The following is a brief summary of Bewusstseinskultur: Towards a Culture of Consciousness, by Thomas Metzinger.
Metzinger opens with a sharp appraisal: Humanity is well beyond the point of stopping climate disaster. The absolute best-case scenario is damage control. The tragedy is that even today, the coming problems are mostly unseen, and the world carries on, compounding them even further. We are well-informed about our trajectory, yet our societies are paralyzed to adapt.
Metzinger points out three main sources of “inertia”:
- Physical Processes – i.e. the climate, ecology, resource depletion. Problems are set in motion and cannot be reversed.
- Society and Politics – our ways of living are architected around infinite growth and resource consumption – which simply will not work on a finite planet. These systems are unable to adapt as quickly as the problems are escalating.
- The Human Mind – the human mind is delusional (self-deception, dubious beliefs, cognitive distortions) toward its own comfort and survival. Delusion is a feature in terms of individual survival, but a bug when compounded across billions of people needing to acknowledge and coordinate around existential risk.
While each type of inertia warrants attention, Metzinger locks in on the human mind. He imagines a “Culture of Consciousness” – the social circumstances required to see beyond delusion and coordinate on a new trajectory for the species.
A Consciousness Culture:
- Cares about people’s mental states
- Systematically cultivates valuable mental states
- Supports the search for true knowledge:
- Inner truth
- Outside truth
- Provides dignity – irrespective of outside circumstances
Metzinger offers some opinions on what this might look like, while also noting the importance of consensus building.
What It Looks Like
Truth and Knowledge
Truth is something we all seek, whether we think about it explicitly or not. The problem with truth is that, thanks to our delusional minds, our knowledge is often ridden with holes, contradictions, and tightly held beliefs without good evidence.
Honest knowledge, therefore, is central.
In the simplest terms, this requires extreme humility, skepticism, and curiosity. This is true not just for outer truth, as exhaustively described by Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution of Knowledge, but also true for inner truth, as we exhaustively cover in this project of Self-Investigation.
This “epistemic attitude”, or pursuit of honest knowledge, is a pillar of Consciousness Culture.
Mental States
Metzinger has devoted his life to studying and exploring mental states. He declines to say which mental states are “most valuable” – but suggests this is something that we should build consensus around. He suggests most people are unaware of the continuum of states out there, and how everyone has the right to explore and expand their perspectives. A Culture of Consciousness should systematically support this.
Mindfulness / Awareness
How can any of us see through delusion? Awareness of awareness (or mindfulness) offers a foundation: understanding the deepest and “purest” aspect of perception and then examining everything that exists within it.
A Culture of Consciousness depends upon this quality of knowing and attending – and the unambiguous way to cultivate it is mindfulness meditation. This is especially true in today’s attention-extraction economy. Incumbent powers and industries benefit from distracting us.
Dignity
Every person deserves dignity, even when (perhaps most especially when) the outside world is failing in some way. The deepest form of self-respect comes from understanding our fundamental nature, which we then might also respect in others.
Hope?
Metzinger rejects optimism. This is a time for realism.
At best, a Culture of Consciousness might enable a sufficient number of us to see more clearly and lessen unavoidable damage.
At worst, a Culture of Consciousness can provide relief and dignity to folks inhabiting a world that is failing around them.
None of this is meant to plunge anyone into doom. We still live in a world of extraordinary abundance, and many of us have much to be grateful for. Both can be true at the same time: looming existential crisis while the sun shines.
The task, for us and for future generations, is to stay sober about these circumstances while neither collapsing into despair nor ignoring the problem entirely. Practicing consciousness culture, and advocating for it, is a small step anyone can take.
The Conclusion About Delusion
The human mind is perpetually deluded in ways we cannot see.
This delusion is both a feature and a bug. It helps us win as individuals and small groups but fails us as a species contending with planetary limits.
Humanity has grappled with delusion for millennia, as evidenced in culture, philosophy, psychotherapy, and cognitive science.
What’s unique today are the stakes.
We are now forced to watch our entire species drive into a wall. It’s not a matter of whether we will crash. We will. It’s a matter of how much we can slow the car down before we do.
This makes one wonder: why are we headed toward this wall?
Ideological war, lack of understanding for ourselves and others, and beliefs that are tightly held even in the face of contradicting evidence.
All rooted in delusion.
A Culture of Consciousness will not save us. It merely offers clarity.
A likely critique is that such “contemplative” responses don’t solve crises – and it’s correct, strictly speaking. But it mistakes the proposal. A Culture of Consciousness is not a competitor to solutions. It is an enhancer of every one of them. Any solution – political, technological, economic – must first be seen clearly and then coordinated around.
Clarity won’t slow the car. It improves the odds we try.
How can we better see delusion in ourselves and in culture?
How can we change lifestyle and culture to minimize harm?
At least, how can we find relief and dignity as this unfolds?
Why This Book Matters
“We need a place where people can go, where there are not monks who proselytize or missionarize who want to have a following and create a cult. Instead we need a community. If there could be something like secular nuns and monks without some elaborate baroque system. There could be different kinds of practice for different people. This is something we are really lacking in this rich western world.”
Thomas Metzinger
Reading Metzinger, we find striking overlap. Self-Investigation.org is an attempt at much of what a Culture of Consciousness entails. We care about mental states. We care about attention. We pursue honest knowledge, inner and outer, with humility and skepticism. We hold that dignity comes from understanding our own nature. And finally, we care about all of this for the sake of cooperation.
We arrived here independently, with similar motivations – which suggests these ideas are ripe for the times, waiting to be acted on.
Metzinger imagines consciousness culture at the scale of humanity. That may not arrive all at once. In the meantime, a network of small consciousness cultures – communities that work like ours – may lead the way. Self-Investigation.org aims to be one node in that network.
Read the full book here.
Discussion
This article is posted to our community forum for discussion.