The Science not yet born -- Cultural Design
Life emerges from death. This is merely a fact from ecology — where the seemingly immortal flow of nutrients continuously passes from the bodies of the recently deceased into new forms as it is reconstituted in the bodies of the newly born.
I offer this metaphor as the starting point to discuss how we can apply biological principles to “guide the flow of nutrients” from dying institutional forms for education, research, and social change practice. In a recent article, I explained why universities are failing humanity to express that disciplinary-based solutions will not help us in a systemic-problem-based world. Only when we reorganize our efforts around the systems in question will effective interventions be found.
-- Joe Brewer
Article:
Read Full Article
Background:
Read Universities Failing
Can We Design the Future We Want?
As I’ve written elsewhere, humanity is creating a future that nobody wants. We have watched a global system of wealth extraction sweep across the planet consuming everything in its path — from nature’s bounty to the social fabric of our own villages and neighborhoods
What we haven’t done (or at least the majority of people haven’t) is create these conditions on purpose. It wasn’t what most of us wanted, to be strapped with debts and live through a rapid decline of opportunities… principally to enable the extremely rich to accumulate even more of the world’s wealth in their coffers.
The trillion dollar question is this: Is it possible to create the future most of us want? And if so, how do we do it?
I’ve grappled with this question in one form or another for almost twenty years. What I learned along the way surprised me. It gave me reservoirs of hope I scarcely imagined possible. And now I see how it is possible to collectively create pathways to a thriving planetary future.
The key to it all is culture.
That’s right, culture. We can guide ourselves forward in time by monitoring and actively evolving the ideas, social norms, values, beliefs, tools and technologies, relationship patterns, and organizational forms that constitute human cultures around the world.
I call this culture design and have written about the tools for practicing it and the formulation of Culture Design Labs for putting them to use. What I haven’t done — nor has anyone else at this point in time — is actively run one and work out the kinks for how it is done.
Time is of the essence and humanity is already in the deep crucible of change. Every one alive today can feel it. The turbulence of yet another disaster, the pain of one more outburst of violence, or the anxiety of one more thing we thought to be impossible that just happened before our very eyes. The impossible, it seems, is now par for the course.
Article:
Read Full Article
Joe Brewer: Joe Brewer on Medium
Awakening from The Meaning Crisis
John Vervaeke, PhD is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science and Buddhist psychology. Here presented are thirty seven (37) episodes of his series exploring the Making of Meaning and the loss of meaning in our 'modern' world. Each episode is approximately 55 minutes long. You will want to pace yourself because he covers a LOT of material. It takes a little while to get going, but by Episode 3 he's rocking and rolling. Full playlist of videos Here.
Episode 2 - Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution
Episode 3 - Continuous Cosmos and Modern World
Episode 4 - Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom
Episode 5 - Plato and The Cave
Episode 6 - Aristotle, Kant and Evolution
Episode 7 - Aristotle's World View and Erich Fromm
Episode 8 - Buddha and 'Mindfullness'
Episode 11 - Higher States of Consciousness - Part 1
Episode 12 - Higher States of Consciousness - Part 2
Episode 13 - Buddhism and Parasitic Processing
Episode 14 - Epicurians, Cynics, and Stoics
Episode 15 - Marcus Aurelius and Jesus
Episode 16 - Christianity and Agape
Episode 17 - Gnosis and Existential Inertia
Episode 18 - Plotinus and Neoplatonism
Episode 19 - Augustine and Aquinas
Episode 20 - Death of The Universe
Episode 21 - Martin Luther and Descartes
Episode 22 - Descartes vs. Hobbs
Episode 26 - Cognitive Science
Episode 27 - Problem Formulation
Episode 28 - Convergence to Relevance Realization
Episode 29 - Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization
Episode 30 - Relevance Realization meets Dynamical Systems Theory
Episode 31 - Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Development GI
Episode 32 - RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness
Episode 33 - Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness
Episode 34 - Sacredness: Horror, Music and The Symbol
Episode 35 - The Symbol, Sacredness, and The Sacred
Episode 36 - Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Eng. Enlightenment - Part 1
Evolving the Future
The world has become a pretty weird place. We’ve lost the ability to intend something to happen and then make it so. Let us find that ability once more, shall we? This is what I mean by “culture design” — that communities of people come together and learn how culture is already changing so that they can co-create the conditions that will be needed to reach their intended goals.
For example, if a small town was wiped out by tornadoes they might want to rebuild on 100% renewable energy so they aren’t part of the problem of global warming that made severe storms more likely in the past. Or perhaps a city riddled with bullets flung between white police and black community members might want to shift the social norms and mental models that militarized the police force in the past. Changes like these can be made intentionally, but only if those involved know what the practices of culture design happen to be.
Here’s a partial list to stimulate discussion:
- Group facilitation can be done to convene workshops, run scenarios, cultivate consensus, or design action plans for a community of people.
- Discourse analysis can be done to study the language underlying thoughts and actions that were dysfunction in the past to reveal where problems in understanding get in the way of finding workable solutions.
- Social learning processes can be identified to see how particular cultural practices get reproduced in younger generations or are thwarted and altered by some kind of educational intervention.
- Pattern and trend analysis can be done to learn how things are changing in the social demographics of a particular community and for the larger social systems that impact them.
-- Joe Brewer
Article: Read Full Article
Why Must We Design Our Bioregions?
Missing from most environmental policies is the question of scale. How DO we get environmental solutions to scale up from local to global? I have explored this question in the context of cultural evolution research where a powerful framework exists that is known as multi-level selection. Briefly summarized, it goes like this:
“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. The rest is commentary.”
- David Sloan Wilson, Evolutionary Biologist
Note how the behavior of individuals at one scale (an isolated group) relates to the strategic impacts for how they relate to other scales (interactions among multiple groups). The insight from multi-level selection is that we have to look at the evolutionary patterns at multiple scales to see how each level interacts with the others.
Applied to environmental problems — as done brilliantly here by Timothy Waring and collaborators — it becomes clear that the social structures within a human society will strongly influence how policies are adopted and at what scales they can be effectively implemented.
In a society that strongly emphasizes the role of the family, social norms among those who are related to each other will be a powerful level for engagement. Contrast this with a society that has weak community ties (such as the United States where most people don’t know their neighbors and move far from family for employment) and it makes little sense to focus on families to get policies implemented.
The same kind of thinking can be applied in the opposite direction as well. Ask yourself which social structures are best suited to solve an environmental problem and see how you might contribute to changing the society itself such that the issue becomes tractable. This is where the bioregion concept really shines through.
-- Joe Brewer
Article: Read Full Article
Think like a Commoner
In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.
The beauty of commons is that we can build them ourselves, right now. But the bigger challenge is, Can we learn to see the commons and, more importantly, to think like a commoner?
The biggest “tragedy of the commons” is the misconception that commons are failures — relics from another era rendered unnecessary by the Market and State. Think Like a Commoner dispels such prejudices by explaining the rich history and promising future of the commons — an ageless paradigm of cooperation and fairness that is re-making our world.
With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating examples, David Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical new forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner explains how the commons:
- Is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests and collaborative consumption, and beyond;
- Challenges the standard narrative of market economics by explaining how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment; and
- Provides a framework of law and social action that can help us move beyond the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism.
We have a choice: Ignore the commons and suffer the ongoing private plunder of our common wealth. Or Think Like a Commoner and learn how to rebuild our society and reclaim our shared inheritance. This accessible, comprehensive introduction to the commons will surprise and enlighten you, and provoke you to action.
Recommended Book: Think Like A Commoner
Forgotten Skills
The modern conveniences we take for granted are but a thin fragile layer upon which we depend. Our society has lost much of its "Bootstrap" technologies and skills needed to operate them. If something were to happen to our current system, many would be plunged into perilous circumstances for a prolonged period.
Fortunately, many around the nation are attempting to revive a set of driven-by-hand skills and techniques of living that do not depend upon our current technology to function.
We present to you the Survivor Library. Much of the works in this library date from the 19th Century before electricity and the internal combustion engine. A wide range of topics are covered and I urge you to use this resource as a base of aquiring new (old) skills.
Please, if you use the library then consider making a donation to keep it running.