Seeing ourselves as we are

Another rainy day, perhaps the last before the summer high pressure system establishes itself in the Gulf of Alaska. Despite the call for showers for the rest of the day, a thin line of cloud edge appears this morning out over the Strait and a robin is singing plaintively in the tree tops.  It's that moment when it isn't clear if it is still rain or if the sounds coming from the trees are the drippings of the canopy. For the forest floor, it doesn't matter.

This morning I have been reading the latest issue of the London Review of Books featuring articles on Einstein, the deployment of Panantir across the British public service, and a review of two books on medieval mental and physical health. One, Self-help from the Middle Ages: A journey into the medieval mind by Peter Jones starts by reflecting on the author's own "acedia." I like that term better than "sloth," the deadly sin that it is describing. Sloth implies a kind of contemptuous avoidance of things, but acedia is a state of being that is a kind of dull edged torpor, purposeless and sinking. As I wrote before about this, the  state might actually be the moment before one recognizes that one is in acedia because once some sense is made of the situation, something happens. One moves from this torpor to aporia, where one is at a loss of what to do, but nevertheless spurred on by a question of what one MIGHT do, and that is the way out.  The antidote to acedia is inquiry? Curiosity?

"It had been a long time since anyone could make sense of anything" is a line quoted in a review of a new novel by M. John Harrison called The End of Everything and somehow that captures for me the larger scale cultural acedia that seems to be consuming the world I live in. That draws us to another state of misguided apprehension that Jones talks about when reflecting on Narcissus.  His sin, as the reviewer Barbra Newman says, was not that he fell in love with his own reflection "but mistook that reflection for another. The essence of pride beneath all the bluster and bravado, is 'failing to see yourself for who you really are.' Humility is honest self-knowledge; prides the lack of it."

I do think that we are living in a time when the world carries on in ignorance of what is happening within and outside of our local sphere of awareness.  The practice of making sense of the world together is drifting into a kind of acedia perhaps driven by the sense that "things" are too overwhelming. It used to be that I found myself among folks who were not afraid to do small things, because truly small things have the possibility to catalyze big changes. But the trick is that you have to do MANY small things because most of them won't work. The cost of things not working and the urgency of making sure that big bets do feels pervasive this morning. 

The concentration of wealth and power, including the power to make sense of the world seems to be overwhelming. Even if it is accepted as true that distributed knowledge and initiative and agency is out here to be activated, getting started on that seems to be one more thing that busy people don't want to do.  

I am working with a client right now who's organization is in a deep transition, whose culture has experienced a massive change since the pandemic began and who still feels the need to try to recover what has been lost, despite the fact that it is done. A form of organizational narcissism. In a conversation with one of the group's leaders, we even used the word "acedia" to describe the current state.  In proposing a course of action, we talked about spending a day together to make sense of where the organization is at and what might be the way forward. There are conversations to have, rituals to invoke, thresholds to cross. There is the straight reckoning of confronting self-knowledge rather than constructing a picture of the face that the organization would prefer itself to have. There is beautiful and important work to do, and a longing in the organization to do.

And I notice that the idea of spending a day together seems like too much.  So the proposal currently in the field is a half day, because it would enable more people to participate. 

I am hard at work watching the conversation unfold.  Of course anything is possible, and a way forward proposed and owned by the group itself is what we are after. This morning's readings have given me my own thoughts to set aside.