P2P and Human Evolution Ch 6

6. P2P in the Sphere of Culture and Self

Chapter 6 of P2P and Human Evolution

I am here tackling the remainder of the two quadrants relating to intersubjectivity and subjectivity, considered in their basic linkage: the individual vs. the collective.

6.1.A A new articulation between the individual and the collective

One of the key insights of psychologist Clare Graves’ interpretation of human cultural evolution, is the idea of the changing balance, over time, between the two poles of the individual and the collective. In the popularization of his research by the Spiral Dynamics systems, they see the tribal era as characterized by collective harmony, but also as a culture of stagnation. Out of this harmony, strong individuals are born, heroes and conquerors, which will their people and others into the creation of larger entities. These leaders are considered divinities themselves and thus in certain senses are ‘beyond the law’, which they have themselves constituted through their conquest. It is against this ‘divine individualism’ that a religious reaction is born, very evident in the monotheistic religions, which stresses the existence of a transcendent divine order (rather than the immanent order of paganism), to which even the sovereign must obey. Thus a more communal/collective order is created. But again, this situation is overturned when a new individual ethos arises, which will be reflected in the growth of capitalism. It is based on individuals, and collective individuals, which think strategically in terms of their own interest. In the words of anthropologist Louis Dumont, we moved from a situation of wholism, in which the empirical individuals saw themselves foremost as part of a whole, towards individualism as an ideology, positing atomistic individuals, in need of socialization. They transferred their powers to collective individuals, such as the king, the people, the nation, which could act in their name, and created a sacrificial unity through the institutions of modernity. (In section 3.3.C., I have tried to show how peer to peer tries to avoid the creation of collective individuals, through the creation of objective algorithms which express the communal wisdom of a collective.)

This articulation, based on a autonomous self in a society which he himself creates through the social contract, has been changing in postmodernity. Simondon, a French philosopher of technology with an important posthumous following in the French-speaking world, has argued that what was typical for modernity was to 'extract the individual dimension' of every aspect of reality, of things/processes that are also always-already related. And what is needed to renew thought, he argued, was not to go back to premodern wholism, but to systematically build on the proposition that 'everything is related', while retaining the achievements of modern thought, i.e. the equally important centrality of individuality. Thus individuality then comes to be seen as constituted by relations, from relations.

This proposition, that the individual is now seen as always-already part of various social fields, as a singular composite being, no longer in need of socialization, but rather in need of individuation, seems to be one of the main achievements of what could be called 'postmodern thought'. Atomistic individualism is rejected in favour of the view of a relational self, a new balance between individual agency and collective communion.

In my opinion, as a necessary complement and advance to postmodern thought, it is necessary to take a third step, i.e. not to be content with both a recognition of individuality, and its foundation in relationality, but to also recognize the level of the collective, i.e. the field in which the relationships occur.

If we only see relationships, we forget about the whole, which is society itself (and its sub-fields). Society is more than just the sum of its "relationship parts". Society sets up a 'protocol', in which these relationships can occur, it forms the agents in their subjectivity, and consists of norms which enable or disable certain type of relationships. Thus we have agents, relationships, and fields. Finally, if we want to integrate the subjective element of human intentionality, it is necessary to introduce a fourth element: the object of the sociality.

Indeed, human agents never just 'relate' in the abstract: agents always relate around an object, in a concrete fashion. Swarming insects do not seem to have such an object, they just follow instructions and signals, without a view of the whole, but mammals do. For example, bands of wolves congregate around the object of the prey. It is the object that energizes the relationships, that mobilizes the action. Humans can have more abstract objects, that are located in a temporal future, as an object of desire. We perform the object in our minds, and activate ourselves to realize them individually or collectively. P2P projects organize themselves around such common project, and my own Peer to Peer theory is an attempt to create an object that can inspire social and political change.

In summary, for a comprehensive view of the collective, it is now customary to distinguish

1. the totality of relations;
2. the field in which these relations operate, up to the macro-field of society itself, which establishes the 'protocol' of what is possible and not;
3. the object of the relationship ("object-oriented sociality"), i.e. the pre-formed ideal which inspires the common action.

That sociality is 'object-oriented' is an important antidote to flatland network theory, on which many failed social networking experiments are based, i.e. the idea that the field of relations is the onlyimportant dimension of reality, while forgetting human intentionality.

In conclusion, this turn to the collective that the emergence of peer to peer represents does not in any way present a loss of individuality, even of individualism. Rather it 'transcends and includes' individualism and collectism in a new unity, which I would like to call 'cooperative individualism'. The cooperativity is not necessarily intentional (i.e. the result of conscious altruism), but constitutive of our being, and the best applications of P2P, are based on this idea. Similar to Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand, the best designed collaborative systems take advantage of the self-interest of the users, turning it into collective benefit.

This recognition would help in distinguishing transformative P2P conceptions from regressive interpretations harking back to premodern communion. I find this distinction well expressed by Charlene Spretnak, cited by John Heron in a debate with the conception of an 'inclusional self' by Ted Lumley of Goodshare.org:

"The ecological/cosmological sense of uniqueness coupled with intersubjectivity and interbeing … One can accurately speak of the ‘autonomy’ of an individual only by incorporating a sense of the dynamic web of relationships that are constitutive for that being at a given moment."

In any case, the balance is again moving towards the collective. But if the new forms of collective recognize individuality and even individualism, they are not merely individualist in nature, meaning: they are not collective individuals, rather, the new collective expresses itself in the creation of the common. The collective is no longer the local ‘wholistic’ and ‘oppressive’ community, and it is no longer the contractually based society with its institutions, now also seen as oppressive. The new commons is not a unified and transcendent collective individual, but a collection of large number of singular projects, constituting a multitude.

This whole change in ontology and epistemology, in ways of feeling and being, in ways of knowing and apprehending the world, has been prefigured amongst social scientists and philosophers, including the hard sciences such as physics and biology.

An important change has been the overthrow of the Cartesian subject-object split. No longer is the ‘individual self’ looking at the world as an object. Since postmodernity has established that the individual is composed and traversed by numerous social fields (of power, of the unconscious, class relations, gender, etc… , and since he/she has become aware of this, the subject is now seen (after his death as an ‘essence’ and a historical construct had been announced by Foucault), as a perpetual process of becoming (“subjectivation”). His knowing is now subjective–objective and truth-building has been transformed from objective and mono-perspectival to multiperspectival. This individual operates not in a dead space of objects, but in a network of flows. Space is dynamical, perpetually co-created by the actions of the individuals and in peer to peer processes, where the digital noosphere is an extraordinary medium for generating signals emanating from this dynamical space, the individuals in peer groups, which are thus not ‘transcendent’ collective individuals, are in a constant adaptive behavior. Thus peer to peer is global from the start, it is incorporated in its practice. It is an expression not of globalization, the worldwide system of domination, but of globality, the growing interconnected of human relationships.

Peer to peer is to be regarded as a new form of social exchange, creating its equivalent form of subjectivation, and itself reflecting the new forms of subjectivation. P2P, interpreted here as a positive and normative ethos that is implicit in the logic of its practice, though it rejects the ideology of individualism, does not in any way endanger the achievements of the modern individual, in terms of the desire and achievement of personal autonomy, authenticity, etc…. It is no transcendent power that demands sacrifice of self: in Negrian terms, it is fully immanent, participants are not given anything up, and unlike the contractual vision, which is fictitious in any case, the participation is entirely voluntary. Thus what it reflects is an expansion of ethics: the desire to create and share, to produce something useful. The individual who joins a P2P project, puts his being, unadulterated, in the service of the construction of a common resource. Implicit is not just a concern for the narrow group, not just intersubjective relations, but the whole social field surrounding it.

An important aspect is the issue of value, both the value in the sense of what is exchanged on a market, and the value in the sense of ethical meaningfulness, i.e. what we value. Peer to peer produces for use value, not exchange value. The wider community therefore derives 'use value' from this common form of production. Participants themselves derive value in two different ways: first, the uptake or not of the 'production' is a sign of the relative value of the product in its wider field of related offerings. Participants will partake in the general recognition/valuation of the project in the wider society. Second, within, a similar form of recognition will operate according to the contribution of participants. The process is often measured or aided by social accounting tools specifically designed to that effect, and individual recognition of effort is always a key element of open source projects. Peer to peer is therefore also a process of social recognition and valuation, that replaces or complements money as a token of social recognition.

How does a successful P2P project operate, in terms of reconciling the individual and the collective?

Imagine a successful meeting of minds: individual ideas are confronted, but also changed in the process, through the free association born of the encounter with other intelligences. Thus eventually a common idea emerges, that has integrated the differences, not subsumed them. The participants do not feel they have made concessions or compromises, but feel that the new common integration is based on their ideas. There has been no minority, which has succumbed to the majority. There has been no ‘representation’, or loss of difference. Such is the true process of peer to peer.

An important philosophical change has been the abandonment of the unifying universalism of the Enlightenment project. Universality was to be attained by striving to unity, by the transcendence of representation of political power. But this unity meant sacrifice of difference. Today, the new epistemological and ontological requirement that P2P reflects, is not abstract universalism, but the concrete universality of a commons which has not sacrificed difference. This is the truth that the new concept of multitude, developed by Toni Negri and inspired by Spinoza, expresses. P2P is not predicated on representation and unity, but of the full expression of difference.

6.1.B Towards ‘contributory’ dialogues of civilizations and religions

One of the more global expressions of the peer to peer ethic, is the equipotency it creates between civilizations and religions. These have to be seen as unique responses, temporally and spatially defined, of specific sections of humanity, but directed towards similar challenges. Thus we arrive at the concept of ‘contributory worldviews’ or ‘contributory theologies’. Humanity as a whole, or more precisely, its individual members, have now access to the whole of human civilization as a common resource. Individuals, now being considered ‘composites’ made up of various influences, belongings and identities, in constant becoming, are embarked in a meaning-making process that is coupled to an expansion of awareness to the well-being of the planet as a whole, and of its concrete community of inhabitants. In order to become more cosmopolitan they will encounter the various answers given by other civilizations, but since they cannot fully comprehend a totally different historical experience, this is mediated through dialogue. And thus a process of global dialogue is created, not a synthesis or world religion, but a mosaic of millions of personal integrations that grows out of multiple dialogues. Rather than the concept of multiculturalism, which implies fixed social and cultural identities, peer to peer suggests cultural and spiritual hybridity, and which no two members of a community have the same composite understanding and way of thinking.

One of the recent examples that came to my attention are the annual SEED conferences in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They bring together, native elders, quantum physicists, philosophers, and linguists, none of them assuming superiority over one another, but collectively ‘building truth’ through their encounter.

P2P dialogues are not reprensentative dialogues, in which the participants represent their various religions, rather, they are encounters of composite and hybrid experiences, in which each full expresses his different understanding, building a spiritual commons.

6.1.C Participative Spirituality and the Critique of Spiritual Authoritarianism

Traditional mystical and religious paths are exclusionary, based on strong divisions between the in and the out group. Internally, they reflect the social values and organizational models of the civilizations in which they were born. Thus they are premodern in authoritarian manner, patriarchal, sexist, subsuming the individual to the whole. Or, in their latter manifestations they are run as corporations and bureaucracies, reflecting the early emergence of capitalism as in the case of Protestantism, and in the case of the new age, operating explicitly as a spiritual marketplace reflecting the capitalist monetary ethos. When traditional religions of the East move to the West, they bring with them their authoritarian and feudal formats and mentalities. Epistemologically, in their spiritual methodologies, they are authoritarian as well, far from an open process, traditional paths start from the idea that there is one world, one truth, one divine order, and that some privileged individuals, saints, bishops, sages, gurus, have been privileged to know this truth, and that this can be taught to followers. The seventies and eighties have been characterized by the emergence of new religions and cults with a particularly authoritarian character, and by the appearance of a number of fallen gurus, characterized by abuses in terms of finance, sexuality, and power. If one decides to follow an experiental path, it is always the case that the experience is only validated if it follows the pregiven doctrine of the group in question.

It is clear that such a situation, such a spiritual offering is antithetical to the P2P ethos. Thus, in the emergence of a new participatory spirituality, two moments can be recognized, a critical one, focused on the critique of spiritual authoritarianism, and with books like those of June Campbell, J. Kripal, the Trimondi’s, the Kramer’s, and many others who have been advocating reform within the Churches and spiritual movements, and the more constructive approaches which aim to construct a new approach to spiritual inquiry altogether, those that explicitly integrate P2P practices in their mode of spiritual inquiry. The two pioneering authors who discuss ‘participative spirituality’ are Jorge Ferrer and John Heron.

Heron has given a good summary of the post-WWII evolution of spiritual culture and describes the current moment as follows:

1. The erosion of guru status as a result of sexual and financial abuse and bullying scandals among both Eastern and homegrown Western gurus and spiritual teachers.
2. The erosion of 'enlightenment' claims by the proliferation of the number of people, especially in the West, making the claim: the more people who make the claim, the more its narcissistic inflation stands revealed. For the 'enlightenment' claim is also an authority-claim to have followers, a recruiting drive; and the more claims that are made, the stronger the competition among claimants in the market-place for attention.
3. A growing awareness that spiritual authority is within and that to project it outward onto teacher, tradition or text is an early, adolescent phase of spiritual development in the one projecting, and counter-spiritual manipulative abuse in any guru/teacher who seeks to elicit, to appropriate and to sustain the projection.
4. The emergence of peer to peer spirituality, which democratizes charismatic, enlightened leadership, and realizes that it is a role which different persons assume at different times, either in the initiation of a peer group or in the continuous unfolding of its process.

Ferrer’s book, Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology: Towards a Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, not only is a strong critique of spiritual authoritarianism, which integrates poststructuralist arguments against absolute knowledge claims, but also a first description of an alternative view. In it, a spiritual practice operates as an open process in which spiritual knowledge is co-created, and thus cannot fully rely on old ‘maps’, which have to be considered as testimonies of earlier creations, not as absolute truths. Spirituality is understood in terms of the present relationship with the Cosmos (the concrete Totality), accessible to everyone here and now. Instead of the perennialist vision of many paths leading to the same truth, Ferrer advocates for an ‘ocean of emancipation’ with the many moving shores representing the different and ever-evolving approaches to spiritual co-creation. In an article on ‘Integral Transformative Practices’, Ferrer also records new practices that reflect this participatory turn, such as the ones pioneered by Albareda and Romero in Spain: open processes of self- and group discovery that are no longer cognicentric, but instead fully integral approaches that collaborative engage the instinctual, emotional, mental, and transmental domains as equal partners in the unfolding of spiritual life. J. Kripal, who is very appreciative of Jorge Ferrer's contribution, does conclude that one more lingering illusion about religion and mysticism should be abandoned: that it is somehow quintessentially 'moral' or 'ethical' and essentially emancipatory in character, a claim that he disputes.

New Zealand-based John Heron expounds, in the book “Sacred Science”, the specific peer to peer practice that he has created, called Cooperative Inquiry. In such a process, individuals agree on a methodology of inquiry, then compare their experiences, adapting their inquiry to their findings, etc… thus creating a collective intelligence, which is totally open and periodically renewed, experimenting both with the ‘transcendent’ practices of eastern nondual religions (transmental ‘witnessing’) as well as with the immanent grounding methods of the nature religions, thus creating a innovative dipolar approach which does not reject any practice, but attempts to integrate them. Peer circles (check the concept in a web search engine) have sprung up worldwide. My friend Remi Sussan stresses that the chaos magick groups on the internet, explicitly see themselves as self-created religions adopting open peer-based processes.

John Heron, in a personal communication, has outlined which conditions a contemporary spiritual practice based on interdependent relationality, should uphold, with explicit P2P characteristics:

On this overall view, spirituality is located in the interpersonal heart of the human condition where people co-operate to explore meaning, build relationship and manifest creativity through collaborative action inquiry into multi-line integration and consummation. Such collegial applied spirituality has at least eight distinguishing characteristics.

1. It is developmentally holistic, involving diverse major lines of human development; and the holism is both within each line and as between the lines. Prime value is put on relational lines, such as gender, psychosexuality, emotional and interpersonal skills, communicative competence, peer communion, morality, human ecology, supported by the individualistic, such as contemplative competence, physical fitness.
2. It is psychosomatically holistic, embracing a fully embodied and vitalized way of being.
3. It is epistemologically holistic, embracing many ways of knowing: knowing by presence with, by intuiting significant form and process, by conceptualizing, by practising. Such holistic knowing is intrinsically dialogic, action- and inquiry-oriented. It is fulfilled in peer-to-peer participative inquiry, and the participation is both epistemic and political.
4. It is ontologically holistic, open to the manifest (nature, culture and the subtle), to immanent life and transcendent mind. To relate (4) back to (3), there can be experiential knowing by presence with the manifest, the immanent and the transcendent, either relatively independently of each other or in full integration.
5. It is focussed on worthwhile practical purposes that promote a flourishing humanity-cum-ecosystem.
6. It embraces peer-to-peer relations and participatory forms of decision-making. The latter in particular can be seen as a radical discipline in relational spirituality, burning up a lot of the privatized ego.
7. It honours the gradual emergence and development of peer-to-peer forms of association and practice.
8. It affirms the role of both initiating hierarchy, and spontaneously surfacing and rotating hierarchy among the peers, in such emergence."

6.1.D Partnering with nature and the cosmos

Throughout this essay, I have defined P2P as communal shareholding based on participation in a common resource (with the twist that in P2P it is we ourselves who are building that resource, which did not previously exist, i.e. the common is actually the 'object of our cooperation'), whereby other partners are considered as equipotent. We also mentioned the co-existence within P2P groups of both a kind of naturally emerging and flexible hierarchy that aims to increase participation to a maximum extent, and egalitarian treatment of the equipotential partners. There are very good reasons to believe that we can and should extent this ethos to non-human forces, be they natural or cosmic, and if you have this kind of faith or experience, with spiritual forces as well. What follows is a speculative account of the philosophical and spiritual sources that could be used by our culture to recover such ethos. Participation emerges here with its central meaning: not that of atomized and separate individuals cooperating, but the growth of a consciousness that recognizes our mutual embeddedness and interdependence. What is emerging is a ‘participative worldview’, but it is also something we need to reconstruct.

Indeed in a sense, spiritually, the P2P or ‘participative ethos’ harks back to premodern animistic attitudes, which can also be found in Chinese Taoism for example. An increasing number of anthropologists, such as Steven Tambiah, have argued that the magical form of consciousness, is not just an outdated form practiced by ancestral humans or contemporary tribal peoples, but that it is a necessary adjunct to causality-inspired rational consciousness, that both are needed and entwined.

During the annual SEED conferences in Alququerque, New Mexico, Western astrophysicists and philosophers are undertaking a continued dialogue with native American elders, as one way to mutually enrich their epistemologies, with the explicit aim of recovering participative approaches. Jean Gebser, in his masterwork 'The Ever-present Origin', is probably the one that has best described the process of recovery of such participative worldview, starting with the artists of the beginning of the 20th century and continuing with the development of quantum physics, in recent times, calling it 'integral consciousness'.

Instead of considering nature in a Cartesian fashion as ‘dead matter’ or a collection of objects to be manipulated, we recognize that throughout nature there is a scale of consciousness or awareness, and that natural agents and collectives have their natural propensities, and that, giving up our need for domination (or rather 'transforming it') in the same way that we are able to practice in P2P processes, we ‘cooperate’, as partners, with such propensities, acting as midwives rather than dominators. French sociologists like Michel Maffesioli and Philippe Zafirian have analyzed a change in our culture, particularly in the new generations of young people, which go precisely in that direction, and it is of course specifically reflected in sections of green movement. Again, this is not a regression to an utopian and lost past, but a re-enactment of a potential, but this time, with fully differentiated individuals. While there is undoubtedly a new stress on 'wholism' in many contemporary thinkers, the stress is on interpretations of interdependence that do not return to pre-individual interpretations, but rather on showing on the individual is fully co-dependent on the whole. In our understanding, this goes much beyond systems theory, as it has to include the necessary subjective and intersubjective elements, an approach that we have used as a research methodology for this book, and which we call integral. (see appendix 1.A).

An important question is: how do we recover such a tradition of thought and feeling-being, we who are the children of the Enlightenment? Here are some explorations of 'genealogies of thought' which could be used to recreate such participative ethos.

One of the possible paths is the recovery of the cosmobiological tradition of the Renaissance thinkers, who are close to us since they had one foot in the world of tradition and one in the world of modernity-inducing change. Loren Goldner uncovers, in a very interesting essay, this ‘third stream of cosmobiological thought’, which he says could be used to reconstruct a post-Enlightenment left. He contrasts it with the Aristotelianism of the Church, and with the ‘mechanistic’ ideas of the Enlightenment (creators of a dead universe and empty space that can be gazed at and manipulated by the autonomous ego). He traces the history of this third stream starts with the Renaissance starting with Bruno and Kepler, and later continued by Baader, Schelling, Oersted, Davy, Faraday, Goethe, W.R. Hamilton, Goerg Cantor, Joseph Needham. For them, the universe is brimming with life, sensuousness, and meaning, and cannot be approached as dead matter. Marx explicitely refers to this tradition, and was imbued by it through his filiation with German 'idealist' philosophy, but, according to Goldner, that has been forgotten by the two dominant streams of the left, i.e. social democracy and Stalinism, who take over the mechanistic Enlightenment tradition. Both Foucauldian postmodernism, and the defense of the Enlightenment tradition by Habermas, miss and obscure this vital link as well, says Goldner. In any case, this cosmobiological tradition is an 'alternative strand of modernity', which lost out but could perhaps be retrieved and redeveloped.

Other important genealogies to recreate a participatory worldview appropriate to our age have been undertaken by Skolimowsky and David Skrbina, in their 'ecophilosophy'. The focus here is on the concept of the 'participatory mind'. David Abram, in his classic ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’, seeks a source in the phenomenological tradition of western philosophy as represented by Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who replaced the conventional view of a single, wholly determinable reality with a fluid picture of the mind/body as a participatory organism that reciprocally interacts with its surroundings. These different traditions stress the embodiedness of humans in our bodies and within nature .

Recently there have been important attempts to rephrase the participatory tradition by John Heron and Jorge Ferrer as well, arising from within the community of transpersonal psychology. The Nature Institute, inspired by Goethe and others, has been working on developing conceptions of qualitative science that fits this evolution as well. Toni Negri and others, are similarly trying to redeveloped a similar 'alternative modernity' based on the oeuvre of Spinoza, though the relationship with nature does not seem to be a prominent theme in his writings. Rather, they focus on developing a participative relationship with our machines.

In any case, there is a natural progression in scope, from P2P groups, to the global partnership-based dialogues between religions and civilizations, to the new partnership with natural and cosmic forces, that forms a continuum, and that is equally expressive of the deep changes in ontology and epistemology that P2P represents. I do not think it is possible to divorce the P2P ethos as it applies to people and humanity, from our wider relationship with nature, and therefore, it will be impossible to fully retain either the modernist objective gaze or postmodern-inspired nihilism. Instead, we have to reconstruct our worldviews and heal our 'split' with nature.

And at some point, we will start to realize that our very realities are 'always-already participative', that we are not separate from the world, that our being-in-the-world is subjective–objective. When this happens on a more massive scale, a new civilization will in effect have been borne.

6.1.E The Emergence of Peer Circles

In the cultural sphere, all these changes are expressed in the emergence of a new organizational form, that of peer circles. We have mentioned the emergence of cooperative inquiry groups and peer circles in the field of spirituality, but this is far from the only field where they are emerging. It used to be that if you wanted to create something new and 'collective', you would create a company, a NGO, or campaign for the creation of a new government agency. But these institutional forms are no longer sufficient to be fully acceptable to the P2P ethos. Attempts at collective creation, at worldchanging, are therefore increasingly taking on the new organizational form of peer circles. Self-help groups, not a new phenomenon, where a pre-internet prefiguration of this trend.

One example are the emergence of giving circles. These are groups of people who pool their resources together. For example, in the particular format of Full Circles, members donate $1 per day, or $360 for the year. They collectively research local causes that are worthy of support. Jock Gill of the Greater Democracy blog has proposed to extend the concept to development. Giving circles would directly connect with villages in developing countries, using internet-enabled videoconferencing, and would fund microcredit schemes. He appropriately calls it 'citizen to citizen' development based on 'edge to edge' relationships.

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