(Roughly) Daily

Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post, Nathan Gardels, editor of Noema Magazine, on a new book by Children of a Modest Star, “A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences” by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman…

Globalization was about markets, information flows and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat. That, in a nutshell, is the core thesis of a new paradigm-shifting book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman titled “Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for the Age of Crises.”

The concept of planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.

“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.

As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”

The open question is how, and if, human governance in the late-stage Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining.

Paradoxically, planetary-scale connectivity is also what divides us. Convergence entails divergence because the universalizing and rationalizing logic of technology and economics that ties the world together operates in a wholly different dimension than the ethos of politics and culture, rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind.

While the emergent world-spanning cognitive apparatus may be sprouting the synapses of a synchronized planetary intelligence, it clashes with the tribal ingathering of nations and civilizations that remain anchored in their historical and spatial identity.

Consequently, this new domain of encompassing awareness is — so far — as much the terrain of contestation as of common ground…

[ Gardel unpacks Blake’s and Gilman’s proposition, which would devolve some decision-making on some issues, even as it globalized others. By way of addressing the Herculean challenge of creating the equitable, workable global system for addressing global challenges they [propose– a task made the more difficult by the divergence in values discussed yesterday— he invokes an episode from American history…]

… At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, America was morphing from an agricultural, largely rural society into an urban and industrial one. Cultural norms and familiar ways of living were in upheaval. Political institutions that had become dysfunctional were challenged — not so unlike the disruptive transition to digital society and planetarity we are experiencing at present.

The turmoil of transition in those days gave birth to what became known as the Progressive Era. Its progenitors sought to address the new social concerns of a more complex society — working hours and safety conditions in newfangled factories, women’s suffrage, public health exposure from mass food processing, poor urban infrastructure from housing to water and electricity, the concentration of power in the railroad and banking trusts as well as exploitative private utility companies.

The Progressive Era response in the American states was to move in two directions at once. The movement promoted direct democracy whereby citizens could make laws and enforce accountability directly, skirting the corrupt and bought-off legislators of the patronage machines, through the citizens’ ballot initiative, the referendum and the recall of elected officials. At the same time, elected Progressive governors delegated authority to nonpartisan experts for commissions that regulated commerce, banking, railroads and electric utilities on behalf of the public interest. Professional city managers, unelected but accountable to direct democracy and the elected officials who appointed them, came into being for the first time to competently administer ever more complex urban environments.

In time, the reforms that resulted from this pairing of citizen engagement and technocracy percolated up to the national level into institutions such as the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Food and Drug Administration and led to the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour working day and women’s right to vote.

The point of this brief detour into American history is not to suggest the unworkable proposition of direct democracy at a planetary scale, but simply to say that it is well within the capacity of the political imagination to marry modes of consent with delegated authority in a way that confers legitimacy.

The paradigm shift and governing innovations Blake and Gilman propose in “Children of a Modest Star” are no less realizable over time than what has come before because, now just as then, changing circumstances demand it…

A paradigm shift from globalization to planetary governance? “The Third Great Decentering,” @NoemaMag @JonathanSBlake @nils_gilman.

* Irish proverb (in Gaelic, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”), quoted by Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin

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As we think systemically, we might recall that on this date in 1998 The Price Is Right aired its milestone 5,000th episode (the longest-running game show in history, it’s over 10,000 episodes to date, and still chugging along). Every prize given away on that episode was a car.