The Inner Life of the Future (Talk at NYU)
Governing with Collapse and Transformation in Mind.
In November I gave a keynote talk at New York University Law School at a wonderful 4-day event called FORGE (Future Of Rights and GovernancE) that recently went online. We had a strict time limit of 15 minutes (that I somehow stretched to 18) but I chose a bold expansive title several months before the talk and then did what I could to live up to it: The Inner Life of the Future: Governing with Collapse and Transformation in Mind (see video below).
The talk was densely packed with ideas, I was clearly overcaffeinated, and I’m not at all sure about the choice of scarf or the random globe that I picked up from the street in London, but I did prepare thoroughly, and overall I am happy with how it came out.
The background is my Open Society Fellowship from roughly 2017-2019 which led to an extended piece of writing called "Dear Human Rights Movement", which was an open letter published in English and Spanish by Open Global Rights in 2020. The letter is based on my year of travel and research making sense of the predicaments of different aspects of the human rights movement and by extension the state of the liberal order.
The main organiser of FORGE, Professor César Rodríguez-Garavito, invited me to speak to aspects of my letter, but also invited me to incorporate some of my latest thinking on the metacrisis, to help provide some big picture perspective for the conference ahead, which is what I did.
I’m not sure how much I lived up to the title in the end, but I say more about what I mean by the inner life of the future here, and there’s only so much you can do in one talk. Now I'm curious to know how it lands with a wider audience, so I would be grateful for any amplification or feedback.
Thank you 🙏
Jonathan.
In other news, Perspectiva will be in touch again soon with an update on our community offering, and we’ll also be uploading two recordings of wonderful events about our inquiry into music, metacrisis, and metanoia.
If you haven’t watched our antidebate video produced by Katie Teague, it is well worth your time, some have called it ‘a triumph’, apparently it has made some people cry, and you can find it here.
At FORGE, I met the poet and climate activist Ayisha Siddiqua who was speaking there too. I was deeply impressed by her insight, composure, and clarity. I am delighted that Ayisha will join Rowan Williams as one of our two main plenary speakers at this year’s Realisation Festival, alongside music, dance, and a wide variety of other workshops and activities. Tickets are selling fast and Perspectiva provides a bursary programme for those who would like to attend but feel they cannot afford the ticket. All details are here.
The simplest way to support all such initiatives and to help Perspectiva financially at the moment is to become a founding member or paid subscriber of this Substack, which will remain our main communication vehicle for the foreseeable future.
Wow, you packed a lot into that talk! It’s such a pity that you were given such a short amount of time to talk about such broad topics. What struck me was you telling a group of law students to put logic on the back burner or at least to not use solely logic, probably went right through one of their ears and out the other. You could’ve spent the entire 18 minutes on this point alone and still not gotten it across due to the way they are trained to think and act. Bravo to you for trying!
Interesting, in the context of "Perspectiva will be in touch again soon with an update on our community offering," and my comment below about inner moves that check-mate our so-called rationality and the *make-believe* aspect of our conscious awareness of reality. I received an email from the Realisation Festival event organizers cancelling my ticket and promising a full refund, of course.
And in the interests of transparency, a principle, which I'm sure the fine upstanding members of the community agree with, the reason for the cancellation is, "We have read the comments by you on the social media of several people connected to the Festival, and feel that your approach is not compatible with what we offer at Realisation."
Seriously! Are people more concerned with themselves than the *metacrisis* and the fact that thousands of children will die during the event in June, as members have a *nice* time? Why not let me attend & have the pleasure of watching highly educated people punch holes in anything I have to say, or wonder about the non-conscious impulse to ignore what I say?
Especially when it comes of showing people the reification-fallacy of their conditioned rationality & how to experience the psychological death & resurrection that enables an embodied grasp the reality of being-in-time, alluded to in the *appearances* structure of the Christ narrative. Is there a *fear* of embarrassment, should I expose the lack of self-knowledge & awareness of *venerated* essay writers?