The world needs a new story

The world needs a new story to make sense of itself. 

It will include

• the fact of evolution and the immensity of time that preceded us 
• the fact that we live on a planet in an incomprehensibly vast universe
• the urgent need for us to be environmentally responsible and a stress on the dire consequences of wasteful consumerism and an economic model built on it
• a sense of the importance of acceptance of differences among people and peoples
• the social, environmental, political and emotional benefits of gender equality
• ways to keep network power nodes in check

and all of this needs to impart a sense of coziness. 

It sounds odd to say "coziness" but that's the nub of it. We all know or sense, more or less, the other stuff. 

In the past, established power was supported by a "sacred" sanction such as the mandate of heaven or the divine right of kings that bounded the universe in tidy ways for us. But this support no longer exists or at least, where it does, it exists in a decadent form from which little good could emerge (and remains vehemently defended by people in thrall to a reaction formation). 

So there's the challenge. To find a story so we feel at home 'on a planet', as opposed to 'in a world'.

Ideological Lag

The economy sets the rules of how we cooperate (and has throughout history), because how we cooperate is how we work together to make and do stuff - any stuff - all stuff - ever. Those arrangements (personal or institutional) are eventually established in terms of our evolving levels of productive technology and patterns of trade.These things are thoroughly interconnected.

But there's usually a very uncomfortable lag between the implementation of an economically significant technology, our new working relationships that emerge out of the change, and the collective story that makes sense of it, a story that generally reflects evolving notions of "justice".

Being forward looking is very important. It's time to resist nostalgia for an imaginary "homeland" as we cannot afford to be tribal in a transnational economy. The last century in Europe should have taught us that. This is what we should remember today.

We need to allow ourselves to risk thinking informed by wisdom and good purpose. 

Means and Ends

The expresssion, "the ends don't justify the means," makes sense.

I sometimes wonder, though, whether we aren't today guilty of a reverse approach: We assume that the means justify the end. For example, money (which has no instrinsic value, i.e., it is not an end in itself) drives industrial production. It is not the things produced, but "the bottom line" that drives production and the concrete outcome is really not considered intrinsically important.

Maybe that's not quite right. Who's to say what's intrinsically valuable (valuable in itself, valuable as an end) and what's valuable only as a means to an end? Values are subjective, right?

I think you can pretty much prove that there are some things that are valuable, but that are not intrinsically valuable, but only valuable for something else. Money is the archetypical example. Considered in itself, "money has no value apart from the paper it's written on." Can it stand alone as the goal of all action? No, it's only worth pursuing if you can spend it, or do something else with it, like purchase things that you need or want or gather social power or prestige.

Conversely, I don't think it's that easy to prove what is intrinsically valuable. Maslow thought certain experiences tied to self-actualization were intrinsically valuable, as opposed to things that were the conditions for that (i.e., life's necessities). Creativity, art, that kind of thing, are considered of intrinsic value, ends-in-themselves.

There's a logic to it: Would you create an organization, for instance, whose sole objective was to audit itself? Even if somebody wanted to create such an organization, everyone would think they were a bit squirrelly (or perhaps totally bureaucratic) ;) and with good reason. That shows that fiscal responsibility is not an end in itself, it is only a means, a way of doing things. On the other hand, it would not be bureaucratic at all to create an institution whose sole objective was to give people opportunities to do curiosity-based research or develop artistic talent.

In the last blog, Jack Martin was quoted as saying that it was a mistake to put the methodological cart before the ontological horse, i.e., to assume that the method or means by which information is obtained is the only criterion by which the reality of what it's about is assessed. This ties back to the mistaken idea that all that is real is measurable because there is, of course, plenty that is real that is not measurable...and much of it considered "subjective" as a result. There's plenty that we don't know, and plenty that we don't know that we don't know. To think that the methods we've come up with so far provide adequate parameters for ascertaining the limits of possible existence is nevertheless a very common assumption.*

Another example of putting means before ends is in the idea that it is a given good that citizens should be "productive". What should they produce? There are plenty of products that aren't worth producing. What about our own reasoning capacity to evaluate the worth of the products we produce? Do we value that less or more than our "productivity"?

*But beware the fallacy of arguing anything from a lack of knowledge ;).