VIII. Earth Earns: An Open CoCreative Earthropocene to Astropocene PediaVerse

4. A Natural Genocratic Complementarity: me + We = US

Hofstede, Geert, et al. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2010. The University of Maastricht premier advocate since the 1980s (search) of social dichotomies from families to nations is joined by his son Gert Jan Hofstede, an information biologist at Wageningen University, and Michael Minkow, a global sociologist at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. This third, 500 page edition of the popular volume continues to articulate a He, She and (S)he and/or an I + We = Us mutual polarity and functional trinity which is seen to recur within every societal phase. These independent/interdependent or individual/collective modes are the basis for our Complementarity of Civilizations section. But it is so obvious that they are not to be opposites locked in battle, as besets political elections which always divide in half. As history closes on 2020, whenever, however, could this iconic yang/yin Tao image become realized as an independent natural genetic source code?

Jaeger, Luc and Erin Calkins. Downward Causation by Information Control in Micro-Organisms. Interface Focus. 2/1, 2012. University of California, Santa Barbara, biochemists propose that phenomenal life evolved by virtue of a dynamic interactive duality of bottom up and top down, program-like influences. Both an operational biocode and an organism’s epigenetic experiences in some way cross-converse to informs and inspires life to rise and shine.

In conclusion, TDC (Top Down Causation) by information control and adaptive selection are at the root of converging forces that shape the evolution of living biosystems from the simplest to the most complex levels. Living systems could therefore be defined as self-reproducing systems that function via TDC by information control and adaptive selection. The functions of the COS (Cellular Operating systems) that control cellular reproduction and DNA replication are maintained through TDC by information control leading to a converging driving force. (37) Darwinian evolutionary processes in living systems are therefore not only ruled from the bottom up but also by fundamental emerging organizational principles that are hierarchically built up and impose necessary constraints from the top down. These principles are the key for defining organic life. (39) We warmly thank George Ellis and Bill Stoeger for their input on a preliminary version of this paper. This work was funded through a STARS grant from the Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, CA. Luc Jaeger wishes to dedicate this paper to St Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon

Keane, John. Global Civil Society? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. The founder of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster writes a book typical of many efforts to articulate a 21st century form of equitable political governance. The recent transition to a single world society makes the old provincial phase inadequate. In their place Keane considers a “cosmocracy” whose roots in Greek thought would finally lead to the blossoming of a global civility. But as is typical of many works, these good intentions remain ill defined because they are not grounded in an encompassing organic creation.

Cosmocracy….is a conglomeration of interlocking and overlapping sub-state, state and suprastate institutions and multi-dimensional processes that interact, and have political and social effects, on a global scale. (98)

Kim, Sungmoon. Beyond Liberal Civil Society: Confucian Familism and Relational Strangership. Philosophy East & West. 60/4, 2010. A City University of Hong Kong management professor rightly notes that western democracies typically emphasize an “excessive individualism.” Rather, a more workable resolve would be to avail traditional Chinese wisdom which in its essence advises a natural, “familial” reciprocity of self and other.

Korten, David. The Post-Corporate World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999. A vigorous essay on the imperative shift from the "dead universe, machine paradigm" as cover for greedy multinational companies to an animate model of self-sufficient community within a living cosmos.

Kothari, Ashish. India 2100: Towards Radical Ecological Democracy. Futures. Online October, 2013. After much improvement of the human condition by western technological industry, a leading Indian environmentalist contends that this model is no longer workable for sub-continent for it will ultimately destroy both culture and nature. A clear course is then laid out for a necessary shift, after much growth, to an organically viable social and natural abide. Ten principles are enlisted: Ecological integrity and limits, Equity and justice, Meaningful participation for all, Responsibilities, Diversity, Collective commons and solidarity, Rights of nature, Resilience and adaptability, Ecoregionalism, and Interconnectedness.

See also in this journal “India and ‘The Great Transition’ to an Ecological World” (online October) by Aseem Shrivastava, and the volume Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India. by Kothari and Shrivastava (Viking, 2012), noted in A Viable Gaia. Of course this has been the firm message of the Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva for some two decades. Her latest work is Making Peace with the Earth (Pluto Press, 2013).

India is floundering in its quest to meet basic social objectives of eradicating poverty, hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, inequality and other socio-economic deprivations. It is also on a steep path of ecological unsustainability. These issues can at least partly be attributed to a fundamentally flawed model of development, its flaws having been accentuated in the last two decades of economic globalisation. At the same time, however, peoples’ initiatives at sustainable and equitable well-being in various sectors are growing, and some policy shifts have also taken place in this direction. Building on this, an alternative framework of well-being, here called Radical Ecological Democracy, can be envisaged. This involves a new political governance with decentralised decision-making embedded within larger, ecologically and culturally defined landscapes, a new economics that respects ecological limits and democratizes both production and consumption, and a new cultural and knowledge-based society that values diversity, collective synergism, and public innovation. The combination of peoples’ resistance to destructive development and alternative, solution-based initiatives, with support from other sections of society, can lead India to be firmly on the path of such a framework by 2100. (Abstract)

LaConte, Ellen. Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it. Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010. In so many words, our machine world is in terminal collapse, but if we could avail an abiding natural wisdom, a sustainable biosphere for all earthlings is still possible. The author is a lifelong environmentalist, once editor of Farmstead magazine, who now resides in the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina. It is Chapter Nine - “Life is Organically Democratic” – that most interests as a social emergence of nature’s constant complementarity of entity and community that, e.g., an African ubuntu, and Simon Levin’s ecologies well evoke. The essay goes on to cite its presence and benefits from microbes to mammals, and offers ways, as the whole book, to save person and planet.

Sharing, equitability, cooperation, partnership, coalition, commitment to the common good, full employment, full participation, self-regulation, self-government – these are among the characteristics of economical natural communities that have allowed their participating members to live within Earth’s means. They are also among the characteristics we commonly ascribe to democracy at its best. (149)

Democracy (for Life) was not a matter of choice. It was simply the first method of organization that achieved Life’s aim – to last – by facilitating its prime directive: to live within Earth’s means. The survival of the whole Life experiment on Earth trumped the survival of any one species. Democracy is what other-than-human species learned how to do together in order to survive and thrive, and what each new species has eventually learned how to do in order to be among the survivors. Democracy got built into Life’s operating system early on. (150)

LaConte, Ellen and Herman Greene. Organic Democracy: Adaptive, Responsive, Life-Sustaining Communities. The Ecozoic Reader. 4/4, 2007. Ellen LaConte is a gardener and author, and Herman Greene an environmental lawyer (Greene Law). Herman is also founding director of the Center for Ecozoic Studies, which seeks to evoke and embody Thomas Berry’s visionary writings upon “integral community in an ecological age.” This article and the whole 100 page issue can be read online at its website www.ecozoicstudies.org, click Publications on the home page. If indeed an animate nature, distinguished by a deeply recurrent, mutually symbiotic, anatomy and physiology of individual and group can be allowed, then an incarnate guidance accrues for diverse, self-organized, rural and urban communities.

Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. The University of California at Berkeley psychologist finds these persuasions to align with feminine or masculine value systems, which then results in our bipolar Democrat or Republican political system. Here is a prime example of gender archetypes manifestly evident on a national scale, whose either/or opposition results in a gridlock recycled every 4 years. But neither Lakoff or anyone else takes the next step to propose an obvious new kind of governance based on a familial and beneficial complementarity of both principles.

It is the common, unconscious, and automatic metaphor of Nation-as-Family that produces contemporary conservatism from Strict Father morality and contemporary liberalism from Nurturant Parent morality. (13)

Landemore, Helene. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. At a late moment when public rhetoric has sunk to win/lose personal and factional rancor, this volume by a Yale University political scientist advises that governance could and must be changed to express much more cooperative progress . An argument is made that through evolution and history coherent social groupings are better able to gain beneficial knowledge and thus prevail and flourish. We peoples would do well to stop perpetual arguemtn and try to get along and ahead. See also Collective Wisdom edited by HL and Jon Elster (Cambridge UP, 2012).

The collective intelligence of the citizens – what I call more broadly “democratic reason” – might in fact be distinct from individual reason writ large. Psychology and cognitive sciences, including the science of animal behaviors, show that intelligence can be a property of groups as well as of individuals. The phenomenon of “emergent intelligence” characterizes societies of social animals such as ants and bees. Another relevant concept is that of “distributed intelligence” – which posits intelligence as spread across both the individual agents themselves (mind and body) and their environment (institutions, language, symbolic systems, and other cognitive artifacts). (xviii)

Collective intelligence is this concept of intelligence applied to groups as opposed to individuals. Although it can theoretically be a linear function of individual intelligence (the sum of the parts), collective intelligence is often conceptualized as an “emergent” property (more than the sum of the parts). In other words, collective intelligence is more than a function of individual citizens’ intelligence and depends on properties that cannot be found in individuals themselves but only in the whole. (18)

Levin, Simon, et al. The Dynamics of Political Polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118/50, 2021. Princeton University and ASU senior scholars introduce a Special Feature of some dozen papers by which tp consider scientific and mathematic ways to explain and understand the deepening, tragic divide in American society as never seen before. A central issue is how it pervades even to pandemic vaccines and climate change. We note Preventing Extreme Polarization of Political Attitudes by Robert Axelrod, et al, Polarization and Tipping Points by Michael Macy, et al, The Emergence and Perils of Polarization by Delia Baldassarri and Scott Page, and The Nonlinear Feedback Dynamics of Asymmetric Political Polarization by Naomi Leonard, et al.

Again our Natural Genesis difference from and response to such terminal gridlock is based on and attributed to these several features: a major evolutionary transition in occurrence to a planetary progeny (albeit yet visible), a resultant global sapiensphere which appears to be gaining her/his own visionary knowledge, a 21st century ecosmic genesis revolution distinguished by a universal genetic complementarity and much more. As a result, an actual me + We = US symbiotic basis of individual, community and United States (ubuntu universe) could provide a natural way to breach this absurd opposition.

Democracies require compromise. But compromise becomes almost impossible when voters are divided into diametrically opposed camps. The danger is that intolerance will grow, democratic norms will be undermined, and winners will be reluctant to let the losers ever regain power. To better understand how polarization can be prevented, or at least slowed, we developed a simple model in which people tend to be exposed to and attracted by views similar to their own, but are repulsed by views that are too dissimilar. The policy implications are described in terms of level of tolerance to other views, responsiveness to other views, exposure to dissimilar views, multiple ideological dimensions, economic self-interest, and external shocks. (R. Axelrod)

Our study was motivated by a highly disturbing puzzle. Confronted with a deadly global pandemic that threatened not only massive loss of life but also the collapse of our medical system and economy, why were we unable to put partisan divisions aside and unite in a common cause, similar to the national mobilization in the Great Depression and the Second World War? We used a computational model to search for an answer in the phase transitions of political polarization. The model reveals asymmetric hysteresis trajectories with tipping points that are hard to predict and that make polarization extremely difficult to reverse once the level exceeds a critical value. (M. Macy)

Li, Shengkai, et al. Memory and Personality in Ideological Polarization: The Politico-physics of Mnemomatter. arXiv:2409.06660.. We record this entry by a global team posted at Princeton University, John Hopkins University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wenzhou and the University of Oklahoma as a most specific attempt to date to identify and describe a deeper, common, mathematic source-code which can be rooted in exemplary physical complexities. Such a conception that implies an independent, phenomenal genesis would be a major 21st century advance. A significant benefit would then be to reveal a natural complementarity, coincidence of opposites between the vested positions

We used physical agents with left/right ideologies but fixed personalities to study what drives a dynamic population to polarize. We consider that persons with high levels of memory (mnemomatter) can serve as a physics analogue of spin handedness as a proxy for ideology. Depending on ones disposition, an agent can act as a curmudgeon who never changes, a pushover who accepts change, a contrarian who does the opposite of what is expected, an opportunist who weighs recent events, and a traditionalist who values past events. We develop a field theory which maps such variances into a public landscape. Our intent is to apply of physics-based systems to better understand the ideological instability observed in the world today. (Abstract)

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  Next