Escutcheons for Praxiology

Diversifying Society

By John Taylor; 2009 July 12, Rahmat 18, 166 BE

Looking back at his last term as U.S. president, Bill Clinton commented in a speech in England that, "In our era we have become globally interdependent but remain unintegrated." This observation impressed me, and I have been thinking about it ever since. I want to address this question in today's essay. How do we get over the hump between interdependence and integration? Why is unity in diversity so difficult to achieve?

One reason integrity comes so hard on a broad social level is that we are not integrated on a personal level. Most people run across very little diversity in ordinary social contacts. They meet a very narrow cross section of society in their day-to-day lives, and their friends are narrower still. When we do meet someone outside our own socio-economic grouping, the relationship tends to be brief, stereotyped and superficial. Family, friends and neighbours tend to be similar to one another. The people we meet at work are a narrow cross section of society. A salesperson will meet clients, other sales personnel and maybe a few other employees, and that is it. A manager in a certain industry will get to know largely other business people. Similarly, a member of a certain ethnic group will mostly have contacts with other members of that group.

Without variety in personal contacts we get little critical feedback. The sounding boards we have tend to reinforce our own inclinations and dispositions. Like a vehicle driving through the same path across a field, our ways of thinking dig into a rut of typical ideas and opinions. As the rut hardens it becomes difficult to dig out of older ways of thinking. Our stereotypes harden into prejudices, which threaten to ossify further into bigotry. As a result, in critical issues we tend to split up into partisans, us versus them, and forget our common citizenship. Ideologies take the place of independent thinking. We break up into left or right, liberal or conservative, this or that.

The problem of lack of variety in everyday social contact was recognized by some librarians who initiated a program in their libraries of "checking out" an member of a certain group by booking an appointment for a half-hour interview. That way if a library client has never met a Jewish Rabbi or a fire fighter or a person of a certain race or ethnic group, they can engage with a volunteer member of such a group in a brief discussion. These programs have proved to very popular wherever they have been tried. I hope this soon becomes a standard feature in every library.

Here is an idea for taking this further. On the Badi' Blog we have been going over John Amos Comenius's escutcheons, his idea to introduce honours and rewards to balance out the punishment that our legal system is presently obsessed with. Each individual would display on a personal website, mantelpiece and other places of honour an escutcheon displaying a summary of that person's accomplishments. One of the charts on this personal escutcheon might be an indicator of the variety of an individual's personal contacts. If the individual has had many meaningful relationships with people of various backgrounds, this chart would be adorned with beautiful ornaments. If not, the chart would wilt and languish visibly.

The advantage of this proposal is that even if someone is not consciously concerned with having more diverse contacts, improvements would tend to come about anyway. Because the escutcheon is public and intimately connected to the escutcheons of friends and friends of friends, they would be encouraged to do matchmaking in order to encourage their apathetic friend to meet a greater variety of acquaintances. Much research is being done on the peculiarly strong influence that networks of acquaintances tend to have.

For example, one recent study of obesity in networks of acquaintances found that the more overweight people our friends and friends of friends know, the greater the chances are that we ourselves will become obese. The introduction of escutcheons as a tool for diversity might break up these unconscious groupings among several levels of separation, not only among networks of overweight people, but also among eccentrics, fundamentalists and other networks of extreme or aberrant types.

If we design escutcheons to encourage diversity in our professional contacts, there might be even greater benefits, for example it might counteract the tendency of intellectuals to become over-specialized and isolated in Ivory towers. An expert's escutcheon might display his or her professional qualification as a well proportioned body (perhaps using Leonardo Da Vinci's famous drawing of a man with arms and legs extended inside a circle). If the display were tied to that expert's diversity of professional contacts, a long period of lack of research, contact and service to people outside that person's area of expertise might show up as a blown up, out-of-proportion head. Too much outside contact and not enough refresher training might shrink the escutcheon's body to a stick man, also out of proportion to the head. Finally the scrawny body would die and that expert would no longer have the right to display an active qualification.

One scientist, Niels Rolling, who was recently involved in an international effort to study how agriculture might feed humanity without destroying nature recently proposed a new integrated science that might act as a mediator for these professional sections of personal escutcheons. He spells out the problem thusly,

"One of the things this exercise brought home to me was how poorly we understand humans as agents of planetary change, how little of what we do know is widely shared, and that this knowledge is scattered across disciplines that appear distant to governance. I began to ask if we needed a new discipline, one that could go beyond the work of thousands of ecologists, climatologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, neuroscientists and the like." (Niels Roling, "Why we need a proper study of mankind," New Scientist, 14 January 2009, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.700-why-we-need-a-proper-study-of-mankind.html?full=true)

The tendency of academics to isolate themselves in Ivory Towers from the general needs and concerns of humanity has long been deplored. This problem was noticed in the 16th century by Comenius, who suggested a sort of Hippocratic oath for anyone who writes or even works in the publishing industry. If all who work with information had their involvement with the common dialog of humankind as to how to survive and save nature displayed along with narrow professional qualifications, it would be easy to involve every expert, everywhere. Rolling introduces two useful words for what we need to set up such as study of all humankind, one being "anthropogenics" and the other "praxiology." He explains,

"I decided to appropriate the name "anthropogenics" for my dream discipline, although I gave the word a broader remit than the adjectival dictionary entry I found, which relates to "environmental pollution and pollutants originating in human activity". My anthropogenics would be an "adaptive" science, in that it would focus on a more effective and less destructive coupling of humans and their environment, while its study of behavioural and social dynamics would be concerned with drivers such as an awareness of interdependence in resource use, rather than individual greed. Anthropogenics would also be a praxiology - a science that informs decisions and action. Crucially, it would only work well as a truly democratic science, shaped not only by academics but by all who have to live by it."

The escutcheons, then, would be a product of both anthropogenics and praxiology, with rewards built in for efforts and accomplishments in those areas that benefit mankind the most. A responsible expert who works on a combination of valued social and personal goals would be rewarded with a prettier, well proportioned escutcheon. This system would maintain quotas for diversity without having to spell them out to anyone, they would be built into the system from the start. As Rollings says, "Underlying such institutions is an acute awareness that individuals can only reach their particular goals if others can reach theirs." Introducing escutcheons for both individuals and institutions would tie both together and make the ties between their mutual success difficult to ignore. Let us give Rollings the last word,

"Current institutions ... clearly do not serve the long-term goals of human survival. At the heart of anthropogenics, then, would be a synthesis of what we know about our ability to sacrifice private for public good, to take less and give more, and of research into game theory, social psychology, anthropology and evolutionary economics. It will challenge the key western assumption that human behaviour is necessarily selfish. A close understanding of how institutions determine individual behaviour might even curb the enthusiasm for "methodological individualism", the tendency to explain collective things such as the marketplace as a necessary outcome of individual choices. ... The underlying basis of anthropogenics is still self-interest - but of a collective rather than individual kind."

John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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