Finding a Way

Will Peoples’ Responses to the Emergencies of the Coming Decades be Warm? Or Cold?

Nora Bateson & Mamphela Ramphele

The crises of the moment do not need further description here. Suffice to say that the complexity of the overlapping crises of inequality, health, justice, technology, ecology and culture are producing emergencies that the institutions of the last centuries cannot contend with. How will the next decades play out amidst these crises? More importantly, what is possible for societies around the world to learn in the process?

We (Bateson & Ramphele) are going to bring our voices together on this topic, to open a conversation with a conversation. We have both been watching these patterns for decades, from different sides of the world, different experiences of life, different cultures, different generations… but we have seen something very similar. Each of us has struggled to find the thing people call “traction” for these observations we share. We have been told it was not practical, strategic, or policy oriented.

Today we are writing this together, mutually learning how to express this extremely important shift in how to approach environmental and social change. It turns out it is not traction that is needed, but relationship.

The lifeboat story: cold version: There is an old metaphor, introduced by Garrett Hardin in which a lifeboat is featured as a way to ponder the mathematics of survival. The thought experiment is…