We live in a state of separation. From nature. From the whole. From ourselves. This is the result of a long cosmological shift in which humanity’s relationship to the world has gradually changed — from participant to ruler, from inhabitant to stranger. The historical journey of cosmology At the dawn of history, there was no separation between human and world. Hunter-gatherer peoples like the…

After reading Kenneth Sylvesteri's review of Nora Bateson's new book Combining yesterday, I was encouraged to look into the notion of "warm data" more. I have been quiet about Gaza lately and I'll just put that out there as context for my curiosity about it. Along the way I listened to a Team Human Podcast with Bateson from October of 2018. There's also a recent one from earlier this month. They are cool discussions.

I am not sure what I think about Warm Data Labs. I get the importance of coherence, but essentially the Warm Data Hosts seem something that will never involve me in one way or another. But I did enjoy hearing Bateson talk about these trainings in the 2018 Podcast. It seems a bit like the Harvard Business School's "case study" method; nota bene: I am probably wrong. Anyhow, Bateson said that at a training in San Francisco the attention was to "addiction." A few months later at a training in Indonesia "addiction" was also the focus. Bateson then said that some of the insights developed in either training were highly relevant to the other ones.

That reminded me of The Ghana Think Tank where laboratories are set up in "so-called developing countries to help solve first-world problems." The American Riad shows how potent such exchanges can be.

Bateson can be credited with coining the term "warm data." It's good that it's not a proprietary term, but rather a living idea that can be put to use.

Martin Garcia at Cabrillo College Federation of Teachers. Book Review: Jack D. Forbes – Columbus and Other Cannibals

Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism

Interesting phenomena appear when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another. ~Gregory Bateson

I recently joined Nora Bateson’s Warm Data Lab host training (hence many articles from her - it really is SO good) and have absolutely marinated myself with overlapping contexts, and am just beginning to understand the implications of this perspective changing work.

“Beginning to embrace new thinking, warmer thinking — in relationship, will nourish a new version of solidarity to participate in a world of vibrant, creative and unimagined change. The warm data process familiarizes groups of people with the ways in which the contexts of their lives marinate and overlap into each other and it offers an introduction to the complexity of their own lives, so that they may better see the complexity of others. Through this discovery people begin to see how vital it is to tend to their families, communities and the land, and they are able to respond to emergencies with warmth.“

“It matters. The way we talk about the crises, from rape to refugees, to climate and wealth gap, from crooked politics to obsolete ways of living –the way we discuss what needs to be done now will shape what it is possible to do.

Finally, it is time to publically notice what has been unsayable. If the discourse is moored to the existing notions of logic, then that is what will be delivered. The need to get out of the rational, credible, authorized tones of dishwasher instructional manuals cannot be overstated — This is not a moment to fix a machine, this is a moment to compose new cultures. This is the time to allow the success stories of the past to find themselves rewritten as denouement. The failures of the past are suddenly as vital as ancient grains.

If the story is told in flatness, the “solutions” will be flat. If the work is done in sterile rooms with sterile power-points, the findings will not be imbued with the new frequencies necessary. The connection between the textures that the emergencies are described within and the way responses can emerge is non-trivial. Stale discourse produces stale responses. Linear discourse produces linear responses. What sort of response is hoped for?“

-  Show up as a human to a human. 

“I want to go slowly into tomorrow wrapped in the warmth of human to human mutual learning. The opportunity to shift the tone is in every single second of every single day.”

+ other excellent appetizers for thought on what to do next. 

Some resilience skills are for keeping together what already is, while some are for moving forward to what could be. This is a third part of the blog I started a few days ago if you did not read the first go here or the second go here.

Photo by K. P. D. Madhuka on Unsplash 

Psychology and resilience

In psychology, resilience is about responding to a multitude of risks, not to an isolated incidence. Specific risk factors can not be looked at in isolation from other risks, and the effect of a risk factor depends on its timing and relationship to other risk factors. Resilience skills in psychology can be broadly divided into three categories.

Resilience skills at the individual level, which are also related to personality, temperament and cognitive ability,

the resilience that comes from social capital and relationships of an individual with other people;

and resilience related to broader environmental factors and institutions (safety, access to life-supporting services etc).

I learnt that while small amounts of stress are good for building resilience, ongoing stress over a long period can result in lifelong physical and psychological consequences. Stressful experiences during critical periods of brain development in infancy and young childhood are particularly detrimental. This sounds quite straightforward.

Then I delve a bit more on the current research on advance neurobiology. It is fascinating to read how environment is changing physiology of an individual even in a lifetime to respond to adversity! We can map out epigenetic changes, such as DNA methylation and histone modifications, which change gene expressions; preparing the individual for future responses to environmental challenges.

How to connect the psychology of resilience back to the idea of composting?

Fear, doubt, self-hatred and resentment cause resistance for unlearning. If composting and letting go for a change is a vital resilience skill, it is a not a surprise that psychology articles that I did read during this journey, place the self-esteem and sense of control over one’s own life as central resilience characteristics. Conclusively, it does not help to make people who have suffered trauma feel that they are victims of the circumstances, at least not at the personal level.

As a matter of fact, the people that have felt, or are in it just now (be it a climate-related disaster, pandemic or a political conflict), are the real experts of resilience. People who are already profoundly merged in the decay of the modernity, and absurdity of the current development paradigm, are finding alternative ways to nurture life. Remarkably, even in terrible circumstances, people show resilience, a “lust for life”. What this could this mean in practice?

In this podcast episode, Vanessa Andreotti narrates her work with the indigenous communities in Latin America. She used the deep adaptation group practises on “a social collapse” derived from Jem Bendell’s work on deep adaptation. The response of the indigenous community that Vanessa is working with was telling. - What? Are you asking us to imagine what would happen when the so-called “essential” services collapse - if a gasoline station runs out gasoline, or if there is no electricity in the grid, or shelves at the food stores are empty? Some felt offended that this was a picture of a collapse of civilization. -  But it is our life now. And we are coping with it, we have to, and we ARE finding ways to live.  

I find this insight fascinating. These communities who are in the midst of it all are the best experts to teach resilience skills. It might be helpful if we (who are not so adversely affected by the multiple crises of our globalized world) would pay more attention to what is emerging in these communities. The following anecdote, which I also heard from Vanessa, helps understand this wisdom. “The water needs to be at least knee hight before we can learn to swim; it is no point of practising at the water that is only reaching up to your ankles.

Are you looking at out of the box or inside the box?

From the perspective of a global society these lessons from psychology might be counterintuitive, would we not need to pay attention to vulnerability, to map out and recognize the systemic inequality and suffering that our Western hegemony and destructive economic system is imposing to those exploited?

Yes, collectively, we need to address the historical burden of inequality. Still, answers how to approach that question might be very different from the ways that we think problems are fixed. 

Indigenous communities involved in the work of Vanessa’s collective gesturing towards decolonial futures are clear that if relationships are not healed, are not grounded, we will end up more killing and destruction. In contrast to regenerative transformation for the whole of humanity, people will turn inwards, to fight to protect their families and loved ones from the increasing violence. That insight feels right to me.

And indeed, more and more thinkers, artists and activists are paying attention to relationships and what happens in “a liminal space” in between. One of the leaders of this thought is a systems thinker, writer and educator Nora Bateson. What I particularly like in her theory is that instead of searching for something outside the current system “to replace the system” we ought to look inside the system. How we, as warm bodies and intelligent organisms, are in our relationships with other parts of the system. Her concept of warm data is not a map of connections that can be drawn on a piece of paper because it is only perceived when being part of a system and participating in it.