When Wholeness Arrives with Bayo Akomolafe (Part 2)

When Wholeness Arrives with Bayo Akomolafe (Part 2)

Ilia Delio and Bayo Akomolafe continue their conversation about navigating the legacy of modernity and our journey into the future as a species. Bayo shares his perspective on the legacies of ingenious thought—particularly how it’s seen from the West. They ask, whether we ever arrive at wholeness? And what, if anything, does politics have to do with it?

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 | S05E12

When Wholeness Arrives with Bayo Akomolafe (Part 2)

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the center for Christogenesis. Today, Ilia and Bayo continue their conversation about navigating the legacy of modernity and our journey into the future as a human species. Bayo shares his perspective on the legacies of indigenous thought, particularly how it's seen from the West. And later, will we ever arrive at wholeness? And what, if anything, does politics have to do with it?

Ilia: I think other cultures where there's more sense of community, where there's a greater sense of relationality and belonging to something together, they deal much better with the ambiguities; and life doesn't always happen when you do something. So I think this deeply western problem, this deep binary problem, of resolvability, which science is going to do for us. It's a bad myth in the sense that it's actually doing us in because we're lonelier than ever in the US. We're more disconnected than ever, and therefore, the possibility of ambiguity or the irresolvable of anything just kills us. So we need ChatGPT or something to give us the quick answers because we don't have one another. We don't have community. We don't trust one another. We don't have that which we deeply long for. The way deep relationality, I mean, my Zomic life is about deep relationality. Entanglement is about relationships like everything else. So how do we rebuild a world of deep relationality? That to me is the big question, I'm sure.

Produced by the Center for Christogenesis

Bayo: I agree with the sentiment that the hyper individualization, these processes on the way in the United States, for instance, are like a field experiment. It's like a large experiment. We're seeing what happens when walls sprout in more than physical ways between people. Nuance is dead. Politics does not know how to hold nuance any longer or complexity. So yes, that is dangerous.

1

It's a biopolitics using the Phekotin sense. It's a biopolitics that is proliferating weaponized boundaries and brittle bodies. Social media is secreting this very, very tempting notion of cancel ability. That if you fall on the wrong side of my opinion of things, which is uncontested, by the way, if you follow the wrong side of that, then I can delete you. It's very powerful to think that I can just take a life and delete it. I do that with moral righteousness because that idea that I can call upon any aspect of history by just typing in the coordinates on Google and pick out a life or sentiment and say, "You know what? I disagree with Mandela because I don't like that Mandela did this."

It has nothing to do with living in that moment. We've gained this kind of unassailability, and that is what I think eternity knows how to do best; to provide unassailable grounds for the fetishized individual. But at the same time, I'm hesitant to romanticize, and that's not what you're doing. But it seems there's a popular discourse that romanticizes indigenous pasts. And I think that's also a product of the modern gaze that, "Oh, in African indigenous or Native American pasts, they lived with ambiguity or there's a deeper relationality." I think there were also troubling fundamentalisms. If not, Chinua Achebe would not write the book, Things Fall Apart to invite us to notice that the trouble did not come from outside, purely, it was already inside. It was already in that community. So I think to live at all is to risk certitude; to live at all is to build up boundaries. We cannot build life or death in ambiguity. This is not a way of dismissing the need for the capacity to hold nuance and complexity. But I don't want to conflate that with bodies without organs. For instance, some people say, "Oh, we need a society built on entanglement." And I'm like, "What does that even mean?" Entanglement is not the place, it's not utopia.

Ilia: Words kind of get faddish. So everyone's like, "Oh, entanglement..."
Bayo: Yeah. So, "Oh, we need entanglement." No, this is entanglement. We're already

doing it. We will not be speaking with each other were it not for entanglement.

Ilia: What I see now is we live in very fragile times. I think there's a deep fragility in the human community as the earth itself is becoming more and more fragile. I think that

2

fragility does cause people to look for new terms or new ways to hold on, to give meaning and that stuff. And I guess the other thing I think, as you kind of alluded to this, is that you're a deep thinker. I'm going to just assume that you like solitude.

Bayo: How do you know?

Ilia: Well, I can hear the way you phrase your thoughts. You're someone who thinks deeply, but you think in that space. It's a space of just being quiet and away from the noises of the world. And I think that it's really essential, quite honestly. I do think what we're losing is the capacity for deep thinking. I think college education system is a capacity in hyper information. We're kind of putting ourselves out. We have so much information today. We're like brain overload. And I guess what I thought to my own experience is if you go deep within the human heart—every person, there's a passion there, like a light. We're called to something. And following that light through the darkness and the ambiguities of the world, to me, is one of the best ways to navigate through the rivers and the terrain and the shifting boundaries of the world. We're all outside ourselves. I've often thought that all that we really desire, the root of that, the compass to that is within us. There's one world, but it has two dimensions in this way; the inner universe and the outer universe. And without that inner universe, I think the outer universe is disconnected itself and can really fail. It can dissipate. I mean, do you feel that we have the capacity to really annihilate or really do vast destruction on this earth? Do you see that capacity there or not?

Bayo: I do think there is the capacity to do that. I don't always think that it is human. And maybe to take a few steps back about the capacity to think or the space to think deeply, and how that is being replaced by this informational overload. That reminds me of that cartoon. I think it's called Wall-e. You might've seen it. Wall-e, where humanity is migrated to the stars because we've just wasted earth. We are so convenient now in our chairs in this shopping mall, like spaceship, the last spaceship that no one gets up any longer. We just sit in chairs and float around and everything is done for us. I think instead—and here's a proposal, that it's not so much that deep thought isn't largely available. One might even

3

say that modernity is deeply thinking. It's not just the kind of thought that is always or evenly available to the human species.

That maybe climate chaos is how modernity thinks. Maybe the ruptures, the pandemics is thought in action, but not necessarily humans in a room thinking deeply. But that thought itself has to be considered as atmospheric, ecological, territorial, and post-human. That when bats and clouds and weather patterns and dehiscence and fungal entities think together, it proliferates counter-hegemonic kinds of realities. So modernity is what Deleuze called ritornello with Guattari. Modality in its captive holding of our bodies is also thinking. It's also gesturing for its whole. It's also gesturing for its mother. Now, the paradigm itself is not just this dead thing. It's thinking, and part of the ruins of its thought is humans abandoning depth and sprawl, and now looking eternally inwards like naval gazing machines and unable to consider the world in its ongoingness. Maybe that's what it means to be part of the city, is to be thought this way.

Ilia: I see us humans as nature. I mean, we are nature. We are the clouds and the trees and the rocks and the caterpillars and even the butterflies. And really, that little thing going on between butterflies and caterpillars, that's us, right? There's something that's within us that a little bit antagonistic, "I don't want to become that." So we're always in this kind of tension between being and becoming. So I do think in this way—and I kind of love the idea that all nature is thinking in this kind of chaotic way, but I also think there is something to the human mind as a vanguard. Like, if you think of evolution as this dynamic process that something dynamically is taking place, and in that way, it's taking place in us in a particular way.

Here, I look at the Jesuit scholar, Bernard Lonergan who had this idea that insight; like we have a way to think and form ideas that lead to horizons. You're looking at this sun beginning to rise on the horizon of the ocean. And this horizon thinking it's a lore. It pulls us, it draws us onto something that doesn't yet exist. That's amazing thing. This insight according to Lonergan, we must reflect on it, we must evaluate it. But ultimately says, how

4

do we know whether to follow this insight of new meaning? I think it's the question of, "Does it really invite us, does it really move us to fall in love more deeply? Do we fall in love with all that we're related to, with all that we are with the world, with our own capacity to be part of something that is desperately longing to be born into greater wholeness?

Bayo: Right. I hear that and it's a beautiful articulation. It tugs in my heart strings to consider this cosmological tugging, this pulling from nowhere and somewhere and all where; everywhere, all at once.

Ilia: But we're conflicted.

Bayo: Yes. I mean, maybe that conflict is already implied in what it means to be embodied. That a plant, a chute that bursts out the loam, gestures towards the sun. It has no hope of arriving. Maybe it does have hopes of arriving at the sun, but it's constantly leaning towards the light. In the conflict and the tension and the intensity of that gesturing, it becomes itself, but it never fully arrives at an idealized—I would say, Aristotelian or platonic ideal. It's constantly pushing. In the push it reiterates what wholeness is, and at the same time, stands its partiality. It's a moving wholeness and an unsteady partiality.

Robert: If arriving at the whole is embracing life and its unsteady journey, how should we respond to the turbulence of life? Next, Ilia asks Bayo about the current state of politics and how he finds hope in the midst of its chaotic flow.

Ilia: I don't think we're arriving at anything, honestly. I don't think there's like a whole up there. Like, "Welcome to the whole. You have arrived."

Bayo: "To the hotel of the whole, get your room..." Yeah. Ilia: You would be bored to death for one thing.
Bayo: I would be.

5

Ilia: We would be bored out of our minds. So to arrive is to be engaged in the flow and chaos and the instabilities of this ever searching life. We can do that. Not wavering like, "Should I be on this journey? Should I not be it? Should I just stay home and be behind my computer and have everything controllable?" I think to be alive is to be precisely within this chaotic flow. That's the joy of it. Then we've arrived.

Bayo: Exactly. This movement, this ongoingness is not predicated on choice. Maybe that's an important thing to—It doesn't come down to us saying, "You know what I'm choosing to move with the whole today and making Fridays afterwards." It's that our doings are not finally ours to own. And that these doings and becomings are part of this uncircumscribing whole that is seeking itself. Choice is only a very, very molecular aspect of what reality is doing. I would go further to say that reality might even be a distraction. I use that in keeping very close to my heart, Lyon's poetics of relations. This theo-poesis that also implies a para-theological; something that straddles or silos and travels alongside creation is always this chaos that is tugging us to never arrive.

Ilia: And I think that chaos is part of God.
Bayo: I like that. That is my sense of things as well.

Ilia: You wrote an essay on “Democracy and Longing at the End of our World.” Just curious, what do you see here in the country where we're coming into a political election soon in just another month or so? What do you see for the role of politics in this chaotic journey where people are really seeking just to not only stay alive, but be alive?

Bayo: I think politics would be a good idea. Ilia: It's a good start.

Bayo: I'm speaking like Gandhi, who was asked a question, "What do you think about British civilization?" He said, "That would be a good idea." For me, politics is that which gets in the way. A lot of what is conflated as politics is this institutional partisanship that is

6

increasingly tribal. For me, politics is like the soul. For me, the soul is not a thing we have. The soul is the erotic, desiring, always fluid processuality of a world in its becoming. It interrupts, it gets in the way of a paradigm of selfing and becoming. It seems that we've become so viscous as to be impervious to what the world is doing. Our politics is no longer responsive to desires, to needs. It has excavated the self from the soul. It has torn apart knowers and the condition of their knowing.

I find it very worrisome that, for instance, debates are planned in the ways that they're planned In the United States. It doesn't feel like a debate. It doesn't feel like an encounter. It feels like a pure rial attempt at one upmanship. So there's no conversation at the moment. I feel saying that, "That is politics" is to me a reductionistic way of thinking about politics. I think politics is what the world is doing, and I think it gets in the way of institutionalization. So of course, there's a lot more things to be said about the status of the electoral processes on the way in these United States, each side accusing the other of holding the baton of fascism. I think that is exactly how fascism shows its face. It doesn't come riding on the backs of villainy. It can come through righteousness. In fact, it seems that it has always come through riding on a horse of righteousness and moral superiority. So we want to be careful.

Ilia: Where do you see then the average person? I mean, where are we in this emptiness of a political establishment? Where people, the “human person is full of life,” really is non- existent. I mean, it is a very mechanistic reductionistic—probably could have robots doing political campaign as well. So what hope do we have? I guess that's the question. Where do we find the hope that we have within us or a more robust life work to be part of this celebration of life's chaotic flow?

Bayo: I have been in some recent events that have convinced me about the compelling, benevolent, if you will, quality of what I now call a conciliatory humanism. I give you this term what I'm naming as a conciliatory humanism is what I feel. People like Van Jones, who's a democratic operative and analyst on CNN, I think. Van Jones is popular for trying

7

to breach divides between Republicans and Democrats. He worked famously with Trump's son-in-Law for prison reforms legislation. But he was demonized by people in his own camp. So I was part of an event where he shared that story and I came to see why that kind of politics is crucial. This idea that we are not as categorical as we think we are, that we can see from each other's side. That I need a person wearing a red hat. I'm not as divorced from his life or her life as I think I am. I think that's something very beautiful. However, I feel it potentially feeds into the start to find institutionalization of politics, so-called. Because it doesn't quite hold space for what Delois might have called the minor gesture.

It's this traveling strange vocation that is inviting us to hold space for something. The institutions of politics that claim to own politics are not doing quite well for grief, for instance, hold space for grief. To hold space, the shared losses we have, the feeling of despair that pervades and traverses tribal political affiliations. All of that just suggests to me that bringing both sides together is still a form of dangerous politics and it doesn't really pay attention to what lies beyond these institutional frameworks. I want to seek how to break institutional causality. I want to notice those spaces and sensitize a para- politics.

Ilia: Completely with you. And I think the systems, they may have worked at some point in the past, but they no longer work at all. These systems are built on old philosophies, old corrupt. They're just now broken. It's sort of like trying to drive a 1920 hoard or something. It doesn’t work anymore. And honestly, everything about us has shifted tremendously. I guess maybe what you're pointing to is what I've thought about as well. What does a posthuman political figuration look like? Really not just kind of dust off what we have. How do we really create something new? Really create—you used a term here, but a creative break in political light to reorganize leadership on the whole.

Bayo: I would say that this is post-humanist politics, this tribalized, it's already post human. It depends on technology, on excel sheets, on blonde haired folks, and on lecterns. It's already post-humanist. Maybe the question then is what are the other iterations of

8

post humanist sensibilities? What are the iterations of possible—what is available politically that is exiled in these forms, these arrangements that we're so used to? I don't know and this is more generative than fatalistic; my confession that I don't know. All I've known sisters, I've grown in nation states with successful wave of a polished photoshopped politician promising something amazing. I'm exhausted with it. I'm not sure what to do with my exhaustion. Even anarchic attempts to leave the system; often feel like the system just exploring its own intelligence. So at this point, I feel that all we can do to lean into these non-legible futures is to experiment with the edges, is to go to those places, those eco tone of our limitations and play with it.

Ilia: Yeah. Therefore, you can become a scientist in your own way; a scientist of new boundaries. I mean, that's the whole idea is to discover and know a new way. You have a daughter, I think, right about three or four, is that right?

Bayo: No, then. She's 11 years old now.
Ilia: She's 11? Oh my gosh. What do you hope for her? Bayo: Yeah. She's 11.
Ilia: What do you hope for her?

Bayo: Okay. That's a brilliant question. And maybe the way that I'll answer that is to story it in this way. We had a conversation recently and she was expressing her disgust with the caste system in India. I mean, my wife is Indian, so my daughter identifies more with her Indian side. For a child her age, she's incredibly well read and is a voracious reader. She expressed her opinions to me about the caste system and said she identifies with those oppressed and marginalized folk, and she thinks it's wrong. The caste system is wrong. Now, I remember saying to her, I didn't want to dismiss her very strong feelings about this phenomenon, but I wanted her to have a sense that the world isn't composed of already predetermined opinions or ideas or people like atomized Newtonian dots.

9

What I was offering her to think with was what I might converse or share with you as a metaphysics of meandering lines, instead of a metaphysics of stabilized dots. So I would like to see my daughter hold space. Be capacious enough to have a philosophy that embraces even what might come across as a wrong idea. That allows it room to become. A dot is just a line pretending to be still. That this meandering quality. It means that we are all part of a palest of becoming. There's no earth text to reality. It's just that the world is moving and it's quality. So I invited her to hold that opinion, but not to hold it so tightly. To hold it softly as something that it will also pass away because the world is moving. That is my hope for my daughter; that she's able to work with nuance and complexity while also having her feet planted on an earth that is moving.

Ilia: Oh, well, that is beautiful. She has a wonderful teacher and model, and you, so she's a very lucky girl.

Robert: This concludes our conversation with Bayo Akomolafe. A special thanks to him and our partners at the Fetzer Institute. Join us for our next conversation with philosopher theologian John Caputo about what he calls, “weak theology” and its merits for renewed life. Hunger for Wholeness is produced by our team at the Center for Christogenesis. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It's very helpful. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.

10