Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity

could this be the biggest wave of change since the 16th century?

Back in 2011 (a lifetime ago), I wrote something on the change coming toward us all. The CEO of a multinational company read it in draft and said to me “The idea that we are involved in the most dramatic cultural shift for 500 years is interesting. But where is the evidence?” Perhaps today less people would question my thesis than then. But for those who still do, my answer is unchanged:

The evidence is everywhere. But such change processes can only be seen in focus after they have run their course.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been endlessly volatile. Few people have any clear sense of where we are and where we are going. We are hit by wave after wave of new calamity and controversy. The acronym VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) has become common currency for those seeking to manage corporations and countries. More striking still is the way that increasing numbers of people are heard to say something along the lines of “I think we need some kind of new form of government”. Yet in the absence of inspired and shared ideas as to what such new forms might look like, the same old power-brokers seek to repackage the same old ideas and impose them on us anew, with increased vigour and more automation.

What the ‘World in Transition’ newsletter is founded upon is a perception that we have indeed embarked on the biggest wave of change since the 16th century, and that the growing turbulence around us is precisely symptomatic of that. It is also founded on a perception that all the responses to that situation which are currently being dreamed up by 'the usual suspects' have really nothing new to offer. In seeking, through ‘World in Transition’, to contribute to the needed debate, I do not necessarily propose that the wave of change bearing down on us in the early 21st century will be bigger that that of the 16th century. Nor necessarily that it will displace it. Only that it will be biggest since the 16th century.

‘World in Transition’ holds to the belief that if we turn our attention away from the schemes of those who are wrapping old ideas in new clothes, we will find instead, beneath the chaos around us, seeds of the genuinely new. It is committed to the possibility of improving our understanding of where we are, how we got here and - most especially – how we might one day emerge from the pain and confusion to a better world, beyond the forever-darkness hypothesised by Orwell and Huxley and co. It takes a position both pessimistic and optimistic: Major problems are likely coming, beyond even what we have seen already in recent years and decades. But humanity has a long record of responding to, and ultimately transcending, even the darkest of times.

Back for a moment though to my assertion that the biggest social change processes cannot be seen for what they are until after they have run their course: The evidence of that is clear when we look at what happened in the last great wave of change: In a period spanning just a little either side of the 16th century, Pico del la Mirandola, Columbus, Luther, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Cevantes, Montaigne, Da Vinci, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes lit up a vision of humanity and the world which was literally unimaginable prior to that. Columbus opened up the terrestrial world, and Copernicus put the Sun at the centre of the solar-system, with that world orbiting around it. Previously unknown forms of objectivity became the basis of science. Freedom of religious belief expanded, and great universities were built. Science, mathematics and philosophy soared to new heights. Something had emerged, fairly suddenly, in the human realm and had started a process of change which flowed on through Newton, Kant, Voltaire and Montesquieu, through the Scientific Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The church was separated from the state, the principle of equality and the rule of law were strengthened, feudalism was consigned to the past by parliamentary democracy, and the possibility was created for all people to own property. The concept of the corporation was born and it led, in combination with rising automation, to unprecedented increases in productivity and infrastructure development. And the whole thing could be comprehended as a single, sweeping, coherent change process only in retrospect.

In short, what happened 500 years ago was that, heralding spectacular change in every field of life, the ‘modern mind’ dramatically emerged, with Romanticism as its right hemisphere and Reason as its left. The two have been creative partners and fierce adversaries ever since. Depth-psychology, existentialism and post-modernism all brought new dimensions to the contest (from around the end of the 19th century) but none can be said to have resolved it. Rather, a now more multi-dimensional contest moves to new intensities. The number of possible 'world-views' is multiplying. And frequently both the new ones and the old are jealous of territory.

As increasing numbers of critics point out, the bright light emanating from the 16th century also cast some dark shadows. That can hardly be avoided. The tensions and ideological conflicts set up by the last wave of change are in a sense coming to a head. The modernists and post-modernists are at each others throats. The promise of science to bring salvation grows only ever more questionable (whatever its merits short of that may be). The tensions between materialist and spiritual world-views are growing, not diminishing, and there is no sign that they can be resolved within our current frameworks. Capitalism and socialism have been explored, developed and implemented in a variety of ways for centuries, and both found wanting - we battle on and on to reconcile their aspirations and principles, and the elusive and seemingly impossible ‘middle line’ between them. Our recognised options for social organisation are increasingly dysfunctional and we struggle to bring into focus any kind of successor. Institutions are failing. On the whole, our conceptual and ideological dialogues seem to circle around the same themes over long decades while the world burns. We have all manner of crises, social, economic and ecological, which we manifestly are also failing to solve within our current frameworks. New fault-lines have developed between globalists and nationalists, on top of all the older polarities. Then add to this rapid change on fronts ranging from the ageing population, to migration, to the still-accelerating digital revolution, to widening wealth-gaps and falling voter turn-out, and our inability to respond well to any of them. All these things send a clear message that ‘old paradigms’ are becoming inadequate.

When ‘the old’ begins to break down in this way, and extended periods of instability and social difficulty develop, ideologues of both left and right are tempted toward autocracy. It has happened many times before. Now, in early 21st century, it is happening again, this time with some who call themselves 'philanthropists' also joining the list of people who seek to impose their will. There is little reason to believe that such inclinations, fully developed, will be less disastrous to the general population today than they have been in the past.

The truth however is that ‘new paradigms’ – that is, real ones, meaning genuinely new, integrative, and lasting, are not planned by ideologues. They emerge organically (just as in the 16th century) to reflect deep processes of change in the collective psyche. And that too is a trend which is in process today: People everywhere, even if they don’t have the answers, are ‘seeing through’ deceptions and distortions which they did not see through before. Amid elements of fear and denial, new perceptions are forming, and increasing millions all over the world are saying ‘it´s time for the system to change’. Which means, unequivocally, that it's time for the system to change. The question is not ‘if’, but ‘how’. It is to such mighty and much-needed debates that 'World in Transition' aspires to make a contribution.