Erling Hope

the Still, Small Voice experiment

If you’ve ever had the experience of being unable to communicate with a colleague, a co-worker, a family member, because they seem to live in an alternate reality, then you have probably visited the front lines of the Cold Civil War, what we once called the Culture Wars. Stolen elections, Biden’s laptop, chemtrails, to say nothing about shape-shifting infanticidal alien reptoids running the Deep State: These caustic, lurid tales, mobilized and accelerated to enact a radical corporate deregulatory agenda, and to degrade the democratic nation-state, are succeeding wildly at shredding the social fabric of a once proud, always flawed, currently democratic republic.

There’s a whole vocabulary being built around our anxiety about the sense that Americans no longer, effectively, live in the same reality. Post-truth politics, the epistemic crisis, the semantic apocalypse, the “Death of Cronkite” and alternative facts. We don’t live inside the same stories about the world around us, about our fellow humans, about what is real and what is illusion and deception.

The Still, Small Voice experiment has been a year-long exploration of building community and orchestrating enchantment without the use of stories or claims about the nature of reality or the human role in it. Instead, it asks if we can satisfy these abiding human needs using only the simple act of questioning. Meetings are anchored in silence, and participants are welcome to speak as we feel moved. Here, you will find a set of values that we’ve found work well, so far, and that we try to embody in our actions and attitudes. Below, you will find a schedule of previous and upcoming queries, and further supporting resources at the bottom of the page. If you are interested in exploring a variation on this experiment, I encourage you to reach out to me. I will be happy to share what I’ve learned, and to hear your own ideas about building enchanted, beloved community.

Last Meeting

DEC 22: What is the Human Being?

As we conclude this year-long experiment in gathering and reflection, we arrive at the question that informs all the other questions: What is the Human Being?

[DRAFT] So we turn to the imaginers, the writers and artists and poets and songmakers to illuminate this space. We are “the linguistic layer of the biosphere” writes Kim Stanley Robinson. We are the recorders of the history of the land says Wendell Berry. “We are a fleet a drones constantly being hacked and counterhacked by angelic and demonic forces” writes one anonymous participant in the CrazyMaking project, progenitor to Still Small Voice.

What are we? is not a new question. It is one that, whether you notice it of not, we ask a lot. For millennia, humans have been looking at the larger animal world and saying things like “we use language, and other animals don’t, so that’s what makes us different.” And then we find vervet monkeys doing what can only be described as language, and then prairie dogs and even yardbirds. So we move the goal post: “We use tools, etc.” and then corvids and chimps and octopi are observed doing that. And so then it becomes “Well we make tools” and then various animals are spotted going at it and then “We have culture…” and “We have abstract thinking” and we make art and exhibit wonder and have self awareness and theory of mind and ponder mortality and every time, we observe animals performing that behavior. Even plants and fungi are getting in on the action now, hosting marketplaces and making something like ‘plans.’

More recently, we have been looking in the other direction, at artificial intelligence, and saying “Well, AI can’t do creative thinking and innovation” or emotional intelligenceI or long narrative arcs. I told my students in the robotics class to draw hands, draw hands, because AI couldn’t do that. But it’s starting to get savvy at that now too.

We’ve been doing this defensive, rear-guard action, hemming ourselves in, from both directions now, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. It’s like all we’re really good for anymore is following a conversation in a loud, crowded room (not as easy as it seems. We’re actually pretty amazing at it, so suck it, AI.)

But asking questions about the nature of beliefs and belief systems, including religions and conspiracy theories, and engaging these acts and these phenomena as creative works of expression, as art, is fundamentally asking about the nature of the human being. Because nowhere in this work will you find the idea that beliefs are “merely works of art.” There is nothing mere about the creative process. There is something in it that reaches into the basement of existence, jacks straight into the electrical panel over there by the dusky utility closet. There is something about the creative process that embeds us into collaboration with subatomic particles, conjuring ever new realities into existence.

What kind of creature is mad enough to do this? What is this human being? [DRAFT]

10AM The Church

DEC 8: What is the Craziest thing that you believe?

The Still, Small Voice experiment is approaching the end of its first year. It is time to reckon with its origin story.

The idea of building community and orchestrating enchantment around the act of questioning dates back to an older project investigating conspiracy theories and of the changing nature of beliefs in general.

Having watched my colleagues in the building trades descend into conspiracy theory psychosis over the course of the previous decades, I began asking people two questions as a way to reorganize my own relationship with certainty, and to invite others into the same terrain. “What is the craziest thing that you believe?” and “What is the riskiest thing that you believe?” That project began almost exactly ten years ago.

In the ensuing decade, hundreds of participants, in dozens of forums both formal and informal, have shared with me a breathtaking range of beliefs. These beliefs informed a series of related projects, including the creation of a home-made conspiracy theory, which remains an ongoing and developing enterprise.

These projects are informed by a conviction that beliefs are fundamentally creative acts. The current ‘crisis of epistemology’, this Post-Truth World, is mainly an illumination of this fact. Note that creative acts are not all positive, or beneficial. Some are extremely dangerous. Some are just plain crazy.

So what is the craziest thing that you believe?

See this as an invitation to other yourself, to examine your beliefs in the widest imaginable context. “I don’t believe anything that’s crazy” is a common response, and a fine candidate for the very thing itself.

NOV 24: What do we give when we give thanks?

Really, what do we give when we give thanks? What is gratitude? Is it a feeling? Because if it is, it is not like other feelings. We are not born with the capacity for gratitude. It is, strangely, a feeling that we must learn. A feeling that we must learn. It requires a degree of reflection, of knowledge, of experience, of self-awareness and of awareness of others. It is a feeling that, in order to experience it, we need to know that circumstances don’t have to be as good as they are, that things could be much worse, that help comes from people who have a host of concerns that have nothing to do with us… Buddhists have a prayer that goes something like “we give thanks for the discipline to practice the discipline.” Thank about that for a moment. Even when we earn something, it is because we have been given the character and the grit, and the conditions, to do what it takes to get there. Everything, ultimately, is given, just as everything will ultimately be surrendered.

Gratitude has a host of well-document positive effects on health, relationships, even ‘workplace performance’. But there’s a double edge to this thing. There is a long history of an emphasis on gratitude being used to keep oppressed people down, as well as to suppress ‘unmarketable’ emotional states. The Christian church has a lot to answer for here, particularly where it was partnered with empire. There’s a lesson here for all of us navigating the greatest consolidation of wealth and power ever seen, the narcissistic nihilism that sustains it, and the system of extinction into which this arrangement embeds us all. Gratitude is the last sentiment to cultivate in this context. Resentment, strange to say, and if this is the opposite of gratitude, is arguably the more proper posture.

This feels like a dangerous sentiment to express. It abrades the (small “p”) positivist nature of USian values, to say nothing of toxic positivity. But there is it. And here we are, in this moment of complexity, needing to cultivate contrary emotional states, needing to balance the care of the self with the care for future generations. Here we are, needing to be human.

LISTEN:

Happiness Break: 5 Minutes of Gratitude: Greater Good Magazine

Overthink Podcast Episode 121: Dark Moods with Mariana Alessandri

OCT 13: What is charisma?

But more than that, where most humans, with some of the best eyes in mammaldom, see three primary colors… mantis shrimp see in 12-16. Primary colors. It’s unimaginable. Again, literally.

Biologists talk about “charismatic mega-fauna.” Elephants, tigers, whales etc.. Even without the technical details above, though, you’d recognize this creature as a “charismatic half-a-foot fauna.” They bring curiousity, spunk, undeniable visual splendor, and a certain kind of charming buffoonery. Yes yes, they bring the rizz.

None of those descriptors appear in any definition of charisma that I’ve read. So what is it?

Among human animals, charisma has a decidedly spotty record, often convincing otherwise intelligent people of some really stupid, occasionally poisonous ideas. The word itself derives from the Greek “kharisma” denoting a vague kind of “favor, or divine gift”. Christians have used it to indicate special aptitudes ranging from interpreting angelic utterances to the gift of “administration.” (1 Corinthians 12:28)

So, seriously, what is this thing? What is charisma?

Photo credit: East Idaho Aquarium

OCT 6: How do you make your pain powerful?

This is a ‘fork-in-the-road’ query, said SSV participant R., opening up the query to many fellow participants. The query was brought to us by Cara Power, and it was challenging at first to know how to engage it. Good queries often invite a range of interpretations, but this one seemed to diverge in contrary directions. And this, it turned out, was its essential strength. “How have you taken your pain and/or suffering”, she wrote, “and made it powerful in your life or in the the lives of others?”

SEPT 29: How do you read the world?

We all do this; we all read the world, mine it for meaning, however tentatively, however absurdly. Every metaphor is a reflection of this—-it is probably involuntary on some level. But it is also highly consequential, shaping our experience in a reciprocal, at times compelling, sometimes tragic resonance. 

For example, think of a metaphor, if you can, that is more widespread, more nearly universal, than the metaphor of light, or of light vs dark. People all through history, on every corner of the globe, of every shade of complexion, have used this metaphor to describe human spiritual aspirations, or just the general sorting out of the world. And for good reason. Light lets us see the way, the light from the sun warms us—it’s the source of all life on the planet. And modern physics—with relativity, wave / particle duality, it just makes the metaphor richer. This metaphor is everywhere because it’s so damn useful!

But, now: Can you think of a metaphor that is responsible for more human suffering? People all through history, on every corner of the globe, of every shade of complexion, have used this metaphor as a reason, consciously and unconsciously, for treating people darker than them badly, often barbarically so.

This framing does not minimize the step-change in human cruelty marked by the European and trans-Atlantic chattel slave trade. But the ubiquity of the bedrock bias shows us that something is profoundly askew. Our hermeneutics of phenomena is broken. Our exegesis of experience is flawed. As clear as the light of day, we are reading the world wrong.

And then there’s that other penumbra effect that proves irresistible to the human hunger for treating the world as if it were a book.

During the last solar eclipse to slide across North America, a host of otherwise hard-boiled cynics suspended their dogged resistance to wonder, and marveled at the bizarre coincidence that we all live under daily. This planet’s sun and moon occupy such a precisely equal amount of ‘sky-space’ that sometimes a solar eclipse is complete, and sometimes there’s a thin ring of sunlight around the moon, depending on a minor irregularity in the moon’s orbit. This astronomically rare, seemingly calibrated condition cries out to the human mind for interpretation, for some kind of reading. It proclaims intentionality with a bluntness that mocks the modern skeptical mind.

Or does it? Strange coincidences, events that seem pregnant with meaning, even day-to-day events that ring with faint poetic echo, they call out our story-telling, pattern-seeking mind. They are the fuel of conventional narrative structure. Sometimes the world seems written for us to read. We must read carefully. We must read deeply. We must read, aware that we do not know all the words, that our grammar may be backwards. We must read aware that will get it wrong.

SEPT 1: How has capitalism shaped who you are?

This is a terrible question. Like asking a fish “How has the water shaped who you are?” Fish doesn’t know. Leave the fish alone.

But continue to observe the fish. This fish is an entrepreneur, part of a thriving service economy that animates coral reefs throughout the tropical Indo-pacific. This is the cleaner wrasse, and how a fish with such market savvy could brand itself with such an unfortunate moniker… is one of nature’s enduring mysteries. What is clear is that this fish is part of a thriving system of patronage and service and exchange and value that can only be called a market.  

But clearly, with the way capitalism is currently deployed in the US and abroad, we are all deeply embedded in a dangerous system of extinction. The Sixth Great Extinction, to be more precise. And globalized corporate capitalism has been a prime mover in this transition for 400 years. 

Systems are composed of parts. And we all play a part in this system of extinction. Unless we live pretty much entirely off the grid, we cannot do otherwise, and we deceive ourselves if we think we can. 

Capitalism is the greatest engine of ingenuity and innovation, as well as of the reduction of absolute poverty, that the world has ever known. At the same time, capitalism is the greatest instrument for the increase of relative poverty, and the most robust vector of self-destructive and addictive pathologies, that the world has ever known,… and is also by the way a slow-motion doomsday device. 

So. How do we live within this tension? What role do we play in this system? What role do we want to play? And how has this condition shaped who we are?

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” Variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

LISTEN:

The Gray Area with Sean Illing: Revisiting the “father of capitalism”

RiVAL Radio Capitalism's Sacrifice of Humanity

AUG 25: What animal speaks to you most clearly?

LISTEN:

KERA’s THINK: Decoding the secret language of animals

CBC Ideas: Feline Philosophy: What We Can Learn From Cats

ABC Conversations: How dogs think — and what they think of us

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman: How can we learn to speak alien?

BBC Word of Mouth: How Animals Talk

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Listening to Whales

AUG 4: How weird are you?

It’s a weird moment for weirdness.

It may be the insult du jour, but there is a depth and a gravity to weirdness, to the surprising and singular, that defies the machinery of surveillance and manipulation. For Shakespeare’s MacBeth, the Weird Sisters were no less than the Fates! Weirdness haunts the basement and the boundaries of modern physics: Our physical reality is constructed of it. For the culture nominally built on Logos, on Reason, on the Word, it’s the Weird that asserts itself convulsively.

The relationship between the individual and the community is one of the cornerstone tensions of the legacy Culture Wars. Back in olden times, questions of conformity were answered with proudly flown freak flags. But in their current form, as the Cold Civil War, with the right’s co-option of the punk rock chaos aesthetic, and left’s affection for hard-won institutions, between the neo-Victorian language policing and the QAnon shaman, it’s unclear where the center of gravity of this tension now lies. Weird inversions abound.

Regardless of the stories we tell ourselves and the calculations we fudge about where and how we fit in, we are all part of the human family. Tell you what though: This is one supremely weird tribe.

LISTEN:

BBC Point of View: The Power of Weird

JUL 14: How can we become good ancestors?

“Terra Nullius”. Nobody’s Land. This was the designation marking Australia on 18th century British maps, suggesting that nobody lived there, that it was uninhabited. This is essentially how we treat the future, as if nobody lives there. And so we mine it for its resources, consign our profligate waste to its narrowing expanse, extract value from its wealth of possibilities. We spew carbon into tomorrow’s atmosphere, toss plastics into tomorrow’s oceans, as if nobody will live there. We consume and consume and consume, aware that we are embedded in a system of extinction but unwilling or unable to find our way out.

The hills around my brother-in-law Mario’s parsonage home on the southern island of Kyushu are peppered with shrines to ancestors. From just a design perspective, the sheer range of approaches is astonishing, from austere to baroque to rustic; it is clear that when grandpa passed you would carry him up the hill and find a spot for him. For hundreds of years. Sometimes the family had means, and grandpa was loved and respected. Sometimes, perhaps, other circumstances prevailed. We won't all get a shrine with knick-knacks left for our memory. But we will all leave some kind of mark. Let it be a beautiful, positive mark. Let it be worthy of remembering, if not, in the end, remembered. Let us be good ancestors.

JUN 30: How is technology changing you?

Have you ever dreamt about your cellphone? I never have, and that's freeking weird. I accidentally left my house without it a couple of weeks ago, and my eye is still twitching from how disorienting that was.

My kids tell me they dream about their phones occasionally. But never, ever has a cellphone appeared in a dream of mine. At the same time, whatever homunculus is responsible for the cinematography of my dreams was clearly trained on movies and television from the 70's and 80's. Cross-fades, jumpcuts, disembodied, third-person camera views, even the occasional voice-over--these all form the visual vocabulary of my dream-life.

Meanwhile (and I have no idea what to make of this) AI is generating the most convincingly dreamlike visions ever available to us in waking life! Take a look at Lil Tommy X’s output. He’s running by now ancient AI software to generate visions that capture the dream state more accurately than even Michel Gondry ever could. I mean, it's uncanny.

Maybe your health tracking app is keeping you fit. Maybe social media is making you lonely and angry. Maybe productivity software is giving you managerial superpowers. Maybe, though, maybe the changes being wrought by digital technology are modifying our inner landscape in primal and far-reaching ways that we can’t even come close to recognizing.

So how is technology changing you?

JUN 16: What is most sacred to you?

It should come as no surprise that a project exploring the use of questions, to frame both a spiritual practice and an aesthetic inquiry, should hold curiosity as its core sacred value. Not stories, not propositional claims about the nature of reality or what the human being should be, but questions. Curiosity, that is, tethered indelibly to respect. Because it is hard to be human being. It is hard to know what is right and what is good and what is true. But questions can help us form those bridges that can show us a way through difficulty, past confusion, away from loneliness. Questions can show us new ways to create, from the brokenness that surrounds us, the world that ought to be.

MAY 5: What is your relationship with awe?

Nestled between a solar eclipse and a spectacular Northern Lights show, this meeting echoed forward and backward, inspiring me to chase the feeling to this 4AM photo of our recent mini-Carrington Event. Is it possible to have too much awe in your life? I’m pretty sure I would be a better capitalist if I had a bit less…

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

Why Do We Feel Awe?

How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality The Power of Awe

The Sense of Wonder Rachel Carson

APR 21: What is Authenticity?

This query was originally “What is pretentiousness?” This came to seem like an excessively negative query, though, and the question of authenticity presented itself as essentially the same question, though inverted. What is Authenticity? Is it one of those archaic words that means very different things to different people, and so becomes an instrument more of miscommunication than of communication?

Authenticity In Our Time w/ reading list

Overthink: Authenticity

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity

The Pretentious Verb, The Verb BBC

Authenticity pt 3, Stuff to Blow Your Mind

2024 SCHEDULE

JAN 14, 2024: What was the last significant thing you changed your mind about?

FEB 4: How can I maintain respect and cultivate curiosity for the people I disagree with?

FEB 18: How do I resist the luxury of despair in a world as fucked up as this?

MAR 3: How does transformation come to us, or we to it?

MAR 17: What role does creativity play in my life?

APR 24: What is the relationship between freedom and power?

APR 21: What is authenticity? (Notes below)

MAY 5: What is your relationship with awe? (Notes below)

MAY 26: How should a tolerant person, or society, engage intolerant people?

JUN 16: What is most sacred to you? (Alternate time and location—Further notes below)

JUN 30: How is technology changing you? (Notes below)

JUL 14: How can we become good ancestors? (Notes below)

AUG 4: How weird are you? (Notes below)

AUG 25: What animal speaks to you most clearly?

SEPT 1: How has capitalism shaped who you are? (Notes below)

SEPT 29: How do you read the world? (Notes below)

OCT 6: How do you make your pain powerful? (Notes below)

OCT 13: What is charisma? (Notes below)

NOV 10: What does “The Pursuit of Happiness” mean to you?

NOV 24: What do we give when we give thanks? (Notes below)

DEC 8: What is the Craziest thing that you believe?

DEC 22: What is the Human Being?

If you’ve got a query you’d like to have considered in meeting, write it down below. If you leave your email, that would help me clarify and refine it, if that is necessary.