Complexity Science & Meta-religion

Path Notes #7

The application of complexity scholarship to global commons problems, including disease, climate, conflict, and political economy, is likely to be an essential component in any effort to ensure the prosperity and survival of life on Earth. The integrated nature of complexity science aligns with the connected nature of the modern world. Complexity science will be essential to all future projects that aim to escape terminal planetary decline.

David Krakauer, The Complex World[i]

Escaping terminal planetary decline?

Ensuring the prosperity and survival of life of Earth?

Sign. Me. Up!

But science? Really? Some would say it is science – and the world shaping technologies it has unleashed - that has led us to the precipice. Do we seriously think that AI-powered techno-optimism is going to somehow science us all to a sustainable future?

Not by itself.

But it’s naïve to think we’ll even have the breathing room for civilizational transition without complexity science at the table. And that’s going to be hard if we treat science as a monolithic straw man.

I was recently at a presentation where one of the speakers started out with the familiar observation that ‘western science’ is inherently materialist, reductionist and linear. Most of the attendees dutifully nodded in agreement as the ghosts of Newton, Bacon and Descartes were dragged onto the stage and forced to hang their heads in shame before the post-modern mob.

Come on people!

Nobody would deny the materialistic, reductionist and linear nature of 18^th and 19^th century science. But – honestly now - would you rather have Isaac Newton figuring out how to protect the grid from a Carrington-level solar storm or sit in the dark reading Foucault’s critique of scientific power by candlelight while you wait for someone to turn the electricity back on?  I would be the first to agree that a mechanistic worldview offers a partial and dangerous map – and it’s one that a lot of people are still using to find their way and shape our world. But it’s been a century since Nils Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics for challenging and reimagining some of ‘western science’s’ core maps of reality and articulating the theoretical foundations for quantum physics. Einstein’s general theory of relativity supplanted Newtonian gravitational theory in 1915. Anything that uses a laser or a semi-conductor…mobile phones, computers, GPS systems, cable TV, fibre-optics, MRI scanners, computer chips…has been made possible by the quantum physics developed by Bohr, Einstein and their ilk. It has literally constructed the technological foundation for post-industrial modernity and its exponential acceleration.

The truth is, quantum physics had already shattered the mechanistic worldview – with its reductionist materialism and linear causality – before we’d even invented the fridge or the washing machine!

But, for the most part, nobody noticed.

Our scientific consensus – let alone our social consensus - has yet to catch up with the revolutionary insights offered a century ago by that new wave of physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists. That’s how it usually works with cultural innovation and the movement between eras. A few visionaries, artists and scientists sense and sketch out something of the adjacent future or emergent edge that is invisible to the rest of us. But it can take an awfully long time for the consensus to shift. Centuries sometimes.

Today the world of ‘western science’ is made up of an astonishingly diverse cast of systems ecologists, theoretical physicists, evolutionary biologists, climate modellers, stochastic analysts, psychedelic researchers, chaos theorists, neurophysiologists and fractal mathematicians. Taken together, they offer humanity an extraordinary compound eye through which we keep discovering the fundamentally interconnected, probabilistic, multi-dimensional and inherently complex nature of reality.

But most children of modernity still describe the world as a noun and experience it as a substance.

It’s hard to let go of habitual patterns of thought and belief and our maps of reality – even if we know they’re wrong.

But despite all of its extraordinary insights, the sciences have become the handmaidens of finance and politics –the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower offered such a grave warning about. It produces an ever more dazzling and dangerous array of gadgets, leaving the bigger questions about their development to unhinged ideologues, emotionally-unripened technocrats, cold-eyed generals and hungry investors in search of the next 10X jackpot. And when you harness greed, fragmented ideology, dissociative thinking and the adolescent mindset to planet-shaping technologies, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Hey Buddy, can you spare a paradigm?

I think David Krakauer is right. Complexity science is going to be essential to all future projects that aim to escape terminal planetary decline. But let’s not kid ourselves. The insights of complexity science can be, and have been, turned to flawed and terrifying purposes.

It has to be harnessed to a mindset of deep connectedness.

I believe that a shared ethos of deep connectedness offers the most viable foundation for long-term human and planetary flourishing. From it flow a sense of reverence and care for the earth, the recognition that humans are part of a larger community of life, and an active sense of responsibility for the well-being of the planet and future generations.

Plus a willingness to place boundary constraints around our world-shaping capabilities.

The perspective shift required for such an ethos presents us with a species-level adaptive challenge. And while it is perfectly possible to arrive at such an ethos from a purely rational perspective, that is not going to be the case for most people. Complexity science inevitably points to the fundamentally inter-connected nature of reality and offers potent strategies for both manipulating and regenerating living systems. For practically re-imagining sustainable energy, agricultural, economic, health and social systems. But, by itself, it won’t get us from where we’re actually at as a species to where we know we need to get to. Religion is going to have to be a stakeholder.

A kind of meta-religion that can help use escape terminal planetary decline.

Let me pause for a bit and look at this along a spectrum from shallow to deep. I realize this could come across as overly simplistic and self-referential (shallow/bad, deep/good) so for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll make my assumptions transparent and represent shallowness as a kind of equation.

• P (Partiality) represents the incompleteness or inaccuracy of a worldview. If we scored it out of 100, a completely inaccurate worldview would get the full 100 points. A perspective that was largely accurate with some gaps or mistakes might score 20.

• I (Intransigence) reflects a worldview’s degree of obstinate certainty and resistance to exploring and expanding its own partiality. Utter certainty combined with an intolerance for dissenting opinions would score 100. A low score would represent a willingness or even a desire to consider counter-evidence.

• B (Benevolence) denotes the worldview's capacity to consistently inspire wise, compassionate or otherwise positive actions.

Partiality (P) and Intransigence (I) both increase shallowness. Benevolence (B)[ii], on the other hand, can modulate or even mitigate it. For example, there was a belief in Ancient Greece that all strangers and beggars are sent by Zeus – the thunderbolt-wielding Father of the gods who lived at the top of Mt Olympus. This belief – which is almost certainly factually incorrect – lay at the basis of a strong Greek moral imperative – philoxenia - which is variously translated as ‘guest-friendship’ or the ‘kindness due to strangers’. A demonstrably partial perspective that consistently led to pro-social outcomes.

But enough geekery already!

The methods and fruits of deep science are ethically and imaginatively centered as well as being ecologically grounded. The disciplined gifts of the deep mind – including scientific inquiry, critical thought and open-mindedness - are more vital now than they have ever been.

Deep science necessarily centers relationship and responsibility.

I want to recognize two of the Wolf Willow Institute’s Positive Deviants Fellows here, Aishwarya Khanduja and Apoorv Sinha. Aishwarya’s recent paper ‘Wicked Problems: Addressing the Crises of the 21st Century with Complex Systems Theory’ is available as a preprint here. It’s part of the foundational thinking for her new start up dedicated to bringing the insights of an ethically-centered complexity science to our most critical challenges. And Apoorv’s vision for a carbon-neutral future is as inspiring as it is practical. They are wonderful examples of scientists who hold relationship and responsibility at the core of their work.

They are far from alone.

There are so many brilliant and inspirational people - Gül Dölen, Gary Paul Nabhan, Suzzanne Simard, Francisco Varela, Neil Theise, Lindsay Crowshoe, Wangari Maathai, Gregory Bateson, & Robin Wall Kimmerer to name just a few – who combine a deep understanding of living systems with a multi-valent perspective and a commitment to uplifting the human and more-than-human worlds.

Every one of them embraces multiple ways of knowing. And every one of them has at least one foot firmly planted in ‘western science’.

Shallow science on the other hand can be a dissociative practice. It is both empowered and fatally flawed by its capacity to separate things from their wider context.

Because the more we know, the more our reason can separate us from the object of our knowing. Reductionist science has given us incredible insight into the nature of reality and delivered countless benefits. But many would say that it has done so at the expense of a sense of interconnectedness with the natural world, an appreciation for mystery and ambiguity, and an intuitive, holistic understanding of complex systems. Context, relationship and meaning. It has left us with the power of gods but less certain than ever what it means to be human.

We ended up knowing about the forest. And we lost the ability to know from the forest.

But if we are going to escape terminal planetary decline, we have to be able to do both. Understand the parts without losing sight of the whole. Knowledge and wisdom.

And that’s where religion comes in.

I’m using the term expansively to include any coherent system of beliefs, practices, and values that provides people with meaning, belonging, ethical guidance, and a connection to something greater than themselves. For most of human history - and for most of your ancestors - that was what we might now call animism. It’s unquestionably been our most sustainable pattern for living on this planet to date. And it’s still hanging in there.

But these days, for about 75% of the world, religion typically means a system that emerged from either the Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, Druze, Mormonism, Rastafarianism etc.) or the Vedic tradition (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Shaivism etc.).

And of course, there are all kinds of traditions that found survival and adaptive success through syncretism. Shugendo, Santería, Voudon, folk Catholicism, Santo Daime and the Native American Church are all vibrant examples of such syncretism.  

What about Daoism you ask? I’m including it as a form of animism. We can talk later…

Zooming out, the tent widens to include what the sociologists like to call New Religious Movements (NRM’s). Things like Theosophy, Scientology, the multi-headed New Age movement, and the many quasi-devotional political, revolutionary or apocalyptic movements - Maoism, Nazism, Juche, Heaven’s Gate etc. Let’s throw in communism and radical free-marketism too.

Phew! And my apologies if I left you out!

And every one of these traditions offer the same things. Meaning. Belonging. Practices. Codes of conduct. A Way.

And every one of them offers a partial map of reality.

The word religion comes from the Latin religare. To bind.

And all too often, it does exactly what it says on the packet. It binds. Shallow religion demands that its adherents deny the laws of physics and the evidence of their own senses - and close the gap with faith and superstition. Failure to do so – or at least enact the requisite performative obedience - is heavily sanctioned. At its best, it uses symbol, story and ceremony to offer hope, meaning and belonging to the dispossessed and desperate. But at its worst, it uses the very same things to further divide and separate, to inflame and dominate, to fuel dependence and foster disunity.

There is enormous power in those stories.

Shallow religious traditions have consistently provided an adaptive advantage over what I would suggest is the often more sophisticated and nuanced perspective offered by animist worldviews.

They have provided social cohesion across linguistic/ethnic/tribal affiliations, access to trade routes, stimulated cross-cultural pollination and innovation and enabled human beings to organize more effectively across time and space and thus leverage greater collective power. They were a critical building block of the modernity that then turned around and challenged the basis for religion’s truth claims!

Shallow religion still has the capacity to organize people at scale. But it is a short straw that seldom reaches the waters from which it claims to have emerged. And just like shallow science, it weaponizes partial truths in service of partial perspectives.

But deep religion doesn’t so much bind as it connects. It stretches its roots sensuously and reverently into the body of the living earth. It is quickened by the life-shaping wellsprings of the soul even as it spreads its branches to embrace the heavens. It uses symbol, story and ceremony as a form of experiential inquiry that can help us perceive and come into communion with the source of life. It offers rigorous practices that enable us to relinquish our biases and illusions and perceive reality more clearly. It celebrates the local and unique, even as it gestures towards unity and the universal. And it invites us to the edge - and then beyond – of our capacity to love.

Deep religion offers cohesion and connection without coercion.

Individual traditions – leaving aside the totalitarian, personality and death cults - are seldom unambiguously one thing or the other. I have encountered practitioners from many traditions who have left me humbled, inspired and allured by their virtue, their vision, the quality of the presence and the depth of their perspective.

And, like you, I’ve seen the inter-generational damage wrought by the necrotic hands of the religious and the revolutionary alike and their continuing efforts to silence courageous observers for simply pointing out the way things really are. Galileo’s heliocentric observations remain the poster child for threatening the 17^th century theological worldview, but he was only one amongst many. From Renaissance priest Lucilio Vanini arguing that humans were descended from apes to the inconvenient findings of government climate researchers, unwelcome observations that impact ‘business as usual’ have often been silenced – whether it be having their tongue ripped out like Vanini or just an internal memo forbidding unauthorized contact with the press. It’s the same reason why autocratic regimes try to control the levers of art and culture so tightly; they are intensely wary of the transgressive power of the untameable human imagination. A new and more complete insight about the pattern of creation can undermine an entire social order based on a less accurate understanding – and leading-edge scientists, visionaries and artists have long paid the price for their ability to both describe the way things are and to re-imagine the way they could be.

But we have to work with what we’ve got.

And what we’ve got is a world where more than 80% of the population still identify with a distinct religious tradition. And those traditions aren’t going away.

Trying to replace them with some insipid hodge-podge of complexity science, post-modern critical analysis, cultural relativism, 24 hour shopping, feel-good ecology, mindfulness apps and the UN sustainable development goals isn’t going to cut it.

And that means that our religious systems – and all of us who identify with them - will have to evolve and deepen. Which in turn requires a realignment around the practical and philosophical implications and insights offered by the complexity sciences. Because, as Baha’i leader ‘Abdu’l-Bahá noted just before the carnage of the First World War, “the religion which does not walk hand in hand with science is itself in the darkness of superstition and ignorance.” We need to find common ground as we work to turn this ship around. And that means fumbling our way toward some kind of meta-religion that can offer meaning, belonging, practices and codes of conduct – ways of knowing, being, relating and doing - that can help us escape terminal planetary decline.

Shallow religion and shallow science offer flawed and incompatible maps of reality that erase complexity and diminish us all.

It probably goes without saying, but deep science and deep religion are one and the same thing.

I was going to end this here. But I’m curious! What would be the design parameters for a ‘meta-religion’ that can cultivate a shared ethos of deep connectedness - thereby helping us escape terminal planetary decline and lay the foundation for a flourishing future?

If we’re paying attention, it’s already taking shape around us!

It’s more than a rational global ethic. It cannot be imposed upon or replace existing traditions; it has to emerge from the soil of what is already here. Like an ecologically-grounded version of the perennial philosophy, it represents the very best of every tradition while inviting each towards its greater evolutionary potential.

A viable meta-religion re-centers every human endeavour and philosophy in the ecological poetics of complex living systems and remind us that the ‘environment’ is not one of many stakeholder categories to be considered but the non-negotiable foundation upon which everything else depends. As a thought experiment – and off the top of my head - such a pattern would surely:

1.     Allow for multiple ways of being and belonging: it must have the capacity to take root in and grow from any religious or philosophical tradition while allowing for multiple forms of identity and affiliation. It cannot erase difference, diversity and variety but must rather uplift the capacity for individuals and local communities to adapt, express, reinterpret and practice within their specific bioregional, ecological and cultural contexts.

2.     Inspire a shared sense of humanity as a single planetary caretaker species: a sense that we are all valued members of a single family who share a noble inter-generational purpose. A recognition of our kinship and inter-dependence with one another and all life, along with an understanding that our well-being is inseparable from the broader health of Earth’s biosphere.

3.     Foster reverence for the more-than-human world: a sense that all life forms, ecosystems, and the planet itself not only have intrinsic value that deserve our respect and care but are sacred. At the same time, it must surely decouple the ‘sacred’ and the ‘sentient’ from the ‘supernatural’ in ways that honour both secular and spiritual sensibilities. We might say that the natural rather than the supernatural must become the basis for truth claims.

4.     Encourage a sense of protopian agency: the idea that heaven is not a static, transcendent or otherworldly utopia, but rather an immanent – and necessarily imperfect - adjacent possibility that requires our active participation.

5.     Promote the unity of knowledge and wisdom: Valuing learning, inquiry and discovery. Honouring our multiple ways of knowing while upholding intellectual freedom and critical thought in ways that help us perceive reality more clearly. Leaving our spiritualities and philosophies porous to the insights generated by scientific knowledge. Anchoring the fruits of such knowledge within life-affirming value sets.

6.     Elevate life-affirming relational values: Promoting values, institutions and learning processes that support compassion, cooperation, and a commitment to justice and nonviolence across our human and ecological relationships. It’s about weaving the foundations for a trans-cultural morality that can balance our astonishing and world-shaping technologies with the realities of living together on a fragile planet with a narrow band of life-supporting climatic conditions. Right relationship.

7.     Articulate more complete frameworks for human development: integral and ecologically grounded maps and models that can help us understand what it is to be and become fully human and that redefine human purpose and fulfillment beyond supernatural redemption or materialist consumerism.

8.     Offer experiential doorways: bodies and rhythms of ceremony, ritual and practice - both individual and collective – that enable us to elevate our consciousness, commune with the sacred (however we understand it), and rebalance and renew our connection to ourselves, to each other, to the living earth and to the source of life. In a very concrete sense, such practices must help us build the capabilities required to understand and relate to both part and whole simultaneously.

9.     Leave room for emergence: a deep epistemic humility and a corresponding resistance to dogma and shallow conformity, along with the ability to radically upgrade its perspective as necessary. As Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, put it: "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.” There is something here too about an ability to release, surrender or relinquish control – to make space for unravelling and the death of things; for the kind of creative and discontinuous emergence that allows us to respond to adaptive challenges and to let go of our partial maps and habitual actions that will not serve us on the road ahead.

Seek and you shall find!

It’s a potent network attractor hovering in the wings and I see little signs of it emerging everywhere I look…just waiting to be pulled into a more complete or higher order pattern of coherence. It’s clearly the next chapter of the human story over the coming centuries. I’ve been grappling for years with the practice implications of cultivating such a perspective…more on that another time.

But if anyone asks these days, I tell them I’m a metamodern contemplative animist!

With a surprising amount of hope and an increasingly complex meta-Hallelujah…

Julian

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[i] Krakauer, D. (2024) The complex world: an introduction to the foundations of complexity science. The Santa Fe Institute Press.

[ii] Caveat! I’m no mathematician! But adding 1 to B ensures that the benevolence factor does not create undefined behavior (i.e., division by zero) if B = 0.