1.
The coffee was strong this morning, and it fueled my brain. Wheels began turning. I am thinking of a meme, "You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic."
The first time I saw it was a few years ago. I was scrolling on one of the social media platforms, and the phrase popped up in my feed. It just stopped me in my tracks, as if I were a car on the parkway at the height of rush hour. In my pause, the phrase rearranged my thinking. After years of having my thoughts line up in one way, the entire structure took a shift in a new direction—like when the lanes ahead of you finally free up and you spot a nearby offramp for an alternate route.
I am a consumer adrift in the marketplace. I am a congregant in a church. I am a voice singing in the choir. I am a driver stuck in traffic.
We love to individualize. We want to differentiate ourselves, to think of ourselves standing apart from some mass reality. When we arrange things in this way, we can imagine we are "struggling" against this mass reality.
But then: You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.
The meme reframes the whole picture. It suggests that, rather than "solving" the problem (and far from actually providing steps that would solve the problem), our struggle results in the very reproduction of the problem that we wish to solve.
This might be a good point to tell you that this post is going to be a little weird.
Okay. Reproduction? Yes. Most of what we do in the world is taking a bunch of systems that don’t work, and sustaining them for another day such that they continue not working in the present and will maintain their non-workability into the future. That—for better or worse—is reproduction.
So everybody complains about traffic. You don’t even have to drive to be worked up about traffic, because if you are not a driver, it’s still likely that you have recently been a passenger. We complain about traffic, and yet millions of us, every day, get up in the morning, put on our clothes, and go out and do traffic again. And again, and again. We perform all the actions that lead to the traffic (and the traffic conditions) that we then proceed to complain about.
Think on this: if a bunch of us individuals would cease trying to game the overall flow of cars on the freeway to our own advantage, then a lot of what we consider "the problem of traffic" would disappear entirely. Put another way: the very steps I take to navigate or "win" the puzzle of traffic around me actually is what creates (and reproduces) the puzzle of traffic around me. The problem is not actually the traffic; the problem is irreducibly me, being traffic, and you, being traffic.
Instead of thinking of yourself and myself as struggling against traffic, what if you and I simply understood that we are together being traffic in this moment? What would be accomplished? Would this perspective change our core behaviors? Would it allow us to be more relaxed and serene? Would you and I go with the flow, in a way we were not before?
That's the central question. Can we let go of our need to differentiate from a mass reality? Can we let go of our desire to feel ourselves in struggle against it? Or should I say, to feel "ourselves" in "struggle" "against" "it"? … because many of these assumptions and identities are, in fact, illusory.
Also, this is not actually a post about traffic.
2.
We can turn these insights about traffic toward our ideas about the world.
That is, we tend to think about "the world" in a similar fashion to the way we think about “traffic.” As individuals, we think each one of us is “stuck” in traffic (when in fact we are traffic. To say is weirder, each of us is trafficking). In a parallel manner, we think we are "stuck" in the world, struggling with or against the world, when in fact we are worlding. The world itself does not world, of its own accord. Despite our sentiments, the world is not a given. The world does not just world without being shaped by an outside force that imposes meaning-making, and that force is each one of us. We world the world. We are the world. (Wow - that's an unfortunate phrase, but here we are).
Sorry. This got weird again. Let me take a step back.
I’m at the edge here of what is known as the Gaia hypothesis. It is a concept that was first coined by philosopher James Lovelock in the 1960s. Another philosopher, Bruno Latour, summarized the Gaia hypothesis like this: “the Earth is a totality of living beings and materials that were made together, that cannot live apart, and from which humans can’t extract themselves.” Like traffic, then, we are inextricably in the world, in the sense that we are in the midst of it, but we also inextricably are the world (that unfortunate phrase again), in the sense that “the world” does not exist unless we humans are doing it.
The weirdness again. My apologies.
I'm trying to think this through. When I type or say this word, “world,” and you read or hear this word, I think what you and I are doing is conceiving of a kind of totality. The “world” is our little green and blue container, floating in dark and cold space, that holds the sum total of all life that we currently know. Everything we could call history, and everything we could call possibility, is right here. Following the thought of Lovelock, we are all in this together. Our human experience is wrapped up with the unfolding experience of all the snails and the dolphins and the poplar trees and every other organism (and inanimate object - that’s Latour’s contribution) with which we share our “home.”
But Latour cautions us here. We can become to romantic in our sense that we “are all in this together” with the snails and the dolphins and the poplar trees. As he notes,
This is not proof that the Earth is “living,” but rather that everything we experience on Earth is the unforeseen, secondary, and involuntary effect of the action of living organisms. This goes for the atmosphere, the soils, and the chemical composition of the oceans. We see it in termite mounds and beaver dams, which are not living in themselves, but without living organisms there would be no mounds or dams. So, the Gaia idea does not involve adding a soul to the terrestrial globe, or intentionality to living things, but it does recognize the prodigious ingenuity in the way living things fashion their own worlds.
Let me turn up the weird now. A droplet of water involved in a laminar flow does not pause to think, “I’m stuck in a laminar flow.” A harlequin rasbora swimming with hundreds of other rasbora in some river in Malaysia does not think, “I’m stuck in a school of fish.” And yet us humans seem to pause again and again and think these kinds of meta-thoughts to ourselves and about ourselves. We say, “I'm stuck in traffic,” or “I’m here in the world.” This meta-reflection seems (so far) to be a peculiarly human thing to do.
We (that is, we humans) think of a world as having a holism and a unity: “Here we are in this big, beautiful world.” We can then separate ourselves from that unity: “It’s you and me against the world, kid.” But ants and ducks and harlequin rasbora and poplars and lions don't seem to proceed in this way. They don’t seem to reflect (like we do) about the world or the concept of the world. We might say, they simply world.
But they “simply world” for whom? Not for themselves, because the result of their worlding does not yield a concept of a world for them. Rather it contributes to the concept of a world for us (that is, for humans). When a poplar and a harlequin rasbora and a human being world together, only the humans get a “world” out of it. The ants and the poplars and the harlequin rasbora (and the rocks, and eveything else) all just continue doing what they would have been doing anyway, whether world or no.
So a “world” might have little to do with any actually existing thing, and much more to do with the meaning that we humans (individually and collectively) give to this common project of worlding (I just mis-typed worldoing, which kind of fits with this idea). Lovelock’s Gaia is a goddess that exists in our minds, a world that only arises when we pause to reflect that we are worlding (or worldoing). This is where Latour’s critical approach to Gaia theory (and the concept of worlding/worldoing) might be informative: “
with the Gaia theory one can grasp the “power to act” of all the jumbled-up organisms without immediately integrating them into a unity that is superior to them and which they obey. In this sense, and despite the word “system,” Gaia doesn’t act in a systematic fashion, or at least it isn’t a unified system.
I don't believe an ant or a duck or a lion or a poplar can be said to be "struggling" with or against the world, because they have no concept of a "world," per se. An ant has no global perspective. A duck has no global perspective. A harlequin rasbora has no global perspective. None of them need a global perspective to do what they do, and to be what they be (do be do be do be do).
So we—that is, we humans—are "stuck" in the "world" in a manner that no other creature (at least, of which we are aware) is stuck. Our sense of the "world" is unique, so far as we can tell.
(Now, of course, this was where Martin Heidegger made his mark: choosing not to make this a unique quality of humanity, but rather, making humanity a subset of the more general set Dasein—the “beings for whom Being is a concern.” Here’s a little more about that, if you are interested.)
What we lose in this re-arrangement is the assumption of the given-ness of the world. Traffic does not happen unless we are all doing it. In a similar manner, the world does not world unless we are all doing it. But "being traffic" and "being world" are not completely parallel. I still have a concept of the world even as I am very remote and alone. When I am all by myself, I still have a sense of being in the world. I am still worldoing, if you will. I still think of myself as part of a unified, meaningful world. As the old poem says, I am “a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars,” even as I find myself impotent and isolated in my everyday life.
3.
This may be the most important distinction here: World-ing, world-making, is fundamentally meaning-making. In world-making, in worldoing, we achieve a past and a future, in addition to an ever-unfolding present. We assume that the world that was, passing through the constant now, is moving somehow toward a future. In worlding, in worldoing, we assert the coherence of the world. We imagine a world that exists before us and after us, a world that will endure our death, even as it funds our birth. When we assume the coherence of the world, we assume that the world offers us a structure for which (and in which) a project of meaning-making makes sense. The coherence of the world assumes a world in which activities (at least some of them) are worth doing.
Worlding offers us space and time, which can be as simple as moving from "one place" to "another." Worlding and worldoing offer us the option of waiting, because we assume that the present will not mark the end. There is something in a certain future to which we will be able to return, even as we tarry. The very possibility of object permanence assumes a coherent world. I know that the mountain I journey to today will be available for me to return to next year or next century. The sea is in constant motion, but the ocean does not move. I can navigate to it, and I can navigate upon it. All of these possibilities arise once we engage in the process of worldoing. We form a world, we world, and we move within a world.
These "places," within a "world," are both part of the world and yet distinct from a world. As a rough analogy, I can point to my spleen as a distinct thing, even as my spleen always—so far, at least—has moved with me, as a part of me, rather than apart from me. I move through the world, even as I world the world.
But we must always keep in mind that the cosmos is dark without eyes to see it. Without some creature like a human (Dasein), or without us humans, there is no "here" and "there." There are no "beginnings," no "ends," apart from the consciousnesses that participate in story-making and time making—and therefore in meaning-making. In this sense, worldoing is no different from story-making.
Does this mean that the "world" occurs only in our language? Not completely—because there are aspects of meaning that move beyond the course of words, even as they are structured by and around our words. Once I have established myself in language I have established myself in a world (similar to once I get in the car I have become part of traffic) but there are experiences and shapes and events that are not dependent on language. They are freed from language once that structure of language is in place.
The light depends on us to see it. We can romantically imagine that there is some ongoing "flow" that is "out there" and independent of us, but (and here we might think of Niels Bohr and Immanuel Kant) that noumenal existence is meaningless. As Bohr suggested, light without a means to measure it is not light in any meaningful sense. Without persons, engaging in traffic, there is no traffic. Without persons engaging in a world, there is no world.
Clearly this is a counterpoint to idealist or formalist positions about the world and about objects. Here it might be good to differentiate between "existence" and "meaningful existence." We might insist a rock exists apart from human endeavors and experience, but what of it? What could it possibly matter, until that object enters the human orbits of meaning and meaning-making?
And yet we remain distracted by the apocalyptic autograph: those bits of knowledge that will confirm for us the absolute state of affairs at the very beginning of the cosmos (which no human was present to see) and the state of affairs that will obtain at the very end of the cosmos (which no human will be present to see). Assuming the coherence of the world supports our hope that we will be able to find meaning before our births and after our deaths. Worldoing is hope-making. These events exist in our minds and in our mathematics, but not in our history. The only meaningful history involves the history of the human experience—even as these non-historical events are incorporated narratively into the flow of our history.
4.
There is a danger in assuming that—because the world does not matter to anything in the cosmos but the human beings who world the world—that the world becomes degraded, or meaning-less. Nothing could be further from the case. We make meaning where the only meaning is possible: in our collective worldoing. It is a candle’s worth of light, but that light is worth preserving among those with the eyes to see it.
Imagining ourselves stuck in traffic, we imagine that somehow the traffic might be changed apart from our banal and everyday participation. We imagine the traffic might change despite us, and therefore we might never have to change. But traffic will only change if we and others change. We must re-integrate our understanding of our individual behaviors as part of the collective, emergent reality that is the traffic. Our complaint about those conditions around us is, ultimately, a complaint about ourselves.
So it is with the world.