Embodying a Timeship vs. Empowering a Spaceship

-

Part 4 of Renaissance Zones: experimenting with the intentional significance of the Damanhur community (2003)

[Parts: Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]

Grounding paradoxes for spaceships and timeships

The metaphor of "space" vs "time" is used in this context in order to raise the question as to whether mainstream, and especially western, thinking is not locked into a form of "space-based" thinking. This might be understood as distorting recognition of any "time-based" thinking that could be vital to meaningful development of society. The question posed in this way follows from previous explorations of the way in which thinking might be locked into a "static" approach, when a "dynamic" approach might be more fruitful (From Statics to Dynamics in Sustainable Community, 1998). A specific criticism has been made of Project Logic, notably in relation to the challenge for African cultures (Knowledge Gardening through Music: patterns of coherence for future African management as an alternative to Project Logic, 2000).

Given the significant failure of many development decades and other programmes in enabling billions to get out of the poverty trap, the challenge is here framed in terms of whether mainstream institutional intiatives could be usefully understood as "spaceships". For whatever reason, it would then appear that such spaceships are effectively "grounded" and unable to perform as originally intended and promised.

Is it the case that people around the world need to recognize the degree to which they have been lured -- effectively programmed -- into a cargo cult mentality? The "spaceships" are not coming to help. Indeed the "institutional space ships" typical of the international system (UN agencies, multinational corporations, etc) have demonstrated over the years the ephemeral nature of the assistance they may choose to offer or withhold -- "Health for All by the Year 2000" ! It is only their own crews and passengers that tend really to benefit sustainably from the projects in which they engage (as exemplified by the array of privileges accorded to them as the new nomenklatura). Those responsible for the "space programme" have no insights into how to put things together -- except for destructive or exploitative purposes -- or for the benefit of the few. Those at Damanhur might indeed be accused of the form of cargo cult science identified by Richard Feynman (Cargo Cult Science, 1974) -- except that instead of waiting for institutional promises to be unfulfilled, they have found unusually innovative ways to nourish their collective quality of life. It is the illusion of the "institutional spaceships" that they are capable of delivering innovation sustainably to the peoples of the world that has proven to be the most insidious form of cargo cult.

The reasons repeatedly put forward for why these "institutional spaceships" do not work is that they lack fuel -- and are therefore inadequately empowered. The possibility that they may be completely inappropriately designed and conceived is not considered. Efforts to "reform" them amount to little more than tinkering. Is it possible that from a design perspective, empowering such spaceships designed with current understanding is like trying to improve the design of aircraft using steam engines?

Efforts to operate many institutional spaceships can be usefully compared to a group of kids in a discarded airplane, pretending to crew it, and imagining they can travel in it. For example, during his time as head of a major UK government ministry, Tony Benn was very articulate in indicating that he had "all the levers of power arrayed before him" but finally recognized that, although "he could pull on them at any time", but "they were not in fact connected to anything".

The table below is a very tentative effort to summarize the possible challenges to reflection about how time-based thinking functions in contrast to space-based thinking. Of particular interest is the sense of identity or invariance in each case -- and of what can be tranformed without losing the ability to recover that sense.

To help clarify the challenge of time-based thinking, it has been presented here within a polarity with space-based thinking. The challenge is of course a larger one in that there is a paradoxical inter-twining of space and time. To explore the richer possibilities beyond such polarization, it is worth using the coding system basic to the I Ching . For example, the overarching continuity of space can

[Parts: Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]