Flapping Butterfly Wings
A Retrospective on TRANET's First 20 years with Implications for the Coming Millennium
by Bill Ellis

The Rise of GROs and Global Governance

In the last two decades, since Habitat I when TRANET was founded, there has been a phenomenal rise of citizen organized GrassRoots Organizations (GROs, often called Nongovernmental Organizations or NGOs) in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The burgeoning of GROs has been initiated by the failure and near chaos brought on by the Industrial Countries' intrusion into cultures they dominated but did not understand. Julie Fisher in her two books, "Beyond Rio" and "NonGovernments" chroniclizes the hundreds of thousands of citizen organizations that are doing for themselves. Springing from the land, uninvited and often resisted by outside developers, and even their own governments, people are recreating their own communities with new and indigenous technologies, and taking over where governments and industries have failed.

Often, stimulated by a special unique local need, these local Grassroots Organizations (GROs) grow to become more broadly socially and politically active, linking up with other GROs to form networks for participatory democracy and mutual aid. There are now hundreds of thousands of local citizen organizations solving local problems with local resources and local skills.

Civil Society

The industrial world even more than the Third World is seeing a revival of citizen Ideas and actions. It is being recognized that the problems facing humankind cannot be solved by governments or markets alone. Nor can governments or corporations create a people center democracy. Grassroots citizen organizations, Civil Society, is a necessary third leg of governance. We-the-people must take, and are taking, action into our own hands. Civil Society is becoming recognized as the rock on which society is built. New citizen initiated social as well as physical innovations are sweeping North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Japan. The hardware of solar energy, waterless toilets, organic gardens, waterwheels, and electric cars, are being matched by the software of Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), co-housing, homeschooling, Community Land Trusts (CLTs), local scrips, and other social innovations. GROs around the world are inventing, exchanging and adopting new ways to make society work. We'll return to the growth of GROs and Civil Sociey in a moment. But first I'd like to describe another portion of TRANET.

The New Paradigm

Searching for these butterfly wings, the individual and disconnected social innovations and appropriate technologies that might have a major effect on the future, has been one hallmark of TRANET since its beginning. But TRANET has had three sections. The first was entitled "The New Paradigm," The Second "Social Innovations," and the Third was sometimes entitled "Lifestyles" and at other "Technologies and Techniques." Together they were meant to convey the concept of a deep fundamental "Cultural Transition."

This holism of TRANET was a reflection of the discussion at HABITAT I and was implied in both words that many up TRANET. TRANSnational implied transcending the divisions inherent in nationalism and inter-nationalism. NETwork was meant to imply the linking into a whole of the many diverse ideas and actions exposed in the TRANET newsletter-directory.

In their 1982 book Networking, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps gave considerable attention to TRANET's concept of networking. They quoted a 1979 TRANET editorial that pointed out that "People in all part of the world are recognizing that big business, big technology, big government and other centralized organizations cannot solve local problems or develop local potentials, only the people themselves can. People are recognizing that small is not only beautiful, but small is possible and small is happening. This decade may be hailed as the beginning of the future because people-to-people networks are initiating a more creative approach to world well-being, -- [they are forming] a second level of world governance"Lipnack and Stamps went on to describe TRANET with these words: "TRANET is a whole, it has no center. ... Organizationally TRANET resembles many of its member groups. Within networks there is not control, but facilitation. Whereas a bureaucracy invariable has a controlling organ that serves as a decision maker, the hub of a network acts to coordinate cooperative decisions." In his 1982 best selling book Megatrends John Naisbitt used TRANET to typify networking, one of the ten major trends that are setting the stage for a deep fundamental change in our culture.

It is thoughts and action on this concept of networking that filled the "New Paradigm" section of TRANET newsletter-directory and led to the unveiling of the Gaian Paradigm.

Chaos, Complexity and Gaia

Many basic scientific observations led to this new scientific/social paradigm. One was the observation that biological evolution did not progress as Darwin predicted by a series or minute changes which led over time to the emergence of new species. Rather, biological evolution happened in quantum leaps. Major biological changes and new species are created in relatively short periods of time after long periods of stability. This observation was designated by Stephen Jay Gould as "punctured equilibrium".

Two other observations were linked to become the "Gaia Hypothesis." James Lovelock, an atmospheric chemist working for NASA, observed that the biosphere of the Earth was radically different from all other planets. It stayed amazingly constant, and within ranges which supported life. Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist, at the same time, was studying the evolution of micro organisms over the billions of years before animals appeared on the face of the earth. She found that life forms were interdependent. Life was able exist on Earth because of a symbiosis among all life forms. Everything was interdependent with everything else. Life created its own biome. Lovelock and Margulis proposed that the whole earth acted like a living organism. It was a self-organized, self-maintaining ecological system. At the suggestion of a neighbor of Lovelock, William Golding, author of Lord of the flies, they termed this life-like Earth system Gaia, after the Greek Earth goddess.

A theoretical understanding of how Gaia, or in fact any system, might "self-organize" came from other fields of science including mathematics, physics and particularly computer science. Chaos and Complexity theories made possible by computer modeling have moved science beyond the limits imposed by linear mathematics, algebra and calculus. Study of the transition of order into chaos, or chaos into order, and the formation of complex systems from simpler ones has opened a whole new area for science.

It is, of course, from the study of chaos that the concept the flap of a butterfly's wing may change the initial conditions in weather enough to create a hurricane a year or so later. Two other breakthroughs in the field reported in past issues of TRANET are particularly relevant to cosmic evolution and the Gaia concepts.

"Self-organizing criticality" is an idea proposed by Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist, Per Bak. His first computer model representing self-organizing criticality was of a pile of sand. As you pour grains of sand on a spot it slowly builds into a stable inverted cone. As you continue pouring the cone becomes unstable until sand slides and avalanches restore a new larger stable cone. He showed that biological evolution occurred in such bursts. Simple entities formed more complex systems, which remained stable until internal pressures built up and caused a rapid reorganization. There seems to be a law of nature, self-organizing criticality, by which new forms come into being ..

"Autocatalysis," developed by Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute is another concept which provides a theoretical base for the evolution of Gaia. Autocatalysis holds that systems of biological entities may promote their own rapid transition into different forms. Kauffman uses the simple example of the slippery footed fly and sticky tongued frog. The mutation of slippery footedness gave no environmental advantage to the fly until the mutation of the sticky tongued frog. Only then did Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest come into play. Networks of potential mutations may develop and remain dormant until triggered by an environmental change or other phenomena that brings on the avalanche of transition. Such networks of potential mutations account for the punctured equilibrium and the formation of complex organs like the eye or the introduction of new species.

'Self-organizing criticality" and "autocatalysis" are among the scientific concepts that show how biological entities self-organize in quantum like leaps from simple cells to linked complex networks of cells, organs, plants and animals.

More than that, physicists like Lee Smolin and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann have extended self-organizing back to the beginning of time at the Big Bang, suggesting that the same principles may apply to the self-organizing of fundamental particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, and molecules into galaxies, solar systems, planets, and life.

At the same time economists like Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, Brian Arthur, and Jon Holland have extended the new paradigm in the other direction, to include economics, social organization, and human consciousness.

Cyberspace and the Networked Universe

Everything is connected to everything else" is one way of stating the Gaian Paradigm. It is a fact of science, and is a social mindset. But it is more than those, it is a fact of technology.

In a technological sense networking was made possible by the railroad, the automobile, the telegraph, and the telephone, each of these technologies made the Earth smaller and put people in more rapid and reliable touch with one another. The real quantum jump in networking is only now before us. Computers and the Internet are providing a challenge that has hardly been explored.

In 1982 TRANET entered cyberspace with a grant from the Apple computer Company including a Apple IIe, a 600 baud modem, and a few 3 1/4 inch disks. TRANET and 3 other alternative organizations (Volunteers in Asia, the Farallones Institute, the University of California a Santa Cruz) were invited to experiment with computer networking. The resulting EcoNet is still in operation now with 10s of thousand members world wide. Cyberspace is a global phenomenon providing humanity the opportunity to work globally in real time. This takes networking into a new era beyond the concept that founded TRANET in 1976 or about which Naisbitt wrote in 1982. Neither its potentials nor it limits have not yet been explored.

The Gaia Hypothesis, the theories of chaos and complexity, and the computer technologies which now face us grew independently of one another. But they form a unity. They in themselves, are an example of the flapping butterfly wings and the self-organizing principle which shapes all of cosmic evolution. Together they suggest the Gaian Paradigm . They challenge us to prepare ourselves for an avalanche of social, political and economic change in the years ahead.

The Implication of the New Scientific Paradigm to Social Institutions

The new Paradigm is a scientific hypothesis which explains many phenomena in cosmic evolution. It also implies a worldview that could be the basis for a very different society than we now live in. It suggest a new mindset by which humans can examine current phenomena with respect to their long range future. Futurists are no longer dependent on examining history and technological trends. In fact, punctured equilibrium and self-organizing criticality suggests that new social, as well as physical and biological, phenomena arrive, like an avalanche unpredictably. We may not be able to foretell them with accuracy, but we can examine groups of related social phenomena that are close to chaos. And we can foresee possible future happenings of social importance. This is not unlike the mountaineer's warnings of avalanches, the meteorologist's prediction of hurricanes, or the geologist's forecasting of earthquakes. The mathematical accuracy of physics, the model science of the past, applies only to a very limited range of phenomena. Even those, as quantum theory says, are only very highly probable. Nature is nonlinear and unpredictable.

Punctuated equilibrium applies equally well to social and cultural evolution as it does to biological evolution. If, and as long as, a society is adapted competently to the values and needs of the people it serves, it will tend to preserve those values and practices that have sustained it, and will resist change. But when things deteriorate (economic downturns, Y2K, the end of oil, street violence, family disintegration, warfare, religious uncertainty, famine, ecological collapse, or whatever) deeply rooted cultural premises are quickly abandoned. A period of uncertainty, instability, and chaos sets in. If new knowledge reveals a profoundly different view of the world, a new cultural and social structure replaces the old. Society today is in a most profound period of chaos and change.

In contrast to the Dominator Paradigm the Gaian Paradigm suggests that people are not independent of, nor above or outside the natural world. They are imbedded in it. There is no justification for one person to dominate or have authority over another. It suggest a very different society than that which grew within the Dominator Paradigm.

Humans do have the unique ability to understand, through science, the laws that govern them, to envision future worlds, and to co-create their own future worlds within the laws of science.

In the coming millennium it is most probable that every social institutions that has been developing for the past 2000 years or more will be deeply, fundamentally, reexamined and radically transformed in the light of the Gaian Paradigm. The new mindset gives humanity a new powerful tool to foresee and prepare for the uncertain future. There could be a flood of self-organizing social phenomena replacing the old.

The appropriate technologies and social innovations that TRANET has spent two decades revealing take on a new meaning. These citizen ideas and actions could be the flapping butterfly wings which determine the future. To see one possible implication of this worldview I'd like to return to the burgeoning GROs and the growth of Civil Society.

A Global Civil Society Governance System

One of the early books popularizing "the new science of chaos," The Turbulent Mirror" by John Briggs and F. David Peat in, quoted a 1982 TRANET editorial as an example of the application of the new science to social and political structure. Their quote suggested that:

"Future world governance can be pictured as a multidimensional network of networks which provide each individual with many optional paths through which s/he can provide for his or her own well-being and can participate in controlling world affair. ... [it will be] composed of links between nodes. [It] will have no center. Each member of the network [will be] autonomous. Unlike in a hierarchy no part or member will be controlled by any other. Various members may draw together for special projects or on different issue, but there [will be] no bureaucracy demanding action or conformity."

This was not meant to be the prediction of a classical anarchistic state, but rather the suggestion that a participatory democracy has been made possible by new worldviews, new concepts, new technologies, and new lifestyles.

Complexity theory suggests that when any atoms, molecules or cells, emerge in sufficient numbers they tend to form networks and special conglomerations. Those simpler entities will combine into to serve the whole. The whole system may self-organize itself into a new type of organized form unpredictable from its component parts. Elisabet Sahtouris in Earth Dance: A Living System of Evolution suggests that the human body with it cells organized into organs, and organs organized into a living being. Is a perfect metaphor for society. Ervin Laszlo and the Budapest Group carry the concept even further with their concept of "General Evolution"

Civil society and the burgeoning GROs are following that pattern. To support the network of GROs, Grassroots Support Organizations (GRSOs) are forming, most often by middle class professionals and technicians who recognize the inequities engendered by the current economic-political system. GRSOs reach out to give in-kind assistance and to legitimize the actions of the peasants and disenfranchised in their bids for empowerment and local self-reliance. Techniques, technologies, information, and service from the industrial countries are supplied through links created by International non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Julie Fisher in The Road from Rio describes world wide network of GROS, GRSO and INGOs in terms that fit perfectly into Chaos an Complexity Theory, although there is not sign that she has ever heard of either.

It is all there. A living body of networked organizations has emerged to fill the niche produced by dysfunctional post-colonial governments. A plethora of unique interdependent social cells have developed organs assuming specialized functions that serve the whole. They have almost magically become the social/political body that promises better life for the people in developing countries, and the whole Earth. The natural laws of self-organizing criticality and autocatalysis are working on the social level.

As Elise Boulding pointed out in her book "Building a Global Civic Culture" the heart of a new world governance has already formed. Through the revelations of science, an understanding of the cosmic process is slowly emerging. With this new understanding, humanity is participating in the co-creation of a sustainable and lasting civilization based on citizen participation in local community organizations -- a Gaian global governance.

The First Phase of Democracy

Like any step in cosmic evolution this is a unique happening. But like any step in cosmic evolution it is subject to the natural evolutionary laws. It was 250 years ago that the first phase of modern democratic governance introduced on the planet. The times then, like the times now were chaotic. The ruling powers, and the ruling system, had outlived their usefulness. Masses of people recognized that they were missing out on many to the benefits that their toil had created. "It was the best of times, and the worst of times." The American and the French revolutions happened.

The first phase of democracy was a foolish idea to the leaders of the day. Monarchs held their power by the "divine right of kings." Neither the churches nor the governments were friendly to the idea that common people could rule themselves, nor even participate in government. The ideas of voting, representation, legislating, human rights, politics, constitutions, or social contracts were little more than hazy academic notions played with by abstruse philosophers. The Magna Charter had given large land owners a degree of power over their lands and its serfs, but these powers were subject to the King's will. It took the Voltaires, the Franklins, the Paines, and the Jeffersons to bring the ideas of every man's rights to the public. And it took the Boston Tea Party, the Bread Riots, and the revolutionary wars, to bring down the old regimes and make possible the self-organization of the new.

Self-organization is the right word. The avalanche of change hit an unprepared society. No one had predicted the rise of national democracy. There were no plans, no designs or instruction books for the first phase of democracy. There were few constitutions, no concept of checks and balances, no rules for voting, no loyal opposition, no political parties, no civil society, no GROs.

The American colonies had assumed a degree of self-control under the British Crown. Direct democracy was practiced in the forerunners of the New England town meeting in some colonies. Voting rights were usually denied women, blacks, Catholics and Jews. Suffrage was extended to only landholders of some substance often as much as 50£ (a goodly sum in those days). Probably no more than 1/3 of the adult free men could vote. Office holding was even more restricted. Commonly, to hold elected office a man had to own at least 500 acres and 10 slaves, or thousands of pounds sterling in other property. Like with today's GROs, ideas and actions were separate and disparate. No associations were ready to exercise political control of society. The task was daunting. But it did happen. In spite of the later failure in France and earlier failures in Athens and Rome, the first phase of democracy was born to last in America.

I have used "the first phase of democracy" to describe the political innovation of 1776 because, as we know today, it was only partially successful. It was only partially successful for many reasons. Primarily because it arrived on the world stage without preparation. The technology of the times made participatory democracy impossible beyond the town meeting. Communication was measured in days or weeks, not as today in nanoseconds. Because of that, we-the-people could only be "represented" in the halls of power. Franklin and Jefferson, following the Native American model, advocated that all decision be made by consensus at the local level, and that representatives be limited to arguing the case for their communities. But Madison and others, following the concept of British parliamentarian, Edmond Burke, argued that representatives should be empowered to make decision in the name of the people. Burkian representation was accepted by most colonies and the Constitutional Assembly. This made the government dominant. It limited the voice of the people. It's dangers are now being felt by a Federal government in the hands of a oligarchy in which money rules. Even before the globalization of industry, corporate money had taken control of the election process. To get people who favor their views elected, and corporate lobbyists to ride herd on "our" representatives once they get them elected, and on the judges in Federal Courts once they get them appointed.

In spite of the extended suffrage to blacks, women, and all citizens, the voice of the people has been steadily eroded as corporations have grown in size and power. People's control of corporations was taken away in 1844 in the Supreme Court's decision that corporations had the same rights as flesh and blood citizens. Earlier, communities or states could revoke corporate charters if a corporation was deemed to not be in the public interest. The rise of corporate power over the people increased with the opening of Free Trade with no restrictions on the outflow of capital or jobs, and no global standards for safety, health, or protecting in environment. The high cost of getting elected and the free flow of money into politics from the wealthy elite, banks, and businesses, has made even the first phase of democracy far less a people's government than was envisioned by America's Founding Fathers.

Emergence of the Second Phase of Democracy

The rise of Civil Society, modern technology, and the new scientific understanding of how evolution works has made possible the emergence of a second phase for democracy. We-the-people now have a voice in our civil society, we have the technology to communicate around the globe, and we have the new understanding of social evolution .

Complexity theory shows that ordered complexity is the natural state of the universe. Biological evolution is the most obvious example of the tendency toward the ordering of simple entities into more complex systems. Every step of cosmic evolution since the Big Bang has been a step toward increasing ordered complexity. Creation occurs on the borderline between rigid order and random chaos, "at the edge of chaos." If an entity is too rigidly ordered it can not change to meet the contingencies of a change in its environment. Flexibility is one of the cardinal biological principles of evolution. Without flexibility a life form is not sustainable, it cannot change to meet new conditions. Without flexibility progress is impossible.

But governments, like corporations, have been organized within the Dominator Paradigm. Good management means rigid order controlled from the top. In the first phase of democracy the people elected their governmental representatives, but all power resided in the authority of government. Humans have been locked into the worldview in which rigid order and authority was highly respected. Rigid order was the goal of organization. Humans are taught to be afraid of chaos, and to avoid complexity. Yet, the new science/social paradigm show us that the edge of chaos is where progress happens with the self-organizing of complexity. If society is to meet the challenges that face it, it needs to live closer to the edge of chaos. It must welcome a degree of disorder.

Democracy since its modern inception has suffered from its self-guilt of being inefficient. Critics and supporters alike have held that democracy is too chaotic. They have searched for ways to move democracy toward more controlled management without surrendering the individual rights they saw as the great strength of this form of government. The Gaian Paradigm sees democracy in a very different light. The seeming weaknesses of democracy are its strength. The theories of Gaia, Chaos and Complexity suggest that self-organizing on the edge of chaos is natural law. It requires the messy flexibility inherent in democracy, and absent in more efficient forms of government. People are only beginning to realize that no form of government, except democracy, provides the freedom and potential of complex ordering to meet the changing demands of modern times.

The rise of civil society, the burgeoning of GROs, the growth of social innovation, community involvement in meeting their own needs, are all parts of the progressive agenda provided by nature. We may not see clearly today the final organization which will emerge if we continue to build the decentralized autonomous communities linked together in worldwide mutual aid. But, that is the way of cosmic evolution as it is seen from the new worldview. It purports the emergence of a second phase of democracy. One in which people in community at the grassroots have a direct input to all decisions which affect their lives. A new form of global governance.

(This essay originated from a 1998 E.F. Schumacher Society Lecture)

For more information: http://www.nonviolence.org/past.php
The Best of TRANET features articles from the first 20 years

Bill Ellis
email: tranet@rangeley.org
website:http://www.nonviolence.org/