Collective sensemaking and the knowledge commons
A few philosophical and cultural comments on the role of civic engagement and participatory creation in modern society
In May 2019 I started the Origins Podcast as a space to explore questions in a longer form way. It was a time in my life when the categories I had long held were irremediably ill-equipped to describe the world I was experiencing.
Across those life-altering conversations I was cultivating an idea for an even more spacious medium to provide open, welcoming, diverse, and participatory discourse. The concept that was forming was akin to the salons of past generations--gatherings that were cultural hubs and actuators of social and intellectual development. These gatherings would be called 'Flourishing Salons,' and the events would be modeled after salons of eras past, providing the critical discussion, information and tools the society of the time needed.
The logistics of finding and funding a regular venue for these exchanges and physically gathering were restrictive. Then the pandemic hit in February 2020 and amidst the overwhelming change to daily life and tragedy was also uncommon opportunity to connect globally and with less burden. In the new virtual-everything space, I launched the nascent salons with thought-leaders that cut across the spectrum of science, engineering, art, and design with the purpose of sharing ideas, creating new connections and communities, and growing capabilities for flourishing systems. Now those salons are an official activity of the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences1.
Origins and the Flourishing Salons continue and there will be longer posts in this newsletter on both. Subscribers will get these as soon as they come out.
I wanted to reify the underlying values and philosophies of those forums as elements of these Flourishing Commons.
How do we make sense of this increasingly complex world? How do we find organization that we can use to structure our experience and understand the world and one another around us? Our flourishing depends on this sensemaking. But it is more than flourishing, it is our very survival. We are each participants in a race between the growing power of technology and the growing wisdom with which we manage it. To make it explicit, I believe sensemaking is generating the wisdom we need for now. EO Wilson captured the essence of our moment in this race,
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
Wilson's prescient words outline this piece. How do we pause long enough to rethink things? As individuals? As collectives? Understanding how we rethink our situation is the prerequisite to building new wisdom and subsequently the systems, practices, and institutions that embody it.
The first thing we need to realize is that the problems of the 21st century are increasingly complex. Stephen Hawking called this the century of complexity2. The second thing is that these problems are beyond the capacity of any one mind. What this means is that we need to better collaborate, better understand how to generate collective intelligence, and ultimately how to build the social institutions that facilitate and enable it.
How do we do it? I feel that the first realization is that we must learn to introduce pauses, lags, latencies in our instantaneous culture to have a deeper think. In the indispensable Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman outlines his pioneering work about System One and System Two thinking. The book in its entirety deserves a spot on your bedside table, but briefly, these systems are the two operating procedures of the brain. System One is unconscious, automatic, effortless and does the vast majority of our thinking. System Two is deliberate and conscious, effortful and the seat of our 'rational' reasoned thinking. Somewhere beneath 5% of our thinking, System Two is subordinated to System One.
Perhaps making wisdom is about engaging System Two and valuing slow thinking to a greater extent in our culture. Perhaps the function of space, slack, and lag in making our decisions and arriving at our conclusions is what we need to sensemake collectively--room to consider more deeply. Perhaps this suspension of immediate decisions would afford us a transformation from reactivity to responsivity. No longer would the loudest and most quick to speak dictate the sense we make of something. This welcomes longer deliberation and more participation in the sensemaking. It certainly led me to question my own assumptions and categories.
The implications of this idea are immense. Political activist, Lawrence Lessig, writes about 'slow democracy'--building a discussion and an action of democracy on a slow modality--invoking the slow thinking as a solution to the world’s unsurpassed best idea for a governing structure of freedom and equality. We need exchanges that promote longer form thinking together, allowing us to consider a question across longer periods of time and in more depth. This is the foundational principle of Origins (see, for instance, this conversation with philosopher and MacArthur Genius recipient Elizabeth Anderson) and Flourishing Salons.
What emerges from this longer deliberation? Could the institutions that are created be more capable of helping us navigate our changing world? For instance, what form would social media take if it was not optimizing for attention, likes, and followers? In perhaps the most enlightening piece on the gamification and simplification of our communication, philosopher C Thi Nguyen unravels how Twitter shapes our goals for discourse by making conversation something like a game, and in the process stripping our information exchange of its richness3. With a slower modality, one open to nuance and uncertainty, might we have a healthier and more collective social sensemaking sphere?
These are open questions, but we can palpate answers to them. An inimitable sage of our time, Rebecca Solnit, wrote, "You cannot write a single line without a cosmology.”4 What she means is that she has to know her values to do anything. What are the values on which systems and institutions of better collective sensemaking will emerge? More deliberation and participation? I suggest patience, pause, and a longer view of time5 are part of that cosmology.
How do these values converge? Perhaps in new spaces where conversations are allowed to evolve and live, places to explore the big questions.
So, we need better deliberative mechanisms and the spaces that provide them, better ways to make sense of things together, better community that can scale to the problems of today. That is what these Flourishing Commons are. They are a place for co-creating the living curriculum for the modern citizen. They are a place to hone and spread those literacies we all need, an experiment in greater civic participation and hopefully a more flourishing democracy. Indeed, Danielle Allen wrote in the entirely visionary treatise on the future of American democracy, Our Common Purpose6,
To overcome … democratic deficits, we need to understand citizenship both as a matter of formal rights, such as voting and running for office, and also in broad, ethical terms that demand engagement from all who reside in the United States, whatever their legal citizenship status may be. A broad ethical definition of citizenship focuses on participation in common life, contributions to the common good, and efforts to serve common interests. When an individual makes such positive contributions to a self-governing society, that person is often regarded as “a good citizen.”
…a healthy constitutional democracy depends on a virtuous cycle in which responsive political institutions foster a healthy civic culture of participation and responsibility, while a healthy civic culture—a combination of values, norms, and narratives—keeps our political institutions responsive and inclusive.
These commons are not alone in thinking about the future of our epistemic sphere. I want to make the point that it is not about being first or heard or ‘right,’ it is about collectivity and raising all voices. This is such an expansive space, we need as many people and groups thinking about it as possible and we should overcome our default rivalrous dynamics and become more cooperative.
In that ethos, I want to point to just a few of them who are kindred thinkers. There is an entire category of groups thinking about the future of governance and trust in the face of existential threats, including the Future of Life Institute7, Perspectiva8, the Consilience Project9. I can think of no better way to end this post and to help it reverberate across your experience as you go about your days and weeks than the Consilience Project’s clarion call for the commons and better sensemaking institutions as inextricable from a democracy prepared for our 21st century future10,
Democracy cannot function without an epistemically healthy public sphere that makes it possible for democratic self-government to achieve successful outcomes, maintain its legitimacy, and avoid runaway concentrations of power in society. The institutional structures responsible for maintaining our epistemic commons have faltered. Only a new movement for cultural enlightenment can harness the energy needed to reboot and revamp our ailing institutions—or generate new ones entirely—and thereby restore our democracy.
As the brilliant linguist and anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson advocates, let's facilitate small groups that get together and dare to think new ideas and pass them on. That is what I hope happens with these newsletters - readers to participate by leaving comments and writing their own pieces to grow and mature the conversation; give it life.
Success here will be judged based on the density of the collaborative networks that emerge from these posts and the diffusion of ideas. Results won’t be immediate as work that is generative of better sensemaking and solutions to our grand challenges unfolds in the long-view of time, over generational time.
A spiritual view of time is a long view of time — seasonal and cyclical, resistant to the illusion of time as a bully, time as a matter of deadlines. Human transformation takes time — longer than we want it to — but it is what is necessary for social transformation. -On Being Grounding Virtues11
So, add to what will always be imperfect, incomplete, inadequate ideas in these posts, share them with others, and join Flourishing Salons and Origins in figuring out how to more collectively, relationally, beautifully make sense.
http://www.cpnas.org/
Nguyen, C.. (2020). How Twitter Gamifies Communication. 10.1093/oso/9780198833659.003.0017.
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose
https://futureoflife.org/
https://systems-souls-society.com/
https://onbeing.org/social-healing-at-on-being/the-six-grounding-virtues-of-the-on-being-project/