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I believe we are failing to address some fundamental assumptions about the situation that this planet faces. It is a responsibility of all who are attempting to change the world to address every assumption and to refuse to build a new world on assumptions that have not been followed through to their conclusions.
I am currently a student on an MA course in Sustainable Development Advocacy. During the initial month of the course I repeatedly raised what appear to be to be two major unchallenged assumptions about forms and scales of human organisation, human ecology, and their relationship with sustainability. This was in the context of a range of dependent but easier questions. And of course you guessed it, the assumptions were generally stepped over in pursuit of the easier questions: let’s build our new house without any foundations for now since they are the hard part – we’ll somehow find a way to squeeze them in later!
So let me try to get these assumptions out:
Civilisation is good – the Ascent of Man. Err, I don’t agree. It could be good or bad depending on what is to be achieved with it. Let’s talk further before reaching conclusions.
Human organisation in terms of civilisation’s strongly hierarchical socio-economic structure is inviolable. Err, no. such hierarchies must continue to grow or they will naturally collapse (Jeff Vail – Hierarchy Must Grow and is Unsustainable). This is not only true of capitalism which is also strongly hierarchical (economists understand that infinite economic growth is essential to capitalism) but the whole of our socio-economic organisation. In fact it is intractably a partner of the population problem so lets give it the same prominence and discuss it as such!
Agrarian life is a ‘hair shirt’. Not today it ain’t. With or without books and internet human society has enough knowledge now that we could live comfortably in a permacultural existence if – no group is permitted to source staple resources outside of its bioregion and if – non-hierarchical principles of organisation are applied (e.g. locally legitimate authority and distributed democratic processes such as anarcho-syndicalism). Why are we accepting the ‘hair shirt’ assertion so very easily?
An urban, techologically based way of life is what we desire and its absence – a non-civilised life – is a “war of all against all” and thus “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Well, civilisation achieves these descriptors with its ever increasing dependency, through war driven by those at the top of the hierarchy and hence most dependent, on imported resources from other peoples’ communities. And those who live outside civilisation, peoples who never experienced The Fall, those in no need of salvation, would not understand what Hobbes was saying. Hobbes point of view came from within the culture of civilisation (which IMHO due to the lack of natural population control is the cause of bellum omnium contra omnes!). Such classical perspectives on nature and man were built on civilised culture making assumptions and misinterpreting Judeo-Christian history of the birth of civilisation and Eden: a misconception of Genesis in the bible itself – See Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Those premises have clouded our view of what civilisation is for millennia. Hobbes, a product of classical culture, would not understand the perspective of a pastoral or hunter-gatherer culture. Let’s continue to discuss!
Unless we challenge such fundamental assumptions, in particular assumptions about what civilisation is and what it does, assumptions that seem to many people to be set in stone, then we are not going to solve the sustainability problem but will simply whitewash over the core problem so that future generations, and Gaia, have to deal with them. We must take responsibility for the hard questions, today.
In the area of social sciences in which I am specialised we tend to view some global macrosphere events such as the credit crunch and general economics as a wild area in which the unpredictable can sneak up and wipe out long-term gains overnight. We call this the 1:106 problem: How do we predict the one in a million, but highly significant and potentially catastrophic, event in a wild world?
My area of specialism is on people’s state of situation awareness or SA in dynamic real-world situations of scale variability. One of my current areas of research (2001-) has been to develop ways of teaching people strategies for maintaining better SA or for enhancing the way in which a group develops shared SA – and my conclusions so far (congruent with Taleb, 2006) are that SA depends on principles of attention switching across modes (contexts), intuitive-rational interplay, and mental simulation, all within a process of suspending drilling-down or action until the most appropriate moment. That most appropriate ‘moment’, in psychological-social terms, seems to be perceptible from relationships between patterns of data rather than from the particular patterns themselves – joining the dots; systems thinking – holistic thinking? This can be most appropriately called ‘ecological thinking’ where it is the links and relationships that are key rather than the specifics, whether those be abstracted means or abstracted concepts of attractor-nodes; both of which are not properties of reality but properties of the mind making sense of the world.
In any given situation some of us are more aware of current events and likely future events than are others. Experts tend to have better SA, but only certain kinds of experts have the best SA; these appear to be the experts who have both the knowledge and the know-how in a wild world rather than in an assumed world of central tendencies and discrete ‘things’ (C.f. Taleb, 2006 who predicted the banking crisis). These experts can respond automatically and with a high degree of accuracy in building advantage against a complex environment in some required context, and can also come out of the automatic when attention must be effortfully redirected to some certain focus or context for such advantage.
Such experts’ experts can also experience strong processes of psychological flow and unflappable relaxation as they maintain ‘metacognition’ while switching between conscious and unconscious processing. I feel that what psychologists mystically call meta cognition is really a way of alluding to a lack of distinction between consciousness in the person and consciousness in the world when a person is able to read the reality of the external world; learning to ride the world as a benign master between limits of equilibrium but to maximise benefit wherever possible to the self within the limits of the self – in the knowledge that eventually the advantage will be lost but for the present a game is won.
The experts’ experts are good at sitting in the waiting room of uncertainty and holding their water until the right confluence of factors emerge for a desired win. The context can be the global situation, or sub-contexts, or even ‘out-of-the-box’ new perspectives – a thinking style that relates more closely to structures seen in network theory, Mandelbrotian maths, and their consequent narratives rather than with Gaussian measurement methods. Real experts are up at the edge of the competition-cooperation paradox looking over the horizon to glimpses of true reality. They have what we tend to call wisdom, they are closer to mystics than professors, they know that their main task is not to manage the known and mundane but to be vigilant in order to identify the unknown unknowns that are waiting around the corner with a sting in the tail.
You never truly get there
Those unknown unknowns can be predicted to emerge when certain processes occur in linkages between patterns. I am currently working on artificial intelligence (AI; connectionist modelling) processes that highlight such changes and bring them to the attention of a system operator either in real-time simulators, real system control, or in data mining techniques such as social network analysis. But it is only a way of maximising cumulative advantage, squeezing the tiniest extra bit of cognitive performance out of the computational machine. Somewhat odd since I am not a competitive person myself; I hate playing to win. But we will never get to 100 percent, not in the lifetime of this universe with its physical laws, even set as beautiful and elegant as they are.
Experts try though. They are dynamic, they continue to scan the data, system, airspace, society, for emerging risks, whereas novices lock-on to the most salient current risk and do not move their cognition effectively across events in order to see emerging patterns from different perspectives. The best experts are always scanning, interpreting, tracking events from past to present and back again, consciously and unconsciously, and they do not have firmly fixed ideas about the future. The best experts are round not square. They are looking for salient relationships between events, not the events themselves, for areas of risk to be attended to. In my models the maths are nothing spectacular but what is novel is configuration to measure dynamically changing contexts and relationships between contexts – a combination of connectionist modelling and iterative multi-dimensional scaling is the basis of the method.
Free your mind
Fixed ideas and the search for certainty are very much the domain of classical thought not the realm of wholistic nature and certainly not at the supra-atomic scale. The reifying of Kantian categories, that are more likely emergent properties, into theories of human nature is one area in which classical thought has been misapplied from physical sciences to more complex behaviours of nature such as those found in social science.
Our heritage, and partly innate use, of classical thinking in order to reduce uncertainty means that we are increasingly living in what Taleb calls Mediocristan, in which the world appears more predictable and certain than it is due to the projection of classically derived theory and logical positivism onto the real world. In reality Taleb argues that we live in Extremistan where unknown unknowns abound free of measurement. We are only looking at what is measured-classified!
Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan makes the argument in the context of theory development in social sciences (particularly areas like economics) that we should avoid drilling down in focus when our classical thinking bias has directed us to look at the current most-likely event. This is because in a real, complex non-linear world the current most likely event is just that – both current and measured. Without knowing what is unmeasured (because we have no context from which to measure other than unknown!) we cannot predict the impact of future low probability events in a dynamic complex wild system.
We need to maintain nuance, and a sense of uncertainty, about the conjunction of present events and our anticipation of future events. This is the true expert who flies by the seat of his/er pants while keeping their sharp mind flashing across concurrent multiple contexts. Taleb’s book is well worth a read, I agree wholly with its thesis regarding how best to stay aware and ahead, it offers the reader some tips (applicable to individuals and shared cognitive settings) on how to achieve this state of action-decision-action mental equilibrium.
So what has this to do with sustainability?
Well, almost everything. It appears that our education system, our institutions of action and thought, our governance, our overall systems of civilisation, are based mostly on processes of classical thinking. This has resulted in the notion that if (apparent) problems are isolated and then solved sequentially then the Ascent of Man will continue unabated. This has resulted in the notion that Leviathan is infallible, the only alternative to the untested, and hence the only option despite its crumbling foundations. Institutional processes adhere very strongly to this kind of information processing.
If the economy is understood and fixed in isolation, then economic growth will continue, despite the sciences based around ecological understanding and physics telling us that the problems of economics cannot occur in isolation. Economists are in charge at present and their theories about the interplay of the individual, society, and environment are therefore in the foreground – we are all being invited at present to drill-down into the problems of the economy to the neglect of many many other contexts. The true experts and the wise among us will be standing back and joining the dots – looking at the big picture and seeing that the problem is far more complex.
However, unlike Taleb I am of the mind that experts, social science experts who look at multiple contexts and interactions holistically, can help by identifying and targeting multiple nodes in the system that are critical to the overall problem. For me the problem is one of specialisms driven by reified classical ideas versus broad ecologically driven complex process thinking. I predict that it is within the habitat of institutions that you will find the former and in the wild leftfield ecology where you will find the latter.
If there is such a class of people known as the Illuminati elite then this is what they will be doing right now: scanning the Big Picture, looking at its nuances and emerging properties for opportunities – and rigging the game, constructing the ludos from first principles of incremental and cumulative advantage. Such advantage is anathema to grass-roots empowerment and human diversity – get this one point – we all end up following the classically predicated standards set by the leaders, we can all end up playing the game created by the leaders’ rules.
Likewise but on the inverse, ecologists and sustainability thinkers-actors (philopraxists) are trying to draw society’s attention to the interaction of problems and how those interactions can be broken or remedied as appropriate. In the latter case there are no rules, no standards, no qualifications or best methods, no specialisms, just interconnections and qualitative interpretations. However, few want to step outside the comfort of conformity into this alternative world of ecological-economic-social uncertainty.
Ecological thinking then is the ability to switch contexts in pursuit of patterns that are interconnected across contexts. Walking through wild nature our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have done just that, people from non-developed or primitive societies tend to do just that.
It’s our Western educated population that has been entranced by the certainties of classical (Taleb calls it Platonic) thinking after the tradition of Platonism vs. aPlatonism and the emergence of what appears to be a Mediocristan-of-certainty but which is really an Extremistan of stacked-up political-economic power but riddled with potential catastrophes (e.g. the banking crisis that Taleb predicted) and opportunities that are only seen by the few – i.e., the freemen elites versus the counter-culture subversives – who are empowered to step outside that thinking mode.
Furthermore, in my view classical thinking has led to the idea that there is a best way in any specialisation – standardisation – and hence the growth in socio-economic hierarchy based around economic and social centralisation. We are a monoculture – our eggs are in the basket called society and culture (Derrick Jensen’s Culture of Make Believe) and it is becoming ever less diverse. This economic centralisation is a highly fragile and the eggs are becoming ever more tasteless. The Culture of Make Believe is almost synonymous with Taleb’s idea of Mediocristan.
We can define the other way of thinking, the non-classical mode of thought, non-theorising imaginative use of attention and creative problem solving, direct perception, as eco-thinking. It is an imperative for the coming Ecological Age. It is supported by the experiences of the eco-therapy movement: take people out of the context of Western institutionalised social structures and put them on farms and amid nature and their mental-physical state improves; and they see the world more holistically and from the bottom-up. They are back in their natural environment where they can exhibit their natural tendency for eco-thinking, perceiving the natural world and their self as an interconnected whole rather than as a set of categories or variables.
Somehow we all need to shift to this mode of thinking if humans and planet are to be reconciled.
Do you still think that Peak Oil is nonsense?
Do you think that the End of Suburbia is a fantasy?
Now, if you are waking up to the reality that most sane people have recognised for the past decade (and many visionaries pointed to 3-4 decades ago) then may I have your ear for the next message:
Oil is a minor part of the overall problem. Yes, oil has created the technologically based way of life we take for granted, fuelled the agricultural revolution, but also brought us rapidly to the point where we’ll have to do without it. We have squandered it.
The next problem is how to repair the 25% of topsoil that we have deliberately washed into the oceans. I hope George Bush has it in his prayers because there is no technological answer to that one.
We have moved from Agrarian to Industrial civilisation, now in the throes of the information age, but our only real hope is a transformation to a horticultural civilisation (while retaining our current ability to communicate globally) and while leaving the rest of nature to go wild, to heal, if we humans are to have any chance of survival one hundred years from now.
Without fossil fuel based fertilisers (and oil to fuel the farm machinery) our only extant option for feeding our populations is a new agricultural revolution in which we repair the ecosystem from our backyard outwards, from the bottom up, not from some complex remote sensing satellite. We could all start today by putting our shit in the soil in the yard rather than washing it out to sea. It’s so simple but from a human motivation point of view it sounds absurd. We have to convince millions of nature deprived people that soil under the finger nails is civilised – against hundreds if not thousands of years of enculturation against nature. George Bush, give us a technological answer to this problem please?
And before you respond, Peak Uranium will quickly follow Peak Oil. If we go down the nuclear route without a safety net then it will confirm my suspicion that the human race just isn’t fitted for this planet.
The coming horticultural revolution will mean that we have to live our lives and consume, and take responsibility for this planet, locally. The permacultural village, with the best of human knowledge to date, with global communications, may just give us a chance.
Any alternatives to offer?
I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process. The applied theories of politics, economics and industry have made a sick society; it is time for new approaches. We live in the post-industrial world, and have an immense amount of sophisticated information and technology which enables us to exchange information while living in a village situation. -Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture (1991)
Villagisation
Swadeshi. A simpler, more spiritual, communal life… is rooted in the village. Swadeshi is that spirit in us which requires us to serve our immediate neighbours before others, and to use things produced in our community in preference to those more remote. So doing, we serve humanity to the best of our capacity. -M.K.Ghandi
Drugs mess-up your head. This message is carried explicitly or implicitly within every warning on illegal drugs. The warnings are very rarely placed alongside a balanced description of their benefits. If this were the case we would see: ‘Sometimes drugs mess-up your head, and sometimes they help solve your mental problems’. However, when have you ever seen that realistic message portrayed by the government or mainstream media?
The reason we are rarely told about the psychological benefits of drugs – apart from the promotion of legal and costly pharmaceuticals – is that governments and medical professionals are finding it very hard to reverse the decades of negative spin that they have applied to the subject. So they continue in the vein: ‘Drugs screw you up’.
In contrast with this dogma, grass-roots drug reform movements have long known that simple dichotomies presented by governments and right-wing campaigners are unhelpful and often seriously wrong. It’s not their fault of course, because governments are by their very nature incapable of thinking in complex ways and presenting complex messages. An issue has to be binary for them because they are dumb and reactionary. As for anti-drugs campaigners I make no comment.
Cannabis appears to be useful in helping to treat chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, gastrointestinal tract disorders and HIV/AIDS. It is also claimed that cannabinoids play a protective role in the brain, slowing the rate of disease. Studies have shown it to slow the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice – lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia and in another study THC destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats. Notably a recent epidemiological study found no greater incidence of lung cancer among cannabis smokers than among those who did not smoke cannabis – potentially due to the anti-cancer properties cancelling out the effects of tar or due to its expectorant effect producing mucous which may catch the tar and lift it from the lungs before damage occurs. Most recently, a study has shown it is far more effective than available Alzheimer drugs to halt the disease’s progression. It has also been found to be related to new cell growth deep in the brain’s memory areas. Cannabis appears to be a drug of significant medical utility as well as a drug that some people abuse.
The medical benefits of cannabis may also be psychological. Hallucinogen researcher Charles Grob says that ‘psychedelic drugs have the potential to alter modern medicine’. Charles Grob is editor of “Hallucinogens: A Reader” and recently co-edited, with Roger Walsh, “Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.” Cannabis as a hallucinogen has the effect of promoting direct perception alongside relaxation. This potent combination for behavioural change and self-awareness is only one of the ways in which a person can be helped to provide him or herself with psychotherapy.
Endogenously created psychological change and personal growth is ideal because it is controlled by the patient and permits introspective analysis of the person’s problem as well as presenting unique creative solutions for those problems. Quite often mental problems are based on incorrect perceptions of the world (e.g., depression) and can be alleviated by altering the perceptual frame. As cannabis becomes more accepted as a medicine we can expect to see greater use of both its biological and psychological properties.
Midsummer and the garden is starting to green, what happened to the Sping? Nevermind. It is time for the summer fields. The time when our peoples naturally migrated to pastures and meeting grounds where they enjoyed the summer in fluid cities of human culture. One remnant of this tradition is the summer festival, now undergoing something of a renaissance in British popular culture.
Could the summer fields be returning? Well, perhaps yes, but always under a fluttering capitalist flag. Tonight I hope to go to Stonehenge Solstice to drum and celebrate the dawning of the longest day. There is no longer a festival at the site, since the government got twitchy at the idea of a free festival unfettered by capitalist exploitation. However, we are now allowed to return to Stonehenge with acoustic instruments and by processing in orderly rows rather than synergistic crowds.
We have to find a way to take back the summer fields for our own purposes, under democratic and self-organising rather than capitalist principles, for people to really enjoy and understand what society can be like when it happens spontaneously and freely under summer sun in beautiful places. See Stonehenge Solstice 2007
