Tubegraph

Ecologies of practices

5 min read

From: jimruttshow8596

Ecologies of practices represent a crucial project to address a perceived “meaning crisis” in contemporary society [00:36:00], providing a home and community for these practices [03:06:00]. This concept emphasizes the need for a dynamic, interconnected system of transformative activities rather than isolated, static interventions [01:21:21].

Purpose and Function

The primary goal of ecologies of practices is to enable individuals to:

These practices aim to address perennial human susceptibilities to self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior, which arise from the complex, dynamical, self-organizing, recursive, embodied, and enacted nature of human cognition [09:20:00].

Relationship to Traditional Religions

Historically, the only systems that have reliably “homed” ecologies of practices and facilitated significant individual, community, and cultural transformation have been religions [03:55:00]. However, many “legacy religions” born in the Axial Age are no longer viable for numerous individuals [04:06:00]. This is largely due to their “Two Worlds mythology”—the idea of an illusory everyday world and a separate “real” world to which one transcends [04:28:00], which is difficult to reconcile with a modern scientific worldview [04:47:00].

The concept of a “religion that is not a religion” seeks to extract the functionality of traditional religions—providing a home for ecologies of practices and fostering transformation—without adopting their worldview or historical problems [04:48:00]. This alternative is explicitly non-supernatural [02:50:00].

Wisdom Famine

A “wisdom famine” exists because while information and knowledge are readily available, there is no clear path for people to cultivate wisdom [10:19:00]. Many describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” seeking wisdom through autodidactic means, which carries inherent risks [10:48:00]. Ecologies of practices must be supported by a community that can provide support, correction, and challenge, much like traditional cultural education [11:02:00].

Design Principles and Characteristics

Ecologies of practices are designed to be:

  • Complex and Dynamic: They are not “one-shot interventions” but rather complex, sophisticated, and dynamic systems capable of reconfiguring themselves to ameliorate self-deception [01:21:19].
  • Self-organizing and Self-correcting: Like natural ecologies, they possess checks and balances and levels of organization that allow for self-sustaining and self-regulating processes [01:22:33].
  • Opponent Processing: A key feature is the inclusion of practices that work in opposition to each other, like the interaction between task-focused networks and the default mode network in the brain [01:20:10]. This interaction introduces variation and selection, optimizing for insight [01:26:36].
  • Layering: Practices can be layered, meaning an opponent processing system within one practice can be put into an opponent relationship with another, such as pairing still mindfulness with moving mindfulness [01:26:50].
  • Pedagogical Programs: There must be a clear “order of operations” for onboarding people into such complex systems [01:27:17].

Examples of Practices

  • Mindfulness Practices: These involve broadly meditative practices (stepping back to observe mental frames for distortion) and contemplative practices (exploring new frames) [01:25:09]. They act in an opponent fashion to make one “insight-prone” [01:26:27].
  • Active Open-mindedness: Practices that dampen the “insight machinery” to allow for more careful inferential processes [01:27:50].
  • Ritual Enactment: Rituals are understood as the “imaginal” (imagination for the sake of perception) in service of the “aspirational” (the relationship between current and future self) [01:31:37]. A good ritual transfers broadly and deeply, affording profound reciprocal opening with reality [01:33:29]. Examples include Tai Chi Chuan, which fosters fluid cognition and adaptation [01:34:45].
  • Community Practices: Singing and dancing together are seen as “folk psycho-technologies” that foster a sense of something “more than just the aggregate sum of all of the individuals” [01:28:21].
  • Technologies of Sovereignty: Practices that help individuals live well in relationship with themselves and their experiences [01:36:59].
  • “We” Practices: Practices for integrating people into a collective “we” while maintaining individual specificity and fostering generative relationships [01:38:15].
  • Reintegrating Human Potential with Nature: Practices for re-weaving human capacity and technology into a symmetrical relationship with nature, restoring “Homo sapiens” as the wise hominid [01:39:51].
  • Life-Event Rituals: Rituals for significant life events like birth and death, which are inherently “sacred” (both important and dangerous) [01:41:00].
  • Synergistic Satisfiers: Practices that simultaneously fulfill multiple important functions, such as breastfeeding, which has “13,000 distinct synergistic satisfiers” for both infant and mother [01:43:42].

Scaling and Propagation

Scaling ecologies of practices requires a shift from propagating “content” or “propositional knowledge”—which characterized the Axial Age religions and led to their dilution and failure [01:54:50]—to fostering a culture designed for positive returns to scale, like Metcalfe’s Law [01:56:05].

Holographic Scaling

Instead of a “photographic” or centralized approach (like the old religions), the scaling model is “holographic” and distributed [02:00:28]. This means:

  • Context over Content: Emphasis on the context that enables practices, not just the explicit content of beliefs [02:00:19].
  • Distributed Empowerment: Individuals are empowered to become sovereign and share their learnings and wisdom with others who are receptive [02:01:40].
  • Focus on Meaningful Relationships: The system is built on the strongest possible relationship lines (e.g., family, close friends), as these are the “most sacred” and capable of the “most meaningfulness” [01:58:37]. When people successfully cultivate these relationships, they have an inherent incentive to propagate the practices to those they care about, creating a positive feedback loop [02:04:47].
  • Leveraging Cataclysm: The current “meta-crisis”—the breakdown of old institutions and the perceived absurdity of the secular world—creates a pressing need and a “wind at our backs” for new solutions to emerge and be adopted [02:02:00].
  • Pedagogical Continuity: This involves creating a sequence of experiences and resources, from video games for young people to advanced workshops, that provide a continuous pathway into the ecologies of practices [01:50:00]. This allows for different levels of engagement, analogous to how Christianity accommodated both basic Sunday school and theological complexity [01:51:53].

Essentially, by focusing on practices that genuinely upgrade individual and group capacity to navigate life’s challenges, these ecologies of practices can organically propagate through the deepest and most meaningful human connections, fostering a distributed, self-sustaining movement [01:57:51].

Graph View

Backlinks