Sowing the Seeds of a New Civilization
Overview
You are warmly invited to participate in an invitation-only Emerge gathering in Austin, Texas, during the weekend 24th to 26th of June 2022. Emerge is a social answer to the personal question: what can I do?
The purpose of the convening is to bring together leading elements of an emerging network who share a perception of context that is sometimes called the meta-crisis, and who are working on it in some way.
The aim is to strengthen a growing number of valuable online relationships by creating shared experience in an offline arena, and also to create a context and agenda so that people doing mutually inspiring work can ‘find the others’.
Given the caliber of the prospective participants, the method will be emergent; a lightly facilitated program of talks, conversations and exercises designed to be prefigurative of the kinds of listening, insight and resolve the moment calls for.
The outcome we hope for is an increase in discernment and morale arising from new awareness of the character and potential of our collective agency, and an invigorated capacity to act with and through it.
The rationale should go without saying, but it is often forgotten. By meeting in person new qualities of heart and mind are generated, new social bonds are formed, and these are all active ingredients that have real effects in the world.
The Calling
No human society, however wise, subtle, prudent and cautious you may consider it to be has had to grapple with the reactions of the earth system to the actions of 8 or 9 billion humans…We understand nothing about the vacuity of contemporary politics if we do not appreciate the stunning extent to which the situation is unprecedented.
– Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2017)
An invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions...
- Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (2021)
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead, recipient of the Planetary Citizen of the Year Award in 1978.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote: ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’ We believe the ‘what am I to do?’ question arises in the context of a true story of being in a time between worlds, with the only doubt being about the depth, difficulty and duration of the transition we are living through.
This is a particularly seismic moment of history characterized by a shift in geological time from the relatively stable Holocene to the unstable and potentially devastating Anthropocene, and the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity. New ways of extracting, organizing, sharing and experiencing information (through the internet and subsequently the smart phone) alongside developments in synthetic biology and virtual reality are subverting our understanding of human nature and reality. There is profound uncertainty about what is emerging, how we might best relate to it and what that means for how we should make best use of our capabilities, energy and time.
The world is awash with conflict and corruption and there are enormous power dynamics in play. It is naïve to imagine there is a pre-political ‘we’ that is ready to spring into action. Still, for those who feel called to fight for a better world, it seems that are called upon to allow some aspects of the world to die well; patterns of governance, economy, technology alongside their patterns of meaning, purpose and value that are no longer serving us well.
We are also called to give cultural and institutional form to the patterns of regenerative power and vitality arising throughout the world. And taking that call seriously also means a commitment to help each other, such that individual agency may become a kind of collective hyperagency that is not merely about acting in the world as we find it, but also the power to create new metanarratives and new worldviews that is the prerequisite for true societal transformation.
Emerge North America
The late JFK’s signature line is worth reflecting on again today: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. While the USA has its share of challenges, the heart of this question is not about the USA, nor even the idea of a country. Today it is a living question for everybody in our new cosmo-local context, where those with planetary awareness typically have only a relatively local sphere of influence. The answer to the question - what can I do? - will not only be part of an historical story, but will also take some kind digitally mediated social form, and Emerge exists to help create that form and nurture it in a way that allows it to evolve.
Emerge was founded by three organizations in Europe: The Ekskaret ‘Oak Island’ foundation in Stockholm, The Co-Creation Loft in Berlin, and Perspectiva in London. All three founding organizations shared the perception that one of the most important challenges of our time is learning to collaborate better in a particular way. We do not mean merely cooperating – although that matters! More precisely, the work is to know ourselves better through encountering others through our shared perception of context, and thereby discerning how to focus on whatever each of us is best at, and uniquely called to do. Some call this collective individuation.
There have been three previous Emerge Gatherings in Europe: in Berlin in 2018, Kyiv (Ukraine) in 2019 and Berlin again in 2021 (video). We have learned a great deal in the process of hosting these gatherings and feel the time is right to extend our activity into North America with a smaller, 150 participants, invitation-only event to gather and build the growing North American network and deepen the North American – European connection.
The gathering is intended to be a meeting of peers and equals. We hope to facilitate a productive cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives. The social norm we hope to uphold is one of collegiate civility and respect for a diversity of responsible viewpoints, but we are not averse to optimal conflict, for the stakes are high, and passion is called for. There will be facilitated workshops and breakout groups, but some of the best experiences will come from spontaneous personal interactions through which new connections and friendships can be made.
So our invitation is to gather to facilitate emergence: To deepen and share our own hard-won insights. To meet and make connections across memetic tribes. To investigate new ways of knowing and being. To explore new world-views. To make the nascent movement visible to itself. And to self-consciously do what we can to create the conditions for the emergence of a new civilization.
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