Our Next Civilization Will Not Be Based on Unity Without Division, Nor On Division Without Unity, But On Unity With Maximum Differentiation

Discussion

An editorial by Michel Bauwens, March 2022:

In the last few years, my work, and that of others in the P2P Foundation, has focused on ‘the thermo-dynamics of peer production’. (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Thermodynamic_Perspectives_on_Peer_to_Peer_and_the_Commons_as_a_Path_Towards_Transition)

It is based on a vision of human history, in which there occurs a ‘pulsation of the commons’. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U7x2PHk0xm3e5Ep7UGG56pDkJ5bAHCy-/edit)

What this means is that, as human groups become more complex and spatially more integrated, they create human institutions that tend to violate their local thermo-dynamic boundaries. The extractive institutions, such as markets and states, that are involved in the competition with other players in the peer polity, tend to overuse their resources. These entities then dissolve, or are otherwise disaggregated, often taken over by other entities, but also seem to create a counter-institution, the commons, expression a more localized mutualization, often created and stimulated by spiritual reform movements, which link the local population to spiritual reformers (advocates of new forms of human consciousness, that create new bonds).

These ‘universal religions’ or ‘world religions’, as they succeed through the commons in regenerating their cultures and regions, eventually become the basis of a new cycle of extractivism (becoming imperial religions in the process). This cycle, inevitable in agricultural based societies, and described for example in Peter Turchin’s Secular Cycles, could be thought to have been overcome by capitalism, but that was really a trick of perception. The reason is that capitalism functioned at the global level, and therefore, exploited and over-used frontier regions, moving from one to another, and thereby hiding the underlying cycle of exhaustion, which has now reached a global level. What this means, is that we need a new human order, in which this very pulsation is abolished.

Indeed, the frontiers are now exhausted, and we are facing a global ecological and resource over-reach. This makes it necessary to start thinking not just about local reactions, but about global counter-institutions, hence, our proposals for global magisteria of the commons, global counter-institutions that can protect from the more extractive global international state-derived institutions, and trans-national capital. The system we propose, and which is already emergent, is cosmo-localism, which combines the best of the two binding elements of human society, i.e. both the bonds of territorial localism, the joint solidarity for the health of the ecosystem close at hand, and the bonds of ideational virtuality, the global open source communities of the new and digitally nomad knowledge guilds. In this scenario, nations become facilitating community-centric state forms, that create the necessary legal frameworks, to make such transitions possible.

What we see in history is ever higher unities of human organizing, which paradoxically also include higher individuation of the human participants, i.e. both more unity and division at the same time. Today we see more and more ideational division, a multiplicity of ideas, taking place over one single technological medium. What we don’t have are the new translocal and transnational institutions that can effect a new integration between the physical and virtual realms, and their respective ‘nations’, into a higher order that is not based on domination.

However, every time such a transcendence into higher unity and more differentiation was needed, a huge danger lurked: that of authoritarian ‘gnosticism’. These are social movements that bind around the conviction that they possess the truth, and that want to organize the whole society around that new single truth. In other words, rather than obtain higher unity through more differentiation, they want to eliminate that diversity, around a new single interpretation, something we could call ‘interpretative absolutism’ and which is right now the object of many conflicts in public institutions that are subjected to this pressure to conform.

This is what happened when feudalism entered into crisis, and it created religious movements that could not accept that any ‘ungodly’ people could possibly run a government, the unity of society was therefore destroyed. Whatever we think of Thomas Hobbes, what he reacted to was centuries of civil war, and christian sects that would simply not accept theological differences, since they were interpreted not as difference, but as evil. His solution, accepted as the new basis of western civilization after the conference of Westphalia, was the nation-state, which would run on a new civil religion around the monarch, and would henceforth consider the religious convictions of its citizens as a private matter. Our societies have run on that compromise for over 400 years, and it is that system that is fraying.

We are today once more facing such a ‘gnostic’ and authoritarian threat. We have a political and social theory, which has developed an epistemology of suffering, intersectionality, which creates a hierarchy of knowledge based on the degree of suffering (standpoint epistemology). It is based on an ideology and theology of victimhood, which needs a universal scapegoat to function. Once more, it is an ideology which declares that dissent and differences of opinion are not just differences, but actual sins that endanger the existence of the self-declared hyperfragile subjects, which see themselves as the new ‘sacred’ elite, and demand subjection (‘allyship’). Subjects that claim that their feelings over-ride the rights of other subjects, and are the basis for policing their speech and civil rights.

Humanity is faced once more with a social movement that wants to erase difference. Just as the earlier Puritans allied with their local princes, just so today, these new authoritarians are allied with the philanthro-capitalist elites, and the big tech consortiums that have the ability to police speech, demanding ever more algorithmic control of what is said and thought. Furthermore, the vision that animates them, is a vision that forces individuals to belong to groups, and that wants to limit the rights of expression of individuals to those of the group. Their vision that speech is only an expression of power and not of any free subjectivity, destroys the personhood that is necessary for free association in common projects. Their vision is one in which institutions allocate resources around group membership, and actively discriminate on the basis of biological markers and other features that occur outside the choice and responsibility of the individuals. In other words, what they propose is a global and segregated caste system, which essentializes people on the basis of their group, which furthermore policies and forbids cultural exchange and hybridization (cultural appropriation). They regularly choose to exercise not just mob pressure to destroy lives and careers, but actual violence on the streets, to insure the new undifferentiated uniformity.

In other words, humanity is once again facing the challenge of social and spiritual movements that want to achieve a binding unity by abolishing differentiation, at the same time undermining any categorisation that can create any order in a society. When Christianity arose in the declining Roman empire, some said it was responsible for its defeat and the sacking of Rome, but the christians were at least showing new forms of organizational solidarity, and eventually would be the agents of a new civilization. What was clear was that Rome, and the territories left on their own after it collapsed, was not able to hold these two civilizational systems in one system. There is no sign at all however, that the new value system has any capacity at all to achieve such an outcome. It rather recalls the outcome we were able to see under Mao’s cultural revolution and Pol Pot. Able to destroy, but not to construct.

Our society thus has a choice to move to a higher unity with more differentiation, or to move to forms of authoritarian unity that limit differentiation, and diminish the complexity that comes from individuation.

This is why the defense of media pluralism, of free speech, of the right to make a living and express oneself, are worth defending. They are not just luxuries that can be discarded, but necessary conditions to be able to achieve a higher unity for humankind, that is not based on abolishing differentiation.

Is there something that can help us in doing this? In my opinion, this is where commoning comes in. Above and beyond any local territorial binding element, based on localization and learning to live within our regional planetary boundaries; beyond local, regional, national and even creed communities, which cannot bind us at the global level, there is the unity that comes from commoning, the joint and free ‘love’ of a common object, that binds us to common ideational and pragmatic projects that are linked to the necessary regeneration and healing of the planet. Common projects that are not just local, but global, cosmo-local to be precise.

Thus the vision that we present is a vision that is inherently cosmo-local, local and universal at the same time. Local, as we work with our local communities to restore and regenerate that part of the planet that is closest to use physically, but ‘cosmic’, as we share with our digital peers through the globe, the common knowledge that is equally needed to solve. Such a cosmo-local cooperation only works if we consider all human beings as equipotential contributors, independently of their biological markers or various group memberships. It is incompatible with any form of racialized hierarchy and segregation by groups. Predistribution of value in the commons can only be based on contributions, all contributions, with no judgment on the other aspects of the participating humans. Once we accept this, we can combine high levels of multiplicity, free thought and differentiation, and a ideational binding around cosmo-local regenerative activities, which give an extra layer of sociality and meaning, as necessary ingredient for the next phase of human civilization (which could very well be a post-civilization order, since it overturns the spatio-temporal logic that was inaugurated by the cycle that started with Sumer.)