IMPLICATIONS FOR GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Sustainable Dialogue as a Necessary Template for Sustainable Global Community (Part #6)

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The importance of dialogue is widely recognized. Here the emphasis has been placed on new ways of distinguishing essential features of dialogue in order to raise questions about the ways in which it is vulnerable to dynamics which render it unsustainable.

Presented like this it becomes legitimate to ask questions about the possibility that many social and environmental problems in some way mirror deficiencies in dialogue processes. Problems such as environmental pollution, unemployment, impoverishment, illness, ignorance, malnutrition, injustice, and misrepresentation, are commonly engendered or encountered in meetings, if only in metaphoric form (***). This in no way denies the concrete reality of such problems in wider society. But the tendency to engender such patterns ensures what amounts to a sustainable problematique. The processes of governance then endeavour to respond to that problematique with the very dialogue processes which sustain it.

There is much intellectual and emotional investment is the possibility that such problems could all be resolved if only people could arrive at consensus. In this respect it is useful to note a divisive debate within the Sante Fe Institute between Murray Gell-Mann (head of the science board) and George Cowan (the former director). For Gell- Mann, as co-initiator of the World Resources Institute (Washington DC), human society must undergo six 'fundamental transitions' within the next decades to achieve sustainability and avoid global catastrophes. In his view this requires widespread agreement on principles (Waldrop, p. 351). One might ask what this 'consensus' could possibly constitute within the nonlinear dynamics of a social system subject to paradigm shifts.

For Cowan however: 'Somehow the agenda has been put into the form of talking about a set of transitions from state A, the present, to a state B that's sustainable. The problem is that there is no such state. You have to assume that the transitions are going to continue forever and ever...You have to talk about systems that remain continuously dynamic, and that are embedded in environments that themselves are continuously dynamic....A term like 'sustainable' does not really capture that.' (Waldrop, pp. 350-356). Genuine sustainability in a living system is maintained by the nonlinear dynamics of continuing instability. As currently conceived as a desirable stable state, 'sustainability' would remove that instability and thus render the global system unsustainable. Such stability is death; somehow the world has to adapt itself to a condition of perpetual novelty.

To what extent does this confusion not reflect that in dealing with human values? The 'equilibrium-centred view' in this case pleads for a universal set of fundamental unchanging values. The 'dynamic view' argues for slowly evolving values. And the 'evolutionary view' awaits crises which would evoke a reconfiguration of values. But a genuinely 'sustainable' pattern of living values would seemingly depend on a form of value instability -- beyond any simple equilibrium. Efforts to 'stabilize' that instability may then be precisely what would render the global system of values unsustainable. These dilemmas are also to be seen in any dialogue.

The decline in quality of political debate, abusive parliamentary interactions, marathon speeches of little consequence, one-party vs. multi-party concerns, and rehashing of sterile policy formulas, are all but symptoms of a malaise that has not been addressed. There is an incapacity to understand dialogue both as science and as art, using all the insights which our cultures have made available.

Efforts to respond to dramatic global conditions through current meeting processes are equivalent to those of the surgeons of centuries past who deplored the frequency with which their operations killed the patient -- but were arrogantly amused at any implication that they should wash their hands before the operation. Meeting hygiene requires attention if healthy policies are to emerge.

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