When Are We

Discussion

Michel Bauwens, 19/2/2023:

WHEN ARE WE ? (editorial)

• WHY WE NEED TO GO BEYOND ‘DEEP ADAPTATION’ AND COPING STRATEGIES, TOWARDS AN EXTROPIC TRANSFORMATION.
• THE COMMONS AS THE KEY INSTITUTION AND PROCESS FOR THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE IMMATURE TECHNOSPHERE

It is quite clear to me, based on both current observations and a study of macrohistory, that we have reached a stage of advanced disintegration of the global Western civilization. The disintegration is both cultural, with the fast advancing hegemony of cultural woke antinomianism, the main agent of the cultural catastrophe; and the ecological dislocation.

But how far will this disintegration go? These are among the main themes of political and social debate.

On the one hand, we have a lot of populist denialism. While they focus on the cultural threat, with good reason, they most often deny or ignore the ecological threat, seen as a plot of the ruling class to their ‘way of life’. Understandably, the poorer section of the population want to keep the essentials they need to live in a modern society. More ‘moderate’ approaches are those of for example the ecomodernists, who believe the essential part of the modern way of life can be preserved, by using advanced technologies, and they may include the WEF adaptationists, who believe a capital-led multistakeholderism, a soft ‘world government’, is the way forward. But such a finance-led process may not be very beneficial for the larger numbers of the world population.

On the other side of the spectrum we have the ‘collapsologists’ and the ‘deep adaptationists’, who believe the struggle against the ecological catastrophe is essentially lost, that we face substantial losses of human life, if not extinction. If you listened to the dialogue between Margaret Wheatly and Michael Dowd, which I shared on this forum, you will understand what I mean. Abandon all hope, the catastrophe is coming, but instead become an engaged ‘post-doom’ stoic, to manage the grief while the mass of humanity is dying. Perhaps more hopeful are the many small communities and individuals, already engaging in a substantial exodus, and creating a smattering of lifeboats with local ecological balance in mind. I have shared the amazing video documentaries of Kirsten Dirksen, showing how many people are doing just that, rather successfully after several decades of an exodus that started in the seventies. But still, they do not offer in any way a global solution for mankind, just the hope for pockets of survivalists and what is certain is that in hard times, they will be our teachers. I must admit that my own study of history, and of civilizational decline and transition, has also convinced me that any smooth transition is NOT in the cards, but I do believe that we must look ‘beyond the catastrophe’.

So here is a double attempt to introduce ‘When We Are’ (as important as to know ‘where you are’), and why the commons is such an important means of transfiguration.

So when are we ?

One useful framing is that of Adam Franks ideas of stages of planetary intelligence.

He distinguishes first of all the biosphere epoch, in an immature and mature phase. This, a biosphere, is what existed before the advent of the technological species called humankind. Before the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’, in which bacteria started producing enough oxygen to create a protective atmosphere, our planet was not homeostatic, i.e. not able to protect the environment for sustainable life. But after that, the living beings of this planet started cooperating to protect balances, and the possibility of life.(see the great work of Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock) Then came the humans and their Technosphere. Until today, this Technosphere has been immature, unable to manage its inadvertent damage to the biosphere, hence the era of the Anthropocene, in which humans are the major determinant of the health, or lack of it, of the biosphere. So here we need to jump to a mature Technosphere, that can manage its own impact. That is the big jump we have to undertake today. This is what Glenn Albrecht has coined the Symbiocene, the age when we finally learn to live interdependently with nature and other living beings, becoming ourself part of the homeostatic system of the Technosphere, capable of a planetary intelligence to manage the many coupled human and natural systems.

Now the climate denialists are telling us not to worry, we’ll just invent the tech that is necessary; and the ecomodernists focus on that tech, both agree on solutions that keep the existing institutional setup mostly intact; the deep ecologists promise us degrowth, a radical societal transformation but without the politics and the polity to do so so far; and the deep adaptationist and the collapsologists promise us survival of the most fit communities at what seems a very low level of technology. While I am agnostic on the full details of the future, I am not at all sure that the latter is realistic. One of the reasons is that looking at the past, so far, once civilization emerged a few millennia ago, it actually never disappeared, a network of cities, and the complex civilizational knowledge to run it, always survived. This is the key thesis of David Wilkinson, on Central Civilization.

So perhaps an extra word on where we are ‘civilizationally’. Civilization itself was the human attempt to survive the ecological catastrophe of the great deglacialization, by ‘mastering nature’, and the Axial Age transformation gave us the ethical tools to manage such societies beyond kinship; giving us a mythical-rational structure to manage them, with One Law and eventually a vision of unified divine order undergirding it. The Enlightenment, perhaps a new axial transformation, then advocated for a full rational and objective view of the world, while Postmodernism then reacted to the Age of Reason. We are now feeling the full brunt of the disintegrating effect of postmodern deconstruction. But the way is still towards more integration, not less. This is what a new Integral vision should help us conceive, an integrative form of human awareness that can integrate the various ways of ‘knowing’, including rationality. Some are calling this new integration Metamodernism, but strangely seem to focus on a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism, a process which I find entirely insufficient, hence my own focus on the concept of trans-modernism, and a much greater integration which includes indigenous and traditional communitarian modalities, the very ones which modernism has largely attempted to destroy.

So in civilizational terms if we count mythological civilizational forms as the First Generation (Mesopotamia, Egypt), the mythical-rational (after Greece) as the Second, and the industrial-rational (the post-Enlightenment western-centric World Civilization) as the Third, the we arrive at the Fourth Civilizational model, which must integrate the cognitive phase with our newfound technological capacity for massive non-territorial coordination. How we count the various adaptations of awareness just identified (Axial, ‘alphabetic’-rational, Enlightenment and Postmodern) will guide us to the number of that transformation, towards symbiotic unity with the non-human world.

This is of course where our work at the P2P Foundation comes in, where we first identified the key role of mutualization for thermodynamic equilibrium (The Thermodynamics of Peer Production), and then some of the potential mechanisms for doing so (P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival). Mutualization (our reports on the mutualization of the urban provisioning systems), through the Cosmo-Local organization of both geographic and non-territorial coordination (the Cosmo-Local Reader) is what we have identified as the key dynamic of transformation.

I want to add an extra perspective here, which may or may not differentiate our approach with the challenge of Deep Adaptation, and that is the age old struggle between Eros and Thanatos, or in other words, between Extropy and Entropy.

All traditional spiritualities and ideologies were entropic, as they witnessed the cycles of nature and the rise and fall of civilizations. They concluded that the universe was ultimately going downwards. Any salvation could not come from the natural world, but required transfiguration towards the transcendent. The civilizational process was always meant as a temporary attempt to create order in human civilization, nothing more.

But science has shaken that certainly. It is certain, based on centuries of convergent exploration of the material world in its development, that the geosphere came first, followed by the biosphere, and culminating in the noosphere. In other words, not just the human world, but the universe itself, has a entropy-denying process, which definitely seems to evolve into more complexity, not less, and similarly so for our forms of human awareness and its accompanying Technosphere. As far as I know, Teilhard de Chardin was the very first to tackle this conundrum, and to offer a convergent vision , marrying the evolving immanent material sphere, to the transcendent sphere. Crucially, he believed not only that matter itself was animated, but that humanity had a key mediating role. The Divine, for de Chardin, needed humanity to ‘green the universe’ and to universalize the noosphere within it.

I am not an expert enough in De Chardin to understand his full vision, but I do agree that any vision that fails to understand the extropic capacity and role of humanity, as gardeners of the universe, is insufficient and prey to an exaggerated focus on entropy. We are a technological species, and our role is to usher in the Mature Technosphere. The way to do this is through the kind of smart mutualization that we have advocated. If we succeed, humanity has millions of years ahead of it, even if it has to pass through the coming fulcrum.

Personally, I think we need this kind of hopeful vision, of our duty as a noospheric species to the other species, inspired or not by a transcendent vision that undergirds it. This is not climate denialism, ecomodernism, degrowth, nor deep adaptation. It grants an important place to technology and planetary intelligence infrastructures. It does require a deep transformation, basically embedding the extractive institutions of the immature Technosphere, into the protective and regenerative embrace of commons-based institutions. It does not predict, nor desires, a low-tech indigenous lifestyle for the few survivors, but something more ambitious, that preserves the Extropic duties of our species.