{"id":200313,"date":"2021-12-27T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2021-12-27T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=200313"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:03:12","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:03:12","slug":"a-proposal-to-humanity-a-path-to-surviving-todays-megacrises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/12\/a-proposal-to-humanity-a-path-to-surviving-todays-megacrises\/","title":{"rendered":"A Proposal to Humanity: A Path to Surviving Today`s Megacrises"},"content":{"rendered":"

After World War II it was widely believed that the formula for peace, dignity, and sustainable prosperity for every sister and brother in the human family, had been discovered.\u00a0 The formula was often called \u201cDevelopment.\u201d \u00a0Its ingredients included the steady advance of the rule of law, the steady advance of human rights including the social rights declared in the Universal Declaration of 1948, and \u2013crucially –mixed economies like those pioneered in Scandinavia.\u00a0 \u00a0Further, as in, for example, India and Tanzania, true development would synthesize human rights, a gift of the West, with the best spiritual ideals of ancient traditions, gifts of the East and South.\u00a0 Development was not just economic growth.\u00a0 Nevertheless, it\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0economic growth.<\/p>\n

Now the dreams of 1948 have turned into the nightmares of 2021.\u00a0 It is not only that humanity is under attack by the forces of climate change, by new mutations of viruses, by growing mountains of unpayable debt, by stagnating living standards, by the exponential growth of precarious low paid employment in some places, by\u00a0 no employment at all for youth in other places,\u00a0 and by uncontrollable waves of migration of the economically desperate and the politically persecuted.\u00a0 It is that humanity is in disarray.\u00a0 Nobody knows what to do.\u00a0 \u00a0The formula of 1948 failed.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

My book with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0The Dilemmas of Social Democracies\u00a0 <\/em>(2006), charted in detail the downfalls of the post-World War II Swedish model, of successive buds and half-blooms of social democracy in Spain, of the temporarily successful but unsustainable Austrian model, of the immense disappointment in Mandela`s\u00a0 South Africa when \u00a0the end of apartheid<\/em> failed to be the beginning of social justice, of the bloody end of Sukarno\u2019s non-aligned version of \u00a0socialism\u00a0 in a country with a Muslim majority (Indonesia), of successive disappointments in Venezuela, and of the philosophical evolution of the World Bank as it deployed its formidable resources of money and of knowledge in unsuccessful efforts to prevent the dreams of 1948 from becoming the nightmares of 2021.\u00a0 A reviewer wrote that there was nothing new about our book.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We simply agreed with neoliberal conservatives like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.\u00a0 They said social democracy does not work.\u00a0 So did we.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it is true that attempts to govern the economy doing what must be done to adjust to physical reality; or to redistribute wealth and power from the few to the many; or to honour human rights to medical care, dignified employment, and security in old age; \u00a0regularly lead to what Karl Popper famously called \u201cunintended consequences.\u201d \u00a0Typical unintended consequences include disinvestment, soaring prices, massive shortages, intolerable tax burdens, insolvent governments, unemployment, and violence.<\/p>\n

But the reviewer missed our point.\u00a0 Our point was that social democracy does not work\u00a0because<\/em>\u00a0social democracy was and is incompatible with\u00a0the basic cultural structure of the modern world.\u00a0<\/em>That is why the dreams of 1948 evolved into the nightmares of 2021.\u00a0 Social justice fell apart.\u00a0 Peace within and between nations fell apart.\u00a0 The governability that might have been \u2013so necessary to achieve the compliance of our species with the natural laws it must obey to survive\u2014was not to be.<\/p>\n

Joanna and\u00a0I did not propose to resign ourselves to the impossibility of peaceful, inclusive, rational, and functional solutions to social and environmental problems.\u00a0 We did propose cultural action leading to culture shifts. \u201cCulture shifts\u201d is here a name for transforming the mechanisms of structural frustration.\u00a0 They are, as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, a way out of the fly bottle.\u00a0 What is impossible because of the BCS, can be made possible by transforming the BCS.\u00a0 The empowering culture shifts would include shifts to ethics of care, shifts to community development, and shifts to unbounded organizing.<\/p>\n

A theoretical construct,\u00a0basic cultural structure<\/em>, one that overlaps with\u00a0basic social structure,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0basic legal structure,\u00a0<\/em>thus emerges in our 2006 study as a name for causal powers that are hypothesized \u00a0to be more decisive as determinants of the course of history than other causes whose impacts changing the course of history\u00a0 are more obvious and perhaps easier to understand, such as who wins wars, who wins elections, population growth, \u00a0new technologies (the printing press, the atom bomb, robotics, artificial intelligence, \u00a0\u2026), and so on.<\/p>\n

Five years later (in 2011) the evolutionary biologist D.S. Wilson\u00b4s book\u00a0Darwin\u00b4s Cathedral\u00a0<\/em>proposed a concept similar, if not identical, to BCS:\u00a0moral<\/em>\u00a0system<\/em>. Wilson wrote of biologists doing a Darwinian analysis to explain which forms of life adapt and survive, and which do not adapt.\u00a0 When it comes to applying such an analysis to Homo sapiens<\/em>, Wilson\u00a0<\/em>suggests, the appropriate unit of analysis is not the individual.\u00a0 It is not the group.\u00a0 It is the moral system.\u00a0 \u201cMoral system\u201d is an accurate and illuminating name for that which adapts and survives or does not adapt and does not survive.<\/p>\n

An initial inkling of what\u00a0basic cultural structure\u00a0<\/em>(BCS) might mean can be gleaned from considering common uses of the three words that compose the phrase.\u00a0\u00a0Basic\u00a0<\/em>refers to institutions that meet basic human needs, such as those Plato referenced when he wrote in the second book of\u00a0The Republic\u00a0<\/em>that the true architect of our city is our needs, and the first and most basic of our needs is food.\u00a0\u00a0Cultural\u00a0<\/em>refers to the ecological niche of the human species.\u00a0\u00a0Homo sapiens<\/em> possess capacities for creativity and cooperation. It passes on new learnings from one generation to another.\u00a0 It\u00a0<\/em>can reprogram its behaviour more rapidly than species that change behaviour much more slowly, for example by mutation and natural selection.\u00a0\u00a0Structure\u00a0<\/em>refers to organization.\u00a0 The same component parts often have different causal powers when they are organized differently.<\/p>\n

More hints regarding the meanings and uses of the BCS concept are given below as by-products of a short list of practical ways to transform the BCS of the modern world.<\/p>\n

A Path to Surviving Today`s Megacrisis<\/h3>\n

Here are some steps you and I can take and can urge organizations we are part of to take.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pledge to act in such a way that, if everyone acted as we do, dignified human life could flourish sustainably in harmony with nature.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly: \u00a0pledge to share our surplus money, time, property, expertise or whatever we have but do not need (if we have any surplus \u2013many people do not).\u00a0 Move resources from where they are not needed to where they are needed.<\/p>\n

Create, or help create, dignified livelihoods that do not depend on sales.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

The BCS of the modern world can be regarded as a moral system whose centrepiece is what Andr\u00e9 Orl\u00e9an calls \u201cs\u00e9paration marchande<\/em>,\u201d<\/em> and whose characteristic form of human relationship is what many call \u201c<\/em>patriarchy.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0These two main features of the BCS already imply the two main findings of J.M. Keynes General Theory<\/em>:<\/p>\n