Global Consciousness?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Think Global Act Local
With the world’s attention beginning to focus on the Climate Change talks in Copenhagen, I felt this might be a good moment to ask what sense, if any, it makes to think of the ‘world community’ as a community, and asking this question with the aid of the ‘Global Consciousness Project’ seemed to be the least boring approach.
If you toss a coin a hundred times and find that you are getting heads every time, you would probably suspect that the coin was weighted in some way, or perhaps had heads on both sides. No wonder, because when something that is supposed to be random suddenly begins to show signs of order, we are inclined to look for an explanation.
So imagine if you had a machine that could randomly generate numbers every second of the day, and then you noticed that periodically these numbers became significantly less random, and that such moments corresponded with major world events. This curious correlation is precisely what a team of statisticians seem to have been discovering for several years, and they believe, with due scientific caution, that the ‘ordering’ of the random numbers may be related, in a statistically significant way, to those moments where a certain number of people pay attention to the same thing at the same time, for instance September 11 2001, and, wait for it, Lady Diana’s funeral.
The Project is led by researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey, USA, but involves the collaboration of scientists around the globe, all of whom are engaged in forms of ‘data mining’. While by no means core to our work at the RSA, I feel this project is a useful one to know about whenever you hear somebody talk about ‘the global community’.
Many of the world’s spiritual traditions seem to converge on the idea that we are fundamentally one rather than many, that our differences mask some sort of deeper unity. Gens Una Sumus is the Latin expression. We are one people. But are we? Does it make it any sense?
If there is such unity at what philosophers call an ontological level, and not merely in a figurative way, then that level will almost certainly be consciousness, if only because there appears to be no concensus emerging on what is known as ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness, i.e. we don’t really know what it is, and so the claim that consciousness is something we all share or inhere in might be more literally true than the idea that we all ‘breathe the same air’ as JFK once put it.
While the Global Consciousness Project, conducted by a group of scientists around the globe, continues to collect and analyse data, many sceptics have disputed the statistical methods and conclusions, but more fundamentally people have critiqued the study for lacking a clear theoretical basis. For instance Robert Matthews suggested “The only conclusion to emerge from the Global Consciousness Project so far is that data without a theory is as meaningless as words without a narrative.” Others have said that the stock market is a better guage of the state of global consciousness.
But personally I find the idea that we share our consciousness quite compelling, and I hope the Global Consciousness Project can find a way to continue to develop their idea and methods, so that, at whatever level of community we care about, when people say ‘we are in this together’, they mean it in a fundamental way.
Five Reasons why you should care about social networks.
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks, Think Global Act Local
Sometimes you need to back up a little. I have spent most of the last few days trying to get my head round the intracacies of social network analysis, and I fear I am losing sight of the bigger picture.
Why bother with community? Who needs connections?
The first answer that jumps out at me is trust. Trust is closely related to connectivity and we want a trusting society, not just to reduce transaction costs, but because we feel better when we feel trusted and trusting. Anthony Seldon developed this point at length at a recent RSA event. So the connected community project is partly about trust, in particular about how to build it, and to better understand how it can be lost.
The second answer is loneliness. The first RSA speaker event I attended was John Cacioppo’s lecture on lonliness, which detailed decades of interdisciplinary research into the pervasive feeling of subjective isolation, and details the deleterious effects of lonliness on health, wellbeing and, yes, trust. We care about social networks because we are looking for such patterns of isolation and exclusion.
The third answer is scarcity. What do you do when the money runs out? There may or may not be green shoots signalling the beginning of the end of the recession, but we know that the public sector typically lags two years behind the private sector, and there will soon be acute pressure on budgets for local public services. If that were bad enough for the short term, rising energy prices and an ageing demographic create enduring pressure on existing services. So what can you do when the local authority faces a funding shortfall of (on some estimates) around 30%? Well, you can look for money elsewhere, rely on enterprise, or you can seek to build social capital so that people make better use of their available community resources(time banks, car pooling, local currencies etc.)
The fourth answer is inequality. There is now good evidence that societies with lower levels of inequality tend to be happier, and we know that social capital is used to perpetuate patterns of inequality. The more we can understand the functioning of these networks, the more informed we will be in our efforts to create a mor egalitarian society.
The fifth and (for now) final answer is friendship. People are basically social creatures who we now understand to be
conditional altruists. In other words, we are inclined to want to help others, but only insofar as we expect that help to be reciprocated. I walk past several people every day without saying hello, or asking how they are or who they are. Some of these people are random passers-by, but many I know I will see again, waiting for the same train, selling the same magazine. Understanding networks will not shift this sort of intertia, but it’s a start. The more we realise the powerful impact of social networks on everything from health to wealth to happiness, the more value we will place on making these links and measuring these effects well.
I am glad I got that out of my system. Now I can go back to reading about alters, nodes, name generators, betweennesss, sample sizes etc without feelign completely disconnected from the real world!
A Community Response to Climate Change?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Think Global Act Local
RSA thursdays fill a gap in our popular imagination of the working week, sharing the honour with manic mondays, pancake tuesdays, ash wednesdays and crunchy -be-thankful fridays. One of the best things about working here is ambling into an RSA Thursday event at lunchtime and having your mind informed, amused and expanded.
I missed the event on October 1, but dutifully listened to the podcast chez london transport, and deliberately took a circuitous route home so that I could finish it uninterupted. The event, Saving Kyoto: Copenhagen and Beyond was chaired by Mark Lynas and featured the astoundingly impressive Professor Graciela Chichilnisky. The talk concerned the complex scientific, economic, and political issues around climate change, and the multi-faceted challenge of preventing planetary degradation.
I mention this event in the context of connected communities because a blunt question naturally arises: why bother trying to understand community regeneration, when faced with imminent global destruction?
Part of the answer was provided at yesterday’s RSA Thursday by Madeleine Bunting who answered a question about everybody belonging to Gaia. The author of The Plot suggested that while we may be intellectually attracted to the idea of one people, one planet, Gaia is not a natural human scale, and that environmental responsibility is grounded in attachment to a sense of place or places. She also remarked that the geographical conception of community is the most useful one.
Earlier this week, Anne Gutowski, senior fellowship support at the RSA, forwarded an email she had received from an RSA fellow, Charlene Collison, who had enclosed what she believes to be “the first community sustainability plan to be published in England” and that this was something she had been directly inspired by the RSA to do. Forest Row is a large village in the heart of Sussex that subscribes to transition culture and is one of many transition towns that is attempting to forge effective and inspiring local responses to global challenges.
In the email forwarded, Charlene Collison wrote:
“I decided the only way not to despair is to change what you can. So I started in my local community, coming together with others concerned about climate change, energy shortage, population growth, resource poverty and so on. We formed a group to create a vision for a sustainable village, under the banner of Transition Initiatives.
The future is certainly looking ominous. But I have experiences that when you join together with others to do something about it, something extraordinary starts to happen. You might start with something that seems small or insignificant in the face of the huge scale changes that are needed, with “ordinary” people, not experts, and no idea how to begin. But in the process, such groups can come up with really robust ideas and initatiatives that start things moving and create a momentum that gradually infects the wider community.”
Charlene sounds like exactly the kind of fellow that the RSA needs to have and support, and details of what has already been achieved in Forest Row can be found at the Forest Row Transition ning.
Action is often the best antidote to despair, but no matter how inspiring and effective a local initiative in the UK manages to become, does it make a meaningful impact given that that the US and China between them emit roughly two thirds of the carbon in the global atmosphere?
I think so. First, as a moral and spiritual duty, we should do what we can, with what we have, where we are. Local transition initiatives are not merely rearranging the deckchairs on a global Titanic, they are more like a fleet of luminous lifeboats populated by those wise and brave enough to jump ship before colliding with the ice flow and giving those still on deck a way out (of course, less figuratively, it is the not the presence of ice but its absence that is the problem…).
Secondly, perhaps eco-inertia can only be shifted on a small and tangible scale where there is a clear relationship between actions and outcomes. The recent IPPR report suggested the British public were generally disinterested in climate change, and would be more likely to change their behaviour if it saved them money, rather than helping to save the planet, but it is not clear what follows from this finding. Joe public may not care about preventing the destruction of the Amazon, the ‘lungs of the earth’, but he might be interested in planting trees in a local public space, and giving his own lungs a workout in the process.
Or he might not, and perhaps we should despair, but findings about the essentially social nature of our brains tell us that we are prone to copy, imitate, and feel pressure to conform to what others around us are doing. Part of the problem is that becasue so many people who care about climate change do so little about it, the people who don’t care literally don’t see a reason to care. So you have to make your concern visible, and the best way to do that is often local, and on issues that people around you are also likely to care about.
Third, have you got anything better to do? We know that one of the consistent and reliable findings from happiness studies is not just that we are happier when we feel connected, but that one of the best ways to get connected is through volunteering, and one of things most worth volunteering for is to save the planet, one place and person at a time.
I feel there is more to say on this subject, but I am not the best person to say it. Will Shaw of the RSA Arts and Ecology team covers such issues in more depth on a near daily basis, and I am keen to hear from others, but the question remains: If the most urgent and important question of the day is climate change, what meaningful role, if any, do communities have to play?
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