Rainbow nation - a South African vision

From the perspective of the Holos Project https://holos.earth/, by embracing the twin and complimentary notions of 'Holism' and 'Ubuntu', South Africa's evolution to its deeper potential can be envisioned. Three principles will apply in enabling evolution;

• Integrity of information - dealing with the facts
• Power of imagination - envisaging potentialities
• Timing - aligning generatively with emergence in an attitude of principled pragmatism

Holistic reconstruction

Following the seismic shift in South African politics after the dramatic May 29 election results, we have posted various pieces calling for a renewed national convention of holistic reconstruction. It has been stressed that such a convention will not be about rewriting the constitution. Whilst it's not flawless, it still represents an excellent guide for directing South Africa's political future. As stressed a renewed convention would be about striving through on-going dialogue towards a deeper social contract: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/south-africa-now-needs-rousseaus-social-contract-claudius-van-wyk-qin0f/

As described in this recently published paper, in many respects South Africa represents a microcosm of the global macrocosm - hence it has an opportunity to offer global leadership in managing the complexity of diversity: https://www.academia.edu/107626924/The_Challenge_of_Transitioning_to_a_Sustainable_World_Evolving_Systems_Thinking_to_Holistic_Systems_Practice

In the manifold challenges to unity presented by the to-be-constituted government of national unity, the participants will need to ensure that divisive ideological issues don't become the core focus. Sticking to ideological considerations is likely to distract from addressing the far more urgent practical issues of social, economic and environmental sustainability. Yes, the complexity and ambiguity presented in diversity will make it difficult, but with principled pragmatism, developments can be positively influenced going forward - that’s what ‘complex adaptive intelligence’ is all about: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/south-africa-faces-complexity-test-claudius-van-wyk-e7txf/ ?

Social contract for policy-formulation and implementation

Typically policy-making addresses the problems arising in society - and in South Africa particularly it has been retroactive - an endeavour to rectify the legacy of apartheid. What South Africa needs is a framework for proactive policy-making - directed towards the kind of society it wants to become. That is what striving towards a social contract will be about. ?

The post-apartheid South African striving has largely been directed at the redistribution of wealth and access to the economy from the white minority to the black majority. ?Whilst it is obvious that equitable access to economic opportunity has to be fundamentally reconsidered, the critical question to be addressed is this:

'What ultimately might South Africa achieve with its economic management?'

That is why the dialogue needs to identify an inspiring vision of a new future ?- one that might yet serve to consolidate a new quality of national unity. And that endeavour might be the new meeting place of a transformed political centre. This must not be an uneasy compromise between the capitalist and socialist ideologies - it must represent a fundamental step up from the ideological divide to embrace the issue of deep sustainability.

The shift from ‘achieving’ to ‘becoming’.

In this Anthropocene age, where humans have left the largest ecological footprint, conscious awareness has tended to be informed by the reductionist perspective with its consequent focus on materialism. ‘Being successful’ came to be proven through 'having' and 'achieving’ - in the neo-Darwinian sense, being better than the next person. And increasingly that required demonstration of a standard of living measured by being able to own and dispose of more material goods. Whilst innovation has enabled people to both support and extend the activities of being human with increasingly sophisticated technology,?the cost has been to generate a competitive world economic system. This not only enslaves the majority, but violates natural living cycles and compromises nature’s ability to regenerate our life-giving resources. And that system ultimately compromises the viability of humanity as a?species. Whilst in the post-colonial narrative, the blame for this situation is laid at the door of neoliberal economics and politics, socialism, with its stance of central state management, has demonstrably failed to offer any real advance. What is needed is a fundamental shift in values - and the application of the principle of self-organisation to implement them. In this paper, for example, the kind of complex adaptive intelligence required to implement a circular economy is described: :https://www.academia.edu/41508786/Applying_complex_adaptive_intelligence_to_circular_economy_implementation

With its legacy of 'ubuntu' and 'holism', and in deep dialogue, might South Africa anticipate a future age of conscious awareness that is informed by an alternative whole-systems view, one where the emphasis will begin to shift from 'possessions' to 'meaningful experience'? With such a view 'being successful' will be demonstrated by the process of ‘becoming’; by the actualisation of its citizens' individual and collective human potential, in collaboration with each other, and an on-going generative co-evolution with the life-giving milieu.

Food production - the issue of land

A core issue on the table in South Africa (literally and figuratively) will be the vexed issue of the redistribution of land. Legislation is already in place for expropriation of particularly white-owned land without compensation. Yet, until such a time that there is a social contract, pursuing such an agenda might eventuate in equally disastrous consequences as has been experienced in Zimbabwe. This relates not only to the challenge of farming and maintenance for on-going food production to meet the nations needs, but indeed the negative consequences of prevailing industrial farming approaches to food production.

The combination of exponentiating population growth and reductionistic technological approaches, has fostered the development of an agricultural system focused on industrial scale food production. Recognised authorities on ecological sustainability warn that the global food system has become the foremost environmentally damaging aspect of collective human activity. It has resulted in globally accelerated desertification and climate change, leading to the exacerbation of poverty, and the growing threat of food and water shortages. This situation will inevitably lead to growing social unrest with an increase in both terrorism and migration. It would be short-sighted to think that South Africa might be able to seal itself off from this adverse development.

Eco-systemic focus

The perceived problem with the current food system, from the holistic perspective, is its failure to comprehend, and hence respect, how ecosystems work, and consequently severely disrupts natural cycles. As a consequence the reductionistic and mechanistic thinking behind the food system (and indeed behind much of global economic activity) sees soil as not much more than a container to be fertilised with chemicals to grow plants in great monoculture farms. As this practice accelerates the destruction of the living nature of the soil, it depletes life’s natural regenerative capacity. This is as true of South African agriculture as it is anywhere else in the world.

Re-engaging with nature

In dialogue South Africa needs to reimagine a future where society might organise itself in a way that promotes an ongoing evolutionary advance in shared human values. That evolutionary advance would recognise that shared destiny is intrinsically interwoven with the wellbeing of the entire planetary eco-system; together with humanity constituting one living entity, namely Gaia.?https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/gaia-already-morphing-from-anthropocene-novacene-claudius-van-wyk/

Transformed political centre

And so South Africa needs to coalesce a transformed political centre aimed at promoting shared learning together about how to re-engage with nature in a way that is not only sustainable, but also soulfully enriching for the human experience. It will seek to research and promote a view where shared endeavours will be informed by a renewed vision of possibility for the future, directed by a clear understanding of the quality of life desired as envisioned here below. It will strive to define the principles to guide life practices; informed by what society can value most deeply. Recognising that in the same way that society has evolved through the ages, driven by the satisfaction of biological, psychological, sociological and spiritual needs, so too each generation recapitulates that evolution, and potentially evolves it further.?Thus can a future be imagined for South Africa in which:

·?????All have access to life-enhancing quality food, adequate shelter, clean air and water?

·?????People are able to live with nurturing families in secure and supportive communities, where life can be enriched by diverse, cultural experience?

·?????Each individual's unique capacities and potential contribution to society and the greater ecology is empowered and celebrated?

·?????Governance systems are transformed, especially to empower at the local level, protect and enable healthy societies with effective and participative resource management?

·?????Human ingenuity and innovation is harnessed to enable deeper collaborative and sustainable creativity?

·?????The sacred potential of everyone is respected and compassionately encouraged?

·?????Leadership is cultivated able to display ‘complex adaptive intelligence’ so that society is better able to address emergent challenges with subtle and dynamic ‘living systems’ and ‘process-orientated’ approaches?

·?????In sensitive engagement and co-evolution with the deep ecology of global ‘Being’ citizens increasingly reverence nature’s deep intelligence?

·?????Mindful and diverse spiritual practices are encouraged to enable intuitive co-creative engagement in the realisation of life’s deeper potentials?

·????People live in gratitude for the wonder of existence and individual and collective ‘being’???????

Gaia’s role

This is why it is important for South Africa to generate a transformed political centre, a dynamic movement. It might research how to develop policy that empowers society with the opportunity to cultivate a deeper understanding of how to steward the land to ensure future access to nature’s bounty.?This includes how citizens will behave towards, and relate with each other. It especially relates to envisioning what the condition of the shared living ecosystem and the land that produces the nation's food will need to look like hundreds of years from now. Through transformed education it will support shared practice to be informed by a vision of successive generations also being able to live meaningful lives.?To enable such a quality of life, any movement from this centre will strive to inculcate an attitude in society of exercising responsibility to earth’s natural resources. Finally might this then include the recognition of the following principles:

·?????That the living eco-system, as a fundamental enabler of conscious being, is deserving of awe, eternal wonder, and gratitude?

·?????That existence is a finely balanced integrated interaction of holistic forces in which human awareness is an expression of the same processes that enable life?

·?????That natural earth elements are the gift of life on its path to consciousness; the mindful response flowing from our consciousness is in turn humanity’s gift to nature?

·?????That behaviour can ultimately be informed by reverence for life whilst joyful co-creation?actualises potentials into transformed forms of abundance??

·?????That citizens gratefully receive the gifts of Earth’s rich ecosystem without compromising her capacity to enable our co-evolution and co-creation with her deeper structures??

Then the new political centre might promote a transformed quality of consciousness to inform policy-making by re-examining:

·?????The new emergent holistic science and the opportunity it provides to help remind citizens of their even deeper shared human potential

·?????Policy-making and education promoting empowered practices to further actualise human potential through mindfulness and enhanced thinking skills.

·?????A deeper understanding of how prevailing epistemology, encapsulated in language, the words and phrases tended to be used, not only influences what is perceived, but what is believed to be possible.

But ultimately, movement from this centre rather than being about abstract intellectualising, will be a serious endeavour to transform governance through political influence towards holistic policy-making.

Consequently transformed governance will ideally re-examine and physically engage in:

·?????Place and practice?- recognising the sacred ‘livingness’ in the soil beneath the nation's feet that ultimately gives life - and the magic of photosynthesis in the branches above the nation's heads that converts energy into life-giving sustenance.

• Generating a transformed social ethos where people to learn to return to more meaningful simplicity and to develop a sense of fullness through human and natural solidarity.

·?????The shift from a mechanistic to organismic ‘living system perspective’?-?to be enabled by physical engagement with nature and actively participating in the practice of ‘growing’.?

·?????A new narrative?- one that might help the many people who remain stuck in the status quo - in old habits of the money economy and consumerism - to generate a new story. Here citizens can be encouraged to understand that being released from their dependency on the destructive food system begins by learning to grow own food, whether that might be mint or tomatoes in the kitchen window sill. To break the embedded belief that the supermarket and the credit card is the only source of sustenance.

·?????Nature’s bounty?- finally developing an understanding of carbon as a building block of living systems rather than being regarded a fossil fuel ecological problem. Recognising that whilst its creative work in the atmosphere is vital for photosynthesis, which also provides the atmosphere we breathe, its generative role is critical in the structures of the living soil and the life-nurturing growth it enables.?

Complexity

Prof. Emeritus Eve Mittleton-Kelly, of the LSE Complexity Research Group, sees three essential phases in managing complexity:

(i) Identifying the multi-dimensionality of the problem-space,

(ii) generating an enabling environment,

(iii) engaging the field of possibilities.

This is the opportunity, in the form of dialogue, to which South Africa is invited in order to evolve a social contract.

With Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', President Ramaphosa and his to-be-nominated team might now be tempted to declare:

"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!

That ever I was born to set it right!"

Then they might rather be persuaded to say:

"The time is now; give us insight,

Since we were born to set it right!"