Holding the hand of pain

On depth education and active listening: an excerpt from a 2023 essay A Compass for Survival: universities, ecological collapse and depth education, lightly edited here for our first Eco-Cit archive, Hyphae #1.

The predicament which Ecological Citizenship has set out to address is commonly spoken of as ‘a climate and ecological crisis’, a phrase which conveniently omits to mention its essentially cultural basis. As Durham University’s Professor Carmody Grey has put this, the quandary confronting us in 2024 is why, ever since the cliff- edge before them became clearly visible around 50 years ago, industrial consumer societies everywhere have broken into a sprint directly towards it? This isn’t a question much helped by a more nuanced understanding of the IPCC’s politically diluted summary reports. What it does require is a better grasp of how our highly pliable human nature has become so lethally maddened by the forces at play within industrialised modernity.

In a January 2023 Harvard presentation Depth Education: confronting coloniality, navigating complexity and rewiring the unconscious the Brazilian academic Vanessa Andreotti offers a compelling analysis of this dilemma. As a mixed-heritage activist- scholar whose educational research centralises collaborations with and between indigenous communities, the foundational context of Andreotti’s pedagogic research is that industrial modernity relies on an extractive and racialised systemic violence – a violence which it’s become ever more adept at normalising, and whose inevitable endgame we commonly refer to as ‘a climate crisis’. As demonstrated by its curious response to this looming existential threat, modernity as such is understood to be fundamentally unsustainable – beyond reform – and in the process of dying.

Andreotti’s educational research, set out in her 2021 book Hospicing Modernity, positions itself in creative tension with the ‘mastery education’ endemic to our university system. Offering students predictable learning outcomes, mastery education’s goal is to enhance their ‘efficiency and skill within modernity’. It promises competencies that will leave the student-customer ‘hopeful, motivated, validated and satisfied’ as they graduate with a now suitably empowered individual self. Andreotti contrasts this familiar transactional approach with another, that she terms ‘depth education’. ‘While mastery education instigates the performance of learner’s self-expression’, she tells us, ‘depth education assumes we are unreliable narrators of our own experience’. Depth education invites us to ‘sit with difficulties’, to ‘activate accountability and responsibility before will’ and to ‘disinvest in harmful desires’. While it may not promise to respect learner’s preferences, what depth education can offer is a means by which to ‘disarm affective landmines’, to hold space for ‘the good, the bad, the broken and the fucked up’ in each other lives, and to ‘become open to being taught in unexpected ways’.

In the Q&A that followed Andreotti’s presentation, one of her audience spoke of their work with under-14s suffering from ecological despair. What advice might she have, they asked, for those trying to help young people to navigate a situation which seems so utterly devoid of hope? In her reply Andreotti used a memorable image to describe the work that she and her collaborators are engaged in. ‘What our work seeks to offer young people’, she answered, ‘is that we learn together what it means to hold the hand of pain – to hold it without throwing up, without throwing a tantrum, without attaching to the pain, without identifying with the pain, and without getting up and walking out.’

Perhaps one thing we can say about such work is that it can’t be hurried, no matter how critical the factors at play. To borrow a phrase from Nigerian eco-philosopher Bayo Akomalafe, ‘the times are urgent; let us slow down’. For theologian Carmody Grey the critical capacity this mode of crisis-response seeks to cultivate is akin to ‘a bomb disposer’s calm’: an observant state of attention that gathers into an ever more focussed absorption, the more immediate the danger. Andreotti’s praxis of depth education – ‘slow down to grow up’ – brings a grounded relational and intellectual rigour to this care-full reparative work. It meets the challenge of disarming affective landmines with a humane criticality centred in ‘honesty, humility, hyper self- reflexivity and humour’, qualities that will become increasingly indispensable as we navigate the radically unpredictable death processes of the dominant culture.

If we seek to foster such a slowing-down within our universities then appraising these institutions’ current role in our deepening metacrisis seems a good place to start. In doing so we might want to ask ourselves whether a neoliberal university can now with any credibility present itself as proffering reliable solutions to the socioecological catastrophe that is neoliberalism. And if it turns out that a university as we’ve come to know it can do no such thing, then what, we might ask, is it for?

Honesty, humility, hyper self-reflexivity and humour. As we experiment with how to root Ecological Citizenship’s work in this grounded ethic of depth education, our most consistent strategy has been to return, week after week, to the practice of active listening – sometimes within a facilitated open circle, sometimes working in pairs. This deceptively simple practice has proved a powerful and even transformative tool for thought, one that fosters a culture of reflexive intelligence, empathy and imagination as we come together in search of congruent responses to ecocide. In a predicament we may be, but what we are not is alone.

SOURCES

A Compass for Survival: universities, depth education and ecological collapse, Mat Osmond 2023, The Dark Mountain Project. (This is an edited excerpt from that essay.)

The times are urgent, let us slow down, Bayo Akomalafe, The Base Healing Community 2019 (accessed March 2020, recording subsequently removed).

Depth Education: confronting coloniality, navigating complexity and rewiring the unconscious Vanessa Andreotti: Harvard University Canada Seminar January 2023.

The Ethical Basis of Civil Resistance, Professor Carmody Grey with Just Stop Oil, Empathy Media 2023

Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism,Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (aka Andreotti), North Atlantic Books 2021