Collins is a sociologist. In his book “Artifictional Intelligence – Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers”, out today from Polity, Collins does many interesting things. To begin with, he argues what qualifies him to have an opinion on AI.

Collins is a sociologist of science at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Part of his expertise is dealing with human scientific expertise, and therefore, intelligence.

It sounds plausible that figuring out what constitutes human intelligence would be a good start to figure out artificial intelligence, and Collins does a great job at it.

The impossibility claims

The gist of Collins’ argument, and the reason he wrote the book, is to warn against what he sees as a real danger of trusting AI to the point of surrendering critical thinking, and entrusting AI with more than what we really should. This is summarized by his 2 “impossibility claims”:

1. No computer will be fluent in natural language, pass a severe Turing test and have full human-like intelligence unless it is fully embedded in normal human society.

2. No computer will be fully embedded in normal human society as a result of incremental progress based on current techniques.

There is quite some work to back up those claims of course, and this is what Collins does throughout the 10 Chapters of his book. Before we embark on this kind of meta-journey of summarizing his approach, however, it might be good to start with some definitions.

The Turing test is a test designed to categorize “real” AI. At its core, it seems simple: a human tester is supposed to interact with an AI candidate in a conversational manner. If the human cannot distinguish the AI candidate from a human, then the AI has passed the Turing test and is said to display real human-like intelligence.

The Singularity is the hypothesis that the appearance of “real” artificial intelligence will lead to artificial superintelligence, bringing unforeseen consequences and unfathomable changes to human civilization. Views on the Singularity are typically polarized, seeing the evolution of AI as either ending human suffering and cares or ending humanity altogether.

This is actually a good starting point for Collins to ponder on the anthropomorphizing of AI. Why, Collins asks, do we assume that AIs would want the same things that humans want, such as dominance and affluence, and thus pose a threat to humanity?

This is a far-reaching question. It serves as a starting point to ask more questions about humanity, such as why people are, or are seen as, individualistic, how do people learn, and what is the role of society in learning.

Social Science

Science, and learning, argues Collins, do not happen in a monotonous, but rather in a modulated way. What this means is that rather than seeing knowledge acquisition as looking to uncover and unlock a set of predefined eternal truths, or rules, the way it progresses is also dependent on interpretation and social cues. It is, in other words, subject to co-production.

This applies, to begin with, to the directions knowledge acquisition will take. A society for which witches are a part of the mainstream discourse, for example, will have very different priorities than one in which symptomatic medicine is the norm.

But it also applies to the way observations, and data, are interpreted. This is a fundamental aspect of science, according to Collins: the data is *always* out there. Our capacity for collecting them may fluctuate with technical progress, but it is the ability to interpret them that really constitutes intelligence, and that does have a social aspect.

Collins leverages his experience from social embedding as practiced in sociology to support his view. When dealing with a hitherto unknown and incomprehensible social group, a scholar would not be able to understand its communication unless s/he is in some way embedded in it.

All knowledge is social, according to Collins. Image: biznology

Collins argues for the central position on language in intelligence, and ties it to social embedding. It would not be possible, he says, to understand a language simply by statistical analysis. Not only would that miss all the subtle cues of non-verbal communication, but, as opposed to games such as Go or chess that have been mastered by computers, language is open-ended and ever-evolving.

Collins also introduces the concept of interactional expertise, and substantiates it based on his own experience over a long period of time with a group of physicists working in the field of gravitational waves.

Even though he never will be an expert who produces knowledge in the field, Collins has been able to master the topics and the language of the group over time. This has not only gotten him to be accepted as a member of the community, but has also enabled him to pass a blind test.

A blind test is similar to a Turing test: a judge, who is a practising member of the community, was unable to distinguish Collins, a non-practising member, from another practising member, based on their answers to domain specific questions. Collins argues this would never have been possible had he not been embedded in the community, and this is the core of the support for his first impossibility claim.

Top-down or Bottom-up?

As for the second impossibility claim, it has to do with the way AI works. Collins has one chapter dedicated to the currently prevalent technique in AI called Deep Learning. He explains how Deep Learning works in an approachable way, which boils down to pattern recognition based on a big enough and good enough body of precedents.

The fact that there are more data (digitized precedents) and more computing power (thanks to Moore’s Law) today is what has enabled this technique to work. It’s not really new, as it has been around for decades, it’s just that we did not have enough data and processing power to make it work reliably and fast enough up until now.

In the spirit of investigating the principal, not the technicalities behind this approach, Collins concedes some points to its proponents. First, he assumes technical capacity will not slow down and soon reach the point of being able to use all human communication in transcribed form.

Second, he accepts a simplified model of the human brain as used by Ray Kurzweil, one of AIs more prominent proponents. According to this model, the human brain is composed of a large number of pattern recognition elements. So all intelligence boils down to is advanced pattern recognition, or bottom-up discovery of pre-existing patterns.

Top-down, or bottom-up? Image: Organizational Physics

Collins argues however that although pattern recognition is a necessary precondition for intelligence, it is not sufficient. Patterns alone do not equal knowledge, there needs to be some meaning attached to them, and for this language and social context is required. Language and social context are top-down constructs.

Collins, therefore, introduices an extended model of the human brain, in which additional inputs are processed, coming from social context. This, in fact, is related to another approach in AI, labeled symbolic AI. In this top-down approach, instead on relying exclusively on pattern recognition, the idea is to encode all available knowledge in a set of facts and rules.

Collins admits that his second impossibility claim is weaker than the first one. The reason is that technical capacity may reach a point that enables us to encode all available knowledge, even tacit one, a task that seems out of reach today. But then again, many things that are commonplace today seemed out of reach yesterday.

In fact, the combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches to intelligence that Collins stands behind, is what many AI experts stand for as well. The most promising path to AI will not be Deep Learning alone, but a combination of Deep Learning and symbolic AI. To his credit, Collins is open-minded about this, has had very interesting conversations with leading experts in the field, and incorporated them in the book.

Technical understanding and Ideology

There are many more interesting details that could not possibly fit in a book review: Collins’ definition of 6 levels of AI, the fractal model of knowledge, exploring what an effective Turing test would be, and more.

The book is a tour de force of epistemology for the masses: easy to follow, and yet precise and well-informed. Collins tiptoes his way around philosophy and science, from Plato to Wittgestein to AI pioneers, in a coherent way.

He also touches issues such as the roots of capitalism or what is driving human behavior, although he seems to have made a conscious choice of not going into them, possibly in the spirit of not derailing the conversation or perhaps alienating readers. In any case, his book will not only make AI approachable, but will also make you think on a variety of topics.

And, in the end, it does achieve what it set out to do. It gives a vivid warning against the Surrender, which should be about technical understanding, but perhaps even more so about ideology.

Collins, Harry M. (2018). Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers. Cambridge, UK; Malden, Massachusetts: Polity. ISBN 9781509504121.

The post Artifictional Intelligence: is the Singularity or the Surrender the real threat to humanity? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I. Aristotelianism

“And this is the purpose of all of the sciences, that in all of them faith is strengthened, God is honored, character is formed, and consolations are derived consisting in the union of the spouse with her Beloved: a union that takes place through love, to the attainment of which the whole purpose of sacred Scripture, and consequently, every illumination descending from above, is directed – a union without which all knowledge is empty.” – St. Bonaventure

To bury spent disciplinary or discursive justifications for knowledge as property and reverse the commodification of the knowledge commons to exploitable and scalable “intellectual property” do we need another Verdun, which Capitalism would appear to be only so happy to supply? Or is it possible to restore the immemorial coordinates of cultural production as formalized in “common law” by turning to the Holy Trinity of conceptual thought proper – that elegant, spare, and wintry tableau that haunts all forms of formative knowledge production? Through T.S. Eliot’s bleak visions, operating in apparent reverse, we might reach across centuries to examine Bonaventure’s reduction of the liberal arts to theology – theology, not religion; and theology as inter-subjective truth, not dogma. This communitarian spirit of intellectual austerities is the transitional state between gray areas (instrumental reason) and black zones (revelation or reverie). If it passes through subjective night, as Jacques Maritain suggests, via negative or apophatic theology, inclusive of negative dialectics (Adorno, 1978), it does so in service to the impersonal agencies of that anterior sky in which stars and constellations (both old and new constellations of thought) appear or re-appear out of a proverbial no-where. “La vita nuova,” perhaps – but also a strange diminution in the analogical, for/toward the anagogical. Therefore, the strange, wintry, and wonderful – or, Bonaventure’s “union without which all knowledge is empty.”

The problem of Agent Intellect, as controversy, has never quite gone away – with its origins in Aristotle’s De anima and its subsequent elaborations and disputations reaching from the Islamic Aristotelians, Averroes and Avicenna, to St. Thomas Aquinas. The issue of whether Agent Intellect is independent of human agency or transcendent to all intellectual activity suggests that this possible impersonal agency is the ultimate ghost in the machinery of thought. The universalizing tendencies of such a power (or source of power) are exceptionally elastic and, ultimately, indeterminate. If it belongs to mankind, as Avicenna thought, and not to individual subjects per se (not embedded within the intellectual capacities of souls), the penultimate question/issue becomes, What or where is such a power? Is this not the very origin of the idea of a knowledge commons? Assimilation to cultural patrimony is quite obviously not the same thing as the assimilation to the circuit of Capital. More critically, How is such a power to be accessed? According to Averroes: “The agent intellect is the last of the celestial Intelligences and moves the lunar sphere; the material intellect receives intelligible forms abstracted by the agent intellect. These intellects are not united to individual man by their substances, but only by their activity” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 70). Thus, signatures or intelligences (lights) are what matter. Gray areas shade into black zones, and reverie is birthright whereas instrumentalized reason or abject utilitarianism is a prison-house for Spirit.

Notably, Aquinas disputed the Aristotelian views of Averroes and Avicenna (Latin Averroism) and placed Agent Intellect firmly within the bounds of the human soul, differing with other Medieval theologians in the process, yet primarily in terms of the relation between Agent Intellect and Possible Intellect – the latter term connoting mere cognition. Anselm of Canterbury, for example, considered Agent Intellect co-equivalent to angelic intelligences. More importantly, however, is what occurs when one follows the argument backward to the early Franciscan School, prior to Aquinas, when, in effect, the major schoolmen said “Yes” to utterly contradictory statements concerning what exactly Agent Intellect was once it was operative within human cognition proper. The key figures here are Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, the latter a teacher of Bonaventure. For example:

“In John of La Rochelle’s view we can call the agent intellect both God and angel, and part of the soul with respect to different objects of cognition. God is the agent intellect for our knowledge of things higher than the soul, the angel is the agent intellect (in the sense of revelation or instruction) for our knowledge of things on the same level as the soul and, finally, the agent is a light innate in the soul for our knowledge of things that lie within the soul or below it” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 76).

Thus Bonaventure and many Franciscans to follow maintained a dual vigil for the transcendental and contingent conditions for knowledge, both personal and collective:

“The reason for the double-meaning of the agent intellect lies in the Franciscans’ characteristic and well-known attitude towards theology and philosophy. They tried to reconcile principles of Aristotelian philosophy with the Augustinian fundament of theology. With respect to noetics this means that they had to unify the Aristotelian theory of abstraction and the doctrine of the agent intellect, which Aristotle had already compared to light, with the Augustinian theory of illumination and the division of the human intellect into two faces, the higher, which is illuminated from God, and the lower, which is not illuminated” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 77).

Thus gray areas and black zones, and all of the attendant problems of locating the place and means whereby the Imaginary (Possible Intellect) may be disciplined and/or illumined. Thus the condemned thesis 118 of 1277 proceeds as follows: “That the agent intellect is a separate substance higher than the possible intellect, and that with respect to the substance, potency and operation it is separated from the body, and that it is not a form of human body” (Nejeschleba, 2004, p. 78, with reference to Hissette, 1977, p. 193). This is but one of 219 Averroistic-Thomist theses condemned at Paris after Aquinas’ death in 1274.

Certainly this dual vision of Agent Intellect (both in its disputatious aspects and in the Franciscan doubling or tripling of its agency proper) suggests that the true issue is not whether it subsists as impersonal agency in the natural world (as a cosmological principle, for example) but, instead, whether it inhabits human intellectual activity and the products of the same. For the ambivalence seems less about whether Agent Intellect is outside of (or transcendent to) all human subjective states, as its other, than whether human agency without Agent Intellect has any merit whatsoever; and, in terms of disciplinarity or the knowledge commons, the question would be as to whether the production of forms of knowledge transcends mere utility and/or supports degraded forms of experience of this larger economy that, on the one hand, is cosmological and, on the other hand, is transcendental.

In the latter case, all of the various problems of privileging a universal intelligence collide with worldly endeavors that may, indeed, be productive of virtual prison-houses. The latter state would seem to be the path of Capital today as it serves merely its own interests – not the interest of individuals and certainly not the interest of the commons. In the first instance, language is always the First Instance for suspect motives and/or ideological sleights of hand; for, false claims to transcendental categories via Reason do, indeed, produce monsters. Such is the source of ideology – market ideology or otherwise. In the former case, when Agent Intellect is cosmological, the multiple disciplines of natural science and philosophy (or natural philosophy) take on exceptional importance to the critique of disciplines and forms of knowledge production that purportedly rely on this vision of universal, non-ideological intelligence. In both cases, there are as many problems as possible virtues, insofar as, since the divorce of theology and natural science, the orphaned middle ground has most often been moral philosophy and ethics. One very obvious analogue for the potential fusion of these discordant worldviews is to incorporate the intelligence embedded in natural systems directly and without mediation into human systems, which need not to be at odds with that larger universal economy (a semi-divine economy). Yet the inordinate nightmare of entropy follows upon every attempt to build synthetic systems that absorb and/or privilege natural systems alone, and the technocratic bias of contemporary culture betrays, repeatedly, any accord between competing visions, provoking the endless recourse to Apocalypse.

II. Franciscanism

“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.” – Chris Marker

This Medieval debate is interesting today if only because then the problem was the differing worldviews of the Augustinians and the Thomists – with the Augustinians and Franciscans privileging black zones, and the Thomists privileging gray areas. In terms of historical merit, the debate has lasted well into the first quarter of the twenty-first century primarily because there was no unitary, Medieval “scholastic” worldview (as there is no unitary Modern worldview), despite attempts to claim such – and the debates at the University of Paris Faculty of Arts in the thirteenth century concerned not so much the production of canon or dogma but the relationship of philosophy to theology (notwithstanding the various attempts by the authorities to shut down debate, plus warnings to theologians not to become philosophers). Indeed, it would seem that the chief argument between Bonaventure and Aquinas had to do with whether these two forms of knowledge (what we would today call disciplines) are different, and whether they should be different. Aquinas seems to have solidified the separation, perhaps unwittingly, while the Augustinians and the Franciscans were arguing for the preservation of philosophy (and metaphysics) as theology – and a proper study of whether this truly meant philosophy as subordinate to theology, or not, would resolve many of the petty arguments that persist in terms of what constitutes knowledge and what constitutes mere instrumental reason. Subsequent skirmishes generally further developed the schism, while around 1900 the argument returned in terms of the historiography of the Medieval world system and the various forms of high scholasticism that dealt with the issue of the created (eternal) world, best described as the focus of the sciences, and the uncreated (ideal) world, the realm of ideas and the source for knowledge per se, inclusive of all of the associated questions and non-answers attributed to not-knowledge, or revelation, always more or less left unaddressed due to the failure of language to properly reflect what was, after all, subjective, inter-subjective, and onto-subjective, pre-conscious experience. (Regarding the pre-conscious self, see Maritain, 1954.)

If Bonaventure and the Franciscans could say “Yes” (or “All of the Above”) to whether Agent Intellect “subsides” within human cognition, outside of it (in angelic beings, in the cosmos, etc.), or with a transcendent (absent) God, it is more than apparent that they were attempting to preserve the sacred province of affective thought as such – or thought undivided (precluding the production of two contradictory, and historically antithetical realms). “Hence, according to [Étienne] Gilson, the philosophy of Aristotle compelled the thirteenth-century theologians to reexamine the proper relation of natural reason to Christian revelation; as a consequence, the great scholastic systems were born” (Quinn, 1973, p. 23). Nevertheless, Gilson’s most controversial conclusions may be said to revolve around his quarantine of Bonaventure and his claims that the Franciscan harbored an irresolvable antipathy to Aristotelianism. According to Gilson, Bonaventure evaluated Aristotelian philosophy as “one who has understood it, seen through it, and passed beyond it” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 24). By 1270 the verdict was in. Bonaventure refused Thomism and Aquinas committed himself to the elaboration of an autonomous philosophy, one according to Bonaventure that exposed him to inevitable error. That Aquinas would dramatically stop writing altogether on December 6, 1273 suggests that Bonaventure was, after all, right.

Several differences of opinion between Bonaventure and Aquinas in the controversy concerning Agent Intellect are instructive in terms of the critique underway here of knowledge production and the biases given most especially to singular disciplines that rely on so-called objective knowledge (or natural reason), converting everything in the process to spectral commodity. For, as it has been said, in times of crisis Augustine almost always makes a re-appearance.

Thus, the Augustinianism of Bonaventure (and the term Augustinianism was only coined during the controversies of the thirteenth century) is the key. According to Gilson, Bonaventure was safeguarding certain traditional, patristic principles against creeping Aristotelianism. The main issue was what might be called the cosmological worldview that almost always signals the Medieval mindset anyway. The Agent Intellect controversy was part and parcel of a larger set of disagreements that only were resolved by the separation of Philosophy and Theology. “By founding his doctrine on the self-consciousness of the soul, Bonaventure clung to the Augustinian tradition while grounding his Christian philosophy in the experience of his interior life” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 25). The struggle between Bonaventure and Aquinas (and they were, after all, colleagues) was quite simply about what constitutes the highest form of knowing anything. While they both reverted to revelation, they also did so in different ways. “Bonaventure, Gilson stated, did not formulate his theology according to the norms of Aristotelean science. Following rather the Augustinian tradition, he recorded his personal experience of the Christian life without expressing it in an objective, or scientific, manner. . . . Bonaventure modelled his theology after the ideal of Augustinian wisdom; so he developed a theological wisdom which was inseparable from his own experience” (Quinn, 1973, p. 41).

Accordingly, Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’ worlds collide in the manner in which the outer, objective world and the inner, subjective world are dealt with. The role of intellect is central – Augustinians reserved knowledge (truth) for the internal tableau of direct illumination from the divine, not Aristotelian abstraction as such, nor an operation of the intellect. Here Pascal’s two infinities come into view. Bonaventure resisted permitting illumination (revelation) to be a guarantor of natural reason (Aristotelian abstraction); and, again, it required a certain acceptance of paradoxes, or the rejection of attempting to rationalize or reconcile discordant principles that effectively underscored that knowledge is not unitary (see Quinn, 1973, p. 39). As a result, “to solve some problems in the natural order, [Bonaventure’s] philosophy relied on a supernatural principle” (Quinn, 1973, p. 39). One exceptional example is the concept of the necessity of grace for all creatures to merely exist. In the case of animals, Bonaventure simply resorted to Augustine’s doctrine of seminal principles. In the case of humans, Bonaventure kicked the entire question upstream, placing infallibility out of reach of contingent intellect. Far from hedging his bets, in the case of the status of human existence, Bonaventure simply jettisoned the need to rationalize what was, in effect, a transcendental category of experience (Being as such). But he again turned to Augustine for support, this time utilizing the well-known metaphor of the double mirror that permits divine illumination to reach contingent intellect, if the latter is turned in the direction of the divine. This judgment of cognition as black mirror, a type of internal Claude Glass, is the very image of black zones (and revelation as path to knowledge). The path taken by Aquinas and Duns Scotus was the path not taken by Bonaventure. “Bonaventure withheld from the human intellect a power which would be sufficient for knowing truth with certitude” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 40). According to Gilson, Bonaventure was safeguarding a particular worldview (an interior vista) “to protect a Christian understanding of creation, divine providence, illumination and moral guidance” (Gilson, 1924, paraphrased by Quinn, 1973, p. 41).

The Neo-platonism is palpable, and an intermediary world of semi-divine ideas seems to be the key nonetheless. If both Bonaventure and Aquinas more or less grappled with Aristotle’s natural philosophy in different ways, and if each retained that which Aristotle rejected (the Platonic theory of divine ideas), the matter then returns (and rests) in where and how ideas are accessed; the result is a battleground between immutable, universal truths and contingent knowledge (or the mere administration of things). It might be argued that the historically determined triumph of the administrative intellect sponsored the emergence of capitalism.

It is possible, then, to see the entire scholastic operation sliding downhill and the mere description and administration (manipulation) of things and people becoming the entire point. The great scandals coming, of course, were named Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and Copernicus, plus Savonarola. (Regarding this period, see Hallyn, 1990.) Furthermore, it is possible to detect in the shadows the instantiation of new models of power and control, with the ascendance of Thomism unnecessarily burdened with the incipient power struggles within the Church between secular and sacred concerns. Thomism could be seen in such a light as a threshold crossed historically, never to be re-crossed other than personally (or existentially) – a metaphysical Rubicon. Augustinianism (as the antithesis), in turn, shelters a certain generous latitude within thought that privileges immemorial reserves within subjectivity (almost always the enemy and victim of power). The return (and/or the suppression) of the singular subject is, in this way, a constant theme in the symphonic histories of knowledge production and humanist disciplines. And the singular subject or, in modern terms, “citizen” is the foundation of both polis and commons. It is for this reason that the approach of Capital, or for that matter any exploitative ideology, to the gates of subjectivity is utterly frightening (Harris, 2017).

It is ideational Franciscanism that merits a closer look today for traces of an alternative. And it is the “right to have no rights” that merits utmost scrutiny – a coinage credited to Hugh of Digne concerning the early Franciscan refusal of property and an elective embrace of Holy Poverty (Agamben, 2013). This highly principled embrace of Christian virtue defined subsequent anarcho-Christian forms of self-government and is not entirely inconsistent with anarcho-socialist agendas. That a schism between the Conventuals and the Spirituals centered on ownership of property (as the Franciscan order began to receive major gifts from generous patrons) only further underscores the significance of the renunciation of worldly rights for higher rights – the latter generally reducible to the right to live where and as one wishes. The chief merit of this renunciation of rights is, notably, that in renouncing such rights the arrogation of those rights by anyone else is impossible.

An extended citation from Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) by Max Stirner, bête noire of Karl Marx (Derrida, 1994), is instructive:

“The time was politically so agitated that, as is said in the gospels, people thought they could not accuse the founder of Christianity more successfully than if they arraigned him for ‘political intrigue’, and yet the same gospels report that he was precisely the one who took the least part in these political doings. But why was he not a revolutionary, not a demagogue, as the Jews would gladly have seen him? Why was he not a liberal? Because he expected no salvation from a change of conditions, and this whole business was indifferent to him. He was not a revolutionary, like Caesar, but an insurgent: not a state-overturner, but one who straightened himself up. That was why it was for him only a matter of ‘Be ye wise as serpents’, which expresses the same sense as, in the special case, that ‘Give to the emperor that which is the emperor’s’; for he was not carrying on any liberal or political fight against the established authorities, but wanted to walk his own way, untroubled about, and undisturbed by, these authorities. Not less indifferent to him than the government were its enemies, for neither understood what he wanted, and he had only to keep them off from him with the wisdom of the serpent. But, even though not a ringleader of popular mutiny, not a demagogue or revolutionary, he (and every one of the ancient Christians) was so much the more an insurgent who lifted himself above everything that seemed so sublime to the government and its opponents, and absolved himself from everything that they remained bound to, and who at the same time cut off the sources of life of the whole heathen world, with which the established state must wither away as a matter of course; precisely because he put from him the upsetting of the established, he was its deadly enemy and real annihilator; for he walled it in, confidently and recklessly carrying up the building of his temple over it, without heeding the pains of the immured” (Stirner, 1995, pp. 280-81).

III. Coda

In terms of “prior art,” or the contorted logic of the legal arguments for subsuming previously existing forms of knowledge, Agent Intellect is the foundation for immemoriality, immemoriality is the foundation for the commons and “common law,” the commons and “common law” are the foundation for statutory law, and statutory law is the foundation for intellectual property rights (patents, licenses, and copyright). Given the above arguments, Franciscanism and “the right to have no rights” may be seen as an early, yet pivotal attempt to protect immemoriality itself (in Platonic terms, the dynamic field known as anamnesis) and the attendant internal prospects for individuals and free subjectivity. In terms of the rights of citizens and the commons, this same logic suggests that the subjective conditions here denoted “black zones” are the foundational state for access to the “Kingdom of God” (which is always within), however that is defined and however that is experienced. Capital would appear, then, to have its sights set on controlling and monetizing Pascal’s and Kant’s two infinities. Indeed, “God did not die, He was transformed into money” (Agamben, 2014). The great copyright robbery underway since around 2000 (Hugenholtz, 2000) races ahead as technology permits regimes of surveillance for collecting tribute or imposing fines, while the surveillance state takes care of negating civil rights or the rights of citizens. This dual campaign, by Capital and by State, represents a turning point for the very concept of the commons and civil society. The double threat for resistance or insurgency is the usual threat – Apocalypse (a new Verdun).

A version of this essay first appeared as Section I of Part I, Essay III, “Mnemonics: Elegant, Spare, Wintry,” in Gavin Keeney, Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

REFERENCES

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974).

Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

Giorgio Agamben and Peppe Savà, “‘God Didn’t Die, He was Transformed into Money’: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben,” Libcom, February 10, 2014, https://libcom.org/library/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio-agamben-peppe-sav%C3%A0.

Avicenna, Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus, I:5, ed. Simone van Riet (Louvain and Leiden: Peeters and E.J. Brill, 1972).

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Étienne Gilson, La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (Paris: J. Vrin, 1924).

Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M. Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017).

Roland Hissette, ed., Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 Mars 1277, Philosophes Médiévaux, XXII (Louvain and Paris: Publications Universitaires and Vander-Oyez, 1977).

P. Bernt Hugenholtz, “The Great Copyright Robbery: Rights Allocation in a Digital Environment,” Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, 2000, https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/thegreatcopyrightrobbery.pdf.

Hugh of Digne, “De finibus paupertatis,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 5 (1912): pp. 277-90.

Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1954).

Armand A. Maurer, CSB, Medieval Philosophy, Revised edition (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1962).

Tomáš Nejeschleba, “Thomas Aquinas and the Early Franciscan School on the Agent Intellect,” in Verbum VI:I (2004): pp. 67-78.

John Francis Quinn, The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure’s Philosophy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973).

St. Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure, trans. J. De Vinck, 5 vols. (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1960-1970).

Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The post Agent Intellect and Black Zones appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Such neotraditional approaches, if they are based on a mutual dialogue, are a very important part of a transition to a social knowledge economy. In the following section, we make the case why this is so important.

The Main Argument: the common immateriality of traditional and post-industrial eras

It is not difficult to argue that modern industrial societies are dominated by a materialist paradigm. What exists for modern consciousness is material physical reality, what matters in the economy is the production of material products, and the pursuit of happiness is in very strong ways related to the accumulation of goods for consumption. For the elite, its powers derive essentially from the accumulation of capital assets, whether these are industrial or financial. Infinite material growth is really the core mantra of capitalism, and it is made necessary and facilitated by the very design of the contemporary monetary system, where money is mostly created to interest-driven bank debt.

But this was not the case in traditional, agriculture-based societies. In such societies, people of course do have to eat and to produce, and the possession of land and military force is crucial to obtain tribute from the agricultural workers, but it cannot be said that the aim is accumulation of assets. Feudal-type societies were based on personal relations consisting of mutual obligations. These are of course very unequal in character, but are nevertheless very removed from the impersonal and obligation-less property forms that came with capitalism, where there is little impediment for goods and capital to move freely to whomever it is sold to.

In these post-tribal but still pre-modern societies, both the elite and the mass body of producers are united by a common immaterial quest for salvation or a similar core spiritual pursuit like enlightenment, etc … , and it is the institution that is in charge of organizing that quest, like the Church in the western Middle Ages or the Sangha in South-East Asia, that is the determining organization for the social reproduction of the system. Tribute flows up from the farming population to the owning class, but the owning class is engaged in a two-fold pursuit: showing its status through festivities, where parts of the surplus is burned up; and gifting to the religious institutions. It is only this way that salvation/enlightenment, i.e. spiritual value or merit in all its forms, can be obtained. The more you give, the higher your spiritual status. Social status without spiritual status is frowned upon by those type of societies. This is why the religious institutions like the Church of the Sangha end up so much land and property themselves, as the gifting competition was relentless. At the same time, these institutions serve as the welfare and social security mechanisms of their day, by ensuring that a part of that flow goes back to the poor and can be used in times of social or natural emergencies.

In the current era, marked by a steady deterioration of eco-systems, is again undergoing a fundamental and necessary shift to immateriality.

Here are just a few of the facts and arguments to illustrate my point for a shift towards once again a immaterial focus in our societies.

The cosmopolitan elite of capital has already transformed itself for a long time towards financial capital. In this form of activity, financial assets are moved constantly where returns are the highest, and this makes industrial activity a secondary activity. If we then look at the financial value of corporations, only a fraction of it is determined by the material assets of such corporation. The rest of the value, usually called “good will”, is in fact determined by the various immaterial assets of such corporation, it’s expertise and collective intelligence, it’s brand capital, the trust in the present and the future expected returns that it can generate.

The most prized material goods, such as say Nike shoes, show a similar quality, only 5% of its sales value is said to be determined by physical production costs, all the rest is the value imparted to it by the brand (both the cost to create it, and the surplus value created by the consumers themselves).

The shift towards a immaterial focus can also be shown sociologically, for example through the work of Paul Ray on cultural creatives, and of Ronald Inglehart on the profound shift to postmaterial values and aspirations.

For populations who have lived for more than one generation in broad material security, the value system shifts again to the pursuit of knowledge, cultural, intellectual and spiritual experience. Not all of them, not all the time, but more and more, and especially so for the cultural elite of ‘cultural creatives’ or what Richard Florida has called the Creative Class, which is also responsible for key value creation in cognitive capitalism.

One more economic argument could be mentioned in the context of cognitive capitalism. In this model of our economy, the current dominant model as far as value creation is concerned, the key surplus value is realized through the protection of intellectual properties. Dominant Western companies can sell goods at over 100 to 1,000 times their production value, through state and WTO enforced intellectual rents. It is clearly the immaterial value of such assets that generate the economic streams, even though it requires creating fictitious scarcities through the legal apparatus.

We have argued before that this model is undermined through the emergence of distributed infrastructures for the production, distribution and consumption of immaterial and cultural goods, which makes such fictitious scarcity untenable in the long run. The immaterial value creation is indeed already leaking out of the market system. While we need such a transition towards a focus on immaterial value, it also creates very strong contradictions in the present political economy, one of the main reasons why a shift towards a integrated social knowledge economy, is a vital necessity.

The Second Argument: the nature of post-deconstructive trans-modernism

Industrial society, its particular mental and cultural models, are clearly antagonistic to tradition. The old structures must go: religion is seen as superstition, community is seen as repressive of individuality, and tradition is seen as hampering the free progress of dynamic individuals. This makes modernism both a very constructive force, for all the new it is capable of instituting in society, but also a very destructive force, at war with thousands of years of traditional values, lifestyles and social organization. It attempts to strip individuals of wholistic community, replacing it with disciplinary institutions, and commodity-based relations.

The subsequent postmodernist phase, is a cultural (but also structural as it is itself an expression of capitalist re-organization) reaction against modernity and modernism. Postmodernism is above all a deconstructive movement. Against all ‘reification’ and ‘essentialisation’, it relatives everything. No thing, no individual stands alone, we are all constituted of fragments that themselves are part of infinite fields. Through infinite play, the fragmented ‘dividual’ has at its disposal infinite constitutive elements that can be recombined in infinite ways. The positive side of it, is, that along with freeing us with fictitious fixed frameworks of belief and meaning, it also re-openes the gates of the past and of tradition. Everything that is usable, is re-usable, and the war against tradition ends, to make place for pragmatic re-appropriation. But as the very name indicates, postmodernism can only be a first phase of critique and reaction against modernity and modernism, still very much beholden to it, if only in its reactivity to all things modern. It is deconstructive, a social regression of the collective ego that can only receive ultimate therapeutic meaning if it is followed by a reconstructive phase. For postmodernism to have any ultimate positive meaning, it must be followed by a trans-formative, reconstructive phase. A trans-modernism if you like, which goes ‘beyond’ modernity and modernism. In that new phase, tradition can not just be appropriated any longer as an object, but requires a dialogue of equals with traditional communities. They are vital, because they already have the required skills to survive and thrive in a post-material age.

The Third Argument: the problematic nature of un-changed tradition

Using or returning to a premodern spiritual tradition for transmodern inspiration is not a path that is without its problems or dangers: it can very easily become a reactionary pursuit, a fruitless attempt to go back to a golden age that has only existed in the imagination.

The core problem is that many spiritual traditions all occurred within the context of exploitative economic and political systems. Though the exploitation was different, most traditional spirituality and its institutions developed in systems that were based on tribute, slavery , or serfdom. These systems usually combined a disenfranchised peasant population, a warrior or other ruling class, in which the traditional Church or Sangha played a crucial role for its social reproduction. For example, Buddhism only became acceptable to to the ‘mainstream’society of its time when it accepted to exclude slaves. Despite its radical-democratic potential, it became infused with the feudal authority structure that mirrored the society of which it was a part. These spiritualities are therefore rife with patriarchy, sexism and other profoundly unequal views and treatments of human beings.

Though the logic was profoundly different from capitalism, these forms of exploitation, and their justification by particular religious or spiritual systems and institutions, should prove to be unacceptable to contemporary (post/trans-modern) consciousness. Perhaps a symmetrical but equally problematic approach would be the pure eclecticism that can be the result of postmodern consciousness, in which isolated parts of any tradtion are simply stolen and recombined without any serious understanding of the different frameworks. Another problem we see is the following: contemporary communication technologies, and globalized trade and travel, and the unification of the world under capitalism, have created the promise for a great mixing of civilizations. Though contact and interchange was always a reality, it was slow, and it different civilisational spheres really did exist, which created profoundly different cultural realities and individual psychologies. To be a Christian or a Buddhist meant to have profoundly different orientations towards life and society (despite structural similarities in religious or spiritual organization). But a growing part of the human population, if not the whole part, is now profoundly exposed to the underlying values of the other civilisational spheres. For example, Eastern Asian notions have similarly already profoundly impacted western consciousness. In this context, rootedness in one’s culture and spiritual traditions can no longer be separated with a global cosmopolitan approach and a continous dialogue with viewpoints and frameworks that originate elsewhere. Increasinly global affinity networks are becoming as important as local associations in influencing individuals and their identity-building.

Fourth Argument: the road to differential post-industrial development

I believe it would be fair to say that contemporary capitalism is a machine to create homogeinity worldwide, and that this is not an optimal outcome, as it destroys cultural biodiversithy. In its current format, which got a severe shock with the current financial meltdown, which combines globalization, neoliberalism and financialization, it is also an enormous apparatus of coercion. It undermines the survivability of local agriculture and creates an enormous flight to the cities; it destroys long-standing social forms such as the extended family, and severely undermines traditional culture. Of course, I do not want to imply that all change or transformation is negative, but rather stress that it takes away the freedom of many who would make different choices, such as those who would want to stay in a local village.

It is here that neotraditional approaches offer real hope and potential. Instead of the wholesale import of global habits and technologies, for which society has not been prepared and which is experienced as an alien graft, it offers an alternative road of choosing what to accept and what to reject, and to craft a locally adapted road to post-industrial development.

It reminds us of Gandhi’s concept of Swadeshi and appropriate technology. He rejected both western high tech, which was not adapted to many local situations, but also unchanged local agragrian tradition and technology, which was hardly evolving. Instead, he advocated appropriate technology, a intermediary level of technology which started from the local situation, but took from modern science and technology the necessary knowledge to create new tools that were adapted to the local situation, yet offered increases in productivity.

Neotraditional economics could take a similar approach, but not limited to an attitude to technology selection, but to the totality of political and social choices. In this way, in harmony with local values, those aspects can be chosen, which increase the quality of livelihoods, but do not radically subvert chosen lifestyles and social forms. It represents a new approach which combines the high tech of globalized technical knowledge, with the high touch elements of local culture. For example, it becomes imaginable to conceive of local villages, adapting localized and small-scale manufacturing techniques based on the latest advances in miniaturization and flexibilisation of production technologies, and which are globally connected with global knowledge networks.

Fifth Argument: Adapting to Steady-State Economies in the Age of the Endangered Biosphere

The essence of capitalism is infinite growth, making money with money and increasing capital. An infinite growth system cannot infinitely perdure with limited resources in a limited physical environment. Today’s global system combines a vision of pseudo-abundance, the mistaken vision that nature can provide endless inputs and is an infinite dump, with pseudo-scarcity, the artificial creation of scarcities in the fields of intellectual, cultural and scientific exchange, through exaggerated and ever increasing intellectual property rights, which hamper innovation and free cooperation.

To be sustainable, our emerging global human civilization and political economy needs to reverse those two principles. This means that we first of all need a steady-state economy, which can only grow to the degree it can recycle its input back to nature, so as not to further deplete the natural stock. And it requires a liberalization of the sharing and exchange of technical and scientific knowledge to global open innovation communities, so that the collective intelligence of the whole of humankind can be directed to the solving of complex problems.

The first transformation is closely linked to our contemporary monetary system and alternative answers can be found in the traditional conceptions of wealth of pre-industrial societies.

For example, traditional religions associated with agriculture-based societies and production systems, outlawed interest. There is a good reason for that: when someone extends a loan with interest, that interest does not exist, and the borrower has to find the money somewhere else. In other words, to pay back the interest, he has to impoverish somebody else. This of course, would be extremely socially destructive in a static society, and therefore, it could not be allowed to happen, which explains the religious injunction against interest.

However, in modern capitalist societies, a solution has been found: growth. As long as the pie is growing, the interest can be taken from the growing pie. The problem however, is that such a monetary system requires growth, infinite growth. Static businesses are an impossibility, since that would mean they cannot pay back the interest.

Now that we have reached the limits of the biosphere, now that we need again a steady-state economy, we need interest-free monetary systems, and paradoxically, the religious injunctions again make sense.

This is just one of the connections between the transmodern challenges, and the value of traditional, and religious systems rooted in the premodern era, such as Buddhist Economics, and of course, the traditions of ‘Buen Vivir’.

We could take many other examples: for example, modern chemical agriculture destroys the quality of the land, and depletes it, so that here also, premodern traditional practices become interesting again. However, as we stated in the third argument, and refined in the fourth argument: since tradition is also problematic, it cannot be simply copied, it can only be used in a critical manner.

An example of such a critical approach is the appropriate technology movement. In this approach, it is recognized that traditional technology as such is insufficient, that hypermodern technology is often inappropriate in more traditional settings, and that therefore, an intermediate practice is needed, that is both rooted in ‘tradition’, i.e. the reality of the local situation, but also in modernity, the creative use of technological solutions and reasoning, so as the create a new type of ‘appropriate’ technological development.

Conclusion: Can the ethos of the social knowledge economy be mixed with neotraditional approaches?

With the emergence of the social knowledge economy and commons-based peer production, and practices like open and distributed manufacturing, a new alliance becomes possible: that between the most technologically advanced open design communities, with the majority of the people who are still strongly linked to traditional practices. Through such an alliance, which combines the traditional injunction for a steady-state economy in harmony with natural possibilities, a differentiated post-industrial future can be created, which can bypass the destructive practices of industrial-era modernism, and can create an ‘appropriate technology’ future, whereby more traditional communities can more freely decide what to adapt and what to reject. While on the other hand, transmodern open design communities can learn from the wisdom of traditional approaches. Such an alliance needs an ideological vehicle, and Buen Vivir is its expression.

Extract from “A Commons Transition Plan“.

Photo by kabl1992

Photo by University of the Fraser Valley

The post The Importance of Neotraditional Approaches in the Reconstructive Transmodern Era appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Tarnas emphasizes that “although the Cartesian-Kantian epistemological position has been the dominant paradigm of the modern mind, it has not been the only one” and argues that with the work of Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, as well as Rudolf Steiner, a diversely expressed but consistent alternative epistemology began to emerge based on the “fundamental conviction that the relationship of the human mind to the natural world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory” (Tarnas, 1996, p.433).

This alternative way of knowing does not contradict the Kantian epistemology, but includes and transcends it. It acknowledge Kant’s assertion that all human knowledge of nature or the world is ultimately determined by subjective principles; “but instead of considering these principles as belonging ultimately to the separate human subject, and therefore not grounded in the natural world independent of human cognition, this participatory conception held that these subjective principles are in fact an expression of the world’s own being, and that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own process of self-revelation” (Tarnas, 1996, p.434). Tarnas explains:

“In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can examine it “objectively” and register it from without. Rather, nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. Nature’s reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind. In this perspective, nature pervades everything, and the human mind in all its fullness is itself an expression of nature’s essential being.” — Richard Tarnas, 1996, p.434

Deep Galaxy Field from the Hubble Space Telescope showing hundreds of galaxies with thousands of star systems in each of them.

Tarnas emphasizes that this participatory epistemology which Goethe, Hegel, Steiner and others, all expressed in different but related ways is not a form of regression to naïve participation mystique. Rather, it is a way of knowing that can be regarded as a dialectical synthesis of the long evolution from the primordial undifferentiated consciousness and the enchanted world of early humans when everything was sacred and alive, on to the dualistic alienation between self and world, mind and body, humanity and nature, to then arrive at a participatory worldview that embraces the paradox of being at one and the same time (seemingly) separate from and fundamentally interconnected with nature.

In being we are an individual self and integral to the whole’s emergence at one and the same time. This participatory epistemology “incorporates the postmodern understanding of knowledge and yet goes beyond it” since “the interpretative and constructive character of human cognition is fully acknowledged, but the intimate, interpenetrating and all-permeating relationship of nature to the human being and human mind allows the Kantian consequence of epistemological alienation to be entirely overcome” (Tarnas, 1996, p.435).

We can acknowledge difference and celebrate diversity without staying trapped in the alienation of separation. The qualities that define the uniqueness of ‘other’ come into being when the self takes a perspective from which to ‘observe’ the world. The perceived separation emerges through a way of seeing, but the world does not cease to be whole. Everything is an expression of the one unifying, living, evolving, and conscious process we can choose to call Nature, Universe, God, the Ultimate, the Whole, or the One. As there is nothing outside it — neither in space nor time since they only come into being through a participatory experience of this process.

For the One to know itself, it has to divide itself in order to get a perspective on itself. This first distinction makes experience and participation possible. We create the illusion of our separation as experiencing subjects in the very act of relating to the unifying process by distinguishing the objects of our experience. Precisely because we can experience Nature we are a part of it and not separate from it.

The perception of separation and experience of self and world — subject and object — are valid and important emergent properties of our participation in and as the One. By embracing the seeming paradox that in our very experience of separation lies the proof of our belonging, we can learn to celebrate diversity and difference as expressions of our underlying unity.

We can find peace and rest in the certainty that with all our striving, going somewhere, and creative passion to co-create a regenerative culture, we are — in every moment — arriving exactly where we need to be, the eternally transforming now of the present moment. Our level of consciousness affects how we perceive this moment. Our collective narrative about who we are and what future we want affects what future emerges.

The French writer Marcel Proust reminded us “the true journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.” The journey towards a regenerative culture is about embracing all of Nature as the ground of our being — seeing ourselves and thereby everything with new eyes. Once we do that we will express our experience of this new intimate relationship of belonging to Universe and to Nature in beautifully diverse and creative ways.

“For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, and thus to rediscover its connection to the whole” – Richard Tarnas, 1996, p.443

A bright intellect advancing science and technology, striving for a ‘better world’ and a caring heart feeling deeply connected with all of life, celebrating the perfection of all-that-is, are not mutually exclusive. I have met many women and men who have integrated the gifts of heart and mind on their own path as cultural creatives of a humanity that cares for nature as nature — in humility, creative brilliance, and full recognition of our kinship with all of life.

Our path into the future is one of synthesis. Just as our experience of a separate self is what Einstein called “a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness”, our experience of time is also an illusion. It has us experience the transition towards a regenerative culture as a journey through time rather than as an arriving where we already are: bringing forth a world, by living the questions together.

[This piece is based on a chapter that my editor suggested I cut out of my book Designing Regenerative Cultures published by Triarchy Press in May 2016].

Photo by amandabhslater

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Our excerpt:

“No matter how promising the design of a new system might be, it would be unreasonable to expect that a nation would abruptly drop an existing system in favor of a new one. Nevertheless, a viable, even attractive strategy exists by which new systems could be successfully researched, developed, tested, and implemented. I call it engage global, test local, spread viral.

Engage global means to engage the global academic community and technical sector, in partnership with other segments of society, in a well-defined R&D program aimed at computer simulation and scientific field testing of new systems and benchmarking of results. In this way, the most profound insights of science can be brought into play.

Test local means to scientifically test new designs at the local (e.g., city or community) level, using volunteers (individuals, businesses, non-profits, etc.) organized as civic clubs. This approach allows testing by relatively small teams, at relatively low cost and risk, in coexistence with existing systems, and without legislative action.

Spread viral means that if a system shows clear benefits in one location (elimination of poverty, for example, more meaningful jobs, or less crime) it would likely spread horizontally, even virally, to other local areas. This approach would create a global network of communities and cities that cooperate in trade, education, the setup of new systems, and other matters. Over time, its impact on all segments of society would grow.

Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition.”

Photo by Occupy Global

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From this, on an invitation by Rich Carlson to contribute to a book called Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (a Springer publication), edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, we produced a book chapter called “P2P and Planetary Futures”, modified for public use as “Toward a Synthetic Theory for P2P Alter-globalization.” The chapter presents peer to peer theory and practice in the context of alter-globalization and planetary perspectives on change. It begins through a short elicitation on peer to peer theory. It then synthesizes a dialogic engagement between peer to peer theory and nine perspectives on planetary change:

• reform liberalism,
• post-development,
• relocalization,
• cosmopolitanism,
• neo-marxism,
• engaged ecumenism,
• meta-industrial,
• autonomism / horizontalism,
• and co-evolutionary perspectives.

The chapter then presents a synopsis of a ground breaking effort in the application of peer to peer theory, the FLOK (Free Libre Open Knowledge) project in Ecuador, which provides a concrete example of P2P as an alter-globalisation practice, providing a experience base which captures the synthetic nature of p2p interventions.

Learnings:

Overall the engagement between peer to peer and alter-globalisation theory is both complex and fruitful. On one hand it does provide a sifting mechanism to situate peer to peer thinking in a broader spectrum of theory and discourse, and sharpens our understanding of where peer to peer thinking sits in the landscape of planetary change. On the other hand it also broadens out the dimensions of peer to peer thinking and theory, and is a vehicle for what can be understood as a an emerging synthetic theory-practice. The following bullet points provide a synopsis of the engagement between discourse and theory, with the warning that to really understand the intersection of alter-globalization and peer to peer theory and practice, one must look at the deeper engagements in the book chapter, modified paper and on the P2P Foundation Wiki. However, in general we can provide these general insights that a P2P perspective:

• Disagrees with the Reform Liberalist approach of a reformed capitalism, e.g. promoting ‘green’ capitalism and accepting ‘netachical’ capitalism, which we feel will ultimately lead to a deeper crisis.
• Sees a synergy with the Post Development discourse through building shared innovation communities and commons, selective de-globalization and the combination of neotraditional and P2P/transmodern approaches.
• Agrees with much of the Relocalization discourse on the need to re-localize much of our production and consumption, but sees a danger in over-romanticizing the local, or in ignoring the role of global solidarity systems and knowledge commons. Smart localization means ‘Cosmolocalization’.
• Agrees with the Cosmopolitan discourse’s emphasis on the need to create post-national structures to solve global problems, but would add the phenomenon of ‘Phyles’ and would de-emphasize CSOs and NGO and re-emphasize the critical role of global collaboration communities.
• Would reframe the neo-Marxist discourse’s commitments to global class formation, into the need for a global coalition of the commons, the forces of social justice (workers and labour movements), the forces for the defense of the biosphere (green and eco-movements) and the forces for a liberation of culture and social innovation (free culture movement), as the constituent blocks of a new hegemony.
• Agrees with the Engaged Ecumenist view on the need for spiritual awakening, but would argue that secular forms of spirituality which emphasize the unity of humankind, nature and cosmos, are as important as the non-secular. A peer to peer spiritual practice is based on a common exploration of the spiritual inheritance of humankind, independent of, but not opposed to, denominational religious affiliations.
• Agrees with the Meta-Industrial and Gender perspective that it is vital to take into account all peoples that have historically been excluded, with the female gender as paradigmatic example. A danger exists, however, for a reformed neoliberalism to embrace gender and sexual minorities and replace them with other inequalities and displacements. Therefore a ‘conscious’ P2P approach is needed, aware of both structural externalities and the internal subjective and cultural characteristics which continue to drive inequality.
• Accepts from Autonomism and Horizontalism the logic of the network form, but argues a global movement requires coherence and needs to draw on the principle of ‘diagonality’. A purely horizontalist orientation, which disowns leadership, embodied responsibility, as well as sequential 4 and programmatic social development, cannot wage an effective struggle in the face of hostile and ruthless state and market forces.
• Sees itself as eminently compatible with Co-evolutionary viewpoint: in particular because the advent of the P2P projects and communities are inherently global in their cooperative dynamics, and coincides with other scale shifts toward a planetary mode of thinking and action.

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I’m here to speak about serious stuff. About capitalist enclosures, environmental degradation, escalating poverty and an economics of despair, shopping malls and other gentrified spaces, and exhausted, thirsty people in Pakistan lined up behind a lone tanker making its first and last supply of water for the day. Perhaps the best way to begin, then, is with a hearty story – a story about a tortoise, his gourd and his quest for wisdom.

Growing up in Nigeria, I was immersed in folktales about thieving spiders, rewarding encounters with water spirits, and lengthy moral-of-the-story moments. I can’t remember when I first heard of the many tales of tortoise’s escapades. Tortoise’s adventures were as ubiquitous and as familiar to us as the ‘Golden Arches’ are familiar to, well, everyone. In one of his stories, tortoise sets out to gather all the wisdom of the world together – to strip the spider of his web-weaving expertise, to take to himself the sun’s ability to rise in the morning, to deny the mighty eagle the immediacy of his knowledge of flight, and to teach the tree how to grow. It’s an improbable quest, but he succeeds: all the animals and beings in the world consciously give their knowledges to this master trickster figure, and tortoise stuffs all of this into an earthen gourd.

Now he must preserve it, and keep his new treasure in a place where no one would expect him to. The tortoise, jealous for the gourd and its world-shattering contents, ties it to his neck, places the gourd right in front of his eyes where he can see it, and proceeds to climb an iroko tree; his desire is to hang it at the very top of the mighty tree, and camouflage it in its leaves. He doesn’t get very far because the protuberant gourd gets in the way and doesn’t allow his little limbs to clasp the tree. The tortoise tries and tries again and again, but keeps falling. Along comes a witless passer-by, the grasshopper, who in the spontaneity of the moment offers an offhanded remark, “You know you could just swing the gourd around your back”, and she goes away.

Tortoise suffers what to us must be a redeeming episode of cognitive dissonance: he realizes that his preoccupations with preserving knowledge and containing the world, and his apparent success at actually doing it, cannot explain grasshopper’s insights. Knowledge does not come from maintaining relations of exteriority with the world, but with situated, material engagements with its ongoing complexity. Realizing his error, tortoise eventually scrambles up the hardwood tree, and unfastens the leather skin he has tied around the gourd’s mouth, thus ‘releasing its contents’ back into the world – or so he supposes.

So you might say, in a way, the African communities that ‘occasioned’ this story and its prescient insights had already examined the business/philosophical model of Google and found it wanting.

But apart from an onto-epistemology of ‘not knowing’ – which means we can only know the world partially, because knowing is not ‘knowledge of the world’ but practices that are constituent in world-making (a co-constitutive negotiation with non-static others) – there is much more that a diffractive re-reading of this folktale brings into focus: namely, a queering of the fixed boundaries between the human and nonhuman, and a resituating of the commons as commoning or as the situated practices of a collective that always includes the more-than-human.

Today, as capitalist enclosures of corporate ownership and state-approved extermination invite social upheaval, as new strategies for contesting exclusion open up, as the orifices of neoliberal monoculture shudder with new energy, the promise of the commons glimmers in the near distance. This promise of a world that works for the many and not a few is what animates the Natives now fighting Enbridge and the Dakota Access Pipeline project in North Dakota; it is what textures the iridescent glow of computer screens on faces as digital programmers in India, in Nigeria or in a certain Ecuadorian embassy, hack the boundaries of information access. In a way, we are marching round the walls of Jericho, and those walls are falling.

But in the falling, old concerns and old habits of seeing remain resolutely present – much in the same way the French revolution might have gotten rid of kings and the bourgeoisie, but did not contest the thrones they sat upon, or the conceptual edifices that occasioned elite rule. It is the same with the discourse on the commons: rupturing ‘superstructures’ only give more room for the same ‘substructures’[2] to be elaborated differently. Patrick Bresnihan[3] tells us that the most influential perspective on the commons is concerned with the rules, principles and insights we can adopt in governing access to ‘common pool resources’, a desire which in turn is motivated by what one might call the ‘tragedyist’ assumptions of liberal epistemologies – that ‘individuals’ need to be regulated or we risk overexposure to limited resources. Another perspective on the commons, one which feels alive in the framing of this particular aspect of the conference on P2P cultures, demarcates between the material commons and the immaterial commons, between nature and culture, which entrenches human activity (in the latter) as productive and creative, and stabilizes nature as something merely to be protected or preserved.

These popular perspectives about the commons are occasioned by the sticky ideas that nature is something apart from culture; that nature is ‘resource’ that never really surpasses its dimensions of instrumentality – or of being a mere background – to the world-making practices of humans; that agency is properly human (and that the way it shows up is as ‘choice’ or human subjectivity); that knowledge of the world (often valorised in manifestoes and compulsions to ‘correct practice’) can be total if the right mediating conditions are present; that the generativity of nature (or its ability to reproduce) is not to be considered as creative labour or productive (just as the life-giving gift-work of women are not considered part of the economy and are elided by a corporate culture that pretends to sustain the whole), and that – all of these taken into consideration – the commons is therefore a human achievement…and the question of who gets what, when and how, or how to ensure equitable access for a larger population than neoliberalism could account for, is really going to be settled by the intricacy of our maps and models and management regimes. By the same logic of anthropocentrism.

Like the tortoise, I am learning otherwise.

Working as an ethnopsychotherapeutic researcher years ago, I was committed to exploring what for our present purposes you might call the psychological or wellbeing commons. In Nigeria, there are – as at last count – no more than 8 sparsely equipped, government assisted, regional psychiatric outfits and some moribund laws designed to facilitate protection for those who present with mental disturbances or need psychiatric care. At the time of my ethno-clinical research, there were escalating calls for government to throw more money into healthcare, and some even insisted on the need for a privatization of healthcare delivery – arguing that with competitive edge, the landscape of mental healthcare delivery would receive the political equivalent of a shot in the arm.

Motivated by the idea that our approach to the healthcare commons was entangled with deeper epistemological issues and worldviews, I decided to study Yoruba indigenous practices with caregiving. At first, my initiating questions were concerned with finding more efficacious means to the same outcomes that would have been celebrated by western psychology (meaning ‘recovery’, ‘sanity’, and ‘wellbeing’). As such, I was caught up with investigating how these healers and elders defined healing and oriented themselves in relation to their clients and their families and what they wanted help addressing. My central question was “What are the stories these healers tell, and how do these stories improve upon western narratives about healing and recovery?”

I expected to find well-established nosologies and diagnostic paradigms identifying and isolating patterns of psychopathological behaviour; I expected to meet well-formed answers to questions like ‘what do you do when a patient presents with auditory hallucinations?’, but what I encountered was an ‘in-the-moment’ aliveness and vulnerability. If I could create a mishmash of responses and reduce all the stories I was told to a phrase – which is not something I would ever want to do – that phrase would be “it depends”. I encountered non-reductionistic, descriptive, and situated knowledges that were just as sophisticated in their account about mental health. Instead of speaking of ‘illness’ as something that can be isolated and treated successfully based on our diagnostic systems, they spoke of mental illness as the effects of wind, as stepping on an eyelash, eating at the wrong time of the day, or having a person curse you. Their categories were spontaneous, with one healer telling me that there were mainly 3 types of sicknesses and then deciding later on in the interview that there could be as many as 30. This ‘not-knowing’ wasn’t a result of indifference or ignorance, but a situated embodied recognition that there were many other agencies impinging upon and crafting the outcomes of a healing encounter – or even the way one could speak about behaviour.

Mind you, their skillsets (which often attracted more traditional western-type psychiatrists to understudy) were highly developed, passed down from generation to generation, and yet a shrug of the shoulders was often the outcome of their work – which is not simply to be interpreted as benign resignation, but more as sacred recognition. From those interviews, I thought I’d get a new story that could carve a surer path to a psychological commons, one that sidestepped the frantic concerns about bed-spaces and poor psychologist-client ratios in the country. Instead I came out with a gasp – an eloquence of a different sort, one that reinforced what vital materialists, post-anthropocentric and feminist performativists like Haraway and Barad are speaking about, and one which reshapes our understanding of the commons…not as a boundaried thing that pre-exists the particular relations that bring it about, or the ways we speak about it, but the ongoing embodied practices and mutual negotiations of boundaries that constitute ecologies of care and exclusion.

This is the more-than-human commons that Bresnihan identifies as “a messier, entangled world…[that is] not simply ‘accessible’ to technical knowledge but unfolding, and thus changing, through practical engagements that tie humans and non-humans together (and thus shapes them) in different ways; not a reasoning liberal subject but a subject caught within a mesh of reciprocal relations that must be negotiated, usually imperfectly.”

In the same way Niels Bohr and Karen Barad, queering the Cartesian ontology of fixed things and static givens, have said there is no ‘thing’ as light as such, only the apparatus or phenomenon or ‘assemblage’ of agencies and ongoing relationships that produce ‘light’. Using insights from her study of Bohrian physics-philosophy, Barad comes to the conclusion that the world is substantiated by relationships, not things (relata do not precede relationships) – and that it is only in the specific context of particular entanglements that boundaries and properties are negotiated. As such, there are no things, only things-in-the-making. This immediately calls into question the old Cartesian assumptions that situate the essence of the human within the human. But stepping back from this representational logic, we can notice a more troubling and deeply rich account of the discursive practices, the scientific traditions, the ecological and biopolitical frames, and the ethical matterings that need to be accounted for before we could speak about the human. This decentering of the human figure, this composting, this coming down to earth, undercuts the liberal humanist frames with which we valorize the commons as a sphere of natural resources to be protected or preserved.

One might also say that there is no commons as such, or that the commons is indeterminate and difficult to characterize; one might say there is only a commoning, a material-discursive doing that brings to our attention the myriad performances which constitute this more-than-human world. ‘The commons is not a resource, it is a cat-cradling activity through shared capacities. Recalling my earlier use of the metaphor of bringing down the walls of Jericho, one might say that the difference between liberal humanist epistemological framings of the commons and this quantum leap and queer vision for commoning is that in one story, the Jews brought down the wall of Jericho – end of story, while in another vision, where the significance of the agencies of nonhuman counterparts are not elided or made invisible, it was the ferocious blast of sound energy, the marching, the rebellious pounding of sandaled feet on ground, the time of day, the yearnings for place, the narratives of divine intervention, the materials of the wall, and even recent archaeological excavations and scientific readings that produced that event.

To practice the commons, which we always do whether we like it or not, is thus to queer our notions of agency, causality, knowledge and identity – and spacetime. We are dealing with no less than the composting of the humanities, or the dissolving of the figure of the human – a trend Rusten Hogness called ‘humusities’. We are coming down to earth, and this coming down to earth is not a coming down to romantic visions of the commons, it is not a revival of premodern notions of recovered edens. Not an incontrovertible restoration of ‘indigenous vistas’ in the sense some New Age groups are calling for a return to ‘what we really are’, as if that could be teased out from the myriad tensions and polyvocal eruptions that make up the world. It is a meeting with, a becoming-with, a sympoiesis, a recognition that we are always part of a grander becoming, and that commoning is not even about human survival or pre-made linear futures.

If one must deal other preposterous figurations to the table, I would call our moment a pagan insurgency. I imagine the conquest of Judeo-Christian and later Enlightenment thinking: the boundarying of the divine in sacred enclosures, and the simultaneous demonization and disenfranchisement of nature as mere resource or obstacle to be surmounted on the path of progress. Now, it seems, those enclosures are under siege and our walled off choir songs are being haunted by near-distant lurid tunes and drumming and noises that disturb the convenient harmony we seek. The halo is too small a circle to account for the profuse and preposterously ravishing enchantment everywhere.

Now, as cognitive psychologists are finding out, those qualities we attributed solely to humans or approximate species – thinking, remembering, feeling, intentionality – are now thought best as intersectional (or intra-sectional!). So thinking is intra-thinking, feeling is trans-affective, and free will or choice is an edited snapshot of a more-than-human murmuration or larger movement – or an exclusionary process central to how we perpetuate an autopoietic or stable sense of identity/self. To put it mildly, and to borrow the language of the times, we are at war but it is a war we must ‘lose’. The veil is pierced. Well, the tale is more scandalous than that: we were never pure to begin with. Never human to begin with. This is not a question of re-joining nature – this is a question of recognizing we are nature in its ongoing complexity.

I think the lines in the sand are being redrawn, and with this redescription of the world as non-anthropocentric, as material-discursive, as polyvocal, negotiated, imperfect, partially encountered, fragile, dispersed and everywhere already enchanted, the potential of commoning is in “shifting our attention away from anthropocentric accounts of world-making towards the situated relations and knowledge practices that characterize the commons as an ongoing, difficult, and more-than-human achievement. In this account, what is shared, by whom, and how, are not questions that can be settled by institutional regimes or techno-scientific expertise…What is shared, who is sharing, and how it should be shared, are not just ‘technical’ questions that can be resolved through the application of more detailed knowledge about the bio-economic interplay of the resources and resource-users.”[4] In a sense, we are not witnesses to the machinated outcomes of our well-oiled regimes of control, we are with-nesses, not outside the rolling, toiling, tearing, regenerative agency of the world we suppose we can cure from a distance.

It is here that I want to consider, in conclusion, the question of inclusive activisms and what the practical import of redescribing the commons as a multi-species, multi-agential, mycelial, messy, nonlinear, collective, ecopoetic, performative, imperfect, non-teleological, queer act of negotiating boundaries and territories and reimagining care or questions about survival. What to do with it? What does it mean for emancipatory politics and our visions of a more just future?

There is widespread acknowledgement that this ethics of intersubjectivity, of intra-action, of commoning – if you will – is political stultifying. There is an ambivalence at the heart of this redescription. It is not clear where to go when directions themselves are now queer…or if we expand the commons to be more than human, not just peer to peer, but particle to particle, parasite to parasite, and place to place. The resolute linearity we can chart out from where we are to where we would like to be now encounters obstacles and riddles along the way, and we are no longer in charge of our destiny. Perhaps it is helpful to echo Deborah Bird Rose’s comment: “[t]here is nothing ’natural’ about the continuity of life on earth, nor is continuity a process which can be taken for granted”[5] In short, dissolving the astral figure of man means sophisticating an ethos of limits – limits not only to what we can do, but also limits to what we can know and how to think about the future. A thicker ‘we’ is and has always been at play, and the image of the technocrat tinkering with nature’s levers eases away to honour a startling, still-in-the-works portrait of more-than-human happenings that – if we are to take Ivan Illich’s suggestion – are often best characterized by awed silence.

As such, it is not clear what ethical imperatives shine in our posthumanist context. An invitation to be humble? A curiosity about nonhuman others? A reimagination of our broader political structures along ecopoetic and biosemiotics lines? New enclosures? Bresnihan writes that “it is important to pay attention to the novel material and discursive practices that are opening around the commons – producing worlds in commons, shared worlds, that have an immanent power, an internal logic, that are radically different to the value and knowledge practices of capitalist production and liberal, techno-scientific regulation (as we have known them).” He affirms that “what is clear…is that the re-invention of the commons, understood as the making of new subjects and “values that are grounded in material practices for the reproduction of life and its needs” will be necessary for any future, emancipatory politics”, and that this does not mean “a ‘return’ to a ‘pure’ pre-capitalist time, nor even a valorization of subsistence while wealth continues to be accumulated…”

This is what informs and animates my work with curators on ‘the emergence network’ (www.emergencenetwork.org) – not so much the articulation of a different activism or the creation of a giant manifesto for inclusive activism, but a vocation to lean into the specificities, to cultivate power-with not power-over, to cultivate new ways of responding with the world.

This ethos of sympoiesis of less than linear futures (or ‘becoming-together-with’) brings us to acknowledge the liminality of our tragic and (simultaneously) stunningly hopeful circumstances. Perhaps in resituating ourselves in postures of curiosity, we queer the liberal humanist ideals that motivate our presents practices of commoning, and allow for new possibilities, some of which may be conducive to our flourishing, to thrive. This is not the same as throwing one’s hands in the air, as if to say nothing matters, it is saying what matters is more interesting than our present frames of analysis could account for. It is saying that there are wilds beyond our fences and cultivated crop monocultures. It is saying there is wisdom in surprising places. Just ask the tortoise.

[1] This talk is heavily indebted to Karen Barad’s insights on intra-action and agential realism, and – more specifically – ’s excellent paper ‘The more than human commons: from commons to commoning’.

[2] I do not presuppose a predetermined distinction between sub- and super-structures; this is just by way of elaboration.

[3] The More-than-Human Commons: From Commons to Commoning [an earlier version of this article appeared in Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alternative Futures. Kirwan, S., Dawney, L., & Brigstocke, J. (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 2015]

[4] Bresnihan, Patrick [The more-than-human commons]

[5] Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: attentive inter-actions in the sentient world. Environmental Humanities, 3, 93-109.

Photo by aresauburn

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“As we evolve we begin to identify with larger and larger systems, recognizing the nested nature of subsystems and the uncountable interconnections between them. Using the terminology from Reed, we can see this process of transforming identity (role & relationship) as a function of expanded human consciousness and pattern harmonization. The more aware we become of how nature works, the more clearly we recognize that we are an integral part of the planetary system (Gaia). The separation between man and nature perpetuated by those lingering narratives is wilting away — though there is a lot of important work to be done to send it on its way once and for all.

The above graphic highlights what Bill Reed calls “Ecological Strategies” in the movement from a degenerating to a regenerating function of human activity.

Let’s take a quick look at what these terms represent:

Biophilia means “an urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” The biophilia hypothesis states that “there is an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems.” In other words, by nature we long to be surrounded by life — plants, animals, and other human beings. Here we may still see ourselves as separate from nature, but we recognize our contact with it as an important part of our overall health.

Biomimetics looks to nature as inspiration for human design and development — imitating nature to produce the built environment and to create man-made systems. Nature is a guide and a model from which we gain important insights about what serves us best. These insights are derived from an understanding of how nature works. Again, still perhaps seeing “nature” as a separate concept from that of humanity and civilization.

In the restorative paradigm a role for humanity in nature emerges. We see nature as a system with an inherent self-organizing capability — and our job is to return it to its natural state. Once we have succeeded in doing so, and in what Reed calls a “finite agreement,” the human’s job is done. Time to move on and let nature do its thing.

With regenerative development and design the role of the human being merges with nature. Nature is no longer seen as an “other” — it loses its usefulness as a distinctive concept. Here the purpose of humanity aligns with the purpose of the planetary system itself, having an evolutionary function that looks to continuously improve through feedback loops, learning, and adaptation toward ever-increasing levels of diversity, resilience, beauty, abundance, etc.

In other words, we are not here by accident. We have an important role to play and it’s time for us to step into it, to transform the narratives that have cast us as separate from an environment designed to serve us.

Those operating from the regenerative paradigm have a deep-seated belief in the potential of the human race — that we are capable of much more than merely “minimizing our impact” or “leaving no trace.” In fact, and contrary to popular belief, many indigenous peoples understood this well and actively managed the land to create greater states of health than would have been if left alone.”

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“Hanauer and Liu (write) on the existing economic story and what they call the “machinebrain” rationalistic approach.

It’s fairly standard fare:

– Call it the “Machinebrain” picture of the world: markets are perfectly efficient, humans perfectly rational, incentives perfectly clear and outcomes perfectly appropriate. From this a series of other truths necessarily follows: regulation and taxes are inherently regrettable because they impede the machine’s optimal workings. Government fiscal stimulus is wasteful. The rich by definition deserve to be so and the poor as well.

The roots of a circular economy, in contrast, lie with those thinkers and designers who recognise that:

– Economies, as social scientists now understand, aren’t simple, linear and predictable, but complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic.

The source for this quote is still Hanauer and Liu. It’s a matter of science, that is what economies are and they follow the ‘rules’ of feedback rich systems. That’s still a very dry, hardly understandable description. What is needed is a suitable metaphor group – a more consistent metaphor, which is more explicit than for example; “taking insights from living systems” which is common in many overviews of the circular economy.

Here is Hanauer and Liu’s suggestion:

– An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden. It can be fruitful if well tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not.

In this new framework, which we call Gardenbrain, markets are not perfectly efficient but can be effective if well managed. Where Machinebrain posits that it’s every man for himself, Gardenbrain recognizes that we’re all better off when we’re all better off. Where Machinebrain treats radical inequality as purely the predictable result of unequally distributed talent and work ethic, Gardenbrain reveals it as equally the self-reinforcing and compounding result of unequally distributed opportunity.

Gardenbrain challenges many of today’s most conventional policy ideas.

One almost visceral reaction to the notion of a garden as a metaphor, let alone ‘Gardenbrain’ as a descriptor is that it reduces or diminishes the human from being in charge to a kind of stewardship. It means a kind of humility, working with the system, being in partnership – it’s somehow ‘fuzzy.’ A garden is also, well, just an old man’s [sic] pastime, an irrelevance surely in the big picture of a technological, fast moving increasingly urban world run by technocrats managing, controlling complicated systems. It’s potentially a big turn off.

Perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but one reality for the ‘machinebrain’ orientated for sure…let’s go on a little. Looking into Hanauer and Liu’s ‘Gardenbrain’ reveals these consequential reframings
Under the prevailing assumption, regulation is an unfortunate interruption of a frictionless process of wealth creation in a self-correcting market. But Gardenbrain allows us to see that an economy cannot self-correct any more than a garden can self-tend. And regulation — the creation of standards to raise the quality of economic life — is the work of seeding useful activity and weeding harmful activity.

Is it possible to garden clumsily and ineffectively? Of course. Wise regulation, however, is how human societies turn a useless jungle into a prosperous garden. This explains why wherever on earth one finds successful private companies, one also finds a well-regulated economy, and where regulation is absent we find widespread poverty.

OK, this sounds much like the circular economy, advocating “optimising system conditions” rather than interfering in the detail or seeking to micro manage anything. Taxes are reframed too, of course. Compare the existing ‘story’. Taxes take…“money out of the economy. It is not just separate from economic activity, but hostile to it. This is why most Americans believe that lower taxes will automatically lead to more prosperity.”

But for Gardenbrain types this question illuminates the key role of circulation:

– …taxes as basic nutrients that sustain the garden. A well-designed tax system — in which everyone contributes and benefits — ensures that nutrients are circulated widely to fertilize and foster growth. … Jobs are the consequence of an organic feedback loop between consumers and businesses, and it’s the demand from a thriving middle class that truly creates jobs. The problem with today’s severe concentration of wealth, then, isn’t that it’s unfair, though it might be; it’s that it kills middle-class demand. Lasting growth doesn’t trickle down; it emerges from the middle out.

It’s perfectly obvious; perfectly consistent, as all effective deployment of metaphor should be. Feedback rules; feedback reinvigorates. It is restorative and regenerative as with “circular economy” aspirations around materials, but explicitly applied to how jobs are created and the process of tax and invest. Note here that it’s not “tax and spend” since ‘spend’ has connotations of spendthrift, to lose, to diminish the organism [“I’m spent”], of waste. Hanauer and Liu write ‘The word spending means literally “to use up or extinguish value,”’

Making sure there is enough demand for products and services is therefore an obligation of governance and is part of creating effective economic flows.

This flows metaphor is, furthermore, deployed in a very interesting way:

Government no more spends our money than a garden spends water or a body spends blood. To spend tax dollars on education and health is to circulate nutrients through the garden.”

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By contrast, ‘left integralist’, such as Joe Corbett and my own ‘p2p theoretical’ approach, claim the next phase is marked by the importance of collaborative commons.

Joe Corbett makes the argument very cogently:

“One often hears within integral circles of the developmental oscillation between individual and collectivist orientations, so that, for instance, whereas modernity is characterized by an individual achievement ethos, postmodernity is characterized by a collectivist ethos, and therefore post-postmoden integral being and consciousness will be characterized once again by a more integrated individualist ethos, presumably one in which each individual becomes an innovative entrepreneur leading the way in a brave new world of John Galtian self-sufficiency and superhuman individualism.

My contention is that this vision is patently false and is based on a misunderstanding of postmodernism (green) that will require a complete reorientation of the direction and goals of the integral leadership and its community.

As Jurgen Habermas and Zygmunt Bauman say, postmodernity is not so much a transcendence of modernity as it is a hyper-modernity in which the goals and values of modernity are extended to people and society where once they were limited and circumspect. Women and minorities are granted rights once denied to them, and the truths of authority (from the white male heterosexual and imperialism to science itself) are put under the spotlight and hollowed-out of their sacred essence.

In a word, under postmodernity the myth of the given is dethroned, and with it the enlightenment myth of progress through the application of science and reason to social problems is exposed as a gender, class, and racial fraud that the white European male has imposed as a narrative on the world for his own advancement and self-aggrandizement. What began as a critique of religious superstition and authority under modernity ends in a critique of scientific materialism and political-economic authority under hyper-modernity (postmodernity).

Thus, what characterizes postmodernity above all is a kind of relativism that lacks moral and epistemological authority beyond the individual in what Norman O. Brown has called the loss of the Father, where there is no center, and self-identity is the only anchor left for individual stability and existential grounding. The vacuum is filled with narcissistic consumerism and the pursuit of money as an infantile anal-fecal fixation, patriotic flag-waving and its variant in vicarious identification with sports teams, and the endless other quasi-individual tribal identifications (gender, race, new age religion, etc.) offered as postmodern forms of self-identity in a factionalized anarchy of cultural centerlessness.

These are the cultural conditions that then make possible the seamless economic and political transformation into neoliberalism, where the institutional and material conditions of a war of all against all can be implemented without resistance for the benefit of the few. This is the current post-enlightenment period of plutocracy we now find ourselves in, where the democratic and scientific foundations of modernity have all but melted into thin air.

Notice that the era of postmodernity is not characterized by a collectivist ethos, but rather by individual narcissism and quasi-individual tribalism. Postmodernity is the logical conclusion of a modern individual achievement orientation, not its transcendence. Therefore, what comes after postmodern-green isn’t the hyper-individualized ethos of innovative entrepreneurialism, which is precisely the neoliberal conditions for a war of all against all, but a collectivist ethos—not of mass obedience to a central authority, but networks of p2p individuals working on common projects for the collective good, otherwise known as (integral) socialism.

If there is one thing holding back the development of the integral vision into a reality, it’s not a mean green-meme bent on social division and deconstruction, but the continued belief and practice of integral leaders and the integral community that the next integral stage of development is characterized by superhuman individualism in the oscillation of the spiral away from “collectivist” green. On the contrary, once integral leaders and the integral community come out of the delusion of superhuman individualism, they will realize that the only solution to first tier problems isn’t self-interested narcissism and tribalism but a collectivist vision of networked individuals working toward common purpose and universal human interests.”

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