Eras of Hope
Getting started in our practice of hope, with an eye toward helpful patterns of community.
(Expected reading time: 10 minutes)
Dear Brilliant Reader,
How are you doing?
Yep, me too.
This is the re-launch of Build Notes, a project I started in COVID times. In this edition, I’ll give you some background on why I’m doing this, why it might matter to you and me, and what you can expect from future editions if you choose to join me for this adventure.
Why Build Notes?
In March of 2020, about a week after COVID lockdown started, I created an email newsletter called Hope Notes to share with family and friends. It was clear to me that it was going to take some effort for all of us to remember the good in ourselves and each other in that moment of terrible fear and isolation.
Six months in, I shifted focus, changing the name of the newsletter from Hope Notes to Build Notes. The term “Build Notes” comes from my professional life, in the software world - when you release a new version of an app, you write a little note to accompany the updated code, explaining what’s new and what’s changed in this version.
When I made that name change to Build Notes, I wrote: “Without ignoring the harder edges of reality, I want to dig deep into how our own resilience really works. We practice resilience as individuals, and we practice resilience in communities of all sizes. What can we learn from each other, in a time when we feel like there’s so much work to do?”
Four years later, that question feels even more important and more urgent. We’re breathing around each other again, and yet we still find ourselves holding our breath every day. Is there even space for us to learn from each other right now?
The Discipline of Hope
In early lockdown times, I attended an online gathering convened by Dave Snowden, who was a mentor of mine early in my career. In talking about COVID and its effects on all of us, Dave observed that hope is not what people often assume it to be. It’s not a willful ignorance of a bad situation, or an insistence that everything is awesome despite all evidence to the contrary. Hope, Dave said, is the management of despair.
What I love about this framing is that it assumes despair will exist. We will have dark times, moments that disrupt our flow and challenge our assumptions about the goodness in ourselves, in each other, in the world. Hope does not pretend that we can live in an emotional San Diego, where the weather is basically the same and perfect every day. It is a disciplined and perhaps stubborn choice that we make, when we come into contact with despair, to see the possibility for something more.
If hope is a discipline, then we can practice it, and get better at it. We can trade tips with each other, like fellow artists talking over dinner about brushes and paints. We can learn from the examples of people in our present and our past, who devoted themselves to the discipline of hope. We can allow our despair to exist, to breathe, to welcome it as a friend and not to feel afraid of it, because we know how to bring it into balance with our judicious application of hope.
It is vitally important that we practice this discipline right now, because the work we have to do is much larger than this present moment. We are living through a transitional time that began before we were born and will still be in transition when we die. The noise of the daily news is just one symptom of the greater shift that is happening around us.
Modern to Postmodern: The Eras Tour
I’m a once and future seminary student, and I am very fortunate to have found the graduate certificate in Adaptive and Innovative Ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. We spent our entire first gathering as a cohort learning about the transition from the Modern Era to the Postmodern Era. I promise you, this is way more relevant to your life than you might think.
The SparkNotes version:
The Modern Era gets going around 1500 CE and runs the show into the 1900s. It’s the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. We invent shareholder capitalism and horseless carriages. We discover antibiotics and gravity. A whole lot of colonizing happens.
In the Modern Era, Western cultures come to believe there is One Right Answer to any problem or question, and that this right answer is fixed forever in time and space. All we have to do is find it! This is the basis for Newtonian physics and most of what we use today as math. We also end up with things like economics and psychology, where we try to apply the rigor of math and science to squishy human beliefs and behaviors. This is the era of the Rational Man - and yeah, it’s always a man, always a pale one too.
The 20th century gets messy, as this One Right Answer keeps bumping up against uncomfortable realities. We start learning about things like quantum physics and complexity theory. The divine right of kings, and the slightly less divine rule of dictators, starts to yield in fits and starts to pluralistic democracy, with a pair of world wars and countless regional conflicts along the way. The One Right Answer, which shaped Western thinking in governance, religion, and culture, starts to break down everywhere. And then we come to the Internet, which is literally designed from the ground up to be distributed and democratic in how it functions.
The common thread in the Postmodern Era, as best as I can tell, is that we contain multitudes. That’s true for every “we” that you can define - true of our individual bodies, true of any gathering of people, true of the natural world around us. We are embodied and embedded in complex systems, where multiple truths can exist at the same time, and a quick look around will confirm that we are so incredibly, laughably, not ready for this.
Think of all the places in your own life where a single option, or a small set of options, has transformed into virtually limitless choice. TV networks? When I was a kid, you could count them on one hand. News sources? Philadelphia used to have 3-4 daily newspapers for a city of more than a million people. How about religions? My dad grew up in a neighborhood where pretty much everybody went to the same church; a few years ago, I worked in a team of 8 people, in which all 5 of the world’s major religions were represented. Shopping? Leisure? Social connections? Fuhgeddaboutit.
None of us are fully prepared for this transition, because we still live in a world of Modern Era institutions. Our governments, our schools, our businesses, our nonprofits, our social outlets, and our churches - all of them were built on Modern Era principles, to sustain Modern Era culture. They were built to last forever, which is clearly not how things are actually playing out right now. These institutions were also built to compete with each other for dominance, until the One Right Answer emerged victorious. That’s clearly not happening either.
There are plenty of weird and distorted “winner” institutions staggering around the landscape right now, hoovering up monopolistic gains. But is the One Right Answer serving us when it takes the form of a Walmart in a small town with a dead Main Street, or a regional health system eating all the local hospitals, or Facebook as people’s trusted source of ground truth?
So much of what’s happening around us right now, which is deeply unsettling and not cool, is the natural consequence of people living in the Postmodern Era with Modern Era educations and expectations. Of course American white people are doubling down on nostalgia, on wanting to make this country great again, meaning their lives are comfortable and orderly. Of course we are now living through this national experiment of anointing a false One Right Answer to run the country. Everything was already kinda broken, and COVID made that feel much worse, mainly by distributing the pain of disruption more evenly across society.
The work of rebuilding our society for the Postmodern Era is already underway, all around us. In a thousand different projects and places, this work is also evenly distributed. That makes it effective, but can also make it hard to see. The work of building this new world is emergent, joyful, and fun. We are living through hard times, but I believe and hope that we will have much to remember fondly from this era of our lives. As Garrett Bucks recently wrote, “We will remember when we taught each other about the world we could create together.”
Patterns for Building
The mission of Build Notes is to find and celebrate new patterns of community that are emerging around us. I’ll talk more about this idea in the coming weeks. But I’ll say for now that in a complex adaptive system, when useful new things are emerging, patterns are a really helpful way to describe and explore what’s happening.
There are lots of people out here doing amazing work on diagnosing and documenting what’s happening around us. I’m grateful to Garrett Bucks, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Heather Cox Richardson, Kyla Scanlon, and everyone else who has stepped up their reporting to help us make sense of this moment. I’m not here to replicate their work, but rather to look across it, and to weave together some common threads. I intend to help create a pattern language for thriving Postmodern communities, and we will need all the ideas and examples we can get.
If you choose to subscribe, Build Notes will show up in your inbox every Thursday. The first Thursday of each month will be a piece of speculative fiction, reporting from our own future - a place we can imagine together, where we get to enjoy the fruits of all this work. On the other Thursdays in the month, there will be alternating weeks of essays and podcast episodes. The essays will be for exploring ideas and patterns; the podcasts will be our opportunity to hear from people who are out here doing the work, and to be inspired by their example. In the months that have a 5th Thursday, which will happen a couple times this year, we’ll do something fun.
Wishing you a measure of peace, some brain space to think and feel clearly, and maybe even a nap if you get a chance? Because the revolution will be cozy.
Yours in stubborn hope,
Michael
Build Notes is a publication of Leaders in Practice LLC, PO Box 241, Glenside PA 19038. Build Notes is Pennsylvania born and made.