Alternative Editorial: Deep In Transition
From New York Times
This week’s editorial takes the form of a response to questions from The Great Transition Initiative (GTI) founded by Dr Paul Raskin, and blogged already this week here.
What is your broad assessment of the state-of-play of the (transition) movement?
How might GTI itself evolve to better serve as a catalyst for a Global Citizens Movement?
DR PAUL Raskin poses two compelling questions - we might say they are the right questions - for a moment in time when we are, collectively, faltering. In the third year of a decade that was identified as crucial for the survival of the human species, our environmental indicators show that we are going backwards.
NATO countries find themselves at war with Russia in a wider context that seems to imply deeper global divisions than any of us have known in our lifetimes. Future-defining tools - AI, nuclear fusion, health - are in danger of being auctioned to the highest bidder, at the cost of the poorest people. We have to know where we are in relationship to 2030.
Let me bring myself into the picture here straightaway—and for a reason. I started in global news media, moved into NGO work, advised national governments on soft power, had a child, diverted briefly into the arts, shifted abruptly into politics (joining a think tank and standing for selection to the UK Parliament) and eventually trained as a psycho-social therapist.
I relate this history because its journey taught me, above all, about the multiple perspectives that feed into a desire for change - and the multiple forms of agency needed to achieve social-political-economic transformation. Each time I adopted a different position in the larger constellation of actors, my understanding of 'what is needed' changed.
As I catch up on the wide range of descriptions of “experiments in movement unity” in the Great Transition site, I’m excited by the breadth and depth of our collective endeavours. Convivialism, cosmolocalism, sustainable mindsets - I'm all in. When Ashish Kothari and Shrishtee Bajpai say this has to be driven by the Global South, I'm in awe at the rightful ambition. When we chart the domain of “transition” initiatives, it's remarkable - particularly regarding the complexity of the networks implied.
At the same time, I feel myself searching for something that is not present on the list. Not competency or resources, but a certain sensibility. To move from lists of global strategists to a Global Citizens Movement is a move from the map to the territory. It’s a shift from authoritative knowledge intent on shaping the public sphere, to a perspective on the public sphere as it is emerging in real time. We need to note the difference between our idea of how our life should have gone—and how it actually keeps unfolding!
While some may be lucky enough to say that these two descriptors easily coincided - family, education, job, achievements all working out according to plan - the language and content of the two scripts would always be ontologically different. The plan would be linear, measurable, objectively successful—or not. The experience of living through it would be emotional, psychological, dynamic, dramatic. Goals are less figures or determinate status to be achieved, as much as they are hopes and dreams that require courage, belief, stamina.
If we don't see the distinction between map and territory—and the different knowledges they imply—we will regularly be disappointed at our success rate in mobilising people behind our theories of change. We'll often be puzzled as to why citizens don't do what they should to save themselves and the planet.
When we mistake map for territory, then our prescriptions for wellbeing can only be progressed if governments pay for people to be in the salvific programme (UBI, care systems, shorter working weeks, healthy food and energy provided). When they can’t pay, progress falters. When the people themselves are seen as the problem to fix, rather than the resource to be discovered, we miss a powerful source of energy.
Meantime, more disruptive forces can step in to exploit these frustrating situations. Appeals can be made to human needs for belonging, meaning, status, but with these passions harnessed towards systems that are, to say the least, not ecologically regenerative.
When we founded the Alternative Global over six years ago, it was precisely in this disjunct between map and territory that we inserted ourselves. Just before Brexit in Europe and after the election of Trump in the USA, we were forced to acknowledge a hard truth.
Which was that all the solutions to the polycrisis might indeed be latent in the archives of theory and practice that comprise our socio-economic-political system. But people could not access these solutions: their lives as worker-consumers kept them unable to relate to the urgency of the crises, or the tools that might remedy it.
Instead, citizens live in a dream of agency - The American Dream, mostly - that if they work hard enough at mostly mindless jobs they will be rewarded with fulfilment. Freedom is equated with freedom to consume and belonging is generated through brand loyalty. Facebook and other tech giants, their computations sifting through our digital behaviour, know us better than we know ourselves; we find ourselves fulfilling their dreams, but not ours.
This is not only the reality for the most conventionally vulnerable, but for most of us reading this. We cannot switch our behaviour out of the old system with sufficient clarity, in order to give rise to a new one: our minds are continually trapped in complex compromises. Too few of us have the space or capacity to possess our thinking. We are cognitively and psychically invaded by a media that emphasises our helplessness; we also lack the mental or physical architecture for building an alternative future.
With only a single vote to cast between diametrically opposing parties every five years, there are no mechanisms that empower us to act directly on change. A Global Citizens Movement under the current conditions is unlikely to materialise except under top-down instruction, which would lack the energy of something more autonomous.
What is missing from the map-oriented framework, then, is not only the imperative of individual development and sovereignty - both internally and externally oriented - but the complex containers within which such development can happen. Third-sector global hubs are great for making a mark with communities and inviting people into their spaces. But these hubs rarely speak the language of human desire.
To be attractive, movements can only arise from the whole of the communities they hope to serve, not just “the usual suspects” - using language and culture that ensures ownership by the people implied. At the same time, these containers of human potential need global connectivity to each other, so they can flourish in a planet-friendly way: cosmolocal in mind, body and spirit.
The good news is that prototypical containers of this kind of new social energy already exists. At the Alternative Global, our word for them is community agency networks (CANs) - complex containers of regenerative, human creativity.
They might begin as ecovillages, community wealth builders or cooperatives - but they’re just as likely to be neighbourhood circles using WhatsApp groups. That is, places wherever human relationship burgeons. Their drive is community flourishing—so their gatherings are as likely to be festivals and celebrations as they are food and energy projects, all within a broadly fourth sector economic framework.
What we see as needing incubating and investment, in what we identify as a CANs movement, is:
· a personal practice of future-being, available to every citizen;
· brave experiments with new styles and ways of living;
· a media system capable of capturing and amplifying this new discourse about human development;
· technology that enables a better quality of participation in deliberation and decision-making, independent of party-political systems.
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Regular readers will know that these incubators - currently spaces of inquiry and design - are ongoing and available to join here. Let's see how the GTI respond to our contribution!