doing their stuff for a long time too. Thus the challenge of assessing what repetition is appropriate, and what extensions and interweavings are called for today, is pretty central. Thus something is in order here below, about evolution as an aim in The Methuselah papers. Reflection about quantity is called for too. In my adult activist lifetime I’ve published at least a million words, and the question of course must be asked: What, more! Why? Again, the question of evolution. But also the question of papanca. In Buddhist dhamma, #papanca is ‘mental proliferation’, propagating and clinging to ‘views’; papanca is a besetting problem of our present disrupted and disruptive times, something I need to pay a lot of attention to.

This stuff here – Evolving legacies

What do I mean by ‘this stuff’ that I’m continuing to do here? And what kinds of evolving legacy are at stake? I have three angles.

First, ‘the dance of knowing’ – As a researcher and writer and would-be ‘architect’ and dancer of as yet unhatched and lovely ways of doing stuff, I’m engaged in systematically reflecting on, and experimenting in, ways that we humans have of becoming skilful and capable, in knowing and valuing and communicating our understandings and capabilities, so that these might bear more fruit and be evolved further, in other times and places, by others for whom the skills and capabilities matter. I can roll all this up under the rubric of ‘the dance of knowing’ and the choreographing of the dances that we ceaselessly do, in the #cultural landscape, as organisers.

The dance of (radical, transformative) knowing is my (received and evolving) class legacy as a working class kid who went up the ladder of state funded public education in the baby-boomer cohort, and was dropped unawares into the professional-managerial class of post-Fordist capitalism #pmc. At different points in my life I’ve been an engineer, a designer-developer of cultural infrastructures and work practices, a developer of regional economic strategy, a business-school action-research academic, a coop member evolving the provision of digital infrastructure. That’s quite a bit of kamma to be worked off, in a lifetime? How to evolve and propagate tools for conviviality and vernacular capability, in the face of systematic production and distribution – by the PMC and by the institutions of post-Fordist capitalism – of ignorance, dependency and incapability?

#toolsForConviviality and capability in the dance of knowing are the defining focus of one of four zones of reach – #zone¿3 – in the #foprop weave, a pattern langiuage framework.

In this blog, I basically take up this dance of revolutionary knowing in the form of storytelling, with an explicit first-person voice. Thus, intentions, expectations, disciplines and variations of storytelling need to be fairly clear? Something below then, on this (actually, in another paper, on what it means to have a practice of writing ‘personally’: Radically re-ontologising).

Second, ‘economy’ – How we organise the material world As an organiser working in-and-against the professional-managerial class, the stuff I engage here means reflecting on and experimenting in the ways that we organise our material world(s), with intended and unintended consequences, foreseeable and unforeseeable outcomes: in wild ‘nature’, in everyday would-be domesticated living and, for the past thirty years, in the radically weird digital sphere too. These days, I roll all this up as 'economy’, meaning the totality of material means and practices of subsistence and wellbeing: the #material landscape of living. That’s my generational legacy, as someone who’s lived in an era in which ‘the economy’ has gone totally crazy in its global-colonial, extractive-accumulative, digitally-mediated rape of the planet and its peoples, and is now manifestly and literally setting the world on fire and jeopardising the prospects for decent living, of our own and other species.

The enormous and perplexing complexity of economy, and its pathologies, are the defining focus of #zone¿2 in the #foprop weave.

Third, ‘the aesthetic landscape’ – what are you folks up to here, on planet Earth? I'm an inveterate boundary-crosser and ‘undisciplined’ investigator (aka organic intellectual): an anthropologist alien who approaches life on Earth from Venus, and constantly must ask: ‘What (on Earth!) is it you folks do around here? And what on earth d’you think you’re up to?’ Thus the storytelling I do here involves gazing open-mouthed at the plurality of the stuff we hubristic, cocky, over-simplifying humans do, under a mind-boggling plurality of rationales and narratives, with utter dedication and investment, and touching faith that in some sense we know what we’re doing and that it will be worth having done it.

I roll this up under the banner of ‘the #aesthetic landscape’: our being drawn to and identifying with this or that, repelled by the other, affiliating (often tribally) with these, wishing (often on the grounds of impurity or toxicity) to delete those: fascinated by beauty, fatally tempted by ugliness. This is my outsider legacy as a person living a life on the cultural and aesthetic margins, fascinated and battered by forceful structures of feeling, utterly disaffiliating with the hegemonic forms and forces and formations (including some of the stereotypes of activism and, especially, slogan mentalities and essentialisms). An outsider whose brain and heart both hurt a lot, who is sure there’s no going back, returning to a womb or an innocent indigeneity or a pre-patriarchal matriarchy, with the modern(ist) genies safely stuffed back into traditional bottles. The only way I know is onward, into more and more complex and subtle forms of awareness and relationship and resistance and reparation: #pluriverse.

#structuresOfFeeling and the relations of aesthetic (re)production are the defining focus of #zone¿1 in the #foprop weave

A fourth: beyond knowable community In addition to these three zones of reach – from the intimate landscape of impulses ‘in-here’, to the cultural-historical landscape of activist formations and traditions, via the here-and-now of material subsistence and material ‘stuff’ – there’s a fourth, deeply intractable one: the landscape of what’s over the horizon (in either time or geography), quite beyond the scope of peer-to-peer relationship or current intelligence. I’ve learned to see this as the legacy of the commons: safeguarding for the grandchildren’s grandchildren at least as much scope for living well as we ourselves have. This calls for a quite distinct kind of focus and intelligence, in aesthetic, cultural and material planes. This is really tough stuff – as if the other three zones of reach were not!

More in due course, on these four zones of reach, and why this is a helpful framing for approaching our collective capability to make a living economy. For now, here are some pages on the conceptualisation of zones of reach.

Plurality and the solo writer – Beyond the fragments in just one lifetime, here

Of course, this is big. And there’s a problem here for the solo author. On one hand, commited to evolving plurality and local particularity of practice across regions (in time and in geography), and pluriversal vision and affiliation beyond the fragments of activist formations and subcultures. On the other hand, developing a narrative that offers conceptualisations and searches for language (‘pattern’ language) that might constitute common cultural and aesthetic ground for joined-up, mutualised action and systemic visioning: across biomes for example, and across the colonial north-south divide. With these commitments to plurality and scope, why in the end did I fall at this time in life into a blogging practice, rather than some collaborative programme of cross-community investigation and harvesting of communities’ insights?

Long story short. . .

Eight years ago, as the 70s’ 'radical science' generation began to do legacy work, with archives and reunions (I was aged 70, entering my eighth decade), I began to look for a way to initiate 'a college’. A college would be a distributed collective, cultivating a cultural commons of activist insight and capability, spanning my own baby-boomer generation, its antecedents (specifically, Marxist, socialist, feminist and post-colonial) and the generation currently 'coming on shift’ and evolving its own responses. The intention of a college would be deepening activist capability in safeguarding the living and the liberty of the grandchildren's grandchildren, without unnecessary re-inventing of the wheel and cultural-practical ‘churn’, in a time of profound crisis and with well grounded and attentive historical and regional-cultural localism.

This college ambition quickly became a community of 'Robinistas': comrades and colleagues who wished to cultivate and evolve the humane ethos of radical economist and cooperator, Robin Murray, ex-Chief Economist of the Greater London Council and its regional economy in the 80s, a development economist and a pioneer of both waste economics and fairtrade. Robin died in 2017 and the Robinistas were convened as a monthly discussion-and-reading group, which eventually started to co-author a book. By that time, prompted by Robin's Danger and opportunity – Crisis and the new social economy”) (2009)”), I'd adopted the focus of making a living economy under a radically re-founded ontology of what 'economy' amounts to, and what activist 'making' (and the making of activist making, aka formación) amount to, in our present times. Along with this, as a way of doing knowing (the dance of knowing, above), I’d adopted a commitment to develop #patternLanguage in the manner wonderfully piloted in the field of urban form in the 70s by Chris Alexander.

Suddenly in 2020 the covid-19 lockdown jumped me into a cross-regional, free software-based, digital infrastructure coop, meet.coop (The Online Meeting Cooperative), and with digital meeting space to play with, I co-convened a monthly mutual learning forum in our membership community: commons.hour. This was aimed at assembling a handbook of capability in doing this new, relatively undeveloped kind of cooperative infrastructure(ing) practice in the digital and cultural commons. Looking then to fully and equitably engage the diversity of our membership community, as civil-society and coop-sector activists, led me to think about practices of #designJustice in digital infrastructure(ing), and about the diversity of our movements in global civil society,. My way of doing this turned out to be #sevenRs of mutual-sector commitment. Three years later, on leaving active operational contribution in the coop (as a second generation of operational actors stepped in), I sought to fund a pattern language project for making a living economy, modelled on commons.hour practice, adopting the handbook principle and mobilising the Seven Rs as a map of scope.

OK, here eventually comes the bottom line: through all of this pattern-oriented cultural-commons organising work over a span of six or seven years, aiming to cultivate #toolsForConviviality, it became inescapably obvious just how heavily over-committed all we activists were (and are), and how hard it is to crystallise yet another formation of organic intellectual commitment and cultural or economic cooperation. So in spring 2024 I decided to stop wearing myself out in organiser mode (in my 78th year I have a limited number years remaining and, as it happens, also a new life partner and expanded grown-up family); and to write personally.

What does it mean to ‘write personally’? On one hand, it means writing in the first person and narratively (and thus journal(ing)): that’s this blog, Methuselah papers. On the other hand, it means not dumping the pattern language(ing) commitment (I'm certain that it’s a powerful and actionable form of evolving description and communication) and the systematic re-ontologising commitment ('practice of theory-of-practice': language(ing) of struggle). Rather, it means holding them as linked background to the blogging, and continuing to develop them where headspace and family life allow.

This combination of documentary practices within the dance of knowing, grounded in the SevenRs diversity of commitments and cultural formations, seems sufficient to me. On one hand, it an be sufficient counter-framing, to resist and undermine the hegemonic framing of mansplaining-colonialist universalism-modernism. On the other hand it’s sufficient for staying absolutely grounded in and facilitating particularity; and thus, in an evolving and collectively stewarded practice, to underpin a ‘college of conviviality’. Particularity and presentations of particularity are things much appreciated by Robinistas, for example, in Robin's practice of theoretically-underpinned, regional and inter-regional, radical economy-making.

With this evolving context, and this perspective on writing, I can then offer a gloss of the intentions of the Methuselah blog, thus: the intention of The Methuselah papers is . . .

I’ll walk through these intentions in another paper Radically re-ontologising. There I’ll explore how writing, and writing ‘personally’ in a blog, might be constituted as a practice under the intentions above.

Taking stock – Claiming too much, repetition, overwhelm

It will take more than this present paper – indeed the entire Methuselah project – to respond properly to the concerns of my dear friend, that I started from: claiming too much, repetition, overwhelm. But let’s take stock here, before closing out this early paper in the series.

Most basic: what about claiming too much for the contribution that a single writer can make? This is not just a matter of limited insight and unavoidable narrowness;. As far as that goes, I’ve been doing this stuff, carefully and with attention, for 50 years, so the claim I might make is as good as any other person, within the space of a single lifetime.

It’s also a matter of the ‘authority’ of the writer? However, that’s not the kind of claim I would want to make. The claim I mean to make is from having walked a path, reflectively, cultivating a capacity for #travelogue, attentive to what is present ‘here’, and where ‘here’ is, in relation to many other places (formations, regions, regimes of power and marginality, past present and future locations), directly known and indirectly known and compassionately imagined, in which other actors live their own single lives. It’s based on a capability to tell a story ‘here’, in explicit and implicit relation to other stories, in other ‘heres’. There is no attempt at an ‘authoritative’ Voice From Nowhere. There is a voice in relationship, within an acknowledged, carefully attended-to, ongoing, evolving pluriverse of activist lives, in distinct regions of time and geography. There is a commitment and a skill in rigour, in conceptualisation and narrative, and in regard to both what we do in language and what we do ‘in fact’, in the round, in social practice.

These are my safeguards with regard to claiming too much.

What about repetition? Across the series of papers there certainly will be repetition, fully intended. The project is, in one fundamental aspect, a project of pattern language(ing) and systematic conceptual architecting (language(ing) of struggle; aka 'theory'). The basic vocabulary of ontology and pattern is meant to be repeated. I’m seeking to initiate a rich collection of pattern-stories about ‘chunks of practice’ that activists successfully elaborate in their many locations. Thus there is a programmatic tendency, an intention to do things in a way that in some sense is a practice of cumulative capability, and even perhaps a kind of design practice.

This kind of reflection and discipline is not everybody’s cup of tea. Some people are all action and spontaneity and intuition and ‘now’ impulse.But many others – including some of those regarded as most wise: the Buddha is my major instance here – promote the skills of systematic and experimental-experiential mindful, in-the-body perception of practice, and a refined language of practice, and an infrastructure of wisely laid-down provisions for ongoing practice: a continuing community of knowing-and-doing (aka sangha) as means to liberation. I'm one of that kind. And practices of other kinds – spontaneist, essentialist, charismatic actor-led, spoken-in-tongues, enraptured, intoxicated – certainly then fall within the scope of what a pattern language can recognise and reckon with: even when these modes are antithetical! In part, this is what the#sevenRs are about. It takes all sorts. We activists have all sorts of ways of doing transformation. Again, what is attempted here is absolutely, committedly, rigorously relational. There is no absolutism or supremacy.

These are my intentions with regard to repetition.

Finally, what about overwhelm: too many words? One version of this difficulty is literal: pages and pages, paragraphs and paragraphs, constructs and constructs. I can only plead complexity and particularity: assembling the polyvocal voice from ‘here’. The world is complex, and attempts to deal with it as if it were simple inevitably produce a fucking mess (regard this as a re-statement Ross-Ashby’s ‘law’ of requisite variety in cybernetics!). This kind of absurd radical reduction, is precisely what extractive-colonial, individualist-rationalist, techno-capitalism has done for example, and we’re suffering the deepening consequences of this as the material world bites forcefully back, from its wilfully obscured and ignored deep ecologically complex suchness.

There’s another angle. Being committed to writing from ‘here’ in relation to other ‘heres’ inevitably calls for a lot of continuous contexting; also, a degree of ‘poetic’ diffuseness, allusion and invocation. Language of struggle can’t be plain-and-simple. Slogans and linguistic triggers will not do the job. Neither will simple intuition or simple solidarity or simple empathy. Being in many relationships, and committed to doing serious work in language, is going to generate quite a lot of words, often in unfamiliar or complex forms. Yes, it can feel overwhelming.

This is another version of the ‘overwhelm’ issue: Buddhism calls it papanca, mental proliferation. We humans have a deep-laid tendency to elaborate verbally, compulsively storytelling, without too much regard for how well founded, or how complete and partial, or how beneficial, the story might be. We are story addicts, our actions tend to be story-powered; and rigour and foundation are only the concern of some stories, some of the time.

These are concerns of the dance of knowing in the #cultural landscape. They also are the concerns of skill in the #material landscape of economy, and concerns of skill in the #aesthetic landscape of #structuresOfFeeling. These latter challenges (in the field of the heart-mind, and of ‘self’) were pioneered by the Buddha for example, through the judicious and skilful suspension of storytelling, through non-dual perception and through dispassionate mobilisation of clarified città – the hungry, hard-to-satisfy, often unsettled heart-mind – in intimate and subtle partnership with the intellectual-conceptualising-narrative mind.

So as regards mental proliferation on the page: if a writer produces a lot of words, the least they can try to do is make them properly rigorous – in whatever local mode is appropriate, across whatever necessary scope in the dance of knowing: inter alia, as poetry, tutorial guidance, methodology, dramatic scenario, relational-situational pattern, historical narrative, journalism, limited scripts for technical apparatus or algorithmic process, abstracted view-from-nowhere ‘scientific’ description, evocations of traditions and myths, invocations of situational texture, dhamma teaching-story; etc etc. Even, maybe, sometimes, aiming to make them effective as triggers: invitations to the gut!

These, then, are my responses to the challenges of overwhelm and pananca.

OK, this will do for now. There will be more related stuff, on writing ‘personally’, with an intention of revolution, in Radically re-ontologising.

Thanks for reading. Shall we talk? Contact channels are in the footer below.

The Methuselah papers

Elder regions, deep time, living economy – https://write.as/papers/
This is mike hales blogging on pattern language(ing) and language(ing) of struggle as everyday activist practices in making a living economy.

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This blog is linked with some sister sites:
– The foprop frame – Pattern language of making a living economy
– A book of skill – The living and storying of an activist life
– Methuselah papers – Mirror site for the blog, in the fediverse

Book downloads are here including Living thinkwork (1980) and Location - Explorations of power(s) and landscapes of design (2016).