Jain Mandala with Varddhamana in the center. Indian, Jain, 16th century via.
This last week I have been in Cebu, Philippines for a conference called Making Futures. I was invited to be one of the speakers and I was talking about what I guess could be termed 21st century guilds and it has been a very wonderful experience, the feedback was great and there have been some really interesting speakers and keynotes, including Cameron Tonkinwise who was unfortunately unable to make it due to COVID-19 related issues preventing students from travelling back to his university.
We are living in a very strange world at the moment. In the last two months we have had incredible (and incredibly depressing) fires in Australia, Brexit, America almost declaring war on Iran and now global panic as various countries struggle to deal with what could be a pandemic.
For the latter, I recommend this article on Stat News talking about the two most likely scenarios that could occur if we are unable to contain COVID-19 and it is a lot less apocalyptic than most people imagine it could be. Stat News in general is a great resource for non-anxiety inducing coverage of the virus spread so I recommend you use it if you are in any way worried about this strain of Coronavirus and its possible effects on you and your family and friends. There is need to be careful, but there is no need to panic. Yet.
You can check out some photos and videos from the conference on the Newtype Instagram Stories and I hope to do a dump about some insight I gained at the conference soon, but until then, let’s get on with issue 2.
A curious individual, with the right tools, methodology and diligence could dismantle the most complicated timepiece. The watch would stop working once it was dismantled, but once put back together, it would start working again.
In this process, our intrepid maker could understand the inner workings of the watch, understand what gears and bearings made what move and presumably, also be able to improve on or affect the way the watch (or future watches) operated in the future.
One of the lasting legacies of modernity is that we act as if, like a man made watch, the universe can be dismantled and approached piece by piece in order to see what was going on, the larger system being nothing but a function of the sum of its constituent parts.
Living, complex things are not the sum of their parts, they are the sum of their interactions within a given context. And that context, and the resulting parts, are constantly in flux. In other words, one can only truly understand a complex system by observing it in motion, but with understanding, does not necessarily come predictability and control. Complex systems have a creative agency that is not deterministic.
It is this random interplay that allows for new things to come about in the universe. For things that have never been seen, to breakthrough.
This ongoing unbundling of the world has certainly solved some mysteries for us, but the deeper we go, and the more we see, the more we realise that not only do most natural systems not work in isolation, but that the bottom continues on, deeper and darker beneath us. We need brighter senses, tools and approaches; we need to be able to look at wholes before we act.
The age of information needs to transition to an age of humility and wisdom. One not characterised by further atomisation, but by an appreciation of holistic systems, and a realisation that with all the power we have, we must tread ever more carefully through the world. We must become avatars of nurture, and leave our aspect of domination behind.
The Vocab
Wisdom Ecologies
We maintain embodied knowledge and the intelligence of place. We perform them repeatedly and appreciate the differences in each manifestation. This engenders creativity. - Newtype Sutra II
Derived from the more commonly heard terms information economy and information ecology, a wisdom ecology represents not only an approximation of the interactions and actors within a given system, but also how they come together to create insight for either the person looking at the ecology as a maintainer, engaging with a facet of it as a problem to be solved or idea to be generated, or as an actor within the system.
We are surrounded by wisdom ecologies - culture is one - but in the 21st century, the emphasis has not been on what exactly our culture is a vector for. Older societies around the world were more connected to this idea of wisdom as a goal to be strived for, but in the modern era, there has been a move away from wisdom as something that should be aimed for, or even achievable it seems. The goalpost seems to have shifted to one primarily interested in metrics - money, health, housing etc.
What matters in this day and age are the connected ideas of utility and the market, with the only knowledge looked for in a system being knowledge that can be exploited to provide tangible benefits, usually, to a market agent of some kind.
This reduction of our various and varied collective interactions into whether or not they serve some profit making agenda or increase our capacity for engaging with the world is unfortunate. Not because the search for Wisdom is inherently good, but because information is only really useful when one can act on it, and in the Capitalocene, only a few have the response-ability to do so.
The rest of us are just sources of information.
Wisdom on the other hand is a fractal concept. Able to inform day-to-day decision making, cultural mores, civilisation building and of course, worldbuilding. Having a telos can empower, whereas knowing that you just spent 11% more time staring at your device last week can only serve to let you know how much you may or may not be achieving your goals.
It doesn’t empower, unless one is already in a position to be empowered.
Another thing to remember about wisdom ecologies is that they are dynamic systems filled with multiple entities and agents interacting in different spheres. This makes them difficult to map as they shift states over time - some faster than others. One can get a sense of the lay of the land though, and this can provide some insight into how the flow of energy and value work within a given ecology, and also allow one to spot invasive, polluting or disruptive elements.
At Newtype, depicting a wisdom ecology is one of our core practices bringing art, cartography, divination, infographics and play together in order to create an object that is simultaneously descriptive and symbolic; literal, but remaining open to interpretation and synchronicity.
Newtype maps of wisdom ecologies are created to always remind the user that a map is not the territory it depicts and instead exists to act as a guide and to facilitate the creation of better maps, mapmaking being an eternally recurring activity since change is constant.
There is a humility and meekness we have to continue reminding ourselves to inhabit as practitioners, as tempting as it may be to believe that we have it all figured out, nature is so much older and mysterious than we might ever be able to understand. Thinking about our cultural environments as wisdom ecologies can urge us to seek out purpose and insights from the interactions between us and the wider nature around us, without assuming privileged knowledge or demanding for something different.
Wisdom ecologies therefore require insight in order to navigate properly. We are in this sense retrieving the ancient role of oracles or diviners in society. None of them could have claimed perfect knowledge of anything, acknowledging as it were their dependence on a mystery that was too big for any one person or society to fully understand.
Context
A society’s craft knowledge is a wisdom ecology.
The religious rituals around marriage are definitely part of the wisdom ecology of a group of people and hint at a larger history around gender relations and environmental conditions.
We can map the wisdom ecology of building in the tropics by examining the approaches to housing construction that the local people had here.
Notes
Wisdom ecology is always about context and will change from place to place. Just because two different systems look the same, it doesn’t mean that the meaning behind their actions is the same.
It is always important to look deeper to get past superficial similarities. Human beings are fundamentally the same, but because we are complex creatures existing in varied, complex environments, we can manifest the same things for very different reasons. The same goes for wisdom ecologies of non-human entities. Two forests may look the same, but their actual states could be very different.
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Library Recommendations
Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra I - (a short analysis of some passages from the larger book)
Weird Studies Episode 59 - Green Mountains are Always Walking
Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene
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Newtype is based in Lagos, Nigeria but is available to work in wisdom ecologies all over the world. If any of this resonates with you, I am available for talks, workshops, consulting and organisational strategy.
The Newtype Vocab is work produced by Yegwa Ukpo under a CC-BY-SA license. So please use it however you like without asking permission: just give credit, and use the same license for derivative works.