Building with what is missing?

Engendering 2052 through Re-imagining the Present: Review of a report to the Club of Rome (Part #9)

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The critique above raised concerns regarding what is missing from the 2052 Report. The review of the Royal Society cited the strategic insight highlighted so notoriously by the former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, namely the subtlety required in the recognition of the unknowns variously known, or not, as discussed separately (Unknown Undoing: challenge of incomprehensibility of systemic neglect, 2008).

The commentary which follows shifts into an imaginative mode in which what is missing invites more creative attention. This follows from the arguments indicating how significance depends so much on the constraints implied by what is missing, as recently articulated by Terrence W. Deacon (Incomplete Nature: how mind emerged from matter, 2011; The importance of what is missing, New Scientist, 26 November 2011).

This is in delightful accord with the much-cited ancient Chinese insight of the Tao Te Ching, to the effect that:

The names that can be named are not definitive names. Naming engenders ten thousand things... Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub. It is the centre hole that makes it useful... Therefore profit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there.[Chapter 11]

Drawing on the considerable tradition of Chinese policy-making, embodied in such texts, would in fact be consistent with the strong argument made in the 2052 Report for the future role of China as world leader and the considerable benefit of learning Mandarin. However, beyond learning the language, it fails to indicate the extent to which other insights from such a culture might be of the greatest relevance, as has been stressed by Susantha Goonatilake (Toward a Global Science: mining civilizational knowledge, 1999), and separately discussed (Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors, 2000).

With respect to the need to transcend the fruitless style of dispute in failing to take account of contrasting perspectives, it is then useful to consider the cybernetic approach advocated by Stafford Beer (Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity, 1994) -- in relation to his development of the viable system model. Consistent with the classic quote of Lao Tzu (above), the methodology explores the process of "problem jostling" to elicit strategic coherence, notably modelled by an icosahedron -- configuring contrasting perspectives around an "empty" centre.,

In further seeking to sustain an imaginative approach to the implications of the 2052 Report, this cybernetic perspective is suggestively consistent with the famed tale by a Sufi poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, namely the Conference of the Birds. The 30 birds of the tale, each of differently constrained insight, are on a quest for a form of transcendent, integrative insight -- embodied in the legendary Simorgh.

If a number of the order of 30 reflects an understanding of requisite variety in a cybernetic sense,  returning to the 2052 Report it is interesting to note the author's indication of his incorporation of 35 "glimpses" (as mentioned above). The concern here is the extent to which these "glimpses" might fruitfully have been related cybernetically, as would be implied by the work of  J. Martin Hays (Mapping wisdom as a complex adaptive system, Management and Marketing,  2010), Maurice Yolles (Maurice I. Yolles, Organisations as Complex Systems: an introduction to knowledge cybernetics, 2006), or the approach of Ervin Laszlo subsequent to his efforts on an earlier Club of Rome report (Cybernetics and Human Knowing: a journal of second order cybernetics and cyber-semiotics), and his instigation of the Cybernetics and Systems Sciences Conference (Vienna, April 2012). Why was the 2052 Report not launched on that occasion? Another example of irresolutique?

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