Alternative Editorial: Soulful Politics
All of the Sunday papers seize upon the headlines that a minister has been caught breaking the rules he himself set. Part of the evolving news story is that the whistleblower is likely to come from within government. And that the consequent collapse of two family homes is a matter for journalistic triumphalism. We have been saying for long enough that politics is broken. But the evidence that the news media is broken, too, has to sit alongside the spectacle of general woe. We are happy to turn our gaze away.
Fortunately, when we wrest back our attention, there’s plenty that is better to observe. Not least the launch of Perspectiva Press (PP) this week, the publishing house of the first ever ‘soul tank’ of the same name.
Firstly, full disclosure: PP is the publisher of AUK’s Co-initiator Indra Adnan’s new book The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility, in the Fractal Age (POWU), which soft-launches later this week on June 30th (a bigger launch later in July). But there are a number of reasons that make Perspectiva the ideal publisher for POWU, as well as a wider context that is worth sharing. Namely the four other books that are being published at the same time which, together, add up to a genuinely alternative approach to politics.
Co-founded by Tomas Bjorkman and Jonathan Rowson – who the eagle-eyed will have noticed was a founding influence on A/UK – Perspectiva (according to their self-introduction) “is a collective of scholars, artists, activists, futurists, and seekers working on the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice. We work to highlight and shape the underlying norms, metaphors, narratives, values, sensibilities and assumptions that generate policy, rather than policy itself.”
They continue:
Our urgent 100-year project is to develop an applied philosophy of education that informs individual and collective realization in our evolving historical context; to learn how to become who we have to be to avert societal collapse and shape viable and desirable futures…
In the ecological and technological context of the twenty-first century, credible hope for humanity lies in forms of economic restraint and political cooperation that are beyond prevailing epistemic capacities and spiritual sensibilities. Our intuition is that we need to grow into the challenges of our time, and that how we perceive and imagine the world matters even more than what we buy or how we vote.
Perspectiva Press publishes books that offer ‘soul food for expert generalists’. Our books are for readers interested in how to talk about the relationship between our inner and outer worlds; from psyche to polity, from dreams to data, from ego to ecology.
Each of the five books being published next week rises to the challenge in a different way:
Anthea Lawson’s The Entangled Activist: Learning to Recognise the Master’s Tools explores frankly what it takes to be an activist these days. Society and the world demands commitment and engagement from us - but we have to be honest about how difficult and exhausting this can be. What if your attitude towards “getting the bastards” actually distorts your take on the very injustice you want to heal? What if you can’t distinguish your private traumas and losses from your rage against the machine?
Drawing on decades of protest at every level - from being an XR “arrestable” to influencing global policy - Anthea shows us the many entanglements that limit and propel our activisms, Once we see them, we can still change the world - perhaps more wisely and sustainably.
Hanno Burmeister’s Unlearn: A Compass for Radical Transformation: is a fascinating perspective from a young German business consultant, mixing intense personal experience (as a gay man and a grandchild of the Nazi era) and perceptive ideas on psychology, organisation and modern politics. “Unlearning”, the ability to let go of cliche and inherited ideologies, starts with honouring what he calls our core experience. If we don’t want to just “change” our systems, but “transform” them - to change what change even means - we have to start at this core.
Liam Kavanagh’s Collective Wisdom in the West: Beyond the Shadows of the Enlightenment holds that Western society is deeply attached to ‘Enlightenment’ ideals of rationality, individualism and equality. These ideals have become dogma, taboo to even question, creating blindspots central to the ecological and political crises we face. By looking into these three blindspots we can rediscover our capacity for deep intuition, collective action, and politics motivated by love. To do this we must leave aside a false dichotomy between intellect and intuition, and realise that ideas can be addictions.
Jonathan Rowson & Layman Pascal (eds), Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity is an attempt to help us perceive our socio-political context with an exploration of the premise, coherence and scope of the ‘metamodern’ sensibility: a structure of feeling, cultural ethos, epistemic orientation and imaginative outlook that has arisen over the last two decades. The authors aim to open a new set of pathways to enhance our sense of agency in this time between worlds, where our world system is dying and another is about to be born.
And finally Indra Adnan’s The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age which – as readers of the Daily Alternative will know - looks at how and why the current political system is frustrating our collective desire for real agency in the face of our collective crisis. More importantly, Indra shares the findings of the past four years of A/UK to show what new socio-economic-political system is possible and already beginning to take shape. Like other Perspectiva books, POWU starts with the idea that we need a more profound conception of the human being at the heart of politics and better conditions for wider participation. At the same time, the evidence that people are self-organising in ever more ingenious ways, giving rise to a new idea of economy and governance, is plentiful - and inspires hope.
Together, what these books begin to detail is that a new politics will arise from a different way of being in the world. Our crises have arisen from a deep disconnect between our public and private realities – where politics has been designed to get our material needs met and emotional needs are side-lined. The media thrives on showing us the dichotomy between a simple economic strategy for growth and the chaos caused by fallible humans whose lives defy machine-like behaviour.
Perspectiva’s first set of books do an important job of telling a new story of Us that could give rise to the re-orienation of our collective agency – the foundation of a new politics that could transform our future.
