A tipping point? Spirituality in a time of meta crisis

Abstract

When I first began to think about this Editorial, I was side-tracked by a message from a neighbour who teaches in a primary school (children aged 5–11). As part of their work on number she encourages her pupils to look for patterns in dates. That morning they had been very excited to find that it was a ‘Palindrome Day’. It was the 22nd of February and, because dates are written in the UK in day-month-year order, the sequence was 22 02 2022 – a sequence which is exactly the same when read both backwards and forwards. Technically a ‘single repetitive integer with zero’, this kind of palindrome date first appeared on 11 January 1011; there will not be another in our lifetimes. Written in the angular font which is often used on digital devices, 22022022 also forms an ambigram since it looks the same upside down. When I later drew my own young granddaughter’s attention to the phenomenon, she pointed out the coincidence that it was a Tuesday, the 2nd day of the week. She delightedly dubbed it ‘Super Twosday’! The unusual nature of the date was even acknowledged on the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News – at 22 minutes 22 seconds past 22.00 hours! I mention all this because, ironically, just two days later, on 24 February, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, a sovereign state in Eastern Europe with a population of over 43 million. It is the second-largest country by area in Europe after Russia, which it borders to the east and north-east. Since then all such trivia as the shape of a date has been wiped from our news screens and replaced by horrific scenes of devastation – of towns razed to the ground by relentless aerial bombardment; of millions of women, children and elderly people fleeing the country in whatever way they can, often with only small hastily-packed bags, leaving their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers behind to fight for the survival of their country; and of people forced to remain in basements, held under siege in cities deprived of water, food and power – in every sense of that word. I entitled my Editorial in issue 10.2 of this journal ‘The best of times, the worst of times?’ (Hunt 2020). It was written at the height of the coronavirus pandemic which, although vaccines are now available and help to mitigate its worst effects, continues to afflict millions of people around the world. I questioned whether the pandemic might have brought us to a long-predicted tipping point in human affairs – a time of ‘breakdown or breakthrough’ (Myers 1990, 180). The predicted breakdown is of the belief that we live in a ‘clockwork universe’. This image has held sway over Western philosophical, political and scientific developments since the seventeenth century (Dolnick 2012). It has created a mindset in which reality is ‘out there’ in a material world of