Hospitality Addenda

Additional Addenda to The Evolution of Hospitality:

Appendix Three: Dempsey Interview

A recent conversation between Jim Rutt and Brendan Graham Dempsey, provided an excellent description of hierarchical complexity (see also Donella Meadows' work on leverage points). This very clearly relates to symbiogenesis, and through that to host-guest dynamics. If this is the case, then why not speak solely in terms of hierarchical complexification as the more parsimonious evolutionary explanation for lateralization, and abandon the more parochial sounding terminology of host and guest? It should be noted that these are actually complimentary ideas, but there may be several reasons to prefer the latter terms as more, ironically, conceptually complex. Asymmetry must be addressed as a feature of the complexification process, and the more numinous or phenomenological features of the ethics of care, as these are seen in other religious and philosophical traditions described earlier, need to be adequately accounted for. But setting these and related criticisms aside, this is a rich vein of thought that echoes some earlier writing on hierarchy and constraints, which is seen as well within the biosemiotics literature. (Incidentally, Dempsey's points may also serve as a partial response to many of Robert Ellis' criticisms of McGilchrist, as they tend to reveal Ellis' own blindspots concerning paradox and transcendence.) The explanation of Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, particularly as it relates to contemporary society, is very eye opening:

Brendan: The big picture, big history, complexification story situates four major complexity levels. Out of some kind of information-energy implicate order you get matter, and then out of matter emerges life, out of life emerges mind (which in this case means active bodies and nervous systems), and then out of mind you see culture [cf. Smith and Szathmáry]. At life, you get a new complexity level because you’ve got genetic information. At mind, you’ve got neuronal information, and at culture, you’ve got symbolic information (language and some of the more advanced semiotic processing). So it’s a helpful taxonomy of levels.

Complexification is happening across all these different scales of cosmic evolution. It is the coming together in coordination [synergy] of multiple parts to form comprehensive wholes that have qualities that aren’t in the parts themselves. Complexity is what we see all around us, and it’s what is increasing across cosmic evolution. As you get parts coming together to form novel wholes that then themselves can be parts in still higher order wholes and so on, you get this sort of potentially recursive complexification dynamic. That is what we see across big history. If you just want to use the example of atoms coming together to form molecules, molecules coming together to form minerals, and then planets — you’ve already got some level of organizational complexity there. Once you get the emergence of the first cell on a planet, then if there’s reproduction of cells, you get multicellular organisms out of single cells, and so on.

I find "hierarchical complexity" to be a really powerful and helpful idea because it’s a unifying concept. New kinds of concepts come online that then themselves become coordinated to form higher order concepts, and those higher order concepts themselves start to get coordinated with similarly higher order concepts to form even more higher order concepts, and so on. That’s why it’s "hierarchical," because it builds up from what came before. It’s a coordination of parts yielding more comprehensive, qualitatively distinct, wholes. These processes by which the human mind learns are the same basic architecture that learning works through at all levels of cosmic complexity - an evolutionary process of variation and selective retention, coordinated at higher levels to produce more complex phenomena.

[Parenthetically, consider the case of a whole that is composed of many parts. Such an object may be said to be both "divided" and "united" at the same time. And so, we may adopt a more hierarchically complex concept, such as a fractal or holarchy, to try to transcend the conceptual limitations of our former means of representation, and resolve the paradox. This third concept is clearly better than either of the previous two concepts, taken in isolation. But is it better than the previous two concepts when these are taken together, as in the form of a paradox? These are separate forms of conceptual synthesis. What paradox allows is the ability to view higher level complexity from a lower level perspective that (as yet) may lack a sufficient conceptual toolset. This may be a fundamentally inescapable feature of symbolic systems - we will always find ourselves at a lower level attempting to glimpse a "higher integral territory" by means of perpetually insufficient maps. For McGilchrist, the "map-terrain paradox" is one of the most prominent features of reality, and what the hemisphere hypothesis (his own map) attempts to explain.]

Jim: What is your take on constructivism?

Brendan: Well, constructivism can mean a couple of different things. What I’m referring to is a kind of developmental constructivism. There are different kinds of constructivism — people have probably heard the phrase social constructivism, radical constructivism. The basic idea is that the mind in some way fashions, shapes, or forms the world as we experience it. If you want to go all the way back to Kant, it's that move from thinking we’re directly interacting with reality as it is, to actually needing concepts and categories in our brain that predefine the world for us.

In the case of radical social constructivism, these might be totally arbitrary. What I find of value here is a kind of middle way. The radical social constructivist approach is very unhelpful and counterproductive, and unfortunately, a lot of postmodern thought tends in that direction. But we also have to avoid a kind of naive realism that what we’re experiencing is somehow just reality as it is, unfiltered. There’s clearly a way in which we are getting a mediated experience of whatever that reality is.

I’m a realist. I think there’s a world out there, and this whole framework helps to understand the relationship between these two things. Getting beyond postmodern radical social constructivism requires that we actually say, yes, there is a real world. But just because we say there’s a real world doesn’t necessarily solve our question about how we have knowledge about it. A developmental constructivist approach situates an individual in a world that is always impinging on us. And through that we craft our mental models and representations of the world in a dynamic relationship with it. So we’re still getting constructed knowledge of the world, but it is in relationship to something that’s out there. That is how you can actually have a sense that we’re gaining better knowledge about something. A "developmental constructivist approach" helps us understand how knowledge is about informing viability and flourishing of an organism in context.

The constructs that we use are evolutionarily mediated. In Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” a bat’s knowledge of the world is going to be very different. It’s not that the world is necessarily a different world than what I’m experiencing, but the sensory inputs and capacities that a bat has to adaptively navigate the world are going to be radically different. We have an umwelt, a way that the world out there gets mediated through our biological inheritance and all the other aspects, particularly for humans, of a cultural inheritance and interpreted in particular ways. If we can appreciate the genuine insight that, yes, in a realist sense, there is a world out there that we can have better or worse knowledge of, and the constructivist insight that our understanding of that is under construction, then we can have the picture then that human worldviews themselves are evolutionary products. There is actually a way in which we can be approaching reality that is more adaptive in our lived contexts.

And that means that we’re out of postmodern radical relativism. Because while there’s some range of variability we can expect to see, it’s not wide open. As we grow and learn about what’s more adaptive in relationship to reality as we experience it, we are constraining the possibilities of more complex moral reasoning. You’re not going to get into higher levels of moral reasoning, in terms of complexity, and see just as many people saying, “You know, it makes just as much sense to nuke the world and take the people’s houses and do whatever you want and be hedonistic or whatever.” Higher complexity levels do tend to converge in particular directions. You could say there’s a kind of attractor at these higher levels. There are certain things that work and that don’t, generally speaking, at those scales. So there is variability, but it’s constrained variability.

Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development were an adaptation from Piaget. Basically, he proposed three major tiers. There’s what he calls the preconventional, the conventional, and the postconventional, and each of those three tiers is broken up into two stages each. Stage one is what he called the punishment and obedience kind of moral reasoning level. That’s basically people making decisions and determining what’s right, based on are they going to get kicked in the face? What do they need to do to make sure that they aren’t experiencing pain and can kind of look out for number one? That’s punishment and obedience. It’s a very basic, hedonistic, egoistic approach.

Stage two is the individual instrumental purpose and exchange level. It’s still egoistic and hedonistic, but at least there’s this instrumental factor. Now you have the ability to say, “Oh, I’ll do this so that this good thing will happen to me.” And you can be a bit more strategic about looking out for number one. So it’s not just sort of ad hoc and do whatever you do to make sure that you’re okay. You can actually be a bit cunning even or strategic and scheming for getting your perceived needs met. Both of those are preconventional levels.

The conventional level, which is stage three, shows up with what he called mutual interpersonal expectation, or relationships and conformity. So this is where people really get socialized into their community in a real way, and they actually start to mutually consider the well-being of their loved ones, their friends and family in a way that is sort of like, “Oh, okay. Yeah. It’s not just about me. It’s about us.” And so there’s a kind of conformist level there that shows up. So it’s like, let’s look out for us, and this tends to be very "us versus them."

Stage four is what he called social system and conscience maintenance. Here you’ve got someone in a system who is basically recognizing that the maintenance of that system is important, and also a deeper sense of individual responsibility in terms of conscience. "I could do this, but I really shouldn’t because it would be wrong, in a kind of theoretical or abstract or principled way." And so it’s not just that we do things because we’re the group and we’re awesome and they suck, it’s because this is a particular way that in order for us to keep being who we are and doing what we do, we have to have some rules and expectations in place. And so in some ways, it’s kind of an extension of that conformist view, but it also starts to get more into a deeper sense of internal conscience and morality and a more abstract sense of the social system.

Then you get the post-conventional levels. Stage five he called prior rights and social contract utility, which is basically thinking not just of society as society maintenance, but actually a prior-to-society standpoint. "What are the things that we would need to be in place for a successful thriving society to exist?" This involves the recognition that we actually do inhabit socially constructed environments, but that these are in place for our well-being and for the collective good. Stage six is universal ethical principles, but was pretty much just hypothetical and found in some philosophical works. So that’s kind of a rough outline of his stage model. Carol Gilligan, a student colleague [as well as critic] of Kohlberg’s, produced a rigorous model that tracks the hierarchical complexification trend. The major takeaway from the research is that these stages are real. They’re not just pulled out of nowhere. There are requisite levels of complexity that are needed to think about topics in certain ways. You can’t have a notion of collective good for society, and personal integrity, absent a kind of systematic level cognition. So being able to situate these developmental sequences in terms of the hierarchical complexification sequence was really interesting. 

Robert Kegan’s whole point in his book In Over Our Heads was that modern society is predicated on these higher levels in terms of what is expected in day-to-day functioning and to understand the systems that we live in and why they’re set up and structured the way that they are. But what he found was that most people are at the conformist level of mutual, relational tribal thinking. It’s very clear to see these dynamics emerge in election season. This is a huge collective problem that we face in our contemporary society of people being able to have the complexity to see why things are the way that they are and why they should be the way that they should be. What we’re seeing with, for example, a lot of what’s happening right now with the institutional breakdown and decay and the undermining of long-standing "rule of law" kinds of ways of thinking — people don’t seem to understand why those are actually good ideas. And they seem like a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic nonsense and namby-pamby sort of good intentions. But there’s a lot that goes into those systems of law and jurisprudence. And when we appreciate the ideals and principles that they’re based on, they make more sense. But what’s disturbing is that a lot of people aren’t getting that. And in terms of the complexity required to get it, yeah, they’re in over their heads in Kegan’s sense.

Human development is possible, learning is possible, growing is possible. Yes, there are going to be constraints on that from all sorts of levels. Social, certainly genetic factors probably figure in there. But we’re not constrained in some kind of genetic lottery that predetermines our entire way of being and value as people. We can actually try to live up to the ideals that supposedly we hold and that are at least in theory at the core of our society. This is not something that gets locked in at an early stage. If people are willing to learn and grow and do the kind of hard thing of trying to accommodate more of our understanding to reality and complexify our minds, we can do that. And I feel like that’s a more optimistic vision of human potential. 

Properly understood developmental models give us a roadmap for understanding how human flourishing can increase, how everyone can find their proper and happy and flourishing place in society regardless of where they’re at in some scale, how there’s a collective need for everyone in the diversity that they bring. We are in a social organism that requires variation and selective retention in the sense that we thrive off diversity, and we thrive off of new ideas and more out-there ideas. If postmodernists really understood the takeaways from these kinds of models, it actually speaks to a lot of the values of diversity, open-mindedness, and tolerance and growth that a lot of people just intuitively value. If we could get more scientific about actually building our systems to help cultivate this, we’d be in a lot better position collectively. And ironically, that’s just what we haven’t done.

Jim: Are the distribution curves of the different stages similar across societies?

Brendan: It would very much depend. If you were to look at, say, a country that gets really hit by war, that has very strong survival values, and lacks a robust educational infrastructure, and so forth, I’m sure they’re going to be much lower.

Jim: Do we want more people at higher levels?

Brendan: If you try to just push rote things — "oh, we gotta up people’s levels," that sort of thing — we don’t want to do that. There’s a whole thing called the "Piaget effect" in the developmental literature that shows what happens when you’re less interested in people organically growing, learning, and engaging in more spontaneous human flourishing through the kind of serotonin-dopamine cycle circular reaction of learning. But if we want to live in a society that values things like rule of law, has a more idealistic set of concerns of tolerance, open-mindedness, growth, and values that actually reflect human flourishing more, then I think the evidence points to the direction that we want to favor robust education systems that increase the level of complexity, making people members of a society in which all those things make sense to them so that they’re less likely to engage in an authoritarian reflex where all this complexity winds up eroding. What we really want is a society in which people have the ability to develop and grow freely, and with robust, strong thinking minds. And I think you want to create a set of conditions rather than try to aim at a set of outcomes to achieve that.

hemiepipmyte ("strangler" fig)

Appendix Four: Kingsnorth interview

McGilchrist's views on the contemporary uses of technology could be described as very critical, but they are also nuanced, so it is worth spending some time attempting to anticipate his response to any proposal for using a novel tool (such as LLMs) in the service of creating a more hospitable future. Below is an extended excerpt from a recent conversation he had with Paul Kingsnorth which appears to highlight a possible role for some LLMs, insofar as it is able to reproduce benefits similar to those we already enjoy from the Internet, but without the clearly dystopian purposes that other technologies could be put to. In short, bodily integrity is not violated (as it would be with chip implantation), personal privacy can be preserved, and top down control need not be imposed. None of this is needed to realize the potential for organically forming new relationships among the demos.

McGilchrist: "What seems to happen in societies is that when they're small and when they're at their their outset (for example, Greece in the 6th century BC, Rome around the year dot and I think I would say um Italy, France and Europe in general from the 14th or 15th century, the Renaissance) [these two versions of the world that we, each of us, have in in our brains, these ways of thinking] work very well, [they are both born in mind] and everything flourishes. They work together in a fruitful relationship in which the right hemisphere oversees the whole and the left hemisphere does a lot of the donkey work. But as things progress the left hemisphere seems to be emboldened by the idea of control. Civilizations get bigger, they have to control bigger land masses. They have greater wealth, and it becomes effectively a bureaucratic machine that grows up. And like a machine, it hasn't the subtlety that humans have about context and place and time and all the non-explicit things that rules and procedures leave out. All that gets lost, and the civilization coarsens, becomes crude, power obsessed and loses its insight into art and religion and the big questions."

Kingsnorth: "So the kind of cultural case that you're making is that in the modern West, and the modern world more generally, the emissary has usurped the master. You seem to suggest that it's effectively a consequence of scale. When society gets to a certain point, does it need to employ the left hemisphere so much that it loses touch? Is this an inevitable thing?"

McGilchrist: "When a society becomes very large we're treated as interchangeable numbers that have no real individual differences. For example, try to answer these ridiculous questionnaires online, where you have to fill in yes or no. You can't move on until you've made an answer. There's never a box for what I want to say which is something more subtle. It depends on the circumstances, and who I'm with, and all the rest. So all that stuff, all that subtlety gets lost. Partly through exaggerated scale, partly through a lust for power, and of course, they go together. But it's clear that the value that the left hemisphere holds is that of power and control. Whereas the right hemisphere is able to see other values. The right hemisphere is also much better able to understand the need for the left hemisphere. And in the myth of the master and his emissary, the master appoints an emissary to go on his behalf and do the bureaucratic work so that he is able to keep a proper oversight of things and allow the community of which he is the spiritual master to flourish. The right hemisphere is in touch with the real presence of whatever it may be, and the left hemisphere categorizes it and represents it, which literally means "makes it present again" when it is no longer present.

I don't want to decry the uses of technology. I benefit from aspects of technology. I don't for a minute doubt the value of various advances in technology in medicine, in daily life, and the internet has its uses. For example, without having to make a very long journey, you and I can actually talk in this way, which is a wonderful thing. You see, the trouble is nowadays there is a very extremist way of thinking. So people think if you're not for something, you must be against it completely. And this one or the other mentality leads to extreme positions. So I would say generally speaking technology has both good and bad outcomes, but taken too far in certain directions the dangers suddenly ramp up. The difficulty is how do we stop ourselves, how do we not do it.

You know, one very interesting thing I heard quite recently, and I can't remember the exact age range of the group of young people, but it was probably something like 18 to 30, um, were asked uh about their hopes and fears, and something like very nearly 50% of them, 47% or 49% even, said that they wish they had been born in an era before the internet, that they're seeing the downside of it. But the thing that really chilled me was reading this article that um I was sent a couple of days ago, quoting somebody I think in the World Economic Forum. One thing they were saying is by 2030 a mobile phone will be obsolete because we'll all have to have chips in us, and those chips will give us access to everything we need. So I mean you can refuse it but how will you go shopping? How will you get on a train? How will you make an appointment with a doctor? Because everything will be funneled through this chip which records everything about you and potentially has the capacity, believe it or not, to interfere with your mind, with your mentation, even with your emotions. Now, I don't know how accurate this is, or whether this is paranoia or what, but I think we're moving in that direction. And what we need is a group of people, a very very large group of people who will simply say no, this is too far."

Kingsnorth: "The notion of the internet of bodies is not a conspiracy theory. That's exactly where things are supposed to go next. So the smartphone is precisely supposed to be a kind of stepping stone towards the chip in the body. The internet of things is where everything is connected to the web, whether it's your fridge or your car or whatever, and that's already manifesting. And the next stage is the internet of bodies. And the internet of bodies is where the rational thing to do is to have a chip in your hand.

This is very much the way that the future is supposed to be planned. And again, from the perspective of your thesis about left hemisphere dominance, it makes perfect rational sense because everything is connected to everything else. We can do everything just with the chip in our arms. We're connected. You can walk into a shop with this chip in your arm. There don't need to be any human beings in the shop to sell you things. You walk through the shop, the scanners will notice what you've picked up, and then you just walk out of the shop again. Very rational. At the same time, the money will be taken from your bank account. You don't have to get your credit card out. You don't have to speak to any human beings. The whole world becomes this frictionless technological thing which a certain type of person who is very left hemisphere dominated presumably thinks is wonderful. The people who control the narrative and the people who create the technology are rushing us very very fast into this robotic left hemisphere world which takes us into goodness knows what horror. But as I say, they don't see it as horror. They see it as they see it as utopia."

McGilchrist: "There's so much to say about all of that. Part of it is, I think, the complete loss of any understanding of what it means to be human, to be a human being. We no longer know who we are, what we're doing here. Can't people see that this drive towards conformity and mechanism, if it were to succeed, would completely destroy our liberty and our dignity? We completely mistake ourselves when we think that every kind of friction, every kind of opposition, every kind of um restriction is something that should be done away with and is negative."

Kingsnorth: "Every religion in the world teaches that suffering is the path to God, to enlightenment, to spiritual improvement. And again, you're not supposed to intentionally seek it out, but when it comes to you, it's given to you for a reason. And the society we live in now teaches that the greatest good is to abolish suffering. And it's not that that's always a bad thing. Sometimes it's good to abolish suffering. It's good to have medical advances and various things that we value. But once you put this on a pedestal and you are prepared to sacrifice almost everything to a safety focused utopia, then well, you really get what Huxley wrote about in Brave New World, which is precisely where we are. It seems to me you have a safety focused utopia in which people give up their freedom in exchange for pleasure. The entirety of the Silicon Valley mindset, and I've done a fair bit of studying of this and spoken to some of the people involved in it, is precisely about removing suffering from all human life, which is seen as the greatest good. It's extremely utilitarian. If we can remove all suffering, then we have succeeded. And the ultimate way to remove all suffering is to abolish death, which is then to just to abolish humanity.

And you know, the whole thing rubs up against limits. So every traditional society, every religious teaching says limits are important. You have to push up against them. Suffering matters. That's what changes you. That's what helps you to grow. This mindset says no, we abolish those things. We don't need them. What you want is ease and a lack of suffering and the end of death. And it ends up being weirdly a precisely inverted version of say the Christian story in which we have an ascent to heaven, but the heaven that we ascend to is the uploading of our minds into a silicon cloud or into an AI. It's a very weird sort of almost autistic utilitarian view of what a suffering free world will look like. And it ends up being something that looks to me like hell. Actually, ironically, it ends up looking like a place in which there is no freedom, there is no humanity, there is nothing that we would recognize as any of those things at all. So, it's almost as if we get to see the consequences of our own fantasies almost playing out around us.

I suppose you must get this question all the time when you're speaking to all of these different people and they're presumably asking you, "So, what are we going to do about this?"

McGilchrist: "Well, yes. And I think what they're looking for usually is what the left hemisphere would like, which is I'm going into supercharged and yeah, I need a five-point plan and I need bullet points. These are the things to do and then I'll go away and do them. But Christ didn't say that. Christ said, you know, you have been taught that there are the ten commandments and so on, but I say to you there are only two commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. I may be misquing, but roughly speaking, that was the drifter. And so in other words, it was not a number of things to do, but it was a way of being, not a code. When I think about a way of relating, and everything is relational, I argue not just human things but actually the whole business of anything that exists comes out of a relational process, a resonant relationship. So if you like Christ didn't say these are the bullet points, this is my five year plan, go away and do it.

When I think about what has really changed my life it has been knowing people, particularly probably during my adolescence there were a couple of people who influenced me. It's not so much what they told me is that they modeled for me a way of being that I wanted to be like. I wanted to be like them and to have that way of being and approaching the world. And that is the greatest gift is to be not told how to do something in the abstract with a number of rules. That's just the left hemisphere, and that's the way AI would deal with it. But it's inhabiting the being of another person to the extent that you can so that you become more like them."

Kingsnorth: Really, the entire story you're telling is a story about a broken relationship, it seems to me, with much of the world. A broken relationship with nature, with culture, with individual people, with our own minds, with our own way of comprehending. And that's fundamentally the so-called solution to the problem. It's precisely a solution about a relationship. Trying to relate differently to things, to other people, to the natural world. Our relationship with nature is so broken. And the thing about this as well that's significant, people need communities to do this in. This is the thing. It's very hard to do on your own. If you feel like you're isolated from the world and you're living in this left hemisphere world and you can see things differently but you don't know what to do, it's very hard to do it on your own. One value of the internet is that it enables people to connect with people who are seeing the same thing. But seems to me that the kind of work we're talking about requires people to get together and kind of make those changes happen at some community level.

McGilchrist: "I agree with you. Also I think the thing that a religion offers is a kind of embodied wisdom which is in acts which are carried out together that have deep meaning and help to change you. So I think that you know true rituals are phenomenally powerful and I've experienced that in my life in an absolutely shatteringly powerful way that leaves one sort of more or less speechless and so moved. To the left hemisphere ritual is just a repetition of something that doesn't have a meaning. But this is why I worry enormously about the left hemisphere's attempt to create something that is a simulacrum of thinking in a material object that cannot think because it also has no body. It cannot understand emotion except it can read that when humans do this it causes them to feel something they don't like and all that. That's not the same as having feeling and it's not the same as being embodied. They can't be embodied in the way that we are. They're not they're not organic beings and they are incapable of knowing what it means to suffer and the prospect of death, which as Dr. Johnson says, "sharpens a man's mind."

Kingsnorth: "I'm just thinking about what you say there about AI. We think we're fixing the world that way, but we can't create an intelligence. The thing we're creating is profoundly unintelligent. It's just a machine that reproduces rather than generates. What we're doing at the moment is in one sense terrifying and in another sense clearly a dead end."

McGilchrist: "The only thing that is asked of you to do is to turn your mind, your heart, your spirit, I would say your soul towards the richly beautiful creative, I think sacred, cosmos and not worry about the things to do because they will follow. If you really internalize that, you will see what it is you need to do. It's seeing something differently. And I suppose what I've aimed to do in my work is to go, "you think the world looks like this, but hello, look at this." And of course, I don't immediately produce that vision, but by gentle steps that are logical and therefore acceptable, I take people, I hope, to a place where they can stop feeling they have to deny certain really elementary but extraordinarily important aspects of what it means to be a living human being. 

Appendix Five: Xenia in the works of Homer

Tamler Sommers and David Pizarro explored the concept, which one might say is the deus ex machina in Homer's works, or the key to understanding the entire epic. And they did so with reference to Emily Wilson's translations of the Illiad and Odyssey. This was a conversation, with most of the description provided by Sommers, however I resorted to combining Pizarro's contributions with his: 

"The pretext for the Trojan war is that Menelaus wants his wife Helen back from Paris. But it wasn't just that Paris made off with his wife. This was also an extreme violation of xenia, the Greek code of hospitality that plays an absolutely enormous role in both texts, in all sorts of ways. First of all, Zeus, the head god of the Olympians, is the god of xenia. Like, he's in charge of upholding xenia, the expectations for how hosts should treat guests and guests should respond to hosts. Like, these are kind of sacred norms, certainly much more ethically central than in the United States today, where we barely have hospitality codes and norms. But my point here is that what Paris did in taking Helen wasn't just like, I'm cucking Menelaus, it's also a violation of this really central moral code of how guests and hosts should treat each other. And so that made Zeus, almost reluctantly, on the side of the Greeks in their battle against Troy. So that's the pretext for the war.

Athena says she's going to go to Ithaca to rouse the courage of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, who we're about to meet. And she appears on Ithaca in the guise of someone named Mentes, who was a guest-friend of Odysseus from way back in the day. Here you get an indication of the importance of this xenia relationship. You have a bond with someone who's a guest-friend. You hosted them, and now you are connected in a deep way. And not just you, but your families are connected. Your ancestors are connected, because you established this guest-friend relationship. So that's who she pretends to be.

In Odysseus' absence, his house becomes infested with suitors who are after his wife Penelope. These guys are not welcome, as far as Telemachus is concerned. They're burning through his riches and his inheritance. You get the idea that they are violating xenia, like, hardcore; they are abusing the hospitality that Telemachus is sort of compelled to provide. And, even though they've kind of taken over the house, they're not hospitable to guests [viz. they are bad hosts], which is why Telemachus is the one that has to go and welcome Mentes. Otherwise, nobody would have.

Now, it's not as if there was a thing called "Greece" at this time, but there's some unity to this group of people called Achaeans. However, there's no hierarchy among the Achaean kingdoms. They make relationships through using these guest-friend codes. That's how these alliances are created. One of the key aspects of that code is when a stranger comes, you offer them shelter, you offer them food, like a meal, and you're supposed to do that before even asking who they are, what their name is, anything like that. And not everyone follows that code, as we'll see, but that's what you're supposed to do. And that's what Telemachus does. So he has it in him that he wants to follow these codes in a way that the suitors don't. He just doesn't totally know what to do. That's a big part of it. And you'll see in the next two books how it works when it's really observed properly."

Appendix Six: Douglas Rushkoff and Jeremy Lent: Society and Symbiogenesis

Rushkoff: "This has always been my concern when I look at history: if we are a wendigo-free society, networked and loving and sweet and spending our resources on mutual aid instead of the military, then doesn't the next violent wendigo civilization clobber us?"

Lent: "This is something that David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, has written very well about, this recognition that, really, there's only been a few times in life's evolution on Earth that cooperation as a driver has actually led to a breakthrough in the complexity of life. And each of these times it only happens when there's a way to overcome freeloaders (like that other aggressive civilization that comes and gobbles you up) through other more important powers. But when that has happened, it's led to things like multicellular life, social insects, and humans. We're one of the greatest cooperators, evolutionarily speaking."

Rushkoff: "So if you look at evolution, it's like, oh, cells are having problems with these little creatures that are bothering them. And it's like, oh, so let's just incorporate the mitochondria into our exact thing."

Lent: "It's mutually beneficial synergy. So it's not just gobbling them up, but the mitochondria themselves say, "Oh, this works for us, too, because we got all these ribosomes to work with and then we'll be almost immortal. We'll just have lots of us." And so they did great out of it too. This is the point, mutually beneficial synergy. But if you imagine two groups of quasi-humans, if you will, and one group, they're all aggressive. They're all these selfish motherfuckers out to get their own thing. And another group, they actually work together for mutual solidarity. And imagine they're battling each other. Well, the group that is working together for mutual solidarity is probably going to win because they're collectively far more powerful than those individuals that are each looking out for themselves.

We need to find ways to organize ourselves that can actually take us to this place where the freeloaders don't, in fact, end up squashing on us, basically. And nomadic hunter gatherers figured out ways to do that. They worked together collaboratively. And when some big man came along, figuring they were so great and wonderful and strong, the rest of the community would get together to actually stop them from doing that. They'd ostracize them because they saw them as dangerous. That all got lost with agriculture and sedentism, but I think the ultimate point is that we can actually create conditions for our entire society to work in that prosocial way. That's what I feel is available to us. That's what our challenge and our opportunity is about."

Appendix Seven: Andrew Davis on Worldview Disintegration 

The anti-natalism simmering beneath the surface of contemporary culture was highlighted by Andrew Davis. How might one respond to this trend? An ethic of hospitality may provide some ideas. Davis also referenced Lou Marinoff, president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), and the series of journals and texts being produced:

"One of the purposes of philosophy is to confront the precarious nature of our existence. And our moment is marked by a deep awareness of existential risk. Various disciplines and forms of literature are weighing in on this risk, this threat of a kind of extinction. How should we act and live such that these possibilities of extinction are lessened and avoided? Now, there's only so much we can do. But there's also much we could do to avoid anthropogenic risks. It's a larger philosophical question as to whether these risks should truly be avoided. You'll see some arguing that rendering humanity extinct might be the path forward. The point is that there are philosophical or ideological exacerbations of this scenario of existential risk.

Some religious notions suggest that we might need to hasten the eschaton or the apocalypse because a better world is behind the veil of this one. And in the philosophical domain there is no shortage of Schopenhauerian forms of pessimism which argue that existence is really no good. Inverse utilitarianism, the drive to minimize harm, has suggested that we should not have children because existence is harmful. (That is one way of putting our future at risk when it comes to our continuation.) There are also varieties of nihilism and misanthropy, forms of hatred of humankind. We've seen political ideologies of retribution and hatred, forms of economic hedonism, and we could name many more. The broader point is that behind existential risk is a certain ideological frame that is philosophically significant. The ideas we hold impact the way in which we approach the real risks of our extinction. 

The meaning crisis has its origins in the disintegration of three very powerful dimensions of a worldview that had previously helped us make sense of the world: nomological (structural conformity), narratological (overarching story), and normative (hierarchy of value). I would suggest that it is our responsibility as philosophers to engage with these in ways that allow us to overcome, rather than succumb, to the meaning crisis and all of its entailments. How can we nomologically reconstruct our relation to cosmos in ways that inspire? How can we narratologically re-embed ourselves in a real meta-cosmological story where our role is actually vital rather than simply trivial? How can we normatively reassert the objective reality of values as being essential, as undergirding progress in moral and cultural evolution?"

Appendix Eight: The Shambhala Warrior

Samantha Sweetwater: "The Greek concept of cosmos meant a totality that is essentially whole and harmonious. And the concept of a holon, created by Arthur Koestler, is the understanding that living and mechanical systems function in terms of nested parts and wholes, nested part-whole relationships. A classic example is an atom is part of a molecule, is part of an organelle, is part of a cell, is part of a muscle fiber, is part of my hand, is part of my body.”

Nate Hagens: "So it's kinda like a biological, ecological overlay on the Russian dolls concept?"

Samantha Sweetwater: "Yeah. Except what's meaningful about it is that there's generally a deep communication between the layers in a ‘natural hierarchy’ as compared to an ‘imposed hierarchy.’ So it can be useful, when thinking about power of any kind, to recognize that without ontic structure the universe would be grey goo. Like, I wouldn't be talking to you. We wouldn't be human organisms with trillions of cells and trillions of non-human cells.

Nate Hagens: "Can you explain the importance of the distinction between ‘power of life’ and ‘power over life?’ How can we participate in processes that bind ‘power over life’ so that the ‘power of life’ wins the game?”

Samantha Sweetwater: "My partner and I now have all the names and phone numbers of all the people on our block; we worked for a couple months to make this happen. We just had our first dinner party last week. It was amazing. Everyone was like, “Thank you for your initiative. We're so grateful.” It was a combination of taking care of each other and building capacity for resilience. There are ways in which we can migrate away from the ‘death and dystopia’ narrative and nourish the conditions for all kinds of things. Just having better lives and better relationships with neighbors who then go out into the world and are in better moods to build more relationships. The difference between a society that is war-like and a society that is peaceful is the instance of acts of reciprocity between people within that society. I think there's an opportunity on the horizon to recognize that the polarization dynamics that have captured our concept of politics are not what politics needs to be like. In the original sense of the word politics, it refers to the process of people coming together to listen to each other and hear each other and do the things that make the larger world work.

The first and most foundational aspect of my theory of change is that we are at a moment that allows us to observe an emergent story about ourselves. We are in a moment where we can recontextualize ourselves in a very unique way, as a species recognizing its custodial role inside biospheric process. Each of us is a holon inside this larger holon. That collective recognition is an emergent stage of social development. Telling that story about who we are creates the context for everything else. In that sense, my theory of change is grounded in this very simple story, this invitation to take a perspective. It’s like the perspective of the cathedral builder: Why might I do anything? Well, because I'm part of a bigger process. And from there a whole bunch of other strategies and possible approaches emerge. That's the center-point of where I’m coming from and what I wanna bring into the collective discourse.

The kinship journey begins when you realize that disconnection is a problem. That tracks with the fact that we have a crisis of addiction. It tracks with the fact that we have a crisis of loneliness. It tracks with climate anxiety. It tracks with all the people who are really struggling with what's going on politically. It tracks with the executives I work with, who come to me when they're like, “Oh my God, I'm participating in the end of the world. Help me. I need to figure out how to redo my value chain.” Our collective ‘WTF’ is a crisis of disconnection. And so that's the doorway into a kinship journey. And the kinship journey is a journey of recognizing your part in something larger than yourself.

We have to nourish a sense that the more safe, secure, and sane path forward is the path that we take together. And we have to do that in many different ways, and put ourselves behind it in real actions that are not transactional, but are relational and grounded in care. The underlying opportunity is exactly where people are trying to figure out where security lies. And in reality there's greater security in the ‘we’ than in the ‘me.’ But how that gets tended, in different contexts, is really different. It is a little audacious to say “I think that things could be different, and I'm gonna do my part to do that.” The paradox, of course, is not to impose one's own models, but to participate in a process that engages more than oneself in reissuing the social fabric or remembering our collaboration with a larger whole.

Joanna Macy has a very basic, yet elegant frame for systems change. And there's three parts to it, to tending a fabric of both story and praxis that nurtures our connection to life. Any one person might be playing one or multiple of these roles at any given time. But the third is ways of being and narrating our way forward, and I would say the work that I'm doing is most primarily in that category. Joanna carried an unbroken thousand-year lineage of an ancient prophecy. There would be a time when Shambhala warriors would know that the world that they were born into was out of alignment with life, and that it was made by the human mind and could be unmade by the human mind. And they would recognize themselves through that true heart that essentially knew that life is sacred. The pathway of the Shambhala warrior is to unwind and remake the systems, structures, and constructs that make our world. These are ‘monomaya’ - made by the human mind and can be unmade by the human mind. This invitation is deeper than words. It is embodied, it is the stance of the person, of the being who feels, who recognizes that we're here as embodied beings who can attune, commune, and creatively reinstantiate reciprocal processes in how we do anything. That's always with me. It will always be with me.”

Appendix Nine: Bifurcation and Benevolence 

In this conversation with Lex Fridman, Michael Levin wonders about the bigger picture: “We make social structures, financial structures, Internet of Things, robotics, AI… we make all this stuff, and we think that the thing we make it do is the main show. But I think it is very important for us to learn to recognize the kind of stuff that sneaks into the spaces.” What is sneaking in? There may be “mind everywhere.” And Levin suggests that it may naturally bifurcate and tend toward benevolence. Those are two very encouraging findings. You will recall that the Hospitality article references his paper "Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence." From this more recent conversation:

Michael Levin: “We have an incredible degree of ‘mind blindness’ to all of the very alien kinds of minds around us and inside our own bodies. And I don't just mean that we are host to microbiota. Consider that even your own cells solve problems, have stress reduction when they meet their goals, and suffer when they fail to meet those goals. These are inside of us and all around us.

I think we call things alive to the extent that the cognitive light cone of that thing is bigger than that of its parts. So, in other words, rocks aren't very exciting because the things they know how to do are the things that its parts already know how to do, which is follow gradients and things like that. But living things are amazing at aligning their competent parts so that the collective has a larger cognitive light cone than the parts. So when we are looking for life, I don't think we're looking for specific materials or metabolic states. I think we're looking for scales of cognitive light cones. We're looking for alignment of parts towards bigger goals, in spaces that the parts could not comprehend.

In the alignment community there's a lot of discussion about “What are the intrinsic motivations going to be of AIs? What are their goals going to be? What are they going to want to do? The very first thing we checked with ‘anthrobots’ was what they would do when we put them on a plate of neurons with a big wound through them, a big scratch. The first thing they did was heal the wound. That was just an initial observation, but I like the fact that the first intrinsic motivation that we noticed out of that system was benevolent and healing. I thought that was pretty cool. And we don't know. Maybe the next 20 things we find are going to be damaging. But the first thing that we saw was kind of positive.”

Lex Fridman: “What advice would you give to scientists and students that are trying to explore the space of ideas, given the very unconventional, non-standard, unique set of ideas you've explored in your life and career?”

Michael Levin: “I have one technique that I've found very useful. It's the act of bifurcating your mind. You need to have two different regions. One region is the practical region of impact. In other words, how do I get my idea out into the world so that other people recognize it? What should I say? What are people hearing? What are they able to hear? How do I pivot it? What parts do I not talk about? Which journal am I going to publish this in? Is it time now? Do I wait two years for this? Like, all the practical stuff. Otherwise, you're not going to be in a position to follow up on any of your ideas. You're not going to have a career. You're not going to have resources to do anything.

But it's very important that that can't be the only thing. You need another part of your mind that ignores all that shit completely, because this other part of your mind has to be pure. It has to be I don't care what anybody else thinks about this. I don't care whether this is publishable, describable. I don't care if anybody gets it. I don't care if anybody thinks it's stupid. This is what I think, and why. And give it space to sort of grow, right?

And if you try to mush them together, I found that impossible. Because the practical stuff poisons the other stuff. If you're too much on the creative end, you can be an amazing thinker, it's just nothing ever materializes. But if you're very practical, it tends to poison the other stuff because the more you think about how to present things so that other people get it, it constrains and it bends how you start to think.”

Section Headings:

Appendix Three: Dempsey Interview
Appendix Four: Kingsnorth Interview
Appendix Five: Xenia in the works of Homer
Appendix Six: Douglas Rushkoff and Jeremy Lent: Society and Symbiogenesis
Appendix Seven: Andrew Davis on Worldview Disintegration
Appendix Eight: The Shambhala Warrior
Appendix Nine: Bifurcation and Benevolence
Practicing Hospitality in Troubled Times
Xenia