An Ecology of Communication

We are living at a paradigmatic juncture where the language we are used to using becomes maladaptive to communicating unprecedented phenomena unfolding before us at a galloping rate. The result for large clusters of the population is polarisation, sensory overwhelm, cognitive stress and/or apathy and disengagement into anaesthetised stupor. It is dangerous to try and communicate what is most important, and yet it seems even more dangerous to not communicate it… 

Official discourses of our dying culture have become atrophied and much of our language has become devoid of communicative function. The way out of this predicament according to Nate Hagens and his guests is to approach communication ecologically. The below conversation is between top humans who I have learned a great deal from over the past few years. The purpose of this little piece is to help myself consolidate what I have learned from this particular podcast episode.

Nora Bateson uses the term 'ecology of communication' in her latest book Combining. 

Below I summarise the opening lines of each participant in my own words.

Listen to the full conversation on The Great Simplification.

What is an ecology of communication?

Nora, Director of The International Bateson Institute, and founder-faciliator of Warm Data Labs kicks off the discussion by thoughtfully drawing our attention to the many unconscious habits in our communication that we have inherited from the age of industry and brought into the age of information while failing to realise that many of the ways in which we use language were not ecological, i.e. were not conducive to producing life but instead worked as a mechanistic straightjacket for ecological meanings.

Our atomised perception of "what's in it for me?" of our communications can keep us imperceptibly trapped in feeding discourses that subvert the communicational value of speech. If life thrives on effective communication between organisms and parts of organisms, overfocusing on parts at the expense of wholes inevitably leads to devitalisation of the entire ecosystem as the narrowing our perception to decontextualised parts distorts optics and leads to misjudgement. If communication is the faculty of the interrelationships which make up the living world, then to speak ecologically, according to Nora, is to speak while paying attention to the relational process between the parts and the whole; it is to speak with an awareness that our words "land in multiple contexts" determined by various discourses that other people live in.

Some of these discourses have been colonised by the monoculture of communication that is a symptom of our existential predicament. An ecology of communication seeks to help us get out of the monoculture of communication by seeking new ways in which we can learn together by meeting each other in conversation across contexts.

Ecological thinking is non-algorithmic

Rex Weyler, Nora's friend and cofounder of Greenpeace, picks up on the theme by saying that the monoculture's way of thinking is incompatible with the complexity of the predicament we are trying to address: while our predicament is eco-logical (“let it live”), our thinking remains techno-logical (“fix it”). The monoculture's fixation on what I call algorithmic rationality (linear, sequential, goal-oriented problem-solving), as Rex argues, is out of sync with the process of life that is of an entirely different kind. 

Rex’s first question to anyone wishing to change the world is "How does a change happen in an ecosystem?." The question entails the recognition of unintended consequences of any action informed by the insufficient linear first-order thinking of many wannabe world-improvers (Daniel grinning mischievously).

From discourse of domination to discourse of transmutation

Following Rex is Vanessa Andreotti , Dean of Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria and author of Hospicing Modernity. Andrea opens up by zooming in on our relationship to language and how it might lead to miscommunication. She refers to Rex’s distinction between two respective discourses: (1) of environment, and (2) of ecology. Each one evokes a respective set of responses: (1) of an “aesthetic form and of the utility of the environment,” and (2) of a “metabolic alchemy in motion.” She describes the politics of the former as one related to “entitlements to more entitlements,” and the politics of the latter as one related to “responsibilities to more responsibilities.” 

Our outdated industrialist-colonialist (domination?) habits of language, according to Vanessa, have “exiled” from the Western discourse certain capacities which could otherwise help us address the current predicament of our dying modernity. Importantly, these habits constitute a deep cognitive-neurochemical imprint optimised for a non-metabolic logic of the will to predictive control in service of guaranteed outcomes. Understood in this way, the monoculture of communication is an “invasive species” on the host of the ecology of communication, thus sabotaging the commitments that are in service of life. 

Shifting our linguistic habits towards ecological communication would require learning to pay attention to “motion and mystery of the interrelatedness and entanglement of everything” which entails deactivating the old habits and reactivating “capacities that have been exiled by these habits.” The habits have layers: cognitive, affective, and relational, which correspond to our perceived entitlement to autonomy, authority, arbitration, affirmation, virtues, superiority, etc. all of which default to the baseline neurochemical imprint which imposes “the story of separation” upon the grammar of the Western thinking. 

Lastly, this grammatical indigestion plaguing the discourse of modernity has been exacerbated by the totalising algorithmic conditioning of AI-driven network dynamics which keeps us entrenched in the old habits while precluding the possibility of escaping it. All of this occurs within the conceptual bias of the Anglophonic monoculture which renders certain dimensions of life invisible and therefore impossible to address.

'I am because we are'

Next up is Daniel Schmachtenberger , cofounder of The Consilience Project (read the most recent publication here) and Civilization Research Institute . Daniel starts off by noting that boundaries between cells, creatures and ecosystems are real but permeable. The bi-directional exchange of energy, information and matter across these boundaries is the communication that makes life possible. Upsetting the intrinsic balance of this exchange would upset the ecological process. 

Considering oneself as separate from the rest of life is one example of such upsetting. If I imagine myself not as an “I” but as an emergent property of my ecosystem, I realise that I am (sub-ject) only insofar as we are (trans-ject). So, to wish to pursue a self-serving goal at the expense of any other creature or ecosystem would be insane because it would mean harming and debasing that on which I depend. A good example of this is a cancer cell that metastasises throughout the organism until it kills its host and dies with it. 

Daniel concludes by offering a refined distinction between authentic and phony communication. While one can be authentic in a crude way that fails to meet the other on the right wavelength, the genuinely ecological communication, he argues, requires the capacity for attunement that might transform what 'authentic' means not in the subjective but transjective sense (terminology borrowed from John Vervaeke). Later on, Daniel also reminds us that every communicational biotechnology, model, or system, (e.g. Neurolinguistic Programming, Nonviolent Communication, dialectic etc.) is potentially weaponisable and therefore can be inverted to be used with an intent to harm, thus subverting its ecological dimension while averting the perception of this being the case. In other words, any discourse of virtue and compassion can be abused as a weapon against life.

Conclusion: towards a planetary ecology of communication

All four speakers have articulated their own perspective on an ecology of communication. Yet, to perceive this content ecologically, Nora reminds us, is be attentive to not what has been said but what relationship there is between what has and has not been said in the interaction. Life happens in between the stories, not in them. The way in which one person’s story elicits a spontaneous response in someone else is the essence of an ecological approach to communication. 

To indulge Nora’s own metaphor, imagine this conversation is a soup and the participants’ voices are chunks of vegetables floating in it. How does each chunk add to the overall flavour, taste and smell of the soup? What does the soup become with more or less of one ingredient or another? How do the flavours come together? How do the ingredients contribute to the overall sensory and nutritious value of the soup?

In an ecology of communication we come together to share in an interrelational process of evolving through complexity, not to solve problems, but to participate in the process of developing ever less misguided responses to predicaments whose wise overcoming will define our future, if we are to have one.