Alternative Editorial: A Month In The Life of Edinburgh
In the term cosmolocal, which steers us at the Alternative Global, how important is local? Is it 50% of the reality we are trying to generate? No: the reason we don’t hyphenate cosmo with local is that the two terms are fully integrated, inseparable in this way of being. Unlike ‘think global, act local’, cosmolocalism is a way of being local which never slips into being disconnected - or simply related to – globalism and beyond to the cosmic realm. It’s 100% all of these at all times.
What that means in reality is that, even without access to the internet, we no longer live lives that are singularly defined by local circumstances. Whether we are living with high streets peppered with cuisines of all kinds, or tuning into music with diverse origins, or talking to peers who practice religions rooted in quite different parts of the world – these interlocutors are streaming factual, emotional, spiritual information from elsewhere, in every word shared.
Of course, once you are connected to the internet this re-wiring becomes ever more intense. The minute-by-minute input into your waking hours of infinitely diverse forms of agency, coming from all across the planet, are colouring and shaping your experience of living.
Even so, where you live grounds those influences, gives them a territory to work on and therefore helps make the new skills they bring tractable. For example, 100 people practicing permaculture who connect on the web have a different generative power than 100 people living in the same town, practicing permaculture together. When you have a local container for your cosmic knowledge you can focus, iterate fast and build all forms of capital – social, personal, cultural and more – all at once.
For that reason (amongst others) working from Edinburgh in Scotland has refined our experience of living on Planet A. It has a different energy from working from London – partly because it is smaller, but also because it has a different culture, and a different power settlement. It is far from London’s metropolis—far enough to feel degrees of autonomy from the widely accepted history of the UK as a Union of nations. Whether or not you are in favour of a formal separation, Scottish people have developed independence – the obligation to self-organise and develop on their own terms.
Within Scotland there are clear differences between the major cities: Glasgow and Edinburgh have a popular rivalry. But Dundee, Aberdeen, St Andrews – each have distinct claims to Scottishness that are impacting the future of the Scottish nation today. There are different kinds of soft power distributed across Scotland’s territory, attracting different kinds of visitors (students, care-workers, tourists ref) and forms of investment. This means that living in Edinburgh cannot be writ large as Scotland, any more than living in Newcastle can define Englishness.
So what does a week in our life in Edinburgh currently look like? In the past fortnight we’ve reconnected with many networks that co-initiator Pat Kane was more directly involved with when he lived here – both musically and politically. Pat’s networking came to a crescendo in the Independence Referendum in 2014. Attending the premier of Lesley Riddoch’s film Denmark: The State of Happiness proved to be an opportunity to reconnect with it all.
Given our own Danish lineage (the political party Alternativet was our original inspiration) we were curious to see what Lesley – herself an inspiration for Spring – was now saying about the ‘mothership nation’, seven years on from when Uffe Elbaek evoked a new political culture there.
The film placed a lot of emphasis on the Danish capacity for co-operation, which Lesley demonstrated was taught from school age. A young teacher in the film described how she was happy to pay high taxes, if others less well-off could attend kindergarten as a result. Could Scotland follow suite?
But moving from being a deeply divided society, post the Indy referendum, to a fully co-operative society is not easily done. In the post-film discussion, Lesley agreed the transformation could take decades of structured development. Not because the Scots are more antagonistic (or even agonistic) but, in her words, because of an education system that encourages conformity – or being ‘telt’ (told, or told off).
But is co-operation with like-minded people the only skill we need? Some of the audience members drew attention to the lack of capacity within Danish society for the kind of cultural diversity that Scotland might have more of.
This would be particularly needed in the age of climate refugees arriving from all over the world. They are seeking refuge with the very Northern countries whose centuries of industrialism and consumerism make them most responsible for the environmental crisis. And rather than embrace them with open arms, there has been a lot of fear and resistance across the Scandanavian countries.
Whereas, as least so far, the Scots have proved welcoming. Maybe Scotland and Denmark have skills and capacities to swap – a process we will be encouraging through our own close links with both
Nurturing our capacities for working together of course, have both inner and outer as well as individual and social dimensions. Even when people are inclined to care for each other, we need architectures of collaboration to sustain that momentum. How do we generate an economy so that those who are less capable can benefit too?
Earlier that month, our visits to the Development Trust Association and an encounter with The Coalfields Regeneration Trust suggested that community agency networks (CANs) of all kinds are developing throughout Scotland. We believe such CANs bring the best conditions for that capacity for co-operation to develop.
At Glasgow's GalGael initiative, we have found a strong example of the mutuality of these four dimensions - inner and outer as well as individual and social – operating coherently through their work on just futures, exemplified by their contributions to self-ownership on the island of Eigg. Their community take-overs of land, and their development of a 4th sector economy, proves that effective co-operation lurks near to the surface of Scottish culture - ever more so when diversity is present.
At the same time, that project leads us right back to our Perspectiva network, with Gal Gael Founding Board Member Alistair McIntosh a recent keynote speaker alongside Indra Adnan at the Realisation Festival. There, Alistair’s poetic and spiritual expression of his mission at Gal Gael resonated deeply with similar currents running through The Alternative Global.
Despite Indra Adnan’s own deep Scottish lineage – with Scottish/Indonesian cousins living in Fife! – her exploration of Edinburgh is closer to virgin territory and deliberately post-party-political. In this mode, we discovered Pianodrome which answers our hunt for arts projects intent on evoking whole new worlds. In the Pianodrome workshop, old pianos are broken down and used to build new structures – notably the amphitheatre where piano players from all over the world, often refugees, come to play.
There’s more to come on founders Tim Vincent-Smith and Matt Wright’s vision for Pianodromes in all five continents of the world (the first in Charlotte, USA) – all interacting as major attractors for a new cosmopolitan appreciation for creativity. Such a joy to discover on The Alternative Global’s own doorstep.
But nothing quite prepared us for the arrival of Bayo Akomolafe in Scotland a few weeks ago for his residency as Centenary Fellow at the University of Dundee, also hosted by the University of Edinburgh, the Centre for Human Ecology, and other communities. Here is the schedule he followed in his brief time here.
We participated initially in Edinburgh at a gathering in the Salisbury Centre. Here Bayo explicitly introduced himself as a trickster, presenting in any gathering as someone opening up cracks in our thinking. Bayo sees his task as unsettling us – literally to generate new settlements of power and agency. His effect is not easy to describe and below we offer a video of Bayo working with his audience to introduce ideas such as fugitivity, sanctuary, and post-activism.
Like us, he is deeply entrenched in the challenge of completeness and seeking a post-human inclusion of all entities, understood as living or not. His work suggests that, as we wake up to the existential prison we have been in throughout the categorisations of modernity, something else, more vital gets released. (Bayo regularly references the works of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in his talks, adapting their rich vocabulary about a reality composed of flows and potentials to his own Yoruban metaphysics). How that takes shape in the future is deliberately not clear within his work, but the joy and devotion to the path is palpable.
The impact of Bayo’s confident moving-around the world, finding audience for his unsettlement, is to accelerate our own rooting in Planet A. As if the engines of our spaceship can now surrender to a new gravity, because it has left the old behind.
Whether or not Bayo would acknowledge the as-yet almost imperceptible emergence of a future ecocivilisation, the wider framework for our recently launched political project Spring, is yet to be seen – especially for some of the reasons we have already flagged. Yet the attraction of the energy Bayo brings—for play, for carnival, for finding each other—is one we ourselves seek and embrace. It evokes again Pat Kane’s book on The Play Ethic as a path to any future.
In the closing moments of the Edinburgh gathering with Bayo, Indra asked him “what is this moment? You speak of the breakdown of all things, but is this also not a rising up? The growing awareness of the need to dissolve – colonialism, modernity, patriarchy – is also a rebirthing of the next. In this moment, what is our agency?”
His response was ponderous, yet electric, asking us to give our attention to the pain in the darkest depths of our system. He described the Three Black Men tour he had participated in, when he visited a prison in Ghana where his ancestors had been incarcerated. Bayo could only lie flat on the floor and give in to the overwhelming emotions still present in the space, for several hours.
His lesson was clear. We won’t be able to generate something whole unless we can sit with the historic and ongoing pain of humanity.
On the day that Bayo left Scotland we got a message out of the blue from Sabra Williams, co-founder of The Actors’ Gang The Prison Project and founder of Creative Acts in the US. She was alerting us to a visit to from Tony Brown, a 23-year-old graduate of Williams’ prison programme, which uses the power of the arts to activate emotional intelligence.
Tony had been given a life sentence for murder at the age of 14, but was now out, working actively in prisons to help young men understand the causes – personal, social, structural - of their violence and to make different choices. It felt like an immediate manifestation of the transformation Bayo was calling for—and which we are saying is now possible. We met Tony in the centre of Edinburgh to hear about the work he was doing with the Prison Education Project in Scotland. His mature and relational approach to change was powerful.
More on our multi-dimensional life in Edinburgh as the weeks go on.
