Humanity's Final Exam

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My vision for Final Exam

My goal, starting with this site, is to create an online resource that will provide a synoptic understanding of what’s going on, what’s being learned, and what’s being done in response to the emerging crises. The intent is not to duplicate or subsume other work, but to span the boundaries between different efforts, allowing workers and visitors to see their efforts and concerns in the context of other efforts.

I also hope that this will make “fruitful connections” across disciplines, and among workers who perhaps didn’t know of each other, but who could now co-learn and co-create more than they could have separately. In addition, this synoptic view may well help to identify “holes in the whole”, subject areas that aren’t being covered (or need to be better covered), possibly useful new actions that could be taken, etc.

By “online resource” I have in mind a public, evolving hyperdocument, allowing for updates, new categories, new links, etc., and also a place for online collaboration within and across disciplines. As I currently envision it, it will be created and evolved by a community of people. Like an open source software project, or the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, I expect there’ll be a core of stewards and primary contributors, and a larger body of less active volunteers. (Some of the volunteers would be people working on their own sites or projects, contributing here as a way to stay connected with related groups or projects.)

I’ve yet to find any site or group of them that currently fills this need, although various elements are there in many places. This site, as it now exists, is a step in that direction. It’s still a personal publication, intended to give a sense of the kind of resource I have in mind, and the breadth and depth of coverage I currently anticipate.

Full disclosure: my own ideas

Many of the works I’ve read have included the authors’ ideas for the best way(s) to meet the coming crises. Part of the collaborative nature of Final Exam will be to provide an overview of these different ideas, and a forum for dialogue among their authors to analyze, elaborate, evaluate, compare theory against practice, and in general to sharpen and improve the tools we have available.

I too have a few ideas, although they’re more at the level of foundations for action than a full prescription. I feel it’s important to reveal them, since they’re part of a way of seeing that no doubt affects the way the site is organized, and determines what I tend to focus on (and perhaps what I tend to miss). Although my goal is synoptic, as an individual I’m as limited and biased as anyone.

My ideas fall roughly into two categories: community and continuous learning:

Concept of Community:
I currently feel that the prime resource for meeting the crises is/will be a large number of relatively small communities with certain characteristics. In turn, these communities will be linked by various means to facilitate communication and collaboration, enabling the formation of higher-level viable social systems. Thus, in my view, the community is the appropriate base level of response.

It’s important here to discuss how I think about community, and especially about the relationship between a community and the individuals in it. The following is a snapshot of my evolving understanding, using some quotes and concepts to give various views of it.

One aspect is well covered by the Zulu/Xhosa word “ubuntu” (see for example the Wikipedia article on the subject). I’ve also seen it described as “a person is a person through other people”.

A slightly different aspect is expressed in Kipling’s line from the “Laws of the Jungle” in The Second Jungle Book: “The strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” Note here that anything that weakens the wolf weakens the pack, and vice versa. To me at least, this implies the necessity of finding a way to be/do/become a community that doesn’t trade off the “good of the individual” for the “good of the whole” -- in a successful community, an apparent zero-sum tradeoff is an opportunity to look for a different way to understand the “good”s involved, and the relationship among the stakeholders.

That said, it nevertheless seems to me that at any given time there’s a natural dynamic tension between the needs/desires of the community vs. those of the individuals. This tension generates forces that can lead to either constructive or destructive outcomes. Poorly managed, they can destroy community or degrade it into an oligarchy (or both, in successive stages); well managed, they can make the community coherent, robust under change and external pressures, supportive of individuals, and able to leverage individuals’ best in synergy for the community.

It’s considerations like the above that lead me to believe that viable, effective communities form the essential basis for evolving a global sustainable society.

Concept of Continuous Learning:
My understanding of learning here comes from the work of organizational researchers like Deming and Senge (The Learning Organization), and also my (very partial) understanding of complex system dynamics, cybernetics (Ashby, Beer, etc.) and of the post-Darwinist concepts of evolution (see for example Elisabet Sahtouris’ books and articles). In terms of the latter, I sometimes think of continuous learning as “human evolution internalized”. Note that I’m speaking of individual learning, as well as the learning of complex systems composed of strongly interacting individuals (autopoietic human systems).

The kind of learning I’m thinking of provides the needed basis for dealing with the forces and flows resulting from the dynamic tensions described above, and thus for “managing communities well”. In turn, this requires high-quality communication among the parts of the system. To me, this implies that no fixed prescription will be adequate to maintain and enhance the wholeness of a community. This doesn’t mean that prescriptions are useless; indeed, they can provide a “toolkit” of concepts that can be adapted into the dynamic structures of the community. It also implies that, within a community and across communities, peace and sustainability will need to be learned through ongoing interactions at all levels -- and will take a significant amount of time. (Cf. Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you think, even when you take account of Hofstadter’s law”.)

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