Part of co-intelligence is collective
intelligence. The collective intelligence of whole societies
is called societal intelligence.
Societal intelligence involves, among other things,
The more all three of these factors are present, the more useful
diverse perspectives will be to the collective mind, and the less
likely the whole culture will find itself stuck at one extreme
or another (unable to respond) or torn apart from within by the
expansion of extremism in a contracting middle ground.
In most technological issues the public discourse is usually somewhat
extreme. Intense discussions occur in widely diverse specialized
groups -- from insurance companies to computer programmers, from
economists to Christian fundamentalists, from environmentalists
to Wall Street investors. The voices involved tend to be either
bearish or bullish about the technology in question. Some fear
a catastrophe and others brush the problem off, pointing to the
prospects of benefits and profits. There is precious little creative
middle ground or dialogic space in which the merits of various
perspectives can be compared and understood in nuanced ways, and
more useful perspectives evolved.
This suggests a need for greater societal intelligence. To help
us understand how to pursue that objective, we can look at the
sort of factors that undermine the three primary conditions for
societal intelligence mentioned above. Among the more obvious
are:
All these obstacles are present in virtually every technological
problem -- global warming, genetic engineering, the spread of
toxics, nuclear issues, and so on. They add up to the cultural
co-stupidity we find when we observe how whole societies are responding
to such problems.
Anything we can do to ameliorate the obstacles to societal intelligence
listed above, will increase our culture's capacity to respond
to this crisis.
Another part of co-intelligence is collaborative
intelligence, the capacity to work with the
world around us, not trying to dominate it.
A large part of most technological problems is our civilization's
effort to get what we want from the world without taking into
account its needs or its wisdom. This leaves our economic and
technological systems overextended, vulnerable and often toxic.
Natural systems are resilient because their complexity has been
evolving for billions of years. Our culture is arrogant enough
to think that it can create highly complex systems and unprecedented
substances from scratch and get away with it. We lack the patience
to learn from nature how to collaborate with it to grow what we
need. We only have the capacity to force nature to tell us enough
of its secrets to take what we want.
This difference is visible in the distinction between indigenous
science and modern science. Indigenous science -- the science
practiced by native peoples -- learns the dynamics and spirit
of nature in a particular place, so that the learner can develop
a right relationship, a respectful partnership with the natural
entities in his or her environs. Modern science, in contrast,
attempts to find universal causal principles that will allow technicians
to manipulate physical reality to construct and extract without
having to give much, if anything, back; without having to belong
or owe or love. Take the money and run.
Our computers and other technologies have been used mostly to
increase our capacity to take the money and run, to efficiently
extract and move what we want from point A to point B, faster
and farther, with less expense, effort or obligation. The interconnectedness
this has woven into our culture has added to our ability to extract
life from each other, from communities, from the highly-evolved
and productive natural systems around us. We suck out life, and
leave deadness behind. Look at the hills that are mined or clearcut.
Look at the boarded-up towns. Look at the faces on the trains
and in the cars, the endless cars and trucks laying their tracks
of stone over everything, driving weather to extremes. This is
a web of death, as brittle as a dead branch, ready to snap. It
doesn't matter how fast the pieces move, how vast the masses/statistics/cities,
how bright the colored plastic. It is not alive and it is forced.
Permaculture offers one view
out. Permaculture has the solidity of modern science yet the sensitivity
of indigenous science. Permaculture has principles, universal
ecological design principles. And once you learn them, you throw
them away far enough that you can then look at the life that is
all around you and really see it -- see what
it does, what it needs, what it has to offer, what kind of dance
it is inviting you into. Permaculture teaches us -- those of us
who have forgotten -- how to work with nature, to become a partner
to Life, so that plants and animals and dirt and water and weather
yield us food and clothing and shelter and meaning freely and
vibrantly without having to be hacked, yanked, forced and poisoned.
Permaculture systems are resilient, because they use the natural
tendencies of things to do what they naturally do, all arranged
so that they are all useful to and supportive of each other. You
don't have to poison the slugs; the ducks will eat them. The ducks
will swim in the pond you made by digging out earth with which
to build your aesthetic, well insulated home, whose greywater
flows through a marsh you built -- complete with lovely cattails
-- to purify it before it arrives in the pond where the ducks
swim above the goldfish.
I saw this very thing on my first visit to an actual permaculture
site near Point Reyes, California. It had a profound impact on
me. It was more Eden than farm, more work of art than constructed
development. It was not planned and built. It had grown and evolved
for several years, with the equal participation of the land, plants,
animals, and humans. The humans brought to the dance their conscious
observation, thinking and caring. Next year that site won't be
the same, because it will have led to something else, equally
beautiful and productive, ever new.
People like I met there don't generate technological problems.
They don't create global warming, racism and toxic wast dumps.
Their spirit is collaborative, patient, spiritual, eager to give
as much as to take, happy to belong and co-create, loving the
wisdom that grows so deeply all around them and curious to see
what it will do next.
If we can learn this gigantic lesson -- if we can see that it
is the brittleness of our systems, the shallowness of our relationships,
the impatience of our lives that is pulling us down -- not just
a problem with technology -- then any technologically-induced
crises we live throuigh will have been worth it. Even if a lot
of us end up suffering. Because then our grandchildren will know
what life is all about. And they will carry it on, they will belong
to the Earth again and to each other. We will have made it, as
a culture. And perhaps we won't do this again, this waste of life
and meaning.
To the person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
To the person with a song, a drum and a dream, every problem looks
like a dance.