how to save the world

The reasons we converse: to remember, reassure, educate, conceptualize, prompt action, convince, assist, think through, entertain, and socialize.

The ten steps to great conversations: Prepare, set the stage, listen (with your whole body), collaborate (yes…and), think through your response, listen to yourself, learn to speak well and facilitate well, resummarize often, think what could have beenbetter, and use simple conversation protocols. And practice, practice, practice.

Artwork “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell

PS: I’m going to be away from technology, and this blog, for a week. Just a vacation. See you all again on the 28th!

While many of these criticisms and doubts are, I think, borne of misunderstanding (or even fear), there are two that, from my perspective, have some validity. So I asked Lea (not her real name):

I was willing to confess both insecurity and addiction, but Lea’s answer was What difference does it make? Why does it matter why polyamorous people are driven to love many others instead of just one? So what if it reflects insecurity, or addiction, or both?

She’s right. What was making me defensive, I think, is that I’ve known people who have kept lovers ‘in reserve’ because they’re deeply neurotic, perhaps as a result of devastating pain after loss of a love so severe that they swore they would never allow themselves to suffer that way again. And, I’ve known people whose addiction to love (not the same thing as sex addiction, although some people can have both) has been very hurtful to the people they ‘drop’ as soon as the euphoria of the early-love hormonal cocktail starts to wear off.

But I know myself well enough to know I’m not neurotic, or even particularly insecure (I think we all have insecurities, but my big ego tends to overcome my insecurities most of the time). And I think I’m sensitive enough that I would not knowingly or deliberately hurt or abandon anyone in the ebb and flow of my passion for them. I believe in complete honesty in relationships, and not making promises or commitments without being positive of being able to live up to them. I believe we are capable of loving many without, in the process, diminishing our love for any one.

Most of all, though, my passion for polyamorism is because it’s just fun. Most of us get too little fun in our lives. For so many, everything we do is serious (even games, for so many, are such a terribly serious endeavour!), and for so many, everything we do is work, struggle, effort. Perhaps I’m lazy, but at this point in my life, and believing what I do, I don’t want to work that hard. Love is conversation (from the Latin meaning turning with) and I love moving with, exploring with, other people. Love is play, and I love to play.

Just to be clear, my love for Lea, and hers for me, are not erotic. She’s too young for me and my ‘paternal’ feelings for her would make any kind of relationship of that kind just feel entirely wrong. She’s an amazing young woman who has accomplished a remarkable amount in her life strictly by her own wits, talents and character and I am immensely proud of her. And she is remarkably courageous in her exploration of love and her openness to it, and in that sense she is a great inspiration to me and a sounding board for my thoughts and feelings. She will forever have a place in my heart.

I said I was through talking about polyamorism on this blog, but as I keep saying, a principal purpose of my writing is to think out loud, to sort things out in my own mind. I’m through trying to persuade people that loving many others is a more natural way to live. But Lea’s words, and her own life experiences, have persuaded me even more that it’s a possible way to live, one that need not be that difficult, and a joyful and healthy way to live.

If you could see my smile, the one I show all the time, and which some people recognize and others are blind to, you would know that I’m not crazy, or dangerous, or wasting time that should be spent on more serious, urgent pursuits. I’ve found my better way to live. Love, conversation, community. Easy, responsive and responsible, sustainable, and fun. The way life should be. You don’t like that model, that’s fine, show me another that works better. I’m listening, I’m paying attention, I’m open to suggestion. Help me imagine the possibilities you see, and I’ll helpyou imagine mine. Playfully.

1. e-Mail
2. chat/IM
3. chat/IM plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
4. v2v (voice to voice)
5. v2v plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
6. v2v plus virtual presence (using a webcam)
7. f2f (face to face)

in the context of both 2-person and multi-person conversations. These 7 media each represent (in approximate increasing order) different levels of intimacy with one’s conversants.

One of the issues Dave Snowden describes in his work on how complex systems operate (and social networks are complex systems) is the fact we act in multiple identities. My work identity, my neighbourhood identity, my identity in interactions with my First Life friends, and Second Life friends, and my identity on each of my blogs, are each different, sometimes accidentally (because of how people using these media have come to ‘know’ me, and in what capacity) and sometimes deliberately (because of the need to keep our work persona and our ‘personal life’ persona separate, sometimes even for legal reasons).

So when you switch from one medium to another, it can be wrenching or jarring for several reasons:

1. Since you aren’t ‘used’ to relating to that person in that alternative persona, your first communications may be very awkward, frightening, even humiliating. When you switch from Second Life to Voice-to-Voice, do you refer to each other by your Second Life or First Life names? Do you need to disclose additional information about yourself? Does this simple medium change fundamentally change the nature of your relationship, because the relationship is now between different identities? (You think Superman had it tough with just two identities, try juggling a half dozen). Even within Second Life, some people have multiple avatars (identities) that they use for different purposes (e.g. business, romance, and fun).
2. You have imagined the other person (or people) to be a certain way, by ‘filling in the spaces’ that the medium leaves open, and when you suddenly discover they are not what you imagined at all, it can be dumbfounding. When you’ve only known someone through blog communication or e-mail or Second Life chat or IM, and suddenly you hear their voice for the first time (or meet them face to face), you may discover they’re a lot younger or older than you imagined, or they have an accent you weren’t expecting (and perhaps don’t like), or that they have three eyes, or even that they’re a different gender than what you expected. Your perception suddenly changes, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. The relationship is forever changed. No wonder some people fiercely resist taking relationships to ‘the next level’! It’s safer not to take the chance.
3. Once you’ve made the transition from one medium to another, ‘richer’ one, it’s hard to go back. We discussed the fact that long-time online ‘pen pals’, after they’ve met in person, often cease communicating by e-mail or IM anymore, for all sorts of reasons. When you’re used to hearing someone’s voice, or seeing their face, and suddenly you have to go back to just text communication, it can be very frustrating, almost as if you’ve lost the use of one of your senses. It can even be disorienting — you start to imagine that person as different from what you know them to be, because their writing just seems different from the way they talk and relate face-to-face. You may even think they’ve changed, or become distant, because text in the absence of context (voice or visual clues) is terribly ambiguous.

As David Wong points out, text is poor communication (easily misunderstood) and less communication (lacking sensory clues to meaning and nuance). But it has its advantages. It gives the inarticulate time to think about a response, which generally makes them sound smarter. It allows for mystery, through deliberate ambiguity — which can be alluring. It is easier to archive and re-read later than voice conversation. And it allows people to role-play, which is (a) fun and (b) safe — you can more easily create and sustain an identity significantly different from your ‘real’ one when you only use text and self-created avatars. I can absolutely understand why some people vow never to ‘confuse’ or ‘cross over’ from an online identity to a more ‘real’ (what Mich calls ‘meatspace’) identity. Each identity is kept completely separate from the others, with no online clues anywhere that might allow someone to track them from one identity or another, and no overlap between the communities and networks they are a part of in each identity. This can be a major juggling act, and necessarily makes you a bit schizophrenic.

The issue of moving from one medium and/or identity to another gets even more complex when the relationship, the community, or the conversation has multiple conversants. What do you do when you’re in a four-way IM conversation and two of the people decide it should jump to voice-to-voice? What if the other two are uncomfortable with this? What if some of the conversants want to go to a whiteboard to sketch out their idea collaboratively, or webcams so they can ‘see’ what each other ‘mean’, and others either refuse or can’t muster the technology to make the transition? Important relationships are built on trust, and trust can be lost easily when one person wants to ‘change’ the relationship suddenly (by moving to a different medium and, by implication, to a different persona or identity). But sometimes the advantages of changing media (and the frustrations of more limited media) are such that the desire to force such a change can be overwhelming.

Add love into the mix and things really get interesting. When two people who have never met in ‘real’ life fall in love, and one of them wants to change media, the challenge to the relationship can be gut-wrenching.

When I first went into Second Life, I was perfectly content to keep my ‘Second Life’ and ‘Real Life’ identities strictly separate. I didn’t want to know who any of my new SL friends were in the ‘real’ world and didn’t want them to know about my ‘real’ identity either. And I didn’t want to use voice-to-voice — as a writer I’m just more comfortable using text than speech to convey what I think is important. But when Mia agreed to help me build a model Intentional Community in Second Life, she quickly persuaded me that clear, fast, candid communication demanded voice-to-voice contact. I was terrified (of what each of us would think of each other) but she was absolutely right, and now I nudge those with whom I share virtual community to talk voice-to-voice as much as possible. I really love the new social media (like GMail/GTalk) that allow you to jump from one medium to another (e.g. IM to v2v) with a single click.

Is it possible to get too caught up in the ‘game’ to the point you begin to take your online identities (and others’ online identities) too seriously, to the point you starve your ‘real’ identity and end up with a stunted social life, neglected ‘real’ world friends and family, and an inability to function properly in the ‘real’ world?

My answer to this question, perhaps surprisingly, is no. Stephen Downes’ brilliant speech on the elusive nature of reality has persuaded me that what we think of as ‘real’ life is just as much a figment of our imaginations as any virtual place we could inhabit. people in ‘real’ life fall in love with fictions, people they just imagine others to be, as readily as if the object of their affection were an invention. And David Wong’s explanation of why virtual worlds are just as healthy places to live in as the ‘real’ world is very compelling. You can learn as much, experience as much, love as much in virtual worlds, interacting with ‘real’ people, as in the real world. You arguably do less damage to the environment through such virtual entertainments than you would driving long distances to consume and then discard crap in the real world.

It’s been argued that it’s irresponsible to ‘hide’ in virtual worlds when so much work needs to be done in the ‘real’ world. I have some sympathy with this argument, for the very few who don’t spend their ‘real’ world waking hours merely reading unactionable information, engaging in impotent debate, and consuming violent, desensitizing video and music ‘entertainment’ that is surely far more escapist than many of the intense virtual world discussions I’ve experienced.

That’s why I’ve been adamant about how I spend my online time, purposefully, in Second Life, and in my IMs (and e-mails when I can’t persuade friends to move to real-time media) with friends I’ve met through my blogs, real-life contacts and other social networks and communities I am a part of. I don’t engage in fantasy, or small-talk, or echo-chamber mutual reassurance conversations, or debates. Every conversation has a purpose — which may be to give attention to learn something new, to understand something better, to convey an important idea or an imagined possibility, to express love and appreciation, to collaborate, or to build community through consensus or exchange. I am a model-builder, and about as far from a cult leader or cult member as you could imagine — I’m neither a leader or a follower by nature: I hate hierarchy and everything meaningful in my life has come through Letting Myself Change and peer-to-peer conversation and collaboration and tossing out possibilities that I hope will be useful to others, when they are ready, and adapted to their own use as part of their Let-Self-Change process. That’s all I could ever ask for.

In a world that permits of infinitely many personas and identities, I am increasingly presenting to the world just one — my authentic self, to the extent my slow learning process has allowed me to understand and represent it. I finally know myself, this one identity, as well as I could ever hope to. I haven’t time to go inventing others, and my oneself has too much to do as it is.

But it’s clear that, like everyone else, I crave attention and appreciation. Just like all the blog writers who face the long, uncertain and lonely process of building up an audience. Just like the Second Life (and First Life) denizens who long for partnership, for conquest, for “just one minute of real love“.

As Patti explained in her recent post, it’s amazing how fear and insecurity drives what we feel and do. And there is no greater fear than that of being alone, unloved, ostracized by those with whom we presume to share community. No wonder then that tyrants, manipulators, marketers, psychopaths and predators exploit our fears, tell us that if we don’t do and feel and think what they want, if we don’t become “everybody else”, we won’t get the attention and appreciation we crave — we will be alone.

We express our love for others not by saying “I love you” but through giving attention and appreciation to those we love, by doing something for others. This is why love has been such an evolutionary success: It gets things done. This is wonderful when the recipient of our love wants and values and reciprocates it. When it’s rejected it’s devastating. Just ‘being’ in love is impotent, hermetic, useless.

The challenge with online communities is that it’s harder to know, every day, what you’re doing for others. You have to rely on them to tell you, over and over, because they can’t show you how much your attention and appreciation does for them, gives them. That’s why I think so many consider online communities insufficient, and insist that the “song of a warm, warm body” is needed to convey and achieve real love, real conversation, real community. Second Life, and video/audio/IM conversations at least get halfway, because they’re multimedia (more sensory clues, in the diagram at right) and real-time. But still…

Still, we live and die on the attention and appreciation we get when we give attention and appreciation to others. My heart soars when the smile I give to a stranger on the subway is returned. I feel delight when the flirtatious remark I give to another at a party, or in an IM discussion, or in a chance meeting in Second Life, is reciprocated.

I am more alive when I hear the whisper of one I love in my ear, telling me what she loves about me. When my comment provokes nods, “yes…and” responses, joyful laughter and warm smiles. When someone I love pushes me down and climbs on top of me for the pleasure she knows, and I know, I can give her. When a conversations suddenly becomes intimate as two of us spark with “aha” realizations, learning from each other, discovering things we already knew but suddenly become clear, thrilling, full of astonishing promise.

When I share an experience, a moment of appreciation of something important, valuable, beautiful with others — a sunset, a quotation that bristles with meaning, a sudden caress, a turn of phrase, a compliment, the view from a mountaintop, the smell of rain, the taste of fresh-picked berries, the sound of a cathedral choir — these are so much more powerful than when they are experienced alone. These are life-changing moments of connection, so rare and important. We can never get enough of them.

I can understand, from an evolutionary point of view, why such moments of mutual attention and appreciation, and shared attention and appreciation, are selected for, and essential to us, filling an insatiable empty space in us. What will forever fill me with awe is how such moments and our search for them can drive us to such incredible heights and lengths, of courage and self-sacrifice and infidelity and sheer madness. And, when they are missing, to equally incredible depths of despair.

Of course we are social creatures — it is to our benefit to be so. But why, and how, can we live and die so much on what others think of us that everything else becomes grey, empty, meaningless? And how can we learn, for our own well-being and that of those we love, and that of those we will never meet but who will be touched in turn by those we love, to be better and more generous at giving and receiving attention and appreciation? If we could all learn to transform our world’s terrible attention deficit and scarcity of appreciation into one of abundance,is there anything we could not then achieve?

A David Wong trilogy:

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable: Read the whole brilliant, hilarious article. Synopsis:

1. There are not enough strangers in our lives — as a result we fail to build up resilience to frustration, and are underexposed to diversity
2. There are not enough annoying friends either — and hence not enough friends, period
3. Text is bad communication — too easily misunderstood (as critical, or as supportive, or as consistent with your own view, when it is not)
4. Text is less communication — missing all the sensory clues of other forms of communication
5. We don’t get enough personal criticism — from which we learn and grow best: “Those horrible, awkward, wrenchingly uncomfortable sessions that you can only have with someone who sees right to the center of you”.
6. There’s far too much echo chamber outrage — the ability to get a steady stream of stuff that plays on what gets you worked up, and none of the stuff that puts all that in perspective
7. We don’t actually do enough for others — because it’s so easy to spend your life in thought and communication, away from the direct physical evidence of what is needed, and the demand that you actually act

10 Ways Online Role-Playing is Changing the Future: A must for Second Life and World of Warcraft addicts, and for anyone else who thinks alternative realities are better than the ‘real’ one, or vice versa.

12 Reasons We Can’t Care About More Than ~150 People, and Why That Makes the Modern World So Dangerous: More than a discussion of Dunbar’s number, this is an amazing analysis of human and animal social behaviour.

How Fear Grounds Us (keeps us focused) and Grounds Us (keeps us paralyzed): Patti Digh explains how our fears and insecurities inhibit us, drive us, and prevent us everywhere. I love the fact she has ‘intentions’ that stem from her insights, at the end of each article. Thought, then action. I challenge you to stop at one page when it comes to devouring Patti’s blog. Totally addictive.

Women Invest in Sex to Obtain Relationships, Men Invest in Relationships to Obtain Sex: TerraPraeta explains what drives men and women in relationships. What do you think? And if she’s wrong, why are we so suspicious of people who make such investments freely, without expectation of getting anything (obvious) out of it?

Why We Love Peace and Hate Strangers: Biologist Robert Sapolsky provides case histories that show that not only are we primates extremely culturally malleable, we are prone, in the absence of environmental stresses, to be both xenophobic and peace-loving.

EO Wilson & Richard Dawkins Square Off Over Selfish Genes: An interesting debate on the biological origins of altruism. I don’t really buy either argument, because I think the late Stephen J Gould had a much better explanation, which is often reflected on these pages, and is consistent with Sapolsky’s findings, above. Don’t miss the comments below the article, which are also fascinating.

Newsweek Weighs in on Marriage, And Broadsheet replies: “The vitriolic response to [the Newsweek essayist’s] decision to define her personal relationships on her own terms also suggests how threatening the idea of not embracing marriage continues to be.” And, Carol Lloyd adds, “For something so exclusionary and heavy with misogynist baggage, I reason, shouldn’t this legal/spiritual/love bond at least perform better as a bonding substance than our 50 percent divorce rates suggest?”

Thought for the Week: From VoxClamantis, a commenter on the Wilson/Dawkins debate:

Summary: Author Laura Kipnis argues in her book Against Love that monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy, and possibly complicit in our emotional detachment from political life and our ecosystem as well. Her argument is consistent with Glenn Parton’s argument in his essay Love Politics.

Quotes:

The illustration at right is from Peter Steiner in The New Yorker, artwork and other items for sale in the Cartoon Bank.

“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Until a generation or two ago, we were all taught that animals had no feelings, no intelligence, that they were incapable of feeling pain — it was all autonomic reaction, they were mere robots. Only humans, magically endowed by God, had these distinguished qualities.

With such staggering, almost unfathomable, universal ignorance of animal nature, it’s not surprising that we really know nothing of human nature. We can, after all, judge the nature of our species only from our own personal nature. There is absolutely no consensus on our innate nature, or even if there is such a thing. Some people believe we are all inherently evil, sinful, and need strict control to prevent us from running amok and committing deadly sins without remorse or restraint. Some people believe we are all inherently well-intentioned, and in the absence of stresses we will always be sociable, generous, even altruistic.

Psychologists and sociologists, with their dumbed-down, simplistic models, seem especially incompetent at understanding our nature. We are left to piece together our own perception of what makes us tick, and we tend to socialize with others who share our worldview of human nature and how the world works.

In Straw Dogs, John Gray painted a picture of human nature as self-absorbed and driven by immediate needs (urgency before importance):

This assessment seemed intuitively valid to me, consistent with Pollard’s Law: We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. While this book’s assessment of the future of our species was gloomy, Gray seemed to be making the point that, just as we emerged from the cauldron of evolution as a remarkable accident, an improbability, so too was our demise accidental, the result of overpopulation and overconsumption that was in turn the result of a series of extraordinary adaptations (the inventions of catastrophic agriculture and what we call civilization) necessitated by a horrifically bad roll of the cosmic dice (the striking of Earth by a meteor that wobbled its orbit and caused the ice ages). I could buy short-sightedness and selfishness as ‘human nature’ but only in the context of the four boldface words above. When times are desperate, yes, I can see us behaving the way we now do. These are not normal times. We live in a horribly overcrowded, violent world where psychopathy is an effective survival strategy and where we are all (and not always just metaphorically) prisoners.

This is what lies behind the apparent contradiction between my belief that our civilization is in its last century, and my passion for creating models of better ways to live. If we can get away from the mental and physical prisons of modern society, we might rediscover how we were meant to live. In a world without desperation, scarcity, urgency, what true human nature and what astonishing joy and accomplishment might emerge? And even if it’s too late to save our species from civilizational collapse, that knowledge of working models might be useful to the survivors. And if we gotta go, what a high to go out on!

In his new book, Black Mass, Gray removes the above four word qualifier from his assessment of human nature. Not only does our world face intractable problems, he asserts, we live in an “intractable world”. He rails for most of the book against various “idealistic” approaches to coping with such a world: Western religious orthodoxy, utopianism, the entire spectrum of political ideologies, and post-modern ideologies of scientific, teleological,  ‘free-market’ economic and techno-utopianism. Only realism, an acceptance that ‘progress’ is a myth and that civilization necessarily entails a constant struggle against despots, liars, murderers, thieves, megalomaniacs, genocides, oppressors, hoarders, extremists, psychopaths, mobs and other manifestations of human frailty. Moral dilemmas where opposing views and needs are simply irreconcilable are inevitable, he argues. And then, wham:

No when times are desperate qualifier. It’s hard to say whether this represents a darkening of Gray’s perception of human nature or merely a tacit acknowledgement that in our terrible modern world times are always desperate. My guess is that it’s the former, and that Gray would not think much of intentional communities. He would probably believe, as others who see humans as ‘fixed and flawed’ would, that such communities are merely idealistic, smaller-scale ‘fixed and flawed’ societies even more open to despots and cultists than larger, more heterogeneous cultures.

And this takes us back to the essential point that no one really ‘knows’ human nature. Our experience and context of it is too narrow, and the narratives of human behaviour throughout history are inevitably tainted by their authors’ worldviews. As Lakoff has explained, we accept information that is consistent with our personal worldviews and reject, almost subconsciously, information that is not. Paul Simon, quoted at the top of this article, said the same thing. We believe what we want to believe. There is no ‘objective’, unarguable data that can be applied to change those beliefs. We are all, ultimately, as Gray himself argues, figments of reality — lonely collections of organs that evolved consciousness in their collective self-interest. He writes, in Straw Dogs: “We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.”

What is the ‘nature’ of a ‘succession of fragments’? I would argue that (at least when times are not desperate) its nature is evolutionary — to live, to experience, to be happy, and to socialize in the interest of enabling a continuation of that happy experience. It is in our collective interest to get along, to love, to converse, to live together in community, to maximize life and its diversity.

But then what do I know. I’m just a figment of reality, a succession of fragments, a complicity of the creatures that make up my body, like anyone else.

Painting above by painter and environmentalist Sophie Sheppard, auctioned in1999 at the Authors Unite in Defense of Mother Earth festival.