A Changing Paradigm

Rational members of civilization, in aggregate and over time, likely process information about paradigm change in a manner that promotes their expected utility, while irrational members of the public lack the ability, because their assessment of reality is constrained by cognitive biases and other manifestations of bounded rationality. This irrational public is wedded to capitalist worldview which makes it difficult to perceive different forms of economic organization beyond dogmatic hierarchical values. 

Individuals can be expected to form empirically sound positions so long as they are furnished with “sufficient and sufficiently accurate information.” Attempts to educate the public devoted to this paradigm are futile, since the public lacks the knowledge and capacity to comprehend; such efforts are self-defeating, since ordinary individuals are prone to “overreact on the basis of fear and other affective influences on judgment.”

Dan Kahan and the Cultural Cognition Project of Yale Law School developed the “cultural cognition thesis” where “cultural values are cognitively prior to facts: as a result of a complex of interrelated psychological mechanisms, groups of individuals will credit and dismiss evidence that reflect and reinforce their distinctive understandings of how society should be organized.” Kahan reminds us that cultural commitments are intrinsic to human rationality. What types of de-biasing strategies will help shift cultural polarization away from orthodoxy? 

Every cycle has a life cycle—it raises, peaks, then moves into decline. When a system is really peaked and dying, the alternatives to that system will continue to show up. It's a loop. At the top is the peak, followed by a decline in the current system—with another loop giving birth underneath it. Today we’re between the peak of the dying and the emergence of the new. We see lots of turbulence along-side enormous innovation.

Multiple problems of increasing complexity are converging together at this point in history, shining light on the inequality that got us here, and the glaringly obvious losses humans face because of short-term economic gains, and the benefits a tiny portion of the global economy has enjoyed over the last half century. Pinning down exactly which economic process has caused what amount of harm, to where and whom, is impossible because of the sheer number of global players in the economy and the interconnectedness of global ecosystem services. Understanding the extent to which nature is sacrosanct is re-evolving in the dominant cultures of the world, now confronted daily by mounting pressures to explain the ongoing series of crises exponentially unfolding on our planet in peril, by means of a fading orthodox worldview. “The persistence of our many problems will progressively delegitimize the current order,” Gus Speth reminds  

But this isn’t just another paradigm change in the typical sense; it’s the mother of all paradigm changes—a change in perception. It’s the coming of a new age, the Age of Aquarius, where the old is held up and judged by its peers, as it breathes its last breath, and is replaced by the new. Joseph Schumpeter describes it as a “change in preanalytic vision.” Since cultural development is cognitively prior to fact, it makes reflecting inward challenging. We are born into a world of stories that shape our worldview, which then determines how we analyze fact from fiction. A change in vision is needed to define the budding paradigm being born out of the creative destructive process of release and reorganization. Today we’re between the peak of viewing the human enterprise as separate from the ecosphere, and the emergence of the new vision of transdisciplinarity, systems, limits, and a new way of understanding the world and our part in it. 

When we're living on a planet with fixed limits, where people are everywhere shaping ecosystems all over the planet, we have to consider how to distribute benefits fairly. Socio- ecological systems are complex and connected across levels: from the local to the global, and in time, from past to the future (Lenton et al 2008). We are now living in this interconnected planet where social-ecological systems are everywhere. There are no ecosystems, there are no social systems – it’s only social-ecological systems (Rockstrom 2009). These kinds of teleconnections must be understood because they can themselves trigger surprise, leading to inconvenient feedbacks that then implicate the possibilities for sustainable development. This is one of the challenges of trying to control nature with technology. It’s different from past understandings of development, where we’ve tried to map out resources, tried to predict and assume that things change linearly and incrementally. That’s on the basis upon which we built our entire economy, assuming that we can predict change in the environment.

Today we are in a situation where surprise is a core element of change. On top of that lies an element of complexity. Not only is climate, ecosystems, health, and development interacting with each other in the hyper-connected world, not only do we have teleconnections, but what can occur when a series of global drivers – for example climate change and financial change across an interconnected global financial system – cause an impact which is totally unexpected, often in a very different part of the world than the very source of the problems? Such inconvenient feedbacks are big, major, surprising events that occur based on global drivers translating themselves to unexpected outcomes (Rocha, Biggs, and Peterson 2014).

These examples of social hyper-connectivity are increasingly well understood. They must be layered together with the recognition that we have exactly the same rising hyper-connectivity, even interdependence, given the teleconnections we see when it comes to changes in the environmental system. Together, the larger scale changes in the social and environmental systems illuminates how we all must live in a much more complicated, hyper-connected world where changes in the climate system effects ecosystems, which together influences both human health, economics, and development at large. This is the new reality that we’re facing, the reality of reflexive modernity. But it’s also a world where we must now understand risk and the probability of super wicked problems where multiple feedbacks begin interacting, and avoid potentials for a complex cocktail of cascading catastrophes from quickly overwhelming humanity’s ability to adapt in-time, without unprecedented disruption to civilization for many generations to come (Galaz et al. 2011).

The “Golden Mean” between two devils—having enough or having too much—and our civilization’s collective ability to identify where that point lies is important for “strong” sustainability. John Stuart Mill’s call for a steady state economy challenges the myth of progress. Moving ahead in the coming decades with deep decarbonization pathways that rightfully place the human enterprise as a subsystem of Gaian Law, requires humankind to respect and live within Gaian hierarchy—serving it and maintaining and restoring its critical order. It will require all of us in the post-industrial modern world to "reduce our level of consumption per head to a rate that allows everyone in the world to live on indefinitely."

The modernist values of “progress” and “nature” need to be put under the microscope...
In other words, our civilization's faith in technology to solve all future problems is the tenant of capitalism.

Our desire to compare ourselves against one another is an innate and deeply human characteristic that marketing grad students from Harvard and Yale have been happily taking advantage of since the 1950s.

The stories of modern civilization are molded around progress and nature--they are mutually exclusive. The majority of us do not attribute moral likeness to the nonliving (abiotic) and other living things in the commonwealth of life.

Modernism is built on a deep disconnection from nature. It freed humans from having guilt over exploiting nature's utility. If we fail to stop this freight train heading towards the end-of-life, it won't be because of lack of understanding or science, but because "the stories we accepted as most profoundly true, the ones that determined our social behavior, dismissed the idea that treating the world as dead would ultimately be deadly to us too" (Rodgers 2014).

Rodgers, Christy. 30 Aug. 2014. "Is the World Living or Dead? Or, the Trouble with Science." The Dark Mountain Blog.