CONVERSATIONS
Contents
Federation through Conversations
More than just talk
Don't be deceived by this seemingly innocent word, "conversations". The conversations that will now extend and continue our initiative are where the real action begins; and the real fun.
If you consider, as we do, the news about Donald Trump or about some terrorist to be nothing really new, then you might be thirsting for some real and good news. And anyhow – why give those people the publicity and the attention they don't deserve? Why use the media to spread their messages? The conversations we are talking about are designed to not only provide good news, but also to create them. And also and most importantly, they will also engage you and all of us in the creation of good news, so we'll no longer be passive observers of the decay of our society, but participants in co-creating a living and evolving one.
OK, the point: The themes are eternally interesting, and couldn't be more relevant in our time than they are. But just talking about them will not necessarily be very interesting – it's difficult to most of us to even imagine how things might be different. The existence of the prototype can make all the difference. "A better alternative", to use Fuller's framing quoted on our front page, has been boldly proposed. This can easily turn the conversations about some of the most interesting themes in existence into real dramas, spectacles, reality shows... It is those conversations and the infrastructures that can support them, and evolve together with them, that are our primary goal. Once again, the medium here really is the message!
This new kind of news that will emerge in the new commons will not be a single bit boring; on the contrary! Just think, for example, of this as news – that there's been this huge and exotic invisible animal, universally present in our lecture halls, media news and conversations. Present yet unseen in our university labs and auditoriums; implicit in both our concern about the "global issues" and our lack of concern; present as hole and an empty slot in our media reports and in our coffee house conversations, where this sensationally spectacular creature was so consistently ignored!
Every era has its challenges and its opportunities, which are often seen only from a historical distance. The 19th century changed beyond recognition our industry, our family, and our values. The 20th century accelerated those changes, and with them also the growth of our important variables. The 20th century created also the knowledge by which the nature of our new situation could be understood and handled in a new way. But we remained caught up in the paradigm that the 19th century left us in, tangled up in its subtle power relationships and institutionalized practices, unable to see beyond. Recall once again the image of Galilei in prison. Today no Inquisition, no imprisonment and even no censorship is required. As Italo Calvino observed decades ago, while it was still only the pages of printed text that competed for our attention – the jungleness of our information will do just as well. And probably better.
When in Federation through Images we talked about the mirror existing at every university, we may have made it seem like an entrance to something – to an academic underground perhaps, or to an underworld. You may now perceive the mirror as an exit – from an academic and more generally creative reality where our creativity is confined to updating an outdated paradigm, to an incomparably freer yet more responsible and responsive one – where we are empowered to perceive and change this paradigm. Where we are helping our society and culture evolve in a new way, and in a new direction.
This new good news will bring to the forefront entirely new heroes. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, whose talents brought him from a village in the Pyrenees to the forefront of French intelligentsia. Bourdieu became a leading sociologist by understanding, in a new way, how the society functions and evolves. And how this evolution is shaped by the subtle power relationships that are woven into our communication. Buddhadasa, Thailand's enlightened monk and scholar, will help us understand that at the core of the teachings of the Buddha – and of all world religions as well – is a deep insight about ourselves, from which an entirely different way of evolving culturally and socially – liberated from those power relationships – naturally follows. Bourdieu's "theory of practice" will then help us see how and why the institutionalized religion grew to be an instrument of that very renegade power, instead of liberating us from it. And how our other institutions suffered from that same tendency, including our academic institutions notwithstanding. We will then more easily appreciate Erich Jantsch's efforts to bring our work on contemporary issues beyond fixing problems within the narrow limits of our present-day institutions, and institutionalized routines and values. And to bring the university institution to adapt to and assume the leadership role in this transition. We will then also understand and appreciate the value of Douglas Engelbart's work on showing us how to use "digital technology" to develop "a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms" – which will vastly enhance this evolution. And why Jantsch and Engelbart – and so incredibly many other 20th century giants – remained ignored.
The nature of our conversations
Large or small...
The first thing that must be understood is that when we say "conversations", we don't mean "only talking". On the contrary! Here the medium truly is the message. By developing these conversations, we want to develop a way for us to put the themes that matter into the focus of our shared attention. We want to engage our collective knowledge and ingenuity to bear upon understanding, and handling, those issues. And above all – we want to create a manner of conversing, and sharing, and co-creating that brings us the people into the drivers seat – and our society's 'vehicles' once again into a safe and governable condition.
This does not mean that our conversations will be technical. That we'll be talking about the systems science, or about the CO2 quotas. On the contrary! These themes may come, but later. The conversations not only be about sensations, they will in the truest sense be sensations. By keeping them transparent and public, they will be a living and evolving record of the birth pains of a new culture; they will mirror the spectacle of the obstructions and the resistances; they will be a reality show through which a new societal reality is forged.
Another thing that must be said is that this in the truest sense re-evolution will be nonviolent not only in action, but also in its manner of speaking. The technical word is dialog. The dialog is to the emerging paradigm as the debate is to the old one. The dialog too might have an icon giant, physicist David Bohm.
While the choice of themes for our dialogs is of course virtually endless, we have three concrete themes in mind to get us started.
The knowledge federation dialogs
Conversation about the prototype
Prototype becomes complete when there's a feedback loop that updates it continuously. And when it lives in the community, acting upon how we think and what we do. This conversation will serve both ends.
The prototype, as we have seen, was carefully designed to serve as a paradigm proposal, and as a proof of concept. We motivated our proposal by pointing to three sweeping changes and trends, and to the need to adapt what we do with knowledge to those trends. We then showed how substantial, qualitative, quantum-leap improvements can be achieved within the order of things or paradigm modeled by knowledge federation:
- Regarding the foundations for truth and meaning: We saw how in the new paradigm a foundation can be created that is triply solid: (1) it is a convention – and a convention is true by definition (2) it reflects the epistemological state of the art in science and philosophy; (3) it is a prototype – hence ready to be changed when new insights are reached
- Regarding the pragmatic side, making knowledge responsive to new needs of people and society: The prototype has that as an explicit goal. The improvements that are possible within it cannot be overstated – and we pointed to them by using various framings such as "the largest contribution to human knowledge", as what we must do to make our civilization sustainable, and as "evolutionary guidance", necessary for meaningfully continuing our cultural and social evolution.
Thomas Kuhn's view of new paradigms points to "anomalies" and "new achievements" as distinguishing characteristics. And so, by telling stories or vignettes, we could point to large anomalies that were reported a half-century ago by Werner Heisenberg, Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, Douglas Engelbart, Erich Jantsch and very many other giants – without meeting the kind of response that might reasonably be expected. On the side of the new achievements, we showed a large collection of prototypes, each pointing to creative challenges and opportunities, and vast possibilities for improvement and achievement, in their specific areas.
Is there room for this new academic species at the university? What action should follow?
Conversation about transdisciplinarity
Knowledge federation defines itself as a transdiscipline. Norbert Wiener began his 1948 Cybernetics by describing a pre-war transdisciplinary group of scientists in the MIT and Harvard, discussing the issues of the method. Cybernetics emerged, from Mas as a common language and methodology through which the sciences can share their results across their disciplinary dialects. Mathematica biologist / philosopher Ludwig von Bertalanffy developed the general system theory for a similar purpose. In 1954, at Stanford University, von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, James G. Miller and Anatol Rapoport initiated what later became the International Society for the Systems Sciences. What we've added to these most worthwhile efforts is "the dot on the i", the capacity to turn this into something we the people can understand and be guided by.
All these efforts to melt the disciplinary silos and make knowledge freely flowing and accessible to all were by their nature transdisciplinary, of course. Was that reason why they never really met with the kind of response, at our universities, that would give them universal visibility and impact? Similarly, as we have seen, Douglas Engelbart and Erich Jantsch – whom we credit as "founding fathers" of knowledge federation and systemic innovation respectively – found no response at major universities for their ideas. Engelbart liked to tell the story how he left U.C. Berkeley where he worked for a while after completing his doctorate, when a colleague told him "if you don't stop dreaming, and don't start publishing peer-reviewed articles, you will remain an adjunct assistant professor forever."
"The individual players are compelled by their own cupidity to form coalitions", Wiener observed in Cybernetics, commenting on the kind of social dynamics that develop in a competitive environment, that was diagnosed by von Neumann's results in game theory. Is the academic discipline such a coalition? Can we evolve the university in a collaborative way, and make it more humane and more useful to our society?
Conversation about knowledge federation / systemic innovation
There are several themes and questions here. Can we add to the academic repertoire or system the capability of directing its own evolution, by evolving its system. Another theme is directing more generally, whether we should direct our creativity