But a heady haze of holism now surrounds the cutting edges of the erstwhile isolated disciplines; and E O Wilson has written a book about consilience.
Holism: the idea that natural systems (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts.
Consilience: in science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" to strong conclusions.
The idea is that research teams, whether academic or business oriented, should be multidisciplinary. So far this is working well for the pure and applied hard sciences and for the biological sciences when viewed through the lens of evolution. Links to the social sciences and the humanities are still meager.
Another idea is that the findings from the holistic cutting edges should be communicated clearly and in plain language so that large numbers of citizens can think things through and thus participate meaningfully in the political process.
Sound bites and catch phrases can capture people’s attention but ICT assisted ways of helping citizens to dig deeper should also be available. This would include (a) glossaries of specialist terms, (b) one-pagers explaining the nature of, and issues related to, the main concepts and (c) a wide range of speaking and listening events both live and on audio and video.
A new political system would rely heavily on those freelance philosophers for whom the cream rises in terms of numbers of visitors to their social networks, websites and public meetings. They would be funded mainly by broad based crowd sourcing and would not thus be ‘bought’ by major sponsors and donors. There are good examples of this phenomenon associated with the Scottish referendum
In this new system the intellectual trickle down effect would be kept alive and relevant by a corresponding trickle up effect. Representative democracy would be replaced by participatory democracy. There would be a new way of speaking the people’s truth to privileged power.
I wrote about this for the UN in 2003 but the booklet was deemed ‘contentious’ and was not used. The title was “No more broken promises? A plain language guide to the Millennium Development Goals”. It is available online from here - http://www.srds.co.uk/mdg/. The short notes about the democratic process were:
Representative democracy is where we vote for politicians and political parties to make decisions on our behalf. This will always be necessary. But, in our complicated modern world, the system needs to be supported. Ordinary people have to form pressure groups to make sure that their particular needs and concerns are dealt with. We can think of this 'direct action' as participatory democracy.
Participatory democracy means that all the people who will be affected (ie all stakeholders) should be involved when policies and plans are made, put into action, monitored and evaluated. But different stakeholders will have different ways of understanding what is happening in the world. We therefore have to organise meetings where all points of view get a fair hearing. This means that a complete set of claims, concerns and issues can be drawn up as a basis for negotiation and decision making.
Yoh - speaking the people’s truth to privileged power.
I wrote about this in 2004. The three page article (The changing face of policy making) is available here: http://www.caledonia.org.uk/papers/Policy-making.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment