ELSI in Detail: Culture and Economy

Culture Includes: Community, politics, law, art, education, tradition, living environments, language, etc. Reflects on: Sociology, ethics, philosophy, history, technology, demography, power, architecture, etc. Culture is the collection of foundational interactions between us as a species. They include all the ways we act, interact, and exchange. Some of these patterns are evolutionary in kind and have grown over thousands of years, while others are new and rapidly evolving. Other species also have culture, which is easily seen in species we have empathy towards such as primates, but obvious species cultures such as ant and bird colonies also show us the rich culture of our evolutionary siblings. In relation to sustainability challenges, cultural aspects impact many areas of development. These range from how we talk about the challenges, to the laws we make, the way we try to stimulate or enforce change, and the regulations and traditions that impact Harmony. Social justice challenges are present in every culture on earth and a driving force for many. Cultural aspects are also often present as an enabler or inhibition to changes in other areas of the ELSI stack. For example, the conservative culture of certain communities inhibit the implementation of more progressive sustainable solutions. As we climb up the ELSI ladder, we find aspects that seem increasingly complex. While we’re adept at dealing with issues on the material and energy levels (often engineering-related), in the culture section live elements that are subject to decades of debates and that can get fuzzy really fast. Because ‘politics’ lives in this area, it’s the section most sensitive to warping from these forces. Some of the most important themes in the culture category have to do with a networked understanding of how we exchange culture in society. When performing a network analysis, you can quickly see that knowledge sharing, in any form, is one of the most fundamental drivers of the creation and flourishing of culture. Primarily, of course, through education, which is the cultural equivalent to water and bread of a society, and an expression of fundamental ‘connectivity’ on the network level. Any culture that inhibits or needlessly restricts education, for example by budget cuts that impact quality or access to education, trades short-term financial gain for future societal decline. A systems analysis shows this as clearly as 1+1=2. Unfortunately, this seems to be all too pervasive a problem in many societies, which may have something to do with the typical short term of a political period of 4 to 5 years, while it takes about 10 to 20 years for an impact on the educational system to register in societal performance. But education is not the only important aspect of knowledge exchange. If we think about the transparency parameter we can see that this is analogous to the access and availability of knowledge in the system. What is keeping knowledge from flowing freely and quickly to all people? This is impacted by, for example, intellectual property rights such as patents, as well as governmental and corporate secrecy. Because part of the knowledge exchange in society has been monetized (through patents) many areas have become inaccessible. This is a huge systemic problem when looking at something like medicine. This leads to a strong disenfranchisement of those without knowledge ownership. Because knowledge breeds knowledge, this has a spiralling effect. Thus, the open source movement, which strives for the free access of all knowledge, can be seen as part of the quest for basic human rights and equality. Similar is the trend for the decentralization of knowledge, and with that, power. Knowledge is now more valuable than physical possessions, with the most valuable companies in the world now governed by companies dealing in data. Power is shifting its base from the ownership of property to the ability to receive, collect, manipulate, and broadcast data. Old hegemonies of material wealth are left behind, and new ones that control networks are flourishing. With the advent of the internet, new lands have been made available to humanity to re-order the power landscape. New opportunities await us to establish a more harmonious and free society with these new found opportunities. Economy Includes: Financial systems, transportation, employment, trade balances, legal entities Reflects on: Alternate currencies, value creation, business models, wealth distribution, globalization, sharing economies The economy section is the area that deals with all the interchange of goods and services among people and the other sections. This is the ELSI section that most people in the world are concerned about on a daily basis. If anything is beyond the scope of this book, it’s an extensive discussion about all the issues and elements of the economy. Not because it’s so much more complicated or important than the other sections, it’s just the one humanity has spent most time fretting about. We are, as a species, completely obsessed with the management, maintenance, and performance of our patterns of exchanging resources. Economy is the logistic nervous system of our society. It’s entirely defined, controlled, and embedded in the cultural layer, but it’s often treated as having a higher importance, which is nonsensical. Without culture we are nothing, and economy is as much a cultural expression of our society as art and science is. Economy is, difficult as it may seem, a collective choice. But, each and every individual is directly dependent on the patterns within economy and few have the resources to change this structure on their own. It’s where our jobs are, our transport, and our infrastructure. There are many themes in ELSI’s economic layer that occur frequently when studying societal problems, but none are as pervasive as unequal wealth distribution and its causal cousin, poverty. These should also become apparent when conducting a Harmony system indicator inventory, especially the Power Balance, Access, and Inclusion parameters. If you make a causal loop map of any large societal issue, whether it’s disease epidemics, terrorism, resource depletion or drug addiction, you will find poverty as a major driver. Providing solutions for poverty is therefore a systemic goal in and of itself. Another pervasive theme in economy is the entrenched pursuit of growth as an economic goal. It’s a typical example of a logical fallacy that growth is a precondition for a healthy organization or nation, which has nevertheless permeated economic textbooks for more than a century. No organism on this planet requires consistent systemic growth to survive and procreate. Growth in a finite space is always fatal. Eradicating the mechanisms of this fallacy is one of the big challenges before us in this century. It gives rise to many of the parasitic mechanisms that exist in our society today, including artificial inflation, which in turn can enslave a people into lives of infinite toil. The most valuable component of economy is labor, and the most strikingly influential is, historically speaking, trade. Trade has pulled along culture as a driving force of cultural exchange and exploration. Jobs are the bread and butter of any economy. Jobs not only give people the means to live and sustain their bodies, jobs give meaning to life. Having the right to work, is having the right to a meaningful existence. This is of course only true if those jobs are fair and ethical. Through this fundamental value of being useful for society through meaningful work, the economy section feeds directly into the health and happiness of the individual.