Category: Blog Wisdom

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In the Dark of the Night: Public Administration in the 21st Century II

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Officers Call

Responding to  Harrison Owen: Public Administration in the 21st Century II.

I think of consciousness from two perspectives.  Both may seem plodding.  I don’t think of it in terms of evolution, understood as involving some novel emergence, like growing a new organ. An improvement of consciousness occurs within the kind of physical and social makeup and potential that humans have had for a very long time and will be stuck with for a very long time.

One perspective is individual development.  I’m reading Bernard Lonergan right now, so I will use his terms.  He uses lists and says there are five degrees of “self-transcendence.”  (Don’t go looking for any long explanation.  I’m working off his Reader, and an excerpt from a 1980 article called “A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion.”)   “The fourth is the discovery of a truth.. the grasp in a manifold of data of the sufficiency of the evidence for our affirmation or negation.  The fifth is the successive negotiation of the stages of morality and/or identity till we reach the point where we discover that it is up to ourselves to decide for ourselves what we are to make of ourselves, where we decisively meet the challenge of that discovery, where we set ourselves apart from the drifters. …becomes a successful way of life ..when we fall in love, whether the love be the domestic love.. or the love of our fellows whose well-being we promote and defend, or the love of God above all in whom we love our neighbor as ourselves.”

This seems to fit with what struck me in Robert Kegan’s book, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization.  He has a nice little progression on “mental capability”, going from socialized mind, self-authoring mind, and self-transforming mind.   The self-authoring mind is a very clever fellow who figures out how to get things done and apply concepts.  They are the leaders today but a few percent get beyond it. Kegan even seems to have some tests that can detect this. And I saw his deceptively simple unlocking workshop really make a difference for several people.

The other perspective is culture.  Lonergan points to a first enlightenment, with Newton, that swept away feudalism.  We are well into a second enlightenment that relativizes it all.  “Just as the first enlightenment had its carrier in the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, so the second may find a role and task in offering hope and providing leadership to the masses alienated by large establishments under bureaucratic management.” (From a 1975 paper in the Third Collection, p56-65.)

While all this sounds plodding, it can also get very sophisticated (in explaining our degraded culture and recapturing lost insight) without at the same time being taken in by some new age or guru, an impulse that has confused and derailed us. (My other guide on this is Eric Voegelin, who understood the errors of gnosticism.)

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Harrison Owen: Public Administration in the 21st Century II

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Officers Call, Policies

Good show to In the Dark of the Night with the “Three Story lines” I find myself in substantial agreement with all that is said about the downsides. However I might put an additional twist on #1 – Changing Consciousness. It certainly can have the air of fantasy, especially when played in the mode of “The Age of Aquarius.” But the positive side might be that it has happened before on multiple occasions – so why not again? I think there is broad agreement that such shifts have happened, and not just in the esoteric community. Less agreement as to the exact phases and mechanisms of development (evolution) – and mild to wild arguments about the details. Developmental Psychologists, Anthropologists, Sociologists all have their schema – along with the esoteric community. It is even possible to do some useful comparative study, for example, Ken Wilbur’s The Spectrum of Consciousness (Quest Books, 1993)

The schema I offered (my take on the Great Chain) certainly falls at the low end of sophistication when compared to the other efforts, but  it has been  around a lot longer than all the rest which suggests a certain historical viability. And it was not my purpose to rewrite the history of consciousness, a task for which I have zero competence – but rather to get something on the table for discussion. Five Easy Pieces, as it were – you might say it was “good enough for government work.”

Anyhow, if shifts do take place, and the schema I offered is a rough approximation of the situation – why would that matter? One might argue that you simply had to fold your hands and wait for the inevitable to take place – and many people would do that – so why bother to even think about it? I think there are at least two reasons. First – when life gets confusing it is helpful if you can see the dreck as part of a process as opposed to mad randomness. I’m told that women experience this in the birthing process, each moment of which can seem like insane hell – and it is also an ordered sequence that gets you to a desired outcome (a baby). The second reason is that with some knowledge of the process, it may be possible to facilitate its progress, which of course is what a Midwife does, and Breathing helps.

You don’t design the process, can’t change it – No skipping of steps! But you can facilitate its flow. That is what happens in birthing. Could it also happen in the birthing of consciousness? Not just with each individual, one individual at a time, but all together, or at least in large groups? I think we have more than a few clues as to how that might happen – none of which include storming the walls of the ancient regime or convening the global design team. I think.

Ho.

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In the Dark of Night: Public Administration in the 21st Century

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Officers Call, Policies

I see three story lines in this particular piece and often in much of your work in the past decade since you encountered Tom Atlee and those he introduced you to (one could say he did change your own consciousness):

Line 1.  We are going to change consciousness

Line 2.  The prior regime needs to be destroyed

Line 3.  The times allow for, and cause us to, organize differently

I am sympathetic with all three, but each has its downside.

Continue reading “In the Dark of Night: Public Administration in the 21st Century”

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Harrison Owen: Public Administration in the 21st Century

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Officers Call
Harrison Owen

Asked to comment on the preliminary abstract for a new article, below the line at Search: public administration in 21 century, Harrison responded as follows.

I like your story line, if only because you reach a conclusion that closely parallels one of my own. Coming off a very different base, I found myself convinced that we are at the cusp of a transformative moment, caught between a control oriented, rationalistic awareness (consciousness) of ourselves and our world, verging into an interactive, self organizing consciousness. And “cusps” are always painful and disorienting, which would seem to be an accurate, albeit mild, characterization of our times.

—  extract from the end advanced here—

The real issue was that The Millennium Organization was not a “new program” – it was a profound paradigm shift. And if Thomas Kuhn has taught us anything it is that paradigm shifts are counterintuitive, painful and always the last thing that anybody in their right mind would care to do. Even worse shifting paradigms is not something you can think or reason yourself into. You can’t plan it, design it, program it, manage it, nor control it. The journey forward follows a very different route. I believe there are any number of useful approaches – but none of them come from the Old Proactive Toolbox. I think.

—read the full story—

Continue reading “Harrison Owen: Public Administration in the 21st Century”

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Seth Godin: Asimov to the Edges–Perceiving Knowledge

Blog Wisdom, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence
Seth Godin Home

From Asimov to Zelazny

When I was in high school, I read every single science fiction book in the Clearfield Public Library. Probably 250 books altogether.

I don't think I had a big plan, I was mostly looking for something to do. What I discovered, though, was that domain knowledge, edge to edge knowledge of a field, was incredibly valuable. It helped me understand where the edges were, and it gave me the confidence to be selective, to develop a taxonomy, to see what was going on.

As the deluge of information grows and choices continue to widen (there's no way I could even attempt to cover science fiction from scratch today, for example), it's easy to forget the benefits of acquiring this sort of (mostly) complete understanding in a field. I'm not even sure it matters which field you pick.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Expertise is a posture as much as it is a volume of knowledge.

Reading every single trade journal, for example, or understanding the marketing, engineering and sales of your field–there are countless ways to go deep instead of merely paying lip service to the current flavor of the moment.

Phi Beta Iota:  Dick Klavans (Maps of Science) has marked the fragmented edges as well as the fragmented Strengths of Nations.  Our task now is to recreate the whole–the unification of diversified knowledge in the public interest.  There are eight tribes of knowledge, not one, or two, or three.

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Koko: Oil Prices & Human Ingenuity

03 Economy, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Koko the Reflexive

Published 23 August 2005, the Ludwig von Mises Institute article by Pierre Lemieux discusses the actual decline of resource prices–including “scarce” resources–and the reason: advances in human ingenuity.  This supports our basic proposition on this web site, that the single best investment that could be made to create a prosperous world at peace is to give the five billion poor free access to the Internet so as to nurture and harvest their brainpower.

The Oil Price Mirage

Mises Daily: Tuesday, August 23, 2005 by

EXTRACT

Until his death in 1997, economist Julian Simon predicted a continuous decline in resource prices. In 1980, he made a famous bet with environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon’s bet was that a $1,000 basket of any five metals chosen by Ehrlich would be worth less (in constant dollars) 10 years later. Ehrlich lost. In 1990, the value of the basket at current market prices was down more than 50%. Ehrlich had to send a $576.07 check to Simon, representing the drop in the basket value. In fact, the prices of all the metals chosen by Ehrlich had fallen.[5]

In his challenging 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, Simon showed that resource prices had generally decreased over time. The relative price of oil (in terms of other goods) has fallen by perhaps as much as two-thirds between the 1860s and today. During the same period, the price of oil in terms of salaries has decreased by more than 90%.