Governance through frozen categories

Tomorrow, Who Will Govern the World?: Review (Part #4)

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Future challenge to categories: With regard to simply rearranging conventional categories -- "re-arranging the deck chairs", Attali's exploration seemingly avoids any sense in which such categories might be called into question -- as the internet has significantly done. His study ignores the extent to which social and conceptual organization based on such "categories" has now been variously by-passed in the lived and working realities of many. People may choose to function within those frameworks and to attach credibility to them, but millions do not. Attali may assume that this "by-passing" is irrelevant to governance, and this may be the reality for some -- but not for others. He fails to address this issue which was succinctly highlighted in a classic quote by The emergence of an increasingly delusional nature of any international legal consensus has been succinctly expressed with respect to the neocon strategy of governance, as presented by Ron Suskind (Without a Doubt, The New York Times, In The Magazine, 17 October 2004) following an exchange he had with an aide in the decision-making circle of President Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The current approach of the Tea  Party movement is consistent with challenging what amounts to a "Washington Consensus" on appropriate governance discourse (Cultivating Global Strategic Fantasies of Choice, 2010).

Nature of a "category": Such questions highlight the role of collective imagination and inspiration and how they may reframe and focus attention. What indeed is a "category" or "concept" and how may the insight with which they are associated best be organized? Is it not highly probable that creativity will challenge conventional rigidity and inflexibility, just as the internet challenged UNESCO's mandate for global responsibility in the organization of knowledge?

Nature of the "future"? In an honourable exercise in reflecting on the future, Attali offers a valuable review of how this has been done in the past. The question is whether the "future" is a category which can usefully be "unfrozen". There are of course many ways to comprehend the future. The simplest merely requires a mechanical adjustment to the calendar date -- a process often as suspect as the fraudulent adjustment of the mileage counter on an automobile. The future may be decomplexified by simply making commitments in a scheduler of some kind -- in 1997, there were already international meetings scheduled for the year 2015. Such scheduling, as with the "futures market", is a projection of present thinking onto the future and implies no cognitive challenge or innovation.

How does the future emerge into the present? How does potential become actuality? What are the cognitive traps associated with phrases such as: "where does the future come from" and "the far-distant future" ? How are present initiatives established as future realities? Why does past understanding appear so quaint from the present and what does this say of present understandings that are taken so seriously now?

Such questions are as puzzling for the individual as they are for planetary society -- if not more so. As safety nets erode, who has a "guaranteed future"? Much is made of future technology and changes to social systems. Far more elusive is any transformation in the way people relate to what they consider reality. As Peter Drucker once said, the most profound and unforeseen changes over a generation are those associated with changes of values -- completely reframing how things are comprehended. And yet it is such changes in the quality of understanding which are part of the individual maturation experience. Sadly they are also the changes which introduce communication gaps between the generations. And what does such change imply for a "global ethic"?

There are curious constraints associated with use of the modern calendar to demarcate future periods. Its essential linearity is a trap. More social change can occur in a brief period than occurs over long periods of years. For an individual, falling in love, a mystical revelation, a major career challenge, a creative insight, or a disabling accident, can all reframe the linear calendar in psychological terms for which non-linear mathematics would provide more appropriate understanding. For those who favour cyclical understandings of time, some form of perigee and apogee might be useful markers.

"Constants"? There is a sense in which Attali appears to articulate the possibilities for future governance in terms of some analogue to the set of physical constants by which physical reality is supposedly determined, according to physicists. However physicists, science fiction, and constructors of alternative virtual worlds freely explore the possibility that these constants may not be as "constant" as the past century has tended to imply. Are there then, yet to be discovered, psychosocial analogues to universal constants, electromagnetic constants, atomic and nuclear constants, and physico-chemical constants? Social innovation may benefit from such inspiration in giving form to new modes of interaction. Will the governance envisaged by Attali be simply marginalized by such innovation?

Does this argument apply notably to "values"? Is there not a case for recognizing the possibility may be experienced otherwise, if only in the future, as separately argued (Freedom, Democracy, Justice: Isolated Nouns or Interwoven Verbs?, 2011; Topology of Valuing: dynamics of collective engagement with polyhedral value configurations, 2008).

Given the importance attached by Attali to the future role of "the market" in governance of the world, is there not a possibility that this too will come to be understood otherwise, if only by some? Curiously, given Attali's own background as first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and given the financial crises since 2008, there is no implication that the "confidence" on which the financial markets are based may also be imagined otherwise -- especially to the extent that individuals lose confidence in "governance", "promises" and "guarantees" -- so readily abused (Abuse of Faith in Governance, 2009; Primary Global Reserve Currency: the Con? Cognitive implications of a prefix for sustainable confidelity, 2011). What may "governance" come to mean in a creative, innovative future? What bodies anticipate such innovation -- if only with respect to scenarios and voting systems?

Attali's strong argument in avoiding the ideal and the imaginative is that those in power will have none of it. The argument has a measure of validity but again is undermined by the uptake of internet technology -- even by those same governments, but especially by their citizens. There is therefore the possibility that Attali's pragmatic recommendations will indeed be implemented but that the real innovation in governance will effectively occur "elsewhere" -- whether conceptually or organizationally -- in another "dimension", as artificial worlds, like Second Life, presage.

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