The Futures We Can Reach

In my first response to Michael Levin, I ended by asking what kinds of institutions leave us capable of discovering better goals. Since then I keep coming back to an older and more disturbing image, a valley full of bones.

The image comes from Ezekiel's vision of a people who believe their future has ended. What brought it back was the possibility that we could assemble almost everything a civilization needs and still fail to make it live.

We know how to accumulate its equipment: buildings, machines, archives, money, trained people. We can give it a constitution and connect its offices. Yet there are places with modest means in which people seem able to begin things together, and well-equipped places where every initiative expires while waiting for permission. I do not yet understand what makes the difference.

Levin's proposal has given that question an unfamiliar edge. If an organization can make previously unrecognized forms of agency possible, then building a society involves more than distributing powers we already possess. It may change what we become capable of wanting and doing together.

I find that prospect hopeful. I also find it difficult to think about without immediately imagining how to take advantage of it.

In the first essay I ended with a provisional name for what I am chasing, a communion attractor: a form of common life that grows more coordinated as its members grow more capable and more themselves. My Christian understanding of the Spirit led me to that question; the name is for a pattern I would like to investigate with others, including those who do not share that understanding. Here I only want to ask what it would mean to take it seriously, for embodied people and the institutions they build.

Acquisition is indispensable. A household needs food; a workshop needs tools. There is nothing spiritually superior about lacking what allows us to work. The difficulty begins when I treat every good as something I could secure if I accumulated enough knowledge, leverage or control.

Friendship resists this method. I can arrange opportunities to meet someone, learn what interests them and become useful to them. I cannot complete the arrangement by requiring their affection. Their freedom is part of the friendship I hope to receive.

The same difficulty appears in an apology. Under enough pressure I may obtain precisely the words I wanted. Reconciliation still depends on something my success has not secured. If I make refusal dangerous, I also make an honest answer harder to recognize.

Some goods are simply like that. They exist only in another person's continuing agency, and cannot be secured by removing it. The harder I try to guarantee them by control, the more reliably I destroy the thing I wanted. This is the plainest reason a civilization can hold everything it needs and still not be alive: the part that matters is not among the things one can seize.

Reception takes work. Learning to hear music requires attention, practice and correction. Receiving another person's testimony may require giving up the explanation I had already prepared for them. A receptive institution would need durable ways of listening, judging and responding. It would have to remain capable of being changed by what it hears.

An organization that gains strength by exhausting its members may finish the task in front of it and, in doing so, destroy their capacity to attempt the next one. One that teaches them to act, judge and cooperate can reach other possibilities. Their resources may be comparable while their paths diverge.

What a group can do next depends on the state each step leaves it in. An action can change the very people who must take the following one. A victory won by destroying trust may leave us unable to do the work we wanted the victory for.

The story of Eden begins with gifts already received: life, a garden, work to do, and abundance. God places the human being there to cultivate and care for it. The prohibition concerns the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

In the next chapter, the serpent presents that limit as something to overcome. The fruit promises an enlarged condition; it is taken, and the consequences include shame, hiding and accusation. Later, access to the tree of life is guarded.

I have often read this as a story about forbidden knowledge. I am now interested in the relationship within which knowledge is sought. The serpent makes the giver appear to be a rival: perhaps what I need is being withheld, and perhaps I can obtain it by taking what I have been told not to take.

That suspicion is familiar well beyond theology. It can turn every limit into evidence of oppression and every refusal into a reason to become more powerful. Sometimes a limit really is unjust. But the habit can become so complete that I lose the ability to recognize a gift, or believe that another person might know something I need to hear.

My Christian reading is that the goodness of creation precedes the attempt to possess it. We begin as recipients. Dependence on a good Father need not be a humiliation from which greater knowledge will release us.

This makes the return of the tree of life at the end of Revelation especially moving to me. It appears with the healing of the nations. The hope extends to a shared life restored. What was lost through the rupture of a relationship is not necessarily recovered by acquiring more of the thing we wanted.

I am tempted to extend this into a metaphysical conjecture: perhaps some forms of participation become possible only to beings capable of receiving them. Love offers an ordinary instance. Whether unfamiliar forms of agency have analogous conditions is a question I would like to investigate, rather than a conclusion I can extract from Genesis.

Ezekiel is led into a valley of dry bones and asked whether they can live. He leaves the answer with God. At the divine command he prophesies; the bones assemble, and sinews, flesh and skin cover them. But the bodies remain without breath. A further command calls the breath from the four winds, and they rise.

The passage identifies the bones as Israel, a people who believe their hope is gone. Its immediate concern is their restoration. The Hebrew word ruach moves among meanings rendered as wind, breath and spirit. My Christian reading begins with that history, not with a laboratory.

What arrests me is the interval between the assembled bodies and their life. Arrangement matters, yet the vision does not end with arrangement. Ezekiel participates through speech and obedience; the life he announces is given by God.

What if our institutions can become capable of receiving a life their designers cannot supply? I do not know whether that means the renewed courage of their members, the work of the Spirit, or something about agency for which our present categories are inadequate. The possibility that these descriptions could overlap interests me as much as their disagreement.

If that received life is the Spirit, it is not organizational efficiency, and not an impersonal force I could switch on. It would be God's own presence, making a people more alive and more fully themselves, which is precisely not a mechanism to install. Ezekiel speaks both to the bones and to the breath, at God's command; his participation is real, though the life he announces is not his possession. The builder's work may itself belong to that participation: making, sustaining and repairing something whose life he cannot claim to own.

The vision belongs beside Levin's question for that reason. It makes me see preparation and animation as two different things, and it does not say how they are related.

A civilization can preserve the outlines of an earlier life: ceremonies, buildings, offices, even its approved vocabulary. People may inhabit those forms without trusting one another enough to do anything unexpected. Equally, a damaged community may retain relationships through which rebuilding becomes possible. Restoration requires attention to what remains alive as well as to what has fallen apart.

The image makes me want to restore things. That desire has its own danger: I can mistake the return of a familiar appearance for the return of life. An old form may still nourish people; another may have become an obstacle. Age alone will not tell me which I am handling.

Perhaps a useful beginning would be to ask where people still teach, forgive, care, pray and make things together, and what would help those activities endure. That is work one can undertake without pretending to command the breath.

Christianity gives the body an importance that my more abstract ambitions tend to evade. In John's Gospel, the Word becomes flesh. The hope takes us into embodied existence: birth, dependence, hunger, friendship, suffering. It makes it difficult for me to describe ordinary life as merely the enclosure from which an advanced intelligence ought to escape.

Paul extends bodily language to the Church. Distinct members receive different gifts, need one another, and share suffering and joy. Those who seem weaker receive particular honor. Many members, one body, and yet the eye remains an eye and the hand a hand: the whole is more unified, not less plural, than the parts alone. No member is a component the body is free to spend, which is exactly the temptation whenever we picture a civilization as a single organism.

The temptation is real. The analogy of the body can make sacrifice sound too easy; someone always seems ready to explain which people are expendable for the health of the whole.

I want a common life that enlarges our capacity for love, judgment and action. Some of its demands will be difficult. Caring for a sick person can narrow our immediate choices while deepening a relationship we would not exchange for an easier schedule. A vow can sustain possibilities that a perpetual readiness to withdraw would never allow.

Reception therefore includes commitment. The Christian image I keep returning to is Christ giving himself, and Paul's invitation to attend to the interests of others. Freely offered sacrifice can make a shared good possible. An institution demanding sacrifice chiefly from those who cannot refuse deserves another description.

The Church's theological identity cannot simply be assigned to a state or a proposed social order. Still, its account of communion makes a civilizational demand on me: what happens to the particular person must matter even when the whole is flourishing.

A society capable of extraordinary projects should also sustain marriage, children, craft, worship, friendship and care. These are among the things for which increased capacity would be worth having. A person should not have to become exceptional to deserve a place in that future.

Take a concrete case, purely as a hypothesis. A workshop trains its apprentices well enough that they leave to establish workshops of their own. They and their teacher exchange the commissions each finds too difficult alone, and each trains others in turn. The first workshop gives up some control over work it could have kept for itself; a wider community gains capabilities that might never develop while every decision remains with the original workshop.

None of this is guaranteed. Training is slow, and time spent teaching is time not spent producing. A departure can wound, in trust as much as in earnings. Cooperation of this kind can fail outright, and a workshop that gambles on it can lose to one that does not. I am not claiming that dispersing capability always wins.

But where it does work, it works by changing what the people involved can do next. That is what I mean by the futures we can reach: the manner of cooperation, and not only the resources assembled, decides which of them come within reach. It is the difference the phrase domination concentrates agency while communion multiplies it was reaching for, and where a communion attractor would have to earn its keep, since a phrase is not evidence.

There are questions through which that change could be examined. Does participation leave people with skills they can use elsewhere? Can inconvenient testimony alter a decision? Does a community support those whose contribution has become hard to measure? Do its arrangements let people begin independent work, or make them steadily more dependent on permission? With comparisons over time parts of this could be studied, though selection would confound it: an institution may simply recruit the capable people it claims to create, and no single measure turns a range of available actions into a verdict of goodness.

One bounded result from outside human affairs is at least suggestive. In a distributed sorting model by Zhang, Goldstein and Levin, elements following local rules recover from faults more robustly than a centrally ordered version, some even losing ground for a while as they route around a defect. It is computational behaviour, not generosity; but it shows how a rule that forbids every local setback can exclude a better route.

The limits weigh as much as the promise. Not every constraint is domination: a rescue can require temporary command, and authority can genuinely serve. But receptivity is not by itself benign either; an institution can become receptive to fear, resentment, or the pleasure of belonging against an enemy, and shared intensity is not yet shared goodness. An honest account has to weigh the effects on outsiders, and on those who cannot refuse, as heavily as the good felt by those inside.

A further danger appears when an institution insists that every relationship pass through itself. A family's obligations, a congregation's worship, a neighbour's care become competing loyalties to be supervised. Such an order may coordinate people very efficiently while making it harder for them to belong to one another. Authority has begun to consume the common life it was meant to serve.

And even a good measurement would not settle the deepest question. Suppose I did find associations that hold real coordination together with real autonomy: that would show the pattern is possible, not that the Spirit was at work in them. To measure the shape of a common life is one thing; to discern its source is another, and harder; the first should not be mistaken for the second.

Matthew's instruction to recognize false prophets by their fruits gives my inquiry its orientation. I would extend it to collective claims: attend to the lives an organization actually produces, including the lives its account of itself leaves out. A Power that makes persons disposable gives us reason to resist it long before we settle whether there is someone behind its demands.

I began with a question about the future. I keep returning to the quality of our present relationships.

A household, school, workshop or church can become more capable of receiving what its members bring. It can also arrange itself so that only the expected contribution is welcome. The difference affects what can happen next, and eventually what kind of common life can exist at all.

Levin makes me wonder how far this principle reaches. Perhaps we will discover unfamiliar agencies through organizations we do not yet know how to build. Perhaps the most consequential possibilities will require changes in us that cannot be replaced by better equipment. Both questions interest me.

For now there is work close enough to touch: teaching a skill, keeping a promise, maintaining a place where people can meet, allowing an honest answer to change a plan. Such acts can prepare something without determining everything that will grow from it.

The valley of bones leaves me with hope for damaged things, and less satisfied with the prospect of arranging them beautifully. I would like to know what it would mean for them to live again, and what part of that work is ours. The hope is larger than anything I know how to build.