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Contents
Introducing our initiative
A historical parallel
To understand the vision that motivates our initiative, think about the world at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. Recall the devastating religious wars, terrifying epidemics... Bring to mind the iconic image of the scholastics discussing "how many angels can dance on a needle point". And another iconic image, of Galilei in house arrest a century after Copernicus, whispering "and yet it moves" into his beard.
Observe that the problems of the epoch were not resolved by focusing on those problems, but by a slow and steady development of an entirely new approach to knowledge. Several centuries of accelerated and sweeping evolution followed. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?
Our discovery
"If I have seen further," Sir Isaac Newton famously declared, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." The point of departure of our initiative was a discovery. We did not discover that the best ideas of our best minds were drowning in an ocean of glut. Vannevar Bush, a giant, diagnosed that nearly three quarters of a century ago. He urged the scientists to focus on that disturbing trend and find a remedy. But needless to say, this too drowned in glut.
What we did find out, when we began to develop and apply knowledge federation as a remedial praxis, was that now just as in Newton's time, the insights of giants add up to a novel approach to knowledge. And that just as the case was then, the new approach to knowledge leads to new ways in which core issues are understood and handled.
Our strategy
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality", observed Buckminster Fuller. "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” So we built knowledge federation as a model (or technically a prototype) of a new way to work with knowledge (or a paradigm); and of a new institution (the transdiscipline) that is capable of developing this new new approach to knowledge in academic and real-life practice.
By sharing this model we do not aim at conclusive answers. Our aim is indeed much higher – it is to open up a creative frontier where the ways in which knowledge is created and used, and more generally the ways in which our creative efforts are directed, are brought into focus and continuously recreated and improved.
Introducing knowledge federation
Knowledge federation is just knowledge creation
As our logo might suggest, knowledge federation means 'connecting the dots' – combining disparate pieces of information and other knowledge resources into higher-order units of meaning. We borrowed this word from political and institutional federation, where smaller entities are united to achieve higher visibility and impact – while preserving some degree of their identity and autonomy.
What we are calling knowledge federation is just what is commonly done with ideas and documents to turn them into knowledge. You might have an idea in mind – but can you say that you really know it, before you have checked if it's consistent with your other ideas? And with the ideas of others? And even then – can you say that your idea is known before other people have integrated it with their ideas?
Science too federates knowledge; citations and peer reviews are there to secure that. But science does its federation in an idiosyncratic way – by explaining the mechanisms of nature, and the phenomena as their consequence.
Why develop an initiative around such an everyday human activity?
A natural approach to knowledge
What we have undertaken to put in place is what one might call the natural way to federate knowledge; or the natural handling of knowledge. Think on the one side of all the knowledge we own, in academic articles and also broader. Include the heritage of the world traditions. Include the insights reached by creative people daily. Think on the other side of all the questions we need to have answered. Think about the insights that could inform our lives, the rules of thumb that could direct our action. Imagine them occupying distinct levels of generality. The more general an insight is, the more useful it can be. You may now understand knowledge federation as whatever we the people may need to do to maintain, organize, update and keep up to date the various elements of this hierarchy.
Put simply, knowledge federation is the creation and use of knowledge as we may need it – to be able to understand the increasingly complex world around us; to be able to live and act in it in an informed, sustainable or simply better way.
You may think of knowledge federation as a way to liberate science from disciplinary constraints, combine it with what we've learn about knowledge and knowledge work from journalism, art and communication design, and apply the result to illuminate any question or issue where prejudices and illusions still need to be dispelled.
Our vision is of an informed post-traditional or post-industrial society – where our understanding and handling of the core issues of our lives and times reflect the best available knowledge; where knowledge is created and integrated and applied with that goal in mind; and where information technology is developed and used accordingly.
Intermission
Different thinking
We would not be echoing Einstein's familiar adage, if it did not point to the very first step with which our journey together needs to begin.We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
In what ways may our thinking need be different, if we should be able to understand and develop a paradigm?
Slow thinking
First of all, we'll need to give it the time it requires.
Slow thinking is to "same thinking" as slow food is to fast food – it does take a bit more time; but it also gives far better nourishment and digestion. A paradigm being a harmonious yet complex web of relationships, some amount of mental processing is obviously unavoidable.
Systemic thinking
The second characteristic of the new thinking is that it's systemic. We now invite you to pause and reflect about what exactly this may mean; and what practical differences it may make. To help you, we have prepared a very brief intuitive introduction to systemic thinking. It will point to some down-to-earth social realities for you to look at in this new way – and already anticipate what all this may mean concretely.
Knowledge federation introduces itself
Knowledge federation as a language
Science taught us to think in terms of velocities and masses and experiments and natural causes. Knowledge federation too is a way to think and speak.
We'll now let knowledge federation introduce itself in its own manner of speaking.
Before we do that, this brief historical note will help you see why that manner of speaking is just a straight-forward adaptation of conventional science.
Science as a language
The rediscovery of Aristotle (whose works had been preserved by the Arabs) was a milestone in medieval history. But the scholastics used his rational method to only argue the truths of the Scriptures.
Aristotle's natural philosophy was common-sense: Objects tend to fall down; the heavier objects tend to fall faster than the lighter ones. Galilei saw a flaw in this theory and proved it wrong experimentally, by throwing stones from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Galilei – undoubtedly one of Newton's "giants" – also brought mathematics into this affaire: v = gt. The constant g can be measured by an experiment. We can then use the formula to predict precisely what speed v an object will have after t seconds of falling.
This approach to knowledge proved to be so superior to what existed, and so fertile, that it naturally became the standard of excellence that all knowledge was expected to emulate.
A curious-looking mathematical formula
But why use only maths?
Ideograms can be understood as a straight-forward generalization of the language of mathematics. Think of the above example as a curious-looking mathematical formula. Just as Galilei's formula did, this ideogram describes a relationship (called pattern) between two things, represented by the bus and its headlights. But while mathematical formulas can express only quantitative relationships, an ideogram can represent virtually any relationship, even an emotional one.
An ideogram can also express the nature of a situation (for which we use the keyword gestalt)! Imagine us riding in a bus with candle headlights, through dark and unfamiliar terrain and at an accelerating speed. By depicting modernity as a bus with candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram points to an incongruity and a paradox. In our hither-to modernization we have forgotten to modernize something quite essential – and ended up in peril.
But there's a natural remedy!
Unraveling the paradox
What this ideogram expresses is an abstract relationship between two things – the bus and its headlights. This abstract relationship can now be made concrete, and also useful, by assigning a concrete meaning to those two things – just as we do in physics, when we say that v is the velocity of a falling object and t is the elapsed time.
We shall now take advantage of the Modernity ideogram to assign meaning to four new concepts. They will help us explain, in precise terms, how exactly the disquieting situation our image is pointing to can be transformed. If the possibilities we'll be pointing to might seem at first incredible or even preposterous, please be aware that for the moment we are still only explaining an abstract theory. Its relevance and accuracy will need to be confirmed by resorting to experience – which is what we'll be doing in the remainder of this website.
Design epistemology
When we say epistemology we mean the assumptions and values that determine what knowledge we'll consider worth creating and relying on.
To see that the epistemology is at the core of every paradigm, and of the general paradigm we call science in particular, notice that Galilei was not tried for claiming that the Earth was moving. That was just a technical detail. It was his epistemology that got him into trouble – his belief that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. Galilei was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions (Wikipedia).
Can you imagine what the next change on that scale might be like? If we "stand on the shoulders of giants" today – what new epistemology may we be able to foresee?
If you consider the light of the headlights to be information or knowledge, and the headlights to represent the activities by which knowledge is created and applied, then you'll easily understand the answer we are proposing. The design epistemology means considering knowledge and knowledge work as man-made things; and as essential building blocks in a much larger thing, or things, or systems. This new epistemology empowers us to develop knowledge and knowledge work and to apply them and to assess their value based on how well they serve their core roles within larger systems – such as 'showing the way'.
Notice how thoroughly this epistemology reconfigures the value matrix that orients our knowledge work work today. When knowledge is conceived as just pieces in a reality puzzle, then every piece might seem equally relevant, and the media can select whatever its audience may be interested in. But when knowledge is conceived as the light showing us the next curve on the road, then the priorities are entirely different. Relevance, and the nature and the quality of information that provides the right insight and guidance, become core issues.
Furthermore those also become core research issues. The research that is most valued today and considered academically fundamental or "basic" is the one whose aim is to discover the details of the 'puzzle' of nature. In the order of things pointed to by the design epistemology, it is the research whose goal is to construct the core elements of an entirely different puzzle – of the socio-technical system or systems by which knowledge is created and disseminated – that becomes fundamental or basic. And if a physical product of conventional research is an academic article in a reputed academic publication, in this new order of things the creative frontier becomes much broader – and includes any creative act that may bring the process of dissolving the core anomaly a step further.
Knowledge federation
You may now understand knowledge federation as simply a prototype 'headlights'. And as knowledge and knowledge work that follow by consistent application of the design epistemology.
The Modernity ideogram also bears some subtler messages. What we are lacking above all are the 'high beams' – which may show us a long-enough stretch of the road on which we are driving. You may now see the Modernity ideogram as the first example. provides one. This image both provides the view of a situation as a whole, and points to what needs to be done.
There's also this other subtlety: No sequence of improvements of the candle will produce the lightbulb. The resolution of our quest is in the exact sense of the word a paradigm – a fundamentally and thoroughly new way to conceive of knowledge and to organize its handling. To create the lightbulb, we need to know that this is possible. And we also need a model to guide us. You may now understand what's being told here as a description of that model. It's what we need so that we may waste no time trying to improve 'the candle' – when it's really the 'the lightbulb' we should be talking about and creating.
Systemic innovation
If you consider the movement of the bus to be the result of our creative efforts or of "innovation", then systemic innovation is what resolves the paradox that the Modernity ideogram is pointing to. You may understand systemic innovation as informed innovation, as the way we'll innovate when a strong-enough light's been turned on and we see the whole terrain; and where the road we've taken is leading to, and those other roads too.
We practice systemic innovation when our primary goal is to make the whole thing functional or vital or whole. Here "the whole thing" may of course be a whole hierarchy of things, in which what we are doing or creating has a role.
There are two complementary ways to say what systemic innovation is. One is to (focus on the bus and) say that systemic innovation is innovation on the scale of the large and basic socio-technical systems, such as education, public informing, and knowledge work at large. The other one is to (focus on the headlights and) say that systemic innovation is innovation whose primary aim and responsibility is the good condition or functioning or wholeness of the system or systems in which what we are creating has a role. But of course those two definitions are just two ways of saying the same thing.
Here too there's a subtle message. You'll easily understand the reason, why a dramatic improvement in the way we use our capacity to create or innovate is possible, if you just compare the principle the Modernity ideogram is pointing at with the way innovation is directed today. The dollar value of the headlights is course a factor to be considered; but it's insignificant compared to the value of the whole bus (which in reality may be our civilization and all of us in it; or all our technology taken together; or the results of our daily work, which move the 'bus' forward; or whatever else may be organizing our efforts and driving us toward a future). It is this difference in value – between the dollar value of the headlights and the real value of this incomparably larger entity and of all of us in it – that you may bear in mind as systemic innovation's value proposition. The dramatic message of our image is that systemic innovation is what can make the difference between "the whole thing" turning into a mass suicide machine – and a well-functioning vehicle, capable of taking us anywhere we may reasonably want to be.
To see that the change this is pointing to reaches well beyond industrial innovation, to see why we indeed propose systemic innovation as the signature theme of an impending Renaissance-like change, notice that the dollar value is just one of our characteristic oversimplifications, which has enabled us to reduce a complex issue (value) in a complex reality to a single parameter – and then apply rational or 'scientific' thinking to optimize our behavior accordingly.
Guided evolution of society
If you'll consider the movement of the bus to be our society's travel into the future, or in a word its evolution, then guided evolution of society is what resolves the paradox. Our ride into the future, posits the Modernity ideogram, must be illuminated by suitable information. We must both create and use information accordingly.
We took this keyword from Bela H. Banathy, who considered the guided evolution of society to be the second great revolution in our civilization's history – the first one being the agricultural revolution. While in this first revolution we learned to cultivate our bio-physical environment, in the next one we'll learn to cultivate our socio-cultural environment. Here is how Banathy formulated this vision:
We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity, and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.
Summary and highlights
How to read the rest of this website
The first and most important thing you need to know is that what's being presented here is not only or even primarily an idea or a proposal or an academic result. We intend this to be an intervention into our academic and social reality. And more specifically an invitation to a conversation.
And when we say "conversation", we don't mean "just talking". The conversations we want to initiate are intended to build communication in a certain new way, both regarding the media and the manner of communicating, and regarding the themes. We use the dialog – which is a manner of speaking that sidesteps all coercion into a worldview and replaces it by genuine listening, collaboration and co-creation. By conversing in this way we also bring due attention to completely new themes. We evolve a public sphere, or a collective mind, capable of thinking new thoughts, and of developing public awareness about those themes. Here in the truest sense the medium is the message.
The details being presented are intended to ignite and prime and energize those dialogs. And at the same time evolve through those dialogs. In this way we want to prime our collective intelligence with some of the ideas of last century's giants, and then engage it to create insights about the themes that matter.
There are at least four ways in which the four detailed modules of this website can be read.
One way is to see it as a technical description or a blueprint of a new approach to knowledge (or metaphorically a lightbulb). Then you might consider
- Federation through Images as a description of the underlying principle of operation (how electricity can create light that reaches further than the light of fire)
- Federation through Stories as a description of the suitable technology (we have the energy source and the the wiring and all the rest we need)
- Federation through Application as a description of the design, and of examples of application (here's how the lightbulb may be put together, and look – it works!)
- Federation through Conversations as a business plan (here's what we can do with it to satisfy the "market needs"; and here's how we can put this on the market, and have it be used in reality
Another way is to consider four detailed modules as an Enlightenment or next Renaissance scenario. In that case you may read
- Federation through Images as describing a development analogous to the advent of science
- Federation through Stories as describing a development analogous to the printing press (which provided the very illumination by enabling the spreading of knowledge)
- Federation through Applications as describing the next Industrial and technological Revolution, a new frontier for innovation and discovery
- Federation through Conversations as describing the equivalent of the Humanism and the Renaissance (new values, interests, lifestyle...)
The third way to read is to see this whole thing as a carefully argued case for a new paradigm in knowledge work. Here the focus is on (1) reported anomalies that exist in the old paradigm and how they may be resolved in the new proposed one and (2) a new creative frontier, that every new paradigm is expected to open up. Then you may consider
- Federation through Images as a description of the fundamental anomalies and of their resolution
- Federation through Stories as a description of the anomalies in the use and development of information technology, and more generally of knowledge at large
- Federation through Applications as a description or better said of a map of the emerging creative frontier, showing – in terms of real-life prototypes what can be done and how
- Federation through Conversations as a description of societal anomalies that result from an anomalous use of knowledge – and how they may be remedied
And finally, you may consider this an application or a showcase of knowledge federation itself. Naturally, we'll apply and demonstrate some of the core technical ideas to plead our case. You may then read
- Federation through Images as a description and application of ideograms – which we've applied to render fundamental-philosophical ideas of giants accessible, and in effect create a cartoon-like introduction to a novel approach to knowledge
- Federation through Stories brings forth vignettes – which are the kind of interesting, short real-life stories one might tell to a party of friends over a glass of wine, and which enable one to "step into the shoes of a giant" or "see through his eyeglasses"
- ALT...We use vignettes – short, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories – to explain and empower some of the core ideas of daring thinkers. A vignette liberates an insight from the language of a discipline and enables a non-expert to 'step into the shoes' of a leading thinker, 'look through his eye glasses'. By combining vignettes into threads, and threads into higher units of meaning, we take this process of federation all the way to the kind of direction-setting principles we've just been talking about.
- Federation through Applications as a portfolio of prototypes – a characteristic kind of results that suit the new approach to knowledge – which in knowledge federation serve as (1) models (showing how for ex. education or journalism may be different, who may create them and how), (2) interventions (prototypes are embedded in reality and acting upon real-life practices aiming to change them) and (3) experiments (showing us what works and what doesn't).
- Federation through Applications as a small portfolio of dialogs – by which the new approach to knowledge is put to use
Highlights
Instead of providing you an "executive summary", which would probably be too abstract for most people to follow, we now provide a few anecdotes and highlights, which – we feel – will serve better for mobilizing and directing your attention, while already extracting and sharing the very essence of this presentation. As always, we'll use the ideas of giants as 'bread crumbs' to mark the milestones in our story or argument.
Social construction of truth and meaning
Sixty years ago, in "Physics and Philosophy", Werner Heisenberg explained how
the nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people.
He then pointed out how this frame of concepts was too narrow and too rigid for expressing some of the core elements of human culture – which as a result appeared to modern people as irrelevant. And how correspondingly limited and utilitarian values and worldviews became prominent. Heisenberg then explained how modern physics disproved this "narrow frame"; and concluded that
one may say that the most important change brought about by its results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century.
If we now (in the spirit of systemic innovation, and the emerging paradigm) consider that the social role of the university (as institution) is to provide good knowledge and viable standards for good knowledge – then we see that just this Heisenberg's insight alone gives us an obligation – which we've failed to respond to for sixty years.
The substance of Federation through Images is to show how the fundamental insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy allow us to develop a way out of "the rigid frame" – which is a rigorously founded methodology for creating truth and meaning about any issue and at any level of generality, which we are calling polyscopy. You may understand polyscopy as an adaptation of "the scientific method" that makes it suitable for providing the kind of insights that our people and society need, or in other words for knowledge federation. In essence, polyscopy is just a generalization of the scientific approach to knowledge, based on recent scientific / philosophical insights – as we've already pointed out by talking about design epistemology, which is of course the epistemological foundation for polyscopy.
Information technology
You may have also felt, when we introduced knowledge federation as 'the light bulb' that uses the new technology to illuminate the way, that we were doing gross injustice to IT innovation: Aren't we living in the Age of Information? Isn't our information technology (or in other words our civilization's 'headlights') indeed the most modern part of our civilization, the one where the largest progress has been made, the one that best characterizes our progress? In Federation through Stories we explain why this is not the case, why the candle headlights analogy works most beautifully in this pivotal domain as well – by telling the story of Douglas Engelbart, the man who conceived, developed, prototyped and demonstrated – in 1968 – the core elements of the new media technology, which is in common use. This story works on many levels, and gives us a textbook example to work with when trying to understand the emerging paradigm and the paradoxical dynamics around it (notice that we are this year celebrating the 50th anniversary of Engelbart's demo...).
These two sentences were (intended to be) the first slide of Engelbart's presentation of his vision for the future of (information-) technological innovation in 2007 at Google. We shall see that this 'new thinking' was precisely what we've been calling systemic innovation. Engelbart's insight is so central to the overall case we are presenting, that we won't resist the urge to give you the gist of it right away.Digital technology could help make this a better world. But we've also got to change our way of thinking.
The printing press analogy works, because the printing press was to a large degree the technical invention that led to the Enlightenment, by making knowledge so much more widely accessible. The question is what invention may play a similar role in the emerging next phase of our society's illumination? The answer is of course the "network-interconnected interactive digital media" – but there's a catch! Even the printing press (let it symbolize here the Industrial Age and the paradigm we want to evolve beyond) merely made what the scribes were doing more efficient. To communicate, people still needed to write and publish books, and hope that the people who needed what's written in them would find them on a book shelf. But the network-interconnected interactive digital media is a disruption of a completely new kind – it's not a broadcasting device but a "nervous system" (this metaphor is Engelbart's own); it interconnects us people in such a way that we can think together and coordinate our action, just as the cells in a sufficiently complex organism do!
To see that this is not what has happened, think about the "desktop" and the "mailbox" in your computer: The new technology has been used to implement the physical environment we've had around us – including the ways of doing things that evolved based on it. Consider the fact that in academic research we are still communicating by publishing books and articles. Haven't we indeed used the new technology to re-create 'fancy candles'.
To see the difference that makes a difference, imagine that your cells were using your own nervous systems to merely broadcast data! Think about your state of mind that would result. Then think about how this reflects upon our society's state of mind, our "collective intelligence"...
When we apply the Industrial Age efficiency thinking and values, and use the Web to merely broadcast knowledge, augment the volume, reduce the price – then the result is of course information glut. "We are drowning in information", Neil Postman observed! A completely new phase in our (social-systemic evolution) – new division, specialization and organization of the work with information, and beyond – is what's called for, and what's ahead of us.
There are in addition several points that spice up the Engelbart's history, which are the reasons why we gave it the name (in the Federation through Stories) "the incredible story of Doug):
- Engelbart saw this whole new possibility, to give our society in peril a whole new 'nervous system', already in 1951 – when there were only a handful of computers in the world, which were used solely for numerical scientific calculations (he immediately decided to dedicate his career to this cause
- Engelbart was unable to communicate his vision to the Silicon Valley – even after having been recognized as The Valley's "giant in residence" (think about Galilei in house arrest...)
So the simple conclusion we may draw from this story is that to draw real benefits from information technology, systemic innovation must replace the conventional reliance on the market. And conversely – that the contemporary information technology is an enabler of large-scale systemic change, because it's been conceived to serve that role.
Innovation and the future of the university
Fifty years ago Erich Jantsch made a proposal for the university of the future, and made an appeal that the university take the new leadership role which, as he saw it, was due.
[T]he university should make structural changes within itself toward a new purpose of enhancing the society’s capacity for continuous self-renewal.
Suppose the university did that. Suppose that we opened up the university to take such a leadership role. What new ways of working, results, effects... could be achieved? What might this new creative frontier look like, what might it consist of, how may it be organized?
The technique demonstrated here is the prototypes – which are the characteristic products of systemic innovation. Here's a related question to consider: If we should aim at systemic impact, if our key goal is to re-create systems including our own – then the traditional academic articles and book cannot be our only or even our main product. But what else should we do? And how?
The prototypes here serve as
- models, embodying and exhibiting systemic solutions, how the things may be put together, which may then be adapted to other situations and improved further
- interventions, because they are (by definition) embedded within real-life situations and practices, aiming to change them
- experiments, showing what works and what doesn't, and what still needs to be changed or improved
In Federation through Images we exhibit about 40 prototypes, which together compose the single central one – of the creative frontier which we are pointing to by our four mentioned main keywords. We have developed it in the manner of prospectors who have found gold and are preparing an area for large-scale mining – by building a school and a hospital and a hotel and... What exactly is to be built and how – those are the questions that those prototypes are there to answer.
In 1968 The Club of Rome was initiated, as a global think tank to study the future prospects of humanity, give recommendations and incite action. Based on the first decade of The Club's work, Aurelio Peccei – its founding president and motor power – gave this diagnosis:
The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future.
If there was any truth in Peccei's conclusion, then the challenge that history has given our generation is at the same time a historical opportunity.
The last time "a great cultural revival" happened, the "Renaissance" as we now call it, our ancestors liberated themselves from a worldview that kept them captive – where the only true happiness was to be found in the afterlife. Provided of course that one lived by the God's command, and by the command of the kings and the bishops as His earthly representatives. Is it indeed possible – and what would it take – to see our own time's prejudices and power issues in a similar way as we now see the ones that the Enlightenment liberated us from? What new worldview might help us achieve that? What new way of evolving our culture and organizing our society might we find to replace them? These, in a nutshell, are the questions taken up in Federation through Conversations.
Symbolic power and re-evolutionary politics
Another way to approach this part of our presentation is to say "Now that we've created those 'headlights' – can we use them to illuminate 'the way'? Can we see where we are headed, and find a better road to follow?" Which of course means that we must explore the way we've been evolving, as culture and as society; because that's 'the way', isn't it?
If this challenge may seem daunting, the giants again come to our rescue. Pierre Bourdieu, for one, who saw French imperialism show its true face in the war in Algeria in the late 1950s. And who, as Algeria was gaining independence, saw the old power relationship mutate and take a completely new form – so that the power was no longer in weaponry and in the instruments of torture, but in economy and the instruments of culture. This insight made Bourdieu a sociologist; he understood that the society, and the power, evolve and function in a completely different way than what we've been told.
We federate Bourdieu. We connect his insights with the insights of Antonio Damasio, the cognitive neuroscientist who discovered that we were not the rational choosers we believed we were. Damasio will help us understand why Bourdieu was so right when he talked about our worldview as doxa; and about the symbolic power which can only be exercised without anyone's awareness of its existence. We also federate Bourdieu's insights with... No, let's leave those details to Federation through Conversations, and to our very conversations.
Let's conclude here by just highlighting the point this brings us to in the case we are presenting: When this federation work has been completed, we'll not end up with another worldview that will liberate us from the old power relationships and empower us to pursue happiness well beyond what we've hitherto been able to achieve. We shall liberate ourselves from socialization into any fix worldview altogether! We'll have understood, indeed, how the worldview creation and our socialization into a fixed worldview has been the key instrument of the sort of power we now must liberate ourselves from.
In this way the circle has been closed – and we are back where we started, at epistemology as issue. We are looking at the way in which truth and meaning are socially created – which is of course what this presentation is about.
Far from being "just talking", the conversations we want to initiate build communication in a certain new way, both regarding the media used and the manner of communicating. We use the dialog – which is a manner of speaking that sidesteps all coercion into a worldview and replaces it by genuine listening, collaboration and co-creation. By conversing in this way we also bring the public attention to completely new themes. We evolve a public sphere capable of developing public awareness about those themes. Here in the truest sense the medium is the message.
Religion and pursuit of happiness
Modernity liberated us from a religious worldview, by which happiness is to be found in the afterlife (provided we do as the bishops and the kings direct us in this life). We became free to pursue happiness here and now, in this life. But what if in the process we've misunderstood bothreligion andhappiness?
It has turned out that the key meme is already there; and that it only needs to be federated. This meme also comes with an interesting story, which lets itself be rendered as a vignette.
Early in the 20th century a young monk in Thailand spent a couple of years in a monastery in Bangkok and thought "This just cannot be it!" So he decided to do as the Buddha did – he went alone into a forest and experimented. He also had the original Pali scriptures with him, to help him find the original way. And reportedly he did!
What Buddhadasa ("the slave of the Buddha", as this giant of religion called himself) found out was that the essence of the Buddha's teaching was different, and in a way opposite from how Buddhism is usually understood and taught. And not only that – the practice he rediscovered is in its essential elements opposite from what's evolved as "the pursuit of happiness" in most of the modern world. Buddhadasa saw the Buddha's discovery, which he rediscovered, as a kind of a natural law, the discoveries of which have marked the inception of all major religions. Or more simply, what Buddhadasa discovered, and undertook to give to the world, was "the essence of religion".
You may of course be tempted to disqualify the Buddha's or Buddhadasa's approach to happiness as a product of some rigidly held religious belief. But the epistemological essence of Buddhadasa's teaching is that it's not only purely evidence-based or experience-based – but also that the liberation from any sort of clinging, and to clinging to beliefs in particular, is the essential part of the practice.
In the Liberation book we federate Buddhadasa's teaching about religion by (1) moving it from the domain of religion as belief to the domain of the pursuit of happiness; (2) linking this with a variety of other sources, thus producing a kind of a roadmap to happiness puzzle, and then showing how this piece snuggly fits in and completes the puzzle; (3) showing how religions – once this meme was discovered – tended to become instruments of negative socialization; and how we may now do better, and need to do better.
Knowledge federation dialog
Finally, we need to talk about our prototype, about knowledge federation. While this conversation will complete the prototype (by creating a feedback loop with the help of which it will evolve further), the real theme and interest of this conversation is of course well beyond what our little model might suggest.
In the midst of all our various evolutionary mishaps and misdirections, there's at least this one thing that has been done right – the academic tenure. And the ethos of academic freedom it institutionalized. What we now have amounts to a global army, of people who've been selected and trained and publicly sponsored to think freely. If our core task is a fresh new evolutionary start – beyond "the survival of the fittest" and the power structures it has shackled us with – then it's hard to even imagine how this could be done without engaging in some suitable way this crucially important resource.
How are we using it?