Jan 08, 2009
The Search for Real, Integrative Solutions
This inaugural issue of Solutions marks the beginning of what we hope will be a long and fruitful dialogue across our global society. To help build a shared vision of where our society wants to go and initiate a broad agreement about how to get there—these are our intentions.
We want Solutions to help us move beyond the debate that dominates public discussion toward substantive and constructive dialogue between all stakeholders in society. “Dialogue” means “through speech.” Webster’s dictionary defines the purpose of dialogue as “seeking mutual understanding and harmony.” Daniel Yankelovich, a psychologist and public opinion analyst, views it as a special form of discussion with almost magical abilities to build cooperation, if done properly.1 With Solutions, we aim to do dialogue properly and extend this special form of constructive discussion to include not only speech, but also visual forms of communication.
One of the root causes of our inability to make progress is that we live in a society where academia, media, law, and politics cast complex problems as polar opposites. This ‘argument culture’ encourages the protection and definition of disciplinary territories with sharp boundaries on the intellectual landscape. Among academics, this makes issues that cross disciplinary boundaries difficult, if not impossible, to deal with. Moreover, large gaps in the intellectual landscape are not covered by any discipline. Deborah Tannen notes in The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue:2
“Throughout our educational system the most pervasive inheritance is the conviction that issues have two sides, that knowledge is best gained through debate, that ideas should be presented orally to an audience that does its best to poke holes and find weaknesses, and that to get recognition, one has to ‘stake out a position’ in opposition to another.”
While there is nothing wrong with debate and direct confrontation on some issues, it does not work for all issues. Certainly, the complex, interconnected issues that we face today—the ones focused on in Solutions—require a complex, multifaceted approach. This approach must encourage real dialogue and must not cast every discussion as a zero-sum, win-lose, either-or dichotomy. People are ready to read about realistic, creative ways in which to create a more harmonious world. They will find some of these ideas in Solutions.
Solutions will help us break out of the argument culture by emphasizing constructive collaboration, shared goals, respect for alternative views, and civility. One way we will achieve this is through a “constructive review process,” to encourage people to build on ideas rather than claiming them as turf and defending them.3 Another way necessitates traveling beyond our national borders, to examine how other societies and cultures address similar problems. Expect to hear undiscovered voices and see unexplored places in Solutions.
Building a culture of constructive dialogue will not be easy from within the existing argument culture, but it is essential if we are to create a sustainable and desirable future.
What kinds of ideas do we expect this dialogue to produce? We expect the unexpected, but there are several recurring themes. In order to create compelling, integrative solutions, we must:
- create clear visions of a future that embody necessary solutions
- design whole, integrated systems, not just individual parts
- acknowledge and understand cultural evolution and how it interacts with biological evolution to create change
- understand the deep connections between world views, institutions, and technologies and how they interact to produce different qualities of life
Solutions will actively seek the best new ideas and give them a platform. If successful, Solutions will help change the world and meet the challenges of the future. We need broad participation in the ongoing, constructive dialogue that we hope to create and foster. It is the most important thing we can do. Please join us.
References
- Yankelovich, D. The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation. (Touchstone Press, New York, NY, 1999).
- Tannen, D. The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. (Random House, New York, 1998).
- See our guidelines for authors and reviewers at www.thesolutionsjournal.org for more information about our constructive review process and other features of the journal.
Designing the Future of the Earth Co-operatively.
There is a myriad of "solutions" that aim to improve life on Earth.
But having a myriad of those is only a continuation of a process that humanity has been engaged since a very long time ago--at least since the "agricultural revolution", a process that got us exactly to where we are now (there never was a dearth of solutions ever)--in the midst of various societal and environmental crises whose extent we cannot even gauge properly.
What is needed is to design the Earth "from the scratch" which has to be done no other way than with the co-operation of everyone who is to have a stake in the in our (us being humans and non-humans alike--we all have equally valid need to live in optimal conditions possible) co-existence on this planet. Even though it is impossible for most people to comprehend the need for any such design, its usefulness will prove itself with use--it would serve as a ground on which to reconcile virtually all differences, controversies, conflicts, and complaints nonviolently and more efficiently/satisfactorily than any army could ever hope to achieve (to mention just one from the, almost limitless, uses it could have).
To date, apart from many Utopians and a some political groups who would try to present a vision of few for all others to follow, there might have been only a handful of people who realized that any shared situations required to be designed with the participation of all who were to share those situations. To my mind come (from among others)--Robert Jungk, Donella Meadows..
Donella Meadows got, I think, the closest to be the one who would start organizing the collective vision for a sustainable Earth globally. Her premature death put stop to that (I wrote an article on her "visionings" that is at www.modelearth.org--please do have a look at it--I believe it is very germane to our topic.).
This is where we are now as I perceive it: We are quite a way into the general "collapse" ("The Limits to Growth" - Meadows et al), and only a miracle-like concerted effort would save us.
The reason (as I see it) that no general sense of an encroaching disaster is being felt is the same that allowed for things to become what they are now: the ones who are heard also have the best chances for survival (even the unprecedented catastrophe that is ahead of us), and those without a say are being wiped out in increasingly greater numbers as we speak without being heard.
In "Solutions" there seem to be a platform that would try to unify a vision that would satisfy all of us who are to share it, however, without assuring that even those who hitherto have had no say in influencing our common future are enabled to participate in the "dialogs", we just end up with a platform of specialists who would make sense to each other, but no more than that (no one could count all the other similar platforms of specialists/elitists that there are in existence now and that purport to have *the* solutions, and making a good living at the same time without making any perceivable difference in the world!)
What needs to happen is to bring into the discussion (condensing all possible "dialogues" on the subject) of even all those who still have no say in their own future and who are perishing in vaster and vaster numbers. Their non-participation in co-designing our common future ensures a miserable future for the survivors, if only because the survivors' morality would not be one that we today could recognize as human.
All venues of *speedily* accomplishing this unification of *all* of our (us being *all* of us) about our collective future, no matter how even ridiculous they might seem to be, have to be considered. (What could all those be? I would vote for meditation to be considered, and for starting living transparently sustainably from the local communities level--but this would have to start happening globally; any non-sustainable portions of the Earth would always consider sustainable communities to be an anathema to be eliminated/exploited, I think.)
I believe that the most expedient method of creating and presenting a unified, optimally accommodating all who are to share the Earth vision would be creating of a simple (simple at least at the beginning) all of ideal Earth descriptive model (the other kinds--predictive, analytical might be more involved, seems to me) that would be virtually accessible by anyone who would want to have a say in their future on this planet. It should be like constructing a world for an online game, of which there are a few in existence, but this time it would be real world for real beings--I just want to highlite that even complex modeling would be possible.
To create an interface that could be used by all--an indigenous person, a social scientist, an "al-Qaida" terrorist, a Third World soldier, a member of any class, even non-humans (by proxy), even children who might start being interested in their future, representatives of any and all ideologies and religions, etc--might be challenging, but the state of technology is up to the task, only willingness to start in earnest doing such a unification of all ideas of what the world should look like to accommodate all of us optimally is what currently is needed. There is a need for a directed hurry--there are more and more desperate people in the world; desperate people tend to lose reason and are prone to violence that when suppressed with violence in return make all vital curves to go more hopelessly exponential.
Modeling of a commonly shared situation (from a locally based community to a commonly shared planet) might be *the* "lingua franca" for us all to use, because everybody could "see" and agree upon in the model what our co-existence would be like--all this by the virtue of transparency with which any component of the commonly shared existence would have to be represented. It would impossible to include in the design/vision/"visioning"/"envisioning" anything not transparent--it would be challenged immediately!
Thank you, Mr. Jan Hearthstone - more at www.ModelEarth.Org .