The Holistic Paradigm as Democracy's Evolutionary Frontier (part 1)
This year has been flying by and for many months now I’ve been meaning to put down some thinking that’s been brewing during my past six years working in the field of participatory and deliberative democracy. Finally I’m relieved to say here it is!
I’ve been incredibly fortunate in that what started out as a passion for facilitating community and activist gatherings eventually turned into professional associate work for the UK’s leading participation organisations.
It’s been fantastic to play a part in an exciting stage in the development of democracy, namely the emergence of citizens’ deliberation as a viable complement to our systems of representation. So far I’ve been involved in facilitating 14 citizens assemblies and juries around the UK, consulted on Austria’s national climate assembly and played a co-design role in the creation of a large number of hyper local community assemblies in the London Borough of Newham.
Whilst carrying out that work I’ve witnessed a great deal and had plenty of time to reflect on this pioneering field and form my own thoughts on its potential for further development. Now feels like an opportune moment to share thoughts and ideas that I, as a habitually discreet and reflective person, haven’t tended to vocalise or broadcast much, at least so far…
As quite a lot has been brewing I’ll touch upon a few themes in this piece and hopefully expand upon a few of them later in further articles.
For the past five years, I've been engaged in two streams of seemingly distinct pursuits.
Firstly the newly evolving field of participatory and deliberative democracy and secondly my longstanding inquiry into the fields of holism, consciousness, psychology, systems theory and spiritual and wisdom traditions. The spiritual inquiry has been a particularly strong personal theme - in the 90s and 00s I spent nearly a decade as a monastic in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
Despite their surface differences, I've sensed that holistic thinking has profound implications for the long term future of democracy. So while leading or facilitating deliberative forums on diverse topics such as climate change, the future of high streets or the cost of living crisis, I've also been contemplating the potential for these dimensions to inform each other.
Furthermore, my connection with colleagues from the Co-Intelligence Institute, founded by Tom Atlee, has provided a wonderful community to delve into these themes. Over the past thirty years Tom has been a pioneer in exploring the intersections of deliberative democracy, collaborative governance, and the holistic worldview.
So this article represents some of the maturation of all of the above. I’ve divided it into two parts. In part one I reflect on:
our dominant cultural paradigm and its destructive consequences
the fact that there’s an emerging, more holistic worldview that is more aligned with reality and therefore more able to address humanity’s crises.
the state of democracy in 2024 and a burgeoning field of democratic innovation
the indications that this field belongs to a new holistic cultural paradigm
In part two I delve into:
future developments that might be needed for governance and collective decision making to embrace these deeper realities
the projects involved in my work with the Co-Intelligence Institute to help catalyse a cultural shift
Our way of seeing
I’ve been following with keen interest thinkers, philosophers and scientists who suggest that the multiple intertwined crises we are facing are symptomatic of a deeper malaise. They all point towards the heart of the problem being the mental models in which we’re embedded, the dominant views or paradigms through which we see ourselves and the world.
Like fish swimming in water we are unaware of the deep conceptual structures that have shaped the world we’ve created. Systems thinker and scientist Donella Meadows proposed that the most impactful leverage point for changing a system is at the level of transcending paradigms - of being able to move beyond the stories we're telling ourselves about what's real and possible. However before we can transcend a paradigm we need to be able to see the one we’re currently swimming in. Complexity theorist and practitioner Nora Bateson asks "How do we think our way through the messes we’re in, when the way we think is part of the mess?" Similarly philosopher Bayo Akomolafe questions “What if the way we act, actually serves to reproduce the same conditions we are striving to escape?”
In that respect it’s important to get to know this dominant view which can be described in different ways, for example, as arising from modernity, from separation consciousness or the scientific Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that formed as part of the Enlightenment.
The paradigm shift of modernity that began in 17th century Europe laid the cognitive foundations for the world we are living in today, how we perceive the natural world and our place in it. The world its scientists and philosophers describe is mechanistic and deterministic, a kind of a clockwork universe in which matter is fundamental and reductionist materialist science is the main tool for understanding reality.
On the one hand this form of thinking and seeing has enabled humanity to advance in a particular trajectory. It has helped build an industrial civilisation, given us the internet and advanced notions such as human rights and progress. On the other hand this worldview tells us we are all separate entities, separate from each other and the natural world.
Consequently it has given rise to a combative mindset that urges us to conquer, dominate and prevail over the hostile otherness of the world and other separate individuals.
Jeremy Lent explains this mental model as having roots in Cartesian concepts. 17th Century French philosopher Réné Descartes pronounced “cogito ergo sum” - I think, therefore I am. The human ability to think gives us an identity as something real and special whereas the rest of the natural world appears as unthinking and therefore lifeless, like parts in a big machine. The consequences of this worldview place humans at the top of a hierarchy with a separate natural world that is open to dominion and exploitation.
Jonathan Rowson directly links humanity’s current crises to the exhaustion of this worldview and calls it the Metacrisis: “the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.”
I share the conviction that our dominant culture, the one we bathe in that informs your and my thinking every day, has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of reality. This worldview is misaligned with the truth of all manifold things being part of an endless flow or process of interconnectedness and interdependence of incomprehensible complexity. It ignores that there is ultimately an intrinsic wholeness, a fundamental ground of being that interpenetrates all things.
Advances in science now suggest the universe teems with cooperative, symbiotic relationships, much more so than the dynamics of competition, combat and selfishness. So perhaps it is now our evolutionary task to align our social and economic systems with these deep realities and bring them into harmony with the natural world of which we are but a part, which is where my interest and practice in the world of democracy comes in…
Democracy in 2024
2024 is a particularly interesting year for democracy with 76 nations going to the polls, directly affecting over half of humanity. Yet we have to face it, democracy as a system of governance is in trouble. Everywhere we look, fewer and fewer people believe that our representative and electoral systems can deliver the kind of future they’d like to see. Strong man authoritarian regimes are on the rise, in the USA Democrats and Republicans can no longer even agree on basic voting procedures, global tech platforms create group-think echo chambers that promote mutually exclusive tribes and culture wars rage.
At a time when humanity faces deep existential crises that threaten our long term future (climate, biodiversity, proliferation of biological and nuclear weapons and more), common ground solutions are needed more than ever. And yet polarisation and short term thinking are increasing, hampering our ability at every level to work collectively on our biggest issues.
Perhaps that too is related to the modernist paradigm of separation and control in which our current democratic systems are embedded. Watch any political programme on television, observe any democratic debate (the word debate has its roots in the french de-battre - to beat down) or electioneering and you’ll see the logic of combat, where defeating the political opponent or party is paramount.
In the realm of electoral democracy monolithic packages of ideology and values - progressives vs conservatives, libertarians vs statists - vie for supremacy. Power changes hands and changes back again, rarely venturing beyond narrow short term goals, whilst the world staggers towards a horizon of depletion and destruction.
However, there are green shoots of something new emerging. In the field of democratic innovation I believe we are seeing a broader paradigm shift away from modernity (and in some respects postmodernity which has its own drawbacks in the rejection of any claims of truth or meaning) towards a wiser, more holistic way of decision making. It’s my conviction that the adoption of participatory, deliberative democracy and collaborative forms of governance are arising as a facet of an evolutionary trajectory towards greater holistic thinking. We’re living in times which compel us to evolve. Whether or not we manage to do that is another matter…
Does democratic innovation belong to a new paradigm?
It is hard to pin down and define this new paradigm due to its emergent nature - it is not yet fully formed or articulated. However, I would venture to say that it involves a more holistic worldview or way of seeing and understanding reality. It embraces interconnectedness, complexity, feedback effects and a recognition that our current fragmented and reductionist modes of thinking are insufficient for grappling with the multifaceted challenges we face.
So in what ways could the emerging field of democratic innovation be seen as embodying aspects of this emerging new, holistic paradigm?
Whereas the dominant modernity paradigm has seen the world as mechanistic, the emerging one appreciates the world’s complexity. Citizens’ Assemblies and Juries have appeared in the past few years as a way of embracing complexity and tackling entangled issues such as abortion rights, climate change, assisted dying, and hate crime.
For readers that aren’t familiar, Citizens’ Assemblies bring together a sample of randomly selected citizens that mirror the diversity of a population who listen to a variety of experts, stakeholders and people with lived experience on a given issue. They then deliberate for an extended period and finally come to collective conclusions and recommendations. This represents a leap towards holistic policy making, compared to decisions borne of political battle by a few elected representatives, their chosen advisors and the influence of opposing lobbyists.
Deliberative democracy brings multiple perspectives together (those of diverse citizens, experts, stakeholders, politicians, etc.). They work towards a whole system approach with participants acting as multiple sensors of reality coming together to deliberate, each of them seeing different aspects of the issue at hand which help move towards a fuller picture. Their final recommendations thus represent a greater degree of collective wisdom.
This demonstrates a collaborative form of democracy in that differences of opinion play a new role: they are seen less as problems to overcome (as we witness in zero sum party political battles) and more as diverse resources that inform choices.
Of course the success of citizens’ deliberation depends upon well designed and facilitated processes. Yet when the right ingredients are in place, common goals and shared orientation can be consistently reached (as seen in the outcomes of increasingly numerous assemblies and juries taking place across the globe). This shows the potential to evolve democracy beyond the realm of partisan politics towards governance based on collective sensemaking.
The decision by a representative or an institution of governance to convene a participatory forum demonstrates a shift of an ego-system approach to an ecosystem one. The ego based advocacy approach of ‘knowing what’s best’ for their constituents shifts towards a facilitative leadership approach that aims to listen to and engage an entire ecosystem of people and perspectives.
This approach demonstrates a potential (albeit not yet fully realised) to invert habitual power dynamics whereby a select few command the resources and decision making that the majority then live by. Selection processes like sortition recalibrate these imbalances towards empowering a truer representation of ‘the people’. For example the Global Assembly on Climate was a microcosm of the globe -“100 assembly members, proportionally representative of the world's population by gender, age, geography, attitude toward climate change, and educational level” - which meant the majority of participants were from poorer, less dominant nations in the Global South.
In general the participatory turn in democracy can be seen as having a deeply holistic significance. Namely that life exists as an interconnected web whereby the unique expression of every being contributes in some way to the wellbeing of the whole. That understanding calls each of us as individuals into honing and sharing our unique gifts and following our natural passion. Equally, this understanding highlights a need to design social systems so that they appreciate, evoke and engage every kind of diversity and uniqueness.
That kind of understanding can be seen shaping the participatory democracy of one of the most pioneering democratic nations: Taiwan. In the realm of digital affairs they have harnessed platforms such as Polis that help societies to understand issues in terms of both diverging perspectives and tribes of opinion as well as areas of consensus where there may be possibility for shared outcomes. Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan, is also a strong advocate for the notion of Plurality - cooperation across differences: “We believe we can create a more diverse, inclusive and prosperous society through collective brainstorming, respecting diverse viewpoints, and transcending boundaries…”
The book ‘Citizens’ by Jon Alexander argues that we are indeed moving through a participatory developmental trajectory, a shift from our past as ‘subjects who obeyed’, to our present as ‘consumers with choices’ to a future as ‘citizens with purpose and agency to create.’
Image New Citizenship Project
The concepts in the table to the left give an impression of the different narratives of who we are as humans that our societies are moving through. The red ‘consumer’ column broadly relates to the modernist paradigm whilst the blue ‘citizen’ column gives a sense of a more interconnected, interdependent, holistic paradigm.
A participatory shift would both require and call forth new structures and ways of co-creating. Are these new shoots of possibility in the field of democratic participation emerging as pointers towards a new more complex and interconnected order? Are we seeing a new paradigm emerge?
Paradigms take time to take hold. We are still living in the structures of the one which began four centuries ago. Do we have time to change as a planetary species? Will rapid destruction of our ecosystems force us to change or will humanity destroy itself? As far as I’m concerned it’s impossible to know. Yet in the field of participatory and deliberative democracy, I feel there is potential for a sea-change arising from holistic principles.
How we might deepen into such a paradigm shift in democracy will be the focus of part 2 of this article…
