New Horizans

Or am I just getting high on conceptual structures again?

My article will start with the ending of Jonathan Rowson’s latest musings, The Inner Life of the Future.

What do you think? Does this make sense? More importantly, does it feel right?

Or am I just getting high on conceptual structures again?

Yes, this feels right and makes sense to me. Rowson has put into words something that has bothered me for a few years. And that something has significance for Metamodern Wannabes.

The viable future for humanity question is often framed as a search for ‘the third attractor’. I first came across this idea in a Daniel Schmachtenberger disquisition, but I have seen other versions of the same contention, namely that a corollary of any rational metacrisis analysis is that the two main default scenarios for the world over the next few decades are collapse and dystopia.

As I explored the SPACE, I discovered this framing and found it quite useful, and still do. But there was something that did not feel quite right. The search for a third attractor is a worthwhile quest, but like all conceptual structures, it delivers an incomplete picture.

Some feel that it is a mistake to make the third attractor too explicit. Envisioning and imagining based on existing cultural and conceptual reference points is likely to perpetuate problematic aspects of the status quo from which those reference points are derived… Among people I know, I believe Bonnitta Roy, Nora Bateson, Ivo Mensch, and Mark Vernon all have some version of this view.

Of these people I am most interested in Nora Bateson, who I hope to post more about soon.

The stylized MW visible at About Metamodern Wannabes captures the name I choose for this Substack account. But the MW is also intended to symbolize Men and Women working together in a way that puts women in the middle. Significantly, men and women think differently and the woman’s voice remains undervalued.

Men tend to create conceptual structures like the third attractor. Many of these frameworks are very useful, not to be disparaged. Women think differently and in ways that are more difficult to put into words. These approaches must also be part of the picture. This is what Nora Bateson brings to the table.

There was something about the SPACE that soon bothered me. I hinted at it in my essay, About Women, written three years ago.

Before I turn my attention to the three women that currently intrigue me, I want to focus on men leading three very interesting organizations: Rebel Wisdom - led by David Fuller and Alexander Beiner; Perspectiva - led by Jonathan Rowson and Tomas Björkman; The Stoa - stewarded by Peter Limberg. What do these have in common? All are involved in some way with a Game A to Game B transition. And all are men, white men (as am I). There is something about this picture that does not feel right.

Jonathan Rowson becomes conceptual and adds a new one, but does so with insight and awareness.

The initial implication seems to be that if we want a third attractor that is neither too explicit nor too implicit we are only likely to find it in the third horizon (albeit in the present) and we are only likely to find it there with something resembling a spiritual sensibility in ‘the third reality’. That sensibility may be quite subtle and it might look and feel quite different from what has gone before; while also co-arising with new forms of social and ecological practice.

The point I would like to make is that finding the third reality will probably require women, perhaps even with women leading the way.

In the online community that I am part of there is a crew called the Gravitating towards a Third Attractor, a worthwhile endeavor. It is led by men and attracted mostly men to its events. When I called attention to this fact, I got some pushback. But I had not made my point very effectively. With the help of Jonathan Rowson, I think I can better articulate something important.

There is an excellent Wikiversity page pointing Toward a Third Attractor. I happen to know who created this article, a white male. I think his prolific work is very good and I hope to soon showcase more of it. But his work is highly conceptual and feels very masculine to me. Personally, I continue to feel drawn to the feminine, approaches personified by Nora Bateson and other women.

The H3 approach in Rowson’s article resonates with me, moving towards an emerging future in less-defined ways.

One major challenge of our times is therefore work and play of all kinds that speaks not just to triage in the first horizon or attempted transition in the second horizon, but to transformation inspired by visions of the third horizon, which means seeing beyond the existing form of society as it manifests in the present.