These are times of change. We don’t know yet when or how our world will change, but we do know that it will change, for it cannot remain as it is. If the range of possible changes embraces on the one hand a breakthrough to a more peaceful, equitable and sustainable world, and on the other a breakdown into chaos, the question of whether we can consciously and purposively orient and manage the processes of change becomes vitally important.
The cardinal sins and cardinal virtues of our time are defined by how we ourselves relate to the change that will come about in the world. The cardinal sins are convenient complacency and facile skepticism.
Complacency borne of the convenience of not having to do anything or change anything claims that things are basically all right as they are. There are problems in our world, and occasional crises, but they are being managed by those in charge—or perhaps they will just resolve themselves. The world has seen problems and crises before, and has muddled through without people like you and me doing anything about them. We don’t need to bother trying to change the world—in the final count the world will take care of itself.
Convenient complacency is the sin of the uninformed optimist.
Facile skepticism is the reverse of convenient complacency; it’s the other side of the coin. It tells us that we don’t need to do or change anything not because things are basically all right as they are, but because things cannot be changed—certainly, not by people like you and me. If we managed to get through problems and crises before, it may have been because we were just plain lucky, or because the problems and crises were not really that serious. We cannot tell whether those that are ahead of us will be really different; they could be resolved by a happy turn of events, or could just play themselves out. In any case, there is not much we can do about it. The world is pretty much what it was in the past, and so is human nature. So, if we are still here tomorrow, it will not be because the world has changed, and certainly not because we have changed it. Perhaps we are just lucky, or because our problems are not that bad. And if our problems are really that serious, and if we are not so lucky, then we won’t be here. That will be too bad, but it’s the just way it will be.
Facile skepticism is the sin of the uninformed pessimist.
Why are both the optimist and the pessimist uninformed? Because they ignore the most fundamental fact about our world: that it’s a complex system that’s no longer sustainable. It’s on the threshold of chaos. If it doesn’t change in time, it collapses. But at the threshold of chaos complex systems can change. They are unstable and supersensitive to everything that happens in them and to them. Even small fluctuations can catalyze major changes in their structure and their behavior—the famous “butterfly effects.”
The choice offered by complex systems at the threshold of chaos is simple and straightforward: transform, or collapse. In the sphere of life, it’s mutate, or become extinct. In the sphere of society, it’s create reform, or lapse into anarchy.
The critical choice—the so-called “bifurcation”—in complex systems near chaos is a well-documented fact. It’s illustrated in the evolution of living species in nature, and in the development of human societies in history. It can even be modeled by mathematical simulation. It turns out that near chaos the “attractors” that appear in the “phase-portrait” of the systems shift. Relatively stable point and periodic attractors yield dominance to so-called “chaotic” or ”strange” attractors, and these are prone to create fundamental change. It’s not reasonable to question the reality of the bifurcation process. But the optimist who takes the stance of complacency doesn’t necessarily question its reality, he just ignores that it’s coming. It’s more convenient than facing it.
The pessimist is similarly uninformed, because otherwise he wouldn’t be so sure that our world cannot be changed. It’s simpler to assume that the world is unchangeable—then there is no need to feel guilty for not doing anything about changing it.
The sins of convenient complacency and facile skepticism are sins of ignorance. Willful, unnecessary, and therefore inexcusable ignorance. Because it’s not true that anyone, at least in the industrialized, information-imbued parts of the world must remain ignorant of the basic facts of sustainability. More and more, these facts are spelled out in the news, but they are also implicit in the stress we experience in the everyday sphere of our lives. They are equally implicit in changes in the climate: we are unbalancing not just the human world, but also nature. It’s absurd to continue to act as if these worlds were not on the threshold of a bifurcation.
Uninformed individuals believe that the world cannot be changed—or that it doesn’t need to be changed. Superficially informed individuals see that the world needs to be changed, but they’re not sure if it can be changed—at least by them. Truly informed individuals know that the world is supersensitive and prone to change, and that they, and people like them, can do all that needs to be done to change it.
Truly informed individuals do not lapse into the twin traps of convenient complacency and facile skepticism. They know that the world will change, for it must change. They also know that they can have a role in changing it: a decisive role. Their stance is that of the activist: the informed activist.
Informed activism is the cardinal virtue in these critical times. It’s our best hope for taking control of our destiny: for creating a world we can live in, and can leave in good conscience to our children.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Bravo Ervin- informed activism is a cardinal virtue, I agree, and would add that this is also about “transcending and including”, as much about transacting as it is about transforming: we call this new capability “TransActivism” in Renaissance2. The question is: how can we produce more transactivists capable of informed activism and who can connect with mainstream systems in transformative ways? My concern is that it is relatively easy for intelligent people to talk about integral approaches (and indeed, they do that, alot!). Yet walking the talk is much harder, especially when one attempts to scale good small-scale initiatives into global solutions. I believe that in the WorldShift Alliance we should make this one of our top priorities- what is your view?.
Bravo!! Yes indeed. I have been thinking about what you say here, and you say it with such dedication and passion. I do hope many people will join in this conversation…in this wonderful salon you have created for us. So I share some of my thoughts:
Many people nowadays have heard of Ilya Prigogine (dissipative structure theory and self-organizing systems) and Rupert Sheldrake (morphogenetic field, morphic resonance…), and I personally believe that studying their work can help enormously in our current planetary situation. Others come to mind too —Jared Diamond, Charles Pellegrino and Jesse Stoff, and the Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin. Their writings speak to your concerns…which you express with urgency and eloquence. I am now reading Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Succeed.” Back around 2000, I read his “Guns, Germs and Steel,” and I think he should be required reading in secondary schools. I know from experience how this age group, these young people, are so passionately looking for a positive direction for their budding lives…their budding intellects…their budding integration of thought and feeling…the development of “the feeling intellect” as Wordsworth put it.
I live in Northern California where the trees are an ever-present communicant within what I call a planetary consciousness. Diamond’s discussions (in the aforementioned “Collapse…”) of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) are to be noticed, and praised. I have read that our giant redwoods grow tall and last a very long time because they reach out and support each other with their horizontal roots…an important lesson—to be sure!
Teilhard (“The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life”) argues for a calm objective eye upon whatever prevailing or impending disasters and, at the same time, in the inner moment of the decision point, a movement of the will of the individual occurs…a movement toward benevolent evolution…”But will not the work itself of our minds, of our hearts and of our hands—that is to say, our achievements, our products, our opus—will not this, too, in some sense be ‘eternalised’ and saved?”
In “Darwin’s Universe: Origins and Crises in the History of Life” (Charles R. Pellegrino and Jesse A. Stoff), we find an exciting chapter entitled “Punctuated What?” which deals in a very intriguing manner with the “model of punctuated equilibria” as introduced in 1972 by Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History and Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University:
“In an attempt to lessen the tensions between genetics and geology…this model (which has its roots in Harvard systematist Ernst Mayr’s allopatric theory, wherein new species arise in very small populations at the edges or frontiers of a new species’ geographic range), punctuation, or rapid change, is typically associated with small founding populations cut off from genetic communication with their parental group.”
Pellegrino and Stoff then go on: “Consider the spread of European sparrows across North America…” and how they were brought into New England during the 1850s, thus separating them from their European ancestors by the Atlantic Ocean, and so spurring differences in size and behavior patterns:
“Then, the Aleutian sparrow, a related species with a different beak and bigger bones, invades the ancestral range, appearing suddenly and possibly even displacing the European variety. If the Aleutian sparrows become a successful central population, we will expect to see no great change in the fossils they leave behind (they will be in equilibrium) until their own PERIPHERAL ISOLATES FORM NEW BRANCHES OF THE GENUS AND RADIATE AWAY FROM THE SOURCE TO ESTABLISH NEW CENTRAL POPULATIONS.” [CAPS are mine.]
You may get my drift here…by analogy, like Penelope, I am trying to weave a tapestry…a pattern with meaning…with beautiful design….”peripheral isolates’ …leading edgers…talk to each other…learn from each other…then move more toward the center to share their ideas.
We could talk of Loren Eiseley and his description of the creative adaptation made by the sea creatures as they were stranded in the tidepools while the primordial waters receded. We can speak of Teilhard’s concept of ‘radial energy’ as being more and more operative within our evolutionary journey. But that may come later…I must go find my old notes!
Jonas Salk said we must always be good ancestors. Are we being good ancestors?
–bss