VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. PART 6

CYBERNETICS FOR DUMMIES.

We now come to what might be called “Cybernetics for Dummies”.

CYBERNETICS is not about Cyborgs or any kind of science fiction or computer-controlled organisations or societies.

Stafford Beer called it “the science of effective organisation” and the more we think, and act and learn together, the more you will realise the importance of cybernetics in co-creating networks of Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

True,  the founding fathers of cybernetics were all whizzes at mathematics and pioneers in artificial intelligence and computers. But don’t be alarmed. As long as you can count up to five that’s all the maths you’ll need to understand why our Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities have to be Viable

A Viable System is any complex, biological or quasi-biological system that is organised so as to meet the demands of surviving in a changing environment.

And its a basic rule of cybernetics that all viable systems are RECURSIVE: they all contain and are contained within other – higher and lower level – systems.

Think of any biological organism – you, me, cats. flies. trees, worms, bacteria. We have many lower level systems: muscles, and eyes, nerves and brains stomachs, lungs and lots of other organs, all of which have their own lower-level systems, all with the same DNA, all combining together to be the unique complex adaptive viable systems that are you and me. Within those sub-systems are sub-sub-systems each with their own sub-systems and so on down to individual molecules of matter. That’s what Recursive means.

And in our turn we are sub-systems of other complex, adaptive systems: families, Enterprises Organisations and Communities. They are all recursive systems too.

But are those recursive systems VIABLE? Can our families, our Enterprises, Organisations and Communities meet the demands of surviving in a changing environment or will they only remain viable as long as the environment – which is itself a complex, adaptive system – continues more or less unchanged.

Of course, all viable, recursive, complex, adaptive systems vary constantly as they adjust to variations in their higher and lower systems. Some small degree of variation is normal and natural and necessary to maintain the systems’ viability.

But, if the systems’ environments change in ways that are outside their normal ranges of variation, then the systems and their sub-systems will cease to be viable and they will die, unless they can rapidly adapt to their new environments.

Thus, as global warming forces the Gaian systems to change in ways that are far outside the range of variation that we, and our Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities have known for the whole of recorded history, we and they will only continue to be Viable if we and they vastly improve our capacity to adapt to our new environments.

Thanks to the great Stafford Beer, we have a model with which we can think, act and learn together to co-create many thousands of VIGDEOCS that will maximise their capacity to adapt and maintain their viability.

By the time Stafford started applying his Viable Systems Model as a major international consultant he had already been a Production Controller, a Director of Management Science, a Managing Director of various companies. So, his ideas are based on and tested and refined by many decades of applications in the real world, at every level from the individual enterprise to a whole national economy.

The model has Five levels of sub-systems, each of which usually consists of other Viable systems.

System 1 is the level where the rubber hits the road: where, , depending on the kind of system we’re talking about, the patient meets the doctor or gets an operation, the products are designed and made: the city council collects the garbage: the teachers meet the students: the state collects its taxes: the company meets its customers and so on: These are the “primary activities” of a complex system. And you can see that there would be other viable sub-systems within those primary activities. That’s because all viable systems are, of course, RECURSIVE.

Another way of looking at System One is to see it as the boundary between the System as a whole and its environment, which might be the market, or the patient, or the electorate, or, as we now understand, the Gaian systems.

System 2 represents the information channels and bodies that allow the primary activities in System 1 to communicate between each other.

System 3 monitors and co-ordinates the activities within System 1. by establishing the rules, resources, rights and responsibilities of System 1 and also provides an interface with Systems 4 and 5.

System 4 covers the bodies that are responsible for looking outwards to the environment to monitor how the system  needs to adapt to remain viable.

System 5 is responsible for policy decisions produced within the other four levels through which the system as a whole maintains its viability.\

The table below summarises how VIGDEOCs might fit with the Viable Systems Model in order for our societies to our societies to be constantly aware of and adapt be the challenges they face.

Over the coming months you’ll have plenty of chances to discuss and modify the chart and relate it to the world we live in, but over the next few minutes let’s try to use it as a basis for clarifying why cybernetics is so important to working out the future of the human family.

	SYSTEM 1	SYSTEM2	SYSTEM3	SYSTEM4	SYSTEM5
GAIA	X	X	X	X	X
DEMOCRACIES	X	X	X	X	X
ENTERPRISES	X
ORGANISATIONS	X	X	X
COMMUNITIES			X	X

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VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. PART 5

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GAIA AND DEMOCRACY.

As I said earlier, networks of VIGDEOCs have also to be thought of as networks of

Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies which cannot function without networks of

Viable Innovative Gaian Enterprises

and

Viable Innovative Gaian Organisations

and

Viable Innovative Gaian Communities.

Together they will add up to an immensely diverse array of Viable Innovative Gaian Societies that are constantly learning how to adapt to, and live in harmony with the natural world of which they are a part.

And that constant learning process has to start with people like you in meetings like this.

For the next ten minutes let’s look at the links between Gaia and Democracy. .

Do we all know what Gaia means? More or less?

Originally, Gaia was the Goddess of the Universe for the Ancient Greeks’, the Mother of all the Gods.

Now, thanks to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, Gaia has a profoundly scientific meaning: their Gaia hypothesis, proposes that all the living and the nonliving parts of the earth combine to form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism,

That qualification ‘thought of‘ is important, because, unlike real organisms, Gaia can’t reproduce itself. It’s a 4.5 billion year-old planet, after all.

But the interplay of Gaia’s biological and physical systems means that in many ways she resembles a living organism. She adapts and evolves and gets sick and recovers. And like all but the most primitive of real organisms, she has billions of other organisms as her working parts and sub-systems. And they constantly adapt and evolve and reproduce and ingest and excrete, and die and … die-off.

Over billions of years, Gaia has been through many dramatic variations. Very hot, very cold, very friendly, very hostile. She has been wounded by asteroids and comets. Billions of species have evolved and died off and sometimes been killed off. But still she continues to adjust and adapt and new species evolve and die-off, and on and on it goes.

Human beings, like every other living thing on Earth, are all part of the Gaian system. And those systems have been more or less stable for about 15,000 years,  but, today, as James Lovelock says:

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported on the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Now that global warming (to name just one of the ways we are de-stabilising the Gaian Systems) has passed the tipping point, “catastrophe is unstoppable” , he says.

Moreover, in his view, all the standard green things, like sustainable development, and cap-and-trade, are just words that mean nothing. “They might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference.”

But when people tell him “You can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do!” ,  he replies, “On the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

On the other hand, he also said in 2008, “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” although, “ I think that our best course of action is to spend at least as much effort adapting to global heating as in attempts to slow or stop it happening.”

Lovelock never spells out what he means by “adapting to global heating”, but, he seems to think that Gaia may do it for us by reducing our numbers from around 7 Billion to one billion or less. over the next few generations.

Not a pretty prospect. And in future meetings, we need to  thoroughly understand why Lovelock  and every other serious natural scientist, takes that view or something very close to it.  No point in burying our heads in the sand.

But, in terms of politics and economics, he is assuming that our societies will continue with “business as usual” because they know no better.

In fact in political terms he’s something of a dinosaur. Lovelock’s political Theories in Use seem to be  aligned with those of the global elites as John McMurtry summarised them.

Thus, although Lovelock,  above all,  has clearly established that –

• the world is a system of interacting subsystems that have evolved together and depend on each other

and that

• Viable Societies depend on a functioning ecological base and a finite, partly renewable resource-base.

He seems not to think that

• The principle of partnership applies (or could apply) to present and future human and non-human systems.

Still less would he go so far as to say that

• The self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems is the model for the co-creation of a global network of VIGDEOCs.

Lovelock is an extraordinarily brilliant and original natural scientist, but in the political and social arena, we have to reject his theories in use in favour of alternatives that enable us both to set in train effective processes of adaptation before, ‘it hits the fan’ AND have a pretty good time while we do it.

Lets move on now to what we understand by “democracy”.

Is it, “Government of the people by the people and for the people”, as Abraham Lincoln espoused?

Well, no, it isn’t.  Nowhere in the world are there  “democracies” that fits Lincoln’s description. .

Rather they are best described as

“that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”  as Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist said in his classic work “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’.(1942)

The role of the people in this “Competing Elites” model of democracy’, in Schumpeter’s view, is simply to produce a government of their betters. The people are sovereign only on election day. Once they have done their job, they should go back to their private affairs and leave governing to the elite they have selected. Dim ill-informed, easily-manipulated and feckless as they are, that is all that the people – that’s you and me, dear friend – are fit for, in Schumpeter’s model of ‘democracy’. And it is a view that is accepted as gospel, as their working ‘theories in use’, by almost all politicians, political commentators and political scientists today.

Moreover, for Schumpeter and his followers, these views are accepted as objective, scientific theory when they are actually an ideological justification for the domination and mismanagement of our societies by incompetent and corrupt elites.

The various ‘competing elites‘ models of democracy, could never fit our vision of using the self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems as the model for the co-creation of a global network of VIGDEOCs.

Rather, we need models of democracy that are ‘about the possibility of collective decision making about collective action for a common good.`as Cliff DuRand puts it

To be Viable, Innovative and Gaian, such democracies would also have to have the self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems

In Viable, Innovative, Gaian Democracies, citizens would learn through their collective decision-making in participatory system-change processes how to re-configure their Enterprises, Organisations and Communities so as to co-exist symbiotically with the Gaian systems on which we depend.

Thus, the adaptability of Viable, Innovative, Gaian Democracies would depend on them having Viable, Innovative Enterprises, Organisations and Communities as their sub-systems.

Which brings us to the topic of Viable Systems and Cybernetics, the science of effective organisation.

Time to stretch our legs again.

model

Tony Judt, Cultural Creatives and VIGDEOCs

This Post is a continuation of Dissolving The USA’s Utterly Broken Systems.

VIGDEOC means Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

In an earlier post I quoted some reflections by Tony Judt on his conversations with members of the public after his lectures on social-democratic alternatives to the USA’s extremist model of capitalism.

This is the second generation of people who can’t imagine change except in their own lives, who have no sense of social collective public goods or services, who are just isolated individuals desperately striving to better themselves above everybody else.

Judt now intends to devote himself to writing a book to help young people think collectively again.

It could really have an impact if I get it right. Something that will get the next generation to see there is a way to think about politics that is not just the way we’ve been habituated to do it. I care about that and I think I can do it.

In response, “Claire” wrote a long and thoughtful comment from Devon in the UK.  She concluded:

I have the good fortune to live surrounded by compassionate, earnest humans who try to make the world a better place AND make school pick up. None are party members but many are micro activists, trying to make a direct and long-lasting impact in their own community,
The age of global communications, instant access and 24 news highlights to many the futility of attempting meaningful and lasting change through the political system. But in many ways it hasn’t made the world smaller – it has actually turned people’s focus once more on their immediate surroundings. If we can’t change the world, we can still do something about the way we ourselves live. James and I have consciously cut our carbon output by around 40% in the past year. We are actively engaged in discussions in the village on where to site a community wind turbine. Our school is run via a dynamic group of parent volunteers. Our village film club opened with The Age of Stupid (and then we all went back to the pub to discuss). The examples of collaborative working for common good are many-fold.
What does this mean to those rightfully frustrated with our lack of oomph? I don’t know exactly. Perhaps be intelligent with your expectations and tailor your battle-cries? Don’t mourn the passing of the old ways without acknowledging the potential power of the new? Don’t give up hope.

The best way I can think of to respond to Claire, and Tony Judt is to try to indicate how hundreds of millions of people  like Claire could (admittedly, its a big ‘could’) begin to think, act and learn together to achieve fundamental systemic change at every level from the local to the global.

Informal networks such as that Claire is rightly proud of, exist in thousands of unremarkable communities around the world.  They are networks of what Paul Ray calls “Cultural Creatives”.

These creative, optimistic millions are at the leading edge of several kinds of cultural change, deeply affecting not only their own lives but our larger society as well. Innovation by innovation, they are shaping a new kind of American culture for the 21st century.

As Paul Ray sees it, Cultural Creatives are questioning the unspoken assumptions of the old culture and opening up new insights and forging creativity in people’s lives at the grassroots.  They tend to be better-educated, better-off,  more concerned about global warming, the ethics of work, business and politics, violence against women and children and similar issues than the rest of society.

And two-thirds of them are women.

Paul Ray’s research indicates that Cultural Creatives comprise 25 – 30% of adult populations in the English-speaking world and Western Europe.

What follows are some introductory remarks that might be made to a group of  “Cultural Creatives” who have indicated they would like to know more about “a global network  of diverse and self-organising VIGDEOCs: Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

The Power-Elite’s World View

The reason today’s politicians, economists, business leaders, academics, administrators and commentators are failing so badly is because they have yet to use the scientific knowledge that has become available in the past half century to co-create VIGDEOCs (Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations and Communities) that can define and resolve the dilemmas that baffle the current system.

They are working within a set of theories and practices that go back hundreds of years. Here is a summary of how they see the world by the Canadian philosopher, John McMurtry.

• Each country is first and foremost a competitor in the global market and should act according to its own interests.

• All states have a right to use all resources within their reach.

State governments

• Are the ultimate source of civil order.

• Should keep out of the markets.

• Should encourage trans-national companies to play a full part in all national and international decisions affecting global trade and development.

Representative democracy

• is the nearest approach to an ideal democracy that is practicable in the real world and is the true guardian of a free society.

Science and technology

• We can ignore the ‘doom-mongers’ because science and technology will always find solutions to the problems that worry them.

The market economy

• All human needs express themselves in the market place in monetary terms and therefore the market will lead to optimal solutions for all problems.

• Permanent economic growth is desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limits to the conversion of life into saleable commodities.

• Individual consumer desires are permanently increasing, unlimited and good.

• Those who do not or cannot express themselves in the competitive process are a problem, but not one that calls for radical reflection.

• The great majority who have only their labour to sell must do so.

• Ever larger trans-national corporations are perfectly natural.

Market forces

• Competition is the dominant principle governing relationships of all kinds.

• Freedom to buy and sell in money exchanges is the basis of human liberty and justice.

• Profit maximisation is the engine of social well-being and is not to be hedged by public regulation or ownership.

• Private property s good in all things.

• Information is a proprietary and marketable good and a legitimate means for acquiring wealth, power and privilege.

• Aggressive individualism on the part of individuals, companies and states is acceptable.

With minor variations, those ideas have dominated human affairs for at least 200 years and have their roots in much earlier times. They go back 2500 years to Plato and Aristotle, 500 years to Machiavelli, to the Westphalian Treaty of 1659, and the thinking of John Locke and Isaac Newton, and, of course, to the free-market theories of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith and Ricardo that have shaped the dominant economic paradigms for well over 200 years.

VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. Part 4

NELSON MANDELA’S THEORIES IN USE.

Is anyone feeling a bit uncomfortable? Wondering whether you should make an excuse and leave? I ask, because if you are highly educated and/or have enjoyed a successful managerial or academic career, you will probably have agreed with both the world view of the power elites AND the alternative, ecological world view.

I can see heads nodding. It’s odd isn’t it. Here we have world views that are incompatible, yet many people can happily agree with and argue for both of them. What’s going on? Well here’s where our Theories of Action split into two parts. “Espoused Theories” and “Theories in Use”

Theories-in-use govern our actual behaviour and tend to be so internalised that we don’t really know they are there. They are a complex set of analytical rules we have acquired since the womb and use to understand ourselves, other people and the world we live in and decide what actions to take. Deep down, our ‘Theories in Use’ provide us with a set of what we take to be practical guidelines, rules, methodologies, that add up to a science of everyday life.  The more educated we are the more complex  our Theories in Use are likely to be.

Our Theories-in-use always determine the extent to which we can act upon our Espoused Theories.

Thus we can espouse an ecological and/or socialist or even anarchist world-view, but live by theories in use that make it impossible to turn our alternative world view into a reality.

The more radical the world view we espouse, the more important it is to examine the world view we actually use to go about the business of our daily lives. Going back Mandela for a moment, was INVICTUS any use when it came to choosing his economic Ministers and advisers? Many of the years he and his fellow-prisoners had spent reading and discussing the great thinkers would have been dominated by the ideas of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Gramsci, Che, Castro and other revolutionary theorists.

Then, just as they got the chance to put their ideas into practice, the whole Communist-Socialist project implodes and turns to the USA and its allies for advice as to how to adopt and implement free-market policies. What a bummer!! All the theories in use they had been acquiring in their prison university had been shown to be useless in the real world.

The only other alternative, Keynesian social democracy (aka capitalism-lite), had been more or less abandoned in the USA and its friends and satellites in the 1980s. So, Mandela’s speeches on economics – like Obama’s today – reflect the hard-line free-market Theories in Use that have dominated the USA and its friends since the 1980s.

The failure of Mandela, and every other would-be radical leader to deliver the revolutionary agendas that they genuinely believe when they espouse them, stems from their lack of Theories in Use that fit with and enable them to implement successfully, their ideals.

And this applies at every level and in every sector of society. None of us could have reached maturity without Theories in Use that are mostly rooted in the distant past, a past dominated by the ideas of – to name but a few – Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, J.M. Keynes, and a few dozen other great thinkers. But all of those great thinkers were theorising at a time when no-one had articulated, still less adopted, a world view in which human societies had to learn how to co-exist with the ecological systems on which they depend and are a part. Concepts such as ecology,  theories of action, viability, systems thinking, complexity, self-organisation, participatory democracy, problem-posing dialogues, learning organisations, sustainability, were totally unknown to them.

Yet those concepts and methodologies need to be the core components of the “Theories in Use” through which we can co-create Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

For the moment, we don’t need to begin to  discuss how our current Theories in Use have affected the way we act and behave and think.  That  can wait to our next meeting. For the rest of this evening we just need to run through what we mean by Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

Let’s start with “GAIAN” after we’ve stretched our legs and had another glass of something.

VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. Part 3.

ESPOUSED THEORIES vs THEORIES IN USE

Before the break we looked at the dominant world view of today’s power-elites and an alternative world view that relates the survival of our societies to their connection to a functioning ecological base. Duh.

This opposing world view is so sensible and understandable that you’d think that any sane and intelligent member of society – and especially those highly-educated and nurtured members of the power-elites – would adopt it as the basis for their policies and decisions.

But of course they don’t. Why not? Because – unlike any of us – they’re cowards? And/or deeply corrupt and dishonest? Many of them, probably, but there is another explanation that we need to be aware of and think about before we cast the first stone.

The more likely explanation for the failure of our power-elites to adopt and act upon an ecologically-based world view is that their unexamined mental maps, their “Theories of Action” stop them learning how to do so.

These are not just ideological issues. We all have world views, mental models, “Theories of Action”, that can stop us from learning how to tackle complex issues and when you start coming to VIGDEOC network meetings they will be the first things you’ll talk about, explore, evaluate.

Of course, not all world views, mental models, get in your way. Without them we couldn’t get through a normal day at home or at work or with our friends. They are what enable us to fit in, feel comfortable, have confidence that we’re doing the right thing, that people will trust and respect us.

So where do those theories and mental models come from?

Think who or what has shaped – and is shaping – the way you think? Parents, teachers, friends, films, books, plays, newspapers, blogs, radio and TV, sports people, neighbours.

We all have them. You don’t have to be an intellectual. Jenni Diski the British writer tells this story of teaching in a tough London girls’ school.

Most of the pupils were planning to get married or pregnant as soon as they left school, and they were worried about Ms.Diski’s future. One day, a sixteen year-old asked ‘Miss’ :

‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Why aren’t you married?’
‘I don’t want to get married.’
The rest of the class joined in.

‘At least have a baby, miss. Because it’ll look after you when you’re old.’
‘At least get engaged, miss, and get a ring. Then you’ve got something to sell.’

Those girls – and millions like them – had such powerful “Theories of Action” that nothing said by their teachers, had any relevance to their mental models of the real world, and the Theories of Action that shaped their behaviours and actions.

Or think for a moment about sports. If you spent your formative years playing American Football, Ice-Hockey and Basketball, your world-view would be very different to contemporaries brought up on soccer, hurling, cricket, tennis and even rugby.

Which brings me to the film about the South African team’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup: INVICTUS. Did you see it?  Why INVICTUS? Yes, its the poem that President Mandela recommends to the team captain, François Pienaar as a guiding philosophy that sustained him through 27 years of harsh imprisonment.

INVICTUS starts

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

And ends

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

Powerful stuff. And we see Pienaar inspired by words that had sustained Mandela to lead his team of underdogs to victory in the competition – and in the process seemed to create a joyously united nation out of the bitter embers of the apartheid system.

But noble sentiments, goodwill and sporting success can take you only so far. Fifteen years later, South Africa is falling apart: economically, socially, culturally, ecologically. No doubt, Mandela and his successors have done some good things. However the Theories of Action they brought to the vast array of problems and opportunities they inherited have not enabled them to transform the fortunes of the vast majority of their fellow-citizens.

Whatever they may say about justice and change and however sincerely they say it, they, and every other democratically elected leader in the world today operates within something similar to the mental models that John McMurtry outlined.

Often, like Mandela, their mental models operate alongside a quasi-spiritual view of their role in the world. Yet, in another part of INVICTUS we see Mandela making a speech that almost explicitly endorses the dominant power-elite world view that:

• Each country is first and foremost a competitor in the global market and should act according to its own interests.
• All states have a right to use all resources within their reach.
• Governments should encourage trans-national companies to play a full part in all national and international decisions affecting global trade and development.
• Permanent economic growth is desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limits to the conversion of life into saleable commodities.

Remember that Mandela was a brilliant lawyer and had spent thousands of days in mutual-education classes with his fellow-inmates during his 27 years in prison. If, after all that, even a great man and a good leader like Mandela shares the same world-view as the rest of the global power elites, we have to start by trying to understand the limitations of our own Theories of Action before we can co-create Viable, Innovative and Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations and Communities.