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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
A friend of mine, a political science professor, forwarded a great editorial by the NYT's David Brooks, A House Divided, and Strong, as a follow up to our offline conversations about my earlier post on Investing in Intellectual Infrastructure.
As we've already established here, the thing is not to emulate the conservative pyramid structure, but to learn from it. Yet many, it appears, have learned the wrong things. To be fair, the metaphor of pyramid is a bit misleading. It's not a lock-step monolithic structure designed with the single-minded purpose of servicing the White House's messaging needs. Rather it's more organic and messy than that, with the bottom layers being relatively self-directed and independent -- and often feuding as Brooks points out. The success factor has not been in their cosy consensus, but in the vibrancy of their debates which have been going on for years: "...neocons arguing with theocons, the old right with the new right, internationalists versus isolationists, supply siders versus fiscal conservatives. The major conservative magazines - The Weekly Standard, National Review, Reason, The American Conservative, The National Interest, Commentary - agree on almost nothing."
The process is thus more like a group of similar species competing and cooperating for keystone dominance in a particular territory. Turns out this is a fruitful environment to develop, gestate and hone big and compelling ideas that stick. It doesn't matter that they are inconsistent at this lower level; that's the job of political operators like Rove to filter, select and frame as these varying ideas and agendas present themselves.
Being out of government, which they were for a long time, also had a galvanizing and freeing impact on the big idea creation process for the conservatives. It forced them to return to their intellectual forebears for direction and reexamine core assumptions about their public philosophy:
That turned out to be important: nobody joins a movement because of admiration for its entitlement reform plan. People join up because they think that movement's views about human nature and society are true.
Liberals have not had a comparable public philosophy debate. A year ago I called the head of a prominent liberal think tank to ask him who his favorite philosopher was. If I'd asked about health care, he could have given me four hours of brilliant conversation, but on this subject he stumbled and said he'd call me back. He never did.
Liberals are less conscious of public philosophy because modern liberalism was formed in government, not away from it. In addition, liberal theorists are more influenced by post-modernism, multiculturalism, relativism, value pluralism and all the other influences that dissuade one from relying heavily on dead white guys. As a result, liberals are good at talking about rights, but not as good at talking about a universal order.
If I were a liberal, which I used to be, I wouldn't want message discipline. I'd take this opportunity to have a big debate about the things Thomas Paine, Herbert Croly, Isaiah Berlin, R. H. Tawney and John Dewey were writing about. I'd argue about human nature and the American character. In disunity there is strength.
My friend believes that the Democrats need to spend more time in the wilderness before they can successfully regain power. In the meantime, what I want to know is what other thinkers would you include in that list?
John Paul II, the 265th pope of the Roman Catholic Church, passed away yesterday. A controversial and long lasting leader, his life and legacy are being extensively debated all over the world. No matter who or what you read, almost everyone agrees on one thing: that the next pope inherits a much more complex world and religious landscape than JP II, and that this presents major challenges to the future of the Church. Much hangs in the balance in this leadership process for this global organization representing over 1 billion faithful.
But with the serious minded punditry, there is also the voyeuristic fascination with the pageantry, rituals and rites that transcends denominations and religious orientation. We lap this up because so little of this is left in the modern world. I mean who isn't just a little bit captivated by the arcane, cabalistic and ancient trivia of the electoral process for the next pope -- everything from the smashing of the papal ring to the minutia of the voting mechanisms to the burning of the ballets, and of course secret power politicking and intrigue amongst ambitious cardinals. We are witnessing history, a singular event, and this novelty is a refreshing break from hearing about failed states and insurgencies. In a fast changing world, these traditions comfort us that constancy does persist in some quarters, that some things do survive the ravages of time. (Incidentally, despite the recent offensive by the Catholic Church against Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, his other novel, Angels and Demons provides an eerily accurate portrayal of this process, albeit with the events being pure fiction. My visualization of this real life papal election has benefited from this fictional account.)
Whatever your sensibilities regarding religion, it's a powerful and pervasive agent of change -- for great good and great ill -- that 'aint going away soon, and as such, is worth watching and understanding with an open mind and through different perspectives. While a "war" is going on between moderns and anti-modernist forces (for example see David Brin's blog debate focused on "Modernism and its Enemies"), I'm more interested in finding bridges across this chasm. Indeed, it's so easy to focus on just the negative aspects of religion or Christianity, which I grant are many and disturbing. Yet as worldchangers we shouldn't overlook the fact that much good can be done in the name of religion. Religion can bring the best out of certain people. Faith can enable altruistic gestures, channel resources and compassion in noble directions, and rationalize disciplined sacrifices and long term investments for a better world. The question is how do we channel this aspect of human nature for the better?
As a student of long term planning and organizational adaptation and resilience, I'm also fascinated by the Church's history, its trials and tribulations, its responses to crises and ability to change and adapt, an intellectual interest reinforced by some scenario work I did on the Church's future a few years back. For whatever you think of its teaching and practices, as a 2,000 year global institution it has been a remarkable and enduring success, outlasting many civilizations. (In fact, only two civilizations, the Chinese and Egyptian, have lasted longer.) Clearly, we have much to learn from this worldchanging example, which will be the topic of another essay, another time. Whether the Church will be able to adapt to the challenges ahead is anyone's guess, but the staying power and capabilities of this long lived institution should not be underestimated. Having said that, a new schism is a good possibility should the next pope fail to address the many cleavages John Paul II has left behind. So while this is arrogant to suggest from such an upstart group, the Church can also learn from the ideas on WorldChanging as it lurches forward in an uncertain future context.
Meanwhile, the immediate question facing us over the next few weeks is who will be the next leader of the Church? Of course, this is hard to predict. John Paul II was a surprise winner and there is no reason, given the fact that there is no clear front runner, that we won't be surprised again. However, to recap for people not following the media blitz, in selecting the next pope three main factors will be considered:
geography: coming from the developing world versus Europe (most likely) experience: pastoral/ "in the field" person versus curia bureaucrat age: youngish or older
The central dilemma is that the Church's growth markets are in Africa and Latin America and the developing world, so the hierarchy would benefit in theory from a leader that better reflects this reality. The developing world, however, is promulgating the most conservative interpretation of the Church's teachings. So ironically, the Church might be best served then if the next pope was from Europe, which is more liberal and open to new directions -- avenues that may save the Church from a debilitating schism or internal revolt. It's a tough set of dilemmas.
However, if I could know one thing that would help me anticipate better the outcome, it would the perceived level of urgency amongst the electors for the Church to adapt and change. If this level of urgency is high -- and it should be -- my bet would be: a younger, pastoral, developing world candidate. I would think the Honduran (Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa) and Brazilian (Cardinal Cláudio Hummes of São Paulo) would be the most likely choice because an African pope (Cardinal Francis Arinze) is just too much of a stretch for xenophobia aspects of Italian culture. The Vatican, the centre of the Roman Catholic faith, is still in Rome after all
The question I'm asking now is: what are the implications of this passing of the ecclestical mantle for the environment? Given the impact that this last pope has had on the world, it's tantalizing to imagine the moral force and power of persuasion a green pope might have on the world. Christian teaching, with all of its variations, is quite malleable on this subject. Interpretations vary with huge differences for a better world. Bill Moyers, for instance, has written a punchy polemic which describes the antagonistic relationship between the evangelicalism of the extreme Christian Right and environmentalism. But many Christians, including the Catholic church, nominally embrace sustainability (see Joel Makower's piece). Responsible stewardship of this earth is an important part of many religious beliefs. I believe this view will win out (I hope!) versus the more maladaptive view.
Indeed, looking ahead, as scenarists and futurists like myself will tell you -- and as science fiction authors have evoked -- future religions and sects may go a step further and fuse spirituality, theology and ecology in surprising and decisive ways, say an institutionalized extension of movements like deep ecology. Perhaps this what our own Pope-Emperor, the self-exalted Viridian leader Bruce Sterling, has anticipated all along!
As for the Catholic Church, the environment as an issue has often been bundled and packaged with other issues, which, interestingly enough, is how the environment movement has evolved as well. The relationships between social justice, ecological, and development are now perceived as highly intertwined which is where the Church was doctrinally all along. However, as such, this makes it hard to evaluate just how green the Vatican is. Official evidence is not plentiful (then again I haven't looked that hard so please forward more if you have it.) Even so, the Church has followed with the issues in its own way. For instance, they started taking seriously "its moral concern for the environment" at the Second Vatican Council the 1962 meeting that modernized the Church's practices. And recently, in preparation for the 2002 United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development, the Vatican published an overview of the Church teaching on the environment, "From Stockholm to Johannesburg: An Historical Overview of the Concern of the Holy See for the Environment" which focuses on statements from 1972 to 2002. As the Catholic News reports:
Official Catholic teaching on the environment is based on the belief that creation is a gift of God that must be protected, used responsibly and shared equitably... Under Pope John Paul II the teaching has developed, uniting spirituality with morality and addressing concrete problems, including population growth, access to water, development and the impact of genetic manipulation.
Yet of all the talk about the five or six most talked about papal successors, I don't know anything about their green records or instincts. That's not exactly encouraging. However, just as John Paul II grasped what was needed to end Communism, this new pope could help carve a fresh papal direction by championing sustainability. He could reframe the controversial "culture of living" to include our natural systems and sustainability. Indeed, the "whole systems for whole people" mantra could easily fit within existing doctrine. It would be fitting: the great shepherd becoming a true ecological steward of the planet. If a developing world pope was elected, this would be especially relevant, since these are often places most vulnerable to environmental collapse and insecurity. This is why I'm rooting for the dark horse.
NOTE: See the WorldChanging version of this essay to view the lively reader feedback.
In discussing the present state of the US Democratic party, former Senator Bill Bradley wrote an insightful editorial in the New York Times (which I read in the IHT). Bradley reminds us of how in 1971, Lewis Powell, who later became a US Supreme Court judge, "wrote a landmark memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses." He wrote it in reaction to his disgust of the "1960s revolution" and activism against Vietnam. The conservatives were loosing the battle over ideas, Powell surmised, and he wanted to change that. Following that memo, the Republican party built up a comprehensive pyramid structure that would fund, develop, and renew the intellectual foundations of the right wing. It works like this:
Big individual donors and large foundations form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.
The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate.
It's a very smart and proven model. By contrast, the Democrats have an inverted pyramid structure, one that relies unduly on its' leader to marshall support and ideas. Whereas in the Republican system the leader matters less because the base is stable (which is paradoxical because Bush is seen to be a "strong" leader), the Democrat's model is vulnerable to collapsing once the pivotal leader changes. Moreover, "In such a system [democrat party] candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions. A party based on charisma has no long-term impact." Recent studies in business and organizational literature also confirm this insight. Sustainable and stable companies avoid the "cult of leadership" and are built more like the Republican pyramid model; since this is the party most closely tied to business, perhaps this isn't surprising. Cross fertilization across sectors and social networks has always been a source of innovation.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have been reaping increasing returns from this 35 year investment in ideas and the institutions that incubate them. It's taken money, vision, and discipline, but arguably the conservatives are in power now because of this. By controlling the discourse through framing the debate, they now control the US government. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has become a thought leader in recent years by making this point and process more transparent to us. His solution is a systematic (re)investment in new framing ideas for the progressive movement, a strategy that Worldchanging fully supports, as Alex Steffen has written in Reframing the Planet and I've done in New Frames.
The imprint of Lakoff's agenda is plainly written all over Bradley's editorial, which is good news. We need more people to take this strategy seriously, because selling longer term investments in anything -- let alone something as abstract and intangible as "ideas" -- is hard these days, a myopic time where our social metrics only seem to recognize short term pay back and gratification.
Part of the problem is that the various actors involved -- leaders, advisors, activists, and investors like foundations in the political sphere -- don't have a good model or big picture for how worldchanging happens across times scales, something that I've argued is important. To simplify, worldchanging happens at many levels at once, and through the interaction between fast and slower moving drivers. The faster moving developments are easily perceived because we see them on the surface (e.g. events, experiments, new technologies, leaders); they are measured in time by the day, week, quarterly, yearly, or electoral cycles. The slower moving drivers (paradigm shifting ideas, values, culture, governance and infrastructure) work over decades and centuries and are thus harder to see and understand. Stewart Brand explains the neat division of labour between the fast and slow layers in The Clock of the Long Now:
Fast leans, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all of the attention, slow has all of the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.
Successful civilizations, organizations, political parties, or individuals throughout history have figured out how to balance short term and long term investments. Without this balance, without both, these systems become brittle and maladaptive, which is where the Democrats are today. And they are not alone: much of the globe today is living with this imbalance, driven by a high discount rate for the future which has created years of underinvestment in our infrastructure -- whether it be transportation, education, health or our ecology.
The question is: can the progressives renew themselves by mustering the vision and discipline to fund such long term projects? This will require a long view. A long view is important because it enables people to see why and how long term investments make sense; a longer view makes these more visible in the present and thus more of a priority amongst the many competing short term imperatives. But the Catch 22 is that a long view is a kind of meta-meme that frames all the other ideas, and thus requires investment and time as well.
At Worldchanging we support all kinds of worldchanging -- both fast and slow. But we're also clear that it's these slower moving ideas that make the biggest difference in the long run. We are concerned, of course, like Bradley because right now it looks as if we're being whopped by better organized and better funded doomsdayers with a savvy sense of how to use both soft and hard power strategies. Even in the pop culture domain it looks as if we are being outmaneuvered, if the Left Behind apocalyptic novel series, which have been disturbingly successful, is any indicator. Not by accident, the authors are right wing evangelical politicos.
At the end of the day, we're hopeful, because we believe that grounded hope is the best strategy moving forward. We also take comfort in the fact that we are part of the culture creative class. This makes us a powerful and emerging contingent, as likely to surprise the mainstream by our collective clout in the near future just as the conservative religious right have done so today. So here is a fun challenge: let's create some pulp eco-fiction, stories that convincingly promulgate benestrophes instead of catastrophes, which is admittedly a much harder creative task than trading on negativity and biblical templates. But it's possible and needed. Besides, most people crave a happy ending more than anything else, so don't tell me there isn't a market for this.
And we're here for the long haul -- online and offline, and we're part of much larger global movement that transcends the American party system. (Case in point: I'm a Canadian based in France writing about American politics.) At Worldchanging, we're indicative of a long view group of committed folks co-creating a coherent set of ideas and practices that will, we hope, evolve into a better theory for how we want to live, work and play on this planet. As one wise person said, "stories are tools for knowing and judging. Change the stories and you change how people live." We believe that parts of this new story are already here, and while fragments of the narrative are still emerging, the bottom-up forces we are fortunate enough to float in give us a sense that they are within our grasp. The hard part will be focus, discipline, and of course, funding. But we'll get there.
One of the interesting social networks and communities I belong to is Pioneers of Change, a global learning community for young changemakers between the ages of 25-25 -- that crucial period where careers and identities are crystallizing.
In one of our email conversations about the future of Pioneers, and what needs it fills in the world, Bob Stilger from The Berkana Institute made this wonderful comment:
My sense is that many of us are on a journey beyond our individual and institutional identities into what I call our integrities. We are beings seeking integrity. And in our search, we are also looking for the fields of our belonging... This is new territory, friends. The kinds of organizational forms that will support this search, and us as searchers, are new.
It reminded me of what Jay Oglivy wrote about when he argued that business education -- and indeed any education -- needed to move away from a fragmented approach that focused on disciplines only -- to an approach that was about understanding whole systems while tapping into our whole person.
It's World Expo time again: that mega event, held every five years, where countries get to strut their national stuff and the host city gets to bask in the glow of the global spotlight, all in celebration of the human spirit and progress & etc. Starting in London in 1851, World Expos have traditionally been a big deal, featuring some of the most exciting endeavors in invention, art, and technology -- including the telephone in 1876 and the Eiffel Tower in 1889.
World Expo 2005 is being held in Aichi Japan, just outside of Nagoya, and will last until September. The theme -- embracing nature's wisdom -- is very worldchanging. The event is designed to highlight the "global matrix of ecological understanding and technological innovation", writes the International Herald Tribune. A total of 121 countries are participating and over 15 million visitors are expected to visit the Expo. The really cool bit: there is a 18,000 year old Siberian mammoth on display, frozen in an archeological refrigerator lab. This is part of a joint Japanese-Russia project focused on understanding the causes of climate change.
Yet there are signs that all might not be right with World Expos these days. Like many 20th century mega-events, the amount of attention they receive has dwindled. The US, for instance, nearly didn't participate this year, thus sending all kinds of bad signals. Embarrassingly, environmental groups are boycotting the event for a variety of reasons (some serious, some not) and other critics are calling it "Toyota Expo" given the corporation's heavy involvement. Indeed, one might ask whether these World Expos have the global leverage and punch that they used. Growing up in Vancouver, I was a teenager when my city hosted the event in 1986. While a big deal at the time, the hyped expectations that the event would transform the city into international center never fully materialized, the hang over of which still lasts today.
Having said all this, this year France and Germany are doing a joint exhibition, something that would have seemed inconceivable even twenty years ago. And anything that shines a light on ecological understanding has to be good for the world. The bigger question I'm asking is perhaps it's time to update the brand image of the World Expo to one that is less nation-state centric? We still need places and spaces for global sharing and collegiality to emerge, but the world has changed a lot in the past 100 years. Heck, why isn't there a worldchanging exhibition? I'm joking, of course, but future exhibitions may need to think of out-of-the box about the many transnational collaborations worth showcasing as well. Maybe Aichi is already doing this. And to give Aichi some credit, they have tried to evolve the concept in an important way by focusing on global environmental interdependencies. Bravo Japan, a clean and green leader in many ways. So in addition to witnessing the majesty of the Spring cherry blossom festival -- one of nature's truly spell-bounding bounties if there was ever one -- you now have another reason to go to Japan.