Section II: Concordive Potentials

     I am going to mark out four concordive potentials that, when actualized, can help us to create and maintain states of organic and balanced concord, peace, and vitality with ourselves and the rest of the planet. There are obviously other concordive potentials, but these are the four I believe to be the most central to our total ability as a species to dramatically change our behavior and presence, and as I noted, this essay is meant only to sketch out my position on these concerns, not to be a completely thorough-going inquiry.  

These four concordive potentials or capacities are: our mutability, our adaptability, our creativity, and our compassion. The first three potentials are, I think, fairly obvious and almost commonplace in the sense that most of us are aware of – and even proud of – our mutability, adaptability, and creativity as human beings. Yet various forms of the myth of permanence have largely obscured the full concordive implications of those three potentials – implications I will examine shortly. But compassion is the most contentious, the most important, and the least understood of the concordive potentials, and deserves the most discussion. Indeed, my discussion of compassion will ultimately ground the principles upon which I will present my claims for total change and the syndividual in the second section of this essay. But first I need to discuss the other three potentials and how they contradict the myth of permanence, since that discussion will help to provide a needed context for understanding the concept of concordive potential, and understanding how these potentials are much deeper and richer than has been previously recognized.  

The first potential is perhaps the most obviously universal – and yet it is the most under-appreciated and ambiguously perceived as a concordive potential. So let’s talk about the obvious first: human societies are incredibly mutable. As Erich Fromm wrote, “man, in contrast to the animal, shows an almost infinite malleability; just as he can eat almost anything, live under practically any kind of climate and adjust himself to it, there is hardly any psychic condition which he cannot endure, and under which he cannot carry on” (The Sane Society, 26). The existence of such radically different societies as the Innuit, Aztec, Han Chinese, Hellenic Greek, Republican and Empirical Roman societies (not to mention the thousands of other societies that have graced the Earth) patently demonstrate the broad scope of possible human societies. And the explosion of technological and general innovations in the last century only further reinforces the inescapable conclusion that we have only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring all the facets of human potential and human organizational capacities. 

This leads to the second feature of mutability I initially mentioned: the mutability of humanity is often perceived ambiguously or seen as merely a neutral feature – a quality awaiting further dispositions and influences before it takes its settled form, a quality as likely to lead to chaos and strife as to order and peace. This claim, while true, commits an ontological blunder: it picks out our mutability as a stand-alone trait to be evaluated and considered on its own. This is the issue with the nurture versus nature argument when it comes to our mutability. Both arguments reify our mutability: it is a potential that only exists in relationship to other potentials and actualities, and is not a stand-alone potential. This is true of all our potentials, indeed of everything in existence, and rather than enter into a lengthy ontological debate I will simply recommend the reader peruse the Buddhist and Taoist classics on the subjects of interdependence and existence, of which my claim is a variant. Each of our potentials and whether and how it becomes actualized, whether it is a concordive or discordive potential, conditions and affects our other potentials and their actualization or lack thereof. However, our potentials form clusters of relationships: potentials that tend to have concordive and discordive relationships with other potentials. This is precisely the reason for discussing the four concordive potentials as a group: they cannot adequately be seen as either concordive or discordive without being conceived in relationship with other potentials and actualities of human nature and the environment that surrounds us. So in the context of our creativity, adaptability, and compassion, our mutability is a concordive potential, since if we use our creativity, adaptability, and compassion to craft a beautiful society and live full, meaningful, and peaceful lives, our mutability will allow us to accept this life without reverting quickly or easily to a more atavistic lifestyle. On the other hand, if we choose to associate our mutability as necessarily associated with our greedy and violent and deceptive potentials, then of course our mutability will be a discordive potential. 

In this profound way our nature and our flowering as beings is up to us: we can choose how to perceive and emphasize those relationships between potentials and actualities of our nature. I choose to see the positive relationships, and I argue for the rest of us to do the same. The positive relationships between our potentials are possible: do we want to make them a reality for the many and not just the few, or is this edenic vision too blasphemous for our fearful hearts? Now is the time to cast aside fear, which has no more claim to verity than does hope – and to live with strength, vision, and hope. 

The second potential is our adaptability. Mutability here is simply the raw malleability of our nature when seen in the context of our creativity, compassion, and adaptability, all emphasized and conceived as a self-reinforcing constellation in our hearts to be brought forth consistently into the world. Adaptability is distinct from mutability in that it is our ability to find the strength of will and the fortitude to survive and to find meaning and value in a vast variety of environments and conditions. In a way, curiosity is often a subset of our adaptive potential, in that it allows us to find value and meaning in exploration and discovery. To avoid reification, it is necessary to note that adaptability is a composite potential: courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude all play their part in forming the appearance of this one potential. But in this discussion of total change and the myth of permanence, it is more fruitful to treat this ability to find meaning and to survive physically and spiritually in a broad array of environments as a somewhat distinct concordive potential. 

Examples of the universal nature of our adaptability abound – the same broad plethora of societies I mentioned before points to our adaptability as much as to our mutability, but countless individual examples of perseverance and adaptability in extreme circumstances abound as well: Nelson Mandela’s nearly 30 years in prison, Auang San Suu Kyi’s long struggle with the military authorities of Burma, the revolutionaries in the British Colonies who fought for independence and created the United States of America. Indeed, even fictional examples of adaptability and all its composite qualities I mentioned, such as courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude, serve to prove my claim that adaptability is a universal potential in us all, since fiction derives much of its appeal from the verisimilitude in its portrayal of this very human trait. One of my favorite examples of adaptability in fiction is in the movie The Two Towers. I am thinking of the scene where Aragorn convinces King Theoden, surrounded by 10,000 orcs and on the verge of absolute ruin and defeat, to sound the legendary horn of Helm Hammerhand and ride out to defeat the orcs and the dark armies of Saruman. There is adaptiveness abounding in this scene, and it is so stirring a scene in good part because it rings true – it awakens within us our own sense of dignity in having such courage and adaptability ourselves, even if we usually express our adaptability in less dramatic circumstances.

 

But of course people can claim our adaptability is discordive as much as I am claiming it is concordive. But that is because we have let it be discordive, we have at times closed our hearts to concordive possibilities and seen only the dark relationships within and without. This is, indeed, a real-world point that I believe Tolkein makes throughout his trilogy - that we can use our adaptability for good or evil, and this is a question of vision, not potential. Our adaptability, if given the right environment and coaching, can enable us to put to effective use the tools that our creativity creates and our compassion guides us to apply. If we trust in our compassion, creativity, and mutability (and by ‘we believe’ I mean we individually believe in our collective abilities to be effectively compassionate, creative, adapative, and mutable) we can adapt ourselves to letting go of fear and of our deep assumptions about the darkness inside of us and around us. And we can find meaning and truth in a newer and better world – an abiding sense of meaning and truth.    

The third concordive potential is our creativity. Creativity is distinct from adaptability in that where adaptability is rooted in surviving (spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically), creativity is rooted in creating and exploring the universe’s possibilities. This potential also has its various dimensions – the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical, and the innumerable beyond; and in many ways, adaptiveness and creativity are deeply linked potentials. Much of the meaning we find in life, that meaning-making and defiance against the sense of meaningless and destruction that so frequently characterizes adaptiveness, is meaning we first discover and awaken through imagination, through our various creative impulses and acts. What creativity discovers and fashions, adaptiveness grasps onto and brings (or does not) into the meaningful center of our lives. Our creativity is one of the central forces responsible for our art, our spirituality, our intellectual lives, our sciences – all the products of man, all the artifices and manipulations of the reality adaptability is a composite potential: courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude all play their part in forming the appearance of this one potential. But in this discussion of total change and the myth of permanence, it is more fruitful to treat this ability to find meaning and to survive physically and spiritually in a broad array of environments as a somewhat distinct concordive potential.

     Our creativity is very obvious as a universal quality, but its profound nature, especially in relationship with the other concordive potentials, has historically been under-appreciated and under-utilized. Much of our creativity, in terms of the products and systems of creativity, has been conceived in terms of the individual systems they appear to represent unto themselves. In this way, much art is typically approached as art for its own sake; much religious and spiritual discourse and activity is approached as religion and spirituality for its own sake; technology for its own sake, on its own terms. We take or leave these activities, we appreciate or denigrate these creative systems based on the values and benefits these systems articulate for and unto themselves. We frequently (but not always) take their internal claims to be sufficient for understanding their values and uses in our lives and in adapting them to our lifestyles. So technology claims value in being able to make our lives easier and less fraught with suffering and difficulty – and by and large we accept this claim in our use or rejection of technological products. The arts, (at least modern theorists and artists) including literature, music, the performing arts, and the visual arts, claim in different ways to offer value in satisfying our ‘artistic’ needs as either artists and writers or readers and purveyors of art – and we accept this claim in our appreciation and use, dissatisfaction and disuse of the systems and products of the arts. The same for religions, spiritual movements, academia, sports, and so on. 

The problem here is that by taking the validity of these system’s claims for granted, without moderation and adaptation to everything else we value and seek in life, we are shortchanging ourselves. We are not properly actualizing our adaptability and mutability as human beings here, since we are not sufficiently utilizing our compassionate potential. All four potentials shine forth brightest when they are considered and actualized in a balanced and self-aware relationship with each other. This is a general grievance, thankfully, and not a universally true one (people do independently assess the claims of our creative products and systems, just not nearly enough). But it seriously underscores the problems we face in coming to terms with all our potentials, especially our concordive ones. The creative potential of humanity, and the products it yields, cannot be approached as self-sufficient and independent entities or processes if we are to actually achieve total change and expose the myth of permanence for what it is. They must be seen as necessary and mutable parts of a whole relationship between all the potentials we seek to actuate and all the actualities we wish to dispel (war, global poverty, famine, wide-spread greed, etc.). So technology and its products cannot be seen simply as devices to make our lives easier and more pleasant. Such an attitude, if seriously pursued or even complacently accepted, deprives us of the ability to see more compassionate and adaptive uses of technology that the technological system itself might not prescribe – it encourages us to use technologies without an eye for the broader implications of those uses in our lives and the lives of others and the life of the universe around us. The same critique can be made of all our creative systems, from art to politics, from sports to television. We need to be able to see these systems and products, and all our own personal creative endeavors and impulses, as part of a whole relationship between our other potentials, needs, and desires as human beings, and our overall place in the universe. And we can do this. We just have to accept that there is a balance to strike, there is a union to be forged between our compassionate aspects and our creative aspects, our adaptive and our mutable potentials – and we are not there yet, but we can be.

I will post Section 3, which is an extended discussion of the concordive potential for compassion, next week. Please feel free to comment or to post a link to this blog on your facebook pages (or other social media pages) if you are interested in this discussion. Also please feel free to post links to related blogs, discussions, organizations and the like here or on my Manbeard facebook page!