It has been ten years since I sat down to write the first lines of what became a 200 page manuscript concerning the state of the world and the trends in progress, a manuscript which I later transformed into a blog (this one and its sister site, Paradoxes and Consequences). It would seem an appropriate time to review some of the predictions I made, even though these predictions concerned a fifty year arc, not a ten year arc!
To recap the project, my predictions were based on an analysis inspired by an article by Joel Cohen in the September 2005 edition of Scientific American. Cohen reported on the fact that, since the mid 1950s, the rate of growth of the world's population had started to decline from its maximum value. This may still come as a surprise to many. The world's mushrooming population is still of major concern, and rightly so. However, the population growth is no longer following an EXPONENTIAL curve - in fact, it is a decreasing curve. What this means is that, if the trend continues, the population will reach a plateau of zero growth, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2050. It will still be nearly double what it is today, which is cause for a great deal of concern, but it will stabilize. Population growth, in systems dynamics, is a major driver of system-wide effects. Based on years of working with system dynamics models, it dawned on me that a fundamental change in such an important "system driver" must have huge consequences for the planetary systems of which we are a part. This was the beginning of my writing project.
One of the insights I derived from this change in my understanding was that an exponential population growth dynamic had affected not just other system parameters, but also our perceptions of the world in which we live. In particular, it drove us to understand the world around us in centric ways. Hence we understand the economy as driven by centres, and markets as extending into hinterlands, that is, peripheral regions around the centres. We organize our lives as a function of such centres, and, indeed, within an exponential growth dynamic, centres will always get bigger and more important. But in an declining growth dynamic, the opposite is true - centres will grow weaker and periphery will become all important, until there are no well-defined centres left. Hence, within the changed dynamic, we live in a "peripheralizing world". Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat follows a similar argument - without making any kind of claim to why the change is occuring, Friedman follows up the consequences of the fact that it is occuring (he argues, probably correctly, that the process is self-reinforcing, that as one sector of the economy "flattens", this drags other sectors also into the same kind of process).
A summary of the major claims of my work would be as follows :
1) That the importance and value of "peripheries" and "networks" is growing, while those of "centres" is declining ;
2) That one of the consequences of this change is that we are moving away from spatially segmented social and economic environments towards more heterogeneously mixed environments ;
3) That political culture and problem solving approaches are shifting from an orthodox-heretic organisation to one dominated by paradoxes ;
4) That we live in a "convergent" world, no longer in a "divergent" one - as a consequence, there are no more "garbage dumps". As long as we lived in a divergent world, we could always push undesirables - things, people, ideas - away and have them stay away. In a convergent world, this is no longer possible - everything we push away comes back, and sooner than we expect!
5) The fact we live in a convergent world means that primarily profit-driven economies will fail. This seems an incredible claim, and was the one I was most nervous about when I first made the case in 2005. However, the more time passes, the more this seems to be born out. In fact, in my original prediction, I suggested that profit-driven economies would fail, or would convert to more balanced social and profit economies with trade-offs between the two, but eventually, the social economy would dominate the profit-based one ;
6) The conversion period, from a centrally-organized society to a peripheral, convergent society will involve a series of collapses or crises. Social change occurs both incrementally, but also through fractures and discontinuities - such crises are inevitable in a period of changing dynamics ;
7) While it is hard to accurately predict transition states that occur during the changeover period, the convergent, end states are much more easily predicted and described ;
8) Our understanding of personal identity is also shifting, as a result of these changes - identity is increasingly viewed as multiple and fractured rather the single and homogeneous ;
9) A consequence of the changes in how identity is understood is that our relationships to each other are also changing. In particular, the nuclear family is another consequence of a divergent world, in a convergent world, other family arrangements will replace the nuclear family. This will change the way children understand the world ;
10) These changes are spreading into other spheres - education, religion and spirituality, other aspects of the world economy, health issues, leisure activities, and so on. Because of the convergent nature of the processes underway, a great deal can be said about the likely end states in many of these areas.
Point #6 was the aspect of my predictions that I was most nervous about in 2005. Interestingly, in the years preceeding 2008, the economy was booming and predictions of catastrophe were viewed with disdain by just about everybody. However, since the 2008 crisis in the American home buyers' market and its consequences which were felt around the globe, there have been a series of smaller crises. Today, in 2014, it appears obvious to "just about everyone" that the economy is stumbling along at best. Some are doing better than others, but all are feeling the bite of more challenging times.
In 2014, recognition of the changing nature of our understanding of personal identity is also much more widespread than it was in 2005. How these changes propagate into our relationships, schooling and other related issues is still not fully processed, however. People know these things are changing, but most are unable to say much about where they are headed.
My blog (and writings) remain as unknown and unacknowledged in 2014 as they were in 2005. True, I am not a sales man, and I would need to do a good sales job to get these ideas into the public eye. Also, there are more voices saying similar things now, in 2014, than there were in 2005 when I started. Of course, it is easier to see the changes in progress now, than it was then. My only claim to fame is that I worked out these details earlier and with perhaps, I hope, more of a global vision than many of the current crop of trend reporters. Indeed, even today, a detailed analysis of the changes in progress based on the broader vision I propose would yield better results than most current trend reporters, who rely on a narrow understanding of these things.
To many, the 50-year focus of my predictions is too long a view to be useful in the short term. However, the sweep of the predictions means that it is possible to say quite a lot about relatively short term effects, just not every short term effect. Also, the end state predictions are quite stable, but the timing at which they occur is harder to determine. On the other hand, current trend reporters also get it wrong at least as often as I do. And as we get closer to 2050, if I am right, my predictions will get better, and theirs will almost certainly get worse.
Showing posts with label peripheralization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peripheralization. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 August 2014
Sunday, 30 May 2010
The Missing Piece
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 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.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
The Crisis... A Year Closer
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.
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
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)