Getting Deep (Part 1)

Five Coordinates for Deep Disposition Work

This article follows a previous piece – Go Deep or No Home: the Essential Power of Deep Narratives – in which we explore how the systems-level crises we face (climate breakdown, rising authoritarianism, ecosystem collapse) are rooted in ‘deep narratives’.

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Everything, everywhere, all at once...

In the context of an accelerating polycrisis and an increasingly overwhelmed public, what is the role of narrative in supporting fairer, safer worlds? Yes, how do we create work that cuts through? And with our traditional approaches fraying in the face of rising authoritarianism, new scientific insight, and increasingly challenged resources – how can we expand our understanding of what narrative can do?

Over the past few years, we’ve been growing an inquiry into the role of ‘deep narratives’ both as drivers of the problems we face, and as a way to respond to them. We want to understand more about whether this is a thing, and if indeed it is, then how do you actually do it? What does the practice of shifting deep narratives look like? What can we learn from the people already doing it?

In this article we share five coordinates that are helping us orient our understanding of this terrain. In the next article we’ll get much more practical, with tools to support the actual doing of this work.

This inquiry involved a lot of nerding out – reading over 150 works from disciplines like philosophy, anthropology, sociology, complexity science, political theory and more*. It would not have been possible without the work of our peers and elders in this field. We also interviewed people pioneering deep narrative work, and brought together 20 practitioners for a series of Deep Narrative Studios to learn more about how to develop and grow this kind of work. In doing all of this, we are hoping to facilitate more effective interventions towards viable, beautiful worlds.

At every stage of this work, we’ve grown the number of people engaging with this question and we’re writing this to include you in that community. As we share our learning, we would love to hear from you about your experience in this space. Please don’t take what follows as the definitive answer to anything, but instead as a provocation to hopefully act like a magnet, attracting and making visible other practice and thinking in this area.

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This article has been co-authored by Paddy Loughman, Ella Saltmarshe and Ruth Taylor. It builds on the work developed with others in the core team for this work, notably Jo Ram, along with c.50 other people detailed here.

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Photo by Inés Álvarez Fdez on Unsplash

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1. Deep disposition

Does something lie beneath our conscious beliefs?

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One of the strongest patterns in our research was that a wide range of disciplines and knowledge traditions, using their own language, invite us to look beneath conscious beliefs and opinions when trying to understand how people make sense of and relate to the world. These traditions are not all describing the same phenomenon and we shouldn’t see their ideas as interchangeable. But encountering them alongside one another repeatedly had us asking questions about the deeper patterns that shape relationships and sense-making.

In Western thought this includes concepts like ‘priors’ (cognitive science), ‘habitus’ (social science), ‘cultural technē’ (political theory), ‘collective unconscious’ (psychology) and ‘implicit models’ (complexity science). From other traditions we encountered ‘kapwa’ (the shared self at the heart of Filipino psychology that came up during an interview with Leni Velasco); ‘ālaya-vijñāna’ (the ‘storehouse consciousness’ of Yogācāra Buddhism, taught in our time by Thích Nhất Hạnh); and ‘vā’ (the relational space between, from Samoa via Albert Wendt). These are not all the same category of idea. Some are analytical or theoretical concepts, while others sit within wider philosophical, religious and cultural traditions and ways of living. Simply naming them here doesn’t convey the fullness of their meaning.

What feels significant is how, from very different starting points, these traditions return to similar questions: how are the deeper patterns that shape our relationships to one another and to the living world formed and reinforced? And what role does the culture we participate in play in shaping them?

Our route into this inquiry was via the term ‘deep narrative’ – the stories that lie underneath the surface of our awareness, influencing how we think and act. Increasingly we’re wondering whether that language is slightly misleading. What we’re pointing towards is more like an orientation than a story – an underlying unconscious assumption about who we are, our relationships to each other and with the rest of life. These deeper cultural orientations shape how people encounter all issues, making some ideologies and actions feel more intuitive or self-evident than others. At least for now, we’re finding ‘deep disposition’ a more useful working term, but the vocabulary is still settling and is one of the things we’d love to hear your thoughts on.

If deeper patterns like this exist, they have important implications for how we think about social and environmental change. They suggest that stories, campaigns and cultural interventions never arrive in a neutral landscape. Instead, they meet people whose ways of making sense of the world have already been shaped, and continue to be shaped, through countless relationships, institutions, experiences and cultural signals. This doesn’t make stories unimportant, but it suggests they’re always interacting with a much deeper cultural ecology that can reinforce, resist or reshape the meanings they carry.

In our previous piece we referenced Suzanne Dhaliwal’s suggestion of this being like an undertow beneath the surface of the ocean. Unless we become aware of it, even our most well-intentioned efforts can find themselves pulled back towards familiar ways of seeing and relating. These deeper dispositions are often most influential precisely because they’re largely invisible to us.

For us, this raises a different kind of question. Rather than asking only what stories we should tell or how to ensure they have meaningful reach, we’re increasingly interested in the deeper cultural orientations those stories express, reinforce or disrupt.

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Coordinate #1

Stories don’t arrive on neutral ground. They interact with deeper cultural orientations that are continually being formed and reinforced.

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2. Out of our minds

What is cognition, and how does it impact work on deep dispositions?

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One of the ideas that kept surfacing throughout our research is that cognition doesn’t just exist in our heads. Across fields like cognitive science, anthropology and complexity science, as well as in some of the older knowledge traditions we encountered, we found accounts of how sense-making emerges, largely unconsciously, through our bodies, our relationships and the environments we inhabit. Cognition, therefore, becomes something we understand to be embodied, ecological and distributed.

Understanding cognition this way helps to explain why deep dispositions can be so persistent – they are continually being shaped by everything around us. They are not simply software in the head that we can uninstall and upgrade. The hardware and software are entangled, and enmeshed with the surrounding environment. It’s also worth being clear-eyed about the role of power. Dominant deep dispositions can help make existing institutions and arrangements feel natural or inevitable, while those arrangements in turn continually reproduce the dispositions that sustain them – often backed by significant disparities in power and resources.

We’ve found it helpful to think about deep dispositions like cultural habits. Like a habit, they generally can’t be reasoned with and are developed through repeated experiences and the cues embedded within our environments. This repeated activity gradually ‘sets’ in our nervous systems, becoming automatic as the ‘path of least resistance’.

If deep dispositions are like a collective, cultural habit, then this might explain why trying to shift them using communications alone doesn’t tend to work. They are held in place by many different aspects of our lives. This doesn’t mean that changing what people think isn’t important, but it does perhaps invite us to widen our attention to also include how the social and material world continually reproduces the deeper assumptions through which we interpret reality. By focusing on the wider conditions, this work joins the expansion of what has traditionally been considered the scope of narrative practice, previously noted by e.g. Rashad Robinson and this piece’s own authors (e.g. Ruth’s Transforming Narrative Waters report), and seeks to extend the explanation and offer further practical guidance.

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Coordinate #2

If cognition is embodied, ecological and distributed, the wider conditions shaping our ‘cultural habits’ are vital.

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3. Cultivation not conversion

What does this mean for how we orient our practice?

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When we began this work, we used the language of shifting deep dispositions. Now we’re much more wary of this term.

There isn’t a switch inside of us that can get flipped from one deep disposition to another in perpetuity. Our environments will continually be influencing us. As we start to cultivate different deep dispositions, we may put ourselves into more contexts that reinforce them, whether that’s through content we engage with, the people we choose to spend time with, or the community activities we engage in. But the other environments of our lives can tug us back.

Instead of pursuing ‘shift’ then, what seems more realistic is growing the contexts where people can inhabit life-affirming deep dispositions. As well as working hard to avoid inadvertently replicating dominant (destructive) ones in the process. For those of us not born into ‘healthier’ dispositions it is likely we’ll spend more time living with multiple ones. Moving between the deep dispositions that we were born into, and the ones we aspire to live in.

This insight about cultivation over conversion also relates to the humility required for this work. Building from older wisdom traditions, the latest science – complexity science in particular – suggests humility: tracing a straight line from intervention to outcome doesn’t seem to be possible. Reality is not linear, reducible to parts, binary and predictable. Cause and effect are difficult, maybe impossible, to reliably track, measure, and control. Unintended consequences are intrinsic to any intervention.

The work is messy, long-term and iterative – less about ‘engineering a shift’, and more about ‘cultivating conditions for (re-)orientation’. This involves: understanding how a culture or system is disposed – where the energy is, where the work is already happening, where the cracks are, what the other possibilities might be, as well as how power and vested interests are operating; always-on listening and sensing to enable this understanding; and making diverse moves towards the other possibilities, adapting as needed rather than pulling one big lever and expecting predictable results.

In light of this, during this inquiry so far, we’ve found three questions have become particularly helpful in orienting our practice:

1. What ‘deep disposition/s’ might be shaping how we perceive, relate and act in our current contexts?

2. What factors might be shaping our cognition – through our bodies, relationships and environments, as well as our minds?

3. What other efforts might be initiated or identified to encourage different possibilities beyond those conditions?

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Coordinate #3

An invitation to focus on growing the contexts where people can inhabit life-affirming deep dispositions, and to inquire more into the conditions of re-orientation.

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4. This is us

How do we show up in this work?

If deep dispositions shape how people make sense of the world, then they also shape any of us who seek to work with them. We don’t stand outside the culture analysing it objectively, but are participants within it. And considering many of us were born into and continue to be profoundly shaped by harmful dispositions, we often find ourselves living them out even through work that seeks to stop and repair harm. For example, a climate intervention carrying scarcity-and-threat framing might reinforce a disposition towards stronger borders and authoritarian control. A campaign championing migrants’ impact on economic growth might reinforce a disposition that sees productivity as the sole determinant of value. A social change field operating with a deep disposition towards individualistic competition, will end up reproducing fragmentation and competition rather than webs of mutually beneficial coordination.

This insight is an invitation to us all to become more aware of the deep dispositions we are both explicitly and implicitly working with. Crucially, it doesn’t seem possible to be free of this. Everything we do is inevitably both expressed from and expressing deep dispositions. Because so many of us have grown up with and continue to be conditioned by destructive ones, if we don’t bring an intention to work with them, it is likely we will unconsciously replicate the destructive ones, in both the things we do and the way we do them. This means cultivating a practice that carefully pays attention to the culture we’re immersed in, invites us to turn the inquiry back on ourselves in order to consider whether we’re mirroring the very things we want to see changed, and encourages us to intentionally cultivate the deep dispositions we want to see in the world.

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Coordinate #4

None of us stand outside of culture. Stay alive to the deep dispositions we are enacting in our approaches, tools, relationships and practice.

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5. “Which deep disposition?”

Is it important to pick a shared focus to orient around?

In this we’re holding two things in tension. The first is that the desire for a single (silver bullet) focus is part of the reductive, linear mindset described above. The second is that our research, interviewees and design collaborators repeatedly highlighted one key reorientation: moving away from the deep disposition of separation, towards that of interbeing. Some people in our process referred to this as the ‘meta deep narrative’.

Interbeing describes the understanding that nothing exists independently, but comes into being through relationships. It refers to relational ways of understanding and organising life that have long been cultivated in many Indigenous, Buddhist, ecological and other traditions – often despite centuries of colonial suppression. As a deep disposition it offers a fundamentally different way of understanding reality than is often found in modern Western life. If we assume we’re fundamentally separate from other human beings, future generations and the other-than-human world, certain things may begin to feel more natural e.g. competition, extraction, domination, individual success, ownership. Whereas if we experience ourselves as fundamentally constituted through relationships, from within that deep disposition other possibilities begin to feel more intuitive – things like reciprocity, mutual care, responsibility, limits, gratitude etc.

To be clear, we’re not arguing for a ‘single story’ here. A deep disposition can be expressed by a vast number of different stories. It can be tailored in messages for specific demographics, around specific issues. It can result in diverse experiences, institutions and structures. There is growing interest in and activity around ‘interbeing’ – it may be worth following this energy, but in various different ways (more on that in our following articles).

The question emerges: is striving for a shared taxonomy energy well spent? Does it matter if we call this ‘deep narrative’ or ‘deep disposition’? Does it matter where we situate ‘separation’ – alongside ‘individualism’ or ‘anthrosupremacy’, or as a meta ‘deep disposition’ from which ‘individualism’, ‘anthrosupremacy’ and others grow?

Perhaps where the labels and layers sit doesn’t ultimately matter, provided we share an awareness of there being something sub-conscious that is shaped by our conditions, which shapes everything we do. But we are aware of the importance of labels and how closely they can be guarded, so we are interested to hear how you feel about this.

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Coordinate #5

Live the questions, holding labels lightly.

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Photo by Emma Birman on Unsplash

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So, that’s a distillation of the key ideas that we’re working with. They have many practical implications, some of which we’ll explore in our next article.

We’re practitioners who are trying to better understand this terrain so that our work can be as generative as possible, and not inadvertently reinforce the harmful systems we’re trying to move beyond. Our interest in this space is profoundly practical, so the next article will really be about how to put these ideas into action.

Thank you for your time and attention so far; if you want to share any reflections or questions, you can reach us at: internarratives@icloud.com

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This phase of this work is being funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation. For information about the previous phases and their funders see here.

As a team we have different feelings and practices about the use of AI and it is a very live conversation amongst us. Different articles in this series have used an LLM to different degrees. We are committed to AI use transparency: in this article we used an LLM to critique an early draft and help surface hidden assumptions we were making (aware that it too is shaped by our culture), which we then responded to without the use of AI – all words here are our own.

*We found over 100 related concepts overall – there are undoubtedly more. We have an extensive Glossary of these, along with relevant frameworks and theories of change, and a Library of the 160+ sources we referenced in our research, which we are building into an accessible website that we will share soon.