How (Post-)Humans Evolve with Bayo Akomolafe (Part 1)

How (Post-)Humans Evolve with Bayo Akomolafe (Part 1)

Ilia Delio is joined by the prolific writer and activist Bayo Akomolafe. Bayo shares with us about his Christian background, growing up as the son of a diplomat in Nigeria. Ilia asks Bayo about how he has uniquely wrestled with the legacy of modernity and Western thought and his own unique approach to process and post-humanist thought.

ABOUT BAYO AKOMOLAFE

“The idea of slowing down is not about getting answers, it is about questioning our questions. It is about staying in the places that are haunted.”

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Local Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute, where he acts as the Forum’s “provocateur in residence”, guiding Forum members in rethinking and reimagining our collective work towards justice in ways that reject binary thinking and easy answers. He has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. Read his introduction penned for the Democracy & Belonging Forum here. To learn more about his work, visit Bayo's website at here, and view the work of the Emergence Network here.

Transcript

A HUNGER FOR WHOLENESS TRANSCRIPT | S05E11

How (Post-)Humans Evolve with Bayo Akomolafe (Part 1)

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia is joined by prolific writer and activist Bayo Akomolafe. Bayo shares a bit about his Christian background, including growing up as the son of a diplomat in Nigeria. Ilia asks about his experience wrestling with the legacy of modernity and Western thought, particularly how he developed his own unique approach to the philosophical systems of process and posthumanism. And later, Ilia asks, are we moving into a new species?

Ilia: We welcome this afternoon Bayo Akomolafe, a prodigious writer, an activist, a very creative thinker, a post humanist, and I think he's going to be a very robust voice for our pursuit of a hunger for wholeness to which this podcast is dedicated. So Bayo, I welcome you to this conversation.

Bayo: It's my pleasure to be here.

Ilia: Yes, thank you. Maybe for the sake of our listeners, I know you have this written on your website, but a lot of people will be listening to our podcast as they're driving and moving along in life. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what has brought you to this moment of your life?

Bayo: I grew up in Nigeria. I like to tell people that I grew up in a very, very heavily hyper Christianized world. I grew up in the south of Nigeria. I was very lucky to grow up in a

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loving family, an itinerant family. My father was a diplomat, and so we traveled place to place. And maybe that idea of the fluidity of place and worlds creolized my perceptions of ontologies. It helped me render the world in much more processual terms than in the categories with which I was trained to think about the world.

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Ilia: Right.

Bayo: Of course, that wasn't immediately evident. I still trafficked in modern absolutes. I carried that vocation into my academic work, my career. At some point—I think a turning point was sitting with indigenous healers in my part of the world, Yoruba healers, and it kind of upset my entire framework and ways of thinking about wellness and psychopathology, which was what my PhD was about.

Ilia: Oh, I see.

Bayo: And they turned my world upside down. So I started to think differently about this and to explore what else wanted to be held and seen and felt. And I think that's where I am now. There's a phrase that is quite popular or saying everywhere at this point in time, that “the times are urgent, let us slow down.” My preferred way of saying that is, “in order to find your way, you must get lost.” So I'm here in the lostness of this moment, knowing that my biography is not mine, per se, which makes it, it's rhizomatic.

Ilia: That's really beautiful and very insightful. If you want to find your way, get lost. That is so—probably is very counter-cultural in a world where we're training people to find your way and know your way, and grasp your way and carve your way, and your experience with the indigenous people, first of all, the deep richness of their wisdom, their spirituality, even their medicinal knowledge of herbal life and the natural organic remedies. We do have a problem, which I have been concerned about for a long time, of Westernization, this kind of western mentality that the west the philosophical and intellectual west is the paradigm for the entire world, and everyone should be thinking like us. We have lost our way because we've cut ourselves off from the deep rich roots of these traditions that have been around for so much longer than we have. Can we get back—I think that's a question you have. Can we regain the lost treasures that we have addressed?

Bayo: I think it is possible to imagine a political imaginary, a situation, a scenario in which we are confronted with the critical limitations of our paradigms of belonging, our ways of

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framing knowledge. I think the anthropocene, whether it's official or not, is galvanizing bodies in this very experimental way. So we are having to ask questions about, wait, what are we doing? Or how are we being done? What does it mean to live in a world with AI? What does it mean to let go of the idea that we are the agential owners of cognition? What does it mean to let go of these things? So I think these questions are birthing or rather libating the grounds for a reemergence of some kind. At the same time, I often like to remind folks to climb up a decibel higher, to suggest that it's not that we're living in separation now, and the work we have to do is to get back to entanglement. That framing is very binarizing. It's that, even modernity is a form of entanglement. It's entangling with different technologies, with different kinds of microbial entities and pandemics, of course, but it is not a divorcing from a world that is fluid flowing, partial and experimental.

Ilia: There's several terms you mentioned. I just want to kind of draw them out. One is you first use rhizomatic, and that's a very posthuman term that's kind of...

Bayo: Deleuzian.

Ilia: Yes, Deleuzian, Luhmannian, you can't separate the worlding of the world from those who are worlding the world. It's kind of a web, but this mycelium web that constitutes what I think in the deepest nature. And my concern with this, I'm right there. I'm a Franciscan sister, so I'm right there in the earth completely in the connection, but I'm deeply concerned about the way narratives of artificial intelligence are really looking to rhizomize us and create some kind of super type of humanity with all the implicit bias of the enlightenment. In my undergraduate course, we just watched the film Blade Runner, the classic 1982 film.

Bayo: Harrison Ford.

Ilia: Yes, Harrison Ford, exactly, where we can't distinguish the android or the humanoid from the human. And the machine is more human than the human.

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Bayo: I think there is undergirding our modern gestures at some kind of full disclosure of what reality entails, or embodiment or belonging. I think there is this conceit or conceited notion, this very charged resumption that we are separate from our tools, that humans are ontologically superior to the tools that they wield. I can understand that sentiment, and I think it works. It works in everyday life. To imagine that I can use a knife without presupposing, that I'm colonizing the knife, or that the knife has an internal life that I know nothing about. I think it works. It's useful, but reality doesn't always lend itself to our convenient ideas of usefulness. What is potentially useless or speculatively pragmatic and definitely scandalous to suggest is that we are not separate from our tools, and that every encounter is a modification of our bodies, and that we can no longer afford to think of ourselves in pure ontological formats any longer. That to be in the world is to let go of purity or rival or completeness. And so, while I also take with some caution, the narratives proliferated about AI now on both sides, if there are sides to this on many sides. One side suggests that they're here to take over, another side suggests that it might ruin our gift of being human or something like that. It seems like something is obscured in the conversation, the popular conversations we're having. What I would like to talk about is how we've never been fully ourselves, how we are even now more virus than cells, you know?

Ilia: Yeah. We've never been really truly human. I mean, we've always been a little bit post- human in this sense.

Bayo: Yes, it is. It is almost like saying that the human is a posthuman process. It might be helpful to distinguish between the trajectories of transhumanism from posthumanism. Transhumanism, of course, is the longing for hyper optimized humanity where we are potentially in control of our emotions. We can press a button, at least in some sci-fi depictions of this transhumanist singularity. We can press a button and feel happy, or we are lords and masters over death finally. It feels like the hyper objectification of the human is a transhumanist vocation is like humanity on steroids. But the post humanist, and there isn't one monolithic enterprise called posthumanism. But it seems what brings them all

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together is the rejection of an essential core; that is the human is already a concatenation and entanglement of furniture, and intensity, and microbes, and viruses, and the animal; the supposed animal, other weather patterns, signs, signification. To try to tease apart what the human is and arrive at some alchemical gold in the midst of the compost heap would be like trying to find out what makes bird sings by stripping them of their feathers, kind of obscures all the tendrilic threads and extensions that make us who we are, what we are, and what we're still becoming.

Ilia: Right. I mean, certainly, I mean, we live in this open—I know you're a process thinker, so the process reality and the ongoing creativity of life. But I do think we do have a dominant narrative that's seems to be pervading the globe in terms of, if you look at where chip production is going, where artificial intelligence is just developing at breakneck speeds in some ways, and we're not sort toward what. That's one of the problems is, it's got this huge competitive edge toward perfecting itself, but we don't know what we want to be with—this technology. I do feel we are overpowered in some ways, we're lured by its capacity to write better papers for us, think more faster for us, and so there is a transhuman element built into what we're doing right now.

Bayo: I think so.

Ilia: And the more complex and organic post-human narrative is a little bit stifled by the dominance because capitalism and the economic wealth is so built into technological development.

Robert: Will technology replace us or evolve us? Next, Ilia asks Bayo about this whirlwind in which we find ourselves, are we a new species? And then, Bayo shares what he believes is driving this evolution. Support for hunger, for wholeness comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Consider getting involved at fetzer.org.

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Ilia: I think people feel that they're in this vortex, this speeding up vortex of technological development, and we're going to if you'd follow Yuval Harari, we're exiting homosapiens and we're on the cusp of a new species, when we have no idea what this means. I mean, do you really feel that we're on the cusp of a new species or that we're moving out of the homosapiens that we come to know and possibly love in some way? What I tell students, they get frightened; they're like, "Oh my God."

Bayo: I know. I think the way that I want to navigate through this is to first suggest that the transhumanist is always haunted by the post-humanist. Right. That, yes, I would agree. I mean, there are transhumanist vocations in Elon Musk's phallic attempts to colonize the out belt—I'm speaking with sci-fi language, or to rapidly proliferate large language models so that our lives are easier. There's something transhumanist about it. But you might also say that there's something transhumanist about a caterpillar eating every leaf it might find in a bid to prevent itself from becoming a butterfly. It's like I will gobble up everything I can so that I can build the muscular capacity to prevent myself from spilling into the goop that I've heard other caterpillars become. But the very attempt of eating so rapidly is part of the process of our spilling, of our becoming different, I think; that's why I say the post humanist is already part of the transhumanist, is lurking there. And that every claim to mastery, every claim to colonial arrival is already intercepted or staccatoed or punctuated by other elements, by other molecular minor gestures that are usually not languaged or noticed.

And maybe the other point here is that, I think we speak too heavily about speciation as if we have arrived and we're a thing unto ourselves. We're ontologically exclusive, and so we are a species. There's something about that that bothers me, that feels like a divine imperative of some kind stamped upon the species. I like to think about these as graphical, that it's we are movements pretending to be selves, or rather we are self-things, rather, you could think. So maybe some distant past a snail took a left turn and it became the human, something like that. It's not that we cartographical, that we create cartographies, but we, our bodies are cartographies in their ongoingness. And so, speciation, the mark

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and the labeling of our species as full, exclusive, complete. Instead of partial and indeterminate may also be some kind of a modern example of categorical thinking.

Ilia: Extremely insightful and very original, really in your thinking. I've never thought about that before because I was trained in biology and the scientific thing is to have these categories, the Linnean category and the species. I think you might be right in terms of— the way I think about it, every time we name something and categorize it, we reduce its breadth and depth. Let's reinsert what we are within a much deeper and richer network of this ongoing shifting process of life that takes where the body forms and reforms into new ways with new feelings and new mentalities. And in that way, I think your way of framing it can ease the edge or the fearful edge of the transhumanist lure. It opens up an organic way to think about development. And I guess my question for you is, what do you think is driving this development? You know, John Passmore had an article a number of years ago on the perfectability of man. There's a kind of a drive within nature for perfectability, or becoming something more, the moreness of nature. What in your view is driving this kind of cartography of evolving life?

Bayo: I heard you use a phrase at the beginning, and it was this search, this quest, this gesture for the whole, and I wonder how, if we're to speak about futures and timelines and this development that we are holding space for right now in conversation, I wonder how it lives in our bodies. I don't want to do the DNA reductionism that seems popular to do now that we're just codified to do this. That doesn't feel adequate. It feels radically incomplete to speak about codes as if they could explain everything. I would want to pay attention to the, I'm going to use Édouard Glissant's phrase, "the poetics of religion" that there is a—or Fred Moten when he speaks about the not complete, right. Again, to use that phrase differently this time, that there is a radical incompleteness that acts every iteration of embodiment. And that this radical incompleteness is some sort of an engine that is constantly gesturing outwards. It's like there's a love affair, there's a love affair between creation and chaos, and creation is never quite itself until it meets chaos. And chaos needs creation to understand itself better. It's almost like, I know it feels mystical and highfalutin

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to speak in this way, but it seems like we're getting to the edge of language here and we're crossing ecotone and moving into where only poetry can stay. This gesturing is why a caterpillar eats and becomes a butterfly, or why butterfly wings are as decorated as they are. It doesn't seem like Darwinian macroevolution has all the details to explain how matter, matters.

Ilia: The way you frame things, first of all, it is poetic in itself, but it's also deep. It's deeply mystical. You have a very philosophical perspective. And maybe what I'm getting at is something that I've been reflecting on as well, and you're putting in a way that it's really much more what I would call theopoetic or poesis. There's a poesis. And you kind of said this, that all that science, and this is sort of the illusion of science that it can name and identify and control and manage and manipulate what matter is. And I know you're very familiar with quantum physics and we know that science itself is under fire today because it cannot do the very things it claims it can do. And so, I would agree with you first of all, that we have to, in a sense, to reframe science is terrific, but all it can do is give us a description of things. It can never really adequately say this is what it is, or define something. And to use your words, the ontological concreteness, you know, and I'm thinking of Whitehead, this is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. You know, maybe the only thing that's concrete is that which cannot be grasped, controlled or manipulated.

Bayo: The same moment we try to name things in any final way. It slips out of view, it slips away from our grasp.

Ilia: Yes. So this is really good and it's really important because I think this is the part—we need to... it's so sad that we built this culture of commodification and capitalism because how do we bring out this poetic interweaving of life in a way that it becomes more and more dominant narrative? I mean, I really do think... I mean, my way to approach it is deepening the mystical side of, I mean, panpsychism is mind and matter. You can't separate these. So, how do we begin to emphasize that mind and awareness and emotions and just the beingness and the flow of life is as important as our scientific measurements?

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Bayo: I'm something of a panentheistic thinker, right? So, not just panpsychism, but a God that is still in becoming and becoming alongside the world writ large. I think that story is now becoming crucial, especially as we rush towards the precipice of all our claims to exclusive mastery. It is becoming more and more affordable. No longer as luxurious as it used to be, to say, maybe science doesn't have all its act together. I don't know if you saw this recent. This is an example that makes me chuckle a bit. Some scientists came out and said, "We have finally solved it." Solved what you might ask. We have solved the age old riddle of which came first, the chicken or the egg, and we know what came first. And their argument was that they found some ancestor, I may not be able to recall the exact details and specifics, but they found a way to prove that it's the chicken that came before the egg. Now, I went further into it's—paleontologists who are making this argument. But I went further and I found that over time this group of people have been saying almost exactly the same thing, "Now we have the answer, it's the egg. Now we have the answer. We're back to the chicken." I chuckle because it feels like that question isn't meant to be resolved. It's not available.

Ilia: Exactly, it's like quantum chicken.

Bayo: Exactly. Logical or wave—it's not meant to be resolved. It depends on the format of approach, the mode of encounter, the tools of observation, the politics of the moment, the intensities in the room. And I think that's what's scandalizing to signs that it's contingent upon other relations. It presupposes that it can stand outside the fray, but now as you say, we have to come down to earth, and maybe it's easier to do.

Ilia: Well, I don't know, because I think you're also naming some of our difficulties. And one is, the inability to stand in the ambiguity of, say, a white particle duality or a quantum moment. The resolvable say chicken or egg, which came first? It doesn't really matter because these two are two parts of one whole. And I think our desire for wholeness is countered by our inability to deal with the ambiguous, the incomplete, that which is not yet finalized. The rough, the chaos that we're in, you know, always this strain. We're always

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in kind of a disequilibrium stage, something is breaking down, but something is always breaking through.

Robert: Thanks to Bayo for sharing his deep poetic insights. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to listen to the rest next week when Ilia asks more about what the West has to learn living in ambiguity and Bayo's hope for the current state of politics. And if you really enjoy Hunger for Wholeness, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It takes two minutes and helps us a great deal. Hunger for Wholeness is produced by our team at the Center for Christogenesis. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.

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