CONVERSATIONS
Contents
- 1 Federation through Conversations
- 1.1 What's really worth talking about
- 1.2 These conversations are dialogs
- 1.3 The Paradigm Strategy dialog
- 1.4 The Wiener's paradox
- 1.4.1 Control depends on communication
- 1.4.2 The invisible hand cannot be trusted
- 1.4.3 Our communication is broken
- 1.4.4 To steer a sustainable coure, we must be able to update our institutions
- 1.4.5 What happens when communication is broken
- 1.4.6 There's no need for censorship
- 1.4.7 It's not a problem, it's a paradox
- 1.5 Reflection
- 1.6 Understanding evolution
- 1.7 Reflection
- 1.8 We are not (only) the homo sapiens
- 1.9 Reflection
- 1.10 Religion as liberation
- 1.11 Stepping through the mirror
- 1.12 Let's talk about academic self-renewal
- 1.13 The next step
Federation through Conversations
What's really worth talking about
We can talk about anything
We can now converse about any theme that might interest you. And yet – in the context that's just been created – our conversation is bound to be different, more relevant and more meaningful. What makes all the difference is our chosen guiding principle, to which we've given different names such as systemic innovation and guided evolution of society.
What might public informing be like, if we should claim it back from "the invisible hand" (or more practically speaking from "the attention economy" – see it explained in our intuitive introduction to systemic thinking) – and develop it as a core system on which all other systems in our society depend? What practical difference might such a public informing make? We cold have similar conversations about education, or healthcare, or any other activity or system of your choosing.
It would't be any less interesting to talk about the perennial "philosophical" or academic theme – the fundamental assumptions, and the corresponding methods, based on which truth and meaning are created. Is it indeed the case that a whole new foundation is now possible, and even called for? To see what implications this may have, recall again the emergence of science, and all the developments that followed until the system of science became as rich and as profound as it is today. Is a whole new frontier of this kind and scale opening up? And if it is – what methods, what social organization, what types of results... have become possible?
We can talk about knowledge federation
We need this sort of conversations to complete the knowledge federation prototype we've introduced.
You'll recall that our systemic prototype must have a feedback loop and a correction mechanism to be complete. A purpose behind these conversations is to secure that.
You will also recall that, in the order of things or paradigm we are describing, it is not possible to make reality claims. All we can do is provide distinct ways of looking at experience. These points of view acquire their meaning, and veracity, when placed into a dynamic relationship with one other, when they are subjected to a social process through which they are continuously checked and updated.
A purpose of these conversations is to create, and indeed to be this social process.
Noticed that the creation of this social process, of this functioning collective mind, is the core purpose of our initiative. It is indeed this process, this operation of our collective mind, that we are calling knowledge federation.
First things first
And yet there is a single theme, which – when what's been told here is properly digested and understood – will naturally be given the highest priority. A clear understanding of this theme is needed to inform our handling of all other themes.
wrote Aurelio Peccei (see Federation through Stories). Is it, really?It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course,
And if it is – in what way can such a feet realistically be achieved?
Large change made easy
Donella Meadows talked about systemic leverage points as those places within a complex system "where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything". She identified "the mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise" as the most impactful kind of systemic leverage points. She identified specifically working with the "power to transcend paradigms" – i.e. with the very fundamental assumptions and ways of being out of which paradigms emerge – as the most impactful way to intervene into systems.
You'll notice that the goal of our initiative is to handle our contemporary condition in this most powerful way.
You'll notice that the specific approach to knowledge we are proposing offers exactly what Donella Meadows was pointing to as having the largest potential impact – namely an approach to knowledge that offers "the power to transcend paradigms", i.e. to transcend holding on to any fixed way of looking at the world.
In addition to being more likely to be effective than the conventional problem-based or issue-based approaches (where we wrestle with a specific issue such as the income inequality or the climate change), this paradigm strategy as we are calling it has the added advantage of being more prone to engage enthusiasm, entrepreneurial spirit and creativity.
Religion for the third millennium
We have already seen that huge, Industrial Revolution-like improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of human work, as enabled by new technology, can be achieved through the approach we've called systemic innovation. The next natural question, and perhaps the most academically interesting one that remains, is – what still hinders us from doing that?
Here we go a level deeper, and look at the underlying causes, which are in the very way in which we've been evolving as culture and as society. We use the light of new information to illuminate the very road that our Modernity 'bus' has been following – which is of course the course of our cultural and societal evolution!
We'll look into, and challenge, what's become in a truest sense the modernity's religion – namely the belief in "the invisible hand" as something that can be relied on to turn our self-serving acts, however narrowly conceived they might be, into the best possible order of things.
We'll do that by combining insights reached by the giants in the humanities, with the insights reached in the world traditions. In traditional societies religion has served (however imperfectly this might have been) as the ethical tissue that binds the society together, and each individual with her purpose. Science (as Heisenberg pointed out, see Federation through Stories) has shaken up the belief systems in which traditional religions tended to be rooted. Advertising has shaken up the values. Can we rediscover and re-establish ethics, and religion, in an entirely new way?
In this way we'll also answer how "the great cultural revival", and a sweeping improvement in "human quality" – which Peccei deemed necessary – may realistically result from the proposed strategy.
These conversations are dialogs
We are not just talking
Don't be deceived by this word, "conversations". These conversations are where the real action begins.
By developing these dialogs, we want to develop a way for us to bring the themes that matter into the focus of the public eye. We also want to bring in the giants and their insights, to help us energize and illuminate those themes. And then we also want to engage us all to collaborate on co-creating a shared understanding that reflects the best of our joint knowledge and insight.
And above all – we want to create a way of conversing that works; which makes us "collectively intelligent". We want to evolve in practice, with the help of new media and real-life, artistic situation design, a public sphere where the events and the sensations will be the ones that truly matter – i.e. the ones that are the steps in our advancement toward a new cultural and social order.
In a truest sense, the medium here really is the message!
Changing the world by changing the way we communicate
There is a way of listening and speaking that fits our purpose quite snuggly. Physicist David Bohm called it the dialogue, and we'll build further on his ideas and the ideas of others, and weave them into the meaning of another one of our keywords, the dialog.
Bohm considered the dialogue to be necessary for resolving our contemporary entanglement. Here is how he described it.
I give a meaning to the word 'dialogue' that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. 'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together.
Contrast this with the word 'discussion', which has the same root as 'percussion' an 'concussion'. It really means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others- but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.
In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.
A real reality show
Two people could be talking about these themes over a coffee house table. If they turn on the smartphone and record, their conversation can readily become part of the global one.
What we, however, primarily have in mind is a public dialog, which begins in physical spaces and continues online. What can possibly be more real, and really relevant and interesting, than watching a new Renaissance emerge? Observing our blind spots and subconscious resistances; feeling its pulse, its birth pains...
The Paradigm Strategy dialog
A roadmap for guided evolution of society
What might be a natural benchmark for us to test a new approach to knowledge?
Neil Postman left us this hint:
The problem now is not to get information to people, but how to get some meaning of what's happening.(...) Even the great story of inductive science has lost a good deal of its meaning, because it does not address several questions that all great narratives must address: Where we come from; what's going to happen to us; where we are going, that is; and what we're supposed to do when we are here. Science couldn't answer that; and technology doesn't.
In keeping with our general approach, we're about to face this challenge by
- building on core insights of giants
- engaging everyone, our "collective intelligence", to weave them together and develop them further
- evolving a way of speaking, and a "public sphere", capable of condensing any diversity of insights to a single point, and of using that point to orient – and begin – action
Or do we need to change the very nature of our evolving, and create and use suitable information as the guiding light?
The paradigm strategy
We wrote the following in our abstract to the academic conference where this roadmap, which we called "The Paradigm Strategy poster", was initially shared (you'll have no difficulty recognizing in it the signature theme of knowledge federation):
The motivation is to allow for the kind of difference that is suggested by the comparison of everyone carrying buckets of water from their own basements, with everyone teaming up and building a dam to regulate the flow of the river that is causing the flooding. We offer what we are calling the paradigm strategy as a way to make a similar difference in impact, with respect to the common efforts focusing on specific problems or issues. The Paradigm Strategy is to focus our efforts on instigating a sweeping and fundamental cultural and social paradigm change – instead of trying to solve problems, or discuss, understand and resolve issues.
The Paradigm Strategy poster
It will be best if you'll be looking at The Paradigm Strategy poster as we speak.
What you see on the left is a presentation of our current way of evolving (culturally and socially), drafted on a yellow background. What you see on the right is the creative frontier where the new paradigm is about to emerge, represented by a couple of design patterns and five prototypes. The large dot or circle in the middle is what we call "the key point" – it is the insight (or gestalt) that can take us from one social reality and way of evolving to the next.
Close to the dividing line, on the new paradigm side, you see "bootstrapping"; it's that very singular act that takes us out of our old paradigm and makes us part of the new one.
The poster is conceived as an invitation to begin to bootstrap – and in that way join the emerging paradigm as aware and active participant. The poster is interactive; the QR codes open up suitable files with further information (they are also hyperlinks, so that also the digital version of the poster can be interacted with). The "bootstrapping" thread leads to the QR code and file with an interactive online version of the poster – where it's possible to post comments, and in that way be part of the online dialog, through which the presented ideas, and the poster itself, are being developed further.
The core insights of giants (and also some other insights, as we shall see) are represented by icons, rendered as vignettes, and combined into threads. By weaving the threads into patterns, and patterns into the gestalt , the central "key point" is made accessible.
As you might be aware, we use vignettes to bring abstract and high-level insights down to earth, make ideas palpable, and real. In this brief summary, we cannot possibly tell each of the 12 vignettes that are represented in the poster! And yet if we only describe them abstractly, we'll lose the solid ground under our feet, and we'll never reach that metaphorical 'mountain top' from where the Middle-Agedness of our present order of things can be seen with clarity and precision.
So what we'll do is a compromise: We'll sketch a couple of the vignette in some detail; and give only a gesture drawing of all the rest.
The Wiener's paradox
Control depends on communication
Norbert Wiener was recognized as exceptionally gifted while he was still a child. He studied mathematics, zoology and philosophy, and finally got his doctorate in mathematical logic from Harvard, when he was only 17. Wiener went on to do seminal work in several distinct fields, one of which was cybernetics.
In a moment we'll let you in on some observations from Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics, and specifically from its last chapter, "Information, Language and Society". If his technical language is unfamiliar, you may interpret the word "homeostasis" simply as "steering a viable course".
In connection with the effective amount of communal information, one of the most surprising facts (...) is its extreme lack of efficient homeostatic process. There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and thus has earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory.
If "the invisible hand" is not to be relied on, then what might be the alternative?
Wiener's point is that suitable information must be our guide.
Or more concretely, that we must study how the structure of natural and human-made systems influence their behavior – and then use this knowledge to create and manage all our systems j– and in particular those core socio-technical ones such as our knowledge work and our governance.
Wiener is of course making a case for cybernetics as a new discipline, whose purpose is to provide exactly the knowledge that is needed. As you might be aware, "cybernetics" is the scientific study of governability or control. The complete title of his seminal book is "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". To have control, we need suitable communication. Suitable information must be created, and also used.
The invisible hand cannot be trusted
To support the quoted point, that the invisible hand cannot be relied on, Wiener points to insights of another pair of giants, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, reached through the study of the game theory, which they established together (Von Neumann's story is parallel to Wiener's; his many seminal achievements include the digital computer architecture that is still in use today). Wiener also points out how those insights are confirmed in everyday experiences with economy and politics.
Our communication is broken
How can we still believe in "the invisible hand" in spite of such evidence? Wiener echoes a core insight of another giant, Vannevar Bush, (whom we've mentioned on our front page and of whom we'll say more below) to conclude that our society's communication is broken – and he uses this conclusion as an additional strong reason for developing and using cybernetics.
To steer a sustainable coure, we must be able to update our institutions
We have shared Erich Jantsch's core ideas in Federation through Stories. We let the following excerpt from his last book, "The Self-Organizing Universe" (in which the emphasis is ours) serve as a concise summary – highlighting once again his conclusion we used here as the title, at the same time pointing to the importance he attributed to the question with which the excerpt begins. <p>
And how is evolution to continue in the human world? Has it, as some hold, become caught in a net of coercifve factors in which it is ever more inextricably entangled with every motion? (...) I believe that the most important task today is the searrch for new degrees of freedom to facilitate the living out of evolutionary processes. It is of prime importance that the openness of the inner world for which no limitations are yet in sight, is matched by a similar openness of the outer world, and that it tries actively to establish the latter. I believe that the sociocultural man in "co-evolution with himself" basically has the possibility of creating the conditions for his further evolution—much as life on earth, since its first appeareance 4000 million years ago, has always created the conditions for its own evolution toward higher complexity.
What happens when communication is broken
In 1980, when this book was published, and when Erich Jantsch passed away, Ronald Reagan became the 40th U.S. president. His message to the world – his winning agenda – was
In our present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.This meant, of course, that "the invisible hand" of the market is the only thing we can rely on. And that we run into problems as soon as we (that is, our governments) interfere with it.
By voting in this way, the American people didn't ignore only the core messages of Norbert Wiener and Erich Jantsch. Just after Wiener published his book, the research in game theory focusing on a phenomenon called "prisoner's dilemma" virtually exploded, resulting in several thousands of publications. The prisoner's dilemma models the real-life situations where collaboration leads to a better situation for everyone – and yet where the perfectly rational players will choose to dissent and compete. Isn't that our root issue in a nutshell?
The scientific production in cybernetics or the systems sciences grew even faster – and its results too were ignored.
"The invisible hand" as the evolutionary doctrine, and the corresponding way of evolving – where the market, or the money, decides – became our "evolutionary guidance"; and remained that until today.
There's no need for censorship
It was during Nickson's presidency, and well before the Web, that Italo Calvino pointed to the root of this problem in an interview. He pointed out that censorship is no longer needed, by comparing the New York times with Pravda, and observing that whatever was achieved by censorship in the latter, it was effectively implemented by overabundance of information in the former.
Recall Galilei in house prison. Could it indeed be the case that there's no longer need to confine giants to house arrest, or to forbid or burn their books?
In a society where the powerful media are used to only broadcast information, it's no longer the strength of the argument, but the campaign dollars and the "air time" they buy that decides what we the people are going to think and believe, and how our socio-cultural or socio-technological evolution is going to be directed.
It's not a problem, it's a paradox
We can already see the pattern we call Wiener's paradox.
We use it to point to a pervasive phenomenon – that academic results are created, and then ignored.
Wiener's just mentioned insight is an especially interesting instance of this pattern, because it was meant to point to that very pattern itself – and to the way to overcome it, by taking systemic evolution in knowledge work, and beyond, into our own hands.
This instance is furthermore interesting to us because of the paradox that Norbert Wiener and the systems sciences created – by committing their insights to the same communication or feedback-and-control system that, as Wiener diagnosed, is broken: Wiener wrote a book; cybernetics, and the systems sciences, organised themselves as academic disciplines.
Reflection
Why Donald Trump is an academic creation
You may reflect on your own – and we may also reflect together, in a conversation. In either case the purpose of these reflections is to connect the dots.
In knowledge federation we in particular want to connect the abstract with the concrete, the general direction-setting principle with the bothersome phenomena we experience daily.
So let's begin this reflection with Donald Trump – who has to many academic people become a symbol of dwindling standards in political discourse; and in political decision making; and of the academic cause losing its bearings in economic and political reality. Enough has been said about Trump in the media; and we won't even mention him further. We only point to him as a phenomenon, and invite you to see how the trend he may represent as an icon follows from the general insights we've been discussing.
Here's a good way to begin the ascent from where we at the moment to the bold generalization we made in the title: Recall the efforts on the part of The Club of Rome to draw attention to the key issue of growth, through The Limits to Growth study. Recall Engelbart's observation (made his second slide at Google) that our civilisation is lacking 'brakes'. Use this metaphor to reflect on the urgency of this matter... Then hear this video snippet where Ronald Reagan is saying, in a most seductive tone of voice,
We believe then, and now, there are no limits to growth, and human progress, when men and women are free to follow their dreams.
Think about what this means, more abstractly. Can you see parts of our collective mind trying with all their might to think thoughts of relevance and meaning – and being swamped by politically motivated sugary nonsense! How is this possible? Just compare the broadcasting power of Norbert Wiener or Erich Jantsch with the broadcasting power of the United States president, and the answer will be clear.
Consider, further, that our issue at hand is our "evolutionary guidance"; and whether academic ideas have impact or not; and whether information technology is helping us evolve toward "collective intelligence" or collective stupidity – and you'll have no difficulty understanding our motivation.
Understanding evolution
Illuminating the way
But perhaps Reagan was right? Perhaps "the invisible hand" is our best guide?
What can we really learn about our societal evolution from Darwin's theory? How well has the non-guided social-systemic evolution served us so far?
What do we really know about this all-important theme?
All we'll need from the theory of evolution is the core insight that Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist, and the archenemy of religion) published in his book "The Selfish Gene" (which led to the development of "memetics" as a research field studying our cultural and societal evolution). Darwinian evolution should not be assumed to lead to benefits or perfection of any kind, Dawkins contended. To understand evolution correctly, we must perceive it as favouring only the best adapted genes – or meme or 'cultural gene' when the societal and cultural evolution is being studied.
What made us powerful
With this we can now just give a gesture drawing of the second thread with which the Wiener's paradox pattern is woven together – and add some finishing touches at the end.
Here we see Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist, who when asked (in 2007? at Google, we are quoting from memory) "Professor Chomsky, what is in your opinion an insight that may be reaching us from your field that could have a large societal impact?" pointed to an (still unorthodox, he qualified) conclusion that our language is not really a means for communication – but for worldview sharing. A bird may see a hawk and go "tweet, tweet, tweet" and other birds will go "tweet, tweet, tweet" and soon enough all of them will be either averted of the danger or gone. But that's not how the human communication works!
This may seem like an evolutionary error. But Yuval Noah Harari is there to explain why it's not – why this singularly human ability, to to create a story and make it a shared reality made us the dominant species on earth. (Put a gorilla and a human being on a deserted island, and guess who'll be more likely to survive. But if you put ten thousand gorillas on a football stadium, you'll get complete chaos! It's the football and so many other shared stories that literally gamify our social behaviour!)
Harari pointed to money as a prime example of a shared story that has successfully 'gamified' our existence. (Give a gorilla a banana – and he'll gladly take it. Ask him to trade it for a dollar – and he'll surely refuse. A human will, of course, be inclined to do the opposite. But the only reason why the value of this printed piece of paper exceeds the value of a banana is that we jointly believe that it does.)
What makes us powerless
How has the power of money, of our shared story par excellence, been used? How has it directed our (systemic) evolution?
David Graeber, the anthropologist, is there to point to an answer.
The story we are about to share is adapted from Graeber's book "Debt; the first 5000 years", which is a history of money. But as the case is with all our stories, we'll simplify his story and use it as a parable. You'll recall (from Federation through Stories) that our goal is not historical accuracy, but to see the elephant.
So imagine that you are living 23 centuries ago, that you are a young king, exceptionally talented, that you've received the very best education, and that your ambition is to rule the world.
You know that with an army of 100 000 men you'll have a chance to succeed. But there's a logistical challenge: To feed and clothe an army of that size, you would need an army of 100 000 supply workers running around and servicing your soldiers.
You've thought of a solution: You print coins and give them to your soldiers; and you request of everyone else to pay you those coins back as taxes. You know that in no time everyone will be busy providing your soldiers with everything they need!
At this point your business model, as we would call it today, is nearly complete; but there's still a problem.
Alexander the Great – the historical king you are impersonating – needed half a tone of silver a day to pay his army! How in the world could anyone secure such massive amounts of precious metals?
There were, it turned out, two ways to do that.
One way was to raid foreign countries, turn the free people into slaves, and have them mine silver and gold for you.
The other way is to raid foreign monasteries and palaces, melt whatever sacred or artistic objects are of silver and gold and turn them into coins for your soldiers.
This makes your business plan complete. It might be a kind of a Ponzi scheme, but – as you know from history – it can work well for awhile.
What interests are here, however, are its cultural and social-systemic implications – and we leave the details to your reflection.
Reflection
The corporation
As the University of British Columbia law professor, Joel Bakan had an insight that, he felt, was so universally important, that it needed to be federated. The result was a popular book, and an award-winning documentary called The Corporation – which you may see here].
Twenty-three centuries after Alexander, it's the international corporations that is the most powerful institution on our planet. The corporation is what takes most people's daily work and power as input – and turns that into socially useful effects. Or so we seem to believe.
See Bakan's film. How has our joint power been evolving? How has it been used?
Can you follow this line of thought all the way to the Key Point at the center of The Paradigm Strategy poster, and beyond, to its right-hand side?
Can you see why we the people now need to direct our power into systemic innovation? And why The Lighthouse project is a natural way to begin?
We are not (only) the homo sapiens
How to live in a complex world without information
The second pattern featured on the left-hand side of The Paradigm Strategy poster is trivial; we don't really need those threads and vignettes to see it.
Just imagine us living in a complex world while immersed in information glut. How can we cope?
There's a simple way – just learn how to perform in your various social roles, as one would learn the rules of a game. And then play competitively.
"Homo Ludens" is a title of an old book; but with a bit of polyscopy, we can give this keyword, the homo ludens, a lot more precise and agile meaning than what Johan Huizinga who coined this phrase was able to do. The homo ludens is a cultural species, distinguished from the homo sapiens. To him, the big-picture insight, or the kind of knowledge combining insights into the nature of a situation with systemic purpose and ethical direction is (to use Carl Jiung's most useful keyword) in his psychological shadow; it's what he had to abandon in order to to achieve success. In the homo ludens world, one does not achieve success by serving a larger societal purpose. Rather, one uses one's social antennas and attunes one's behavior to the personal wants of other players. By accommodating their power, one acquires a power position of one's own.
Now you know the rest of our story, in a nutshell. The reason why we still give you these details is the importance of this theme: We need to know what we are up against, if we should really be able to cope with our situation and find solutions. Evolve beyond.
Furthermore what we are talking about is really the heart of the matter. What hinders us from recreating our systems? What hinders us from hearing our giants? Answers will be provided by weaving our remaining two threads.
A warmup thread
The bottom-left thread will give us a quick and easy start.
The thread begins with the excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche's Will to Power, which was quoted near the bottom of the Intuitive Introduction to Systemic Thinking. (This is a good moment to re-read that excerpt. Hear Nietzsche say that already in his day, we the people were already overwhelmed with impressions; that already then we were losing our ability to truly comprehend, and to truly act.) Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University biologist, environmentalist and "pessimist") telling how when in the 1950 when he was doing field research with the Inuits, he realized that each member of the community was closely familiar with all the community's tools. It ends with Anthony Giddens (Britain's leading sociologist and public intellectual) describing "ontological security":
The threat of personal meaninglessness is ordinarily held at bay because routinised activities, in combination with basic trust, sustain ontological security. Potentially disturbing existential questions are defused by the controlled nature of day-to-day activities within internally referential systems.
Mastery, in other words, substitutes for morality; to be able to control one's life circumstances, colonise the future with some degree of success and live within the parameters of internally referential systems can, in many circumstances, allow the social and natural framework of things to seem a secure grounding for life activities.
It is very easy to see how the distinct vignettes that form this thread enhance one another and lead to a larger insight.
We heard Nietzsche tell us that we are so overwhelmed by impressions, that we defend ourselves from taking anything deeply in, from digesting ideas. We then heard Ehrlich tell us that within the time span of a single generation, our tools – and on a larger scale our reality – have become impenetrably complex (just think of your smartphone – does anyone still possess the kind of knowledge that would suffice to put such a thing together?). The shared excerpt from Giddens' "Modernity and Self-Identity" then shows how we adapt to this situation – by "substituting mastery for morality".
Symbolic power
We pick up the second thread with which the homo ludens pattern is woven at the middle, and then work our way to both ends.
Let's consider this to be Pierre Bourdieu's gift to the world in a nutshell. In what follows we'll unpack this gift and see why symbolic power is a key piece in the big-picture puzzle of our condition we are now putting together.[S]ymbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.
As the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, Bourdieu was at the very peak of his profession, in effect representing the science of sociology to the French people. In the latter part of his career he would abandon his purist-academic reluctance to become a public intellectual, and become indeed an activist against the "invisible hand" ideology.
Our story begins, however, much earlier, in 1955, when Bourdieu was an army recruit in Algeria, where a war was about to begin. Our goal is to share an insight that made him a sociologist. Like Doug Engelbart and quite a few other giants, Bourdieu did not enter his field by studying it, but by first having an insight; by observing something that would make a large impact on that field, and potentially also on our understanding of ourselves.
During the Algerian war Bourdieu had no difficulty noticing how the official narrative (that France was in Algeria to bring progress and culture) collapsed under the weight of torture and all manner of human rights abuses. So he wrote a small booklet describing this in an accessible language, in the Que sais-je series.
Back home in France this booklet contributed to politicization of French intelligentsia during the 1950s and 60s. But in Algeria it had another effect. A contact would bring Bourdieu to an "informant" (who might be a man who'd been tortured) and say "You can trust this man completely!" What a wonderful way for a gifted young man to look into the inner workings of the society, at the point of buoyant change!
Having became politically independent, Algeria entered a new stage – of modernization.
With sympathy and profound insight, Bourdieu was 'a fly on the wall' in a Kabyle village house, deciphering the harmony between the physical objects and the relationships among its people. And how this harmony collapsed when the Kabyle young man was compelled, by new economic realities, to look for employment in the city! Not only his sense of honor, but even his very manner of walking and talking were suddenly out of place – even to the young women from his own background, who saw something different in the movies and in restaurants.
It was in this way that Bourdieu came to realize that the old relationships of economic and cultural domination did not at all vanish – they only changed their way of manifesting themselves!
Bourdieu was reminded of his own experiences, when after childhood in alpine Denguin in Southern France he joined the Parisian elite, by studying in the prestigious École normale (not by birthright, but because of his exceptional talents).
Theory of practice
Bourdieu called his theory "theory of practice" – a fitting name for a theory explaining our social practice, and practical reality.
His keywords "symbolic power", "habitus", "field" and "doxa" will suffice to summarize his insights.
We'll interpret them here somewhat freely (as it suits our overall main goal, to materialise the elephant) with the help of the following brief reflection.
If you would break into your neighbor's house, slaughter the family and rob their property, you would surely be considered a dangerous criminal and treated accordingly. If you wold make a speech on the main square inviting your fellow citizens to do the same to the people in a neighboring country, on a massive scale, you would surely be considered a dangerous madman, and incarcerated accordingly.
Unless, of course, this sort of behavior is part of your "job description", because you are your country's monarch or president. In that case you might even be remembered in history as a great leader – as Alexander the Great might illustrate
Whence this inconsistency?
Odin the horse
But before we revisit Bourdieu's concepts, let us sketch the other two vignettes that complete the thread.
Odin the Horse is a short real-life story about the territorial behavior of Icelandic horses. This excerpt will be sufficient for our purpose.
When Odin the Horse – an ageing leader of the herd – runs parallel with New Horse pushing him into the river, and away from his mares, he is protecting just the physical spot on the turf and the specific social role that he considers his own.
Imagine – in the manner of sharing a certain way of looking at things – our culture as a turf. Then the first thing you'll notice about this turf is that it's considerably more complex than the turf of the horses – just as much as our society and culture are more complex than theirs. There are the kings, and there are his pages; and there's the nobility. Furthermore you might be in king's favor, or in disfavor. You'll feel the difference by the way the king addresses you, as soon as you him. And even if you won't know consciously, something in you will know. You see everyone bow as the king enters, and you automatically do the same. How could it be otherwise?
Descartes' Error
Antonio Damasio completes this thread by helping us understand why symbolic power is so powerful, even when – and especially when – nobody's aware of its existence.
Damasio, a leading cognitive neuroscientist, explained in a most rigorous, scientific way a key element of our social psychology that you may not even have noticed – namely why we don't wake up wondering whether we should take off your pajamas and run naked in the street. Damasio showed that the content of our conscious mind is controlled by an embodied cognitive filter, which presents to it for deliberation only those possibilities that are "acceptable" – from the embodied filter's point of view, of course.
You might already be guessing how this all might fit together?
Socialization explained
We may now understand Bourdieu's keyword "field" as a symbolic turf, or metaphorically as a game with rules and distinct avatars, each having a set of capabilities. You may understand "habitus" as a distinct position on the symbolic turf, or as everyone's set of capabilities. Odin the horse has one. And so does Alexander the Great, and everyone else.
You don't bow to Alexander – off goes your head. Each habitus has a socialised collection of ways to negotiate its relative power with the owners of each other habitus.
And finally, doxa. The more familiar word "orthodoxy" signifies that there is one "right" social order, and one "right" story, the "right" way of conceiving of the world. Doxa is a further step in the same direction, where only one option is allowed to exist. Doxa is what we've been socialized to call "reality".
We let Harriet Tubman's observation serve as an epigram pointing to the quintessential practical consequence of doxa; and of the the kind of power ("symbolic power") it has over us. Symbolic power is what makes us accomplices in our own disempowerment!If I could convince more slaves that they are slaves, I could have freed thousands more.
How can we ever be free?
(The Liberation book will be our attempt to give an answer to this enduring question.)
Reflection
Consequences
We offer the following four consequences of what's just been shared for reflection – and conversation.
Why we cannot see systems
An often used parallel – between our socialization and the Indian tradition of training an elephant to stay put when tied by a rope to a branch – can be used to explain why we ordinarily cannot even conceive of systemic innovation. The point is that we've evolved in such a way that our systems are not admissible to our conscious deliberation; they are a result of our socialization. Our obedience to systems is pre-conscious – just as is wearing clothes and saying "hello".
This explains a paradox that permeates this proposal – that larger-than-life benefits that become accessible when we allow ourselves this new degree of freedom of thought and action are habitually ignored.
The obstacles to our proposal are cultural and social. Overcoming them is an evolutionary step – which needs to be understood and handled accordingly.
Redefining politics
The second consequence of the homo ludens pattern is that it changes the conventional political game ceases, from "us against them" to all of us against the obsolete socio-cultural structures (for which our technical keyword is power structure).
We'll say more about this below, when discussing the religion for the third millennium – so let it only be said here that while it may appear that the kings are the winners in a social game, and their pages are the losers, this view radically changes as soon as we are able to see the game from the outside. Everyone is socialised into a certain role, or habitus. And systemic innovation can make everyone much better off. Odin the horse doesn't really need all those mares. He's an ageing horse, the farmer had good reasons for bringing New Horse to the farm. But Odin doesn't think in this way. In fact he doesn't think at all. He only feels that someone is violating his turf, he feels threatened, and just he wants to push him into the river.
Redefining reality
The third consequence is that the idea of reality – which in the traditional cultures occupied the most honoured position as the foundation on which our creation of truth and meaning is based – now becomes the heart of our problem. The reality, or more precisely Bourdieu's doxa, is perceived as what organizes the game, as the very structure of the symbolic turf – which keeps us disempowered without noticing.
Why giants are ignored
Have you been wondering why the giants tend to be ignored? In spite of the gigantic usefulness of their ideas? And their intrinsic beauty and value?
The problem with giants is that they're too large. If we would let them in, they'd occupy way too much space on the symbolic turf...
Religion as liberation
Buddhadasa's discovery
After just a couple of years of monastic life in Bangkok, barely in his 20s, Nguam Phanit (today known as Buddhadasa, "the slave of the Buddha", and celebrated as a reformer of Buddhism) thought "This just cannot be it!" So he made himself a home in an abandoned forest monastery near his home village Chaya, and equipped with a handful of original Pali scriptures undertook to live and practice and experiment as the Buddha did.
It was in this way that Buddhadasa found out that the essence of the Buddha's teaching was not at all as it was taught.
Buddhadasa further understood that what he was witnessing was a simple phenomenon or a "natural law", the rediscovery of which marked the inception of all religions; that all religions had a tendency to ignore this essence; and that his insight could be transformative to the modern world.
Liberation prototype
Buddhadasa’s insight is being fully federated within the book manuscript titled “Liberation” and subtitled “Religion for the third millennium”. This will be the first book in the Knowledge Federation trilogy, by which the ideas sketched here will be made accessible to general public.
Here we only highlight several points, which will help us weave together and complete some streams of thought that are central to our initiative.
Cessation of suffering
According to legend, Prince Siddartha, who later became the Buddha, left wealth and security to withdrew into the forest and find the cause of suffering. “Suffering”, however, is a rough translation of the Buddhist keyword “dukkha”, which denotes a specific kind of suffering.
This explanation will serve us well enough: dukkha is, simply, what drives Odin the horse to engage in turf behavior. Applied to humans, dukkha is that part of the human nature whose characteristic emotions are anxiety and worry; and which urges us to control and dominate.
Dukkha is so much part of our everyday life that we tend to take it for granted.
The isight into how much dukkha colors our daily experience and our relationships is life changing. Even more so is the insight into the exquisite way of being that the liberation from dukkha entails. The Buddhists talk about sukkha; other traditions talk about bliss or charity or unconditional love.
What is most interesting for us, in the context of knowledge federation and guided evolution of society, is the possibility of substituting our present naive or misguided pursuit of happiness with (what one might call) evidence-based or informed pursuit of happiness – which can take us incomparably further than our present one.
Way to cessation of suffering
The Buddha called it dhamma. Buddhadasa interprets this completely central keyword as pointing both to a certain natural law, and to living and practicing in accordance with this natural law. It’s like watering the plant – you engage in a certain discipline, and something grows. Asking “why” is beside the point. It’s enough to know that Odin the horse can be tamed; its whims don’t need to dominate our emotions, and our behavior.
The essence of this practice, of the ‘watering’, is to remain free from any sort of clinging – both to what is desirable and to what is not. The key is “mindfulness at the point of contact” – at the point when something we might be inclined to cling to presents itself to our senses or to our awareness, the mind is present and alert and says “no”. A natural way to train Odin is by serving causes that are larger than oneself.
Two points are most interesting from the point of view of “a great cultural renewal”, the possibility of which we have undertaken to illustrate:
- The Buddhist practice is not just different – it is opposite from the ecology in which our modern culture emerges us. Meditation combined with “mindfulness” removes from us the overload of impressions; it allows us to become more sensitive (recall Nietzschje).
- You may see how Peccei’s wish may realistically come true: dhamma is the natural law that links our capability to experience happiness with our work on improving our “human quality”!
Seeing the world as it is
Buddhadasa doesn’t use the word “enlightenment”. Rather, he describes the accomplished or elevated state of veing as “seeing the world as it is”.
Our discussion of the homo ludens pattern offers a ready explanation: The liberation Buddhadasa is talking about is not only the liberation from dukkha; it is also the liberation from our socialisation, and our socialised ways of looking at the world.
So interesting that those two things – our suffering and our socialization – might be closely related!
There are two ways to God
Buddhadasa describes the Buddha as a reformer and a rebel. The rebirth he was talking about is not the physical rebirth of the HIndus, but the rebirth of our ego-centeredness, which can happen one hundred times a day.
He describes how just a few centuries after the Buddha the belief system of Hinduism took over, and replaced the original teaching of the Buddha, the real way out of suffering, here and now.
This invites the following conjecture: That there are two approaches to religion, corresponding to what we’ve been calling the homo sapiens and the homo ludens evolutionary streams. That religions tend to begin when an especially gifted person, a true giant of religion, discovers the dhamma (or whatever this may be called in his or her language) and practices and becomes transformed. Other people see this result, and gather round him to see if they can reach it themselves.
But as the movement grows, and its forefathers are gone and forgotten, the “socialization” sets in and the institution suffers exactly the kind of transformation that we’ve described above on the examples of social and military organisation, and the corporation. Religion ceases to be an instrument of our liberation, and becomes an instrument of our socialization.
Federating religion
In most people’s minds the word “religion” is associated with a strongly held (clinged onto) set of beliefs.
When we compare those beliefs together, surely they appear to us as irreconcilable.
When, however, we consider religions to be world traditions within which most valuable experience has been developed – about inherent human possibilities, about the ‘seeds’ we carry inside and how to ‘water’ them – the religious scene becomes entirely something else.
You will now have no difficulty seeing how polyscopy and knowledge federation engender an approach to knowledge that can help us do the latter – just as our traditional approaches to knowledge focused on the worldviews of religions, and ignored their true gifts.
The point is simply this: When we focus on what's valuable and common in experience, and treat the worldviews as "syntactic sugar", then we can easily show that
- a radically better realm of human experience (call it nirvana or nibbana or enlightenment or...) is accessible through a certain praxis
- there's a strong agreement among the world traditions about the nature of this praxis
We are now back to where we started. Recall Heisenberg's observation about the "narrow frame" or narrow way of looking at the world that the 19th century science gave our ancestors, which was damaging to culture and in particular to religion.
Stepping through the mirror
Back to polyscopy
The last on the list of prototypes on the right-hand side of The Paradigm Strategy poster is the Polyscopy prototype. We've talked about polyscopy quite a bit in Federation through Imges, where we've seen it as the approach to truth and meaning on the other side of the metaphorical mirror. We reached the mirror from a fundamental interest, by exploring what the giants have found about "language, thought and reality", as Whorf's put framed it. Here we are once again standing in front of the mirror, but now with a handful of most practical or cultural interests – by exploring what the giants have said about success, happiness, love, values, religion...
On this side of the mirror the winner takes it all. And the winner – that's the traditionally the king. Or perhaps today – the millionaire. So everyone today wants to be a millionaire, just as in olden days everyone dreamed of being a king.
Can you imagine a radical change of values – similar in magnitude to the change from the values from the Middle Ages to the ones of modernity?
Can you see how Peccei's dream may now come true – about a "great cultural revival", where "human development is the most important goal"?
Religion on the other side of the mirror
All we need to do to get there, once again, is to see ourselves in the mirror. We then instantly realize that how we define winners and losers is all just part of our socialization, it's all part of the game we've learned and accepted as reality. We also realize how much what we experience as desirable and pleasant can be just simply our perception, a result of that collection of illusions (recall Einstein). We become ready to listen to the experience of others – and correct our ideas and our experience.
The Buddha (as the tradition portrays him) may well be seen as showing us the way (through the mirror) – didn't he leave the wealth and power of his royal existence, to pursue a whole other way from suffering to happiness? Christ may then be seen as pointing to the ultimate sacrifice – of one's "interests" or "happiness" or "ego" – for the sake of a larger good.
Emperor Alexander meets the Buddha
What would have happened if a great historical king, such as Alexander the Great, met an enlightened follower of the pursuit of happiness on the other side of the mirror?
The event – Alexander visiting Diogenes (who was sunbathing in front of the barrel he was living in) – is familiar. And so is this detail, quoted here from an ancient text.
So the king came up to [Diogenes] as he sat there and greeted him, whereat the other looked up at him with a terrible glare like that of a lion and ordered him to step aside a little, for Diogenes happened to be warming himself in the sun. Now Alexander was at once delighted with the man’s boldness and composure in not being awestruck in his presence. For it is somehow natural for the courageous to love the courageous, while cowards eye them with misgiving and hate them as enemies, but welcome the base and
like them.
This wasn't, of course, their entire conversation. Diogenes did not miss this opportunity to make his main point, that virtue and wisdom, rather than inherited social status, is what distinguishes true royalty:
... [Diogenes] went on to tell the king that he did not even possess the badge ofroyalty. . ."And what badge is that?" said Alexander. "It is the badge of the bees, "he replied, "that the king wears. Have you not heard that there is a king among the bees, made so by nature, who does not hold office by virtue of what you people who trace your descent from Heracles call inheritance? " "What is this badge ?" inquired Alexander. "Have you not heard farmers say, "asked the other, "that this is the only bee that has no sting since he requires no weapon against anyone? For no other bee will challenge his right to be king or fight him when he has this badge. I have an idea, however, that you not only go about fully armed but even sleep that way. Do you not know," he continued, "that is a sign of fear in a man for him to carry arms? And no man who is afraid would ever have a chance to become king any more than a slave would."
Rebuilding the tower of Babel
According to an old myth, a very long time ago the humanity was well on the way to reach this other realm of cultural possibilities that the founders of religions and adepts of spiritual practice have been pointing to. But they got divided by their different ways of speaking and looking at the world, and the project failed.
We are now in a position to do it again.
![Babel2.jpeg](/images/9/9a/Babel2.jpeg)
You'll find a brief report about this prototype in Federation through Applications. Further details will be provided also here.
Let's talk about academic self-renewal
Let's stand on the shoulders of giants
What are the scientists to do next?
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers — conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.
Vannevar Bush was an early computing machinery pioneer, who before the World War II became the MIT professor and dean, and who during the war served as the leader of the entire US scientific effort – supervising about 6000 chosen scientists, and making sure that we are a step ahead in terms of technology and weaponry, including the bomb.
In 1945 this scientific strategist par excellence wrote a scientific strategy article, titled As We May Think, from which the above excerpt is taken. The war having been won, Bush warned, there still remains a strategically central issue, which the scientists need to focus on and resolve – our organization and sharing of knowledge. Bush's argument is for collective sense making. He observed that we must be able to in effect think together as a single mind does – which explains his title.
Doug Engelbart heard him (he read Bush's article in 1947, in a Red Cross library erected on four pillars, while stationed as an army recruit in the Philippines) – and carried the project significantly further. Doug foresaw (already in 1951!) that the enabling technology would not be the microfilm (as Bush thought – microfilm too needs to be sent and broadcasted) but digital computers equipped with an interactive interface and linked together into a network. And he created the technology that was still missing (see Federation through Stories).
Norbert Wiener also heard him. Wiener cited Bush in the already mentioned last chapter of his 1948 Cybernetics (see Federation through Stories). Wiener took this initiative further by developing cybernetics – which is a different and complementary direction than Doug. The message we need to receive from cybernetics is that we the people act through systems. And that it is the structure of those systems that determines whether our action will be effective – or self-destructive. And that proper communication in a system is necessary if the system should have control over its effects on its environment – and on itself just as well.
A case for academic self-renewal
Erich Jantsch, who gave us this most timely advice a half-century ago, understood that it is the evolution of our systems that is the key to changing our condition. That the only system that can be capable of bootstrapping this evolution is the academic system. And that to be able to do that, the academic system itself needs to self-organize as it might suit this new role.[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing the society’s capacity for continuous self-renewal.
The academic system is indeed already in charge of our society's evolution, or autopoiesis or self-renewal. Through research, this system creates the new knowledge that drives the evolution of other systems. And through education, it recreates the world with every new generation of students. The only question is whether we in the academia are also doing this job.
As we have seen, neither Doug Engelbart nor Erich Jantsch found a fertile ground for their ideas at a university. Also the core message of cybernetics, or the systems sciences, is yet to be heard.
Vannevar Bush's most opportune strategic initiative is still waiting to be taken up.
So why don't we at the very least have an honest academic conversation about this all-important theme?
What we would like to offer to this most conversation, what we'd like to put on the round table around which we are going to sit, is an academically solid case for academic self-renewal.
A careful reading of the material we've presented here will reveal three distinct arguments and three reasons for this course of action – focusing on technology, epistemology and ecology.
Here's a brief summary.
The technology argument
The printing press – which served as technological underpinning to Enlightenment – only automated the social process that was already in place, authoring and broadcasting of documents. The new media technology is, however, qualitatively different; it is properly speaking a collective nervous system.
To see why the new technology enables us to make a quantum leap in our collective intelligence – only if we self-organize in an entirely new way (if we learn to function as cells in a nervous system do), imagine what would become of your own intelligence if your cells would be using your nervous system to only broadcast data to your brain and to each other. You may be thinking your thoughts and walking toward a wall. Suddenly, you find yourself standing a meter from a wall, with full awareness of this fact. This would not have happened if your eyes were trying to signal this fact to your brain by writing academic articles in some specialized domain of academic interest!
And as we have seen – the new technology was conceived to enable the collective mind re-evolution, a half-century ago, by Doug Engelbart and his team.
Knowledge federation is by definition what a collective mind should be doing. Our technical prototypes we developed – in education, public informing, scientific communication and other core areas – show how different our systems now need to be; and what an enormous difference this can make.
The epistemology argument
There is a reason why the traditional university is not so interested in technology. Our most valued academic preoccupation is "basic research" – whose goal is to "discover" the mechanisms and processes by which the nature operates.
The epistemology argument is that the reasons for the traditional academic values – and mechanisms and processes – are historical. At the time when they developed, the esteemed goal of a philosopher was to distinguish truth from illusion, to find our how the things "really are" in reality. The solutions to this time honored challenge that the pioneers of science conceived were so vastly advantageous, that they quite naturally became the society's – and the university's – esteemed standard.
We have seen (in Federation through Stories) that this approach was, however, too narrow for supporting core elements of human culture. An erosion in culture took place. And then the naked narrowness of this approach to social construction of truth and meaning emerged as a hard fact in modern physics, and in other sciences and in philosophy as well.
We have seen in Federation through Images that modern science finds the whole "correspondence with reality" approach to truth and meaning unsound for two reasons: (1) it cannot be verified and (2) correspondence with reality tends to be a result of illusion. We have then seen how a foundation for social creation of truth and meaning can be developed which is triply sound and solid:
- Because it is a written convention (and truth by convention cannot be disputed)
- Because its fundamental conventions are the state-of-the-art epistemological insights, written as conventions
- Because it is a prototype – and hence equipped with a mechanism for self-renewal, when new insights require that</p>
We have seen how on this foundation a new paradigm for knowledge work can be developed, which gives us the people exactly the kind of knowledge we need.
We have seen that in this new paradigm the work on the design of knowledge work principles, values, tools, mechanisms and processes rightly claims the status that the "basic research" now has.
The ecology argument
We use this word, "ecology", to point to the fact that the power of human systems has grown so much that we can now impact, even irreversibly, the bio-physical and natural systems, and ultimately endanger the very systems that have so successfully supported the emergence and proliferation of life on our planet
We also use this word to point to the human-systemic ecology we've created, which now drives our technological, societal and cultural evolution.
We have seen in this module that the ecology we've been relying on – uninformed self-interest, mediated by "the survival of the fittest" – has from the beginning of civilization, and into the modern times, favored the most aggressive societal structures (such as the Macedonian Phalanx, and the modern corporation). It is those erosive power structures that now coerce us to not only destroy our environment, but to even remain oblivious of that very fact.
We have seen that the guided evolution of society has been pointed to as the natural remedy; and as the next large stage of our evolution. We have seen that the guided evolution of society crucially depends on an "evolutionary guidance system" or in a word, on suitable knowledge.
Homo ludens academicus
This brings us to the key question, which we propose for the agenda of this conversation – the question of the academic ecology.
Is the academic value system, and the system of academic remuneration and promotion, still suitable for supporting this re-evolutionary new role of the academic system – whose urgency and importance is now so rapidly growing; the role of giving our society the knowledge it needs? Of enabling its continued self-renewal?
If we now tell you that the present-day academic ecology (the so-called "publish or perish", which so flagrantly favors routinized hyper-production in traditional academic disciplines) is not a solution, that it indeed favors a certain cultural sub-species at the detriment of all others, we will not be saying anything that you don't already know. We propose to call this cultural sub-species the homo ludens academicus.
And there can be no doubt that the homo ludens academicus is an evolutionary error. A moment of thought will suffice to see that the homo ludens academicus should not even exist: Isn't the very purpose of the academic system to secure that our society as a whole follows the homo sapiens evolutionary path?
Reviving the academic spirit
Galilei, and Giordano Bruno and Copernicus, are of course exemplary figures. But if we should go back to the original academic spirit, we must go further back in time than that – all the way to Plato; and to Socrates, his teacher.
It was Plato, as you'll easily recall, that created the Academy from which the modern academic tradition evolved. And it was his teacher, Socrates, to whom Plato gave the credit for creating the very spirit on which the Academy was founded.
And Socrates was, by today's standards, a strange kind of academic indeed. HIs publication record, as you might recall, was all but impressive . His work was to engage people in – dialogs!
His goal was to help his fellow citizens see that what they saw as reality was largely an illusion, which gave them illusion of power.
Socrates was sentenced to death for impiety, and for corrupting the Athenian youth. But his spirit lived on. And it led to Plato's academy, but to its rebirth in the Renaissance, and ultimately to the modern-day university.
Can we once again revive some of that original spirit, in this age?
Occupy your university
"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future", wrote Aurelio Peccei.
Not long ago, when it became obvious how intolerably wasteful and unjust our global monetary system was, people found themselves called to occupy Wall Street. Certainly we must leave our spectator position, we must learn to react and act. The question is – What strategy may be most promising? Where – in what system – can the re-evolutionary change of our society most naturally begin?
When we begin to look into this question, we realize at once why the Wall Street may not be the answer. Those bankers wouldn't really know how to change their system – even if they wanted to! They too are just doing what they are paid for – making the rich richer. Isn't the growing income inequality an eloquent sign that they are doing their job expertly? And hasn't the banking elite acquired their expertise at our elite universities?
Judging from what's just been told, occupying your local university would appears to be a more promising choice.
And if you already are at a university – then there's nothing left to occupy!
All that remains is doing what we are paid for – being creative. And yes, perhaps also being creative in new ways, when the circumstances require that.
The next step
It's important to start right
As Lao Tzu already observed, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It is all-important, however, to take that one step in a good direction.
It might surprise you now to hear that we see consider this first step to be an inward or ethical one, rather than a surge of action. And yet from what's been told you might have discerned that an embodied ethical stance will have to be the very root from which the contemporary cultural revival can grow.
As long as we remain competitive role players in a competitive world, our hands are soiled and we are bound to soil everything we touch.
If you've realized this, than you can also understand how we intend to handle this situation. We want to above all keep our intentions clear. And we want to leave a clean space for you to step in.
This is a very delicate path for us to walk. We'll surely make many mistakes. But we see no other way to go; and there's no turning back.
Being "nice" and accommodating each other's whims and foibles, and by extension the existing power structure, is obviously not a good direction. But neither is starting a turf strife – which can only create more of the dynamic that got us into trouble.
We will not change the world
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has", wrote Margaret Mead. (Let's just mention in passing that as the first woman leader of the systems community, Margaret Mead championed the strategy that this community should apply systemic thinking to its own system!) You will find evidence of our thoughtfulness and commitment on these pages.
And yet it is clear to us, and it should be clear to you too, that we cannot change the world. The world is not only us – it is all of us together!
So if the world will change, that will be a result of your doing; of your thoughtfulness and commitment!
We've been socialized to think and act within systems. To conform to the worldview we've been socialized to accept as "reality". Deviating from this feels unnatural; it hurts – and yet that is the re-evolutionary next step that those of us who can now simply must take!
All the rest will be just fun; just creative play!
Knowledge federation is not our project
See if you can see knowledge federation as your project, not ours.
We shall from here on be implementing our back seat policy – holding onto an advisory role, and offering our insights and experiences to people worldwide who'll want to step in and take initiative along this most timely of agendas. We'll do that because it is that very act, of taking such an initiative, and not the results of the initiative, that brings the new paradigm into being.
Collaboration is to the emerging paradigm as competition is to the old one. In Norway (this website is hosted at the University of Oslo) there is a word – dugnad – for the kind of collaboration that brings together the people in a neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon, to gather fallen leaves and branches and do small repairs in the commons, and then share a meal together.
It is this spirit that we now need to emulate.
If there is any leadership in this adventure, its goal is to create a space and invite you in. Your task – the most important one – is to take initiative. Dare to be creative. We passed you the ball, and it's now in your hands.
Surprise us with a creative move of your own. And if you'll want to play with us, invite us to a dugnad!
Rest assured that we won't be able to refuse.