From Orthodoxy To Paradoxy - 21st Century Musings

Towards Economic Stability

2010-06-14T09:25:00.004-04:00

In my previous post, I reproduced a large chunk of a text I wrote in 2006 about the state of the economy and where it seems to be going, given the other tendencies I've already discussed in this blog elsewhere. I realized afterwards that I had failed to copy all of my text over... but just as well, as the posting was already way longer than it should be to be readable. The text is better broken into shorter pieces.

However, before going on to the next part of the chapter on the economy (which goes into more detail about the "shadow economy"), I have been thinking about the situation with regard to the social economy and have gained what I think are some important insights (that can be stated concisely!).

In the first part of the first decade of the 21st century, the talk about the social economy was primarily organized around NGOs and organizations that harness volonteer work. Already, it was becoming clear that the social economy, even viewed within this, rather narrow, framework, already represents some 25% to 30% of the "productivity" of most developed states.

However, the first decade of the 21st century has seen the emergence of several new types of social economy, particularly in relation to the internet. For example, take Google. Google has built a profitable business on top of a free service, and the provision of its free services seems to be built into its business model. It is likely that, if ever Google reneged on its provision of free search capabilities, its dominance of the internet marketplace would founder. Hence, although Google is a company with a bottom line in dollars, it also has a "community service" bottom line which is, in some ways, more important than its monetary value. Google is not the only internet company like this. These "hybrids" have developed a way to make money on top of a free community service. As such, these companies are a part of the social economy, even as they also share in the monetary economy.

Why is it necessary to define these as different economies - after all, social and community services can be bought and sold - a monetary value can be assigned to them. The reason has to do with this dual "bottom line". A company whose "value" can be reduced to a monetary bottom line, which makes it or breaks it only in terms of its financial stability and worth, belongs to the monetary economy. A company such as Google (or Etsy, or Linden Labs, and there are many others on the net) must maintain its monetary bottom line, but if it loses its social bottom line, it is also "more dead in the water than if it failed on its monetary bottom line". These companies are as defined by their social agenda as by their financial business models.

This type of company is both growing in impact and in sheer numbers of successful outfits. From a marginal phenomenon in the late 20th century, these social hybrids have become major players in today's economy. In tomorrow's economy, they risk becoming dominant players, not just major ones, especially as many mainstream companies are forced to adopt more of a social image as well.

In my previous post, I talked about the fallacy of the managed global economy. Money is not the simple thing the economic pundits would have you believe, it is actually something which by its very nature is highly paradoxical, and hence its management is next to impossible. In earlier postings, I suggested that the world is headed for a series of "crises" over the next twenty-five to thirty years, each of which will move us forward and closer to the convergent, post-sustainable world outlined in these pages (and elsewhere!). The US housing crisis of 2008 was the first major crisis, the collapse of the Greek economy the second. Both of these are events that occurred to nations, but both have had lasting and profound effects on the world's economy. There are signs that other economies may also be in trouble - there have been rumours of difficulties similar to those of Greece in Spain and Italy and other European nations. Last week, the new Japanese prime minister made a public announcement that the Japanese economy is tottering on top of a collosal national debt.

These crises look purely economic in nature, but they are not. They have profound impacts throughout our societies, especially towards how our societies are organized. The housing crisis led to a questioning of banking practice and to changes in the regulatory structure around banking. Banking, of course, is at the heart of our monetary system. Changes to the nature of banking represent changes with profound influence throughout society.

While I indicated that the global economy cannot be easily managed, and though the series of crises that have started to emerge it have made it clear that the global economy is, in fact, highly volatile, the growth of the social economy is actually a sign of change for the better. In essence, the stronger the social economy becomes, the more stable the total economy and the less dependent we all are on the ups and downs of the monetary economy. Remember that one of the consequences of the Great Depression was the beginnings of the Welfare State, that is, the emergence of a significant Social Economy. Each financial crisis strengthens the social economy.

This increased stability is precisely what is needed to handle a zero-growth economy. A zero-growth economy that is purely monetary in scope cannot be stable. Within the convergent, peripheralized world, as indicated earlier, extremes co-habit neighborhoods. Money, which is a complex manifestation of our social sense of economic value, is therefore pulled and pushed by more extreme ideas as part of normal operation. As a result, monetary stability will necessarily decrease, at least over the short term. However, the social economy is common to all the different, interacting groups, and hence will act as a stabilizer. Without the social economy, we would have been doomed to a wildly fluctuating world economy, of which the signs are already present. With a strong social economy, this will damp itself out to some extent. The more we can do to strengthen the social economy, the better.

With the emergence of the third component of the new economy, what I call the shadow economy, we have the three components of a stable total economy in a zero growth world. Value will be determined not only in terms of "money", but also in terms of community benefit (and also as means of disengaging from the community via the shadow economy). Although community benefit can be "monetarized" the model is different. Money is a value exchange commodity. Community benefit is not an exchange - it is a production, a gift, a giving away. Although it can be monetarized, experience has shown that when community benefit if fully monetarized, it loses its "benefit". Community benefit, by its very nature, cannot be converted to an exchange value. This does not mean that one cannot exchange community benefits - indeed, to the extent that one can, community benefit can be monetarized. But it cannot be fully monetarized.

The fact that acts of benefiting the community cannot be fully monetarized because they do not involve a mutual act of exchange between individuals, but rather an act of "giving away" to a collective, is the reason why the social economy is distinct from the monetary economy (or exchange economy, which might be the better term for it), and has very different dynamics. Indeed, part of the act of "giving" includes a "giving up" of control over the results of the act. In mutual exchange, control is also exchanged with ownership. In true altruistic behavior towards the collective, control is abandoned.

It may be that the inability of standard economic theory to deal with a zero-growth economy or, indeed, to stabilize the world economy is a result of its failure to recognize the value of altruism as an economic force (alternatively, its failure to recognize anything else except mutual exchange). Although altruism has been long suspect in our societies, much of the internet is built on altruistic acts. Altruism towards the collective is here to stay.

Fortunately, the somewhat dismal picture of the economy in crisis is offset by the more hopeful image that is developing from the still growing rise of the social economy. We expect the latter to begin to dominate the former as the world situation evolves over the next two decades. The only "dark" element that now needs to be integrated into this model is the so-called shadow economy, which also has its role to play.

Moving on - the Economy as a Set of Interlocking Paradoxes

2010-05-30T22:48:00.009-04:00

One of the things that stalled the unrolling of my 2006 book manuscript into this blog was my feelings of ambiguity over my chapter dealing with the economy. In 2006 the world seemed to be in a fantastic boom period with not a cloud in sight, while my analysis of the Peripheralizing World suggested we were headed for a very turbulent period of economic uncertainty and change. I doubted my own analysis, based on the evidence in front of my eyes.

In the three and a half years since I first wrote these ideas out, the world has become a very different place. Although the economists are still spinning out a story of growth and development in a "business-as-usual" mentality (an idea I have indicated time and again in these postings simply cannot be maintained by any intelligent observer of today's world!), they are now forced to acknowledge that the world's economy is also beset by "some difficulties". If you listen to the politicians and the economists they hire to present the situation to the public, we are experiencing "local events", that is, the tail end of a "housing crisis" brought about by a lack of regulation in the banking system, followed by the collapse of the Greek economy, no doubt rendered fragile by the worldwide effects of the housing crisis in the US economy. There is no understanding of these events within a broader, cross-disciplinary framework of socio-economic-environmental change.

On the other hand, despite such "official" positions, I find my own ideas and arguments have been reinforced and substantiated by recent events, and although I still feel "precipitous" to make economic proclamations, I also feel that perhaps the time is right to put these out into the public discourse, right or wrong. Even if they are wrong, I think they raise interesting questions about the nature of the world and the socio-economic environments within which we function. I also think that we need to break through the "expert-only" mentality that says only trained economists can talk about the economy. In the context of cross-disciplinary perspectives, one can infer almost as much about the economy from other connecting studies as from economic analyses directly, perhaps more. Therefore, someone with a good grounding in relevant disciplines may actually have something intelligent to say about the economy, even without direct training in the latter. Well, so much for my attempts to bolster my credentials!

“Paradox I now see to be inevitable, endemic and perpetual. The more turbulent the times, the more complex the world, the more paradoxes there are.” – Charles Handy, The Age of Paradox (1984, p. 12)

The economy in a post-sustainable world is almost inevitably going to be characterized by zero growth, at least in terms of today’s standards. Any growth that will occur will be localized, limited in time, and offset by decline in other areas of the economy. Although today’s experts have divided opinions concerning how such an economy can function, the world will have to find or invent a way to make it work. All indications are that the world will have to give up its dependency on fossil fuels over the next twenty to thirty years, and there are numerous studies that tie economic growth to energy use. So with declining energy use and declining population growth, the emergence of a zero growth economy seems assured.

A zero-growth economy

What do we mean by a “zero-growth economy”, though? Why all the fuss?

Such innocent-seeming questions take us into the heart of modern economic theory and its paradoxes. Economic theory today is in a bit of a shambles. There is no complete theory for the global economy, not one that can be trusted to serve as a guide to policy. This despite the fact that many national governments have staked their fiscal policy on one theory or another. Regardless of the various economic theories presently in circulation, however, all, or almost all, assume as an initial condition that the economy grows. Furthermore, this is an assumption, not a conclusion.

As a result, if the assumption is challenged, the whole fabric of the theories and their predictions begin to break down, without any explanatory power to deal with the situation of zero-growth. This is, in a nutshell, the source of the disarray over the idea of a “zero-growth economy”. This is why there is a fuss. Some economists, when questioned on this issue, blithely assume that “somehow” the economy will continue to function as it always has. Others predict the collapse of the whole system. But both these reactions are, essentially, blind, almost instinctive reactions in the complete absence of any real data. They have more to do with the emotional propensities of
their proponents that to any real world behavior.

What is the way out of this dilemma? Without pretending to deep economic understanding (I am not an economist, perhaps fortunately!), the beginnings of an alternative view would appear to reside in an analysis like that of Jane Jacobs (Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, 2001; Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, 1984; but also, Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 2005.) Jacobs argues that the whole idea of global management of the economy is a non sequitor, it is the misapplication of a principle at the wrong scale. She argues that the real economy resides in the functional operation of cities, and that the very notion of a national economy is nonsensical. She uses an analysis of an ancient city, which had its own currency, as a touchstone for understanding the organic nature of the feedbacks that exist between a city’s economic development and the corrections that currency fluctuations introduce. In a few words, a currency’s fluctuations are in direct response to city conditions and automatically correct a city’s economy towards economic health. When a currency is applied to a larger region involving several cities, a number of anomalies creep in – the system of checks and balances no longer operates to correct the dynamics of the city.

The basic tenet for her idea is that cities are complex systems that concentrate the ability to replace imports on which they depend with local innovations. Each time this replacement activity, which occurs in a burst, happens, the city diversifies itself and attracts new workers to support the production of the new products. Then, it begins to import new categories of products, often luxury or unusual items that are not produced by the city itself, and exports the local innovations. Over time, the city becomes dependent on the new class of imports, and goes through another replacement burst. A city, therefore, cycles through phases where there is a dependency on exports, followed by one on imports and then the replacement burst. When in the part of the cycle dependent in imports, the value of the city’s products are lower and this exerts a pressure to reduce employment. During the replacement burst, employment pressure grows dramatically and the value of a city’s products go up, while the value of imports drops. If the city has its own currency, the fluctuation of currency values will support this cycle, dropping when in its import stage and rising when in its export stage. These changes in currency value will serve to pressure the system into moving on to the next part of the cycle – a lower currency value will make imports more costly still and encourage the development of import replacements, while at the same time keeping the cost of living low when employment is down. A higher currency value will increase the value and return on investment of exports, eventually making the exports too expensive and hence shifting the economic focus back to imports. Jacobs argues that the move to nationally managed economies and national currencies created perverse conditions where a city’s production cycle no longer receives the right feedbacks and hence may go into permanent decline.

The judicial use of trade tariffs and regulations at the national scale can partially offset these difficulties, but this is most effective for small nations with a single major metropolis. Jacobs argues that, overall, the use of a “national currency” acts as a kind of systemic pressure that slowly emphasizes one metropolis over all others within the nation. All nations move towards a “one city, one nation” environment. For small nations, this is close to the natural organization of the country. For large nations, especially geographically large nations, this creates anomalous effects that may hamper economic development, since a majority of the population resides outside the main city.

Paradoxically, this is without doubt the reason for the re-emergence of large cities as economic entities in their own right. The rise of the internet with its opportunity to form new social arrangements that start to break down the population’s sense of belonging to its national culture and government, is leading to a growth of awareness of the “major players” in the economic world – and cities are benefiting from this shift of awareness. Without necessarily accepting all the precepts of Jacobs’ arguments, this constitutes a very powerful argument for a society in transition, away from the imposition of orthodoxies (of which nations are a highly typical example) to a greater contact with paradox.

However, the globalization of the world economy has led to the emergence of other effects that are not directly addressed by Jacobs’ groundbreaking ideas. Indeed, it has become clear that the environment must be managed at a planetary level – nations are poor drivers for this, as they tend to focus on their own specific needs to the exclusion of those of others. Because we all live in the same world, there has been a net progression towards more effectively addressing the problems we have created in the environment, but this work has been undertaken at the level of world-wide organization. A return to city-based economies will not address this problem.

Also, the internet itself provides an extremely powerful global structure for the economy. In a sense, the internet acts as a kind of “virtual city”, with a market economy not unlike those of individual cities. However, its global nature makes it an effective tool both for social change and for economic development in a way that bridges regions and distances.

Third, the globalization of the world economy has created huge opportunities for wealth. With fewer currencies in circulation, and dramatically reduced presence of trade tariffs, economic activity in one area can rapidly influence activity in another area. It is a situation ripe for the operation of the “butterfly effect” in economic terms. While national economies are a kind of nonsensical structure, a global economy is a different kettle of fish. It has its perversions also, but there is a dynamic that operates globally that is not yet understand and is participating in the
profound social changes in progress.

Jacobs argued that managing the economy beyond the scale of a city makes little sense. This is where I part company with her analysis. I believe that there is a global systems dynamic that operates through and around the internet. However, I disagree with those who seek to create a “unified global economy” or that the current globalization necessarily takes us to such a situation. Rather, I believe we are headed towards a fragmentation of the economy, not in regional terms, but in the broad framework I have outlined here – at least three different, partially connected
economies, with several splinter economies also at city scales.

The global economy

Current future thinkers are suggesting that, not only are our national economies connecting with each other in unprecedented ways, but that this is leading to a situation where the income extremes are lessening, and may, eventually, disappear (Note that Jacobs was more critical of such ideas. She believed that management efforts that seek to impose controls are destined to fail – instead, we need to restore appropriate checks and balances. She argued against loans and so-called development help, which is partly what is proposed to deal with the African continent, and, indeed, suggests that poor agriculture is not primarily a problem of climate and geography, but of the lack of city development. Her arguments do not, however, constitute a direct contradiction to the ideas presented here. From a systems perspective, the large inhomogeneities between regions may well tend to subside, even when Jacobsian dynamics are included in our considerations). Until the late 1990’s, the world’s poor were concentrated in both Asia and Africa. Now, only Africa is left (except for pockets throughout the rest of the world). It was believed, up until the sudden change in the Asian economy at the turn of the century, that corruption was the primary cause of poverty (see Jeffrey Sachs). Now, with several Asian countries still rife with corruption doing reasonably well, it has become apparent that this is not the case.

Jacobs’ arguments about city-based economies applies here. Jacobs discusses a number of “hinterland” effects of large city economies that can be extremely destructive for local economies. One of these effects is the development of a “supply region”. A supply region is a region whose main purpose is to supply a city, often located at a considerable distance, with needed products. This results in the implantation of an economy within the region that serves to support the local population, but only as long as the product need exists. Because these regions do not develop into a diversified city culture themselves, they are totally dependent on the distant city for their existence. And, as already mentioned, the way a city functions, it will eventually find a way to replace such dependencies with new products that can be produced more cheaply and closer to home (often involving the development of new technology). Jacobs points out that colonies served as supply regions for their founders, and that much of the developing world acts, essentially, as a vast supply region for cities in the developed world. She points out so-called “developmental aid” – loans and injections of foreign capital, usually exacerbate the problem rather than solving it. The effective solution is to encourage the development of local capital and local business environments that have the ability to develop replacement economies. This means that they must trade with regions of similar technological and economic level, in order for the replacement principle to operate (i.e. they must have to ability to develop local products of higher quality that the imports that are not produced locally). If the economies with which trade develops are advanced cultures, this replacement can never take place.

The emergence of the Asian countries as economies of force in the world marketplace actually confirms her ideas. The cities that are at the source of the changeover include Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai. These are all cities that developed through particular funding arrangements into replacement city economies. Furthermore, they traded first of all with other cities in the region – trade with advanced western cities is much more recent. These cities have now become competitive with many cities in the developed world – they were able to replace imports from the west and produce local variations of them more cheaply and more effectively, with quality near that of the originals. Now they have become net exporters of these products and are flooding western markets with them.

The route out of Africa’s poverty will need to follow a similar path. This is now being recognized by a variety of organizations, both within and without Africa. Projects such as the Millennium Cities Initiative (http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/news/2006/story04-24-06b.php) aim to enhance the economies of African cities with just such a viewpoint in mind. Hence understanding of the source of such poverty has grown by leaps and bounds and through appropriate international investments, it is appears possible now to alleviate the extreme poverty of nations in this situation, regardless of social and political factors that may degrade the effectiveness of this aid. In a highly connected, zero growth economy, large economical disparities will disappear. System dynamics argue for this. Instead, we will have a constant "bubbling" of economic replacements at a range of scales. In contrast, in today’s world, the economy is driven by large gradients that are often geographically organized – and these gradients occur when there are differences in quality of life while buying power stays high. The world’s poor, although they suffer from low quality of life, also have low buying power. But, as we have seen in Asia, when buying power soars, quality of life improves dramatically (leading to improvements in education and a corresponding drop in population growth rates).

These changes occur within an economy that combines regulation and free market forces. It is now widely recognized that economies that are regulated only in limited ways do poorer than economies that have a good mixture of both, while economies can also lose efficiency if they become too highly regulated (Hank P. Savitch and Paul Kantor, 2004, Cities in the International Marketplace: The Political Economy of Urban Development in North America and Western Europe, Princeton University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 480 pp.). Finding the right balance varies from one situation to another, depending on cultural and other values, but all economies that do well are in the middle field.

Furthermore, it has become clear that cities are the motors of good economic health. In the 21st century, economic management will shift towards a greater emphasis on city scales and on global scales, with a corresponding downplay at national and regional scales. Also, there must be a return of awareness of the natural cycles that regulate an economy. Currently, all national governments throughout the world are focused on the need for innovation to be more competitive. But as highlighted by Jacobs’ analysis, there are times when innovation is the opposite of what is called for. Indeed, innovation emerges spontaneously when an economy is in the right state of readiness (at least, this is true of a city economy). Jacobs pointed out that, historically speaking, this innovation often begins with artists – it is artists who seek to replace imported goods with local equivalents of high intrinsic value, and these equivalents are then modified and used in other applications. Hence the current pressure for generating innovation “at any cost” is another perverse effect of the existence of national economies. It is an attempt to find a cure for the desultory economic development of national economies, when the source of the problem lies elsewhere (i.e. with the definition itself of a national economy!).

The corporate and consumer worlds

What kind of consumer economy will function effectively in a highly connected, zero growth world environment? Business is already changing, with the emergence of the internet as an effective economic force. The technologization of the business world and the merging of networked computing with web-based services will continue to exert huge pressure on business. This ongoing transformation may appear to be rooted in technologically driven change, but it shares with the other social changes in play the shift from a centralized economy to one in which peripheral effects will dominate.

Today, the vast majority of businesses function locally in steady-state conditions – one has only to think about the “corner store” to see this in operation. Physical location is still important, and likely to remain so for some time to come, especially as energy costs increase. Cities, in particular, are gaining in importance, and a new, worldwide, city network is currently emerging.

In a post-sustainable world, the context within which businesses will operate will be different, however – our living communities will be globally networked as well as locally rooted, and this will create pressures that will lead to new economic arrangements. The human need for progression, in the absence of population growth driven development, is leading to an increasing tendency to incorporate social values within the global economic marketplace. Today’s governments have come to recognize the importance of the so-called “social economy”, that part of the economy built on not-for-profit organizations and volunteer work. (For example, current Canadian statistics suggest that the social economy constitutes about 3% of the GDP, while government defined broadly generates about 12% of the GDP. Combined, the social economy may be said to represent 15% of the GDP today. However, these statistics should be treated with care – what they measure is still money. The social economy actually generates considerably more health than wealth, but our current measurement means do not account for this. They only track the wealth component.) The emergence of Web Two Point Oh businesses on the internet, of which the most prominent example is almost certainly Google, is accelerating this shift towards socially focused businesses.

In addition, bartering is emerging worldwide as a “new” source of economic power. Some, such as e-Bay, are based on the use of money, while others trade product for product or service for service. This forms the basis for what I call the shadow economy. (Today, the term “shadow economy” refers to that part of the economy that escapes taxation and other forms of regulation, but this usually includes monetary exchange. My use of the term is somewhat different. In the post-sustainable world, universal taxation will likely not exist in the form it takes today, since a variety of different “social contracts” are expected to come into being and participation conditions will vary. Choosing to avoid regulation is certainly a form of shadow economy, but the use of non monetary means of exchange constitutes a second form that may serve this need but has somewhat different consequences.) With the increase of non-monetary bartering within the business world, and the increasing use of corporate organizational structures within the social economy, this shall lead towards co-existence and, eventually, perhaps partial fusion, of the social and consumer economies. What is today a fundamental difference between not-for-profit societies and for-profit corporations, is already blurring and, in many cases, may disappear.

One of the means under discussion to change the focus of the monetary economy is to create new currencies based on limited resources such as energy production capacity or byproducts such as pollution (“Eliminating the Need for Economic Growth”, a Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability document, http://www.feasta.org/documents/energy/Feasta_Stern_Review2.htm). These alternative currencies are often regulated by a diminishing total supply, and hence their use favors a gradual reduction in reliance in these resources or byproducts. The creation of such new economies may offset the risk of a collapsing mainstream economy as overall growth slows.

Furthermore, it is likely that our living environments will also change. We shall increasingly live in worldwide, networked communities of individuals and groups with shared learning needs, in which both physical locality (especially cities) and non-localized social affinities (e.g. through the internet) work in tandem. This will result in the limited movement of people from one physical location to another within a given networked community, and will ensure the continued existence of the tendency to homogenize goods and services offered across different locations within the network. There will be interest in local communities and the specific cultural environments they have to offer, but there will be a tendency towards the development of global franchises. Furthermore, these living communities will likely be based on social contracts that are legally binding and will eventually replace current national systems. It is therefore likely that businesses will operate across many different legal regimes, even within a given locality.

Predictions are also almost universal that energy production will drop over the next twenty to thirty years. Oil production is near its limit, and alternative energy sources are not as “energy-rich” as petroleum products. There will therefore be a global shift towards less intensive energy consumption and changes as dramatic as those discussed elsewhere in this text in the organization of business and trade worldwide, in transportation services, and so forth. This will result, for one thing, in a drop in tourism and business travel. Long distance travel may well be more heavily focused towards maintaining new networked living arrangements, eventually, and not almost exclusively, as today, on business travel and tourism. Within the transition period, movement to the benefit of the social economy shall also increase.

Finally, as shall be explored in more depth later, there will be an intermediate period during which large inhomogeneities in wages and production costs will occur (this is already in play). This is resulting in the establishment of global methods of moving goods and services from one location to another*. Once created, even as the inhomogeneities begin to dampen out, this infrastructure will serve the new circulation structure of the economy and encourage a certain segmentation of the market place as a function of locally determined strengths and weaknesses.

Our economy will continue to function both locally and globally. In addition, larger businesses may feel the pinch sooner**. Although many businesses will sell to broader markets, the majority will remain focused on serving small, albeit networked, communities. What happens to big businesses, however? These will clearly be impacted by an economy that changes along the lines we are projecting. As we move towards a global zero growth economy, we can expect new currency-based economies as described above, to develop in many areas. Some cities may decide to form their own currency and break away from the global currency basis. Each currency, whether monetary in the traditional sense, or not, provides a means to treat a variety of activities not necessarily focused on direct production of consumer goods and services as a form of business development, and to shift trade and market development to arenas not driven by traditional quantitative production incentives. Businesses will diversify into these new markets, and the result will be “quality-driven growth” rather than the “quantity-driven growth” that we have now.

Ultimately, today’s commodity stock markets may be replaced by a kind of “social development stock market” that better integrates the many different “values” that humans share, rather than converting these to a purely monetary unit as is done today. It is likely that if such an approach takes hold, there will be a merging between organizations that are seen today as different, even opposite – so-called not-for-profit companies versus commercial businesses. Indeed, until recently, these organizations were considered to operate in entirely different ways. Today, this is no longer the case. Not-for-profit organizations are now called “businesses”, suggesting a shift in attitude, and it is recognized that they contribute in significant ways to the overall economy. They are viewed as businesses that market human resources for social gains rather than human resources for economic gains. But social gains have an economic value associated with them that is becoming increasingly evident, and economic gains may have a social value55. Already, the distinction between these two types of organization is starting to blur.

Managing the economy

One of the ideas of the 20th century that has generated a great deal of both attention and anguish has been the idea that the regional and global economies can be managed. A great many brilliant thinkers have been seduced into the idea and have generated arguments concerning how such management may be achieved. However, each timegovernments have heeded these arguments and institutionalized them as policy, real economic behavior has escaped the prison and surprised us all over again.

It is my belief that the idea of the global economy as a more or less orthodox sub-system of the world, and therefore one that can be managed or controlled through rule-based behavior, is problematical. The economy is based on the notion of the flow of money, and money itself, while it seems to be a very simple idea, is actually one of the most complex ideas we have, and one that is profoundly paradoxical.

In a world undergoing expansion, it is somehow not surprising that the main economic issues are viewed as “inflation”, “unemployment”, “capital growth”, “interest rates” and such indicators. Nor is it surprising that classical economic theory should state that as prices rise, unemployment should fall and vice versa. Although money is in circulation, it represents something that is not in circulation, but in expansion. Therefore money per se will tend to degrade in value over time, a consequence of a fixed amount being in circulation in a system whose overall value is growing. However, the paradoxical nature of the situation means that such growth cannot continue
unchecked.

In today’s world, the economy is “managed” by modifying interest rates, borrowing or lending monies, stimulating spending and promoting the reduction of debt. Essentially, these permit small fluctuations in the way in which the value of money reacts to economic drivers, but they do not really constitute management in the sense that the overall drivers are under “control”. As we shift to a zero-growth global economy, the circulation of money will come back into synch with the overall economic value of the community at large. Many of the experts fear such a state (or disbelieve it, which comes to the same thing). They believe society will collapse before it can operate in a zero growth situation. But nobody really knows – this is the first time in history our society is achieving zero growth in a highly connected environment with a very complex system in place.

Possibly the single most mysterious aspect of a post-sustainable society is what the economy will look like. Despite a growing awareness that the world is moving towards a zero-growth economy, not only is there very little consensus about what is involved, there are actually almost no ideas about what a functional zero-growth economy might look like. All current economic theories are constructed upon the idea of growth – to the point that many economists deny even the possibility of a functional zero growth economy. Others suggest that the post-sustainable world will be characterized by technological growth and hence that a zero-growth economy is unlikely to occur. There is, however, more confusion surrounding such affirmations that any form of good
sense.

The Economy of the 21st Century – A Riddle Worthy of the Sphinx

As with all the changes in progress, the evidence for how the new society will function is already in place around us. The trick is to sift through the many different threads and find those that are likely to persist. In different parts of this blog, a view of 21st century life is constructed. The broad argument is that the change to a zero population growth society within a highly connected world will engender a shift in how personal identity is viewed. We shall live in a less centrist world, one in which periphery becomes paramount. In the absence of a clearly defined centre, our
world will consist of apparently irreconcilable opposites often located next to each – we shall have to abandon the idea of consistency, and enter into a world in which paradox reigns supreme.

The economy has been treated, in various historical currents, as a mathematical system, a system of assumptions, and various forms of social subsystem. Only one school of thought suggests that the economy cannot be separated from the rest of the social system – that of the so-called institutionalists. The most prevalent economic theories of the 20th century were focused on the economics of exchange. However, all these different approaches have been based on assumptions about the nature of human beings.

In this blog, the assumption made is that human beings stand on the threshold of choosing to live with paradox instead of within orthodoxies. This is a different assumption about human beings than most economic theories make, and therefore a new kind of economic theory will be required.

Furthermore, the notion of paradox is central to the new economic theory. The role of paradox within the human psyche, as recognized by Zen Buddhism, is that paradoxes cannot be answered intellectually – instead, when approached with any kind of persistence, they result in the engagement of the whole being, a contact with irreconcilable opposites that, over time, leads to the emergence of a “third way”58. In Zen Buddhism, this is “enlightenment”. In Freudian or Jungian analysis, this is a transformation of the self, what Jung called "individuation". For society or the economy, this is a transformation of the whole.

The economy that is consistent with the world described in this blog is a non-centrist economy. All economies in recent history have been centrist in nature, many even, imperialist. As with human identity, this means that there is a dominant economy that acts as an organizing principle for the whole economy. In a post-sustainable world such as that outlined here, the world will be made up of many distinct units, not nations as today, but communities with at least a social reason for being, and sometimes a geographic one as well. Furthermore, the so-called “business economy” characteristic of the 20th century will be just one economy among several, each with different functional laws. As outlined earlier, what is called the Social Economy today will grow to rival the business economy. In addition, it is expected that a sizeable proportion of the population will “opt out” of these economic arrangements and develop a separate, shadow economy of street bartering and trade.

As suggested earlier, these different economies already co-exist in parallel with each other. One or two decades ago, these were not viewed as “economies”, simply as marginal activities. Today they play a significant role in world development, but when we discuss “the economy”, we still refer to the “stock market” as the primary and dominant motor. However, in the coming years, this will make less and less sense. In a zero-growth economy, the need for capital investment will decrease, and hence the interest in the stock market will likewise play an increasingly marginal role. The business economy will become but one part of a much larger, more pervasive economy that, in its total state will become too complex for any individual or group to understand. Each of these sub-economies will use a different form of “money” although these will have overlaps between the systems. Let us explore the issue of money a little more.

Money and the Worm Ouroboros

Money is both mysterious and quite concrete, however, it is an entity that tends to shy away from analysis. In its simplest terms, “Money is a medium of exchange”, it is a symbol that serves to simplify value transactions. It may also act as a store for value and as a unit of account for thinking about value (Kit Sims Taylor, 1996, Chapter 3: Why Economists Disagree, Human Society and the Global Economy, http://online.bcc.ctc.edu/econ100/ksttext/disagree/disagree.htm). Today we think of money as “a spectrum, running from the most liquid (easily spendable) form to the less liquid forms that better serve as stores of value” (Ibid).

The tricky part comes in trying to determine the value of money. In essence, this value depends on the willingness of others “to accept it in exchange for the goods and services we want to purchase”61. Hence money is not just the value we negotiate with the salesperson, but also the value of this purchase in relation to a kind of average social value across the monetary system.

We may make an analogy, therefore, between money and the worm Ouroboros. Remember that the worm Ouroboros is the mythical serpent that swallows its own tail. When we engage in a transaction, we either give or receive money in exchange, but the interaction in essence propagates out into the global economy and mingles with all other such transactions, then comes back around in its collective form to be swallowed again. Whether we spend money or earn it, money becomes a part of our action in the world and this returns to us in the form of its net value.

In a sense, money is the name we give to the crack in the universe, the place where the worm Ouroboros eats his own tail. By our labor, we produce value, and this value we exchange via a symbolic entity we call money. But money doesn’t mean only the value we ascribe to it, it means the value the whole operation of our social machinery returns to it. In a world of circularity, money becomes the means by which we understand how our work is valued by the collective, it is our action coming back and biting us from behind.

Conclusion

Although I call the postsustainable economy a "zero-growth economy", in essence it is really a "micro-growth economy" or a "zero net sum economy". The economy will of necessity be characterised by lots of movement and change, but the movement will be between different parts of the economy (for example, between the monetary economy, the social economy and the shadow economy) and across different scales (for example, between cities and different internet-based communities). The fear of collapse in a zero-growth economy is based on the idea that zero-growth means stagnation. But as we human beings know, beyond our rapid growth in youth, there is still enormous room for dynamic change within our sense of being. The growth spurt is not necessary to ensure change. Although analogies between individuals and global economic systems are untrustworthy, the point is, just because we don't currently understand how a postsustainable economy can function doesn't mean that it won't function! Already many of the underpinnings of the new economy are taking place around us - the trick is to see these for what they are. While my attempts to do so may be error-prone, I dare to say the same will be true of most other attempts. But I suspect the emergent economy will already be much clearer within the next decade as the world stumbles through a series of crises, each of which will allow the changes to consolidate.

*Samuel Brittan writes : “There will be for a long time opportunities for business expansion meeting the growing needs of the Third World. And even in a static Western economy there might still be a good deal of investment and entrepreneurial action. Consumer desires, even if modest, might still be subject to changes of taste; the fashionable clothing "gear" might change; or trips to old coalmines might alternate with visits to the Himalayas, or painting one's home in a novel manner, as ways of spending leisure.” http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text101_p.html (Samuel Brittan, Economic possibilities for our grandchildren, Financial Times, Jan 3, 2002)

**“To be more concrete, companies that use automated, specialised equipment to make very large quantities of one thing in one place and then need to ship it to markets around the world will tend to lose out to smaller firms which use rather more labour with a higher level of skill and less specialised equipment to make a wide range of things for their local markets. Higher prices also shift the balance away from the centralised supply of energy drawn from fossil sources to local systems supplying energy from local sources. Local energy sources become important again and, just as in the past, instead of energy being taken to wherever in the world is currently a cheap place to manufacture, economic activity will move to wherever there is a reliable supply of competitively-priced energy available for its operations. This has the potential to bring about a shift in political and economic power.” http://www.feasta.org/documents/energy/Feasta_Stern_Review2.htm, Eliminating the Need for Economic Growth,
December 2005, A submission to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, FEASTA

Religion turned inside out

2010-05-30T21:20:00.007-04:00

I realized while going back over my posts on this blog that I never did publish the chapter of my book manuscript that dealt with religion, and that without it the comments regarding Bishop Spong's book and thoughts lack context - they discuss a comparison while the "other half" of the comparison has not been laid out for public perusal. In the interests of allowing this to occur, I here reproduce the main elements of my 2006 chapter, even though were I to write it today I would incorporate some of Bishop Spong's concepts and update the text based on more recent experiences.

My 2006 text begins with the following quotation from Charles Handy's book "The Age of Paradox" :

“Living with paradox is not comfortable nor easy. It can be like walking in a dark wood on a moonless night. It is an eerie, and, at times, a frightening experience. All sense of direction is lost; trees and bushes crowd in on you; wherever you step, you bump into another obstacle; every noise and rustle is magnified; there is whiff of danger; it seems safer to stand still than to move.” – Charles Handy

In preceding sections, we have developed a global view of the changes underway and focused on particular changes that will occur but also that need to be guided into appropriate paths in the development of new learning environments and new business arrangements. Here, we are concerned with another major aspect of daily life beyond School and Work, that of Church. Some may question the importance given to this topic so early in the unveiling of the changes in progress – others may wonder why this hasn’t been given top billing. In fact, religion remains, one of the major motive forces in our current world society and is intimately tied to daily life throughout the world, although the nature of the religious practices vary. Later on, we shall be dealing with other aspects of our spiritual lives, and the importance this has in the development of new living arrangements, but here, we lay the groundwork for these more nuanced discussions by engaging in a critical study of religion.

Our discussion of religion follows the broad plan laid out in this blog – from orthodoxy to paradoxy. Religion has been, since its beginnings, the foundational model for orthodoxy. On the other hand, some have argued that the spiritual figures on which religions are based, Jesus, John the Baptist, Mohammed, Buddha, and so on, are not, themselves orthodox – rather, orthodoxy is the set of codified beliefs and practices that are built up over time based on their usually more spontaneous teachings.

From whence comes this apparently universal tendency to create coherent systems of thought around inspirational individuals, and then require people to follow these systems? This is an important question for those such as ourselves, who have at the least named a counter-tendency, the modern drive to move away from orthodoxy, and who propose to strengthen this counter-tendency.

The Origins of Orthodoxy

In an earlier posting, I noted that the word “orthodoxy” derives etymologically from the roots “ortho” and “doxa”, Greek words meaning “right” or “correct”, and “thought”, “teaching” or “Glorification”71. Its formal definition is given as “correct theological or doctrinal observance of religion as determined by some overseeing body”. A common definition is, on the other hand, “a belief or orientation agreeing with conventional standards”. The notion of “right thought”, however, is actually a part of the teachings of many of the spiritual figures within religion, including Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed.

In other writings (actually, my published scientific writings!), I discuss the idea of Presence. Interestingly, although Presence is a current pre-occupation with regards to the design of effective virtual reality environments, it also has its roots in religious experience. Presence, in particular, appears to result from a kind of CONTACT with the Other. In religious experience, the Other is God (or the Buddha, or the Tao, and so on). Furthermore, Presence is not about CENTRE, but rather concerns PERIPHERY. The whole idea of the Other is a form of PERIPHERY. Finally, Presence is an experience that occurs in the Now. It is a CONTACT with the Other in the Now. Prayer is a way of attaining a form of Presence, as is Meditation (N.B. This is, indeed, if my reading is correct, how Bishop Spong situates the role of prayer). Right thinking may also be a way of achieving Presence. Enlightened individuals are concerned to bring about a greater contact between other individuals and this Presence, for the greater good of our being. Furthermore, we all have experiences of Presence in one form or another, indeed, the moment we stop and listen, even to ourselves. These moments are not attainable without a sense of awareness, a paying attention to ourselves. Right thinking among most spiritual leaders incorporates this idea of self-awareness.

Given that we all have experiences where we associate what we are thinking and how we are thinking, with the experience of Presence, it is perhaps not so large a step to want to systematize these associations within the goal of achieving a greater, ongoing sense of Presence, that is, a spiritual Enlightenment. Hence the emergence of a doctrine of “right thinking”, that becomes an orthodoxy. The tendency may be a result of what it is to be human, and what it is to experience Presence.

However, once an orthodoxy has been formed, it tends to become both fixed and invasive. Rather than remaining a guide for choice for the individual, it often becomes a straightjacket imposed by the community upon its members. Furthermore, different religions define their orthodoxies differently, and seem to get locked into a given belief system based on their particular doctrines. This has resulted in the dividing up of the world into different groups and beliefs. Finally, this is often where tolerance is paradoxically least felt. Why is that?

The Relationship between Identity and Belief

Modern research in cognition(*) is slowly revealing a fundamental truth about human nature – our very identities are built on our beliefs about ourselves and the world. Therapy and psychoanalysis are largely activities designed to bring us to question our beliefs about ourselves and to allow the reorganization that may spontaneously follow when these change. In the post-sustainable world, identity is a continual reconstruction that occurs by questioning who one is every single day (i.e. a focus on process), while in the old world, identity was a cumulative construction with a fortress-like defensive system aimed at “preserving” identity (a focus on structure). Identity was viewed as a means to ensure survival of the individual (or the group) through defensive action. In the new world, it is achieved through a more stable, but fundamentally more challenging method, by re-questioning one’s beliefs and allowing oneself to be redefined with each new contact. The fear is that we shall lose ourselves, that we shall lose our way by acting in such a paradoxical manner. The truth is, based on more than a century of experience with psychotherapy and analysis, the self is much more robust than that – the self thrives on paradoxes and contradictions, and grows as a result of dealing with them.

The shift in identity from a focus on structure to a focus on process follows the paradigm shift from a world struggling towards sustainability to a post-sustainable world. In the first world, the world of expansion, identity as a cumulative central structure makes sense. It is only in the new world that identity as a continual re-construction process comes into play. This suggests a second reason for the universal tendency towards the creation of closed orthodoxies. We begin with the need to develop a “right thinking” guide, and then we naturally build upon this within our understanding of what it means to have an identity, and hence accumulate doctrines and defend them.

Within the new paradigm, our identity needs to be constantly under re-construction, because our boundaries must be open, to function effectively in a world characterized by circularity and periphery. This will lead us away from orthodoxies that are cumulative and defended, whether these be religious, scientific, historic, or some other form. Instead, we shall be focusing on the co-existence within our systems of thought of often contradictory ideas. Right thinking to achieve Presence will still be a necessity, but it will be found by exposing ourselves to controversy and paradox. Ultimately, this will be closer to the original thoughts behind the need for “right thinking”, where such thinking arises not from a community-based doctrine, but from the necessities of remaining open in a world where paradox is primordial.

This, of course, heralds a profound change that will occur, eventually, in the way our religious experiences and lives are organized. Even the notion of “organized religion” will have to be rethought, since it is based, at least partially, on the idea of cumulative knowledge. However, to be fair, most religions today are struggling with the emergence within them of critical and questioning voices that are driving the very kind of identity re-thinking we are discussing here.

We are suggesting, rather, that such change from within will become ever stronger over the coming years, and that religions will be called upon, at some point, to rethink their entire organizational structure. The more centralized they are, the harder this will be.

Towards Paradoxy Within Organized Religion

In order to survive in the post-sustainable world, religions will have to give up their vice-like grip on orthodoxy, and on the idea that one can be “wholly” within one belief system. The single most important aspect of the post-sustainable world to grasp is that it is based on “paradoxy”, not orthodoxy. All the rest follows.

When I go to church (every Sunday – I sing in the choir), I hear sermons that assume that I have an absolute belief in God and Christ, and that tell me what I should do to better live the life of a Christian. But I carry within myself a deep contradiction. While one part of my being finds the sermons interesting, the symbolism fascinating and, on some level, true, even in terms of its call to action, another part of my being rejects the whole exercise as being far too focused on a single idea about the world, a single belief system. I have long said to myself that “one’s first right as a human being is to be inconsistent”. There is no outside authority that requires one to believe in any given system. I flirt with astrology, and there are times I accept what it tells me, and others when I consider it all to be nonsense. For a scientist, the first is considered unpardonable (science is another orthodoxy, another system of beliefs, that needs to move towards paradoxy).

I am not alone in this. While there are still many, perhaps even a majority, of people who “buy into” our orthodoxies, most are also struggling with doubts and other beliefs that are not allowed to surface (orthodoxy is very much about what is allowed, or not). But once one makes the switch to paradoxy, it is hard to go back. It is a harder road to follow, more uncomfortable at a personal level, because with it goes an acceptance of the contradictions within the self and the uncertainties that may result in our choices. However, the paradoxical road is, ultimately, the one that leaves us with a more robust identity, more open to growth and change, more equipped to survive.

Religions (and other orthodoxies, such as science, political parties, nations, and, even, to some extent, certain parts of the artistic community), will have to give up the idea that one can be “wholly for” or “in” their particular belief system. In fact, we may be both Buddhist and Christian, scientist and artist, spiritual and atheist.

A Practical Guide for Change

What does this mean in practical terms? What kinds of changes need to take place? One of the recent struggles experienced by many churches was the adaptation of their doctrines towards a more inclusive language. This was what has been termed the “Politically Correct” or PC movement. One of the down sides of this movement was that it was a highly orthodox movement. It was a revival of the idea of “right thinking, right action”, but within a context that permitted no inconsistencies. The results, in some cases, have been changes in hymn books and doctrinal texts that have taken much of the paradoxical life out of these documents. We are due for a sensitive counter-movement, one that allows some inconsistencies and contradictions to creep back in, provided there is an overall focus on “right thought, right action” within a paradoxical flavor.

The struggle over women ministers or priests, and over gay marriage are also recent issues that have brought many religious communities to question themselves and their basic tenets. These debates have often brought home the realization that real life communities do include contradictions and paradoxes, and that even the doctrines of religion incorporate some of these within them.

However, religious communities are still, for the most part, focused on the idea of an “exclusive belief”, even thought they often act more inclusively. Hence, for example, in recent years I have taken part in communion at several different churches, Protestant, Anglican and Catholic. However, I have also been exposed to doctrine-based affirmations such as “all those who are baptized are invited to take part” or “all Christians are invited to take communion”. As inclusive as these may sound to many members of these communities, I am neither baptized, nor, strictly speaking, Christian. Hence, although from a practical point of view, I may partake in
these activities, in fact I have been formally excluded from a doctrinal point of view.

Furthermore, I have found that I am frequently not alone – I know several individuals in these different communities who have likewise not been baptized, or have other beliefs than those shared by Christians.

The first major step towards paradoxy, therefore, is to be more inclusive in doctrine, not just in practice, with regard to other religious beliefs, including non-Christian ones and even atheistic beliefs. There is a general feeling that this would be going too far, but it is a crucial step if religions are to survive over the long term. Furthermore, despite fears to the contrary, this does not mean giving up a belief in the Numinous, nor giving up a practice of “right thinking and right action”. It simply means making these more part of our personal doctrines, and more a result of a
struggle and less a part of the organized doctrines that make up a religious community.

As discussed elsewhere in this blog, the new world will be profoundly structured around the idea of PERIPHERY rather than CENTRE, as the world we are leaving was organized. Organized religion needs to recognize and understand this change. It is a matter of shifting the focus of attention. Religions, like many complex structures and organizations, contain many different elements and may adapt to changing circumstances. Shifting to a PERIPHERAL focus is another vital step. Many churches and religious groups are still clinging to the idea that they should struggle to play a
more “CENTRAL role” in society, and undertake extensive, costly, and, ultimately futile activities aimed at achieving this. Instead, churches and religious organizations should embrace their role as being important to the PERIPHERY of society. Since society is a whole is moving to become more PERIPHERAL, this is actually a focus that favors survival, even a new kind of flourishing.

Since Presence itself is PERIPHERAL, and hence human individuals are also PERIPHERAL, this should be no great hardship. But moving towards a more peripheral focus also means giving up the importance of Place. Place is a central notion that will become less important in the coming years and decades. Hence the notion of the Church or the Meeting House or the Temple will become less important. Organized religion needs to let go of this idea, and start to develop a more malleable notion of contacting the Numinous. This won’t happen overnight, but it will need to happen over a longer period of time. We won’t completely let go of Place, instead we shall create many Places, none of which has dominance over the others.

Organized religion also needs to network more strongly with other faiths. With the move away from doctrinal orthodoxy, this should become easier than it is today. Although some cooperation occurs today, it is often based on joint outreach or socially engaged action, because these do not require doctrinal modifications.

Already, the four practical actions we have outlined (changes in doctrine to accommodate other religious beliefs, acceptance of the shift to a Peripheral role in society as a positive value, movement away from a centralized Place of worship, and networking with other faiths at the doctrinal level) represent major changes in thinking and understanding for most religious communities in existence today.

The Recognition of Shadow

In other postings, I've gone to some pains to discuss the importance of allowing a shadow culture and economy a more accepted place in our societies. Likely actions include creating public forums for discussing our own personal shadow behavior as well as those of others. Organized religion offers a significant forum for doing just that, if there were an openness within these communities to do so. The discussion around gay marriage is certainly an example. Gay relationships were long relegated to our society’s shadow, and because they challenge us in heart of our own contradictions, they are still a touchstone for strong, not always understood, feelings.

Religion provides a very interesting environment for opening up a discussion about the shadow. It has always provided a forum for discussing demons, albeit within an orthodox environment – demons were always to be condemned. To open the doors to a more paradoxical debate about the nature of good and evil, a necessary step is to open the religious environment to discussions of belief and doubt. This is quite different from orthodox discussions of belief, that see doubt as something to be found within a box “over there”, a source of challenge towards orthodoxy and hence something to be acknowledged so as to keep it out. Instead, I am talking about paradoxical discussions about belief and doubt, about the idea that God might not exist, a doubt that is allowed to challenge one’s religious identity, rather than kept on the wrong side of a wall of orthodox doctrine.

All of the great religious orthodoxies act in this way (Christianity, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhism, Shintoism, Judaism, etc.), with the possible exception of Taoism. However, each does so with a different flavor. Hence, while the demons of Moslems are not the same as the demons of Buddhists or Christians, they all discuss these demons within doctrine. The possibility of opening up the world’s religions, “from the inside”, offers fabulous cultural enrichment to the peoples of the world, if we can only let go of this persistent clinging to orthodoxy, to exclusiveness, to shutting parts of ourselves out, and with this, shutting other people out.

Conclusion – the Means for Change

What I have laid out is a roadmap for change. I recognize that it is unlikely that these changes shall be realized over a short period of time. However, although the significance of this work may be that we have named the demon to be tamed, over the longer term there will be growing pressure for the changes outlined to occur, not just for Christian churches but also for Moslems, Buddhists and other religious groups.

Religion is rooted in the essence of being human. Despite all the arguments over the years, from Marxists and communists, from science and psychoanalysis, from feminists and anarchists, popular interest in religion persists. There is something compelling about religion and religious practice, even when one does not, fully, believe. Instead of struggling to return religion to its central role in human culture – a struggle that it will lose – a more intelligent response would be to open itself up “from the inside”, to turn itself “inside out”, so that all the paradox of human spiritual growth is still given a place to reside, but not an exclusive central place, rather a set of intermingling peripheries. This is the future of organized religion, sooner or later.

One of the abiding qualities of religious communities is their longevity. It would be a shame to lose this quality in our communities, because of an inability or an unwillingness to change. Furthermore, the changes need not always occur in the midst of controversy and struggle. Oftentimes the solution to a paradox is to sit quietly, perhaps years at a time, until movement emerges, until change comes as a form of necessity, within a third way.

*Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, as developed by Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck, is based on the idea that our emotions are determined by our thoughts and core beliefs. However, there are recent indications of a merging between cognitive therapy and classical Freudian and Jungian analysis, and these hybrid approaches focus more specifically on the role of beliefs (see Mark Solms and J. Allan Hobson, Freud Returns, Scientific American Mind, April/May 2006 edition.

Final note

Interestingly, although this text was written completely independently of knowledge of Bishop Spong's writings, the two visions are very closely allied. In some ways Bishop Spong is far more radical in his vision of the changes that need to occur within the Christian Church than I was (although I was discussing all religions more generally than only the Christian Churches), in other areas I was more specifically radical (for example, in questioning the central role of Place) but we both agree that change is not only possible, it is necessary, not just for the survival of Christianity, but also for the survival of humanity. As I indicate in my text, I am not strictly speaking a Christian. I spent much of my life as a self-defined atheist, but always as one who recognizes that we humans have an inner spiritual life, even if we may have trouble articulating it. I have recently come to recognize that my understand of "God" (not a word I am comfortable with, fundamentally) is of an immanent presence, not a transcendent presence (following distinctions that Gregory Bateson discusses in his books - see, especially, his "Where Angels Fear to Tread - Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred"). This notion of an immanent God is very close to the non-theistic God as the "Ground-of-Being" discussed by Bishop Spong. Also, Bishop Spong presents a very cogent and articulate argument about the need to accommodate shadow. I focused in my text on the role of doubt as part of a religion's shadow (and also the issues of gay marriage and women ministers), but the whole notion of shadow is much more extensive than this and Bishop Spong gives it more place in his writings. In fact, the whole notion of shadow in a communal sense needs to be extended and explored in much greater depth.

The Missing Piece

2010-05-30T11:48:00.008-04:00

The past three years have seen a maturing of my vision of the world of the 21st century. As reported in my last post, none of my earlier conclusions seem to be contradicted by current trends, but several refinements in understanding have occurred.

The world is now entering its second global financial crisis in three years. I suggested in an earlier post that the transformation towards a "peripheralized world community" requires/required a series of economic crises across a period of twenty-five to thirty years. At the time I wrote this, there was not a cloud in the sky. However, within 18 months of the first discussion of this issue, the United States economy passed through a major crisis with enormous consequences world-wide... we are still recovering from this context. And now, this year, the Greek economy is in collapse and the ripple effect may carry a good chunk of the European Economic Union with it. We are not quite yet in a global crisis, but there are signs it may evolve into that. In any case, two major shocks to the global economy result in a weakened system which is susceptable to additional crises. It seems likely, now, even to the most naive pundit, that we are in the middle of a series of crises. If my "predictions" play out, we are not "in the middle" of a series of crises... we are at the beginning of a long cascade of crises that will result in the transformation of the world as we know it!

In addition, the move towards a social economy is growing. The social economy, almost invisible until the final years of the 20th century, is growing by leaps and bounds, driven at least in part by the still changing internet. Internet businesses such as Google operate on a different basis than businesses of the past. Yes, they make money, but their "bottom line" is as much about improving the state of being of humanity than about making money. The new business model is, to paraphrase David Meerman Scott (in his fascinating book "The New Rules of Marketing and PR"), to link a money making model to the information-sharing modes of operation of what is often called the Web Two Point Oh so that people are drawn to the paying service via the information sharing. They are given the option of paying for additional, targeted services or just sticking to the freely offered basic services. Basic services are free, only the value added elements cost money. This model is transforming businesses in the internet era - what was considered a marginal and untried business model only a few years ago has now become main-stream! In addition, the internet, including Web Two Point Oh services, is enabling the emergence of mega-organisations of like-minded individuals focused on humanitarian goals. Often these goals are environmental in focus, but a growing number of organisations with other goals are emerging (think of Avaaz.org, for example, for pursuing humanitarian aid goals as well as environmental ones).

Despite these increasingly important changes, many people and organizations continue to function as if the world were the same as it always was - what I call the "business as usual" model. Remember, as laid out in my early postings here, the business-as-usual model cannot be right! In today's world, for the first time in human history, the rate of growth of the world population is declining. The world is connected, for the first time in history, by a vast computer network to which almost everyone has access (there are, however, economic factors which limit access by some, but there are also efforts underway to overcome even these barriers). For the first time in human history, we have reached (well, surpassed) the resource limitations of the planet we live in. Under such conditions, business-as-usual is impossible. What we do today has IMMEDIATE consequences on what happens tomorrow - there are no decade long delayed reactions as was the norm before! The "business-as-usual" models suggests that one may act as an indivual (person or organization) with no regard for the feedback effects ("what goes around, comes around") of one's actions. This is NOT the world we live in - today, what I do today bites me in my rear end tomorrow, and the time between action and consequence is shortening all the time!

However, one of the challenges I faced in my earlier postings was the following : what difference does it make to know these things? These changes are not directly under our control - they are part of a large "systems" movement that has been in operation for years, decades, even centuries. How does my understanding that we no longer live in a "business-as-usual" world affect my ability/interest in acting in the present? How do my actions count?

This is not a banal question. Despite the growing focus on the "individual" in our media culture, in some ways the individual seems to have less power to change things than was apparent earlier. If you are a "viral" internet figure, perhaps you have the ability to "be heard", but there is no obvious way to engineer a "viral response" to what one has to say! Viral internet response seems to be pretty haphazard, and also a bit too heavily doped towards media "hype" than dealing with real-life issues in their complexity! But if you have no "viral audience", how can you be heard, never alone have a sustained effect on the world?

The answer I have to offer is multi-level. First of all, one needs to go back to the nature of a paradox. In earlier postings, I described a paradox as "contradictions within being that can be resolved", noting also that the word's roots are found in the idea of being "beyond thought" - so "contradictions within being that can be resolved, but in a process that is beyond thought". We don't "think ourselves" out of paradoxes - we must maintain contact with a paradox until it resolves. The difficulty of being heard or having an impact on the world as an individual, in a society that is increasingly driven by large groups of people, is a paradox. The way forward is to maintain a clear focus on what one has to contribute and to "stay there", taking opportunities to speak to it, to act from this place, and so forth, until, eventually, the world begins to change as a result. It sounds crazy, but it does work! This blog follows this philosophy... if you are reading it, then you are already part of the "give" in the world!

The second part of my answer, however, draws on some reading I've been doing with regard to religion. In an earlier posting I've already talked about the "problem of religion" and the challenges faced by religions today. I've been reading an interesting albeit contraversial writer concerned with Christian theology - John Shelby Spong. I skipped his provocatively-titled book "Why Christianity Must Change or Die", not because I disagree but because the book was largely a critique and offered little information concerning where the Christian church needs to go. Instead, I went straight to the sequel, "A New Christianity for a New World", a fascinating book by anyone's standards.

Spong's argument is not that far from my own, albeit focused towards the issue of religious thought and perhaps without the more scientific or systems thinking elements of my analysis of the root causes of the current tendencies (he is not, after all, a scientist, although his explanation of evolution is one of the most coherent and well-articulated accounts I have ever encountered!). Spong argues that humankind is in the process of attaining a kind of emotional maturity very different to what was the case in the past. He reaches this conclusion based on an array of readings, including Jung, religious scholars of the past hundred years or so, scientists and others. As I also presented, he doesn't discount the presence of religious "fundamentalism", its popularity and its apparent attempt to "turn back the clock", but like in my own analysis, he views this as a "last bastion" of those who are still resisting changes that have become massive and inevitable. In the face of scientific perspectives that leave no room for a "heaven just beyond the clouds", for God as an "immaterial being" who can "intervene directly in human lives" and "perform physical miracles that defy the laws of physics", that leave no room for the "miracle of virgin birth", etc., Spong claims that Christian doctrine needs to be radically rethought. He "deconstructs" standard Christian doctrine within an attempt to find the "essential core", the part of Christianity (that is to say, the part of the Christ story) that existed before the layers of interpretation were added. His solution is rather subtle, and I won't attempt to describe it in detail here - I'm still thinking about it myself!

However, in an equally fascinating chapter on the nature of evil, he re-situates evil in two places - as a problem of the incompleteness of human beings, on the one hand, and in a kind of corollary, as a problem of the refusal to acknowledge, understand and incorporate one's shadow on the other, following Jung's ideas about the shadow self. Let me quote Spong as he talks about Jung's ideas :

"Carl Jung suggested that a part of every person's humanity was something he called our 'shadow'. This 'shadow' is defined as that aspect of our being which is feared, repressed, denied, coped with, and in some cases even transformed to serve the well-being of the person. However, Jung argued that one's shadow is never healed until it has been brought into the self-consciousness of the person whose dark side it is. Healing, for Jung, comes with the embrace of our shadow, the acceptance of our evil. Evil too is a part of God, Jung suggested, because it too is a part of Being."

Spong calls this a "startling concept" and "one not easily absorbed". He goes on, however, to suggest that 21st century Christianity needs to accept and incorporate this very different idea of evil than the one embedded in current Christian thought. He declares "the primary task of a faith-community is to assist in the creation of wholeness - not goodness, but wholeness". He talks about the "wholeness that comes to us only in community", that "includes our shadow, which is never separate from our being". "Some of us need to be rescued from our goodness to be made whole, while some of us need to be rescued from our evil. But none of us can be made whole until good and evil are bound together inside one being. That... is a community function." Furthermore, "That ... is the work of the church".

I believe that this is the piece I have been missing in my own analysis of the current process of transformation of the world. I agree with Spong that the "shadow work" which needs to be done MUST BE DONE, at least in part, BY THE COMMUNITY. While we must each of us struggle with our own demons, our society also has its own shadow sides, and we must find a way to acknowledge this shadow as a community, so that we can heal ourselves, heal humanity (note that this is related to the argument I spelled out in the post "On Children"). The longer we put this work off, the harder the transition will be. While certain aspects of the transformation (the "convergence") under way are beyond our control to reach and address, this aspect of the transformation is very much our work and very much within our means to act, to be heard and to contribute to the changes underway.

The Crisis... A Year Closer

2008-08-31T10:42:00.001-04:00

In the year since I last posted to this blog, a whole slew of changes have occurred, both worldwide and locally. However, none of these contradict what I have been saying, all of them further reinforce the strength of the arguments I have laid out. People are more aware that "something is going on" today than they were a year ago. Also, many doomsayers are predicting a massive, global economic crisis within five years, an even more draconian time frame than the prediction of 20 years I had read about before.

I got stuck writing more, not because I had little to say, but because I had so much to say and it was so complex, I found the blog format difficult to "fence it in". Since then, I have had a number of opportunities to speak in public to these issues and to evolve my own understanding of how to talk about them, so I'm going to make another try to get down some of the impacts and issues that the process of "peripheralization", the term my colleagues and I have started to use to refer to the shift from orthodoxy to paradoxy, engenders.

Also, when I wrote up the blogs originally, I had identified a number of key sectors that would need to gain awareness of the changes in progress and learn new ways to function. These included the museum sector, in which I have become professionally active, issues in relation to the aging population, disability and identity, another area in which I have become professionally engaged, and the education sector, about which I have a lot to say that is urgent but have been unable to articulate clearly and neutrally. Because I work at a university, I have found I am emotionally caught up in the issues of education and that this makes it hard for me to step back and talk more neutrally about this area and the crisis that I believe is coming.

Like the doomsayers, I believe a major economic crisis is coming, but I think its scope is as much about social change as it is about economic change. I also believe the crisis is necessary to "get us past the hump" onto a different incline, a different set of dynamics. Crises are the means by which transformation occurs. They are always painful, but they are absolutely necessary to move past a knot. So I don't count myself among the doomsayers, who say crisis is inevitable, it is coming and it will be disastrous. I agree it will be painful, but that is it both useful and necessary.

On Baby Boomers, Peak Oil and Climate Change

2008-08-31T10:41:00.001-04:00

Three arguments currently dominate social thinking about change and society - the impacts of an aging population of so-called baby boomers, the increasingly urgent idea that our climate has entered a cycle of human-caused change, and the idea that the energy supply will pass through an economic crisis in the next few years (the so-called "peak oil" crisis). These ideas are so compelling, that current national research policies, when they are not focused towards the issue of technology growth, are dedicated to increasing our understanding of their nature and their impacts. It has become apparent that tremendous socio-economic forces are being engaged to deal with these problems. As a result, focus on longer term issues, whether these be the paradigm shift I have been discussing, or problems such as ongoing poverty and inequality in the world, often take a back burner.

These issues, as important as they are, are obscuring deeper issues that will have consequences at least as profound, perhaps more so - the process of peripheralization and the shift from orthodoxy to paradoxy discussed here. In some ways, the aging population, the peak oil crisis and the environmental crisis are major challenges that are tying up resources in such a way that by the time our attention frees up again, the other changes in progress will be sufficiently advanced that the transformation risks being well underway. It behooves us to pay attention to these deeper issues while dealing with the current crises ... paradox management means being aware of the many interconnected forces in play and maintaining an open active stance towards them all. The era when we could focus our efforts exclusively on one or two issues is gone if it ever existed - policies that try to simplify the world go awry. From a systems perspective, it is important to understand and maintain a set of "nudges" aimed to making changes to the system flows - it is the collection of all such nudges that constitutes a program for change, not one single effort. The world is not an object that needs to be shifted, it is a complex collection of systems and flows, and change is brought about by nudging those flows.

Fortunately, it is possible to address the deeper issues while focusing on the current crises. The result is a modulation of our actions, a change in focus when appropriate, rather than a radical change in what we do.

The Story So Far...

2007-06-04T08:50:00.000-04:00

My blog postings so far have explored the origins and some of the dimensions of the paradigm change currently in progress. We began with the roots of the change in the dynamics of population demographics, and explored the nature of paradox and orthodoxy to better understand the ground within which the change is occuring. We then explored how the change affects us in our individual make-up and our immediate social relationships, with intimates, family and friends.

In the next series of postings, I want to shift the focus somewhat, to examine the socio-economic implications of this on a broader canvas. I want to address issues such as the huge inequities that persist between the rich and the poor of our planet, and how these come into the picture. What is the nature of the economy that must struggle to come into being in a world of near zero economic growth? How must business change?

What is government and how will it be affected, as a major institution? What new forms of government are emerging?

What about the shadow side of the picture? How might the recognition that we are multiple and inconsistent change how we deal with the shadow self and the shadow side of social relations? What possibilities exist for new social forms as a result?

Are there impacts on religion and spirituality of this change? How will these aspects of our humanity mutate? They have already undergone tremendous change in the 20th century, but they are due for much more in the 21st.

Another area I plan to address is the issue of human health. Our understanding of health and our relationships to our bodies will also likely change as a result of the paradigm change in progress. I shall be exploring some of these issues as well.

Finally, we shall need to bring these different strands together and examine our living patterns, how we build communities, and on what basis might they exist in the "post-sustainable world".

The main argument throughout this discussion is that, although the overall focus is within the context of sustainability, the underlying fabric of our societies is changing and hence the issue of sustainability must be understood within a new grounding, rather than on the old one.

More on Identity

2007-06-02T13:48:00.000-04:00

I spoke at a meeting organized by the students in the Museum Studies program (Muséologie) at Laval University this past Saturday, on the nature of identity and the change currently in progress. This allowed me to consolidate and further develop these ideas.

In an earlier post, I describe a shift in how we view identity in three areas - from a focus on history to a valorisation of the now, from a focus on identity as a centre to the idea of identity as peripheral, and from a single, coherent entity to a multiple incoherent entity.

One of the ways of highlighting the latter is the shift from the idea that one may have a single national identity to the idea that one may have passports from many different countries. I remember reading about a journalist (Wilfred Burdett) in the 1970s who carried 24 passports with him... although still an exceptional case today, the idea of having several passports is no longer as strange a concept as it once was.

Some people wonder if the difference between having one identity and one of having many isn't just "a question of semantics", of how one defines identity. Of course, this may certainly be true, but I believe there are differences that go deeper. Essentially, I believe that the self, the whole of who we are as individuals, encompasses many more states of being than we usually recognize or acknowledge, or even than we can know. Modern neurology tells us that the brain is modular, that it is organized into a large number of distinct units, each with a particular function, and that the whole behaviour of the brain is an emergent property of the interaction of all these different parts. What, then, is identity and how may we define and understand it? Is it the complete collection of all these elements as they manifest themselves in behavioural expression?

But we know that, from a certain perspective, the self is not only the brain and the body, but it is also our interaction with the environment. We do not simply act on the environment, the environment acts upon us through our interactions and changes us. Different environmental interactions allow different possible behaviours for the self to emerge, even to come into being. So to be complete, we would have to define a "full identity" as including all the behavioural components, beliefs, values, etc. stored and expressed in the brain, the body and the environment. But this definition makes the self very large indeed - it incorporates most of the universe!

If we agree to separate the self - as - identity from the environment, then we may already have several selves with different behavioural characteristics, depending upon the environment within which they function. These selves may be viewed as sequential, that is, as an evolution or transformation of the self over time. This is often how we find a way to reconcile the idea of multiple selves within an individual - that is, we allow for the possibility that the individual may evolve over time. But this is not so very different from accepting that one may have several functional identities "in parallel", that is, they function in different environments over the same time span. Hence the notion of multiple identities within a single "self" is commensurate with modern cognitive theory.

Once we accept the idea that we may have more than one identity, more than one set of characteristic behaviours, values, strategies, beliefs and representations of the world, then it becomes possible for these different sets to contradict each other - in values, in strategies, in beliefs or in the representations of the world that we use. Indeed, if we go back to the argument that the self is larger than any given identity, then inconsistency is necessary. We know inconsistency is part of what it is to be human, the effort to enforce a "consistent human image" has failed whenever it has been attempted. Humans rebel against consistency, sometimes murderously, violently.

There is another reason it is necessary to view humans as fundamentally inconsistent. Essentially, we embrace death within our beings, but death is by its very nature inconsistent with the rest. Part of our current culture is to deny the existence of death within us, to exorcise the idea of death from our beings, another way of enforcing orthodoxy. Such a program is doomed to failure. We all die, and sooner or later, we must confront this fact of our existence. The introduction of death and its awareness into the psyche, into the self, means that we must necessarily embrace a form of inconsistency. A healthy response to accepting our eventual death is therefore to accept that we are multiple, inconsistent, and larger than we can know.

As indicated above, the nature of our being is fundamentally fragmentary. The idea of integrity, of us being single, is an illusion. The cognitive system is very good at maintaining such illusions - it fools us into thinking we are single, that our vision is complete and has no holes, that our perception of time is continuous, that we are eternally alive, that our consciousness is most of us, and so on. These are all illusions.

This idea of the self as fragmentary and as multiple actually leads us into this other observation about how our perception of the self is changing - that we are not determined by our history but that we determine ourselves through our actions in the now. The problem with the history argument is that it requires a simple and single definition of the self - otherwise, who's history are we discussing? Also, for the self to change, no change is possible without action. We change ourselves through our actions. For this to be true, it cannot be the case that we are determined solely or even primarily by the history of our interactions with the world.

Hence every action we take constitutes an activation, a reinforcement, even a mutation of some characteristic of the different parts that make us up, some transformation of one or more of our identities. We take responsability for ourselves when we act. This moves us away from the socio-cognitive model of morality we have adopted for the past several decades, into a more embodied, direct form of morality. In the socio-cognitive model, our values and actions are determined by what we learn from our parents and our social and cultural environment at an early age, and these determine what moral behaviour we shall adopt. It is an argument of "history determines who you are". But under the new paradigm, I determine who I am by the actions I take. This allows for exceptions, it allows individuals with a common history and family to take on radically different moral stances. Although this is not common, it happens, and it is perhaps more common than we have been led to believe.

Not only does our history no longer define who we are, but our sources of authority are changing. Within the older idea of identity, authority was centralized into key and significant individuals - parents, prime ministers, school teachers, bosses, and so forth. The notion of expertise is also rooted in the idea that particular individuals may become "central authorities", simply because they have the right credentials, not necessarily because what they have to say is right or useful or valuable. In today's world of the blog, although central authorities get some coverage, this does not make what they have to say important, unless it makes sense. Within the purview of collective intelligence, what we each have to say contributes, but does not determine, global awareness. There is no centrality, no credentials, unless what one has to say reflects the collective understanding. Authority has become peripheral, and expertise, communal.

Finally, our old sense of identity was delimited by our belongings, by the groups to which we belonged - Canadians, Christians, academics, westerners, professors, men, etc. to name but a few that circumvent my identity. In today's world, however, we belong to fewer and fewer long term groups. Instead, we participate in networks, but networks are not defined by belongings but by flows. Within networks, relationships are constantly changing, and our presence is actualized by our activities, our actions in the now, not by our histories. We are constantly moving from one network to another. We do not "invest" in networks the same way we invested in groups in which we were members, rather we engage with networks and then switch or move on to new ones. The process is more dynamic, more fluid, less static, and our identities change likewise with each new participation.

To come back to the context of museum culture, about which I shall have more to say, to survive in the coming decades as our sense of identity continues its transformation, museums among many other institutions, will be called upon to change. Museums as promoters of culture and identity, as questioners and challengers, will continue to be needed, even more so now than in the past. But museums as centralized collections of artefacts will diminish. The notion of holding onto artefacts, material, tangible things, must be rethought within the new paradigm, or the collections will be disrupted and disbanded for lack of funds. Artefacts will have a role to play in the new identity structures, but only if ways are found to valorize them within the new arrangements, not by holding onto and defending old ideas about identity and culture.

These comments are, of course, valid for other institutions which will also need to change if they are survive. More on this another time.

On Change, Action and Paradox

2007-05-22T09:50:00.000-04:00

It is time to talk a little more about paradox and how to deal with it. As ideas about a major paradigm shift emerge within this blog, about major changes in how we understand ourselves and relate to each other, it becomes important to address the issue of how we may act, and how our actions affect the world unfolding around us.

In an earlier post, I suggested that paradox deals with contradictions that can be resolved. However, this isn't quite right. As a friend and colleague, Dr. Blake Poland, points out, "paradox is not necessarily easily resolved at the level of the contradictions it holds within it, but rather via the lateral shift in thinking it invites when one is prepared to hold the paradox". He goes on to suggest that "things are 'resolved' when we stop fighting them, when we accept them as they are and are thus able to see them anew, and new possibilities, from a qualitatively different vantage point". Hence dealing with paradox does not mean trying to think things through and force a resolution into being through action, but rather it means to hold the opposites within one's being until a path forward comes into being, emerging from its own nature. Dealing with paradox therefore means a kind of "not action".

I have long felt that the notion of choice is also problematical. We appear to be free to choose many things, what we eat for dinner, who we frequent and who our friends are, what job we do, and so forth. One of the most stressful periods of a person's life is often the period in late adolescence and early adulthood when we are asked to choose what kind of work we want to take up. It is assumed that one may examine the characteristics of a range of different activities, perhaps examine our own feelings about these, and then choose to invest in one of these activities. Is that really how we function, as human beings?

I am not so sure. My experience is that, over time, we find the work that "works" for us. Whatever "choice" we make during this "job choosing phase", quickly evolves and changes as we start to engage ourselves within these activities and we may end up in a job environment totally different from what we "expected". What "works for us" may have very little to do with our intellectual capabilities, and more to do with the sets of checks and balances that we need in our lives to function. Hence many people work in jobs that do not necessarily reflect themselves deeply, but that allow them to function within certain constraints (reconciling job and family, for instance).

Do we "choose" our lovers and life partners, in a similar way? Do we "try people out for size"? Again, I have my doubts. We may choose to date, or go to bed, with almost anyone, but that person will not long remain in our lives if they do not "fit" in ways that are invisible but all important. The relationship need not, on the surface, appear to be healthy to be "right" for us. Why we are attracted to certain people and not others is still a mystery, a mystery that has everything to do with the larger picture of who we are. We "choose" certain relationships because these relationships engage us, even though sometimes we may appear to be choosing the same type of person and hence appear to be "stuck".

From the perspective of dealing with paradox, there appears to be only one choice - with what level of commitment to I approach and hold the opposite sides of the paradox within myself, to what level do I allow myself to listen to the endless series of reflections between myself and the world, with what patience do I allow myself to stay steady as a rock until a path opens in front of me, partly of my own making but not forced?

To "force" a paradox into a resolution is to leave the paradox intact, and put off its resolution to another day. If I am not patient enough to stay steady, even though holding a paradox may be painful, until a lateral shift occurs and I can see the way forward, I may shake my head and step away from the paradox, and do something else. But this will mean the paradox will still be there when I come back to it. This is true about my work environments, my relationships, my life choices, and so forth.

Another aspect of this situation is the nature of action with regard to choose. It is often assumed that we intellectually choose and then put this choice into action. However, it may be that we act, and then intellectually justify the action as a "choice". "What I eat for dinner" may have less to do with my intellectual choices, "meat" or "fish", than to do with how I act in the now, rooted in a context that includes knowledge about what is in my fridge, knowledge about my own financial status, predisposition to plan and buy certain foods, and so forth. The idea that we intellectually decide and then implement the decision in action is probably wrong. Intellectually, we are not able to include all the necessary factors into our decision-making process. Instead, when we turn our attention away from our thoughts, that is when we may act.

This underlines the importance of the paradigm shift from identity based on history to identity as actualized in the now. How we act determines who we are. This is the reverse of the commonly held belief that "who we are determines how we act". Actually, of course, both are true. Part of the change underway also concerns our beliefs about ourselves, indeed, about the self. Beliefs are a part of identity, so this should not be surprising. We are becoming more focused on understanding who we are without intellectualizing this understanding. Perhaps attending to who we are would be a better term.

This affects not only personal acts but also social action. We are, increasingly, acting communally. This ability to act as a group has been enhanced by the collective awareness that arises from the internet - the broad circulation of blogs, chat, photos, videos, and so forth. We are "attending" to ourselves as a community. This is focussed not just on the larger issues of socio-economic organisation, the environment, and so forth, but also on the everyday details of our individual and collective lives. This increased self-knowledge, as a community, it part of our enhanced ability to act as a community. These actions, in retrospect, appear to be mysteriously coordinated, but no systematic planning of the whole seems to have been involved (some coordinated planning may be present in parts of the community, however).

As a community, via the diverse communication tools available to us, we are "holding the opposites" in our collective being. This is dealing with paradox in its full sense. Therefore, one of the most important acts we may take as individuals is to assist in the process of "attending to". This is what this particular blog is about... a way of assisting our collective intelligence to attend to issues of its own make-up and functioning.

More and more, how we organize our lives is related to our collective actions about the world. Each act engenders a change in awareness, in consciousness, in identity. And these changes lead in turn to newer possibilities for action. Therefore each act, especially those that we undertake under the auspices of attending to apparent opposites in our lives, carries a weight. It is often asked what we can do to help address a serious social problem. The answers are usually given in concrete terms. But simply attending to the issue and its relationships to our everyday lives, is a form of response that is, in the long term, of critical importance.

"What may I do to decrease child poverty in other parts of the world?" Acknowledge that there is a link between our lives and theirs. Attend to the fact that how I organize my life involves actions that propagate into the economy, and ultimately lead to socio-economic organizations that engender such poverty. Increase my knowledge of how my daily activities affect a child's well-being elsewhere on the planet. Share the results of your newly acquired knowledge.

These actions appear to be frustratingly simple, indirect and limited. But ultimately, paradoxically, they are the ones that are likely to be fruit. As e.e. cummings poem says, "only connect".

On Children

2007-05-21T19:48:00.000-04:00

One of the most interesting properties of the changes underway, in our identity and our relationships, and our shift from a focus on orthodoxy and orthodox life situations to more paradoxical ones, is the changing experience of children. Children are at the heart of the change going on, and the current generation of young children will be the lever that shifts us out from under the rule of orthodoxy.

Paradoxically, our relationship to our children remains simultaneously both one of the more taboo subjects, and one of the areas where people have the most to say. Children remain, for the most part, one of the groups of people with the least amount of power over their own lives. It is all too easy to assert that children lack the emotional maturity to take charge of their lives, and to use this blanket argument to keep the status quo. The reality is starkly different - some children develop emotional maturity at an early age, and overall there are shifts and changes in how much and what kinds of maturity emerge over time. The landscape is constantly changing with children, and so a "one size fits all" argument simply does not apply.

Also, the idea that children should be kept "innocent", that is "ignorant" of key factors that affect their growth and development, is a recent idea that emerged in Victorian Britain and spread from there. The need to keep children ignorant was as much a response to their association with the role of women in that era as it was a social movement aimed at their betterment. In fact, most of the ideas we have about children are recent and developed to serve social, political and economic agendas rather than the well-being of children per se. We should be very careful about what we believe to be "natural" about childhood.

A number of studies have begun to emphasize the fact that families are becoming less centrally organized and less structured as a function of duty and authority. "The modern family being classically founded upon duty (central value) and the principle of authority to settle relationships between individuals, its main features are opposed to those of the contemporary family. The latter, which started to emerge over the sixties, is characterized by both the prevalence of parent-child relationships symmetrization and the emergence of the search for immediate pleasure. The change from parental authority to consensus as a principle ruling the relationships within families leads to many consequences later noticed through changes in the construction of the child's psyche along his development and in the relationships dynamics....When consensus is at the center of the family, and according to concrete meetings with the other offered by the thousand and one situations met in the daily life, the aims and satisfaction modalities of the child's impulses will evolve into a relation often based on either strength or seduction." (Lazartigues, Morales & Planche, 2005)

This particular study highlights the fact that parent-child relations have changed to become more symmetrical - the child is increasingly viewed as a "decider" in his or her own right, on a par with adult deciders, or at least with negotiation rights. However, the article also emphasizes the focus on immediate gratification, the characteristic of the children of the baby-boomer generation. The growing importance of the environmental movement and other changes under way suggest that later generations of children will be less focused on immediate pleasure and more focused on a balancing of personal and social need.

Children are still raised within an expectation of orthodoxy, even though the family situations in which they grow are becoming more diversified. Each child believes their family situation to be representative of everyone else's, a kind of prototypical experience of family that is assumed to be valid generally. Ensuring the children recognize the paradoxical uniqueness of their particular family arrangements will be predicated on the cultural paradigm shift to paradox relationships. As the upcoming generations of adults embrace these changes, each in turn, their children will become more attuned to both the differences and the similarities of their own family life to that of others.

It may even be the case that the experience of conformity and difference as experienced by children and adolescents will change as a result of this broader social awareness. Although some of this may be necessary experimentation with social versus personal identity, it is likely that the experience is also fuelled by overly orthodox family attitudes that are felt to be a straightjacket by young people as their sense of identity emerges.

As children and adolescents become aware of their identity, the nature of their surroundings will affect their ability to recognize and work with paradox. When functioning within orthodox social arrangements such as the nuclear family, but also single parents and other situations that are promoted as typical, or within peer groups, young people learn to repress those aspects of themselves that are not recognized within the orthodoxy. This becomes part of their shadow self. Later, as an adult, the shadow self will come to haunt one and a number of ways that are both significant but uncomfortable, and that have large consequences for society as a whole.

Some creation of a shadow self is probably inevitable, but to the extent that a young person remains attuned to the contradictions involved in personal versus social life, and is allowed or encouraged to remain aware of the unconscious repressions that may be in play, it may be possible to avoid some of the worse excesses of a strong but unacknowledged shadow self that plagues our current society.

A strong and unacknowledged shadow self emerges when we are forced to suppress elements of our behaviour that are considered to be inconsistent with current orthodoxy. Acknowledging our shadow self is a characteristic response related to accepting our own inconsistency. The human psyche is a jumble of different, distinct processes - the feeling of unity and integrity is an illusion. Instead, there may be any number of inconsistencies, gaps, contradictions, or exagerations in our ongoing functioning. Furthermore, there are several distinct sub-personalities within each of us. In addition, these distinct processes and personalities mature at different rates when we are young, and hence the inconsistencies and so forth will mutate over time. To the extent that our children learn to accept this about themselves, and that we as adults acknowledge them, our ability to function more effectively and develop social and communal structures that are more holistic and balanced will likewise grow.

The evidence is becoming incontravertable - the social and psychological experience of children is changing. It has already changed significantly over the 20th century. It is now undergoing an even more rapid change, from one generation to the next. Recognition of this is key to understanding the changes in how the world functions that are coming into play. Not only this, there are opportunities to affect the change as it unfolds. There is an urgent need for a broad group of individuals to understand these changes, how they will likely affect our social and institutional structures, and what we may do to steward or guide these developments as they unfold.

On Relationships

2007-05-18T23:25:00.001-04:00

The new perspective on identity presented in the previous posts has substantial consequences for both how we form relationships and how we function within and develop family. We shall examine each of these issues in turn.

If our sense of personal identity is shifting towards a peripheral organisation, towards taking responsibility for one’s actions in the now, and towards a multiple and inconsistent set of identities, then these changes will be necessarily reflected in the relationships we form. In fact our relationships are one of the tools that are in use to help forge the new identity. Relationships have an inertia of their own. As long as the majority of them were rooted in the older identity paradigm, change was slow, but today, increasingly, relationships incorporate some of the shifts in how identity is constructed.

Almost all of our knowledge of ourselves is reflected knowledge. A person is more than 90% "underground" - that is, aside from the occasional fleeting thought in our conscious minds, almost everything else in who we are is unconscious, and not directly accessible to us. Our memories store both factual knowledge and procedural knowledge, but procedural knowledge is not stored in a way that allows us to recall it as we would a fact. And although we may store information about ourselves in our factual knowledge memory store, this information is not the result of direct observation of who we are, but rather some form of interpreted knowledge.

Because all of the really important information about ourselves and who we are is automatic and unconscious, we have only three means of examining it - watch "thought/feeling" events as they flit through our conscious minds, make note of the actions we take, and observe how other people react to us. The first is problematical, because the events that happen in our conscious mind actually tell us very little about what is going on in our unconscious. I will come back to the second means later. The primary means is by studying other people. We reflect an image of ourselves back from the people who surround us. This is the function of "projection", and it is fundamentally necessary in order to be able to determine anything of importance about ourselves.

I have heard people say to me, "you're projecting, stop it!", or "you're not seeing me as I am, you're projecting". Well, the truth of the matter is, it is impossible to turn this off... we are always "projecting" all the time. It is how we make sense of ourselves and our relationships to others. The trick is not to stop doing it, but rather to stop doing it unconsciously. It is to known when and how you are doing it, so that one can take this effect into account when untangling information about ourselves from that about the people with whom we are interacting. When we become aware of how we project ourselves onto other people, then we may mentally "subtract out" things we know about ourselves and are left with inferences about the other person. This is actually what is meant by someone who says "stop projecting"!

Modern research in cognitive science has discovered some of the neurological machinery that underlies this process. Hence so called "mirror neurons" fire when we act or emote, but also when we observe the same emotions and actions in another person. Hence the reflecting process is built into our brain structure.

Incidently, this phenomenon of reflection underlines one of the main facets of the human condition - we cannot function effectively in isolation from other living beings.

When I say that we are reflected in our relationships, of course I mean all the varied forms of relationships, including family, lovers, friends, colleagues, business partners, acquaintances, students, clients, teachers, therapists and passing strangers.

Unfortunately, most people are unaware of how they project, and indeed, need to project, their own being into their relationships in order to acquire an image of who they are. Becoming aware of this process is a crucial step to taking responsability for who one is, and for ensuring that one is integral to one's own nature, that one is not dependent on other people's actions to determine who we are.

The first major shift in identity, away from a predominant focus on one's history and towards one's actions in the present, is expressed here as the need to develop greater awareness of how we "project" ourselves into our relationships. The use of our personal histories, which has been our principle way of defining the self, will become increasingly outmoded. Indeed, within the older paradigm, much of our self knowledge was organized into our personal history. Hence we all have the experience of knowing "how we have always felt" when relating to certain kinds of person, and assuming that this historical knowledge is a reliable indicator of what we shall feel, say and do in the present. We have all also been surprised on occasions when what we feel, say and do is quite different from our historical expectations - it would seem that other factors affect our behaviour and not only "what we have always done". In fact, our reliance on personal history may have biased us towards its having a greater effect on our current actions that it need necessary do. 21st century relationships will revolve around more awareness of who we are and how we interact than did 20th century relationships - whether these be intimate relationships or passing strangers or anything in-between.

We see signs of these changes in all our different social environments, even though many relationships are still mired in the older paradigm. In a society in which we must co-exist, side-by-side, with people who are different than we are, there are both more occasions and a greater need for being aware of who we are and how we interact. Today's men are highly aware of the different discourses that surround the relationships between men and women, and comments made today are offered in full knowledge of these complexities. The same is true of women with regard to men, perhaps even more so. Things that were said unthinkingly in the 1950's cannot be said in the same way today. Usually, the individual not only speaks in ways that recognize the surrounding discussions, but he or she will situate him or herself in relation to this discourse when speaking to each new person. How we talk to children has changed, and how we talk to our parents is changing.

While for much of the 20th century (and previous centuries), we were focused on issues of duty and obligation in these contexts (to intimate partners, but also to family, colleagues, and so forth), today we are much less willing to engage in duty to the exclusion of personal factors. That is, each instance of duty is modulated by specifics of how we feel about a person, what we think about them, what our values are and where they are situated in our value system. In the old days, duty meant duty, independent of personal factors. In the 21st century, duty is still present, but it is modulated by other factors. This again highlights the shift from orthodoxy to paradoxy.

The second characteristic of the paradigm shift in identity is the move from a central focus to a peripheral one. How is this expressed in our relationships?

Throughout the 20th century, the principle social unit was the nuclear family. The nuclear family is a complex unit, but includes a monogamous intimate relationship between two people, usually a man and a woman, along with a sharing of responsability between these two with regard to the needs and responsabilities of raising children. The nuclear family is a centralist nexus of relationships, a necessary organisation in the face of rapid socio-economic expansion and change. However, by the latter part of the 20th century, the signs of stress and breakdown in the nuclear family were becoming a flood!

The "orthodox" heterosexual couple was one of the first elements to break down. Today, many gay couples are clamouring for recognition within marriage, after having obtained a certain level of recognition as longterm life arrangements. However, the couple as a social unit is also under threat from a variety of sources. Increasingly, friendships, which were long seen as a well-defined relationship, are diversifying into a range of possible relationships. Individuals today do not, for the most part, expect to be in a life-long intimate relationship with a single partner. Many may still yearn for this, but most do not expect it. Nor do they expect all their needs to be met through one person. In today's emerging world, relationships are characterised by more variety in form and nature, and more pluralistic. This is an area that shall see substantial more change over the coming years as the straightjacket of orthodoxy, which has held relationships frozen in form for a long time, loses more and more its hold.

I shall be exploring issues of family life in more detail later on. What is important to note at this point is that the nature of our relationships are becoming more pluralistic and more diversified, hence more peripheral in organisation.

Finally, the large number of extra-marital affairs that is known to occur in both sexes, highlights the fact that people are not consistent, even within themselves, certainly not within orthodox social arrangements. The need for various sexual partners, and the need for intimate partners who meet different needs, the separation of issues of child support from issues of intimacy, friendship, sexuality, identity, and so forth, are all alligned with the shift towards a multiple and inconsistent identity.

The Changing Nature of Identity

2007-05-15T11:47:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I introduced the idea that our identity is changing, that our understanding of identity is undergoind a paradigm shift. I want to discuss this in more detail, as this underlies much of the discussions that will occur later, and also because it may be one of the changes that is the most transformative for the individual.

I indicated three ways in which our understanding of identity is changing
- from a focus on past history to present actions;
- from a focus on centrality to peripherality; and
- from a focus on a single, self-consistent sense of identity to a multiple, inconsistent sense of identity.

Before pursuing this line of argument, however, it behooves us to examine more closely the notion itself of "identity". In the 1980's, identity was defined as "a system of representations, feelings and strategies, organized in defense of its primary object...identity is a structured and differentiated model simultaneously rooted in the past..., in the coordination of current behavior and in the legitimized future (projects, ideals, values and styles)". Hence we see that both one's historical past and one's actualized present form part of one's identity, along with one's future oriented ideals, one's representations and one's strategies.

Wikipedia gives a more straightforward definition, as "an individual's comprehension of him or herself as a discrete, separate entity". In its section on "Identity Formation", Wikipedia also states "Pieces of the entity's actual identity include a sense of continuity, a sense of uniqueness from others, and a sense of affiliation." This underlines what I said in the previous post, that identity is not only about differentiating ourselves from others, but also a set of affiliations with others, of commonalities.

Our personal history usually echoes both these properties. Often a history is given as "I was born on such and such a date, at such a place, and my early life was spending doing such and such". This constitutes a differentiation - most of the time, the time, date and place of birth constitute a near unique marker of who we are, and our early history further emphasizes our distinctness. On the other hand, our biography may also state "I was born of parents with such an ethnic background in such a country, and when we left this locale we joined this new community". This part of our history consists of our membership in various groups. Not only individuals but also groups and communities are defined and described in these terms - it is the movement between what differentiates us from others and what brings us together with others that constitutes our particular identity.

In today's online environment, however, we often leave this information behind us. For example, within the environment of Second Life, the online virtual world, many people refuse to provide any information about who they are "in Real Life" and it is considered impolite to insist. Not all blogs are "authored" by real life identities either - usually, the only validation requested is an email, and with the ability to create emails with very little identification, blogs may be authored by individuals whose "true identity" remains completely obscure. Within these environments, it is not your history that defines who you are, it is how you act towards people, what you say and how you say it, that determines how you are to be treated and whether you shall have any popularity.

These changes are not restricted to our online behavior, however. Rather, they are illustrated by what happens online. In today's world, people often have more than one job. They may act very differently in each work environment, indeed, the perception their co-workers have of them may be suggestive of entirely different people. People are often quite different in their family lives than their work lives. Increasingly, relationships, even intimate ones, are transient - by moving on to a new relationship, we can set our "behavior history" back to zero. The same is true of creating a new family following the fragmentation of an older one. We typically move from one job to another, and if we are stable within an employment situation, we find other ways to change our "reflecting environment" so that we may take on different roles and modes of being.

Of course, many people lament these changes. They are treated as symptomatic of a "breakdown" of social mores and values, or of a generation that has "gone mad". This is perhaps a natural response to the loss of a way of life, of a sense of stability. However, there are no indications that the change is temporary, that the new generations will switch back to the older way of functioning. Instead, the change is accelerating. Therefore, instead of seeing this as a temporary phenomenon, a kind of transient breakdown "until people figure things out", it is time to switch our understanding and see this for what it is... the emergence of a new kind of personal identity, a new social fabric, a dynamically stable system state that is likely to persist for the foreseeable future, indeed, to become even more esconced.

The second dimension of the change is the switch from viewing ourselves and our communities and institutions as being "central", of "central importance". This is less obvious, but of critical importance. We have functioned within societies that were globally organized as a set of centers. Each community (family, city, nation, people) viewed itself as having concentric circles within its interior and a boundary that separated it from the outside. Hence a family's core might be the parents or even grandparents, the larger circle would include chidren, then grandchildren, and so forth. Cities are viewed as having cores, and nations have capitals that constitute a kind of core. As individuals, we also see ourselves as having a "core" (our heart, perhaps, our mind, or for some people our soul) and a boundary around the self, that may or may not include other people (our children, our life partner). Actions we undertake have more important consequences when they occur in relation to the core region than near or outside the boundary. In addition, one can expect the consequences of actions to dissipate over time, a transference of the notion of centrality to the temporal domain. This mode of thinking about the self and about our communities has dominated history.

Within a peripheral or networked view, there is no clear notion of a "core". All neighborhoods are equally important. There are no gradations of membership, with some being "more representative" than others. There is also no boundary, not in the traditional sense. There is no "outside" - alternatively, everything may be viewed as "outside", including the self. Any actions I take remain active and present, they do not dissipate. They lose influence only when other actions occur to compete with them. Furthermore, they propagate throughout the periphery, and become present everywhere. This startlingly different idea of identity is the one that is beginning to take hold of our society.

Within the internet, as stated earlier, my status in life has little bearing on my importance. My actions, and the image of my actions, is what determines how much other people listen. However, my actions do not dissipate either. If I publish a blog, the blog is as present ten years later as it was the day I published it. Not only that, what I say will inform other people's blogs. And lest one believe that this behavior is limited to the net, notice that within our work environments, something similar is taking place. Even in our home environment, what our parents say does not have the same status of authority as it did in another epoch. Instead, what we say as parents is accepted by our children when these affirmations have the "ring of truth". If they are poorly motivated, our children may well reject them, and fail to respond as expected. People are less and less willing to accept the "word of experts" - they question their doctor's advice, their lawyer's instructions, based on information they have researched themselves. Like the shift from a focus on history to our actions in the present, the shift away from centrality and authority is here to stay. It represents a profound change in how we function within our social environments.

The third change is towards a multiple, sometimes inconsistent identity rather than a single, coherent identity. Again, there are many signs of this occuring in our everyday lives. This is more than simply a question of point of view. It is not the case that we are simply placing greater emphasis on the multiple facets of who we are, but that we remain organized around a single, coherent identity. This shift follows from the movement away from orthodoxy towards paradoxy.

In Wikipedia's definitions of identity, the emphasis was placed on the idea that identity is a perception of how one is continuous, different and yet also part of other identities. The issue of continuity harkens back to the ideas put forward by John Locke in the 17th century, one of the first thinkers to struggle seriously with the issue of identity. From a modern perspective, one could suggest that our identity is a product of our relationship with the world around us, that is, it follows from ecological considerations.

In Middle Age Europe, the world was conceived of as a unity dedicated to the glory of God, an orthodoxy from which all forms of identity were derived. When social functioning is viewed within an orthodox framework, then personal identity is necessarily viewed in terms of this framework, both in terms of differentiation and affiliation. Within the Christian orthodoxy, the self is defined as belonging to a spectrum of behaviors that may be good or evil, and it is submission to authority (of God, of the word of God, or of the priests or ministers who represent God) that allows us to determine right behavior.

Within an orthodox framework, there is only one self. All forms of reflection of who one is are subsumed within this framework. Within orthodoxy, inconsistencies are expressly and intentionally supressed - that is the nature of an orthodoxy. This process of rejecting that which does not fit is also applied to the self. Identity, therefore, is defined as self-consistent within an orthodox environment, but this self-consistency is achieved only by a process of systematically eradicating inconsistencies from one's identity.

Hence the idea that one is self-consistent is an illusion that is carefully nourished within an orthodoxy.

In today's world, however, we are witnessing the breakdown of orthodoxy in its myriad forms. In particular, we are left with no "central" organizing orthodoxy, but with a multitude of ideas and arguments about the nature of being, of self and of community. The illusion of self-consistency is therefore stripped away. We may therefore embrace our inconsistencies, accept them as part of what it is to be human.

Likewise, in the absence of a single organizing orthodoxy, such as the Christian church provided for millenia, and more recently has been replaced for some by feminism, for others by political correctness, and still others by sociopolitical agendas such as neoliberalism or the New Right, in their absence we may proceed to affirm that the self is not a single unit, but rather a multitude of interacting elements. Modern cognitive theory confirms this view - our psychological makeup is very far from being unitary, in fact, even the notion of continuity is suspect as a feature of identity!

Hence the multiplication of contexts in which we make take on alternative personas of our being, whether these be online or in our daily lives, do not present simply different facets of ourselves - rather, they allow us to explore different investitures, different subsets of our ecoself, some of which may not appear to be parts of the same person. Indeed, the problem with the single identity/multiple facets perspective is that the multiple facets are generally understood as being windows into the same being. However, humans are characterized by an ability to construct many different beings from the same set of constituents - in the extreme, a Hitler can enjoy art and small children on the one hand, and promote the destruction of millions of people on the other. Most people consider Hitler to be either a monster or a highly deranged individual, and therefore assume these distinct personas to be atypical, but while we are not all Hitlers, we all have the ability to construct ourselves out of diametrically opposite subsets of our total being.

We are shifting, therefore, from an identity construction process that consists of pruning and trimming the inconsistencies from one's identity, to an alternative construction paradigm, that allows us to explore identity construction across a much broader canvas that we have tended to do in the past. I like to think of our being as a universe in itself, from whose materials we can construct several individual identities, and each of these forms its own identity ecosystem in relationship to other people.

If identity was just formed from our psyches, no such change would be possible. But of course our identities form from the collision between our genetic origins, our unfolding lives and our environment. Identity is the result of a system, and the system as a whole is evolving and changing. While we remain human, we are discovering that human identity is larger than we believed, than we were led to believe by the institutions that make our up societies.

Convergent End States and the Post-Sustainable Society

2007-05-14T09:11:00.000-04:00

One of the characteristics of a convergent dynamics is that it is relatively straightforward to talk about the system states towards which the system is converging, but much harder to situate the intermediate or transitional states that will need to come into being before convergence is achieved. In the case of divergent dynamics (that is, human history up to this point in time), only extreme end states could be described, that is, those expected if growth were to continue unchecked, and these were catastrophic scenarios.

However, a discussion of end states in a convergent world will help frame the changes that will likely occur over the coming decades. As discussed in the previous blog, not all of these will come into being on a linear time scale... in fact, most will not. Some will not emerge until a series of crises occurs, others will become increasingly present in particular regions and slowly spread to others, while some may occur worldwide over a very short period of time. Determining which are likely to occur when is also not easy to do.

Also, these are not so much predictions as observations of dynamics that are already in play. These are complex dynamics, and not all the intermediate interactions will be obvious to begin with. In addition, other dynamics than straightforward system dynamics are also in play. So-called non linear effects, resulting from chaotic systems behavior, will also have a role to play and will modify these dynamics.

With these blogs, as the story unfolds, we shall study a number of these convergent states - including education, the economy, relationships and the family, science and technology, the media arts, religion and spirituality, government, community, health, and crime. Collectively, I call this set of convergent states, the "postsustainable society", since they are predicated on the need to achieve sustainability as a precondition.

Remember, the overall conclusion is that we are moving towards a locally heterogeneous but globally homogeneous society of near zero growth but high interconnectedness, with no remaining "dumping ground" for getting rid of undesirables, whether these be products (e.g. waste products) or people (undesirables). People with widely different worldviews and values will no longer be buffered from each other by distance or social conventions, hence orthodoxies will no longer have the same power over our souls as they have had in the past. Instead, contradictions and paradoxes at many different levels shall be the rule of the day, and we shall be required to learn, both individually and collectively, to live with the uncertainties these will engender.

Our identity as individuals as well as individuals within a collective, is changing. Within the new world coming into being, what distinguishes us from each other will be less and less our life history, and more and more our actions in the present. This is not because our lives will be similar to each other, but rather because the lives of all individuals will be clearly demarcated by their differences with regard to others. Although we operate under the illusion that are lives are different from each other, our identities today are largely conditioned by common histories, by our sense of belonging to particular communities based on similar histories. In the future, although we shall continue to belong to different groups and derive some of our sense of identity from these associations, our values and sense of self will result more from taking larger responsability for our actions in the now.

This shift in identity from a focus on the past to a focus on the present is already occuring. In extreme form, shootings by individuals in schools, for example, are a misguided way of affirming identity based on action rather than history. Within culturally and ethnically mixed societies, one's ethnic roots no longer act as a key to identity. Instead, what one does is what counts. While we may deplore the media focus on stardom, actors and singers are evaluated within that world by what they do... or at least, what the public perceives they do (hence the focus on "image"). Although an overly emphatic focus on image can be unhealthy, animage is more related to what a person does than to what history they have. This is a big change from earlier centuries, where "who you were" was determined by your family and personal history.

Likewise, within the still rapidly evolving environment of the internet, it is "what you say" and "how you say it" that determines your proeminence, not your particular history. Identity is largely about reflections - and in today's world, what gets reflected back at us has more to do with our actions and words "in the now" than our personal histories or family backgrounds, or even what groups or communities we belong to.

Another, related aspect of this change in how we understand identity is the shift from a central to a peripheral focus. In earlier epochs, things that were "important" were things that were "central". I argue that the "centre" held a privileged place in a world undergoing exponential expansion (the past two thousand years), but that a central place is going to become less and less important in a convergent world. Indeed, it is going to become increasingly more difficult to even define the "centre" and what is "central". In a highly connected, zero growth world, there is no obvious centre. As our society moves towards a convergent state, our centralities are going to dampen out. Already there has been a fundamental shift in the way we view cities. For much of the 20th century, cities were viewed as attractive "centres", towards which the population was moving from the so-called "hinterland". By the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, our understanding of cities is changing. Cities are connected to each other in a network, a world-wide network, and cities, despite their historical, cultural and linguistic differences, are becoming more alike to each other. Predictions are that within a few decades, following current trends, 90% of the world's population will live in cities. Within such an arrangement, cities are no longer centres, they are simply the substrate within which people live. Instead of focussing on cities as centres, they have become part of a peripheral world.

Although from a technical perspective, one might claim that with the disappearance of centres, the notion of periphery also loses its meaning, it remains true that the dynamics of a network resemble those of a peripheral world more than they do a central world. Hence to say that our identity is shifting to a peripheral focus is a useful affirmation for highlighting the changes that are occuring.

This shift from viewing the self as central, to a world in which what is important is peripheral, is of capital importance to understand. The consequences are enormous. Within the world coming into being, it is not central control that matters, but the ability mobilize opinion and action throughout a large part of the periphery that counts. The internet, which is organized in just this way, is a case in point. Even governments must today act in such a way - the era of a government deciding unilaterally on some key international action is gone. Without the collaboration of other countries, the US could not have effectively invaded Iraq (if one were to call the invasion effective - in many ways, the difficulties concerning sustained involvement in Iraq today are a result of this "peripheralization" of action... the old ways of acting no longer work as they used to, in a world society organized in terms of centres).

This shift in how we understand and construct identity is radical, it represents almost a complete 180 degree turn. Many of today's institutions are struggling with this change - unless they learn to promote "peripheralization", these institutions will likely fail and collapse. Institutions such as schools and universities, hospitals, cooperatives, banks, governments, and so forth, but also less tangible institutions and practices such as marriage, family, nations, ethnic communities, and so forth. Often the changes under way are ascribed to the effects of new technology, but this new technology operates within a broader framework of social change that is often not understood. Certainly the high connectedness of our world is a result of new technology, but the effervescence of new technology development is the result of socio-economic forces that have been in play for decades, even centuries. It is not necessary to determine which is the cause of the change... but it is necessary to be conscious of social factors in play, as these help orient our future actions more than trying to second-guess where technological development will go next!

Another feature of the change from a central to a peripheral organization of identity, is that identity is increasingly viewed as being multiple. Within a centralist perspective, we were perceived as having one unique and internally consistent identity, characterised, as indicated above, by our person history. Within a peripheral understanding, however, identity may be multiple, and even inconsistent. This is highlighted within the digital world of the internet, by the increasing multiplication of different "identity masks", but it is also underlined by the large number of passwords and identification numbers we must carry around with us in today's world. Twenty years ago, we had only a few of these identification numbers and passwords - today, most of us carry dozens and sometimes hundreds. In today's online world, we may have several personas, avatars, or other representations. These are not, however, mere "faces", they represent distinct modes of interaction and reflection with other people, and hence consist of "mini-identities".

In summary, the convergent state towards which the world is moving is characterised by a change in how we understand and construct identity. We are moving away from a focus on centrality, past history and a unique self-consistent identity, and towards a focus on periphery, identity based on actions within the now, and multiple forms of identity, not necessarily consistent with each other. Although this corresponds to a convergent end state within a postsustainable environment, there are numerous examples of the change in identity paradigm in operation today. This highlights the importance of identifying likely end states, as this allows us to understand today's world in new ways.

Timing and Dynamics - Towards the Collapse of Several Socio-economic Balloons

2007-05-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

One of the comments I have received concerning my blog concerns issues of timing (Dr. Blake Poland, at the University of Toronto). Although Dr. Poland agrees that, in the long term, my views may be correct, he argues that the absolute numbers of population are continuing to increase, and that inequalities between nations, for example, the rich and the poor, are widening, not decreasing.

There are several points I want to take up in response to these arguments... indeed, this provides the opportunity to bring these issues into the discussion earlier than I had originally planned. First of all, my primary argument is that the main driver of socio-economic organisation is not population numbers, but population growth and the rate of change of population growth. Clearly the numbers are also part of the picture, but the population growth has always been the primary driver of economic growth. The numbers are important in the sense that, within our current management strategies, we are near the limits of growth that the planet can support - many more people, and society will collapse due to catastrophic failure of our ability to feed everyone. The collision with our environment is also largely mediated by the total population numbers, combined with our current socio-economic organisation, which has been singularly ineffective in changing how we pollute the atmosphere and hence led us into the growing environmental crisis that is developing around us. The numbers are also important in terms of density of people on the Earth - I claim that one of the reasons why local population dynamics becomes important in a globally convergent world is because of the density of people in our cities, which is where the 21st century population is living.

So having pointed out the importance of the absolute numbers of population, let us examine in more detail the issue of population growth rates and the rate of change of such growth. Of course, it is this rate of change that has taken a nosedive, from a high positive rate to a substantive negative value. This change is confirmed by several studies, although different researchers give different dates and reasons for when it occured. Using statistics available on line, we may note several studies in the mid-1990's noted that the rate of change was still increasing (Pimentel et al, 1996). However, the discussion presented by J. Kimball, dated September 2006, indicates that the rate of population growth peaked in the early 1990s. On the other hand, Wikipedia assigns the peak in growth rate to the year 1963, and the peak growth rate doubling time to have been 31 years. Hence, although different sources provide different dates, there is agreement that the change occured same time ago, but wasn't yet clearly measurable.

Within system dynamics, there is a distinction to be made between the rate of population growth, and the rate of change of population growth. Let me illustrate. Today, the total world population is about 6.5 billion. The growth rate, as I indicated earlier, has declined from its peak value but is still very high . The rate of growth is usually expressed as the number of years it would take to double the population numbers at the current rate of growth. This number is presently close to 60 years - in 60 years, the population of the planet, if the rate of growth were to continue, would be 13 billion. In another 60 years, it would be 26 billion, and so forth. At it's peak, it was closer to 30 years. A doubling rate of 60 years is still very, very high, and the world's economy will continue to be driven by this rate of growth for some time.

My argument, however, is that our socio-economic organization is predicated, at least in part, upon the rate of change of the growth rate, and not only on the growth rate itself. Hence the growth rate has steadily increased for the past hundred years, indeed, the past several hundred years. The doubling rate has been shortening for a long period of time. It has been the shortening of the doubling time that has dramatically exacerbated many of our socio-economic difficulties. The extreme stress on the environment is a result of this shortening doubling time, but so also are a number of more subtle aspects of social organization.

When the doubling period is shortening, what this means is that a population unit (i.e. a city or a country) never gets the chance to "catch its breath" before the next stage of growth overtakes it. Stability in socio-economic structures in not possible under such circumstances. Each time society adjusts to a given rate of growth, developing social mechanisms for introducing new production elements, society is forced to readjust again and develop yet other social mechanisms. This was the characteristic feature of the 20th century, of change spiralling ever faster, and each generation forced to reinvent its ways of functioning. This is often attributed to the development of technology, but this, too, is driven by the shortening of the doubling period in the population.

In the 20th century, as each developed country's population growth flattened out, however, the growth rate changed its nature. Economic growth shifted from production for internal markets to production for external markets, and also the economy went through several retoolings, resulting in the emergence of new products for both internal and later external markets. Let there be no mistake, however, even though a particular country's population growth may stabilize, the country's economic development remains dependant on the global population dynamics. Hence, countries such as the United States, whose population demographics are nearly flat, benefit from high growth rates because of exports and retooling.

Jane Jacobs, in her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations, argued that the natural economic unit for human communities is a city, and that our current organizations into nations is artificially maintained and counterproductive in the long term. One of the possible ways that nations, as they are currently organized, are maintained likely follows from the shortening doubling time of population growth. Several studies (e.g. Rosenau, 1999; Godfrey, 2004) underline the fact that today's nations are organized in ways that are different than, say, a hundred years ago. To hold countries together, they need powerful legal and constitional frameworks, but they are also held together either by high growth rates (in the case of developing nations), or high levels of exchange with foreign economies (in the case of the developed world), especially high levels of export. Essentially, there are social and economic dynamics that keep everything in movement, and hence prevent the collapse that might occur naturally in the absence of such movement. High levels of export depend on the existence of countries with lower levels of productivity, the so-called developing nations. The latter, in turn, rely on every poorer nations for export markets.

However, countries whose ability to contribute products to the global marketplace is too low, will not be able to use imports from the richer nations and hence will become poorer over time.

This analysis highlights several points:

1) high economic growth rates are ultimately linked to both high population growth rates at the planetary scale, and to the shortening of the doubling time, although there may be several intermediate linkages in the causal chain;

2) high growth rates exacerbate inequalities in the system, which tend to grow over time, because for a time these inequalities generate additional economic growth;

and, following from these two premises:

3) the change to a lengthening of the population doubling time means that economic growth must begin to slow on a global scale;

4) with the slowing of economic growth, several artificially maintained "balloons" will start to collapse.

As long as the global economy was growing, and growth was accellerating, the poorest nations had a hope of one day crossing the threshold to a level of productivity that would allow them to "buy in" to the system ... much as happened with the Asian economies in the closing years of the 20th century. But once economic growth begins to slow, their hopes of crossing this threshold will also start to dwindle. It has likewise been pointed out that many of the poorest nations are saddled with a geographic context which makes it very difficult to develop a sustainable economy - they tend to be landlocked and in regions where climate in inhospitable (Sachs, Jeffrey D., 2005, Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?, in Scientific American, September edition.). Without a renewed effort on the part of developed and developing nations to provide direct assistance to these countries, the world will be headed for a major crisis of poor versus rich nations, a crisis for which there have been warning signs for decades.

At the same time, however, perhaps not for a few decades yet, nations themselves as political and economic entities will feel a pressure towards collapse, as the global drivers of internal movement start to drop out. This won't happen tomorrow, the growth rate is still too high, but as the growth rate sinks below some as yet unknown threshold value, consequences of this order of magnitude will start to appear in our social structures. The system will start to fracture. Some pundits predict an international economic crisis in the 2030's, based on similar arguments. It would be nice if we humans were smart enough to avoid such a crisis, but it is unlikely. To do so would mean acting now, and as we have seen with the environmental crisis, until the signs are all about us and "in our face", we do very little. Once the symptoms become clear enough to see them all around us, it is too late to be able to stop a crisis, it is only possible to diminish its effects and try to avoid system collapse.

The Importance of Paradox in a Convergent World

2007-05-07T07:12:00.000-04:00

All right, so let us accept the idea that we live in a convergent world instead of a divergent one, as argued in the previous blogs. What does that mean? And what does this have to do with paradox?

The world we have entered is a world that is converging towards a state of negligible growth within a finite space. Any growth or development that occurs, once convergence is achieved, will have to be first of all qualitative rather than quantitative. Hence, we may replace an existing product with a new one, engendering the development of a new industry, for example, but only at the cost of the decline of an older industry. If the new industry uses resources more efficiently, there will be some net growth. However, unlimited global expansion of resource use will become impossible.

Today, we function within a growth economy because the population is expanding, and because there are markets outside our own sphere of influence. The expanding population has always been the largest driver of the economy, to the point that it is not understood how a stable economy can function in the absence of such growth. The expanding population also drives large differentials between the rich and the poor, the expansion of space and resources, the conversion of the environment into waste products, scientific progress, the confrontations between nations, and so forth.

The new, convergent growth regime corresponds to a period where differences between populations, including economic differences and living standards, will be evening out (partly as a result of the increased connectivity), population growth will be declining and a balance between resource production and population use of these resources will need to be achieved. A highly connected, zero growth, planetary economy will therefore entail profound changes in the ways our societies are structured and how they operate, and these changes may well engender additional transformations, up to and including aspects of our psychic makeup.

This zero growth state corresponds to another profound change, of which we are all much more aware – the global manner in which the world is now connected via the internet. A sustainable state of socio-economic survival with a population that is close to the productivity limit of the planet is, by its very nature, a world characterized by a circular flow of information and cause and effect. In other words, the world is sufficiently dense and closed back on itself that our actions will come back to haunt us. The whole idea of not needing to care about the consequences of one’s actions is operative only in a world undergoing expansion. The nature of the expansion ensures that consequences may seep away – this is what it means to say the evolution of the world is divergent.

The emergence of the internet exacerbates the effect of closure still further. In the world coming into being, all our acts will reflect off our surroundings and come back to affect us. The need to be held accountable for our actions is already widely felt – in the coming decades, it will become a necessity. This will have profound consequences for both corporate and individual behavior. At the same time, human diversity will remain – indeed, it will be enhanced. When social pressure increases, people, by their very nature, rebel. People will seek ways of living and expressing that escape these pressures, whether this be adulterous affairs in a marriage, new spiritual explorations, the rise of certain forms of crime, new forms of creative expression, or any other form of individual and group expression. Values will differ from one group to another, identities likewise. Under increased socio-economic pressure for accountability, this will lead to a diversification of human interest groups, a multiplication of different interests, and hence to the increasing co-existence of extremes and groups in opposition. My central argument here, is that these opposing tendencies, and many others that will come into play, will create a social fabric that is characterized by opposites that co-exist side-by-side, and that new forms of resolution will be called into being. In the world of expansion, groups with radically different values did not always need to constantly rub shoulders. In the world coming into being, this will become the norm.

On the other hand, while we are looking at substantial changes in behavior, both at an organizational and, eventually, at an individual level, many things will remain similar to what they are today. Human nature, overall, is still human nature. The new society must be as diverse as the one today, or it cannot function. It must be able to accommodate viewpoints that dissent, even from widely held moral principles. The system that emerges will, therefore, be characterized by larger local inhomogeneities, in order to accommodate the increased global uniformity that follows from dynamical convergence.

In a zero growth economy characterized by high interconnectedness, the differences between one group and its neighbors will be exacerbated. Contradictions will co-exist side by side. Today’s global inhomogeneities and expanding population act as buffers against this situation, but these buffers will diminish over the next decades. In today’s world, we isolate our cultural and individual differences by moving away from groups that offend us, by surrounding ourselves with people of like mind. Likewise, we turn our gaze away from our own darker human side, and succeed in this, because there are places we may look that are “outside” the system and our reflections of the self. In a convergent world, as the space “outside” diminishes, we shall find this harder and harder to do. As a result, like it or not, we shall be forced to deal with paradox, increasingly, on an everyday basis.

What is a Paradox?

2007-05-01T23:54:00.001-04:00

Wikipedia asserts that “A paradox is an apparently true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition.” It goes on to state “Typically, either the statements in question do not really imply the contradiction, the puzzling result is not really a contradiction, or the premises themselves are not all really true or cannot all be true together. The word paradox is often used interchangeably and wrongly with contradiction; but whereas a contradiction asserts its own opposite, many paradoxes do allow for resolution of some kind.” The “whatis.com” dictionary modulates this definition by indicating that “A paradox is a statement or concept that contains conflicting ideas” – hence extending the definition from embracing only statements to also embracing concepts. Etymologically speaking, the word means “beyond thinking”, just as orthodox means “right thinking”. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary also adds the following : “one (as a person, situation, or action) having seemingly contradictory qualities or phases”.

In this blog, it is assumed that paradoxes are not only a property of statements and concepts, but also of being. This is similar to the way paradoxes are expressed in zen koans. Zen koans are statements such as the popular “what is the sound of one hand clapping”, and hence fall within the definition given by Wikipedia, but they are statements that may engender profound reorganization of the self. In this sense, they evoke paradoxes of being.

These definitions highlight both the relationships between paradox, conflict and contradiction, but they are, for the most part, careful to distinguish between them. Hence when we say that in a convergent world, contradictions will co-exist side-by-side, this is not itself a paradox. As indicated by Wikipedia, paradox implies that a form of resolution is possible. This actually provides a framework for defining paradoxes of being : that is, these are contradictions within being that can be resolved.

However, it should also be clear that a paradox is, by its nature, opposed to an orthodoxy. Paradoxes may be resolved, but never in obvious or predictable ways, and certainly not according to tenets of doctrine. Orthodoxy, for the most parts, seeks to exclude contradictions, to develop a consistent argument. What I call here “paradoxy”, then, is an alternative to orthodoxy in terms of suggesting modes of being and action. Rather than right action being determined by committee, it derives from the resolution of paradox, a resolution which, by its very nature, must follow from the source of the paradox itself.

Paradox is heavily used within certain kinds of psychoanalysis, especially Jungian and Freudian approaches. Jung characterizes an archetype as 'irrepresentable'. Archetypal representations, are therefore, within Jung’s thought, “representations of the irrepresentable” . Jung was also fascinated by the presence of paradox within Zen Buddhism, as revealed by the following comment : “Above all I would mention the koans of Zen Buddhism, those sublime paradoxes that light up, as with a flash of lightning, the inscrutable interrelations between ego and self.” (C.G. Jung, On the nature of the psyche, p. 135). Freud’s theories are also rife with the presence of paradoxes – the opposition between the search for pleasure and the personal destructiveness this can lead to, or between the desire for things that are of necessity forbidden by social conventions, are two examples. There is even a variant of psychoanalysis called Paradox Theory, based on the observation that both Freud and Jung recognized the human mind as based on “opposite forces”.

These ideas further emphasize the notion that paradoxes may not always refer to statements or concepts, but also to behaviors and states of being.

Let us now explore how paradoxes differ from orthodoxies, as this will lay the groundwork for understanding where one is going if one is leaving orthodoxy behind. If orthodoxies are determined by committee or convention, and therefore imposed from without the individual, then paradoxes are determined by the inherent nature of things, and imposed from within the individual. For this reason, there is a relatively strong relationship between paradox and personal forms of spirituality, while organized religion is more strongly associated with orthodoxy and doctrine.

These are mutually exclusive, also, because if one is attentive to one’s inner paradoxes, orthodox thinking will be irrelevant, while one adopts orthodox ideas if one does not entirely trust one’s inner resources. As has been indicated earlier, the concept of a paradox implies something that can be resolved, or that can resolve itself. The process by which resolution is achieved, however, will rarely be straightforward, due to the nature of a paradox.

Of course, paradoxes of being and action may also occur at organizational levels, and not only within individuals. In such situations, organizational paradoxes may come into conflict with organizational doctrines.

“Paradox is what makes life interesting.” (Charles Handy, 1994, The Age of Paradox, p. 13.)

Population Growth versus Environmental Activism

2007-05-01T22:40:00.000-04:00

After watching Mr. Gore’s important film on global climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, I am struck by the fact that, not only does he mention the fact that the population explosion is braking (this is in the extended DVD addition, perhaps not the original film), he makes little extra mileage out of this fact, except to say that scientists consider this a “success story” and that the huge population in terms of numbers makes our situation unique in human history.

On this latter point, we agree, but not quite for the same reasons. It is my suggestion that, in addition to being unique because the population numbers are close to the sustainable limits of the planet, the dynamics of convergent population growth will have substantial additional impacts that are not yet recognized.

In the extended section, Mr. Gore talks about the “tipping point”, at which moment the environment goes into a self sustaining change that will be much harder to challenge than before the tipping point is achieved. However, others (see, for example, the “universarium project” at http://www.universarium.net/movie.html) use the term “tipping point” to emphasize the moment in time when a new way of thinking and action is achieved, when we humans finally gain the ability to sustain our lives without threatening the environment.

In my earlier blog (“The Demographics of Change”), I noted that humanity has already passed through the critical point in population growth when the dynamics changes. Mr. Gore, and the ecologos institute which is behind the universarium project, believe that the “tipping points”, whether viewed in terms of irreversible loss of control or recovery of a sustainability, are in front of us. I do not disagree with this, but the result is something very interesting. We are currently situated in this rather unique situation between these two moments in time, each of critical importance in the system dynamics unfolding around us. With the crossing of the critical point in population growth, we have entered a new era, but until we also regain a sustainable balance, we are unable to fully realize the potential inherent in that era. We are between the hammer and the anvil, and this unique moment in human history, a kind of moment of suspension, cannot last very long.

I have been careful, in the above paragraph, to avoid saying that the tipping point in front of us corresponds to “recovery of control”. From a systems perspective, the idea that we seek to control the environment is a fallacy. Control is only possible when one is outside the system whose behavior one is attempting to influence, and we are decidedly not outside the planetary ecosystem – trying to control this is part of what has gotten us into trouble in the first place. Seeking sustainability does not mean seeking to recover control, rather it means correcting imbalances that follow from our behavior, to the extent that such correction is possible.

My argument here is not, therefore, that Mr. Gore is wrong, not that correcting the imbalances in climate constituents that we influence must be restricted, on the contrary, we must engage the substantial resources at our disposition to achieve the right kind of “tipping point”. However, it is important to not lose sight of the other dynamics in play, as our actions and the social reorganization we put into play to deal with the one problem, will have consequences for the others. We need to be aware of these issues. If we turn “action against global warming” into a new kind of orthodoxy, and use this orthodoxy to censure people, groups and parts of society, we shall be in serious trouble several years down the line. That is the danger, and just as Mr. Gore makes a compelling case for action on climate change, we must not lose sight of the need to be open to other viewpoints and issues that emerge and may even challenge this movement at times.

The Demographics of Change

2007-04-29T23:05:00.000-04:00

In the previous blog, I presented a portrait of our current societies that emphasized the omnipresence of orthodoxy. It seems slightly presumptuous to claim that we are moving, as a collective, away from the dominance of orthodox beliefs, given such a massive presence of orthodox thinking. On what evidence can such an argument be maintained?

I mentioned several phenomena that do not follow orthodox behaviors, but, with the exception of the internet, these phenomena have been around for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years. They did not prevent the development of huge collections of orthodox thinking before. On what basis can I affirm that they will have such an effect now?

The argument that leads, inevitably from my point of view, to such a conclusion is somewhat complex, but it is rooted in a very simple observation. Throughout most of human history, the population has been in accelerating expansion. Since the first cries of alarm raised in the 1950s, through books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and over the following decades, it has become clear to a large part of the world’s population that we, as a people, as part of a larger ecology, have been headed for serious trouble if this were to continue unchecked. Not only that, it was noted that the “crunch” would come all too quickly, given the fact that the exponential expansion was nearing the limits of the ability of the planet to support it.

The September 2005 edition of Scientific American was devoted to the observation, now confirmed by a growing number of studies, that this situation has changed. Although the rate of expansion has never been larger than now, the global rate is slowing for the first time in human history (with the possible exception of times such as the Great Plague in Middle Age Europe or other major diebacks).

This observation is, itself, somewhat paradoxical. The world’s population is increasingly concerned with the issue of environment change – the consequences of not having acted earlier to stem the impacts of human development on the environment. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that actions taken now will not be enough to prevent dramatic climate change. The statement that the world’s population growth has started to slow seems a small consolation for the developing catastrophe that is our relationship with the environment. It is a relief, perhaps, but no one is suggesting that we drop our guard, in this of all times.

On a second look, the change is not only a relief, but a suggestion that we, as a species, are perhaps finally taking our responsibility towards ourselves and our environment more seriously. If the tendency continues, we are on the road to a situation of sustainability.

It still, however, seems to be only a small blip on our radar screen.

However, as a scientist, I find I cannot accept such a lackadaisical reaction. I believe the consequences of this change in demographics to be profound. I believe this may prove to be the single, most important event to have occurred in recent, perhaps all human history.

Why?

Because the dynamics of a decreasing expansion rate are dramatically different than those of an increasing expansion rate. From a systems perspective, these correspond to entirely different system states. Just as the rapidly increasing expansion rate that characterized the twentieth century fed many different forms of dynamics, and all of these led to a worsening of the prognostics for long term human habitation of the planet, so a decreasing expansion rate entails a change in dynamics for a large number of secondary, but all important, processes. We are no longer in a divergent dyanamics, we are now functioning within a convergent dynamics.

And because we have never, as a species, experienced such a regime while the population is commensurate with the resource limits of the planet, with nowhere else to go. In former times, when life got difficult, or times troubled, one could move to a different place, outside the sphere of influence of the earlier location. This didn’t always solve the problem, but it was always a possibility for individuals or groups, and provided a way of siphoning off some of the sources of conflict and trouble. In our world today, there is nowhere on the planet one can go to, and escape the issues that are facing us. And our will and technologies are not advanced enough, yet, to support movement to other planets, or even to orbital stations.

As a people, as a species, we are in a “crucible”, a “nexus”, a “moment of transition”. The moment when a system changes from accelerating expansion, to braking expansion, is called the “critical point”. It is hard to observe, because the change is small and the expansion rate is high. But the system operates after the critical point in a way that is fundamentally different from how it operated before the critical point.

Humanity appears to have passed through its critical point, without hardly noticing it has done so. Human life, from here on in, will be different from what it has been. It will take time for the differences to manifest in a way that becomes obvious, but the change is no less profound for being invisible to us.

Moving Away From Orthodoxy - A Portrait of Our Times

2007-04-29T22:13:00.000-04:00

eWe live in a world where the official discourses are highly orthodox, but where the underlying and emerging realities are increasingly less orthodox.

The word “orthodoxy” derives etymologically from the roots “ortho” and “doxa”, Greek words meaning “right” or “correct”, and “thought”, “teaching” or “glorification”. Its formal definition is given as “correct theological or doctrinal observance of religion as determined by some overseeing body” (wikipedia). A common definition is, on the other hand, “a belief or orientation agreeing with conventional standards”. Hence there are two distinct ideas here, one that orthodoxy is determined by a committee, and the other by convention.

We can find many, many examples of both these forms of orthodoxy within our current society. Hence most religions, sects, and so forth are orthodox in the first of these senses. The Political Correctness movement, often called, simply, PC, resulted in the promotion of an orthodoxy of the second kind. The feminist movement, one of the driving forces behind the PC campaign, itself struggles with the issues of orthodoxy – not all feminists are in agreement over its necessity within the broader movement, indeed, some believe that “orthodoxy” is a tool if not invented by men, then certainly wielded by them to keep people (e.g. women) in line.

Another example of orthodoxy is the existence of political parties within our democratic institutions. Political parties are often characterized by both forms of orthodoxy, both a doctrine decided upon by a small committee that applies to all “card-carrying members”, and conventions that may apply to a much broader group within the voting public. As a result, our governments are generally based on orthodox doctrines. In the case of dictatorships, this is likely to be even more the case, although the determining group may be a committee of one.

The institution of scientific research follows an orthodoxy, albeit a somewhat heterogeneous one. Scientific doctrine is vetted not by a single committee, but by many committees, however, the overall goal of these committees is very similar, and very much devoted towards “right thinking”. The funding of science is also an exercise in orthodoxy, as is, somewhat paradoxically, the funding of art. Art is not in and of itself an orthodox practice (well, not so-called “high art” – it can be argued that popular art does follow a form of orthodoxy, since it is heavily constrained by conventions). Educational institutions follow orthodoxies, as do medical institutions. Professions, in general, are based on some form of doctrine and hence are orthodox.

The list gets longer… it might be tempting to say that all aspects of our culture are dealt with through various forms of orthodoxy. However, it is easy to point to other constituents of society that are not orthodox. Much of the economy evades determined attempts by governments and others to establish an orthodox and controlling doctrine. The internet in its totality escapes all attempts to impose a single doctrine. Our individual psyches do not follow doctrine, even though many would like that to be the case, or attempt to convince themselves that it can be done.

All three of these are examples of what are called emergent phenomena – that is, phenomena which are characterized by global patterns that are not directly determined, but rather emerge from more local phenomena that may be pre-determined. This is an important point, it allows me to restate my central idea in a somewhat different way. The social arrangements into which we are moving are emergent phenomena, different from the determinations at smaller scales that lead to them. The 21st century world is an emergent culture, and, as such, cannot be understood in terms of orthodoxy.

It is my claim that, despite the apparent omnipresence and ubiquitous nature of orthodoxy throughout our current social fabric, that we are moving into an era where orthodoxy will have far less of a hold than it has in previous centuries.

Furthermore, the very existence of paroxysms of violence based on orthodox religion in various forms that we are experiencing on the world stage presently, reinforces my argument. Orthodoxies in today’s world feel threatened – the violence we see is at least partially a consequence of that sense of change that is installing itself in many levels within our social and economic arrangements.

Introduction to 21st Century Musings

2007-04-29T15:42:00.000-04:00

It is my belief, and in these virtual pages I am planning to present the complex jigsaw puzzle that constitutes this belief, that we, humanity as a whole, are entering a new era which will have substantially different forms that those we have become accustomed to, over many centuries. The fundamental change I propose to explore is a shift from a social, economic and personal preoccupation with orthodoxy and orthodox thinking, towards modes of being, thinking and acting that are much more paradoxical.

This belief is not, however, “pulled from a hat” - it is based on broad exposure to a variety of different disciplines, thinkers … and contexts of everyday life, along with a lifetime effort to bring together disparate modes of being. I am also aware that my position is “radical”. I am going to argue that, unlike the argument that suggests there is “nothing new under the sun”, that on the contrary, the nature of what it is to be human is changing.

Although I am a scientist, my argument is not primarily technological. I am not making any claims that what it means to be human is changing because of the introduction and use of new technologies, whether these be physical, biological, informational, or something else. In this regard, I present an argument that differs from a great many of my colleagues.

Although my arguments are convergent with those of a growing number of key thinkers today, and are rooted in contributions from giants of the past, I believe many of the details within my arguments will surprise many. They have taken me into nooks and crannies I did not expect to go to myself, sometimes highly controversial areas of discourse. Over the course of the adventure, I expect to talk about a great many subjects, many of them taboo in one way or another. Indeed, I expect to get into trouble with some readers because of this. I believe that as part of a “great airing” that needs to take place, of issues, possible actions, dreams and nightmares, we need to take the “kid gloves” off with regard to issues we’re all afraid to talk about openly. We need to name the things that disturb us, call them forth into the open, give ourselves the space to say things, even in writing, that are controversial and, sometimes, counterintuitive.

I know I am being a little mysterious about this right now, but all in due time. First of all, we need to lay down some foundations before we can begin to talk about such things.

A word about writing style. This blog is being developed from an unpublished book manuscript I wrote last year, but I am rewriting and adapting the manuscript to suit a blog format as I go. I believe the blog format is ideally suited to this kind of exposition. Indeed, part of the argument I want to make is that these issues need to be taken up by a much broader community – these issues concern us all. The process of writing a manuscript and publishing this as a book has stood us in good stead for more than 500 years, but the internet today provides a different approach that can be much more effective. I hope to take advantage of what has been called “collective intelligence” to broaden and deepen my own understanding of these issues.

I also expect to include more informal musings about events in the world as they unfold, in relation to these arguments, as well as discussions regarding any responses readers may be prepared to provide, as these become appropriate.

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