Principles for Knowledge Commons?

2022 in review, three principles to explore in 2023, and developing the 'curriculum of the future'

Winter and especially the end of a year, that arbitrary boundary where we believe some kind of handshake occurs at the closing of something and the opening of some distinctly new thing, are odd times. Each year I feel it. And I think it is somehow illustrative of where tension arises in our political and social lives (not to mention in how we do science): at the perceived boundaries of a thing. What happens at the edge of a thing? How do we govern intersectional space, personally as communally? How do we perceive beyond the boundaries we hold? These are questions that lay before us, civilizational callings.

When these unnamed transitions are accompanied by real changes in a life, the perception of their significance rises to a discordant crescendo and occupies an irreducible attention. For me, the changes are witnessing my daughter run headlong into toddlerhood and my own transition into a new job with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In these times when the inherent unsettledness of life is less easy to dismiss or deny (despite the ancient wisdom in Heraclitus' admonition that 'the only constant is change' modern society is adept at denying change, indeed Richard Feynman was prophetic in stating that 'the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool'), it is ritual that we fall back on to manage the psychological and sociological tension that change brings.

Each December, we all have some form of end-of-year ritual, whether recognized or not, that affect our next trip around the Sun. My own are a kind of year-in-review with the purpose of articulating principles to shape my life. The purpose of directing the rituals toward principles is to try to create a framework. Here there is a vital distinction between a framework and a model:

Models are rigid codes that govern our behavior and problem solving. They readily become automatic and unconscious — they program us. Frameworks break our programming. They encourage consciousness, systemic thought, and careful consideration of what is appropriate in a specific situation (Paraphrased from Carol Sanford's The Regenerative Life)

I have always thought that new year’s resolutions, at least as traditionally practiced, were a poor attempt at transformation, but I never had adequate language for why that might be. Sanford articulated it - resolutions prescribe a model, not a framework. Writing down principles can be something different, indeed for me it has been.

I share my ritual and personal principles for 2023 at the end of this post if you're interested, but after a year of writing about commons, civic spaces, and relationality, I'd like to think out loud with you about how these practices can be a part of flourishing collectives. How might personal rituals for personal flourishing be translated to collective practices for collective flourishing? This is part of a wider discussion about the connection between the personal and the collective, about which we will write much more in future posts. To the extent that these newsletters are part of the infinite game of the expansion of knowledge about how we live together and relate to one another, this post is but one move in it.

Three principles for exploring the commons in 2023

I conducted a 2022-in-review of the activities, conversations, and groups around these commons and emerged from them three principles related to flourishing commons to explore in 2023:

1. Live the questions, suspend answers, and embody a comfort with ambiguity.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his inimitable Letters to a Young Poet, "“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

How do we live together? What does flourishing look and feel like? Immense issues like these go beyond the existing lexicon, so we turn to questions. But our culture's philosophy of instantaneity and immediate satisfaction, we seem unwilling to sit with the questions, instead rushing to resolution no matter the violence to the idea and possibility that hurry can do. To allow the more beautiful, the more nuanced, the more capacious to emerge perhaps we need to sit with the questions longer. I often feel unequal to the task, but what is out of the capacity of the individual may be possible in collectivity. I wonder how, together, we might hold the questions longer, take a longer view of time.

2. Practice and cultivate the perfection (pāramitā) of listening.

Poet, writer, and Zen priest, Norman Fischer, describes the six pāramitās, or perfections, of Buddhist philosophy as a spiritual practice leading to kindness, wisdom, and an awakened life. These perfections are not things to be attained but things to be strived for. He described the striving, “We require a path that engages our need for the impossible. The bodhisattva path, which proposes a horizon of universal love that we will never see in our lifetime, is the only thing that will continue to inspire us, and the six paramitas are the simplest way of describing the bodhisattva’s way of life.” It resonates with one of the most cited entries in Pirkei Avot (a collection of Rabbinic Jewish teachings), "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." Intellectual history of what constitutes or gives rise to a good society is littered with this wisdom in different words—there is an ancient Greek proverb that states, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”

In our culture little room is typically made for contemplation, silence, invitation; we have lost the art of listening. By understanding listening as a perfection, a striving, we might challenge ourselves to become better listeners, which means being open to receiving what the other has to say, cultivating a different quality of attention, and letting go of our own assumptions to take in the new.

3. Create networks and collectives, not for the sake of creating them, but for the purpose of social change.

Underlying any commons is a network, a collection of individuals and their relationships. So a prerequisite for understanding commons is to think in networks. Networks are the language of complexity. It is a language we must learn to speak to understand complex systems. Bringing this into the civic and social space, networks are the language of how we relate to one another. This principle suggests that we use network and systems thinking as we construct our groups and think about our relationality. Merely thinking in networks will not lead to flourishing systems, however. We must muscularly bring the literacy to social change. Over the coming year, let's enrich our conversations with network and systems concepts, advice Donella Meadows laid out more than a decade ago in her oracular Thinking in Systems.

These are merely suggestions. What should be our collective principles in 2023? Perhaps we can begin by sharing our principles with one another. At the end of this post are a few of my own end-of-year ruminations and principles.

The curriculum of the future

I will conclude this post with an idea that has been with me for many years. It emerged as a category that organized a collection of notes that I had across books, podcasts, conversations. Those notes in various ways mentioned new literacies, educational practices, and pedagogy that we needed as humanity and society evolves in the 21st century. The coy title of the collection was the 'curriculum of the future,' and it was centered on the question of what would be a part of an education of flourishing? It is an expansive topic, supported by decades of thought by minds better than my own. I am now and will always be a student of it. I bring it here because I will periodically center posts around certain aspects of this curriculum in the hopes that we can together build from those pieces a muscular framework in which we can explore healthier collectivity and commons.

Tongo Eisen Martin describes a curriculum as an ideological framework for the realities of the work that one has become aware of with the purpose of building your power of recognition and discovery and putting that recognition and discovery into practice. I can think of no better framework for exploring flourishing commons than collectively imagining a curriculum for them.

My end-of-year ritual and principles for 2023

A ritual that we as a culture share is the end-of-year reflection. Something about beginning a new path around the Sun that elicits looking back at the last go around. Indeed we find ourselves situated in cycles. Google end of year reflection and you will see endless piece upon piece about how to plumb the depths of the last 365 days. Most target some set of resolutions that you hope will define 2023. I tend to question the reliance on such an illusory significant moment to make a change in one's life (what is special about the time we choose to say is the start of a new era?) and am discouraged by the general lack of longevity of the high ideals of this period, but welcome anything that inspires an individual or group to reflect.

My own flavor of the end of year reflection grew, years ago, out of advice from Tim Ferriss to forget new year's resolutions and conduct a past year review instead. Over those years, my practice has evolved. Now it looks like this:

• Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.

• Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.

• For each event, sit with the emotional memory and then write down the people (P), institutions (I), activities (A), or commitments (C) associated with the peak positive or negative responses in the respective column.

• The columns then serve two purposes: 1) put on your calendar for next year those things that brought the most positive emotions; and 2) keep the lists with you for the first weeks of they year to crystallize as a filter for what you say 'yes' and 'no' to.

• Alongside these lists, make separate lists for other things (intentionally more idiosyncratic than what we normally make lists of): big ideas and concepts, questions I’ve been asking myself and others, quotes, etc. To populate these lists I look across the multitudinous places where I take notes, perhaps the most important of which are my commonplace books. I consider these lists cultural achievements themselves.

• Looking holistically across all of these reflections I articulate my principles for the year ahead.

I want to put my principles out there as a kind of preregistration that I can revisit next year, gather feedback from, and evolve in that ongoingness that is the essence of vitality. Here they are:

• Be an energetic, generous, and present father, husband, friend; practice toward the perfection (pāramitā) of compassion

• Live the questions, suspend answers, and embody a comfort with ambiguity

• Practice letting go and relinquishing

• Practice and cultivate the perfection (pāramitā) of listening

• Cultivate gratitude and humility and understand the emotions related to them as muscles that need attention and development

• Build systems (forms of culture or knowledge or religion) that do not view themselves as replacing or being better then another one, but contain within themselves a way of undoing themselves

• Create networks and collectives, not for the sake of creating them, but for the purpose of social change

• Create feedbacks - tell people the affect they have had on you; create pathways and networks of energizing qualities like muscular hope and generosity

• Make things about learning and delighting in witnessing the process of learning

• Make the space for movement; emptying and relinquishing something so that there is a meaningful void. Explore the meaningful void

• Generate in the period of first emotion and always be shipping something that moves the conversation forward (be generative)

  • Get things done/CREATE during meetings (use presentations and meetings to get the work done, advance, deliver, iterate); do not simply write to do's

  • Let that creation be imperfect, inadequate, and be vulnerable in putting it out there

• Build in pause , space, reflection, and lag

• Take the long view of time

  • Embrace and cultivate integenerationality (learn from more generations; think of the 200-year present)

  • Let the focus and action be toward the ongoingness and vitality

  • Focus on learning and the understanding of how we learn

• Share more, be more vulnerable (with Rachel and my family and in my writing)

• Center Flourishing

  • Create spaces for the dignity of all beings to flourish

  • Cultivate a muscular hope and be a source of it in the world

  • Understand and create frameworks for the literacy of flourishing (this is the curriculum of the future)

• Create culture, create community; Let the focus and action be toward the ongoingness and vitality that are the centers of culture

• Build community, become a more skilled facilitator (cultivator of healthy relationality),  develop a more complex understanding of community (e.g., network science + working with networks)

• Witness the world through the lens of complexity

• Attempt to witness how to 'see' beyond your current system

• Foster the capacity for imagination

• Relate everything to civic discourse and civic behavior/action

• Develop an appreciation of the value of otherness

• Liberate yourself from the pathology of progress

• Search for a language, an ontology, a vocabulary of mystery

Finally, an evolving practice is to also write the questions that I'm living to accompany and evolve these principles, as with any living thing they are constantly changing.

Mindful that these posts are about our commons and our collective intelligence and action, I wonder what the significance might be of these rituals I’ve described around entering a new year for community and collectivity. As these are personal practices for my own flourishing, how might these rituals be collective practices for collective flourishing? This is part of a wider discussion about the connection between the personal and the collective. Society is built from collectives of individuals, so systemic change may begin with personal transformation. But what happens in this process is unclear and vital to flourishing and commons. I want to explore what emerges at the boundaries between the personal, the group, the community, and the society, and how our practices can or cannot transcend them.