Previously tribes communicate via face to face communication
With the invention of the written word comes the institution e.g. the church, the army, the state (these are hierarchal in nature)
Communicating turns to giving directives turns to hierarchy
The printing press, escalates this hugely
After institutions comes markets, supported by infrastructure (e.g. highways)
Finally comes networks so we are now in a quadraformist era which is extremely complex. However networks are different to the other three, networks aren’t ‘things’. Networks have also transformed the other three (e.g. tribes can communicate remotely, institutions not only top down, markets are global process chains).
Newtonian framework suggests if you know the laws you can have agency and work within them. Darwinian framework recognises there are processes so we can then understand non-fixed and evolving conditions. Capitalism is build on Darwinism (e.g. survival of the fittest), no space for change and we can’t understand non-linear dynamics or systems not in equilibrium.
Ecology is the interdependence of things to each other in their context, an ecological framework should come next.
Where to start with an ecological framework? We cannot look at everything at once. We can look at a 1. material ecology, 2. social ecology (economics & political included) or 3. mental ecology (culture).
The only way to have agency in the ecological framework is through the imagination. In the sense of the “image making, cognitive processes of our mind that we use even when we’re reasoning, even when we’re perceiving something new, all the way up to the freeplay side of imagination”.
Imagination must then be used and useful, put to purpose.
Imagination is “covert in nature”.
Things far away now effect us more quickly and widely since we are so connected - COVID! “Physicists call them ‘irreducible unknowns’, often they are not only irreducible but novel. Often only understood in retrospect.”
It is usually impossible to reverse actions in the network (e.g. species extinction).
“Resilient systems, learning systems” small disruptions teach the system and it adapts, big changes cannot be coped with.
There are slow and fast variables in each system, bigger shifts will more likely be caused by the slow variables.
Fast fixes cause long term troubles (e.g. a drone strike to kill supposed terrorists kills 6 civilians, these 6 civilians, and their families and tribes, are now radicalised)
Working in the system: 1.Understand and listen to the system
You cannot work in the system without trying solutions, but these ‘tries’ will have their own consequences.
We need new tools, methods & mechanisms. And the imagination (forming internal images).
The Pragmatic Imagination (the imagination put to purpose): “ The Pragmatic Imagination is a concept that sees the imagination as a spectrum of coherent synthetic image making that runs from dealing with the know to projecting the novel, and from porsaic sense-making to poietic sense-breaking. It values the entire spectrum, the domain of the poietic imagination, is necessary in a world that is rapidly changing and radically contingent. And finally, it proposes catalysing, scaffolding and instrumentalising the entire spectrum for pragmatic purposiveness.”
Poetic = generative (greek use) in this sense
Radical empathy - putting yourself in someone else’s shoes
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