You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'peace' tag.
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.
The current US administration seems shamelessly intent on crushing Iran in the same way that it has crushed Iraq, in pursuit of its own ends. Iran is a soveriegn state that doesn’t have a brutal dictator in charge, but the US has nuclear proliferation as its excuse this time.
Can you let the US government attack an otherwise peaceful country like Iran? Watch this Flash video Why isn’t the US government focusing with all good faith on peaceful diplomacy? If the US gets away with it again, then wherever you live on the planet your own peace and security will be threatened too because they simply won’t stop at dominating the Middle-East. Get on the Peace Train
Centralisation of fossil fuel based power: terrorism/war, energy supply, climate change. Centralisation of cultural power, e.g. the television: fragmenting societies. Globalisation: the centralisation of resource, political, and other forms of power. In response, the internet as an unregulated and (so far) decentralised cultural and social system is breathing new life into the efforts of those of us who are, to varying extents, distancing ourselves from centralised power.
An important (the most important?) question arising on the net concerns the potential end of civilisations as we know them. Many people who are developing ideas surrounding, and solutions for, global social and population collapse are putting those ideas out on paper. Jared Diamond’s Collapse is but one of hundreds if not thousands of books on the topic of global human/environmental collapse, dealing with the questions governments either don’t want to face, or are attempting to address covertly (and probably ineffectually) because the conclusions are too unpalatable for the public. There is no doubt also that the minds of the security and intelligence services are also focusing on these issues.
In this context Derrick Jensen [1] argues that the only solution to our civilisation’s collapse (known as civ among dissenters) is to cut its vital resource organs in order to force localisation of power. This is necessary because, Derrick argues, existing hierarchical civilisation will continue rampaging til the end, beyond the point of no return and a mass extinction. The rebirth of a similar society is possible… that is, if enough people survive. We simply do not know how much of a ‘nuclear winter’ there might be after all the coal, oil and gas have been burnt but there is the potential that no mammal may survive, apart from the frightened little mouse-like creatures who survived the dinosaurs’ apocalypse. Or, maybe only the ants will survive. That is a potential reality. Derrick argues that the solution is, for those who have awoken to the enormity of the problem, to dismantle and disrupt the systems of the hierarchical civ and hence give societies time to adapt to a low-impact lifestyle, only it will not be called lifestyle and will not be in glossy magazines. It will be lifestyle under the fingernails.
Civilisation is an expression of a system in full feed-forward mode, driven by the application of agricultural production for surplus and enabled by a pocket of fossil fuel, which may now be at its peak of output before declining over this century. Note that we believe agricultural production probably to be around 12,000 years old, and that the use of fossil fuels at current scale has only been occurring in the last 150 years. Coal has been mined since 50BCE; oil/gas has been drilled for from about 400CE and was used to pave the streets of Baghdad with asphalt by 800CE, and was being pumped through pipelines by 1000CE. Marco Polo saw ‘hundreds of shiploads’ worth of oil being pumped from the wells. This is valuable stuff. Oil has been used at its current scale since 1846, and this coincided with the increased use of coal. We can see the roots of climate change in exponential growth of the industrial revolution, which brought together different kinds of fossil fuels, and later made possible complex chemicals from the by-products of those fuels which now artificially feed crops. Thus, when the oil runs out, green production will also decrease. Western industrialised civilisation is insecurely predicated on finite fossil fuel.
We are now at a point where we have realised that the oil we are using to maintain our current lifestyle is about to start declining in availability. At the very same time, other emerging economies are now able to afford oil and coal and they are demanding it. They also have increasing wealth to pay for it. £20 or $30 per gallon of fuel is not a possibility, it is inevitable under the free marker laws of supply and demand. How would you function if every mile you travel in a car costs $1 or if heating your home cost $30 a day? How would you afford this if wages fell to $100 per week? As fuel costs increase we will be faced with becoming heavily industrially and agriculturally labour intensive – think of the conditions in factories in the developing countries and you are imagining what could potentially happen in Europe, North America and Australia. If you are in your thirties or forties now, with a lifespan of perhaps 80 years, just imagine what your last decade could be like living in the conditions faced by the majority of people in China. This is a realistic projection.
Each year that goes by the cost of fossil-fuel energy for developing renewable energy infrastructure will rocket from for example $1 trillion to $10 trillion in a decade. The green revolution, which was powered by oil-based artificial chemicals and transport networks, will retract, making food scarcer again. The production required in order to equip everyone with wind, wave and solar renewables would put as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere fossil fuels as we have done already since the industrial revolution.
If we don’t engage all our resources now, in future we will need to learn to live on the few watts of electricity that can be provided with a small area of solar panels or a family sized roof-top wind turbine. Furthermore, if we don’t drastically reduce consumption to such levels the effects on climate change are truly scary. Billions will die as tropical regions turn to deserts, killing off the rainforests and releasing a significant part of the carbon sink, making the situation even worse. Wars will be fought over resources. We are already at the brink of war between several African nations due to water source disputes. The implication is that when today’s healthy and well-fed 30-40 year old Westerner is 70 a life of hard physical existence awaits.
We have a choice, all of us now. Many don’t know they have this choice, others have already taken it for a variety of reasons. The Amish people of the North Eastern US live and farm in a strict interpretation of Christian values. They do not approve of rising above God’s earth, so any form of technology and sophistication is avoided . They exist simply, and I have no doubt with a far lower dependency on the earth’s resources or pollution of Gaia in return. There is also a modern and scientific system for maximising human and agricultural existence with the minimum impact on the earth, known as Permaculture [2]. Permaculture argues that we can all exist based in small communities with our food resources all around us, and without fossil fuel energy. In a permaculture, human culture, agriculture and the environment are all in balanced. Multiple closed loops (both socially and agriculturally) cycle energy and resources, and human cultural and political power, locally. There are no doubt many traditional communities in parts of the world who exist in this balanced way, and there are ‘intentional communities’ in the industrialised West who exist under permaculture principles. These communities probably don’t have TV’s: why would anyone burn 200w of electricity to see other people when the local community, like the earth it exists on, produces so much home grown culture, knowledge, and entertainment?
A society somewhat akin to the Amish and communities currently practising permaculture might arise naturally if enough time is available, and I suppose this is one of the aims of those who would want to dismantle civ; to give us enough time for humanity to reorganise away from fossil fuel and the centralised power it permits. The more successful community (or node) would probably be based the permaculture method since it is not averse to technology, but embraces technologies not based on oil and profligacy, and reusing resources locally in novel ways.
Jeff Vail [3] argues that unless something is done to prevent hierarchy from taking hold again there is no point in trying to force civ to decrease its voracity for the planet. Jeff argues that rhizomes [4] are the natural state or order, civilisation is an imbalance in the natural order. Derrick Jensen argues that industrialisation is the problem. Jeff argues that agriculture is the problem. I think that Jeff has it right about agricultural production for surplus, as Marx did before him (by the way Jeff works in intelligence so he’s probably good at spotting emerging patterns). Derrick argues that we are going to kill off most of the human species (and most of the other species) unless civ is stopped, and there are plenty of examples in his book A Language Older then Words.
However, I think that industrialisation is merely a symptom and that it is agriculture and fossil fuel that are the drivers of civ. If I am right then the projected decrease in fossil fuel availability will force us towards low impact living (and hard physical labour). We are going to face a gradual process for the industrialised West, a process that James Kunstler call the Long Emergency. This is in contrast with some pretty awful events that are to happen (and already happening) in countries affected by global warming. Many of those events will also directly affect the industrialised West. The people of the Middle-East and North Africa will be wanting to enter Europe, and the people of an area including Central America and the Southern US will be wanting to enter the Northen US. Their progress will be slow, over decades, and will be mediated by war and civil war.
On the whole though, those of us in our comfortable temperate countries are going to face a future of complete economic downturn over decades, as fuel becomes more expensive and as people turn away from complex technology and non-renewable energy, and as we find more sustainable and efficient applications of our current human knowledge. Permaculture is both a workable way to become sustainable, and it is the natural conclusion for human society which has scientific and cultural knowledge. Knowledge, without fossil fuel to permit it to be used under centralised power, must be applied to simple technologies which produce cause and effect cycles only at local nodes of the rhizome. There simply won’t be enough quick-release energy to cause hierarchical civilisation to bubble. The level of sophistication of this balanced state of human existence is debatable. It is debatable whether we would be able to run something like the internet, given the complexity of sub-processes required for it to be of use in the way it is right now in 2006. A telephone system may be possible. Equally, it is questionable as to whether we would want people to be communicating other than through their local rhizome node. To do so would permit a power hierarchy of knowledge – of an intelligence and exploitation culture – to emerge independently of the local control of the anarcho-democracy that rhizomatic tribes would be self-organised into.
A recent debate opened on Derrick Jensen’s discussion list as to whether the Dalai Lama’s Eastern ‘personal compassion’ approach is compatible with Derrick’s assertion that we must ‘take down civ’; that we must all become the change we wish to see by taking responsibility for our immediate actions (Ghandi). We can act for change, and ‘blow up’ the infrastructure that civ depends upon [5], or by default we will be taking part in an apocalyptic genocide. The solution of blowing things up is extreme, but if we accept Ghandi’s teaching that we must become part of the change then it may have greater moral value than to continue to support civ. This discussion offers a glimpse of the reasons why Western governments are so scared of counter-culture and activism that they see them as dangerous radicals: radicals hold morally legitimate opinions that are dangerous to the concept of centralised/hierarchical civ predicated on cheap energy and technology, and there are millions of them. A significant number are probably prepared to act for change and would be convinced they are right to do so because of the evidence that people like Jensen and Vail and hundreds of others are coherently and convincingly articulating. The logic is as compelling to progressive activists, who are emotionally and intellectually alienated from mainstream Western culture, as is a mullah’s words to a young man orphaned by ‘collateral damage’. Terrorism as a response to Western civ will evolve into a War in the Minds played out through centralised power and centralised culture against any attempts to ‘take-down’ civ through illegal or legal means. We will see a diverse range of organisations, some religious fundamentalist, others simply driven by clear moral positions, all taking up a struggle against civ. It won’t be possible to label all these people as terrorists – the public will see the patterns and the moral logic. But if a War in the Minds develops, driven by centralised power and effected by security and intelligence services, then the public may be denied access to information and the communication channels needed in order for society to be aware of what is happening. If you think the news is currently biased then wait til you see what the CIA can do with psyops and cointellpro activities within the mainstream (and alternative) media.
It is to be expected that the security and intelligence services are already beginning to infiltrate progressive activism groups in order to prepare the ground for War in the Minds. It is also likely that extremist activist groups are plotting to commit acts of destruction or even violence against people in order to attack civ. However, I just don’t think either side need bother. The supply and demand of oil and the extent of climate change due to use of fossil fuel are going to be the deciding factors in the future of the human race. You can play at War in the Mind and you can play at terrorism/freedom fighting but none of it will change the facts.
We do not need to choose between violence and being part of the problem; these are both part of the problem if we take the Dalai Lama’s personal compassion perspective. We will slowly be forced to (or wisely prepare for) to a return living in balance in Gaia or we will perish. This will force an evolution in human society, changes that are already being outlined in Vail’s and Jensen’s critiques of current human society and power. We can become a part of the solution by getting off-the-grid, going back to the land in intentional and intelligent communities, and by preparing the knowledge banks and library shelves with the best of human culture and useful (non fossil fuel based) technologies before the internet goes out.
We do not need to be violent or destructive towards civ, instead we should take the best of what it has to offer and transfer scientific and social knowledge towards systems like intentional communities and permaculture – turn the forces of civ into forces for good. The sooner we do this the more complex the technologies we will be able to transfer. If we leave it until the brink of collapse there may be no time and we will all go back to the stone age – literally. This is how to be a part of the solution – to lead the way immediately and prepare the ground for the millions who eventually will be forced to follow us. You can do something today by getting hard copy information, off the internet, out of libraries, on your bookshelves and begin to understand how to live like people did before we had oil – but more intelligently, using the best of current scientific and technical knowledge.
If the intelligence and security services and their agents, who are not doubt at work within progressive activism communities preparing the War in the Minds battlefield, really want to do something positive for human society in the next few decades they will not work against progressive activism. Instead, they will work with us all to turn away from the pointless conflicts of history and now anachronistic concept of centralised power based on finite cheap/free energy. They will work within the media and use cointellpro techniques to get the message and mantra of sustainability into the minds of every person in the world. In doing so they will be a part of the solution.
- Derrick Jensen http://www.derrickjensen.org/
- Permaculture: A system of sustainable and intelligently applied low eco-impact living. Permaculture means permanent agriculture and permanent human culture where energy and cultural power are used within local cycles. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren
- Jeff Vail A Theory of Power
- Rhizome: a system of nodes with power distributed more-or-less evenly across them rather than power being unequally distributed hierarchically (c.f. Western linear cause and effect v Eastern complex cycles of nature).
- The writer makes no assertion that anyone should blow up anything. This statement is provided as an example of the kind of consensus that people are coming to on Derrick Jensen’s discussion list.
