Friends of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

Chapter   2

GOVERNANCE

The new is a scientific theories explain many phenomena in cosmic evolution.  And they do  more than that.  They  suggest a new world view or mindset by which humans can examine current social phenomena with respect to their long-range future.  Futurists are no longer dependent on examining history and technological and economic trends.  In fact, punctuated equilibrium and self-organizing criticality suggest that new social, as well as physical and biological, phenomena spontaneously self-organize, like an avalanche, unpredictably. 

We may not be able to foretell the futrue with accuracy, but we can examine groups of  related social phenomena that are close to chaos.  In addition we can foresee possible future happenings of social importance.  This is not unlike the mountaineer’s warnings of avalanches, the meteorologist’s prediction of weather, or the geologist’s foresight of earthquakes.  The mathematical accuracy of physics, the science models of the past, apply only to a very limited range of phenomena.  Even those, as quantum theory says, are only very highly probable. Nature is nonlinear and unpredictable.

Punctuated equilibrium applies equally well to social and cultural evolution as it does to biological evolution.  As long as a society is adapted to the values and desires of the people it serves, it will tend to preserve those values and practices that have sustained it and will resist change. But, when things deteriorate (economic downturns, street violence, family disintegration, warfare, religious uncertainty, famine, ecological collapse, or whatever) deeply rooted cultural premises are quickly abandoned. A power of doubt, uncertainty and chaos sets in. If new knowledge reveals a profoundly different potential of a better world, a new cultural and social structure replaces the old.  Society today is in its most profound period of chaos and change ever.  Not only is science operning up new possibilities,  but the economic free fall of 2009 is exposng the failure of the economic system.

In the coming years, it is most probable that every social institution that has been developing within the dominator paradigm for the past multiple mullenia will be deeply, fundamentally, and radically reexamined in the  light of the new social/science Gaian paradigm.  The Gaian paradigm gives humanity a new powerful tool to foresee and prepare for the uncertain future.  There could be a flood of self-organizing social phenomena replacing the old.  In the following three chapters we look at three to explore the potentials of Gaian cultures:  the burgeoning civil society and the possibility that it could emerge into a new mode of global governance;  the growth of deschooling which could be the forerunner of a radically different, community-based lifelong learning system; and the convergence of science and religion which portends a unified knowledge system.

In 1982, for a European journal on communications I wrote an article on  “Transnational Networks and World Order.”  John Briggs and F. David Peat in one of the early books popularizing “the new science of chaos,” Turbulent Mirror, quoted it as an example of the application of the new science to social and political structure.  It was pretty primitive thinking,  but may perhaps suggest the direction that more thought should be applied as we move further within the new Gaian paradigm.  The quote suggested that:

“A future world government can be pictured as a multidimensional network of networks which provide each individual with many optional paths through which s/he can provide for his or her own well-being and can participate in controlling world affairs.  ... [It will be]  composed of links between nodes.  [It] will]have no center.  Each member of the network [will be] autonomous. Unlike an hierarchy no part or member will be controlled by any other. Various members may draw together for special projects or on different issue, but there [will be] no bureaucracy demanding action or conformity.”  

This was not meant to be the prediction of a classical anarchistic state, but rather the possible fruition of a participatory democracy made possible by new knowledge, new technologies, and new world views.

That the current social/economic/political system is on the edge of chaos is made too obvious by daily newspaper headlines to require much confirmation here: global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, teen suicides, world hunger,  global warming, Washington gridlock,  the failure of local governments in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Ceylon, Mayamar, and the Middle East; the widening rich-poor gap; the inability to solve, or even confront global pollution problems; child labor; street crime; sweatshops;  racism and the glass ceiling; the wanton waste of natural resources;  downsizing of industries; the export of jobs; the merging of failing corporations; the break down of the family - are all mere symptoms. 

The popularity of Barack Obama’s call for “change” without defining the changes he’d make, results from the general malaise and pessimism of the people. The the natural basic  human values  are lost in the current  market/government orientation, which fosters competition, free trade, self-centeredness, profit-over-people, globalism, and widespread alienation.  Deep systemic problems give a clear picture of a civilization on the edge of chaos.  An alternative system is needed.  And it is spontaneously self-organizing.

In the past two decades there has been a rapid rise of citizen organized Grassroots Organizations(GROs), a subset of Nongovernmental Organizations(NGOs) in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It has been initiated by the failure and near chaos brought on by the industrial countries’ intrusion into, and domination of, cultures they did not understand.  This subversion of other cultures to the Western ways starting with Columbus are well known.  It is enough, here, to say that indigenous cultures have been overwhelmed by the dominant and domineering EuroAmerican industrial cultures.

Springing from the land, uninvited and often resisted by outside developers, and even their own governments,  people are now recreating their own coalion and communities with new and indigenous technologies, and taking over where governments and industries have failed.   Often stimulated by a special unique local need, these local GROs grow to become more broadly socially and politically active, linking up with other GROs to form networks for participatory democracy and mutual aid.  Outside aid to GROs is provided by Grassroots Support Organizations (GRSOs)  formed most often by middle-class professionals and technicians who recognize the inequities engendered by the current economic-political system.  GRSOs reach out to give in-kind assistance and to legitimize the actions of the peasants and disenfranchised in their bids for empowerment and local self-reliance.  Techniques, technologies, information, and service from the industrial countries are supplied through links created by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs)

NGOs are also becoming a greater force and better recognized in the Industrial countries.  The problems facing humankind cannot be solved by governments or markets alone.  Nor can governments or corporations create a people-centered democracy.  

However we-the-people are solving our problems world wide  by the third leg of governance, civil society - that is, by citizen participation on a local community scale.  New citizen-initiated social innovations are sweeping North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Japan.  These social innovations are being borrowed and exchanged among nearly every country around the world.

From England came the cooperative movement, started in Rochdale England in 1844 by some disenfranchised weavers.   It spread to the U.S. with producer co-ops during World War I, and with a plethora of consumer co-ops during the 1960s. 

The Mondragon network of co-ops, in the Basque area of Spain, added the concept of creating secondary co-ops to serve the primary co-ops.  Banks,insurance companies,  management services, and other businesses owned by the primary co-op serve the member co-ops .

The Seikatsu Club of some 10,000 Japanese housewives organized by “hans,” local co-ops, create their own businesses when the market does not meet their social, ecological , or economic demands.

From Bangladesh came the Grameen Banks that introduced a new credit technique by lending money through groups of borrowers who guaranteed one another’s loans. 

From Canada came Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), a local citizen-owned computerized exchange system.  Local scripts, (such as Ithaca Hours) help local businesses and individuals create local jobs and exchange goods and services regardless of the inflow of federal dollars.    “Time Dollars” systems promote baby sitting pools, senior citizen services, and other forms of local mutual aid based on hours worked not dollars spent.

From Denmark has came CoHousing, in which families own their own homes but with common ground and common space including child care facilities and community dining rooms bringing a new sense of community solidarity.  This, of course, adds to the array of communes, community land trusts, intentional communities, and ecovillages in which citizen provide the planning and development so lacking in government and corporate housing developments.

From Switzerland comes Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) bringing farmers and citizens together to produce local food with local resources.  The consumers sometimes own the land, share the produce, and participate in the work,  paying a professional gardener to manage the growing.  Other innovations in the food and agriculture area include farmers’ markets, homesteading, and the rapidly growing development of home gardening.

From India came the concept of Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and the Gandhian nonviolence that has already transformed social protest and citizen actions.  [I’ll explore these social innovation in a bit more detail in future chapters.]

Many other social innovations such as citizen patrols, homeschooling, community learning centers, community loan funds, peace brigades, homesteading, and community bulletin boards are building community solidarity,  empowering citizens at the grassroots and promoting local community self-reliance without relying on governments or “the market.”

It is all there.  A living body of cooperative networking organizations has emerged to fill the niche produced by dysfunctional, postcolonial governments.  A plethora of unique interdependent social cells have developed organs assuming specialized functions that serve the whole. They have almost magically become the social/political body that promises better life for the people in developing countries, and the whole Earth.  The natural laws of self-organizing criticality and autocatalysis are working on the social level.

Through the revelations of science, and understanding of the cosmic process is slowly emerging.   Perhaps with the concept of Gaia and its new understanding, humanity can participate in the co-creation of a sustainable and lasting civilization based on citizen participation in local community organizations -- a Gaian global governance.

THE FIRST PHASE OF DEMOCRACY

Like any step in cosmic evolution, this would be a unique happening.  However like any step in cosmic evolution. it would be subject to the natural evolutionary laws.  It was 250 years ago that the first phase of democratic governance was a unique happening introduced on the planet.  The times then, like the times now, were chaotic.  The ruling powers, and the ruling system, had outlived their usefulness.  Masses of people recognized that they were missing out on many to the benefits that their toil had created. As Charles Dickens said in The Tale of Two Cities,  “It was the best of times, and the worst of times.”  The  American and the French revolutions happened.

The first phase of democracy was a foolish idea to the leaders of the day.  Monarchs held their power by claiming the “divine right of kings.”  Neither the churches nor the governments were friendly to the idea that the people could rule themselves, nor even participate in government.  The ideas of voting, representation, legislating, human rights, politics, constitutions, or social contracts were little more than hazy academic notions played with by abstruse philosophers.  

In 1215 the Magna Carta gave large land owners a degree of power over their lands and its serfs, but these powers were subject to the King’s will.  It took the vices of Voltaire, Franklin, the Paine, and Jefferson to bring the ideas of everyman’s rights to the public.  And it took the Boston Tea Party, the Bread Riots,  and the revolutionary wars, to bring down the old regimes and make possible the self-organization of the new.

Self-organization is the right word. The avalanche of change hit an unprepared society.  No one had predicted the rise of national democracy.  There were  no plans, no designs, and no instruction books for the first phase of democracy.  There were few constitutions, no concept of checks and balances, no rules for voting, no loyal opposition, no political parties, no civil society, and no grass roots organizations.

The American colonies had assumed a degree of self-control under the British Crown.  Direct democracy was practiced in the forerunners of the New England town meeting and in some colonies.  Voting rights were usually denied women, blacks, Catholics and Jews.  Suffrage was extended to only landholders of some substance, often as much as fift English pounds (a goodly sum in those days).  Probably no more than one third  of the adult free men could vote.  Office holding was even more restricted.  Often, in order to hold elected office, a man had to own at least 500 acres and 10 slaves, or thousands of pounds sterling in other property.   

As it is with today's nongovernmental organizations, ideas and actions were separate and disparate.   No associations were ready to exercise political control of society.  The task was daunting.  But it did happen.  In spite of the later failure in France and earlier failures in Athens and Rome, the first phase of democracy was born to last in America.

I have used “the first phase of democracy” to describe the political innovation of 1776 because, as we know today, it was only partially successful.  It  was only partially successful primarily because it arrived on the world stage without preparation.  The technologies of the times made participatory democracy impossible beyond the town meeting.  Communication was measured in days or weeks, not as today in nanoseconds.   Because of that, we-the-people could only be represented in the halls of power.  

Franklin and Jefferson, using the native American Iroquis Confedoracy as a model,  advocated that all decision be made by consensus at the local level, and that representatives be limited to arguing the case as agreed upon in their local communities.  But Janes Madison and others, following the concept of British parliamentarian Edmond Burke, argued that representatives should be empowered to make decision in the name of  the people.  Burkian representation was accepted by most colonies and the Constitutional Assembly.  This has made the government dominant and limited the voice of the people.

In spite of extending suffrage, the voice of the people has been steadily eroded as governments have grown in size and power.  People’s control of corporations was taken away in 1886 in the Supreme Court’s decision in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific gave coporations the the same rights as flesh-and-blood citizens.  This personhood of Corporations eliminated earlier, powers of communities or states to revoke corporate charters if a corporation was deemed to not be acting in the public interest. 

The rise of corporate power over the people increased with laws enaected to make profit the only legal function of corporations, and the opening of free trade with no restrictions on the outflow of capital or jobs, and with  no global standards for safety, health, or protecting the environment.  The high cost of getting elected and the free flow of money into politics from the wealthy elite, banks, and businesses, has made even the first phase of democracy far less a people’s government than was envisioned by America’s Founding Fathers.

THE SECOND PHASE OF DEMOCRACY

The rise of civil society, modern technology, and the new scientific understanding of how evolution works has made possible the emergence of a second phase of democracy.   We-the-people now have a voice in our civil society, we have the technology to communicate in real time around the globe, and we have the new understanding of the cosmos including of social evolution .

Complexity theory shows that ordered complexity is  the natural state of the universe.  Biological evolution is the most obvious example of the tendency toward the ordering of simple entities into more complex systems.  Every step of cosmic evolution since the Big Bang has been a step toward increasing ordered complexity.  

Creation occurs on the borderline between rigid order and random chaos -- at the edge of chaos.  If an entity is too rigidly ordered it can not change to meet the contingencies of a change in its environment.  Flexibility is one of the cardinal biological principles of evolution.  Without flexibility, a life form, or a government, is not sustainable, it cannot change to meet new conditions.  Without flexibility, progress is impossible.

But governments, like corporations,  have been organized around the concept that good management means rigid order directed from the top.   In the first phase of democracy, the people elected their governmental representatives, but all power resides in the government.  Humans have been locked into the worldview in which rigid order was highly respected. Rigid order was the goal of organization.  Humans are taught to be afraid of chaos and to avoid complexity.  

Yet the Gaian paradigm shows us that the edge of chaos is where progress happens with the self-organizing of complexity.  If society is to meet the challenges that face it,  it needs to live closer to the edge of chaos.  It must welcome a degree of disorder.

Since its modern inception, democracy has suffered from its self-guilt of being inefficient.   Critics and supporters alike have held that democracy is too chaotic.  They have searched for ways to move democracy toward more controlled management, without surrendering the human rights they saw as the great strength of this form of government.  

The Gaian paradigm sees democracy in a very different light.  The seeming weaknesses of democracy are its strengths.  The theories of Gaia, Chaos and Complexity suggest that spontaneous self-organizing on the edge of chaos is natural law.  It requires the messy flexibility inherent in democracy and absent in more efficient forms of government.  People are only beginning to realize that no form of government, except democracy,  provides the freedom and potential of complex ordering to meet the changing demands of modern times.

The rise of civil society, the burgeoning of GROs, the growth of social innovation, community involvement  in meeting their own needs are all parts of the progressive agenda provided by nature.  We may not see clearly today the final organization which will emerge if we continue to build the decentralized autonomous  communities linked together in worldwide mutual aid.  

But, that is the way of cosmic evolution as it is seen from the  view of Gaia.  It purports the emergence of a second phase of democracy, one in which people in community at the grassroots have a direct input in all decisions which affect their lives: a new form of global governance.   

End Chapter 2

Governance

Such a rich life!
Glad to have you in WiserEarth Barry.
I looked up Project Sara the other day and interested to know more.
Will visit the website and read more.

Warmly,
Bowo
Indonesia