How to Classify Projects that Aim to Address the Meta-Crisis
The Liminal Web features many people, organizations, and projects aiming to address the meta-crisis, which is a term that refers to the several interdependent and interrelated crises that we are facing simultaneously, which pose an existential threat to human civilization. Some people have created maps, websites, and diagrams to help us understand the meta-crisis, including one that I created.
It seems clear that no single approach is going to be the silver bullet here. The meta-crisis is a hyperobject whose complexity is so great that we cannot really comprehend nor talk about it in full detail. These maps can help us make sense of it and hopefully can help provide momentum, organizational strength, and funding to the many projects that aim to meaningfully address these greatest challenges of our time. One thing that these existing maps lack, and this article aims to provide, is a taxonomy that can be used to classify these projects. This is needed because we probably need a variety of approaches to be in progress simultaneously and these need to stand in relation to each other. We might also use this taxonomy to help assess the viability of proposed projects and perhaps also to evaluate the progress and effectiveness of projects that are already underway.
Projects that aim to meaningfully address the meta-crisis can be classified in a number of ways, including:
1. What components of the meta-crisis does the project relate to?
One way of analyzing the meta-crisis is to look at it as an aggregation of multiple crises that cover a broad range of philosophical, scientific, and socio-cultural topics. Now, even if we do identify multiple crises, it is important to keep in mind that these cannot be disentangled from each other, hence the need to maintain a meta perspective on all of it as much as possible. Nonetheless, it is helpful to identify these crises and topics because this can help us consider the relations that our collective and individual actions have in exacerbating or partially alleviating any one of these crises. It can also be helpful in evaluating specific projects that are supposedly positioned to address the meta-crisis because for any such project, we should be able to consider whether and to what extent the project is meaningfully addressing this more specific crisis and also what second or third order effects that these interventions might have upon any one of the other ongoing crises.
The following list of crises and topics was created from a synthesis of Zak Stein’s essay Education is the Metacrisis and Jonathan Rowson’s essay Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation. The items from these two essays didn’t seem to overlap so they were all brought together and have been grouped by the main questions that we need to begin by asking: What? Who? Why? How?
What?
Ontology — What is the case? How do we make sense of ourselves and the nature of the world around us?
Epistemology — What do we know? This includes building maps as necessary and understanding the territory.
Ideology — What do we believe? We have ingrained ideologies that are hindering responses to changing and challenging times.
Aesthetics — What do we design? We keep relying on design processes that have outlived their usefulness and are suicidal.
Who?
Legitimacy — Who should do it? Who has authority and legitimacy in our lives and in our world? This includes incoherence at the level of cultural agreements.
Identity — Who are we? We need a larger sense of ‘we’.
Why?
Purpose — Why should we do any of this? What is our meaning and purpose for wanting to address these crises? This includes concerns about authentic living and efforts to avoid inauthenticity in one’s personal experience.
Complexity — Why is all this complex stuff happening? We are not able to sort through the noise and rise to a higher level of consciousness and think with a high enough level of abstraction to be in a position to act.
Imagination — Why would anything ever be different than it is now? Our imagination and creativity are limited and stifled.
Communication — Why would anyone understand what we’re saying and why would they care enough to join forces? We are unable to speak about these existential threats in public and be understood and taken seriously by very many people.
How?
Capability — How can any of these crises be addressed? What capabilities do we need? This includes our incapacity at the level of operating on the world intelligently.
Systems — How can we optimally reform our political, economic, and social systems? This includes the world system dynamics through which our economic, political, and social systems are interrelated with psychology.
Coherence — How do we understand our past and coherently move into the future? We have different memetic tribes (modern, postmodern, traditional) and our historical understanding is deeply confused and we lack the ability to coherently move into the future together.
Education — How do we educate our children and our adult citizens who are supposed to be stewards of our world? Our educational systems, processes, and capabilities are failing to adequately develop people and are not able to prepare them for this changing world.
This listing does leave out 2 W questions: When? and Where? The answer to When? is given in the following item that describes triage, transition, and long term. The answer to Where? can be answered both broadly and narrowly. Broadly speaking, we are concerned with the whole of planet Earth, so our efforts need to be focused on the entire biosphere, including every continent, every island, every ocean, every lake, and every one of the Earth’s many bioregions. Indeed, some projects are not geographically limited in scope and thus have the potential to have positive impacts across the globe. Some projects are also focused on specific geographic regions, such as those based on regenerative finance and those aiming for fundamental political reform within certain countries, and we would hope that vibrant and regenerative projects are launched in every region of the world.
2. How does the project relate to the underlying causes and generator functions of the meta-crisis?
The meta-crisis can also be seen as having underlying core causes that cut across some or all of the many crises that were listed in the previous section. These can be called generator functions, and game theory is often used to evaluate their negative impacts as well as to help design solutions that are intended to overcome these problems. Many projects are specifically designed to address certain generator functions, such as:
· Rivalrous dynamics — including arms races, the tragedy of the commons, multi-polar traps, and “Moloch”.
· Subsuming the substrate — including causing damage to our underlying social fabric and the degradation of the natural environment upon which all life depends.
· Exponential tech — including the democratization of catastrophic weaponry, influence of digital media.
· Rules for rulers — this is shorthand for the underlying dynamics wherein people in power often have incentives to be corrupt.
· Principle-agent problem — this refers to conflicts in priorities between a person or group and the representative authorized to act on their behalf.
3. What is the project’s time frame, including triage, transition, and long term?
There are also important considerations relating to time for any project that aims to alleviate or remediate large-scale threats to our civilization and our biosphere. These considerations include when the interventions can and should be enacted, how long it would take for such interventions to bear tangible results, and whether interventions would need to essentially become the new normal. In the 5 part Bend Not Break series within the Great Simplification podcast with Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger, wherein Daniel is talking about how our efforts could be sorted into triage, transition, and long term. Triage would refer to immediate interventions that we need to enact as soon as possible in order to contain the ecological emergency. The next time frame recognizes that we are in a time of transition, which Zak Stein has referred to as a “Time between Worlds”, and such interventions would need to be enacted in the coming years in order to foster this transition to new economic and political systems and in order to begin to live more sustainably. Then there are interventions that are needed in the long term in order to maintain the health of our biosphere throughout the next several human generations. Even though it would be difficult, we should begin to plan for and enact long term interventions and we should begin scaling these over the course of the coming years and decades. This is related to the Three Horizons model.
4. What is the project’s main focus?
In the same Bend Not Break series, Hagens and Schmachtenberger also discuss the need for projects that are focused on diverse tangible and intangible phenomena, and this can be sorted into the tripartite distinction between infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure. Infrastructure is the basis for all other levels and includes how basic needs are met and how it interacts with the local environment. Social structure (often simply referred to as “structure” in the related literature) refers to a society’s economic, social, and political organization. Superstructure is related to cultural forms that resonate with people, including ideology and symbolism. To this triad, it would make sense to also include a special consideration for natural ecology and for the structures of our human relations with the environment, which is distinct from our human-made infrastructure and which we can call the “ecostructure”. Once this item is added, the result is a four-way distinction.
Our lives depend on the continued vibrancy and complex adaptive evolvability of each of these structures. The protection and stewardship of each of these four is assumed to be important for addressing the meta-crisis. In addition, every project is assumed to impact at least one of these four. Many projects have impacts across two or more of these, but in most cases, we evaluate a specific project and determine which of these four that the project would be expected to have the maximum impact upon.
5. What important aspects of life does this project aim to address?
To get a bit more granular than the tripartite distinction given above, we can assess what aspects of life any project aims to address. There are several aspects of life that are being threatened and any intervention might have impacts on more than one of these. Hopefully, we have a good mix of projects that can collectively promote good health in each of these important areas:
· Ecological — the health of our natural environment.
· Political — the health of our public civic space and our democratic institutions.
· Economic — the health of our businesses, industries, trade networks, and financial systems that allow people to provide an adequate living for themselves and for their families.
· Socio-cultural — the health of the fabric of society and the cultural forms that allow us to live collectively in peace.
· Psychological — the health of our minds.
· Biological — the health of our physical bodies.
· Technological — the health of our human relationship to ever-more-intelligent technology.
6. Where does the project fall along the sophistication spectrum, which is related to the dichotomy between the ascending path and the descending path?
This ultimately hinges upon the distinction between original research (which is ascending) and educational efforts that attempt to onboard more people to new ideas (which is descending).
The ascending path involves conscious beings who wish to invest their attention, mental effort, and emotional energy toward the development of higher states of consciousness, greater intelligence, new frontiers of life, greater complexity, and elevating their own self to higher and higher levels along any developmental dimension. The descending path involves one devoting their mental and emotional resources to the care of other conscious beings, to promote the general well-being among the populace, and to share one’s knowledge and wisdom with others. It is not that such people actually descend to lower states or stages, but to say that they are on the descending path means that they direct their finite and limited mental and emotional resources to the betterment of those who are not quite at their own level of privilege, sophistication, or well-being in some important ways. The result of the descending acts might be to lift others up so that they might end up being on approximately the same level as their descending teachers, mentors, and caregivers. Perhaps the recipients of these investments can rise higher even still. We need both ascenders and descenders in our society, and people often alternatingly play both roles in different aspects of life. Healthy and wise human individuals and human organizations operate as both ascenders and descenders in different situations.
The ascending and descending paths have many manifestations, including in education and research. This dichotomy can be seen as a spectrum, where at the high end we have original research that is highly sophisticated. This is where the educated elite are pushing the bounds of human knowledge in certain ways. This form of the ascending path is only cognitively accessible to those who have already mentally ascended quite high in their life to be able to understand the extremely complicated material that is being produced. This highly complicated research has the potential to change the world as we know it, but hopefully the most advanced forms of human knowledge should not be the domain of a select elite.
At the lowest end of the sophistication spectrum, we have the most basic forms of early childhood education, and this spectrum continues through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood and extends into all stages of higher education. The educational efforts that aim to bring people to higher levels of sophistication in some way can be seen as descending paths that are essential for the intergenerational transfer of knowledge that sustains our society and culture. Teachers act as descenders as they work to educate people and lift them to higher levels of knowledge and understanding so that they might provide for themselves an adequate life and so that they might meet the challenges that they will inevitably face and so that they might thrive in the face of such adversity. A balance is needed between the ascent of original research and the descent of education.
7. What is the project’s holonic relation, which might involve either emergence from below or emanation from above?
This is essentially the distinction between grass roots efforts (emergence from below) and reforming the status quo (emanation from above).
Projects can also be classified by their holonic relations. All people, all groups of people, and all projects are holons in some way or another. Holons are inherently related to their constituent parts and also form parts of larger holons and this forms what is known as a holarchy.
In the context of human society, we can identify emanation from above as including people in positions of power, authority, influence, and leadership working within the context of some well-established mainstream institution (governmental entity, business, or other organization). These people have levers of power available to them. If they can use this power more wisely then this can have a meaningful impact on our greatest challenges.
In human society there are many examples of people not in positions of power who self-organize and innovate and create new businesses, organizations, and technologies. We can call this phenomenon emergence from below and it involves grass-roots autopoietic development of new ideas and new ways of doing things. Projects in this category often stay small or fizzle out shortly after creation, but they have the potential to go viral and to have significant impacts on the larger society in unpredictable ways.
Emergence from below and emanation from above are mutually interdependent and mutually interpenetrating. In the two loops model, the top loop represents emanation and will inevitably start to decay and fail over time. All human institutions and cultural forms have a lifespan. At the height of their power as mainstream institutions, they are essential to overall stability, but eventually they will give way to the new emerging order. The bottom loop forms naturally through grass-roots innovation and people’s efforts to respond to new challenges that arise in changing circumstances. The bottom loop becomes stronger in part due to the failing of the top loop, and a transition occurs in which the emerging new order becomes dominant and mainstream while the legacy institutions that once were emanant are allowed to die peacefully.
Conclusion
Dr. Roger Walsh warns us against the so-called “single focus fallacy”, which has 3 aspects:
· The single issue fallacy: The idea that there is a single important issue that we need to focus on as the most important and the most grave crisis and we just need to hammer that point as much as possible. For example, people who say it is global warming or overpopulation.
· The single cause fallacy: The idea that all of our major problems stem from a single cause. For example, it is all caused by capitalism or greed.
· The single solution fallacy: The idea that all of the major challenges of our time can be addressed by a single type of intervention. For example, we just need a better balance between left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere thinking, or we just need to consume less and pollute less.
The taxonomy given here is intended to help us avoid each of these fallacies by keeping in mind a diversity of issues, causes, and solutions. We should not be reductive in our thinking for issues nor for causes nor for solutions. Should instead welcome diversity for each of these three. It is important to develop mental maps that allow us to conceptualize each of these three in a way that is realistic but not overwhelmingly complex. We have to believe that we have the collective power to address the meta-crisis and to save our civilization and our biosphere from collapse. It would be defeatist to concede that solutions are beyond our ability to understand and coordinate. As such, we should create and maintain maps that have the needed depth and complexity such that we can use them effectively to address real-world problems and we should not allow our maps to become so extremely complex to the point where they would be impossible for us to mentally manage.
This taxonomy does include several elements and the number of possible combinations is quite large already, but it might be useful to group some of these elements together and to create maps showing their interrelations. We can also create small grids to visualize how these concepts are adjacent to each other and this should also help us recognize that every combination is important.
One such grouping was suggested by Schmachtenberger, which would involve looking at every combination that would connect elements of the two triads Triage, Transition, and Long Term with Infrastructure, Social Structure, and Superstructure. If we add ecostructure to this list then the result is a 3 x 4 grid.[1]
In addition, we can think of the two dichotomies represented by ascending vs. descending and emergence vs. emanation intersecting to form quadrants. We can map projects into these quadrants.[2]
I can offer the following as a key to help understand this grid: a) Research into how to develop new grass-roots movements that might replace status quo institutions. b) Research into how to evolve the existing status quo. c) Educational efforts targeting grass-roots efforts. d) Educational efforts targeting those in power within legacy status quo institutions.
Notably, some projects might be plotted in more than one cell of one or both of these grids. It is important to create maps like these so as to remind ourselves of the need for diverse approaches to addressing our most complex societal challenges. One reasonable hypothesis is that we can only meaningfully address the meta-crisis through the simultaneous efforts of effective projects within each cell of both the 3 x 4 grid and the 2 x 2 grid shown above. I do feel that we need to simultaneously look at how we can evolve existing institutions and also develop entirely new institutions that replace the existing ones. And for each side of that polarity, I believe we need both original research and educational efforts that would put this research into practice.
Approaches that are based on different sides of any of these polarities or triads would stand in relation to each other and would mutually complement each other. As an analogy, there is a reason why a wrench is structured in a way to simultaneously push or pull on multiple corners of a nut. If you only pull on one corner, then the nut doesn’t move. Likewise with approaches to addressing the meta-crisis, the success of our efforts to enact needed reforms of legacy institutions is dependent upon our grass-roots emergent efforts gaining and maintaining momentum, and vice-versa. The success of original research is dependent upon educational programs that are aimed at all stages of human development, and vice-versa.
I also agree with Schmachtenberger that we need to simultaneously target our efforts at our physical infrastructure, which would include our energy sector and the human-made structures upon which our life depends, at our social structure, which includes our political and economic systems, and also at our superstructure, which includes the cultural forms that deeply impact our collective behaviors and our understanding of what is expected and what is possible. Obviously our natural environment should be our paramount concern throughout all of this, since all life depends upon our ecostructure. Our efforts need to target all four of these and we need to consider the three horizons of triage, transition, and long term for each of them. And we also need to do what is necessary to promote good health for a broad range of phenomena, including our natural environment, our political systems, our minds, our bodies, and our relationship to technology.
There are many combinations of factors that we would need to consider as well, including the fundamental questions of Who? What? Why? How? When? Where? along with considerations of generator functions and rivalrous dynamics. The meta-crisis is highly complex, but we can come together and come up with processes to better understand it and to manage our efforts to mitigate it and to work toward a more just, sustainable, and healthy future.
[1] I learned the term “ecostructure” from Andrea Farias.
[2] The analysis of these concepts into 2 x 2 grids was inspired by the work of Hemant Gupta, as given within his book Meditations of a 21st Century Hunter Gatherer.
