Reality is entropic. It has a way of eroding even the most noble and robust columns bearing the load of our institutionalized beliefs. It crumbles the old walls of our assumptions and forces us to build stronger, more resilient edifices of knowledge and practice.
Those of us who will shape the 21st century are facing unprecedented challenges, challenges that will require a thorough evaluation of our past and present social systems, and the design of bold new structures for organizing our species and governing the Earth. The governance of tomorrow must rest on the deepest understandings of reality we have today--and the ultimate design task for this century will be the redesign of governance.
Constituting:
Old Maps of Governance
The Newtonian politics that emerged at the end of the 18th Century were a triumph of human ingenuity and foresight. Applying the latest technologies and a scientific understanding of the universe to the design of governance, the crafters of the U.S. Constitution created an entirely new map for ordering society, one that successfully addressed the problems of previous systems, and eventually replaced the divine-autocratic forms that dominated the times.
While written constitutions based on mechanical cosmologies have enabled an enormous range of human possibilities and techno-social evolution, their capacity to deal with global climate change, chaotic economic fluctuations, and a host of other emerging disruptions appears to be insufficient. Moreover, a seemingly inherent blindness to the causes of human suffering and the inability to meet basic needs sustainably makes it clear that ad hoc reforms and amendments to our current systems will not suffice. To survive the 21st century, humanity must undertake a massive, collective program to redesign our basic governing structures worldwide. This reconception and redesign must be based on today's (and tomorrow's) technological landscape--and tap the most current and powerful understandings of life and the universe at hand.
New Models?
A Vision of Quantum Politics
Scientific, spiritual, philosophical, and mythological worldviews, shaped by available technologies, have provided the basic principles and values for the creation of social order. Indeed, at every size and scale, political and social experimentation has been a necessary and persistent human activity. However, with the exception of the relatively short-lived experiment with centralized communist statism, there has been little true innovation in governance since the creation of the U.S. Constitution. If mechanical governance is fatally flawed both technologically and cosmologically, then where else can we look?
The findings of scientists looking at the behavior of sub-atomic particles have completely overturned many of our fundamental notions about reality, or at least shown them to be incomplete. The Newtonian universe, with its orderly balance of forces and its direct, rational process of cause and effect, is only one particular state in the more complex--and utterly weird--quantum world. In this world, observation has a direct impact on the presence and form of matter. Randomness and irreducible uncertainty are woven into the fabric of reality. Particles in the universe are deeply connected, entangled, and can influence other particles at a distance. Although often counterintuitive to our common sense, quantum physics has proven to be the most successful physical theory of the last century.
Accepting the premise that political systems should be based on the most powerful and extensive theories of how the universe works, scholars from across disciplines have begun to look to quantum physics for new principles of governance. However, making the case for the limitations of a Newtonian system has been much easier than showing how a quantum politics might actually function in our world today. And, operationalizing the quantum view of reality into a working structure is a profound design dilemma.
Political Designers:
Architects of a New Governance
So, if we have design dilemmas, then we need to find design solutions. "Design thinking" seems to be applied to everything these days--everything, that is, except governance. Thomas Jefferson, the architect, applied his knowledge of form and function to the construction of government. However, we rarely see designers, architects, or engineers doing the same today, much less political scientists.
Perhaps the sheer enormity of the task is too daunting. Or perhaps a categorical disconnect between design and politics--based on misconceptions about what politics actually is--stands in the way. In recent years, some of the leading designers and architects of sustainability have dodged the challenge of applying design thinking to governance, wishing to avoid "politics." They have echoed the widely held conception of politics as, at best, the institutions of policy-making and enforcement, and at worst, the practice of the powerful in securing their place in the hierarchy.
This view of politics is naïve and disempowering: there's no need for an architect if the house is already built. But, if we allow ourselves to look at governance as an empty lot, and take stock of both the needs and resources in front of us, we can more freely imagine the kinds of structures we can and need to build. If we view politics as the process by which the basic givens and rules of society are constructed, then we can see how design thinking becomes productively political.
This then, is a call to action to designers and architects--to join forces with scientists, artists, technologists, indigenous philosophers, community organizers and forward thinking entrepreneurs, to begin to design the transformation, and to build truly post-Newtonian, 21st Century systems of governance.