Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes 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.

By depicting our society as a bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation.

Modernity ideogram

We need new 'headlights'

The way we see the world

The COVID-19 crisis and its fallout reminded us once again of the connectedness and the vulnerability of the human world. And of the importance of those 'headlights'. This crisis was still a relatively minor disturbance—compared to the irreversible changes that are expected to result from, for instance, the climate change. Shall we, in the absence of true understanding, resort to age-old scapegoating and blamede "the lazy people on welfare", the immigrant workers, the 1%, the blacks or the whites? Or shall we see our situation in a way that will empower us to resolve it truly, by finding a new course?

We have 'candles' as 'headlights'

How exactly we ended up with a dysfunctional and obsolete way of comprehending the world is illuminating, and we must return to it, however briefly.

Around the middle of the 19th century, our societies began to change by a landslide: Our countries became democracies, our worldviews became scientific and secular, and our lifestyles became mechanized and modern. The way we looked at the world also changed—and then for about a century remained frozen!

During that century, our academic understanding of things of course continued to evolve. But it remained confined to disciplines, which grew and got fragmented into subspecialties, until they lost contact not only with the world at large, but also with one another. Entire academic fields failed to communicate to the world even their most basic insights.

Massive academic publishing made things worse.

And so did the new media, which got appropriated by commercial and superficial actors—who used them to appropriate the public's attention.

Neil Postman described the situation that resulted as follows:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

Neil Postman

The KF proposal

The goal of knowledge federation is to restore agency to information, and power to knowledge.

Imagine us as a collection of academic 'cells' who mutated in a new way. Having perceived our society as a bus with candle headlights, we perceived ourselves as (part of) those headlights. Naturally, we began to self-organize differently—to become 'lightbulbs', not 'candles'!

We understood, in other words, that we must use our creativity in a new way; not by merely observing and reporting—but by being and acting differently.

Knowledge federation concretely

We are proposing to establish knowledge federation as a new academic field, and a real-life praxis.

As a new academic field, knowledge federation will (as "applied research") be the 'headlights', and turn academic and other relevant insights into shared vision; and also (as "basic research") create the 'headlights' (the way information and knowledge are handled in our society), and continue to create them continuously, to keep them in sync with relevant insights, technology, and our society's needs.

As a way to operationalize this proposal, we offer to

• establish knowledge federation as a transdiscipline—for which the Knowledge Federation prototype (detailed on these pages) is offered as a detailed explanation and template
• develop the holotopia as a real-life initiative to change the way we as society see and handle our larger situation at hand, and information and knowledge in particualr—by developing the Holotopia prototype, which is described here

An application

The Club of Rome's assessment of the situation we are in, provided us with a benchmark challenge for developing the Holotopia prototype. Four decades ago—based on a decade of this global think tank's research into the future prospects of mankind, in a book titled "One Hundred Pages for the Future"—Aurelio Peccei issued the following warning:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Aurelio Peccei

Peccei also specified what needed to be done to "change course":

"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

This conclusion, that our present crisis has cultural roots and must be handled accordingly, Peccei shared with a number of twentieth century's thinkers. Arne Næss for instance, Norway's esteemed philosopher, reached it on different grounds, and called it "deep ecology".

In "Human Quality", Peccei assessed our contemporary situation as follows:

"Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world."

The Club of Rome insisted that lasting solutions would not be found by focusing on specific problems, but by transforming the condition from which they all stem, which they called "problematique".