Bringing Together Time and Space within Fractal Pluralism
William Connnolly, a brilliant theorist of Pluralism, says that the openness and complexity of Pluralism can only be navigated with an ethical compass. Right in line with this, the information feedback loop at this historical moment seems to be generating a greater moral awareness and the desire to life a life more driven by values. More and more there is an outright longing to live in this way. The contemporary nature of information has turned us towards the social systems undergridding the basic infrastructure of production and consumption. The producers and means of production are not as invisible as they once were. The environmental impact of our consumptive systems are continuously being brought to light. The flood of the information feedback loop is pushing us beyond ethical decision making into value-based, life style cultures. In the vast array of options we become aware of choice. In the illumination of the ways our actions affect and create the systems of our co-existance, we become aware of our responsibility to decide how to live. The moral implications of our behavior and the dynamics of ideology have begun showing up in the decisions of everyday life. In the landscape of heterogeneous capitalism, we can see this with cause branding. Being marketed to on the basis of our values is a signal that we are making more decisions based on values. Innovators and consumers are bringing their awareness to areas that can be shifted, niches that can be filled and responding with action, making those options available to the larger whole.
Understanding how an individual decision reverberates through the scales, creating what the world is, is crucial for understanding our role and responsibility in bringing about Global Justice. If a person’s time-scale perspective is: my family, this year, then they literally cannot see the implications or ramifications their choices have, or even how they are a part of the bigger picture. From a limited time-scale perspective certain decisions genuinely make sense that in a broader view clearly have devastating repercussions.
If your time-scale perspective is: nation-states, this century; you might think the most horrifying issue around is starvation in Africa. Whereas if your time-scale perspective is: nation-states, the millennium; it would seem like the sending of food to geographic locations where people are dying of starvation is the problem, because it keeps more people alive and being born who then face starvation. External aid is artificially providing sustenance for that eco-system, influencing their ability to develop a self-sustaining ecology between humans, nature and technology.
If you are a time-scale pluralist, you see how both points are valid and how both foreign aid and regional development, along with multiple other factors are continually leading to the changes that are coming about and influencing what will continue on into the future. If you are a Fractal Pluralist, then you feel that the transmutation, the development through and beyond the issue of starvation, is critical and necessary for the overall well-being of the planetary system while also seeing that the issue will be and is being taken on by those who are directly affected as well as those who are engaged in a form of participation that feeds their emotional or pragmatic needs.
What this model enables us to do as diverse types of people working to bring about a better world, is that it gives us the ability to contextualize our efforts within the ecology of distinct time-scale perspectives and activities. Here, modeling just the spatial scales of our human activity is especially illuminating and advantageous. Mapping out social space allows us to stop, see what is, see the bigger picture, become lucid in our decision making, look for grounds of possibility and develop targeted, consciously designed, creative response strategies. From the vantage point of an individual, one can step into empowered choice about where to direct one’s energy, what social formations one wants to be a part of as a mode of affecting change on which Interest Plateaus. What issues make sense for one to be a part of given one’s specificity and gifts and what issues one must entrust to others, in faith and understanding that efforts are being undertaken.
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