Post-Conventional Imperative
Description
Jonathan Rowson:
"The post-conventional imperative is about the necessity and urgency of collectively reimagining who we are and what life is for, with five main points of emphasis:
- Post-Tragic (hope on the other side of despair)
- Post-Growth (reconceiving societal purpose)
- Post-Rational (ways of knowing beyond intellectual limits)
- Post-Exploitation (reflective on the uses and abuses of power)
- Post-Tribal (togetherness in the context of power and love)."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/post-conventional-imperatives)
Characteristics
The Post-Tragic
Jonathan Rowson:
"The Post-Tragic sensibility: ...One way to think of it is as ‘a station of the self ’ in which we move from pre-tragic (all is well, every problem can be solved) through tragic (all is lost, life is dark and despair abounds) towards post-tragic in which we transcend and include tragedy into a fuller and richer and ultimately more real and meaningful view of life. Why contend with tragedy at all? Because tragedy is the meaning and mattering of life. The more life matters, the more vulnerable we are to tragedy. The concept applies beyond the self to society as a whole. The pandemic wrought tragedy in abundance, the enduring emergency of climate change is tragic and widespread human addiction and distraction through surveillance capitalism is tragic because – individually and collectively - we urgently need to concentrate on what truly matters and how we should therefore live."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/post-conventional-imperatives)
The Post-Growth imperative
Jonathan Rowson:
"The Post-Growth imperative is about finding a sound social and ecological basis for enduring prosperity so that as many people as possible can live what Roberto Unger calls ‘larger lives’. Post-growth thinking is about reconceiving the purpose of the macroeconomy, but at a personal level it is about thinking of related features of life including ourselves as consumers, whether we work too hard, what time and wellbeing means to us, and what we care about most. In this sense post-growth thinking is not so much economic or political as meta-economic and meta-political, it opens up discussions about underlying societal purposes and what kinds of viable futures we might look forward to creating together. There are many thinkers in this space already, but Professor Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey is one of them – he is aware of the relevance of Bildung in this context and invited me to write the essay on the relationship between Bildung and Sustainable Prosperity. There is still a place for economic growth in specific places and circumstances, and there are other ways to grow that matter, but to be ‘post-growth’ is part of facing up to where we are in 2021 when we have already transgressed several ecological and social boundary conditions that destabilise the world."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/post-conventional-imperatives)
The Post-rational inclination
Jonathan Rowson:
"The Post-rational inclination is about recognising the limits of the intellectual function in its ability to grasp what is happening in the world today, while also respecting ways of knowing that are not antithetical to reason, but attempt to work alongside it, including insight and intuition and imagination and various forms of somatic and metaphorical and relational ways of knowing. We are now in a world of what Timothy Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’ that are both everywhere in principle and nowhere in particular, and these include climate change, artificial intelligence, and the pandemic. Our contexts and complexity and technologies and degrees of interdependence are such that we are caught up in a world that even the most knowledgeable and wisest people cannot in principle understand. As we all try to figure out the perennial question ‘what should I do?’ the sources for that answer will not be purely rational, which is partly why the festival speaks of ‘beauty, imagination and calling’ – alternative touchstones to orient ourselves towards meaning and purpose."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/post-conventional-imperatives)
Post-exploitation
Jonathan Rowson:
"The need to be post-exploitation refers to a reckoning with history, with power, with class, with race, with patriarchy, with colonialism, and with coercion of all forms. The long history of St Giles House includes both slavery (for example the first Earl had plantations in the Bahamas and in South Carolina until about 1713) and the abolition of slavery (the seventh Earl, along with William Wilberforce, was a strong proponent of the abolition of slavery and other social reforms in the nineteenth century). Slavery is the rawest and most brutal form of exploitation, and enforced servitude is still widespread today in many forms. The Realisation Festival is committed to a meaningful and genuine reckoning with how colonial history still informs the present. We believe that this discussion is an essential part of the unlearning and reimagining that informs the gathering. For instance, exploitation can be relatively subtle and includes conscious and unconscious bias against people of colour; it also includes the unpaid mental, emotional and domestic labour undertaken mostly by women that is often taken for granted. To consider exploitation systemically, Roberto Unger’s definition of a progressive is helpful: “someone who wants to see society reorganised, part-by-part and step-by-step, so that ordinary men and women have a better chance to live a larger life’. By larger life he means a “a life of greater intensity, of greater scope, and of greater capability’."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/post-conventional-imperatives)
The post-tribal injunction
Jonathan Rowson:
"The post-tribal injunction is about recognising the problem of political polarisation and epistemic filter bubbles and facing up to the fact that humans cannot continue to be tribal but nonetheless have to be. This perspective implicates technology and the underlying business models of social media, but it is also about our complicity in that and opportunities to create alternatives. There is a deep and adaptive human need to belong, and belonging is meaningless unless it is somehow circumscribed, for instance by place or people or purpose. And yet, it is equally true that we need to expand our circles of belonging more than ever, perhaps to encompass the whole globe of eight or so billion people. And we have to try to do so in a way that is not warm and fuzzy but ultimately lame, and that means not being naïve about competing commitments, power imbalances, competitive pressures, incommensurate values and other features of life that inevitably undermine collaboration. We need a kind of post-tribal tribalism that recognises ‘We work’ is one of the most fundamental challenges of our time. It is hoped that by combining an aristocratic context alongside a set of democratic imperatives, the post-tribal challenge will be a particularly intriguing part of the setting. In all these cases, ‘post’ is mostly about transcending and including rather than opposition as such."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/post-conventional-imperatives)