The article
is a revised version of a plenary lecture and available in the APLS Journal.
was delivered at the
Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Politics and the Life
Sciences, September 4, 1998, Boston. Comments were invited for the
Twenties APLS 2000 Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. August 31-September
3, 2000 and printed in APLS, Vol.
18, 1
Abstract. As the
twentieth century ends, we may identify both constructive and destructive
trends that will influence the future of humanity. Which set of trends
will dominate the future is uncertain. Attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors
all interact to direct the flow of change over time. However, the options
and constraints of human life are ultimately fixed by those cosmic elements
of the environment over which humans have no control. The modern
assumption of a world without end or limits risks collision with that obdurate
reality. Facing threats to its long-term survival, humanity is challenged
to learn how to build a sustainable future. A successful effort will require
a concerted and cooperative effort among all fields of knowledge. This
article identifies some of the trends that threaten humanity's future and
suggests four lines of action that should be pursued in order to reduce
the likelihood that humanity will destroy itself.
The attached comment
by Heiner Benking was invited by L.K. Caldwell and will be subject to editorial
changes. Please see the Journal and Society hompage http://www.lssu.edu/apls/
and Caldwell's site in Indiana http://www.indiana.edu/~speaweb/perspectives/humanity.html.
Pls
see the Comments of the Symposium:
Commentators include: Herman
E. Daly, Is Humanity Destined?, Back to Basics in Environmental Politics,
Sheila Jasanoff, Our Predicament: We Can’t Know Enough to Know, Donald
N. Michael, The Hare and the Tortoise: Dead in the Heat? Cross-National
Differences and Knowledge Gaps in Environmental Policy, Nicholas Watts,...
the full list of the twenty-eight
contributions can be found at the end of my comment or at the APLS
site.
Invited Comment by Heiner
Benking in APLS Round-Table:
Show
or Schau?
Lynton
Caldwell (1999) allows us a look behind the facades or under the surface
of the dangers threatening humankind. I subscribe to his analysis and synthesis
of the threads and dilemmas, including his four lines of action.
Given
this unique chance to comment on such a fundamental and basic article,
I will not lament over words, dates, or issues left out in his piece, as
this would be the typical trick of people avoiding the big picture and
the urgencies and immediacies at hand. Instead, I will try to go with him
on a higher plateau of pondering where humankind is going and what the
issues and challenges are in my view after reading his article.
Shared
Images and Models
I
definitely agree with Caldwell that we are in danger of losing our shared
rationality. This danger is real, as we are not equipped by evolution for
such fundamental and rapid change. Subject to this glut of new ways, means,
and messages, we are out of touch and subject to confusion about the basics
of our existence, like the "loss of distance" and the questioning of our
feelings, positions, and perspectives in this new, strange environment.
Being and feeling "lost in space" (slide 6), we try to avoid confronting
our outdated world-models and views; instead, we invent "spaces of flow"
or "a second flood" as part of a post-modern cyberculture. There are alternative
and non-dualistic models that we can structure, merge, and morph (more
about this later), but we are afraid of leaving the mold, afraid of leaving
the shores and sailing into new lands. I will return to alternative models
and views, even on very central terms like "net" or "space" later; at this
point, I just want to give an example of how we use language metaphorically.
I invite you, for example, to see "space" as an extensional potential that
allows us to make issues real, and solid, and allows us to make issues
and contexts real instead of making us feel "lost in space." So please
take our terms for real, not as empty in a void of nothingness. We focus
here on terms, as the modern technologies have usurped central terms like
"space" or the "net." (slide 6)
In
a series at the Humboldt University in Berlin at the end of the millennium,
which we called "Zeiten-Wende" or "Zeiten-Welten-Wende," (slide 4) I focussed
on the modern media impact, on pictures and icons we use to paint and communicate
possible futures. Examples from thinkers and writers through the ages included
"show" (Illich), "varieté" (Huxley), "sweet mash" (in German, "brei"
or pastry) according to the Grimm’s fairy tales. These pictures or analogies
describe our modern world of edutainment, politainment, lawtainment, or
bread and games as we know from Roman times, as in the following examples:
images describing loss of control or freedom include "prison" (Orwell),
"(second/final) flood" (Bible, Ascott, Lévy) "bomb" (Einstein for
telecommunications impact). Lynton Caldwell is obviously not alone when
pondering about our destiny, but he does more—he invites us take a "middle
road."
Making
Concepts Real and Adding Context
And
that is exactly what I am working on and want to outline here: real alternatives.
We have three alternatives: we can either immerse ourselves in the issues,
or take on an observer status that makes us a little more immune to the
details, or as the middle path, oscillate between the different perspectives,
but in a way that we know where we are and what we are looking at, and
in which context. Our exercise is one of physical and of mental mobility
at the same time, bridging objects and subjects, re-establishing of creativity
and fantasy in combination with questioning identities, values, levels,
proportions, and consequences along and across scales, cultures, languages,
and times. In this physical and deep immersive model, called "House
of Eyes", children have tested alternative positions and perspectives
for years.
Our
middle route here is trying to leave dualistic traps of being right or
wrong. It is not an easy perspective, especially if we only can use words
instead of concurrently feeling and showing what we do. So just consider
one moment not being right or wrong, or only in one place or one model,
at any one time, but instead being able to see their relativity, the various
aspects, and be able to be concrete or solid in an artificial terrain or
model. If we follow this thread just one further moment, we can imagine
embodying issues in extensive spaces as peace rooms, situation rooms, or
order spaces, instead of "playing" in war rooms or with models like architects
and designers. By considering the difference of abstract "spa-t-ial"
and embodied "spa-c-ial" conceptions, we might be more prepared
for modern times of media and tele-technologies, and use the new "space-scapes"
to combine concepts and their context.
Caldwell
has urged us to try something new, especially when we are confronted with
high risks and have no safe and clear direction to take. He has encouraged
us not only to share and care, but to dare! We have done so over the years
with children, and also tried to open the eyes and ears of "elders" with
varying results. So the way forward may be a way back, by eliminating too
much abstraction and coming back by drawing on many senses/intelligences
(Gardner), or poly-aesthetics in the sense of Kueckelhaus,
Menuhin,
Mozart. In our "House of Eyes" we invite such a concert of perspectives
and senses in order to not get lost in the one and only right view. Immanuel
Kant warned us that "concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without
concepts are blind." So what I propose here is to look into other ways
and means, to study how, for example, the Japanese bio-holistic "baa" concept
might allow us to appreciate other forms of space, nested spaces, and space-scapes.
This
section with the figures was later inserted into the comment!
please
see also the "postscript" file below.
On the WWW we are able to include picures
and links, giving you and idea and structure which allows you to go deeper.
I have added an arbitrary collection of presentation folios to help you
get where and how I want to explore issues like I learned to explore with
models pleases we can not go to, like in the deepers regions or levels
of Planet Earth or some Outer Stars. I will reference in the article
to the figures but can not "develop" the whole story in this very short
comment. Please also note the later added "epiloge" which provides some
entries into the context and background.
Observer
or Trustee and Stakeholder?
I
met Lynton Caldwell at a roundtable at the EMEC'93 conference in Baltimore.
There the panel "experts" from policy, science, and engineering met with
activists and housewives, playing the typical confrontation that they experience
in environmental dialogue and mediation. However, this time they changed
hats and positions, assuming different views. In this way—through the rotation
of viewpoints—agendas, tactics, and strategies became not only visible
but obvious. The idea is to solve problems by taking on the partners’ position—and
to reflect upon it—just as the Sufi say: "If you want to solve a problem,
take your own viewpoint out." This is exactly what we do with the House
of Eyes—we create a cognitive panorama in which there are three spaces
and time on a continuum.
Overview
(slide
7) or Overclaims and Oversimplifications?
I
see a trap in our dichotomous thinking and a way out in accepting different
levels of thought. Eho tells us that knowledge is only in the detail and
with the specialists? Who tells us that there is no overview and
orientation possible and that the last generalist died 200 years ago? In
knowledge organization, for example, we differentiate between detail, route,
and survey knowledge. Why must we feed our children details and noise,
cultivating a strange myth or dogma, and avoid giving them coherent and
complete alternative "overviews"? Coherence models are not only possible,
but feasible.
The Approach:
PLEASE
NOTE: all figures are "click&zoom"
pictures. F11 in "Microsoft worlds" will bring you to the "full screen".
Is There a Meta-paradigm ?
According to Georg Kühlewind, we are in search of the only new paradigm, a paradigm in which all other paradigms originate. Thomas Kuhn started his "paradigm" thinking with the baseline of the physical sciences. In his book Consilience,
E. O. Wilson uses the bio- or life sciences as the yardstick and schema
for lines of thought. Maybe, as one alternative, we could come up with
a meta-paradigm
as proposed at a 1996 Council
of Europe conference for "new ideas in science and arts, new
spaces for culture and society." The "meta" maps the context, the origin,
the background, and so we suddenly have a map to localize ways and forms
of reasoning.
The
painter Franz Marc wrote that pictures can help us to "arrive at another
place," help us to "see with new eyes." In this way we can realize, as
some children do, that there is not just one or ruling hierarchy when we
think deep or lateral/diagonal (spacially); instead, we have to assume
that there are multiple hierarchies, meshing and forming a new fabric,
depending on where we are and what our angle of focus is.
Applications
for Another Pattern Language? (slide
12)
This
language based on spacial metaphors and embodyment evolved when we were
thinking about patterns and fields as real. Are there applications, and
can the findings be shared, or are we talking here about just another creative,
artistic outcry? First, we can share levels, proportions, horizons,
and also "feelings." Second, we can consider new forms of multi-modal,
multiple access search machines for the world wide web. And last but not
least, we can engage in "culture navigation," which allows us to access
and assimilate content from libraries and museums around the world, making
multi-media, multi-lingual, multi-cultural connections, caring for a 'humane'
multi-lingual (information) society. Another possible field is social systems
design, and that might be close to what Caldwell is looking for.We must
find ways to reach people.
Let
us start with the traditions of story telling. In one story, Mamun, the
son of Harun al Rashid, saved his just-inherited, fast-deteriorating empire
for decades by having artists design a positive, aesthetic, shared model/vision/picture—in
this case, a model of a beautiful city and rich community. By jointly constructing
positive futures, we can create realities that can become "true" if we
share the dream and work on it! (late note: see the "Ethics
Summit" presentation which covers the story from 1001 night in greater
detail and how we can create new stories like this
one, and develop the art
of story-telling and dialogue.)
Space
as Potential or Forbidden Land
Caldwell's
article urges us to look for a way out so we are not destined to whatever
real or imagined fate. The main stumbling block seems to be in thinking
dualisitically, hierarchically, and analytically. We avoid lumping when
we can split everything, and we avoid anything that is not tangible (even
when some of us can agree upon it, at least for a certain end or purpose).
Last but not least, and maybe the central issue here, might be our concept
of order, and even more deeply rooted, our concept of space. One basic
is that space, like a container, can be emptied or filled—for example,
with air or water. Goethe said we need both: analysis and synthesis. It
is like breathing in and breathing out. We may forfeit our futures and
put an end to science if we just do one, as when we just specialize without
generalizing.
Such
misconceptions are deeply rooted. We could learn a great deal from native
communities, who consider "space" as potential full of depth and surprise.
Space has potential and depth; we are not by nature flatlanders.There are
such things as spacial cognition and spacial mental models, and we should
review the work of the founder of "cybernetics," the late Norbert Wiener.
Wiener
saw a social mission in his work and coined the term "cyber," from
the greek word "cybernetes," so that we have a "steering-man," who need
not be a captain. We can all be sailors, and so we need maps (stars), a
gyro, and a vehicle/boat. And suddenly we are close to the central questions
of society: orientation and frameworks, common frames of reference.
True
Visions Make Worlds
What
we have covered so far is the question of identity and how we can share.
This has to do with our modern mental isolation. Werner Kollath has said
that "much is known, unfortunately in different heads." We must invite
everybody to design real images and models, models that can bring us together
and help to develop an antenna (Gregory Bateson) for what is not at hand,
but has levels, proportions, and consequences. Nelson Goodman has put it
aptly by noting that visions can be tangible and real: "People make visions;
true visions make worlds."
The
Difference: Show versus Schau
We
covered above the metaphors of varieté and show, which see humanity
as passive—as spectators or observers, remote and detached in an age of
"entertainment." The word in German, "schau," has an extra dimension to
it, the dimension of depth, which allows us to be part of the picture.
"Schau," as in weltanschauung, is more than a certain belief system or
school of thought. It is much more than seeing; it requires engaged, active
communication and concern, being part of and moving "hands-on" in the field,
scene, or drama. Goethe put it aptly in the foreword to his Farbenlehre:
The
mere gaze of an object cannot engage us (completely). Each look flows into
a careful examination, each examination into a meditation and each meditation
takes us into a connection. With each attentive look into the world we
already begin to theorize about it. If the abstractions we fear is to be
harmless and the experience we hope for is to be real and useful, we need
to engage skillfully with consciousness, self-reflection, a sense of freedom,
and—to use a daring word—a sense of irony.
Thanks,
Lynton Caldwell, for outlining or setting up the stage and putting some
conditions and historical contexts straight, so that we cannot avoid looking
for a more complete picture. Thanks for challenging us to go beyond the
gridlock into new borderlands, and for helping us to get rid of too many,
final and fixed "knowns" and introducing us to a world of unknowns. These
are worlds where we develop "awe the more we gaze" (Santanya).
Notes
