Spokes of the Flourishing Commons: Salon Gatherings
There are many ways of knowing and a cultural commons is something that emerges from all of them. Part Two of a series exploring the myriad forums of exchange that make up these Flourishing Commons.
Back at the very beginning of Flourishing Commons, I wrote about a spectrum of things that in some way sparked this newsletter and these commons. One of those is the Flourishing Salons and I said then that this would be a space to be more spacious with the ideas that emerge from those gatherings.
There will be future posts that build on conversations that start during those salons, so I wanted to provide a brief background.
What are the Flourishing Salons? Why do I consider them a component of the Flourishing Commons?
The salons were started as a way to grow a new Community of Practice that operates in the spaces between fields of science, art, engineering, design, culture, public and private life. They are the live counerpart to the living, cross-medium, active and asynchronous conversations that characterize a commons. The concepts of antidisciplinary and flourishing-seeking introduce the salons.
An antidisciplinary sensibility
The salons were originally animated by the belief that this antidisciplinary space requires a new sensibility that must emerge from an enhanced plurality of thought.
First a few words about this provocative term “antidisciplinary.” Antidisciplinary means increased plurality of thought and transdisciplinary connections. It does
not mean ‘against’ disciplines and other terms that could be used are polydisciplinary and omnidisciplinary. As we wrote in a piece about the science of team science [McGranaghan et al., 2020]:
Antidisciplinary is anything that does not fit comfortably or completely within traditional academic disciplines–a field of study with its own particular words, frameworks, and methods. Antidisciplinary grows from the concept of sharing valuable information from across disciplines to catalyze any single discipline. Thus, antidisciplinary is in many ways synonymous with ideas that promote wider sharing and openness, ideas that perhaps enjoy wider celebration in the arts and design communities. Antidisciplinary is about building the standards that promote interoperability, between systems, individuals, and disciplines. But it is more than simply defining the standard.
That step is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Antidisciplinary requires that one build on the new foundation for communication and interaction to embrace research that does not fall into one discipline. It requires creation
and innovation – sharing ideas, combining, rearranging, amalgamating, in the service of producing the needed new.
We believe that the path to antidisiplinarity lies in an embrace of radical collaboration, new scales of interaction, and the corresponding changes (in thinking, in community structure, and in support) that must accompany it. This is inextricable, prerequisite to flourishing.
Flourishing
What is flourishing? Here are a few cobbled, inadequate, incomplete thoughts:
the capacity to play several different roles in the course of a day, the capacity to be something other than a worker in a meaningful way in the course of a day; to be fully expressed -Paraphrased from Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics
Using our wealth well to enrich ourselves spiritually, enrich ourselves mentally, and doing social good -James Suzman
a capacity to enter imaginatively into the minds of people with whom you don’t immediately agree and look for the charitable explanations for behavior which doesn’t appeal to you - Alain de Botton
These could go on seemingly without end. Flourishing will continue to defy final definition. Indeed flourishing means different things in different contexts. But it is clear that flourishing is not a thing and not static, but rather an unfolding, a process; it is a movement toward the future, a project.
Perhaps the way that these commons and the salons think of flourishing is best guided by two of the greate sages of the concept, Simone de Beauvoir and W.E.B. Du Bois, together parameterizing and outlining a framework within which to search for flourishing:
The individual is defined only by his1 relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others -Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Co-workers in the kingdom of culture -W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks
We use the word flourishing because it implies a more muscular framework than we are used to talking about, not one of constant uninterrupted bliss and progress, but an acknowledgement of the difficulties and living amongst them.
We have been animated by the very question, “What is flourishing?”
A venue for flourishing: the salon
For three years we have cultivated the antidisciplinary sensibility and flourishing-seeking through a new avenue for interaction – the salon. We use the term salon because of its historical position as the seat of cultural hubs and actuators of cultural and intellectual development. Our events have been modeled after these culture-altering exchange of ideas, providing the critical discussion, information and tools to identify and explore new directions and opportunities.
These salons are gatherings that bring together 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.
Flourishing Salons and these Commons
To talk about the importance of flourishing and the relationship between the salons and this newsletter, I want to step back and introduce the concept of the commons. The commons is a resource that is owned, used, and managed by a community. A commons is a social regime for managing a collectively owned resource. In 1968, Garrett Hardin published what has become a seminal work The Tragedy of the Commons in which he posed that all commons are doomed to unravel by self-interest:
The tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use,[1][2] act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. [Hardin, 1968]
But in 1990, Elinor Ostrom published a work that eclipsed this idea that all commons are doomed to deteriorate, exposed it as a myth more appropriately called the tragedy of the unregulated resources. She helped us understand that there were solutions to commons problems that did not require state intervention or corporation: that there are robust self-organized governance regimes that led to flourishing commons spaces. The question that we’ve been asking since and continue to ask is, “How to govern commons and how to bring about the flourishing of commons spaces?” Now the concept of the commons is much wider than merely natural resource domains like forests and fisheries, with the spaces where we share knowledge, communicate, and gather vitally important commons spaces: digital commons, knowledge commons, epistemic commons.
That question and the recent expansion of the concept of the commons guide the Flourishing Salons and these Flourishing Commons.
What's happening now? How do you participate in the Flourishing Salons?
The Flourishing Salons is now collaborating with the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS) to converge kindred efforts to create living conversations, muscular discourse, and cross-domain/-cultural exchange to build flourishing collectives and systems in a new series called “Wonder Workshops.”
Wonder Workshops carry forward the goal of the Flourishing Salons to activate new communities of practice that permit intersectionality, liminality, and consilience (thinking and thriving in the liminal spaces between fields).
Get a glimpse of what these workshops look like and reach out to join the communities of practice! Future posts here will follow some of these workshops, bringing dialogue here to sustain the interactions in-between virtual gatherings.