January 21, 2021

Retrieving

(Regressing)

“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” Friedrich Nietzsche

The iconic 1960’s cartoon sitcom “The Flintstones” derived much of its humor from the subtle dissonance between the Stone Age environmental context and artifacts, and the modern worldviews, values and lifestyles of Wilma and Fred Flintstone, their family and that of their friends, Barney and Betty Rubble. The shift of temporal context that made the surroundings strange also placed modern values and desires in the foreground for our consideration and amusement. Leiden University philosopher Jan Sleutels has developed a theory of evolving forms of mind. His paper The Flintstones Fallacy asserts that in contrast to current thinking in evolutionary psychology, cultural interiors, including the ways we make meaning, evolve apace with external structures (in a manner similar to sociologist Anthony Giddens’ Structuration Theory) meaning that the contemporary human brain is in an iterative reciprocal dialog with the evolving environment. Propositions that interiors of beings - encompassing sentience, epistemologies, values, and world views - also continuously evolve in tandem with the biosphere and the technosphere, assert that natural hierarchies do exist in an intelligent and holographic universe, and that we are active participants in an unfolding Mystery both purposive and paradoxically, utterly pointless. The Flintstones Fallacy invites us to better grok the evolution of forms of mind, and cautions us against projecting modern mind upon ancient mind, or vice versa. Meaning that ancient woman was not just differently socially conditioned and constructed, she also made sense of her world from different structures of mind and their evolutionarily correlated worldviews. <Selfing - Othering>

Evoluting and involuting, we are the physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere. Our contemporary societies have evolved through, and now rest upon, Archaic, Tribal, Traditional, Modern, and Postmodern values and achievements. From an evolutionary perspective, there is no going back, no returning to a premodern way of life. We can’t go back in any functionally or meaningfully inter-systemic way. Furthermore, we can go forward only by means of artifacture. Our collective designing for a thriving planetary future will depend on our ability to “become human” (Fry) by means of design. Dropping into this realization too often results in nihilism, doomsday predictions about our human condition and planetary future, romantic flights, escapist fantasies and apathy. Coming from an adult developmental perspective, psychospiritual philosopher Ken Wilber introduced the term “pre-trans fallacy” to describe the confusion that frequently arises when premodern, pre-rational, and pre-personal states are conflated with postmodern, trans-rational and trans-personal states. For example, lacking awareness of the sequential nature of developmental stages, we may valorize premodern peoples over our contemporaries in a neo-romantic fashion. The pre-trans fallacy in accountinf for the sequential and incremental nature of developmental stages revises many ur-mythologies. In Up From Eden, Wilbur revised the biblical story of The Fall as not a fall from grace but as a developmental step up toward differentiation between self and other.

According to Wilber, Neo-Romantics worship and grieve the loss of a projected image of a mythic “nature” constructed from the “Flatland” modern worldview - a world of exterior surfaces lacking interiorities and subjectivities. “If nature”is the ultimately Real, then culture must be the original Crime” (quoting Wilber in ?) the goal, then, must be to dismantle culture, in order to achieve a lost paradise involving unconscious unity with pristine nature. Cure repression with regression, as some Earth First!ers have done in their call for a return to the Pleistocene age. Such a yearning for primal unity with divine nature is tempting, but potentially disastrous both individually and culturally. Moreover, this regression will not halt ecological destruction. Only a major change in socioeconomic and political institutions will help halt ecological destruction, and such change requires the growth of “mutual understanding and mutual agreement based on a world centric moral perspective concerning the global commons.” Such an achievement involves interior growth and development. To escape ecological destruction, a genuinely post-human humanity must overcome its fear of authentic psychological development and interiority, since these alone can integrate what modernity has dissociated.” (Integral Ecology pp 32-33) <Ecologing - >

Many progressive postmodern theories of un-development and de-growth serve us well as correctives to modern narratives of unchecked progress. Yet they also rest consciously or unconsciously on thinking that conflates the premodern with the postmodern in an undifferentiated way. This does not in any way invalidate the sense of loss and grief that arises as a feature of the postmodern worldview. This is not to deny that progressive narratives enfolds the potential for catastrophic destruction. As the Flintstones fallacy illustrates, even if it were possible to somehow restore the infrastructures and lifestyles of the premodern world, the structures of consciousness and of society that correlate with those artifacts would fall short of affording the development of our late modern brains and nervous systems. Due to the co-structuring of the bio-, psycho-, social dimensions of reality, going backward would entail regression to a pre-rational forms of mind. This does not mean that humankind is doomed to an endlessly progressive post- historical, post-human forward march. But it does mean that post-postmodern design will skillfully discern the distinctions between regression and retrieval, and between retreat and revival. <Grieving - Stagnating>

Post-postmodern design activists can recognize that as we shift from transactional to transformational models we evolutionarily rest on the achievements of modernism. We can only build from where we are.   Recognizing that reality is multiple and not reducible to simplistic mythologies that no longer make sense to our trans-rational minds, we see that both poverty and affluence challenge the natural world. And that humans are a planetary crisis and also the authors of the future. Can seeing clearly these paradoxes be tempered with courage and compassion? Recognizing that Neo-romantic sustainability design thinking is part of the problem can we act from greater discernment? How might we steer creative efforts away from futile efforts to recover, return or revert to ways of life that from our present vantage point may appear to have been idyllic?  How can conscious designing channel a spirit of fairness and communitarianism into the gaps, weaving it into a better, less unfair, and more accessible present? <Embracing - Releasing>

As Nietzsche said, humans are a rope between the past and the future.  Be(com)ing our legacy to future generations is the great project of our age. An indispensable skill of the conscious designers is retrieval - knowing what to bring forward from the present and what to discard. Knowing what to retrieve from the past and what to leave in the past.  Being awake to possibility entails strategic decisions about materials, typologies, configurations and patterns that serve The Good,  and thus need to be retrieved, and brought forward into the present,  always in new ways, and always a weaving anew of the past into the context of the living present.  Fresh design configurations lend vitality to time-tested traditional rituals and practices of daily life. Consciously and skillfully retiring structures, programs and practices that do not serve the greater good is a vital component of conscious design strategy. <Absenting - Presencing>

Retrieval places complex demands on individual designers and design teams to weave the best of the past into our hopes for the future.  We now understand that the blank slate approach to design is a modern design fantasy that deprives us of the rich wisdom that patient bio-, psycho-, sociotechnical evolution has made possible. Although our retrospective idealism about communitarian relations in the past may sometimes fall victim to the pre-trans fallacy, there have been remarkable societal expansion of our collective circles of care and concern. For example, the more just and egalitarian postmodern cultures emerging all over the world are byproducts of modernity.  Although it’s fashionable at the present time to critique and  reject design configurations that embody the modern worldview,  more nuance and discernment are actually required here.  Modern structures, whether tangible or intangible, actually create the conditions whereby postmodernity may flower and flourish.  While postmodernity is a vitally important critical response to the unintended consequences of modernity,   postmodernity also derives its own raison d’être from modernity.  Modernity is not a cancer to be allopathically eradicated from the body.  The dynamic interplay between modernity and postmodernity is the raw material of design in the social organism. <Dwelling - >

The design professions have been instrumental in the evolution of technology and industrial production. The Luddite Rebellion by British textile workers, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the simultaneous emergence of Romantic leaders like William Morris and John Ruskin constituted an early reaction to the unintended consequences of modern industrialization, asymmetrical population growth, pollution, urban poverty and alienation. William Morris was an early proponent of craft production (proto-industrial design) as a palliative to industrialization (Kemp). Morris, having witnessed the growing ennui of his times and sensing a flattening of the depth and values concomitant with industrial rationalization, committed the” pre-trans error” (Wilber) in assuming that the only possible corrective was a return to proto-industrial handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Ironically, with time and perhaps due to this reactive overshoot, Morris influenced a school of thought that wedded designers to service of the luxury markets. Like turbine engines in the Egyptian style during the early Industrial Revolution when classical poetics snuck into the rational logics of industrialization, Neo-classical early industrial design viewed industrialization as vulgar and applied a stylistic veneer reflecting the vogue of the times for classical Egyptian forms. This tension around how Modernity manifests progress in the built realm continues the Romantic/Progressive dialectic through present times.

Retrieving enacts practical wisdom and prudence. As a conscious practice, retrieving is design foresight whose beneficiaries are present and future generations. The designed world is an archive of evolved wisdom and regrettable folly. Diverse practices of dwelling are living systems holding the potential for innovations retrieved from situated praxis and coupled with visionary futuring, remembering, reminding and commemoration — primordial functions of the built environment. Conscious designing retrieves ways of being in relation to what had been possible to make when we still had a future (or before the end of the future).

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