Purposive Drift

“People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.” 
Marilynne Robinson

“As we might expect, a workable approach to remaking Paradise turns clever certainties about the nature of constructive work upside down. Paradise gardeners are reknown for their “zero-work ethic” – Mollison’s “reclining designer.” That’s because we are elementally about co-creating landscapes that are attuned to Nature’s patterns and rhythms: self-sustaining, edible landscapes that require an absolute minimum of intervention on the part of the Gardener. In other words, no toil: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin.” The yoke is easy.
Of course, taking it easy hardly fits in with conventional notions of virtue, but then again, our civilization’s valuation of the nature of virtuous work may well be rotten to its core. As Terence McKenna puts it: “Now you see, the current theory of problem solving is that we must solve all our problems with solutions that make a buck. Well, it just may not be possible to solve the problems of the 20th century and make a buck at the same time. But if you’re willing to put aside that notion, then the human future appears endlessly bright.” Or, to paraphrase the words of the Christos, Mammon sits fundamentally at odds with the irresistible march of evolution. That, in a nutshell, is the stark truth underpinning a collaborative return to the Garden, perhaps the truest attunement to the Great Work we are capable of. “Work, motion, life,” says William Bryant Logan, “All rise from the dirt.””
Nick Routledge

“We have to actually lose the idea of intelligent design, because that’s actually what that is.  The top-down theory is the same as intelligent design.  And we have to actually stop thinking like that and start understanding that complexity can arise in another way and variety and intelligence and so on.  So my own response to this has been, as an artist, to start to think of my work, too, as a form of gardening.  So about 20 years ago I came up with this idea, this term, ‘generative music,’ which is a general term I use to cover not only the stuff that I do, but the kind of stuff that Reich is doing, and Terry Riley and lots and lots of other composers have been doing.
 
And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden.  One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.  And that life isn’t necessarily exactly what you’d envisaged for them.  It’s characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I’m really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound.  So in fact, I’m deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience.  I want to be surprised by it as well.  And indeed, I often am.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator.  You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together.  Gardener included.  So there’s something in the notes to this thing that says something about the difference between order and disorder.  It’s in the preface to the little catalog we have.  Which I take issue with, actually, because I think it isn’t the difference between order and disorder, it’s the difference between one understanding of order and how it comes into being, and a newer understanding of how order comes into being.
And another way I can translate that is to say it’s a repositioning of ourselves on the control/surrender spectrum.  I’ll talk briefly about that, then I’ll shut up.  We’re used to the idea, coming from the industrial and very intelligent post-Enlightenment history that we have, we’re used to the idea that the great triumph of humans is their ability to control.  And indeed, that must be the case, to some extent.
What we’re not so used to is the idea that another great gift we have is the talent to surrender and to cooperate.  Cooperation and surrender are actually parts of the same skill.  To be able to surrender is to be able to know when to stop trying to control.  And to know when to go with things, to be taken along by them.  And that’s a skill that we actually have to start relearning.  Our hubris about our success in terms of being controllers has made us overlook that side of our abilities.  So we’re so used to dignifying controllers that we forget to dignify surrenderers.”
Brian Eno

“The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise–in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us–as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future. Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.”
Brian Eno

“There are really two things about riding a motorbike that help to explain my passion for it. One is that the relation between a decision and its consequences is so close. And since you are so vulnerable, it demands a quality of observation that is extremely intense. This observation is not only of what is happening but also of what may happen in the very next instant. Most bikers observe ten times more than those driving four-wheeled vehicles–their actual survival depends on it!”
John Berger

“The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and u­sing it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strategy to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination.”
William Gibson Interviewed by David Wallace-Wells Paris Review

“What I’ve repeatedly noticed is that the people who really get in trouble during these crises are those who try to think everything through before taking any action. The problem with defining and refining your hypotheses without testing them is that the world keeps changing, and your analyses get further and further behind. So you’ve got to constantly update your thinking while you’re sitting there and reflecting. And that’s why I’m such a proponent of what I call “sensemaking.” There are many definitions of sensemaking; for me it is the transformation of raw experience into intelligible world views. It’s a bit like what mapmakers do when they try to make sense of an unfamiliar place by capturing it on paper. But the crucial point in cartography is that there is no one best map of a particular terrain. Similarly, sensemaking lends itself to multiple, conflicting interpretations, all of which are plausible. If an organization finds itself unsure of where it’s going, or even where it’s been, then it ought to be wide open to a lot of different interpretations, all of which can lead to possible action. The action and its consequence then begin to edit the list of interpretations down to a more manageable size.
And this is the point I wish to underscore: Action, tempered by reflection, is the critical component in recovering from cosmology episodes. Once you start to act, you can flesh out your interpretations and rework them. But it’s the action itself that gets you moving again. That’s why I advise leaders to leap in order to look, or to leap while looking. There’s a beautiful example of this: Several years ago, a platoon of Hungarian soldiers got lost in the Alps. One of the soldiers found a map in his pocket, and the troops used it to get out safely. Subsequently, however, the soldiers discovered that the map they had used was, in fact, a drawing of another mountain range, the Pyrenees. I just love that story, because it illustrates that when you’re confused, almost any old strategic plan can help you discover what’s going on and what should be done next. In crises especially, leaders have to act in order to think – and not the other way around.”
Karl E. Weick

“We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.”
Donella H. Meadows

“I’m acutely conscious of how dependent I am on those who built and sustained the NHS – including, pre-eminently, generations of labour movement activists and socialists. And as I sit with my IV drip, I’m mindful of those in government and business who would smash the delicate mechanism of the hospital and shatter the network of dependence that sustains me.
I’m being kept alive by the contributions of so many currents of human labour, thought, struggle, desire, imagination. By the whole Enlightenment tradition, but not only that: by older traditions of care, solidarity, mutuality, of respect for human life and compassion for human suffering. The harnessing of science, technology and advanced forms of organisation and information to compassionate ends is by no means automatic. It leans on and is only made possible by the conflict-riddled history of ethical and political development.
Beautiful as it is, this network of dependence is also frightening. Restrictions in capacity and mobility are hugely frustrating, and relying on others to supplement them is not a straightforward business – for patient or carer. I often feel I’m engaged in a never-ending battle for autonomy. I fight it out in relation to institutions, experts, medications, means of mobility, forms of diet. Not to mention the vital effort to live a life beyond illness, to hold on to that kernel of freedom that makes you who you are.”
Mike Marqusee

“Editing, like stringing sentences together, or working through a design, is not the rational problem-solving procedure we often pretend it to be. It’s more like a process of discovery where skill and chance work together. The skill of an editor is to be confident enough to allow for chance to indicate where the next cut should go, and then to be adept enough to follow that path. In a similar way novelists talk about characters taking over a story or graphic designers describe how ratios between type and form feel right. If the editor is really working in sync with his material he doesn’t assemble the film, the film assembles him. Do some buildings build themselves?”