Hello! It’s been a while.
The bulk of this was written on a train way back in mid-July, just before a hectic work week tipped me over the fatigue cliff and into a long covid relapse.
I’m still not quite out of that hole, but am getting there. And in lieu of a brand new issue, which felt a tad too taxing, I thought I’d revive this one. I was curious to see what had been on my mind at the time anyway.
I’ve tidied things up a bit and made some italicised additions, from present me. But have tried to leave it as it was, for the most part.
As ever, I hope this finds you well. Any feedback and comment is always much appreciated. I’ve been reading and watching and thoroughly enjoying the things people have sent me in follow-up so far! And please do share with anyone else you think might be interested. I should have another edition in your inboxes soon.
Back again… And leading with a reminder that July has been the hottest month on record, and likely the hottest month for at least 120,000 years. The Earth could soon be hotter than it has been for the entirety of human existence.
What does that mean? Severe, almost unimaginable heatwaves, as we’ve seen across the US. Flooding upending lives in Japan, India, China, Spain and beyond.
But every tenth of a degree that we can save in the warming process keeps areas habitable for 140 million people - with thanks to Bill McKibben for helping keep some of this in the forefront of my mind.
Then came September…far and away the most anomalously warm month on record. Followed by the warmest October ever recorded, making it almost certain that 2023 will match July in becoming the hottest year in the last 120,000. All while we fall behind in 41 out of 42 policy areas required to cut emissions.
Probably, the fact that this whole newsletter isn’t about climate change makes it look like another case in the spiralling ‘great derangement’. But to the extent that it’s about care and connection, acting and imagining collectively for a better future, I think (/hope) it’s all of a piece.
Optimising the brain
There was a lovely quote in a June issue of Sentiers, from a piece by Jennifer Brandel. Intended in part as a corrective to over-investment in new technologies, it was about optimising the brain:
“I’m arguing that we have a ~521 million year-old technology called the human brain, which needs equal amounts of investment so it can optimise for care, compassion, deep listening, and fully embodied information gathering, co-creation and dissemination. These are things we’re capable of, but still don’t have all of the psychological and interpersonal skills, let alone incentives and support, to do consistently.”
L M Sacasas’ Convivial Society newsletter had touched on similar themes a few days earlier. More specifically, he expressed concern that in our overemphasis on new technologies and the control they offer (through improved data-collection, planning, monitoring etc.), we may lose sight of human-afforded care. He discussed this in the context of parenting, where control, or surveillance, can be confused with care.
“Care implies a form of patient and deliberate seeing... So the outsourcing of our seeing, of our notice, of our attending vision [to digital technologies, for instance tracking our children’s movements using their mobile phones] already precludes the realisation of care.”
The two pieces stuck with me in part because I read them while in the midst of a series of workshops with headteachers from a London borough, helping them develop a vision for the future of education there in 2030. And those heads were talking about similar things.
They were concerned that many of their students were not exhibiting these ‘psychological and interpersonal skills’, and increasingly so. They worried about students who appeared to have few, if any, real life friends, and who struggled to communicate and empathise with other humans irl as a result. They wanted educational assessments to be more holistic, including an emphasis on the development of ‘soft skills’, or more broadly still, ‘life skills’.
This all raises the question of how to go about developing these skills and doing this brain optimising. There’s no shortage of contemporary writing and work that gets at versions of this, looking for ways to ‘re-connect’: to nature, to other people, to our own bodies, to Brandel’s ‘Actual Experience’. (Meditation! Movement! Psychedelics! In-person conversation!! As brain optimisation goes, it’s a far cry from the sudoku-heavy brain-training agenda of the ‘00s.) But these interventions still feel overly-targeted at the individual, at addressing symptoms, with a structural element missing.
The exhortation to reconnect and re-emphasise care implies that we were once connected and caring, and that something - presumably something external - has pulled us apart. Maybe it’s social media. Maybe it’s capitalism, or years of austerity. Maybe, probably, it’s many things. The education system might be able to provide some of the ‘incentives and support’ (Brandel) needed to re-establish this connection, but it doesn’t feel like a problem that schools can solve, and it’s hard to imagine how you could reasonably assess children on their individual ability to overcome it.
Besides, optimising the brain implies an effort to elevate it above a state of basic health, and in very many cases it’s not clear that this prior condition is met. Some of the teachers’ most profound concerns related, quite simply, to hardship: students struggling to see past the end of the day, whose mornings would be so traumatic that a ‘safe room’ was needed as a space for them to decompress when they arrived at school. With adequate funding, schools can help alleviate symptoms here, but the problems run much deeper. And as the UK continues to hobble through the most severe wave of public sector strikes in years, it feels as though we’re a long way from getting a handle on them.
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Asides I:
My colleague Andrew Curry flagged a recent study in his own newsletter which posits that a decline ‘in children’s opportunities to engage in play and other activities without adult oversight’ is one of the main drivers of deteriorating mental health among young people (linking nicely to Sacasas’s fears about the conflation of surveillance and care in parenting - this piece suggests that surveillance should instead be seen as the opposite of care). The impact of social media on mental health is seen as negative, but ‘very small’ in comparison. Quoting the paper itself, these unsurveilled activities ‘may promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life’ (my emphasis - these mental characteristics seem increasingly vital, just as they are on the wane). On structural factors, Andrew points to the rise of the car: ‘traffic’ is one of parents’ two main concerns when it comes to letting their children go out and play (the other being ‘crime’).
Another take on this is that we need to change our societal narrative, moving from the prevailing “consumer story” - in which we are ‘independent, self-contained individuals,’ fending for ourselves on a quest for ultimate self-reliance, buying goods and services as we pursue our self-interest in competition with others as they pursue theirs - to the “citizen story” - which defines humans ‘by our fundamental interdependence, lives meaningless without community,’ and where ‘the strategy for navigating difficult times is to tap into the diverse ideas, energy and resources of everyone’. This argument is made by Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad in their new book Citizens, with the quotes from their BBC Future article on the subject (h/t Kai from Dense Discovery). Some re-narrativisation along these lines probably does need to underpin any structural changes, and it would have serious implications for an education system which quite obviously and often explicitly prepares people to play their role in the consumer story. Suspect I’ll return to this.
Dance as activism
I mentioned in the previous edition that I’d planned to write about dance. And I’m glad I waited, because things have deepened.
I was thinking a lot at that point about a quote from Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home (thanks for the book, Gus!), which I saw picked out in Elijah’s yellow squares: “The Dancefloor is a Technology of Togetherness”. The quote has been reinforced, melded into my mind, by a couple of recent experiences.
The first was in Brussels in May. The day before Horst festival, my friend Vas and I were wandering through the city and stumbled upon a dance performance in a public square. Over the course of the 10-15 minutes we stood there, the dance progressively involved more and more of the spectators - growing from two dancers to more like 30, i.e. everyone watching - in a variety of different styles and with an emphasis on fun (at one point everyone was split into two lines and told to run screaming at each other, just sliding past at the moment of almost-contact).
A few days later, towards the end of the festival, I recognised one of the dancers and said hi. She told us that they were an inclusive dance collective that went round the public spaces of Brussels, performing (with no money involved) for all and aiming to bring as many people as possible into the joy of the dance, from children to the elderly.
Over the course of three Mondays in June, I also did a series of beginner’s classes in contact improvisation (CI), encouraged by my housemate Sim, who has been going to classes for months and consistently returns home euphoric. It’s a pretty fascinating discipline, for (I think) a few main reasons:
There is no leader or follower. One teacher suggested thinking about it as a form in which everyone is a follower, ‘listening’ to their partner(s - it doesn’t have to be just 2 people, could be 10 all joined up) and trying to sense through a point of physical contact what their body/ies want to do. No one leads the dance in a direction, yet, somehow, movement happens, as if out of nothing.
Music is unimportant, at least relative to other dance styles. For most of the classes I’ve been to, there has been music, but it has been rhythmless. Evocative of a mood, rather than directing movement. The idea is to follow the rhythm of your body and the body of the person you are dancing with, primarily.
The dance happens most often in ‘jams’. These are spaces where people can move through the room, dancing with whoever they want (provided the intention is reciprocated), whenever they want, in any combination. You can leave a dance at any time, dance on your own for a bit, or just go and chill on the sidelines and watch, rest, drink some water.
Oh, and it also manages to not feel sexual. Which I think comes as a shock to most people I mention it to, given that you’re constantly in physical proximity and contact with other people’s bodies. You feel connected, like you’re having a conversation with them, rather than aroused.
There is a very obvious political slant to all this. Listening rather than following, finding ways of relating and co-creating that are not directed or sexual. A new initiative set up by Emilie Darlet and Rick Nodine, two prominent people on the London CI scene, makes this more explicit: Dancing New Ecologies (the video on that homepage is a good intro to CI in itself) describes itself as
“a dance activist network that aims to investigate how embodied collective practices may contribute to the reactivation of a politicised public space by envisioning, experimenting with and constructing alternatives to capitalism, through dance.”
“[We] invite participants to explore through Contact Improvisation new ways of encountering and relating, of supporting one another through deep listening in a playful and mindful co-creation.”
It’s easy to think that there are better or worse ways to effect change in the world, that this is somehow measurable (aka the Effective Altruism Trap). I feel re-energised every time I discover people exploring new avenues to help address some of our myriad collective challenges that I hadn’t even considered. And it’ll sound absurd to some, but it makes complete sense to me that having people dance more, together - young and old in the streets, listening to each other’s bodies doing CI, getting sweaty in a club - could be transformative. There was lots of anecdotal chatter after the Beyoncé concerts in London about audience members not dancing; maybe this isn’t just throw-away snarkiness and an actual problem (or a symptom of deeper problems) which is worth paying attention to.
Let the people do CI!
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Asides II:
I’m curious about how you might integrate movement and dance into more ‘formal’ contexts - for instance, futures workshops for organisations (asking for a friend 😁). You wake up/octopus (great find, Finn!) felt as though it used movement and space pretty effectively for helping you experience what it might be like to be a newly-born octopus. Could we also use movement and space to explore possible future states and scenarios, and the perspectives of a variety of people in those states/scenarios, in more ‘professional’ settings? Is there a way you could do this that wouldn’t immediately turn people off??!?
Naturally, I now want to start an inclusive dance collective in London. Anyone down?
Until we dance again,
Lewis
p.s. I’ve started a more rough and chaotic newsletter about music, the state it’s in, where it’s going. If that sounds like your bag, you can subscribe (or just read the first post) here.