The Ecstasy of Sensemaking
Good on awareness and feels but light on operational measures
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, Sensemaking is the investigation by a discrete network of public intellectuals into different ways to navigate divisive issues that cause social discord and conflict.
Sensemaking came about as essentially a new philosophical and psychological field emerging from similar right-coded energies that spawned the intellectual dark web.
It was different than what went before. Although Sensemaking strove to explain, it was never about identifying definitive truths. Nor was it a traditional attempt to find the ‘centre’ ground where, thanks to the magic of fact-checking, everybody might converge.
I assume that it appealed mostly to people who are low on cognitive rigidity and comfortable with abstraction and ambiguity. I fell upon it with the enthusiasm of someone weary of the old conceptually conservative mode of ‘proving’ things and being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. You probably had to be a certain type to be interested in Sensemaking and I suppose I’m that type.
Before diving deeper, a prefatory note.
1: I’ll capitalise Sensemaking to emphasise its status as a distinct thing - not just shorthand for making sense. It’s probably best understood as a branch of psychological, sociological and semiotic* philosophy, so it was always destined to be a fringe interest. Like many philosophical enquiries, much of the content appeared airy but still seemed to promise application in the ordinary world where we grapple with the problems it sought to address.
[*semiotic - relating to signs, symbols, communication and meaning to different observers]
2: I typically use the term ‘conservative’ in two slightly different ways. Sometimes in the conventional sense of a political leaning but also to signify close allegiance to the ideals rooted in certain traditions, such as education. This means that strongly liberal people are also often conservative in this way.
In the latter non-political sense it is the impulse to conserve a status quo partly because it is a status quo that works for an interest group for whom moving away from it might threaten status perception and self-conscious identity.
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My interest in Sensemaking began during the pandemic when I realised that something bad was going on with polarisation. Suddenly everyone in my personal orbit and anywhere I dwelled online seemed over-confident in their understanding of a complex new unfolding event that none of us had previously experienced.
It now seems to me that the pandemic was bigger than any other event in my lifetime - including 9/11 - as a catalyst for neurosis, anger, interpersonal hostility and lasting damage to relationships. This may be because it seemed to act with unique potency as an identity-sorting event, so that ‘which is my side?’ became a more urgent question than in any previous moment.
All of that was fascinating and unsettling to me.
As is my wont, I was quickly bored and suspicious of the confident pronouncements of the opposing sides. Then, out of the blue, an artist friend I admire for his wildly abstract mind told me about the Rebel Wisdom project. It comprised discussions and films exploring what was happening at the social level in this troubled time. But in a different way than traditional media reporting and punditry.
Rebel Wisdom felt like a dose of sanity in those strange months as the pandemic wore on. Suddenly I was hearing good faith, non-partisan conversations about how to navigate the moment instead of binary arguments fuelled by fear, anxiety and mutual contempt.
[For context, I have never doubted that Covid-19 is a serious disease and I was vaccinated at the first opportunity. I have not updated either core position and never regretted receiving 3 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The truth or otherwise of Covid’s seriousness or vaccine efficacy and safety are not relevant here, but it would be natural for a reader to wonder where I was personally at on the pandemic, so there you have it. The result was that I consistently felt like an outsider glancing askance at what was unfolding in the social sphere]
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What most appealed to me about what Rebel Wisdom were striving for was the concept of pursuing what they called a ‘synthesis‘ between seemingly incommensurable standpoints. Admittedly, that is a kind of Holy Grail, but I saw it as a noble and wise pursuit.
I won’t lie. The snob in me also saw it as intellectually superior to just batting for a side; Trust The Science vs Do Your Own Research. In fact I scorned the two sides who revealed themselves during those strange times, for their respective flattening, naivety and certitude.
Rebel Wisdom came at just the right moment for me.
I’d developed a personal meditation practice over the previous year, along with a set of new life habits that lifted me out of a crisis of depressed anxiety. Part of this personal effort had involved much more looking inward than pointing the finger outward to understand ‘shit’. Later I wrote about that wonderful time in the post That feeling when you get phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Vental Tegmental Area.
So I was primed for Rebel Wisdom to be the first people I’d ever heard talking about how our internal psychological state influences what we believe about the world.
I appreciated the way they teased out the strands in how figures like Jordan Peterson had tapped into a growing minority concern about technocracy, managerialism and credentialism. Something was happening with all that and the bafflement of those who couldn’t or wouldn’t see why it was a concern to some was also catnip to my innate curiosity.
I still miss those days of discovering Rebel Wisdom and the richness, originality and depth of their thinking. But my enthusiasm wasn’t to last.
Over time, I couldn’t shake a growing sense of unease. The impression that a lot was being said but nothing was ever quite resolving.
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When Rebel Wisdom ended I continued to follow Alexander Beiner. He was a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom with David Fuller, who had apparently burned out and seems to have more or less disappeared from public life. I was still thinking that, having laid some strong foundations, something with useful wider application might begin to emerge and that Alexander would be one of the conduits.
Maybe it wasn’t them, it was just me
Instead I began to feel that Alexander and everyone else that I’d been so fascinated by were still saying a lot without saying anything that I could really latch onto as insight. That’s when my confidence and hope first began to wane in the Sensemaking project.
Revisiting a lot of the sensemaking world that seemed so refreshing to me at that time, I now realise that many of those conversations are pretentiously opaque and meta, never quite arriving anywhere that really does make sense.
The irony is not lost on me. I couldn’t make sense of Sensemaking.
This doesn’t mean that I think the outputs of all those discussions between the figureheads of Sensemaking lacked value. I got some tips that helped and which I still sometimes reflect and draw upon; for example, Professor Jon Vervaeke’s concept of ‘relevance realisation‘ remains personally useful.
But so much of Sensemaking just seemed to consist of sophisticated, circular word salad with little-to-no real life application.
Perhaps it was always naive of me to expect more from an essentially fringe academic philosophical investigation but the lack of implicitly promised answers was disappointing. Occasionally I’ll dip into the field again to check for progress but nothing seems to have changed.
The conversations continue among the same people, but they never seem to land somewhere that points to a way forward.
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I was always conscious that the sensemaking world had a politically conservative bias. There was a bit of Dark Enlightenment energy about some of the figureheads. But this always seemed understandable. After all, both were ideas that emerged in opposition to technocratic credentialism and what I had already come to see as a naive ‘trust only the experts’ principle whenever it was maximally applied.
I still don’t trust the manual for Truth promoted by parts of an academic and managerial class who seem as driven by self-interest to maintain a specific normative framework for seeing and moving in the world as they are by a desire to really understand it. I could never dispel the suspicion that the PMC were less motivated by pro-social impulses than by status-seeking, a personal sense of superiority and identity-preservation.
My hope was for a synthesis between instrumental expertise and more human-grounded wisdom. I revisit this often as an under-recognised issue. And it’s still that synthesis which Sensemaking seemed to be striving to reach.
Five years on from when I first encountered it I think that the Sensemaking project was a necessary but insufficient attempt to find a synthesis between two obvious but oddly incommensurable truths; that science and domain expertise are often (probably mostly) the best guides to understanding and solving big problems, but that something else - typically called wisdom - is necessary to prevent that approach from becoming a kind of cold, bloodless machine government that seems to operate apart from people. ‘Regime government’ as writers like legal philosopher David McGrogan puts it.
It’s kind of sad to me that Sensemaking just continued meandering or drifting in the way that it has when it held the promise of grounding us in something more whole, in terms of a worldview.
Sometimes you need nutters. But also, nutters are nutty
I suppose it was inevitable. There was always something odd about the people involved. And then there was the issue of their heterodoxy in general.
The most obvious example is always Jordan Peterson. You know this because there is an implicit social rule about him. You are either to think that he’s the Messiah or an unhinged christo-fascist.
The irony is that both positions are taken by people who don’t understand a lot of what he’s saying.
This at least offers me a useful personal heuristic.
If someone only ever has negative observations to make about Jordan Peterson it’s safe to say they have nothing interesting to say about anything in the sphere that Peterson tries to explore. Which is obviously an important and interesting sphere. Similarly, if they never acknowledge what a nutter he obviously is, they typically have nothing but woo woo to contribute. Sadly Person is also a credential that fans can wave to demonstrate belonging in the ‘heterodox’ camp.
This is because flattening is easy and the fact is that flattening is what sensemaking was originally pitched as the solution for. On the one side we had the total rejection of credentials, domain expertise and science. And on the other side the conventional but blinkered intellectual’s reflexive and contemptuous dismissal of good faith critique of those heuristics. It’s tiresome to me when people blankly and scornfully dismiss critique of naive materialism as the WHOLE answer to EVERYTHING just because critique sometimes invokes ideas that can’t be modelled or measured in a controlled environment.
My intuition remains that synthesis of polarised positions is a more intellectually rigorous pursuit than declaring who’s factually right and who’s factually wrong. And that means allowing for the validity of non-measurable factors that might be grouped under the heading of ‘wisdom’.
The way that people separated into two camps over every aspect of the pandemic was the initial impetus for my interest in Sensemaking but it also folds into the whole nexus of bitterly contested issues that are so salient today; things like reactions to the cultural disruption caused by mass immigration into Britain and countries in Europe, where the opinion divide looks more like a religious schism than the practical discussion it really needs to be.
Another feature in this nexus is ‘misinformation’. I have a theory that the lions share of blatant misinformation always emerges from the populist right for good reason. This is that the social engineering promoted by the class labelled as ‘elites’ (which includes the ordinary professional-managerial-academic strata of public life) has permitted no honest and open discussion of the issues that everyone else with no identity skin in the game can see are real and important.
There’s still an obvious gap that Sensemaking was attempting to plug
I’m confident that the sensemaking movement, or whatever one might call that eccentric collection of thinkers, correctly diagnosed a problem. The information environment is still contaminated with too many shoulds and oughts that we are required to hold as is positions.
The (necessary) process of cultural liberalisation has clearly overshot and now threatens to cross the line where authoritarianism begins. And all there is to oppose that drift right now is a vulgar form of popular rebellion that really isn’t for me.
Epistemic problems have somehow become moral issues. Even today there are scientists in multiple fields who say that certain facts about the world should literally never be studied because it would be wrong to. And any debate about freedom of expression is now contaminated by the question of whether certain views are to be punished, whether or not they can even be plausibly shown to produce real world harm. Britain is perhaps the best example of a mature democracy where people are jailed for expressing an opinion that caused no damage to life or property. Google this. It’s amazing to me the extent to which it happens because I don’t really follow British news now.
Sensemaking promised to shed light on a middle way in situations where threats were perhaps real but exaggerated. It offered hope that there could be a synthesis in which competing perspectives could each be respected, if not reconciled, followed by the emergence of a fruitful third way of navigating them.
We needed a new vocabulary and a new lens. Sensemaking did give us those
Having diagnosed a genuine problem, Sensemaking as a discrete discipline went on the generate a compelling vocabulary to describe it and proposed various personal practices that seemed the offer a way of stepping off the information battlefield without just becoming a nihilist.
Remembering my early immersion in those Rebel Wisdom discussions I was relieved as much as anything else to no longer feel compelled to fight.
While most authorities and their followers naively pursued (and somehow still do) ‘fact-checking’, ‘debate’ and ideological moral persuasion toward a ‘correct’ belief set as solutions to overheated controversies, Rebel Wisdom went at it from the angle of understanding belief formation itself.
It was like a cooling breeze in those superheated times. I derived comfort from the soothing balm of people thinking differently.
The Rebel Wisdom people were discussing factors to which the participants in those information wars seemed oblivious.
Examples that seemed trivially obvious but are typically overlooked, such as:
Belief is state-dependent. What we find plausible, threatening and morally salient varies with our fluctuating states of psychological arousal.
Identity - our sense of who we are - shapes our reactions to facts or opinions that represent identity threat or identity bolstering.
The importance of social position, because certain beliefs and opinions are subject to value judgements. Typically they are ‘low status’ or ‘correctly relatable’ in our own circles.
Hearing this discussed at last was reassuring because I was already coming to see belief formation as downstream of self-image and mood.
That this was acknowledged in the Sensemaking world as something we could address in ourselves reminded me of how I had accidentally come to a similar conclusion while wrestling with looming circumstances that threatened a bad period which consequently turned into a wonderful year.
Previously, the faults in our thinking had always been relegated to dry lists of cognitive biases. Which, of course, only ever afflict other people. This is the thing that we rarely recognise about cognitive biases. In this way they are like the Games described in Transactional Analysis. We play them outside of awareness. And our biases shape our thinking in similarly unconscious ways.
Sensemaking was about spotting one’s own process, joining dots and taking personal responsibility for really understanding how we think.
But it was the jumping off point that also appealed to me; the external factors explored in Sensemaking world, such as how rigid technocracy creates affective backlash.
And how the dogged insistence that legitimacy flows exclusively from credentials and models alone overlooks the human need for agency, meaning and moral literacy. We know what’s best done about x because we know more than you about x was clearly the core governing principle and it had to be outed as an incomplete, intellectually naive and authoritarian stance.
Flowing from this was the obvious fact that while a doubtless well-meaning intelligentsia believed that it only pursued certain actions after a deep and sincere process of reasoning, in reality political and other solutions to large-scale problems are in fact subject to factors which precede reason.
There’s something counter-intuitive here, which is a sense I have that the internal state of being well-intentioned is suspect. Which of course is not a very original notion, given that everyone knows the aphorism about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
I do not doubt that Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Milliband, is an intelligent operator with a strong internal urge to make the world better. But it’s precisely that urge that seems suspect when his policies don’t necessarily stack up in the real world, once outside of the models his advisors create.
It’s actually his moral sincerity that will probably be his downfall, and the downfall of all those who refused to consider focusing on - say - resilience to climate change, rather than imposing technocratic will on controlling the latest climate fluctuation at a so-far unquantified cost to people further down the pecking order.
For those schooled in the conservative tradition of knowing your place and deferring to your betters it comes as a shock to learn that people are sceptical about such things. I know, because I was one of those people. But being exposed to so much anger erupting on my side about people not believing what they were told, especially as the pandemic wore on, left me in no doubt that the whole problem with these ‘hyper-controversies’ was almost all psychologically rather than epistemically driven.
No wonder the door was open for someone like Jordan Peterson to articulate the hitherto subliminal pissed-offness that many thoughtful and intelligent people had been experiencing as credentialed institutions swung into pathologising rather than engaging with dissent.
Peterson was obviously ‘right’ in some way about status, the erosion of meaning, bureaucratic overreach and the sublimation of actual human flourishing into managerial optimisation. Just as he was obviously right about many of his 12 rules for life, however smugly the PMC derided them on the website formerly known as Twitter.
Sensemaking seemed to be a genuinely corrective approach, merely by naming what was obvious, but denied, shamed and effectively sidelined from open discussion.
This was a moment of hope for some of us who were trying to engage in good faith with the obsessions of our time; pandemic measures, climate change, the fallout from a socially unnerving and destabilising mixing of cultures and so on.
I sensed that I was one of many who had intuited the fusion of belief and identity that underpinned the religiosity of the conversations about such things and that we had really had enough of it. Either because it was obviously fracturing relationships between good people but also because it was tiresome, uninteresting and cognitively unsophisticated. Rebel Wisdom and the broader sensemaking project was for us.
At last we had a diagnosis. Next would come the cure.
You’ve already guessed that it never came.
The failures of Sensemaking
Instead we got word salad and endless meta-analysis. All that seemed to happen was conversations and then conversations about those conversations that had a strangely recursive quality. There was a proliferation of ‘frameworks’ for understanding what ascending to a more ‘enlightened’ plane could look like. It began to feel like the classic confusion of map with territory. The big names of Sensemaking never stepped off the map and onto the ground where the rest of us are.
But my biggest problem with it all is now that while the layers of abstraction keep stacking there emerges nothing that you could falsify. Call me old-fashioned (even conservative) but for any proposition to mean something to me I need to know how you would either validate or falsify it. Yes, I’m a fan of unquantifiable, non-measurable principles of ‘wisdom’ but I still need grounding in something solid when we’re talking about things that are happening in the world. And then I want to know what action I can take, if the proposition is one that I think is worth pursuing and even promoting.
What might I do differently to contribute to the process of de-polarising and bringing better mutual understanding between apparently exclusive standpoints? This seems to be a reasonable question from someone who followed the evolution of Sensemaking for the past 5 years. But I have no more idea of the answer than I had when I was enjoying the meta-analyses of Rebel Wisdom, alone in a strange country under lockdown, all that time ago.
I don’t want to be negative but what a lot of the outputs of Sensemaking feel like to me now is more akin to art than insight.
There’s rarely anything suggested that you could point at and say let’s do this instead or this is a terrible idea that would actually make the world and our relationships worse.
It’s fair to say that the emergent Sensemaking were wholesome and healthy for the development of personal resilience and even flourishing in this life. But none of them resulted in me ever having a more productive conversation with anyone invested in their political identity. I could only ever discuss it with outsider types, like me.
Sometimes there IS a concrete idea. But it would obviously never actually work
Occasionally someone comes up with a proposal which no one in their right mind would dispute as a cool thing to do. But the common feature is that how to scale it to make a manifest change to the original problem is never explained.
Here’s a good example, from Alexander Beiner, formerly of Rebel Wisdom, remember, who now has a Sensemaking project of his own called Kainos.
I’m a longtime fan of Ali’s diagnoses of liberal technocracy’s fault-lines so it feels mean-spirited to pick fault in his latest idea. It’s a proposal for stemming the rise of what he calls the “morally and intellectually void” populist right-wing parties in Britain and Europe by talking “differently” about immigration.
This essay is quintessential. Listen to the Land: How to Talk About Immigration.
As a piece of writing designed for reading and enjoying I love it.
It is atmospheric and psychologically compelling. There is nothing wrong or incorrect in it. I feel slightly bad for criticising it (a guilt that I note and will reflect on at leisure).
It is obviously good to explore contentious issues from as many angles as possible and he’s certainly doing that.
But there are two obvious problems with the idea, both of which are catastrophic.
Scale. How could such an initiative ever be scaled to make a difference?
Cold reality. The world is just not romantic like that. The essay takes no real account of the competing value systems that create chronic unease about immigration, factors such as finite and often scarce public resources, the electoral incentives to which most parties are responding, unpleasant truths about people’s security concerns, housing pressure, labour markets and all the other reasons that have made immigration the highest-salience social issue of this time.
Again, pushing through some personal discomfort in doing so, I have to point out that it’s just unrealistic
The essay promises an answer to the knotty question of how to talk about immigration. We definitely need an answer to that. I just don’t talk about it at all with most people even though I would quite like to. But the ‘xenophobe’ and ‘racist’ canards have stuck, like shit on the wall, having been so successfully thrown for so long by leftish types.
What that essay proposes is a kind of carefully curated group therapy, run by highly competent facilitators and a willingness and capacity in the participants to engage with deep emotional and symbolic framing. Also, let’s not forget physical access to ‘wild’ land.
In a way, this kind of ‘solution’ is a sleight of hand. It sounds great. I’d quite like to participate in such an exercise myself. No doubt it would be interesting. But how it transforms the public conversation at scale is never explained. And if it was self-selecting I cannot imagine any people who actually have a visceral distaste for ‘foreigners’ or all-in ‘migrants are welcome’, ‘no one is illegal’ ever signing up to take part.
The sort of people who’d take part in that exercise are not the problem.
Sensemaking was always full of this, I know realise. It boils down to a a kind of politically-oriented personal group therapy and ritual. In fact, Rebel Wisdom really did focus heavily on group work and ran many successful events which people reported benefiting from. But the world outside doesn’t work like this and there needs to be a political process for such a knotty and intractable issue.
How Sensemaking could transition from a process of exploring meaning into becoming a political process was and still is never explained.
This always seemed to be the trap that Sensemaking fell into. Reducing conflict between small groups of people was doubtless a good experience for those involved but it remained so far outside of mainstream political realities that it began to seem self-indulgent and hand-wavey.
It’s not that I’ve ever thought that the Sensemaking approach was wrong per se. They were clearly right about the personal ‘work’ required to move off the merry-go-round of pointless debate between intransigent standpoints. I’d already come to the same conclusion via my own mindfulness practice and then by thinking a bit differently about who I am in the world.
Nor do I fundamentally object to the hand-wavey and symbolic stuff. Jung is a good example of someone who stood apart from rigid scientism while remaining coherent and valuable as a thinker who pointed successfully toward achieving improved subjective wellbeing.
But even I draw the line at listening to the land as a way of having more productive conversations about immigration. Because that’s really just a rhetorical device and I need something operational.
Even I need more than good feels and different ways to see meaning
In my everyday life I ‘listen’ to trees and they tell me things, but this is my subjective experience and will never translate into anything useful for the rest of society, let alone the world of politics and arbitration of inevitable trade-offs.
Still feeling bad about this ... because it feels mean, but all I see in Alexander’s essay is the re-symbolising of a conflict rather than any way to resolve it. And that is where Sensemaking consistently fell short, even though I’d see myself as the exact market for it; open as I am to novel ways of understanding, post-partisan, non-ideological, anti-flattening, deploring of maximal moral or epistemic positions and sceptical of the current regime-style doctrine that causes the problems in the first place.
It verges uncomfortably (for me) from making sense of complexity to resolve ingrained conflicts into a kind of charismatic group facilitation of the kind practiced by people who might reasonably end up labelled as ‘gurus’.
I may be a bit woo woo myself, with my tree-hugging and love of Chuang Tzu, but I’m still also a fan of democracy and the deliberative political process. Listening to the land with a selected group of people who are culturally different to me isn’t a political solution to reducing the salience of migration.
I’m all for retreats and workshops, storytelling and documentary as ways of looking at the world through different lenses. It feels like I learn as much about the world through classic fiction as from factual reading. I also did a lot of ‘the work’ already, without knowing it even had a name. Probably, 5 years ago, I would have been more confident than I am today that listening to the land might just work. But this is where I’ve really come unstuck from the world of Sensemaking.
I know the hunger for meaning. I know the affective power of stumbling upon people who seem ‘enlightened’ in some way. I know how managerial liberalism has reduced much of life to bloodless normative language rules and one-size-fits-all models aimed at manipulating and constraining. And I see and feel the ugliness of populist crudity and the unease that it creates for others. I know the need that Sensemaking grew from. In Britain I imagine that need is stronger than ever.
Sensemaking will probably go from strength to strength as a kind of cult movement. It’s also still better than what currently passes for debate and discussion. I’m personally keen for gnarly shaven-headed white men to stop displaying the Cross of St George in public spaces all over England but also desperate for the lumpen-headed liberal intelligentsia and their PMC disciples to grasp why they are doing it.
Someone has to see this shit for what it is and the Sensemaking people do. Those of us alienated by two warring camps will be constantly tempted into the Sensemaking world.
But it’s also obvious that it’s institutional change that makes things really happen and no amount of workshops or meditation or listening to wild spaces is going to achieve that.
At some point you have to move on from diagnosing epistemic breakdown, describing psychological dynamics, naming what is denied by a woefully inadequate and blinkered ruling and media class and creating human-centred spaces for reflection. But that’s where Sensemaking remains stuck and probably will remain forever. You’ll have all these guru-adjacent people circling around these same conversations which never break through the clouds to reach sunlight.
In the end, it’s mostly just a nice activity.
Which still leaves us confronting the specific failure modes of late-liberalism; excessive faith in formal expertise, normative edicts smuggled in as technical necessities, disagreement framed as ‘low-information’ stupidity and always negatively moralised rather than respected.
Maybe these failure modes are not accidental. Maybe they arise because human beings strive for status and fight to retain it. No institution that pitches credentialed expertise as the answer to every really hard problem is likely to step forward and volunteer to be a bit more accountable. And the liberal intelligentsia is never going to rein in on its moral overconfidence because why would they? They didn’t get to their station in life by humbly acknowledging that they might be wrong about something like Net Zero, achieving societal strength through cultural diversity or ‘re-wilding’ instead of growing more food, but that they’re doing their best under complicated circumstances.
This is why scientific and technocratic communication really is shockingly bad. It always emerges from a cognitive silo.
Sensemaking promotes wisdom and that’s great for us as individuals. How to make institutions more wise is a whole different question, especially when it’s a certain type who dominates them and then does the hiring to keep the same vibe going.
So the Sensemaking world just carries on diagnosing the problem, because that’s the easy part. And occasionally proposing something, as Alexander Beiner did with that essay, that sounds great until you realise that there is no way of scaling it to make a real difference.
But on the bright side ...
One thing I do like about Alexander’s workshop for listening to the land idea is that it is not rooted in doomspeak. You can read his essay and feel good imagining how nice that process might be. In this way it works as a pleasant form of entertainment.
I prefer Alexander’s Sensemaking approach to many others in that world, who position their thinking as the answer to averting a looming apocalypse. One example is the ‘Emerge’ network, which promises a ‘multi-species response to metacrisis’.
On its About page you’ll read that civilisation appears to be dying. Which is discordant with my perception, because I think that - on average, for more people than ever before in the history of humankind - things have never been better in the world.
But ... I love the Emerge network and you weren’t expecting that. After all, who can resist an essay promising to disambiguate post-progressive integralism or explain Germane Marvel’s Diunital Philosophy of Black Metamodernism? It reminds me of K-Hole Trends, which I also loved. But I love it as entertainment and not as a guide to anything.
So we are where we are.
I can’t have been the only one who thought Sensemaking was going to be a thing you could instrumentalise to make the world a bit calmer. Maybe prevent you from falling out with your friends and reduce the number of annoying posts on your Facebook. But it was never going to do that because what it really was was a mix of entertainment and abstract art. But also it was - and remains - a system that produces an affective comforting state.
Why I called this piece ‘The Ecstasy of Sensemaking’.
Tune in, turn on and drop out. That’s really the pitch and I’m down with that.
But I recognise that such an approach just isn’t ever going to fix anything.
Sensemaking is very of its time. That time being now, when we’re flooded with ways to tune in, turn on and drop out.
I was amused when someone told me that she was dosing intravenously on her favourite right-wing podcast, following exposure over Christmas to a doggedly Woke family member, because I understood that impulse. I felt her pain and her pleasure in the remedy.
Many of us feel this sense of being in a comforting altered state, immersed in our little niche worlds of chatter. That’s why BlueSky was invented, when X ruined the experience of immersion for liberal leftishists.
So I do remain interested in the writings and thoughts of Alexander Beiner and sometimes even Jordan Peterson, when he’s being a bit less crazy (which is sadly rare these days).
But something else has changed since 5 years ago. Which is that I no longer believe that we really are in a ‘meaning crisis’ or a ‘meta-crisis’, both of which are terms beloved of the Sensemaking community. I think that late-liberal technocracy is a bit shit in some ways but still way better than any previous time. It just needs some correction to the stupid parts.
I do still think that Sensemaking is good for the individual who cares about being less of a dick and I endorse many of the practices that are described. There’s a lot of hyper-creative and abstract culturally exploratory writing produced under the banner of Sensemaking and wading through it is more fun than scrolling through short-form posts authored by people reacting to the latest Thing.
Last summer I posted a piece called ‘The Ecstasy of Joe Rogan’ to try to articulate this sense of altered state achieved via a cocoon of reassuring chatter. It was a struggle to write at the time because I was having a particularly abstract moment. Now I see that this exploration of what was right and what went wrong with Sensemaking gets a bit closer to where I was aiming with that one.
You might enjoy it. It may even make more sense now.
