Introducing Season Nine: Trailer and a meditation on the shadow side of vulnerability
Join the Flourishing Commons community of listening and living - receive the newsletter that enriches these Origins conversations
Welcome back to a new season of The Origins Podcast.
I can't genuinely describe my experience in the world right now without the term confusion.
Confused in a deep sense: feeling a growing distance between the world as I experience it and the world we seem to be creating together.
There exists an incongruity between what I know, from experience, is a better way of living, and the way I end up living each day, bombarded by this society I live in. Krishnamurti wrote, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." I can sit down in the morning to write and have a clarity of mind and a connection to those values that most lead to my flourishing and that of those around me: humility, silence, nonviolence, compassion. Yet by the end of the day I often feel those commitments worn down by the very structures through which contemporary life is organized.
And it is out of this incongruity so maddening and sometimes saddening, perhaps indeed better indicted as unhealthy as Krishnamurti does, that much of my exploration emerges. Little is stronger in drawing me towards conversation, exchange intended to draw out another rebounding to draw out myself, a dance woven of reciprocity and responsiveness leading to a transformative entanglement never again to be undone.
And so I find myself asking the question that animates every conversation on Origins: How do other people navigate this?
In my scientific life I have increasingly become preoccupied with risk--both in how we calculate it and in the concept as a description of the world we inhabit.
In 1992, Ulrich Beck coined the term 'risk society' to refer to the world of compounding threats we currently inhabit. Risk science is the effort to understand hazards and their impacts in ways that inform real decisions by individuals and groups of all scales alike.
The dynamic moving the focus of my scientific research is the recognition that today’s risks are not isolated—they are compounding, cascading, and concurrent, spanning physical hazards, social systems, and technological infrastructures. We are charting a path toward a science of resilience (for ecosystems, for critical infrastructures, for lives individual and collective) and ultimately toward complex risk--the risk that arises when interacting hazards, infrastructures, ecological systems, institutions, and human behaviors produce nonlinear impacts that cannot be inferred from any component in isolation.
The condition we describe as complex risk is not separate from the bewilderment many of us experience personally. Complex risk science is the apotheosis of many years of systems thinking and transdisciplinary practice, and it is also a pointed response to the whiplash of the last several years.
How do we live in this entanglement, inherently complex, irremediably uncertain, and maddeningly paradoxical?
From this milieu is this next season of Origins.
Risk science for a complex world increasingly comes down to how we characterize vulnerability. Vulnerability is one of those ideas that, once you have met it, shakes the ground you walk on. Vulnerability could be simply described as some likelihood to fail. But it is by no means simple nor stationary. It is a term so core to the entire project of humanity and life that there is no field untouched by it, alighting across physical science as well as the political, social, cultural, and spiritual spheres.
Underneath all of these meanings lies a shared recognition: to be alive is to be susceptible, needful, dependent, unfinished.
Season Eight explored this topic.
So, my adventures out in the world, in science, in Origins, in writing, and in living have been around and toward everything it gathers around this phenomenon of vulnerability.
If we take seriously writer Junot Díaz, as we must, that vulnerability is the precondition to contact, this season must be an exploration about what unfolds out from and beyond the kernel of the Season Eight conversations: what emerges from the recognition of our vulnerability? What are its clarion calls for how we understand our world and how we live in it, with and for each other?
The shadow of vulnerability is capacity. Acknowledging vulnerability emerges new possibilities: solidarity, mutuality, belonging, collective intelligence, resilience. Seen through the lens of connected collective lives, the notion of vulnerability is refracted to reveal new structures for living and ways of working.
This is not to write that we should dismiss vulnerability nor the irreducible and irreconcilable suffering a person experiences. Parker Palmer writes that we must be neither invasive of the mystery nor evasive of the suffering. Belonging arises first from humility, pausing ourselves long enough to be open to the other voices, to what else is possible. If we look to nature as our prevailing genius for how to live, in its unthinkable history (of which all of human history is but a blip on the record) it has not erased vulnerability. Rather ecosystems hold the vulnerabilities within them and are conversations across vulnerabilities and capacities.
Poet C.D. Wright lends her uncommon genius to this experience of living:
I do what I have done I wake up and join the struggle of the trees to find a way through and then a dark clot of poetry breaks off
Origins episodes have been moving toward this conversation. The core remains the same--conversations with thought-leaders across domains, crafted for the category-defying society we live in--but in conversation with the cultural milieu it emerges from and into. Conversation, unfolding, these are the dynamics that meet this moment of the risk society and that characterize resilience and possibility and collectivity. "Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way the hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go," writes poet David Whyte. For too long we have conceived of flourishing as some final state of rest, a passive absence of dis-ease rather than an active ongoing process of conversation between beings and between a being and its environment.
As always, we will orient our discourse toward what it means to flourish, to live well with and for each other. Our conception of flourishing meets what we are describing about vulnerability and capacity here, carrying an intention to bear witness to more of the complexity of the other, to honor and echo not only the similarities but also the differences. In this way, there are exhilarating parallels between resilience and flourishing.
The season that follows is an entry into this growing digital anthropology of flourishing, inadequate always, irrepresentative, yet slightly less so each episode. Unfolding, indeed (and comments are a good place to share new dimensions of this immense topic, both in scope and in importance, that we should be exploring).
We will commence on June 30, with the second in our series of Great Asking, harkening back and imagining anew the conversation we began with Sara Hendren and Krista Tippett, this time featuring Julio Ottino, famed co-author of Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World, and one of the most important philosophers working today, C Thi Nguyen.
Some things you will hear across these conversations:
Forms of collectivity, collective effervescence, and rituals in the context of a life and work;
Contemplative science;
Structural plurality;
Breakthrough in philosophy and science;
Poetry as the language that can hold more of the complexity of the world;
Creating new cultural imaginaries and the generative narrative of our time;
Conflict transformation and nonviolence;
Sound and its transformative effect; and
How we hold conversation, how we build broader coalitions across and embracing difference.
The appropriate response to bewilderment is not certainty but deeper conversation. That has always been the purpose of Origins: A person bewildered by the world turning toward another person and asking: How do you live here?
So strangely, out of vulnerability there is capacity. Out of confusion there is hope.
The episodes in this season are meant to be companions in that work. They are certainly companions in mine.
What we do now will be oriented toward creating those sites at which vulnerability becomes capacity: belonging and solidarity. I hope each episode becomes an encounter with flourishing.
Let me leave you with a line of verse from Seamus Heaney:
You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass