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.

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VIGDEOCs and Cultural Creatives: Part 2.

THE POWER ELITES’ WORLD-VIEW

VIGDEOC = Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

Look at this photo. What do you see? Not a trick question.

INSERT  PHOTO of FROCK-COATED 19th

CENTURY SURGEONS

Surgeons at work in the mid-19^th century? Yes.

What are their patients’ chances of survival? About 50%. Until about 1870, 48 – 50% of surgical patients died. This percentage had not changed in hundreds of years. Now look at this picture of a 20^th Century surgical team at work.

INSERT PHOTO OF  MID 20th.   CENTURY  SURGICAL OPERATION

What are this patient’s chances of survival? Better than 99% even for the kind of hugely-complicated surgery that was beyond the wildest imaginings of the gentlemen in the first picture.

Yet, this improvement did not take long to happen. The patients chances of survival had improved to around 99% within a few decades of that ‘first picture being taken.

Mortality rates today are only marginally better than they were at the end of the 19^th century. So, tell me, what happened?

After hundreds – even thousands – of years of stasis, had surgeons suddenly got better, cleverer, more dedicated? Had their training changed drastically? Had their instruments improved?

What happened around 1870 to make even the most difficult surgical operations vastly safer than they had been a decade or two earlier? Any suggestions? Any theories?

The answer is that surgeons everywhere started to apply the scientific knowledge that had just become available from Joseph Lister in England about Hygiene, using Carbolic Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide as Disinfectants, about Bacteriology from the work of Louis Pasteur in France, and about the Sterilisation of their instruments from Robert Koch in Germany.

Interestingly, because surgeons were all private practitioners at that time, it was market forces that drove even the most hidebound and blinkered of them to rush to implement the entirely non-surgical innovations that were making their more scientifically-minded colleagues very wealthy.

How does this relate to the VIGDEOC networks?

Remember the Questionnaire? We are agreed that

our current systems of  government and democracy do not know how to respond to crises we are facing

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 that can define and eliminate the problems that baffle the current system.

Just as the 19^th Century surgeons before Lister, Pasteur and Koch, 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.

If there were less than a Billion people on Earth, if wars were fought with muskets and swords, if the highest form of technology were the steam engine, that world view would not immediately threaten the future of either the human family or of the species we evolved with.

Today, however, with over 6 Billion people on the planet, with wars waged by horrific high-tech weapons, and technologies that rip off the tops of mountains or scour the coral reefs off the ocean floor, those values and assumptions have to be consigned to the trashcan of history.

In the 21st. Century,  our societies have to tackle the complex systemic new threats we face within a new world view,  one that assumes:

• The world is a system of interacting subsystems that have evolved together and depend on each other
• Viable Societies depend on a functioning ecological base and a finite, partly renewable resource-base.
• The principle of partnership applies to present and future human and non-human systems.
• The self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems is the model for the co-creation of a global network of VIGDEOCs.

Time for another little break, I think. Then,we’ll outline how being part of a global network of VIGDEOCs could  affect your lives and the lives of everyone you come into contact with and the future of every living thing on Earth.

David Harvey and the Big Questions

From Amy Goodman’s interview with David Harvey,  Democracy Now March 2009

Capitalism historically has grown at a 2.5 percent compound rate of growth since 1750. OK. And in good years, it’s growing at three percent.

Obama, the other day, said, “Well, in a couple of years, we’ll be back to three percent growth.” Gordon Brown says, “Well, actually, the economy will double in the next few years.”

Now, when capitalism was constituted by everything going on around Manchester and a few other hot spots in 1750, three percent compound growth rate was no problem. You’re now looking at a situation where you’re going to say three percent compound rate of growth on everything that’s going on in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, North America and everywhere in the world. We’re looking at a different kind of world.

The total economy back in, say, 1750 was about $135 billion. It was $4 trillion by the time you get to 1950. It’s $40 trillion by the time you get to 2000. It’s now $56 trillion. If it doubles (again) we’re talking about $100trillion. And by 2030, you’re going to have to find three trillion .. profitable opportunities for capital to operate at that point.

Now, there are limits .. and I think we’re hitting those limits environmentally, socially, politically. And I think it’s time we started really thinking about an alternative. In other words, we have to think about a zero-growth economy.

This is a very useful way of putting the current crisis in perspective and he goes on to say that these stark statistics and trends mean that …

DAVID HARVEY: … In effect, you’re going to have to have a nonprofit economy. And how you do that, of course, is a big, big question. I’m not—I don’t have the blueprint for it. But I think that this is one of the key questions we should be thinking about right now.

And what disturbs me is we’re going through this crisis right now, and we’re not asking those kinds of big questions that we should be asking.

Gaian Democracies was written to ask  those big questions – and many more – within the context of co-creating democracies that could live in symbiosis with the Gaian systems  on which all life depends.

Moreover, it tried to offer ways in which our societies could think, act and learn to be ever-more completely democratic by adopting a soft-systems approach to tackling  those big and complex questions.

Critics  of neo-liberalism and capitalism  like David Harvey, and many of the quasi-anarchists in the anti-globalisation movement,  ignored or rejected all the questions we asked, the new vocabulary we used and the new ideas we offered.

And, as far as I know, they  still do.  Yet, as Harvey says,

In effect, you’re going to have to have a nonprofit economy. And how you do that, of course, is a big, big question. I’m not—I don’t have the blueprint for it.

Note:  The wholly wrong-headed idea that somewhere there could be  “the Blueprint” for tackling ‘the big questions ‘.  This is a typically Command and Control way of thinking: “Here’s my plan. Now you go and implement it.”

It also  illustrates the distance that those who say they want our societies to tackle the big questions have to go before they can begin to work out how to think, act and learn systemically so as to re-configure today’s lethally obsolete  political, economic, governmental and security systems.

Note:  Tackling the big questions will require us to “RE-CONFIGURE today’s …  SYSTEMS’

Together those systems and their many components  form “The Global Monetocracy”.

We coined this term to enable readers of “Gaian Democracies’ to see  all those big  questions as ‘emergent properties’ of a profoundly anti-gaian and anti-human system.

Thinking in terms of blueprints, or policy proposals or grass-roots protests and projects will do nothing to change the fundamental purposes and values of  The Global Monetocracy. Still less will they take the reins of global government from its greedy grasp.

What kind of global system of democratic governance is needed for the human family to come through the next couple of centuries in good shape?  That is the really big question and one that all  the  progressive, anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movements need to start to work on today rather than just talk about  in terms of their obsolete ways of thinking.

If they put their minds to it, they might just do the bulk of the work in time to make a real  impact ‘After Obama’.