[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Dissensus and Organic Process

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 10 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


In bringing up the vexed relationship between evolution as it happens in
nature, on the one hand, and the ways the concept of evolution has been
redefined in current ideologies on the other, last week's Archdruid
Report post dipped a tentative toe into some very deep and murky waters.
Over a century or more, ideas and metaphors from the natural sciences
have become potent factors in the public life of the western world;
terms such as "natural", "organic", and, yes, "evolution" have been
caught up by any number of players in the scrimmage of contemporary
culture, and more often than not have come out much the worse for wear.

There's no shortage of ingenious ways to misuse concepts such as these,
but one in particular has had a pervasive presence in our collective
dialogue. Perhaps the best way to show it at work is to track the use of
natural concepts in one of the towering creative minds of the twentieth
century, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Full disclosure probably requires me to admit up front that I'm a fan of
Wright's work, and not only because he was one of the handful of
first-rate creative talents to have been influenced by the modern Druid
tradition. In his quest for an organic architecture - notice the concept
lifted from the life sciences - he reshaped the vocabulary of space and
form in ways that are still being explored by architects today, and he
also produced rather more than his share of stunningly beautiful buildings.

Still, there are few geniuses whose works are without flaws, and Wright
was not one of them. Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog {1} fame has
set out the case for the prosecution in his useful book How Buildings
Learn (1994). To begin with, Brand points out, all Wright's roofs leak.
This may seem like a small thing, but since the basic purpose of shelter
is to keep weather out, and it's not actually that difficult to design a
watertight roof, Wright's failure to accomplish this fundamental
requirement is not a good sign.

More generally, Wright paid close attention to the esthetic qualities of
building materials, but not always to their structural strength; the
results included a fair number of splendid buildings that could not hold
up to normal wear and tear, or in some cases, the simple force of
gravity. Thus a great many Wright buildings have had to be torn down
since his time, and others linger on as museums, struggling to raise the
money to meet their huge maintenance costs. Similar concerns run through
every aspect of his work; the chairs he designed were beautiful, for
instance, but many of them are acutely uncomfortable to sit in.

The problem with Wright's work, essentially, is that he applied his core
concept of organic architecture in too one-sided a way. The way he
structured space resonates intensely with the nature of the site, the
purpose of the building, and the esthetic of the materials he used; so
far, so good. The difficulties arose because he handled at least two
other aspects of the building process in a profoundly inorganic way. The
first of these, as mentioned already, was his cavalier attitude toward
the structural qualities of materials, and more generally to the
"substance" side of Aristotle's famous form/substance dichotomy. The
rain that leaked through Wright's roofs, and the dampness that pervaded
his famous house Fallingwater - it had a stream running through the
middle of it, complete with waterfall - and made its first owner refer
to it as "Rising Mildew", are substances as relevant to the architect as
the material forming the beams that support the floors. An architecture
that embraced substance in an organic way would arguably shape form
according to the physical potentials and weaknesses of the relevant
substances, just as Wright's forms were shaped by the esthetics of the
substances he used.

The second aspect is subtler, and the book by Stewart Brand mentioned
above is perhaps the best guide to it. A building is a pattern in space
and in substance, but it is also a pattern in time, following its own
trajectory from the first work on the site to the last swing of the
wrecking ball. Successful buildings adapt to the people who live in them
or use them, just as the people adapt to the buildings; Brand argues
that in this sense, buildings "learn". Many of Wright's buildings -
though there were important exceptions - were distinctly slow learners,
and some proved to be wholly unteachable. Admittedly, in Wright's day as
now, the architect's job mostly ended when the blueprints were handed
over to the builder; additionally, of course, creative minds in his
milieu were expected to be prima donnas, and his income and reputation
depended at least in part on playing that role. Most of today's
fashionable architects suffer from the same fixation on form over
substance and process, without the benefit of Wright's sure esthetic touch.

All this may seem far removed from the questions that have become
central to this blog - the twilight of the industrial age and the
birthing of constructive responses to its end - but the same three
dimensions just considered - form, substance, process - apply to design
in any context, from a mud hut to an alternative currency. Mud huts
aside, most modern design that tries to be organic focuses, as Wright
did, on organic form, and much of it neglects substance and process.
Thus, for example, you get plans for "renewable" energy systems that may
use sun or wind, but can't be made or maintained without petroleum
products and massive energy inputs, and power equally unsustainable
machines or lifestyles.

These same concerns apply even more stringently to plans for social
change. Plenty of proposals for allegedly "natural" or "ecological"
societies, communities, and institutions have been floated over the last
three decades or so, and most of them are natural in the same sense that
Wright's architecture is organic: they represent one person's best shot
at grasping the natural potentials of a situation. Very often, though,
these proposals fail to address issues of substance or process.
Substance in a social context refers, among other things, to the people
who will presumably take up the new social system, but who inevitably
bring to it attitudes and behavior patterns from other social contexts
and the evolution of our species; it's notorious, and also true, that
most Utopian schemes would work wondrously well if human beings could
just stop behaving like human beings.

Process in a social context, in turn, refers to the way that the new
system is to be designed, set in motion, and adapted to meet changing
needs, but there is another dimension as well: how the new system is to
deal with competition from other social systems. When this has been
addressed at all, it has too often been phrased in simplistic and
stereotyped terms, as by insisting that lifeboat communities have plenty
of guns so they can fight off the marauding hordes that feature so
largely in contemporary survivalist fantasy. The history of Utopian
communities in North America offers a useful corrective; most of the
successful communes of the nineteenth century, for example, went under
once the founding generation died off and the younger generations found
communal life less appealing than the seductions of mainstream culture.
The same thing could easily happen in a generation or so to any number
of the communities being planned so eagerly today, since a future in
which the inhabitants of such communities have no other options is
probably the least likely of all the possibilities before us.

I've critiqued the Transition Town movement in these essays, but the
value of organic process is one thing that this movement has grasped at
least as well as anybody in the peak oil movement just now. Those who
are still trying to impose plans based on some ideology or other on the
fluid potentials of the future might learn a few things from this
source. Still, it's possible and, I think, useful, to go further still
in the same direction. One potentially valuable way of doing so is the
process of dissensus.

I've borrowed that term from postmodern theorist Ewa Ziarek, who
introduced it in a book on ethical theory in 2001. As most of my readers
likely guessed at first glance, dissensus is the opposite of consensus,
and it comes into play when consensus, for one reason or another, is
either impossible or a bad idea: when, that is, irreducible differences
make it impossible to find any common ground for agreement on the points
that matter, or when settling on any common decision would be premature.

This latter, I suggest, is a fair description of where we stand as we
face the future that will follow the end of the industrial age. There's
an interesting dichotomy in our knowledge of the future: history can
give us a fair idea of the type of events that we will encounter, but
neither it nor anything else can give us the details. When housing
prices started zooming upwards a few years back, quite a number of
people compared that to other speculative bubbles and correctly
predicted that an enormous crash would shake the world economy when the
bubble popped - but neither they nor anyone else could have known in
advance when the crash would come or what the details of its downward
course would be.

The twilight of the industrial age puts us in a similar place. Looking
at what's happened to previous civilizations that overshot the limits of
their resource base, it's not hard to recognize the parallels and
predict the onset of the familiar process of decline and fall. That
process has some constant features, and it's probably safe to predict
that those will occur this time too: for example, mass migration is a
very common consequence of the fall of civilizations, and recent
warnings about tidal flows of environmental refugees in the not too
distant future suggest that it may be a safe bet to assume that the same
thing will happen in our future. What nobody can anticipate are the
details: what will set any particular migration in motion, what its
scale, route, and final destination will be, and above all what the
timing will be.

Lacking those details, a consensus plan is not a good idea. If you knew
today, let's say, that the region containing your ecovillage was going
to have much less rain in the future, you would make one set of choices;
if you knew that the same region was going to have much more rain in the
future, you would make another, and so on. If you knew that a million
refugees from climate change will be coming through your town, your
plans would be very different from the ones you would make if you knew
that your town would be far from the migration routes. Since these
things can't be known in advance, though, whatever consensus you reach
has a very real chance of being exactly the wrong choice. This is where
dissensus comes to the rescue. In a situation of uncertainty,
encouraging people to pursue different and even opposed options
increases the likelihood that somebody will happen on the right answer.

Dissensus, it deserves to be said, is not simply a lack of consensus.
Like consensus itself, it has its own methods and process, its own
values and style; the Thelonious Monk CD playing in my study as I type
these words might also serve as a reminder that where dissensus is
encouraged, and individuals pursue their own visions rather than
submitting to a socially based consensus, the results can include
dazzling creativity. Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom I began this essay,
was a master of dissensus; great artists usually are. Yet the greatest
master of dissensus is arguably Nature itself.

Those first inch-long vertebrates who darted about in shallow seas half
a billion years ago, after all, did not come to some sort of genetic
consensus about where evolution was going to take them, nor did the
evolutionary process itself push them in one direction. Some of their
offspring became fish, some amphibians, some reptiles, some birds, and
some mammals, and a few of the latter are either typing this essay or
reading it. Evolution is dissensus in action, the outward pressure of
genetic diversification running up against the limits of environment
and, now and then, pushing through to some new adaptation: the wings of
bats, the opposable thumbs of primates, the cultural evolution of human
beings. As we enter a future of new limits and unpredictable
opportunities, this is arguably the kind of organic process we need most.

_____

{1} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/12/dissensus-and-organic-process.html


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