“The truth is always stranger, more lively and more expansive than anything we can compute” (p. 101).

The paradox.

I am happy to be introduced to the meteorologist/Quaker/pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson in these pages. I love this: that he attempted late in his life to discover a mathematical basis for the causes of war and the conditions of peace. He was pursuing a hypothesis of his that a propensity for war might have something to do with the length of shared borders between states. The hypothesis turned out not to be true, a scientific dead end. And yet — as advance at scientific and personal scales so often goes — even as he did not succeed at what he had set out to do, he learned something he didn’t know to look for. It’s now called “the Richardson effect”: the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more complex they become. The more closely you measure the coast of Britain, for example, the longer it gets. 

As Bridle summarizes: “Instead of resolving into order and clarity, ever-closer examination reveals only more, and more splendid, detail and variation” (p. 102). 

And isn’t that true, too, in life as in science???

The word.

It’s been a fascination of mine across the years, how modern culture receives and orients around the Darwinian soundbite of “survival of the fittest” — the idea that life has primarily progressed through fighting and winning. The evolutionary biology of our time is roundly revealing that to be such a reduction and simplification as to not actually be true. Cooperation is our superpower, not struggle, the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has taught me. James Bridle is in conversation with the work of the late biologist Lynn Margulis, who said it this way: “Life did not take over the world by combat but by networking.” 

She coined a word I can not stop thinking about and letting shape my view of the world, of change, of the human condition: endosymbiosis. It points at a deeper, radical collaborative creativity at the heart of evolution and reframes the very meaning of a phrase I use all the time: “life together.”

Our very bodies are ecosystems like the trees in the forest. You and I consist, by some calculations, of more microbial than human cells. And that is only a swath of the intra-action that is a human person. We are the product of, and live in a world, populated everywhere by endosymbiosis: organisms living inside other organisms. In James Bridle’s words: “Every time we train our most sophisticated tools upon the central questions of our existence — Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? — the answer comes back clearer: Everyone and Everywhere” (p. 109).

I’m always attentive to the tender reality that revelations about the strangeness of life and the limits of our understanding, even our wild interconnectedness, can be hard on us human creatures to take in — unsettling, unnerving, especially in times when the very ground beneath our feet feels tenuous. And that describes a lot of people in a lot of circumstances in our world right now. 

And so, here’s a pleasing coda before I send you off. The “Richardson effect” was picked up by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot as he developed the notion of “fractals.” And fractals — as a way of seeing the deep and wondrous strangeness that is the true reality of nature and of life — come up all the time in my conversations in these years and in all kinds of contexts. The “emergent strategist” adrienne maree brown described to me how learning about fractals when she was a political organizer helped her make sense of that reality that theories of how things should work consistently failed to match the way they do work. Now she finds it a helpful, even practical and “comforting” way to be in touch with the world we can see and touch even as we reorient to all that is being learned, all we’re being called to see:

“Sometimes I’ll use the language of fractals: sometimes I’ll just point to actual examples. Look at a head of broccoli. Look at a fern. Look at the delta around New Orleans, and then look at how these veins and artery systems move through your system and your heart and your lungs. Look at the spiral shapes on your fingertips, and then look at the shape of galaxies. And in that way, we can begin to see there are no isolated patterns. The universe has some favorites, and they repeat and they repeat, at every scale … yes, your body is a whole water system. There’s all these different formations that are all how to move water, and we’re one of them. And I find it very comforting to find myself in one of those patterns.”

If you want to read deeper into contemporary evolutionary biology, I recommend David Sloan Wilson’s book This View of Life. I’d also offer up an On Being episode including him, which feels resonant for this contemplative reading exercise and maybe even the spirit of Thanksgiving week: an intriguing, mind- and heart-expanding exploration of of the ideas of the 20th-century Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. We’re adding that to the playlist below, along with my beautiful conversation with the wise and wonderful ecological writer and explorer Robert MacFarlane, who first told me about Lynn Margulis.

Chapter 4 of Ways of Being, “Seeing Like a Planet,” is at heart about one of my most favorite subjects of all — time. And that is precisely what I have “run out of” as I entered this week. I leave you to delve into this one on your own, and tell us what you find if you’re so inclined, by replying to this email or tagging @onbeing on socials  — and you can always visit the full archive and my conversational exploration of past chapters right here.

Thanks to all who wrote in this week or tagged us on socials. Krista and our team have so enjoyed reading your reflections, and will surface a few each Saturday, right here. Notes lightly edited for length.

From Alan:
Your reflections on contemplative/conversational reading reminded me of something Martin Marty wrote many years ago in his book The One and the Many: America's Struggle for the Common Good. Marty tells about Macheavelli who described entering his library at the end of the day and putting on "regal and courtly garments" because he was about "to begin conversation with great and generous people..." Macheavelli would address questions to them and they would generously impart  their wisdom. Marty writes: "Books should not be considered finished products. As long as they challenge and judge us, evoking our response along the way, they remain unfinished and open to conversation..." (p. 19).

From Jeff:
I reference page 86 in Ways of Being: “Science, it struck me then, is a guide to thinking, not a thought: an endless process of becoming.” Everything everywhere is in the process of becoming. One could and should substitute any discipline for science (theology, sociology, etc.) and that sentence would still be true. It seems Bridle’s point is that all disciplines must be in conversation with each and every other for the process of becoming to grow well. The network theory applies to the exchange of ideas and concepts and baked goods among neighbors!

From Gary:
Max Planck, the German, Nobel prize winner in Physics in 1918, puts it this way: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you are looking at change.” If you want to find a new route through the thicket, look at it from a different (new) perspective. Approach it from a different angle. Look higher, look lower, shut your eyes and see what was unseen. Approaching a problem or an obstacle, this is a terrific exercise in learning and changing. Thank you.

From Patrick:
One of the threads I continue to see goes back to a favorite concept and expression from Thich Naht Hahn that I came upon several years ago. Rather than saying we are all connected he used the phrase and concept of "inter-being." I found this to be far richer and closer to the truth of our existence, but after reading Chapter 3, I think an even deeper way to get at the essence of all existence is to combine Barad's "intra-action" with Hahn's "inter-being" and see our place as part of "intra-being." Thinking in these terms helps me grasp how all that exists is inseparable.