Understanding the Role of Polarisation in Times of Transition

= Editorial requested by the magazine evolve in Germany (www.evolve-magazin.de). evolve is a magazine for consciousness and culture.

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

Why the polarization, and can we overcome it ?

Most of us will have noted that our societies are increasingly polarized, and social media are regularly blamed for this state of affairs. But think of the 1930s in pre-war Germany, then it was radio, or the religious civil wars at the time of the Reformation, then it was print.

Can we really blame the media ? Yes and no.

Societies are very complex systems, holding together a multitude of people with different and often antagonistic interests, yet most of the time, there is a glue that holds the population together, i.e. common institutions that are trusted by everyone. There is enough of a joint narrative so that people trust the societal institutions, and they can use politics and other means to fight out their differences in a common framework. However, in times of civilizational transitions, trust in common institutions collapses.

There are two scenarios, only in one of them is the role of media crucial.

Complex societies are expensive to maintain, and the trust of the population is to a large degree dependent on public services provided by the state, or by well-functioning and regulated markets. Rome famously maintained the institution of the Tribunate, the defensive institution of the plebs, and ‘bread and circuses’ to keep its population happy. But what happens when the society in question can no longer extract the necessary surplus to maintain the institutions that provide this well-being ? This is what Joseph Tainter famously explained in his popular book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. The Roman Empire became too extensive to maintain its complexity, lost access to the supply of gold and slaves, and started declining. At such a moment, the glue that holds the society together starts dissolving, and fragmentation occurs. Paradoxically, this very fragmentation leads to polarization. When everyone has to retreat to the smallest of tribes, precisely because of that reason, people seek common denominators. Thus, the end of the Roman Empire was characterized by the struggle between the Pagan and the Christian Church. The next form of European civilization was clearly dominated by the victor, the Catholic Church.

The other scenario is not a loss of resources, but an increase of complexity, and this is where media comes in. The crisis of Europe, which started in the 14th cy, was clearly influenced by the role of print. It increased complexity, and the rapidity of the spread of heretical ideas, to such a degree that the ideological control of the Catholic Church collapsed. Here the polarization occured between the Reformation and Catholicism. Again: fragmentation led to polarization.

Today, in our current poly-crisis, both effects occur at the same time. We are living in a time of decreasing resources, and the counter-hegemony of China means that the extractive capacity of the West is diminishing. At the same time, the internet and social media have exploded the fragmentation of opinion, and trust in the institutions are at an all time low. The polarization today takes the form of the culture war, the split between the educated urbanites, i.e. the ‘Nowheres’ or the ‘Virtuals’, and on the other side, the Somewheres and the Physicals. The Culture War around the values of progressive identity politics and the counter-reaction to it in the form of populism, are the current form of this conflict.

How does that end ? Here again, there are two main scenarios.

One is the scenario of descent, the evolution of society to a lower form of complexity, with less means at its disposal to maintain the former institutions. That is clearly what happened at the end of the Roman Empire: though the Christians would eventually develop a complex civilization after the 11th cy, the first effect was a return to a demonetized rural economy, and end to the intellectual exchange of the Roman and Greek academies, and the imposition of a common dogma. Feudal warlords would dominate Europe for many centuries to come.

But a society can also move upwards, to a higher form of complexity, which ‘transcends and includes’ the elements of the former conflict. Think of what happened after the Reformation. Essentially, religion was moved to the private sphere, where it could be freely practiced, but also replaced in the public sphere by the civic religion around the monarch, and the shift towards ‘business’. Adam Smith and Hobbes, the capitalist market and the nation-state, transcended the religious conflict and actually increased the level of complexity.

This is also the choice, if it is a choice, that we have today. Our societies can collapse to a much more primitive form, or it can move upwards, in a new integration.

Peter Pogany, in Rethinking the World, puts it the following way:

The global Smithian system that was created after the Napoleonic Wars, based on the domination of capital over labor and without global institutions, collapsed in WWI and WWII This created a new global system, based on a social contract with labor, and ‘weak multilateralism (the UN, World Bank, IMF system)

This is the system which is in the end phase as we speak, a process that started in 2008.. Pogany believes that the way forward will be generalizing the social contract to the whole world population, the creation of strong global institutions to protect the web of life and limited resources, and a new kind of contract between Humanity and the Web of Life.

My own twist to this is that the institutions of the commons, based on the systematic mutualization of provisioning systems to save matter and energy while keeping complex services afloat, will be the key to an upward transition. But if we fail, the polarization will lead to the post-Roman scenario, i.e. a new Dark Ages.

What do you think ?