The three civilizational priorities of the next societal transition

Can We Truly Change Our Civilizational Model? What we can learn from Peter Pogany's 'Rethinking the World'.

This contribution contains three parts:

1. My editorial contribution on what <exactly> are the priorities of the next civilizational shift

2. Some documentary material on the author that inspired me to this way of thinking: Peter Pogany

3. A professionally well done video conversation where I summarize the logic of the cosmo-local approach

Part 1 : The three axes of change

A positive response to the question in the subtitle - Can We Truly Change Our Civilizational Model? - might seem like hubris, or at the very least a gross overestimation of humanity’s ability to influence the systems in which it exists. Yet, this is precisely the wager proposed in the work I urge you to read, i.e. Peter Pogany’s ‘Rethinking the Word’.

First, we must understand that a civilization is a model of human organization, providing the overarching rules for coexistence—not only among human groups but also with all living beings and even the living matter surrounding us.

Humanity can preserve its relative rationality, but it must also recognize that rationality depends on the non-rational—those fundamental choices that determine how and on what "object" we focus our thoughts. Think of how unproven axioms are necessary to make a rational mathematics possible. This is what, anthropologically and historically speaking, religion and spirituality originally provided, the minimal unspoken premises of societal organization, validated transcendentally. From this we moved to the secular premises, but also the struggles for societal control, by competing post-religious worldviews. Today, this is my own premise, we are moving to ‘constructive networks’ as the way to thrash out competing worldviews.

There is some material I recommend reading to understand this way of looking at societal change:

• The Religious Ground Motives Behind Human Thought, by Herman Dooyeweerd (i.e. Transcendental Pragmatism)

• The Root Metaphor Theory in the Fourfold World Hypotheses Model of Stephen Pepper which distinguishes Formism (similarity), Mechanism (machine), Contextualism (historical act) and Organicism (living system)

• The Theory of Thought-Shapers: "Thought-shapers are essentially non-conceptual contents that operate in the construction of mental imagery”.

Arnold Toynbee, the renowned English macro-historian and author of the 12-volume The Study of History, believed that civilizational models themselves depend on what he called “creative minorities.” These are groups capable of inspiring action among the larger, less-educated, and less-visionary masses. At pivotal moments in history—such as the emergence of early civilizations or the spiritual reforms of the Axial Age, marked by ethical and revolutionary movements—these minorities sought to restrain warrior classes and limit the abuses within civilizations. Think of how the original christian hermits, establishing themselves in the desert, became thriving and productive monastic agrarian-craft communities, and through the Church, a vital half of an emerging new ‘feudal’ civilization. Samo Burja goes a step further in his Great Founder Theory, but I prefer to see the interplay between both. Note how Constantine’s elevation of the Church was equalled by Emperor’s Ashoka’s elevation of Buddhism, and how Alexander moved to expand the purview of Greek philosophy.

Every time civilizations invented new extractive techniques to increase surplus, counter-movements arose to regulate these extractive capacities.

Before the emergence of a global, capitalist civilization, civilizational models were geographically limited. Competition and conflict between different ways of “living together” were inevitable. In this context, the Polish macro-historian Felix Koneczny predated Samuel Huntingon’s famous “Clash of Civilizations”, and I strongly recommend checking him out.

This expansive and competitive nature of civilizational models created cyclical dynamics: to win in their struggles, civilizations had to overexploit available resources, leading to fundamental crisis moments, which included full collapse. During these periods of great transformation, the so-called “dark ages,” humanity had to reinvent its coexistence with new principles, as survivors recognized the necessity of spiritual revolutions or reforms to replace failing models. These dark ages were thus moments of discontinuity and bifurcation, during which human consciousness charted new directions. Pitirim Sorokin is the great theoretician of those shifts, from Ideate to Sensate (spiritual vs materialistic) forms of civilization, and back again.

While such changes were previously geographically confined—albeit on vast, almost continental scales—the situation today is markedly different.

The reason for this is essentially the ‘planetarization’ of human culture, technology, and economics, and the resulting ecological meta-crises. No matter how different the human civilizational cultures that we inherited, and the sincere attempts to relink post-Westphalian nation-states to their civilizational background, under the guise of ‘Civilization States’, all countries in the world organize themselves in the two major forms that became the norm in our world civilization: the nation-state and the capital-driven market. In that sense, there is really a world civilization today, and it’s crisis is a crisis for every culture that lives in it and with it.

This, and two other factors which I explain here below, indicate what precisely needs to be changed in the current transitional process.

A Unique Moment in History: The Three-in-One Transformational Moment

1. Humanity and Gaia

The relationship between humanity and the Earth’s living system, Gaia, has become problematic. Civilization, as a relationship between land and city, also reflects humanity’s relationship with all living beings. A model based on pure domination, extraction, and radical separation is no longer tenable, as we are now in a phase of ecological destruction threatening vital balances. Humanity must conceive a new, more participatory “contract” with all the beings upon which we depend.

= > Task #1: A new contract between humanity and inter-dependent life

2. A Globalized Solidarity

Human civilization has become planetary, yet the social systems of solidarity necessary for a dignified life are in relative decline in the West, and largely absent for the global majority. The social contract between humanity’s productive and managerial classes must be rethought on a global scale. The aim is to avoid major local and global class war, or its degeneration in multiple identitarian conflicts.

= > Task #2: A new social contract, but for the whole of humanity, not just for Western working classes

3. Strengthening Expanded Forms of Multilateralism

We must reconcile the differentiation of competitive civilizations and indigenous cultures with a new universalism compatible with those differences. Technology has created a layer of planetary self-organization by affinity groups, which, in some respects, is “post-geographic” and even “post-civilizational.” How can we integrate the local-geographic with the virtual-nonlocal?

But that doesn’t mean the current geographical order is not problematic: there is a strong desire to protect, or revive, local differentialisms at different scales, whether through localism, bioregionalism, or the revival of the power of the old Westphalian nation-state model. This differentialist push must be recognized, and harmonized with planetarization.

Local human groups and their ecologies, particularly commons-based institutions, must evolve into cosmo-local structures to act as a counterweight to state and market systems. Alongside transnational financial systems and international state systems, we must build cosmo-local commons institutions.

Humanity must reinforce multilateralism, both inter-state and trans-state, to recognize new multipolarities and protect ecological systems that transcend local and regional scales. How can we transcend the historical condition of competitive cultural groups and achieve global peace?

I have shared my own proposals before, so here I am just summarizing my essential beliefs:

• Because the nation-state is a historical and political entity, it is too removed from the local thermo-dynamic equilibrium, hence bioregionalism is a more appropriate model at the level below the nation-state.

• Because local regenerative communities are dwarfed in power by potentially hostile nation-states and extractive forms of trans-national capital, these productive communities need to be strengthened cosmo-locally.

• Each productive community has therefore two interfaces: one with its bioregional neighbors, united in the effort to regenerate the local territories, and one with other trans-local players in the same domain, its trans-local coalition.

This combination is what we call cosmo-localism, the integration of the local and the global, to create a new social bloc of both bioregionally and cosmo-locally organized regenerative and productive communities.

=> Task #3: Establishing Cosmo-Local ‘Magisteria of the Commons’, for peacemaking and protecting the Web of Life

These three changes are not technologically neutral, they require appropriate value-compatible technological systems.

Transforming the Technosphere

To date, Gaia (called Earth System by scientists) —our mature biosphere—has enabled the development of a human-made Technosphere. However, this Technosphere remains immature and damages the biosphere. The task before us is to transform the Technosphere, ensuring its long-term evolution aligns not only with human survival but also with the flourishing of the biosphere. Humanity remains a Promethean entity, incapable of abandoning its aspirations for transcendence, whether material or immaterial. If we succeed in this transformation, humanity could thrive for millions of years, potentially even beyond Earth. My own belief is that the next transformation cannot be just an Ideate rejection of the Sensate, but needs to be an integrative transformation that balances the material and the spiritual.

I believe this necessity of a technology-inclusive transformation requires transcending the current struggles between the Up- wingers and the Down-wingers. In a certain sense, the down-wingers are the spiritualist reaction to materialist excess, while the Upwingers want ever more technology to solve humanity’s problems. But it may be more paradoxical, as contemporary Down-wingers worship a mostly materialist nature, while Up-wingers are trans-humanist who want to achieve spiritual transcendence through materialist-technological means.

As Steve Fuller formulates it:

"UpWingers (or “Blacks”), above all, anticipate futures of greater energy consumption. They tend towards technological solutionism, their view of the future is in the accelerationism/singularitarian spectrum. … DownWingers (or “Greens”), broadly, anticipate futures of reduced energy consumption (through efficiency or destruction, if you’d like). They tend towards localization/resilience thought, their view of the future (tend to be) … declinist .”

A Collective Awakening

This time, it will not be just a “creative minority”, although someone does have to start the process, but humanity as a whole that must awaken to accomplish this monumental task. It will not be artificial intelligence that leads this transformation, but rather self-learning and collaborative collectives, organized in networks, who may use AI to good effect. The good news is that the techniques required already exist, and we have documented this ‘true’ regenerative accelerationism in the P2P Foundation for fifteen years now. They can be learned and improved upon collectively. As William Irwin Thompson has argued or shown, in previous transitions, it was in the dark ages that human consciousness radically changed. Think of change in your personal life: if you have only one problem, you can hang on to other successful or coping strategies in your life, but if all aspects of your life go bad at the same time, a more fundamental reorientation is required. It’s the same for civilizational crises, when they are really profound, fundamental change is required. What we need now are productive, ‘contributive’ groups, not just actively engaged in regeneratively producing basic human needs, but with a deep capacity for self-reflection, both individually and collectively.

My concluding prompt is therefore: Become a member of these creative majorities. Become a builder of the new civilization.

Part 2: Visualizing Peter Pogany’s Vision of the New Global System

The three-pronged strategy of change was largely inspired by the work of Peter Pogany, author of the remarkable book, Rethinking the World.

Dave McLeod has produced a remarkable introduction to his work.

It contains the following visualization, which distinguishes different phases in the globalization of the world. In this vision, we are now poised for a further transformation of the global system, which first emerged around the 16th century.

See below how he sees the phase change from Global System 2 to Global System 3. He misses the distributed network aspects that have become more obvious today, but nevertheless, we believe his vision of the evolution of governance and social contracts to be spot on.

Part Three: A video overview of the Cosmo-Localist Approach to Human Transformation

I invite you to watch this professionally produced conversation. I believe it is our best webcast from 2024.

Cosmo-Local Commoning with Web3 - Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation)

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With thanks to Matthew Monahan of Ma Earth.