Holotopia
Contents
HOLOTOPIA
An Actionable Strategy
Imagine...
You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice the flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?
Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it?
Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.
The Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation by depicting our society as an accelerating bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world, try to comprehend and handle it as guided by a pair of candle headlights.
Modernity ideogram
Scope
"Act like as if you loved your children above all else",Greta Thunberg, representing her generation, told the political leaders at Davos. Of course the political leaders love their children—don't we all? But what Greta was asking them to do was to 'hit the brakes'; and when the 'bus' they are believed to be 'driving' is inspected, it becomes clear that its 'brakes' too are missing. The job of the politicians is to keep the 'bus on course' (the economy growing) for yet another four-year term. Changing the 'course', or the system, is well beyond what they can do, or even conceive of.
The COVID-19 pandemic may require that we update some of our systems, and ways in which we collaborate—now.
So who, what institution or system, will lead us through our next evolutionary task—where we will learn how to recreate the systems in which we live and work; in knowledge work, and beyond?
Both Jantsch and Engelbart believed that "the university" would have to be the answer; and they made their appeals accordingly. But the universities ignored them—just as they ignored Bush and Wiener before them, and others who followed.
Why?
Isn't restoring agency to information and power to knowledge a challenge worthy of academic attention?
It is tempting to conclude that the university institution followed the general trend, and evolved as a power structure. But to see solutions, we need to look at deeper causes.
We readily find them in the way in which the university institution developed.
The academic tradition did not originate as a way to practical knowledge, but to freely pursue knowledge for its own sake, in a way that is disciplined only by the knowledge of knowledge (what we learned about the meaning and purpose of information and knowledge, and about their relationship with truth and reality), which the academic tradition has been developing since antiquity. Wherever the free-yet-disciplined pursuit of knowledge took us, we followed. And as we pointed out in the opening paragraphs of this website, by highlighting the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest,
it was this free pursuit of knowledge that led to the last "great cultural revival".
We asked:
Could a similar advent be in store for us today?
The key to the answer is in the state of the art of the knowledge of knowledge, and that's what we focus on.
To see the answer, we follow the lead that Stephen Toulmin left us in the above excerpt, quoted from his last book, "Return to Reason". At the point where the modern university was taking shape, it was the Church and the tradition that had the prerogative of telling the people how to conduct their daily affairs and what to believe in. And as the image of Galilei in house arrest might suggest—they held onto that prerogative most firmly! And yet the censorship and the prison were incapable of stopping a new way to explore the world, an idea whose time had come—to transpire from astrophysics where it originated, and transform all sides of our daily reality.
It is therefore natural that at the universities, we consider the curation of this approach to knowledge to be our role in our society. At the universities, we are the heirs and the custodians of a tradition that has historically led to some of the most spectacular evolutionary leaps in human history. Naturally, we remain faithful to that tradition. We do that by meticulously conforming to the methods and the themes of interests of mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, sociology, philosophy and other traditional academic disciplines, which, we believe, embody the highest standards of knowledge. People can learn practical skills at professional schools. It is the university education and the university education alone that can give them up-to-date knowledge of knowledge—and the ability to pursue knowledge in the right way in any domain.
We must ask:
Can the evolution of the academic tradition continue still further?
Can it once again give us a completely new way to explore the world?
Can the free pursuit of knowledge, curated by the knowledge of knowledge, once again lead to "a great cultural revival" ?
Can "a great cultural revival" begin at the university?