The Planetary: Fragments of Thought

This work is early stage #WorkingOutLoud. I spent the weekend amongst a diverse group of thinkers at the Berggruen Institute Planetary Summit, exploring aspects of a Planetary perspective and philosophy, with insights from science, philosophy, economics and art. I’m taking some time this week to process and illustrate ideas, as I work in parallel on the new leadership book, ‘The Unreconciled Self: a planetary philosophy’.

Across the two days, the conversations shifted from a philosophical and cosmological perspective (what we mean by the ‘planetary’), through to one of governance and pragmatism. The lens of my own work is probably best viewed as parallel to some of this: I take a stance that we have become disconnected from our environment, and engineered a hyper connected, and yet abstracted and exploitative relationship with our natural environment, in way that is neither sustainable from an ecological standpoint, nor from the perspective of our wellbeing and thriving.

For today though, I am simply sharing some #FragmentsOfThought and early sketchesthat I have taken away from the weekend. Fragments, because what I share here is neither internally coherent, nor yet aligned to my own thinking and work, although I will signpost where I can.

[1] Conceptions of the Planetary – a series of parallel lenses through which to consider the planetary. My work does not consider broader cosmological perspectives on this, but in my current work on Social Leadership I am deeply rooted into the view of theOrganisation as Ecosystem, and both biological and evolutionary approaches to understand the fundamental relationship between ‘self’ and ‘system’.

[2] Legitimacy Frameworks – a general striving to explore parallel and alternative structures of understanding around our relationship with our natural environment. This includes questions of Governance and Justice. I found conversations about our ‘accountability to currency’ to be useful, as well as our accountability to complex histories. As I published in ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’, I tend to view a shift towards multiple parallel systems, as opposed to the fracture and schism of one dominant system, so in the context of the Social Age, I am tended to see that we will be accountable into an increasing number of parallel systems, within which we will also hold our senses of identity and belonging, but which will ultimately never be ‘reconciled’ into one clear new dominant narrative.

[3] Futures – my overwhelming sense is of fragmentation and interconnection. Probably also to include the digital and physical, and hence the core language of Social Leadership – at the intersection of systems – is ever more relevant. The idea of ‘The range of liveable futures’ landed well with me, and of course begs the question of who owns these, who arbitrates them, pays for them, services them, or is excluded from them – particularly relevant in the current climate crisis debates. At times I was unclear about the usage of the term ‘pragmatism’, ranging between a prosaic and grounded reality, towards a somewhat politicised perspective, or a filter of delusion, or hope.

[4] Belonging – this is obviously core in parts of my work, and the notion that our identities will proliferate and be more fluid resonate well, providing us with both comfort and confusion. My own work in particular is a more detailed exploration of the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘place’ and in particular the number of ways in which we can know a place (through story, through measurement, through belief, and so on).

[5] Citizenship & State – again some familiar themes from my own work on citizenship, with a general disaggregation and diversification, although in my work (which is best viewed through a liberal and optimistic lens) I tend to see a general rebalancing of power between our legacy structural and national systems and our emergent social and technologically moderated ones, but it takes little imagination to see how this ultimately translates into geopolitical context and conflicts. Indeed, I may be naive to imagine that we are not already almost there. Consideration of our anthropological systems of belonging feels like fertile territory. The idea of citizenship as ‘inherited property’ raises interesting questions about digital ancestry and inheritance, as well as questions about tangible assets and intrinsic value in the age of AI. Similarly the phrasing of citizenship as ‘beyond blood and soil’ is simple and effective. In the context of the Social Age, we would consider that the technologies of communication and transport were the primary limiting factors for our legacy structures, and that we have moved beyond technological limitations of citizenship into simply political ones.

[6] Architectures of the Planetary: in many ways I would have valued more conversation around this, as the relationships between pace, and power, are inherent to our understanding of our social context and evolution. As our world becomes blended between the dimensions of physical and virtual, our units of the ‘local’ will themselves fragment. And the architecture not simply of our structures of power and habitation, but also our taxonomic structures, epistemological architectures, even perhaps our architectures of belonging and belief, all become both unhitched from the physical, and possibly devolved.

[7] Identity – the dislocation from the national, and imposition through context. Obviously I am taking ‘identity’ as the central theme in my own work, with a perspective that we will remain unreconciled, but we need not be dissociated.

Perhaps – as I reflect on this – my stance is that we can be both ‘unreconciled’ in our identity (holding many different identities within multiple concurrent systems) and yet still be planetary.

There was no conclusion in the conversations from the weekend: the only thing noticeably missing was a coherent narrative around AI. I found it useful, in part as I felt an outsider in so many ways. As I explored in the work on ‘An Ontology of Havoc’, to be trans-disciplinary, or the polymath, or generalist, is I think a central identity for the planetary, but also a challenging one for our sense of belonging.

I’m deeply grateful to the Berggruen Institute for the opportunity to be part of the conversations this weekend.

The work I have previously shared in fragments, and which is working towards publication in ‘The Unreconciled Self’, considers nine elements of this disconnection, and ultimately argues that we can reconnect to our natural systems, but only through a realignment of our ideas, and reengineering of some fundamental structures of our societies. In particular, I have focused on the loss of ‘texture’ from our lives, aspects of motion and boundaries, and the lens of identity (and how we are ‘unreconciled’), and shifts in notions of citizenship and belonging. The full list of ideas runs as follows:

[1] Shadows on the Earth – a systems view of humanity – this is a broadening of perspective to consider the notion of humanity within the ecosystem, not standing upon it.

[2] Fracturing Citizenship – this is probably closest to my existing work on the Social Age, exploring our radical connectivity, synchronicity of communication, and the abstraction of space as the digital domain matures.

[3] The Unreconciled Self – specifically to consider the things we have lost or are losing. Our separation from the local, our emergent global cultures, the distillation of global mythology, the need to belong and the reinterpretation of what belonging means.

[4] The Space of Belief – our need to be held, the permission to forgive, the urge to judge, the emergence of celebrity, a world beyond gods, belief itself as culture.

[5] Dialogue Engines – a hyper connected world, the sensory halo that surrounds it, the new Dialogic AI, commodification of the social, anthropomorphism and empathy. Human exceptionalism.

[6] Moving towards my more philosophical work on ‘In how many ways can we know a place?’ The analytic, the narrative, the philosophical. Trans-nationality, the narrated soul (the Instagram soul).

[7] Embodiment of Being – to reconcile consciousness into landscape – self into landscape. This is the most abstract part i know. Ideas of motion, boundary, trespass (which you will have seen in my Social Leadership work recently.

[8] The Tyranny of Taxonomy – self, space, system, and how taxonomies are only useful until they are not…

[9] The Self Remaking Society – the Social Age – interconnection, planetship.