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.
Showing posts with label convergence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label convergence. Show all posts
Monday, 14 May 2007
Sunday, 13 May 2007
Timing and Dynamics - Towards the Collapse of Several Socio-economic Balloons
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 even 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.
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 even 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.
Monday, 7 May 2007
The Importance of Paradox in a Convergent World
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.
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.
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
What is a Paradox?
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.)
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.)
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