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A Vision of the Future
A GAIAN PARADIGM
For some 2,000 years or more, civilization has
been ruled by a social paradigm on which all
aspects of the EuroAmerican cultures are based
-- the "dominator paradigm." In the past two
decades a new social paradigm has been emerging
that could have the most profound and
fundamental impact on human civilization since
hominids first came down from the trees.
The old paradigm placed humans in a purposeful
universe created by some supernormal power for
the domination and use by man. The new paradigm
we, call "A Gaian Paradigm," suggests a
spontaneously self-organizing universe in which
humanity is but one of the created tightly
linked, interdependent webs of being.
THE DOMINATOR PARADIGM
The "dominator paradigm," has had a long
evolution. It evolved from the Jewish creation
myth that held that the earth was created for
the use of and domination by man. It was
strengthened by Greek philosophy with the
postulate that man is the measure of all things.
The early Church held that a chain-of-being put
man at the top of a hierarchy with only a few
celestial beings above.
The "dominator paradigm" was imbedded in the
minds of Europe by the thousand-year
Inquisitions that burned thousand of heretics,
mostly women, at the stake for believing in
Earth as our creator. It was spread to the East
by the crusades that destroyed "infidel" humans,
cities and nations. During the Age of
Colonization and Discovery it was perpetuated
and made worldwide by the sword (technology) ,
the flag (nationalism), and the
cross (Christianity)
Newton's
clockwork concept of that cosmos, and Darwin's
theory of evolution were interpreted to "prove"
the validity of the dominator paradigm. It was
fixed in our secular moral system by the
acceptance of Adam Smith's economy that human
"self-interest",the-fittest
come
into
play. Networks of potential mutations may develop
and remain dormant until triggered by an
environmental change or another phenomenon that
brings on the avalanche of transition.
Autocatalysis, linked with-survival- competition
and materialism should, and do, dictate all human
actions. This abomination as the essence of
humanity now rules the world.
A GAIAN PARADIGM
A Gaian paradigm not only has many roots but can
be, and is becoming, the underpinning of a new
global network of cultures replacing the now
dominant and domineering man-centered industrial
cultures. Like all cultures, the new cultures will
be holistic and unified coherences of
interdependent components -- religion, economics,
social and others.
The emergence of a Gaian paradigm is resulting in
a deep fundamental transition of our world view,
our social institutions, our cultural norms, and
our lifestyles. The need for this transition is
being made obvious by the growing numbers of
dangers inherent in industrialism including
endless wars and economic breakdowns. But the
transition is happening, and being made real by
the introduction of many positive and creative
social innovations.
This millennium is being looked upon as a time of
radical and fundamental change. Minds are opening
to new ideas. People are looking for new actions.
It is in this spirit of a hopeful, deep,
fundamental social transformation that this book
is addressed. These are the concepts we'll explore
in the next few chapters.
FOUNDATIONS FOR A GAIAN PARADIGM
Many basic scientific observations led to this new
scientific/social paradigm. The advancement of the
Gaia theory, the establishment of Chaos and
Complexity theories, and new concepts of evolution
were among them.
New observations that biological evolution did not
progress, as Darwin predicted, in a series of
minute changes which led over time to the
emergence of new species. Rather, biological
evolution happened in quantum leaps. Major
biological changes and new species are created in
relatively short periods of time after long
periods of stability. This observation was
designated by Stephen Jay Gold as punctured
equilibrium.
James Lovelock, a scientist working for NASA,
observed that the biosphere of the Earth was
radically different from all other planets. It
stayed amazingly constant within ranges which
supported life.
At the same time Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist,
was studying the evolution of microorganisms over
the billions of years before animals appeared on
the face of the Earth. She found that life forms
were interdependent. Life was able to exist on
Earth because of a symbiosis among all life forms
and the geological Earth. Everything was
interdependent with everything else. Life created
its own biome.
Lovelock and Margulis proposed that the whole
Earth was a self-organized, self-supporting
ecological system At the suggestion of a neighbor
of Lovelace, William Golding, author of Lord of
the Flies, they termed this living Earth system
Gaia, after the Greek Earth goddess.
A theoretical understanding of how Gaia, or in
fact any system, might spontaneously self-organize
came from other fields of science including
mathematics, physics and particularly computer
science. Chaos and Complexity theories (made
possible by computer modeling) have moved science
beyond the limits imposed by linear mathematics,
algebra and calculus. Study of the transition of
order into chaos, or chaos into order, and the
formation of complex systems from simpler ones has
opened a whole new area for science. Two
particular breakthroughs in the field are relevant
to the Gaia concepts.
Self-organizing criticality is an idea proposed by
Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist, Per Bak.
His first computer model representing
self-organizing criticality was of a pile of sand.
As you pour grains of sand on a spot it slowly
builds into a stable inverted cone. As you
continue pouring, the cone becomes unstable until
sand slides and avalanches restore a new larger
stable cone. Bak showed that biological evolution
occurred in such bursts. Simple entities formed
more complex systems, which remained stable until
internal pressures built up and caused a rapid
reorganization. There seems to be a law of nature,
self-organizing criticality, by which new forms
come into being.
Autocatalysis, developed by Stuart Kauffman at the
Santa Fe Institute, is another concept which
provides a theoretical base for the evolution of
Gaia. Autocatalysis holds that systems of
biological entities may promote their own rapid
transition into different forms. Kauffman uses the
simple example of the slippery-footed fly and
sticky-tongued frog. The mutation of slippery
footedness gave no environmental advantage to the
fly until the mutation of the sticky-tongued frog.
Only then did Darwin's survival-of-of-the-fittest.
explains how complex organs like the eye, or new
species emerge.
Self-organizing criticality and autocatalysis
are among the scientific concepts that show how
biological entities spontaneously self-organize
in quantum-like leaps from simple cells to
linked complex networks of cells, organs, plants
and animals.
More than that, physicists like Lee Smolin and
Nobel Laureate Murray Gellmann, have extended
self-organizing back to the beginning of time at
the Big Bang, suggesting that the same principle
may apply to the self-organizing of fundamental
particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, and
molecules into galaxies, solar systems, planets,
and life.
At the same time economists like Nobel Laureate
Kenneth Arrow, Brian Arthur, and Jon Holland
have extended the new paradigm in the other
direction, to include economics, social
organization, and human consciousness.
This new scientific-social paradigm suggests
that people have no superior divine mandate
within a universe created for them. They are not
independent of, above or beyond the natural
world in which they are imbedded. They do have
the unique ability to understand, through
science, the laws that govern them, to envision
future worlds, and to co-create those future
worlds within the laws of science.
CYBERSPACE AND THE NETWORKED UNIVERSE
"Everything is connected to everything else"
is one way of stating the Gaian paradigm. It
is a fact of science, and is a social
mindset.
In addition it is more than those; it is a
fact of technology. "Networking" was
identified by John Naisbitt in Megatrends as
one of the major rends of the age. It was a
social and political as well as a scientific
trend. It was made possible by the major new
findings of the twentieth century. As he saw
it, networking was like roads, the
automobile, the telegraph, airplanes, the
telephone, and computers. Each of these
technologies made the Earth smaller and put
people in more rapid and reliable touch with
one another.
The real quantum jump in networking is only
now before us. Computers and the Internet
are providing a challenge that has hardly
been explored. Cyberspace is a global
phenomenon providing humanity the
opportunity to work globally in real time.
This takes networking well beyond the
concept about which Naisbitt wrote only a
few years ago, or the concept of
transnational networking which was the root
of the formation of TRANET, the organization
with which I've been working since 1976.
The Gaia hypothesis, the theories of chaos
and complexity, the Gaian concepts, and the
computer technologies which now face us grew
independently of one another. But they form
a unity. They, in themselves, are an example
of the self-organizing principle which
shapes all of cosmic evolution. Together
they make up the Gaian Paradigm. They
challenge us to prepare ourselves for an
avalanche of social, political and economic
change in the years ahead. This millennium
is evolving radically differently from
anthropocentric (man-centered) paradigm
which has dominated the past 2000 years.
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END CHAPTER 1 ************
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