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.
After Obama?? 