CONVERSATIONS

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The paradigm strategy

Large change made easy

Donella Meadows talked about systemic leverage points as those places within a complex system "where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything". She identified "the mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise" as the most impactful kind of systemic leverage points. She identified specifically working with the "power to transcend paradigms" – i.e. with the very fundamental assumptions and ways of being out of which paradigms emerge – as the most impactful way to intervene into systems.

We are proposing to approach and handle our contemporary condition in this most powerful way.

If you've really taken the time to digest what's been said in Federation through Images and Federation through Stories, then you'll have no difficulty understanding why we've remained stuck in a paradigm – even when both our knowledge and our situation is calling for such change: It is no longer possible to make a convincing argument that a some given worldview – any worldview – represents the reality as it truly is!

Evolving beyond the paradigms

Have you noticed how different cultures have tenaciously held on to their worldviews or paradigms as the only right ones? Even to the extent of waging wars on people who upheld a different variant of the same religion – in which killing was forbidden by divine command!

It has now – by virtue of what we've just said above – become possible to do something incomparably more germane to creative changes of our condition, and to enhancing our evolution. And that is to transcend paradigms (as they have been traditionally) altogether; to liberate ourselves from any fixed way of conceiving of reality – and to enable new forms of awareness to emerge responsibly yet freely.

It is to ignite this way of evolving that is the core purpose of our conversations.


These conversations are dialogs

Changing the world by changing the way we communicate

There is a way of listening and speaking that fits our purpose quite snuggly. Physicist David Bohm called it the dialogue, and we'll build further on his ideas and the ideas of others, and weave them into the meaning of another one of our keywords, the dialog.

Bohm considered the dialogue to be necessary for resolving our contemporary entanglement. Here is how he described it.

I give a meaning to the word 'dialogue' that is somewhat different from what is commonly used. The derivations of words often help to suggest a deeper meaning. 'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together.

Contrast this with the word 'discussion', which has the same root as 'percussion' an 'concussion'. It really means to break things up. It emphasises the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view. Discussion is almost like a Ping-Pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself. Possibly you will take up somebody else's ideas to back up your own - you may agree with some and disagree with others- but the basic point is to win the game. That's very frequently the case in a discussion.

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It's a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

We are not just talking

Don't be deceived by this word, "conversations". These conversations are where the real action begins.

By developing these dialogs, we want to develop a way for us to bring the themes that matter into the focus of the public eye. We also want to bring in the giants and their insights, to help us energize and illuminate those themes. And then we also want to engage us all to collaborate on co-creating a shared understanding that reflects the best of our joint knowledge and insight.

And above all – we want to create a way of conversing that works; which makes us "collectively intelligent". We want to evolve in practice, with the help of new media and real-life, artistic situation design, a public sphere where the events and the sensations will be the ones that truly matter – i.e. the ones that are the steps in our advancement toward a new cultural and social order.

In a truest sense, the medium here really is the message!

Conversations that matter

Imagine now, if you have not done that already, that you are facing this task – of choosing just a handful of themes that matter; the ones that will be most suitable for us to initiate this process. What themes would you choose? We have tentatively chosen three themes, to begin with. In what follows we'll say a few words about each of them.


The Paradigm Strategy dialog

How to respond to contemporary condition

The theme we chose for The Paradigm Strategy dialog appeared to us as perhaps the most natural one, which had to be represented in this showcase of knowledge work that illuminates the way: How to respond to contemporary issues.

We wrote the following in the abstract where this idea was initially shared

The motivation is to allow for the kind of difference that is suggested by the comparison of everyone carrying buckets of water from their own basements, with everyone teaming up and building a dam to regulate the flow of the river that is causing the flooding. We offer what we are calling The Paradigm Strategy as a way to make a similar difference in impact, with respect to the common efforts focusing on specific problems or issues. The Paradigm Strategy is to focus our efforts on instigating a sweeping and fundamental cultural and social paradigm change – instead of trying to solve problems, or discuss, understand and resolve issues.

A roadmap for guided evolution of society

At the same time this dialog introduces a roadmap for guided evolution of society – and it develops further by engaging and weaving together our collective knowledge and ingenuity. Can we perceive our own time, our own blind spots and evolutionary entanglements, in a similar way as we now see the dark side of the Middle Ages?

This too is a natural theme – because what could be a better way to showcase the new approach to knowledge, than by providing what's been lacking – as Neil Postman insightfully observed:

The problem now is not to get information to people, but how to get some meaning of what's happening.(...) Even the great story of inductive science has lost a good deal of its meaning, because it does not address several questions that all great narratives must address: Where we come from; what's going to happen to us; where we are going, that is; and what we're supposed to do when we are here. Science couldn't answer that; and technology doesn't.

The Paradigm Strategy poster

PSwithFredrik.jpeg

Fredrik Eive Refsli, the leader of our communication design team, jubilating the completion of The Paradigm Strategy poster.

How can we combine together the core insights of giants in in the humanities – and use them to illuminate our way into the future?

We created an interactive multimedia document that combines a variety of techniques including vignettes, threads, patterns, gestalt and prototypes – as a way to organize and orient a situated intervention and a physical and an online dialog.

It will be best if you open and look at The Paradigm Strategy poster as we speak.

What you see in the middle is what we generally call gestalt, and in this specific case the Key Point – it's the pivotal point of change, the wormhole from this paradigm into its transformation. On the left we show where we come from – by weaving together the stories or vignettes of giants into threads and threads into patterns. On the right we show where we are going – or should be going, by illustrating the emerging paradigm by a handful of prototypes. There is also a specific advice how to move from the present condition to the next, how exactly to go into and through the point in the middle, or "what we're supposed to do when we are here" – which we called "bootstrapping".

You'll notice that there are 12 vignettes; they do not attempt to complete the roadmap, or fully explain "where we come from" (you'll notice that most of what's been told on these pages is not represented). They, however, should be sufficient to reach the main insight.

There's a good reason why we use those vignettes: They bring abstract and high-level insights down to earth, make ideas palpable, and real. We cannot possibly do this in this very brief summary! And yet by only speaking abstractly we would risk completely missing our main point – which is to gently guide our audiences to the metaphorical mountain top, from where the naked realness of what we are talking about is seen with clarity and precision.

So what we'll do here is a compromise: We'll just sketch a single vignette in some detail; and give only a gesture drawing of all the rest.

How Pierre Bourdieu become a sociologist

As the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, Pierre Bourdieu was at the very peak of his profession, in effect representing the science of sociology to the French people. The story we'll tell is about an insight that got him there. Just like Doug Engelbart, and like many of the giants, Bourdieu was moved to do what he did by first having an insight; by observing something that could make a difference that makes a difference.

At the beginning of our story Bourdieu is an army recruit in annexed Algeria, where a civil war is raging. And he has no difficulty noticing how the official narrative (that France was in Algeria to bring economic progress and culture) collapsed under the weight of evident tortures and murders and abuses of all kinds – and seeing the naked and ugly real face of contemporary imperialism. So he decided to write a small booklet about this in an accessible language, in the Que sais-je edition (which you may think of as a bit more serious variant of the familiar book series "For Dummies").

Back home in France this booklet contributed to politicization of French intelligentsia during the 1950s and 60s. But in Algeria it had another effect. A contact would bring Bourdieu to an "informant" (for example a man who'd been tortured) and say "You can trust this man – completely!" What a magnificent way for a brilliant young man to look into the nuts and bolts of a human society, at the point where it is buoyantly transforming!

It was not only the war that was played on this historical stage. The war would soon be over, and the Algerian society would begin a whole new phase – of "modernization".

With palpable sympathy and affection, Bourdieu was 'a fly on the wall' in a Kabyle village household, recording the beautifully-intricate harmony that existed between the organization of the house and the relationships among its people. It was then not difficult for Bourdieu to notice how painfully this harmony collapses when the Kabyle young man is forced, by new economic necessities, to look for employment in the city. Not only his sense of honor, but even his very way of walking and talking was out of sync. And even to the young women from the same village – who'd seen something entirely different in movies and in restaurants.

In this way Bourdieu got to realize that the old relationships of economic and cultural domination did not at all vanish – they only changed their manner of expression!

All this made Bourdieu remember – and understand – what he himself had been experiencing after having moved from Denguin (an alpine village in Southern France) to join the chosen ones in French academia by studying in the uniquely prestigious Parisian École normale supérieure (not by birthright but owing to his exceptional talents) – what difference it made to know the right brands, and wines, and have the right table manners and the right manner of speech.

Theory of practice

The theory that resulted Bourdieu aptly called "theory of practice" – it being a theory of how the society evolves and operates in practical reality.

The keywords "doxa", "symbolic power", "habitus" and "field" will suffice for us to represent it here. Let's just say that the power – which was once seen to be manifested in prisons and chains and torture chambers – can functions even much better without all that, through only symbolic means; and that this "symbolic power" works without the awareness of its existence on any side – neither of its winners or losers, victors or victims. Just the embodied manners of the "habitus", and the subtle coercion of the "field" turns out to be enough.

But before we revisit those concepts, let's just briefly sketch the other two vignettes in the same thread – which will help us see Bourdieu's theory in even a bit different light than what he may have intended.

Odin the Horse

Odin the Horse is a brief real-life story about the territorial behavior of Icelandic horses. But it's also a bit of a private joke, whose explanation we shall see a bit later.

Let's just go straight to the point. Remember that what we are really after is a way of looking at things, and specifically a way of looking at our socio-cultural condition, and evolution, and our present-day point in that evolution.

When Odin the Horse (an aging leader of the herd) is pushing New Horse with his body, physically, away from his mares, he is protecting just that one physical spot on the turf and the one single role in the herd that can be protected. Imagine – in the manner of looking at things in a certain way – our society and culture as a turf. Of course this turf is incomparably more complex than the turf of the horses – just as much more complex as our society and culture are more complex than theirs. There are the kings and their guards and pages; and then there's the nobility. Furthermore you could be in king's favor, or out of favor. You can feel the difference in his body's demeanor, as soon as you approach him; and in the tone of his voice as he speaks. Then there are of course also different contemporary variants of those categories and behavioral patterns, even more nuanced.

The word "habitus" in Bourdieu's theory of practice stands for embodied predispositions, which are transmitted through bodily interaction. The king steps in, and everyone bows. Naturally you bow your head as well – as he looks down upon you all from his throne.

In our modern world the turf is of course not at all that simple. There are all kinds of interests one must be sensitive to. Imagine them as composing together a kind of a field, akin to a magnetic field, which naturally orients our behavior. Different positions carry different power – as in a computer game, you acquire certain capabilities when you step into a certain role. But there are no guards and no chains; everything is just subtle play of embodied predisposition, just symbolic.

Antonio Damasio and the Descartes' Error

Antonio Damasio steps in within the third and final vignette in the thread, to help us understand how the keyword doxa fits into this picture. Damasio, a leading cognitive neuroscientist, explained in a most rigorous, scientific way something you may not have even notice, not to speak about considering it as a question to ponder about – namely why it is that you don't wake up wondering whether you should take off your pajamas and run out naked into the street. As Damasio showed, the content of our conscious mind is controlled by an embodied cognitive filter, which presents to our prefrontal cortex only those possibilities that are "acceptable" – from the embodied filters point of view. You may be getting how this all fits together?

So let's go back to doxa. The more familiar word, "orthodoxy", signifies that there is one "right" social order, and one "right" way of conceiving of the world. Doxa is a step beyond that, where the prefix "right" disappears, and where only one social order and one way of conceiving of the world is considered possible. It's what is called "the reality"!

How our systems have been evolving

Let's just mention one more thread on the left-hand side of the poster, the Chomsky – Harari – Graeber thread. The point of it is to see the societal structures that this has given us – and exactly the manner of evolving them – by engaging the Charles Darwin's or more precisely the Richard Dawkins' angle of looking at it.

Instead of going into the details – which we offer to unpack in our conversation – we offer only this intuitive reflection. If you would fancy to break into your neighbor's house, kill him and rob him of his property and treat his wife and kids in some suitably unthinkable manner, you would surely be considered a dangerous criminal and treated accordingly. If you would stand with a loudspeaker on the main square and invite your fellow citizens in a fiery speech to do similarly to the people in your neighboring country, you wold surely be considered a dangerous madman, and treated accordingly. Unless – of course – your fellow citizens have been socialized into accepting from you this manner of behaving, because it's part of the habitus that corresponds to your social position (because you are a king, a dictator, or the country's president) – in which case you may even be recorded in history as a great leader. Like Alexander the Great (whose story is told in the Graeber vignette)!

Four consequences

With apologies for just throwing all these ideas on you in this way, and the offer to develop them leisurely in our conversation, let's just illustrate what all this means by pointing to a couple of consequences or corollaries of this ad-hoc theory. (You'll recall that it's making our understanding of the world consistent with the findings of giants, and being able to understand what we perceive, that we are aiming at.)

The first consequence is that we may begin to understand what might otherwise (when one does the rational thinking part) seem completely incredible – namely our inability to see and improve our systems. To engage in systemic innovation, in other words. The point is that we've been socialized to accept them as "the reality". This socialization is pre-conscious – and we cannot conceive of doing that just as we cannot conceive of running out into the street. What is ahead of us is, in other words, precisely an evolutionary issue...

The second consequence is that the whole political game ceases to be "us against them" – and becomes all of us against the obsolete socio-cultural structures (for which our technical keyword is power structure).

The third consequence is that the idea of reality – which used to be the foundation for knowledge work – now becomes the heart of our problem. The reality, or more precisely Bourdieu's doxa, can now be perceived as what organizes the game, as the very structure of the symbolic turf – which keeps us in disempowered positions without us noticing that.

And finally the fourth consequence is an explanation of our other core theme – what's been going on with those giants, why they tend not to be heard. The problem with giants is, of course, that they occupy so much space (of the invisible symbolic turf)...


Liberation dialog

Testing a paradigm

There can hardly be a better benchmark for testing an emerging paradigm in knowledge work than religion.

The Enlightenment liberated us from a religious outlook on life, and empowered us to use our reason and pursue happiness here, in this life. Or so it seemed. But what if in the process we've misunderstood the true nature of religion <p>and

happiness? What if a whole new chapter in both of those pursuits is now available to us?</p>

As we have seen in Federation through Stories, Werner Heisenberg explained how something of this kind could have happened. He in particular pointed to religion as formerly a core element of human culture, which didn't find a place in our newly formed narrow and rigid way of looking at the world. We have see that Aurelio Peccei pointed to human ethical development, or the development of "human quality", as the most important strategic goal. Religion – however imperfectly it may have been implemented – did serve that role in the traditional culture, as the scaffolding of men's ethical elevation.

Can renewed religion once again fulfill that role?

Engaging the public

and

There can hardly be a better choice of theme for engaging the general public into an impassioned dialog than religion.

Most people seem to have a strong opinion about religion. And those opinions vastly differ. Have you noticed how ready we've been throughout history and until present to wage wars on those others who worshipped the same god differently – even when that god explicitly forbade us to kill? Have you noticed those of us who are scientifically-minded people are at times almost as passionate about convincing us that religion is a delusion – as those religiously-inclined have been about converting us to "the right faith"?

We are about to offer a view on religion that will reconcile all such opinions with one another – and at the same time risk to provoke them all, because it will be radically different from all of them.

Completing the paradigm

Finally – and most importantly – the insight (or phenomenon or "natural law" or meme) we are about to share will turn out to be a key element in the emerging paradigm. Something that might truly tip the scale...

Igniting the light

It is for the above three reasons that we decided to begin the Knowledge Federation trilogy – a series of three books with corresponding dialogs, by which the ideas sketched on these pages will be shared with the general public – with this theme.

The first book will have the title "Liberation" and subtitle "Religion for the Third Millennium". All three books will have "the Third Millennium" in the subtitle; the idea is to suggest that if we want to be around for another millennium – then, we propose, the following might prove useful or even necessary.

Buddhadasa's rediscovery

After just a couple of years of monastic life in Bangkok, still barely in his 20s, Nguam Phanit (today known as Buddhadasa, "the slave of the Buddha", and celebrated as a reformer of Buddhism) thought "This just cannot be it!" So he returned to his native village, or more precisely to an abandoned forest monastery near by, and equipped with a handful of original Pali scriptures undertook to do live and practice as the Buddha did, and find out what he really taught himself.

It was in this way that Buddhadasa found that the essence of the Buddha's teaching was not at all as it was taught.

Buddhadasa further understood that what he was witnessing was a simple phenomenon or a "natural law", the rediscovery of which marked the inception of all religions.

Instead of elaborating this most interesting finding – which we'll do in the book manuscript that is now being written – let's just fit it into our story by fitting it into what's been said above, about Odin the Horse and the rest.

The point is that our social behavior does not at all need to be territorial! As Odin's name might point to, we do have a "divine" nature, and a capacity for an entirely different set of behaviors! The horse can be tamed – and his (that is, our) "divine" side may transpire.

What exactly does this mean, practically speaking? How can we do that? What might be the practical consequences?

Life beyond suffering

Buddhism, you might recall, is all about "suffering". According to the legend, Prince Siddhartha determined to uproot suffering from its very root, and withdrew into the forest and practiced and meditated for years, until he found the answer. The word "dukkha" however, which the Buddha used and which is commonly translated into English as "suffering", turns out to have a more precise, more subtle and somewhat technical meaning. Dukkha is the kind of psychological suffering that is so much part of our lives, that we tend to consider it as just as unavoidable as "birth, old age, sickness and death". But according to "the noble truth" that the Buddha discovered, dukkha can be eliminated through a certain kind of praxis (which was the substance of his teaching).

A life-changing insight here is to see just how much dukkha is part of our emotional makeup. And of the relationships we create with others. And what it would really mean to be liberated from it!

The heart of the practice is to tame "the horse" to stop even wanting to impose his will on his surroundings. To develop a certain attitude, a certain way of looking at the world, where not only selfishness, but even the very identification with oneself and with one's "personal interests" is no longer there!

You'll have no difficulty seeing how different this praxis is from what our contemporary modern culture has given us.

And how, to name an example, Christ's command to "turn the other cheek" might be understood as an instance of that same paradoxical praxis!

Society beyond contention

We are accustomed to consider religion as a strong belief, which one holds onto even against strong counter-evidence. According to Buddhadasa, the essence of religion is the liberation from clinging onto anything whatsoever – and to beliefs and socialized identities in particular!

The natural way to "tame the inner horse", to liberate oneself from the embodied cognitive structure, is by serving a purpose that is larger than oneself.

You'll have no difficulty noticing that the people who would choose that principle as personal ethical rule of thumb, and as the 'glue' that binds them together into a society, would create incomparably better societal structures than what we've been able to create.

And how that would give us still further dividends in happiness.

Seeing the world as it is

Buddhadasa does not use the word "enlightenment". He points to the effect of the mentioned praxis as "seeing the world as it is".

You might now revisit what we've told above, why we are not those "objective observers" and those "rational choice" makers as Descartes and others believed and made us believe. There's a socialized, embodied cognitive filter that controls what we are able to rationalize and conceive of. In what way could we reprogram this filter – or better still, liberate ourselves from it entirely?

Imagine if it turns out that what we believed to accomplish by looking at the world through the "objective" prism of "the scientific method" – cannot really be accomplished without some of this quintessentially "religious" practice, of serving the world instead of just serving (what we perceive as) ourselves.

And wouldn't this then also explain the vignette about Doug Engelbart, and other stories of giants; and perhaps even the the phenomenon of the creative "genius". The point here is not necessarily that those people were so much smarter than us others; the point could just as well be that – having a different goal in mind, and serving that different goal – they ended up having a completely different cognitive map in their mind. That they "saw the world as it is" – and differently than how we see it.

Happiness between one and plus infinity

Here comes the most interesting part of this story!

It is what might happen with our "pursuit of happiness" when we liberate not only religion but also "science" (understood as our trusted approach to knowledge) from its historical subservience to unconscious and all too often malignant socializations.

In the Liberation book we show how a roadmap for an informed "pursuit of happiness" can be developed by simply federating relevant experiences from a variety of ancient and modern traditions – including modern psychoanalysis, and what F.M. Alexander taught and various others. What transpires is that a whole range of human experience is possible, which we've nicknamed "happiness between one and plus infinity", to signal that what we've known and pursued so far is only between "zero" (no happiness at all) and "one" ("normal" happiness, as we see around us, and as we've experienced it).

When the insight of the Buddha, as explained by Buddhadasa (and also the teaching of Christ, and of other giants of religion) are liberated from the 'worldview puzzle' and placed into that one, they turn out to complete it quite perfectly. So that it all makes perfect sense!

The details are beyond this short essay and left to our conversations. For now just observe how beautifully this completes our larger vision, of an Enlightenment-like change triggered by an up-to-date approach to knowledge.