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</a>Keys to global governance qembeddedq in synergetics as a meta-model
Geometry of Thinking for Sustainable Global Governance (Part #11)
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The argument above uses the richness of Fuller's synergetics to stress that attention is required as much to what is not elicited from that work, by himself and those who have followed, as to what is evident and a widely appreciated inspiration. In that sense, as a comprehensive model, the more general argument is that it does indeed model integrative thinking through the geometry -- but some (if not a greater proportion) is effectively "hidden" or "buried" within the model. The model embeds or embodies that of which it is not conscious. It effectively implies a (cognitive) dual which is implicit and to that extent absent.
Like each comprehensive endeavour, it is its own metaphor -- using the phrase of biologist Gregory Bateson (Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor; a personal account of a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation. 1972). In explaining why "we are our own metaphor", Bateson pointed out that:
One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don't ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we're not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity. (pp. 288-289)
In this sense a model is not what it seems. Its hidden dual holds a complementary pattern of insight. It is only together that they are effectively as comprehensive as is claimed for the objective interpretation. But comprehending what has not been rendered explicit is a challenge because it is "about" the process of comprehension -- of "thinking about the geometry".
Due to the progressive interlocking of accumulated patterns into nested meta-patterns, as a solution to human processing capacity limitations, there is a form of directed, convergence onto a progressively clarified ultimate meta-pattern, towards which learning tends asymptotically, in that final (en)closure is never achieved (except possibly as an essentially transient, private, transcendental experience). Bateson describes this ultimate pattern as:
The pattern which connects (all living creatures) is a meta-pattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that meta-pattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect." (Mind and Nature; a necessary unity, 1979, p. 11)
Of possible relevance in terms of poetic sensibilities, in the light of Bateson's comment, is the concept of a clinamen. This is a constraint that guarantees an enormous flexibility of meaning and is an act of memory.
Model builders have a marked tendency to set cognitive processes in definitional "stone" -- to reify and to petrify (Reorganizing Knowledge and Unfreezing Categories, 2009). Matters are in fact worse when it is "the other" who gets set in stone and petrified -- by whom one is then "petrified" in turn, hence "terrorism". Any dynamic engagement with such a "stone" -- dialogue -- is then ridiculous. Some of the challenges are delightfully highlighted by the following points.
| The Hazards of System Building Matthew Melko, System Builder (Presented at the Foundation for Integrative Education Conference, Oswego, New York, 1969; reproduced in Main Currents in Modern Thought, vol. 269 no. 2) |
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