The Path of Humanity

SOCIETY IN PERSPECTIVE SERIES, VOLUME V

Parthenon Publishing House

PO box 22199, 1302 CD Almere, The Netherlands

www.uitgeverijparthenon.nl

© 2018 Henk Diepenmaat. All rights reserved.

COVER DESIGN: Studio Jan de Boer

PHOTO AUTHOR: Jeannette Schols

ISBN: 978 90 79578 900 [book – English edition]

ISBN: 978 90 79578 924 [ePub – English edition]

ISBN: 978 90 79578 894 [book – Dutch edition]

ISBN: 978 90 79578 917 [ePub – Dutch edition]

‘Eadem mutata resurgo’

(Changed and yet the same, I rise again)

Inscription on the grave of Jacob Bernoulli (1654-1705) in Basel

‘I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite

beyond the bounds of true science.’

Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray (18 June 1857)

‘To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation

as two opposites seems foolish to me.’

Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929),

German Democratic Party politician, from his 1927 lecture

after receiving the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize.

‘To us, unlike Kepler and Fludd, the only acceptable point of view appears to be the

one that recognizes both sides of reality – the quantitative and

the qualitative, the physical and the psychical – as compatible with each

other, and can embrace them simultaneously’

Wolfgang Pauli. Writings on Physics and Philosophy,

Springer Verlag, 1994, p.259

‘I think we should hold up Darwinism as an awful warning for

how we should not organize our societies.’

Interview with Richard Dawkins about evolution,

determinism, and free will, www.pbs.org, 1995.

‘Just hold my hand and we're there

Somehow we're going somewhere’

Jon and Vangelis, ‘I’ll Find My Way Home’ (1981)

For Frank and Chris,

To a wonderful journey to high peaks.

For Hilda,

For the peaks up to now and those in the future,

and for the way you navigate even the deepest valleys.

Foreword by Jacqueline Cramer

In your hands is a magnum opus by Henk Diepenmaat. It is a rich and substantial book, in which the author takes the reader on a fascinating journey along the path of humanity. The book’s central idea is that the course of human development has been erratic but, over the long term, upwards. The path that our development is following has given the book its name. According to Henk, we can refine this upwards pattern even more, and with greater focus.

We started as a society of hunter-gatherers and through the phases of agricultural societies and city states have landed in the modern nation state. That was a path of trial and error. We are now at another point of transition. Our current late-modern society consists of more and more actors, increasingly climbing their own individual ‘improvement peaks’, according to the author, and the gaps, walls, and tensions between all these actors are unmistakably increasing. The book is structured around the argument that, despite this growing fragmentation in the shorter term, we are nevertheless growing towards a new phase in our societal development. This is, in Henk’s words, ‘the plurimodern society of Team World’. The quality of this society is much higher than ours, and, he says, we can absolutely facilitate and accelerate its achievement.

You may have a lot of questions at this point: what is this Team World, how does it work exactly, can that actually be done, isn’t that rather optimistic, and how will it happen? I understand. It sounds abstract and even utopian. But Henk paints a colourful picture of our societal development along the path of humanity with broad brushstrokes. The developments in particular sectors, including construction, healthcare, and the financial world, are outlined in terms of this path, often with help from experts in these fields. And once you start to read you’ll notice that the author builds his argument clearly and systematically in order to answer the above questions. Rather than simply stating or hoping that our future society will be better, with this book he aims to give a well-grounded argument for why he expects it will be better.

The nice thing about the book is that the reader is immersed in a sea of information without losing the way. This is because the book is based on a copious arsenal of scientific knowledge and insights, yet its more narrative sections read like a novel, thanks to the informal writing style and the mix of scientific reflections and his personal life experiences. Anecdotes about fixing a flat tyre and his son being startled to find a scorpion under his pillow bring the abstract explanations back down to earth. In essence, the author has the reader take his or her own journey. Its building blocks vary from the personal and familiar to highly abstract. Some readers will feel right at home reading about how academic scholarship functions and what the advantages and disadvantages of specialization are. Some will find his analysis of objective–subjective, rationality–irrationality, and material–mental relationships, and the importance of finding a balance between them compelling. Yet others will enjoy the theoretical adaptation of his ‘societal balance model’, his criticism of chains of production and consumption, or his typology of six innovation methods built around the notion of societal balance (or lack thereof) that results. Or his description and explanation of Benford’s and Zipf’s pattern laws. Or the sawtooth and wave patterns that he distils from the number line that he uses to explain why he thinks (as a non-mathematician) that the Riemann hypothesis holds true. It’s this interdisciplinary breadth that makes this book fascinating for a diverse range of interested people.

The intriguing thread running through the book is that while you read it, you are presented with a developed philosophy of society that the author uses to provide an explanation for the nature of our societal path of development: recursive perspectivism. In a nutshell, according to recursive perspectivism, our societies consist of actors, and actors consist of perspectives. Hard figures, statistics, and prime numbers are introduced into our discussions of how we think about society. If you throw a dice, the pattern is random and unpredictable in the short term. But with all its irregularity, in the very long term, the average nevertheless moves unmistakably and inevitably towards 3½. Similarly, human actors, capricious and inconsistent in their short-term actions, together follow a long-term path of preference in what Henk calls a perspectivist space (an idea already presented in his doctoral dissertation). This makes it easy to see why at the largest scales our long-term societal development can follow a path to improvement without we humans driving it, and even without our consciously realizing it. Some forms of society turn out to be stable, others not, and this is also elucidated in terms of perspective.

The author’s ultimate goal is to make a contribution to the methodological insights that make further societal improvement possible. His reasoning is that we are not good at understanding large societal practices, because of the multiplicity of actors who each act from their own perspective. Henk contends that he can see this complexity much better using the multi-actor approach that he developed in his previous works, and he gives a variety of examples. When you read them, the world indeed looks much more manageable. Societal practice is of course much less manageable than a structured reality. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know which perspectives really matter. Furthermore, people are not always willing to see things from another’s perspective, and prefer to stick to their own mental frameworks. Henk acknowledges this but also emphasizes that we have to keep our efforts focused on arriving at a more connected and partly shared understanding of different perspectives. After all, a better society is the result of greater cooperation in the right kind of coherence. Our history demonstrates this unambiguously, and this, according to him, is precisely what characterizes the path of humanity.

Henk stresses that he aims to stay far from dogma and from creating the impression that he thinks he knows better. But a book like this cannot be entirely value free. The author aims to address your own life experience. Starting with shared societal life experiences, you’ll look together at the historical practice of societal development. At the same time the book aims to improve society by catalysing innovation in society. The nature of societal innovation gets ample treatment by the end of the book. Here as well, the perspective he takes is that of historical development. Using a description of the incremental development of environmental policy and sustainable development, he outlines what societal innovation is essentially about: from a one-issue approach, through accumulating interests and needs (including their internal frictions), to a far-reaching synthesis of various aspects of sustainable development in multi-actor coherence and cooperation. He introduces several methods for giving form and content to societal improvement. It is all engagingly clarified while you read.

The Path of Humanity: Societal Innovation for the World of Tomorrow is a fine mix of theory, practice, and the author’s personal experiences. It’s an aggregation of all the insights that Henk has had in his 30-year career, drawing on his first research at the Dutch research institute TNO, his dissertation, the practical knowledge from his multi-actor consultancy, his part-time involvements with universities, his previous books, and his role as a bearer and transferer of knowledge. The book has become an enriching and honest source of inspiration that can help the reader to do what is necessary to help him or her along the path of being human.

With my experience in politics, societal practice, and academia, I realized that there are many obstacles along our shared path, and that sometimes we have to take many winding roads. Whether we get there or not does not lie in one person’s hands but is a collective process. Although human development will always be somewhat haphazard, Henk has set out a clear long-term path of progress, unclouded by the issues of the day in our societal practice, by thinking deeply about societal development. His ideas and arguments shed an exceptional light on the fluctuations of human development up to the present day and represent a highly optimistic route to our future. It’s encouraging to see that we’ve more or less been able to follow this path in human history thus far, with the attractive and less-attractive sides it entails. Henk offers ideas and methods that can help. The Path of Humanity can spark renewed thinking about the nature of our societal development, and what we can do together.

Jacqueline Cramer

Professor of Sustainable Innovation, Utrecht University

Former Minister of Housing, Spatial Development, and Environment

Amsterdam, September 2016

Preface by the author

This book explores the principles of our societal development. When I say ‘our’, I mean humanity as a whole. When I use the word ‘societal’, I include structural, configurational characteristics of our societies on top of substantive social characteristics. Exploring these principles can help us to better understand our collective history up to now. But more importantly, the purpose of this book is to enable us to further improve our societies with greater focus in the future. We are nearing a crucial phase in our history as humanity. The cracks in the cement of our societies are showing, and we cannot take it for granted that things will be better in the near future than they are now. However, we do have some choice in the matter – but we’ll have to make intelligent choices. This book attempts to throw some light on just what making these intelligent choices for our future entails.

The book pushes some envelopes, and it chooses some unconventional routes. Human societal development is perhaps the vastest and most multifaceted subject there is to explore. Nevertheless, the central hypothesis of this book is that this massive development is constructed from a single building block. I call this building block ‘perspective’. Every perspective consists of three components: an initial situation, a process of change, and a resulting situation. For example, you start off at home, then you get in the car and drive, and finally you’re visiting your parents. Or let’s say we are currently exhausting and contaminating our planet, then we take measures, and thus, in the future, we have a sustainable world again.

Perspectives can also be composite, recurring at a smaller or larger scale, in space (like two Lego blocks forming one larger one), time (like the series of smaller actions that go into fixing a flat bike tyre: the result of one is the beginning of the next), or in any way at all. That is why I call the concept of perspectives, which are both repeated and nested at several scale levels, ‘recursive perspectivism’ (recursive = recurring in a similar form). Everywhere, perspectives are meshed and interlinked. For example, driving your diesel car to visit your parents is praiseworthy, but it also has an element of unsustainability. And how else should we define societal patterns if not as experiencing, linking, and passing through huge networks of perspective?

Recursive perspectivism involves a far-reaching generalization. It functions as a unification methodology and applies to societies as well as to other phenomena. While writing this book, I often thought of a quote by the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli: ‘This paper is so bad it is not even wrong.’ Pauli is referring to the positing of theories that are formulated so sloppily that it is impossible to even prove that they are false – the gutter of human thought. Although the workings of recursive perspectivism may sound quite abstract so far, you can observe its effects all around you, if you know how to look. Examples of it are Zipf’s Law and Benford’s Law (two laws governing statistical patterns observable in our environment), and the largest pattern of all: the path of humanity, the historical development of our societies.

I developed recursive perspectivism to describe as many phenomena as possible using as few concepts as possible. At first, perspective is as slippery and hard to grasp as a piece of soap in a full bathtub. But if you learn to work with it, a whole new way of looking at consciousness and societal processes reveals itself. Perspective, in its farthest-reaching interpretation, lies at the basis of human experience: everything we experience is experienced as recursive perspective. It constructs our consciousness, our needs and desires, and the logic of our intentions. Perspective is at the basis of situations, of change, of time and space, of subject and object, large and small, and mind and matter (an idea put forth by Spinoza as well as Pauli, who is mentioned above) – and also of our human societal development in its entirety.

I’m not a fan of absolute and eternal truths in general. But if you nevertheless accept that such a highly universal building block as recursive perspective is a fruitful and workable idea – and I do in this book and this series – it leads to many new pragmatic insights. These insights look simple at first, but they quickly cut across the range of academic disciplines. They start with philosophy and go through science all the way to the practices making up our daily lives (and back again). They link physics and psychology and sociology and management to mathematics. They result in continuous, qualitative, entropic, quantum-theoretical, and relativistic implications. This is actually logical if you assume that just one building block underlies everything, but it’s also quite impressive if you’re working on it. You see, I’m far from a master in all these fields. Yet in thinking, working, reading, writing, and looking around, I come to the conclusion that there are actually many more reasons to embrace the idea of recursive perspectivism and use it pragmatically than to reject it.

I outline how the entirety of human development, from the prehistoric Laetoli footsteps to today, and further into the future, is also given form by recursive perspective and is thereby subject to clear-cut statistical balance principles. These balance principles can only be seen well in perspective, at huge spatial and temporal scales. They explain many societal developments that we can observe around us, in such sectors as healthcare, construction, education, transportation, agriculture and food, and many more. I will also outline these developments (many people have helped me with this). If we start to recognize them for what they are – structural developments in network structures of actors and perspective, we can start to make better use of them, and the odds will be highest that things will be better for us in the future.

This book explores the development of our world – our society – as a structure of recursive perspective that is partly bubbling along, partly turbulent, and partly chaotic, with the ultimate goal a better understanding and more conscious guiding of our shared human development. This book is Volume V of the Society in Perspective series (published in Dutch as Maatschappij in perspectief; this book is the only volume translated into English thus far). The series is preluded by my dissertation and is the product of a long process of thought, work, and personal growth. It has been a fascinating voyage of discovery, but now and then also a harsh one, often shared with others but at times also lonely and alone. In some places, the book is highly intuitive and sometimes frankly speculative, and in others, it touches on experiences familiar to us all. Ultimately it aims to make our journey to a better future easier to navigate.

The book is built on many concepts drawn from other people’s ideas, works, and theories. I may not have grasped some of their finer points, and I often have only a mediocre comprehension of them. If I have not properly acknowledged someone else’s genuinely original quote or idea, I would like to apologize for a lack of a source reference. I would also like to apologize if I have interpreted the work of others too idiosyncratically, or even erroneously, but please read the quote by John Stuart Mill from On Liberty at the end of this preface before drawing too harsh a conclusion.

A society does not improve if it only thinks cautiously. I think that the culture of intellectual ‘claims’, such as the intellectual-property battles currently prevailing in sectors of industry and science, has gotten entirely out of hand and is squarely blocking the way to society making any decisive progress. I suspect that this also applies to claim cultures of the non-intellectual kind. I personally think that recursive perspectivism is my modest contribution to the path of humanity, but above all my hope is that many people will incorporate it in thinking productively and working towards improving society. After all, what is an intellectual-property claim worth, compared with improving our world?

This book might not ever have been written if I’d followed the rules of scientific scholarship. But some great scientists also have a crystal-clear explanation for why books like this have a right to exist. I’ll close this preface with a quote from Erwin Schrödinger, one of the developers of quantum mechanics (a theory I often thought about while writing this book), that expresses this very nicely:

A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects and, therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master. This is regarded as a matter of noblesse oblige. For the present purpose I beg to renounce the noblesse, if any, and to be freed of the ensuing obligation. My excuse is as follows: We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning remind us, that from antiquity and throughout many centuries, the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to require reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind to fully command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them – and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. So much for my apology. (Erwin Schrödinger, preface to What Is Life?, 1944)

These are wise words. Therefore, I am deliberately taking the risk described by Schrödinger, supported in part by the quote by John Stuart Mill below. I invite you to run this risk with me. With this book and this series, I present a widely applicable building block and a unifying methodology to more consciously shape the path of humanity, our shared path, in the future. Given the enormity of the subject, a small amount of humility may be in order, but this book and series support and propagate a single message: an enormous field of societal improvement perspective is out there, for whoever is interested. We have so much to gain, as humanity and as society.

Henk Diepenmaat

Zeist, Christmas Eve 2015

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much, and even more indispensable, to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere, an intellectually active people.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

The structure of this book

1

Introduction

1.1 An ambitious undertaking

‘And when we have made ourselves better we will
also improve the environment and make it better.’
Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary

This book, volume V of the Society in Perspective series, is an essay about improvement, with special attention paid to societal scales. Its central question is ‘Can we improve our world?’1

There are many ideas about what exactly an improvement entails. Nevertheless, I won’t keep you guessing for very long about my own answer to this essential question, even without discussing all these ideas in more detail. My answer is a wholehearted ‘yes’.

This book describes a way of looking at the whole of human development up to the present that gives us more and better opportunities to improve our society in the future. My position is neither that of a utopian, say, nor of a populist, but rather of a strongly reflective pragmatist.2 The book calls on your will and your ability to look at our entire human development practically, theoretically, and philosophically. The result is a general methodology for further societal innovation and for focused further improvement of our societal practices.

The demand for improvement in the world is especially appropriate in this very era. After all, we’re living in tumultuous, exciting, and tense times. The modern machinery of progress is breaking down. We’re starting to see cracks in the cement in our late-modern society. This is why many of us are experiencing the beginning of this third millennium as a transition period. Change is in the air. We’re all ringing out the old era, expecting that it will disappear while we lead our daily lives and that another age will appear in its place. This can take many different forms. But we can’t be absolutely secure in the knowledge that our future will be better.

Technologically we’re racing ahead, and the fact that we can do this is of great benefit. At the same time, we’re failing in terms of society. Individuals are feeling more and more alienated in the societies we form with each other, as witnessed by the growing numbers of refugees, like those now crossing the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe. At the same time, the developmental model to which the West owes its prosperity seems to be reaching its limits. Financially and economically, the world shakes on its foundations with regularity. Depletion of natural resources and ecological disruption (for example, climate change), once only possible future scenarios, are now visible everywhere around us, for anyone willing to acknowledge them. Last summer I visited the glaciers in the Alps. They are still grand, but I can see how much they have shrunk in thirty years or so, and that’s downright worrying. Doubts are arising as to whether we can house and feed nine billion people peacefully. These doubts are hypocritical, mostly the worries of the well-off, since war and scarcity already cause hundreds of millions of people to suffer every day, and millions to die every year. At the same time, it is unique, historically speaking, that ‘we’ can formulate these global concerns together. Against the background of our world’s hypocrisy and powerlessness, it expresses a new shared sense of responsibility, as well as a societal consciousness on an unprecedented scale.

As humanity, we’ve faced major trials and gone through intense transition periods before. Today, however, it’s less clear than ever what our future will look like.

Generally, there are two attitudinal extremes in the face of societal transition, one passive and the other active. The passive attitude is the exact opposite of my view. In it, there is little we can do to develop society as individuals. Society, according to this approach, is simply much too complex for us to understand it, let alone guide it with any kind of direction. We can seize opportunities now and then as they present themselves, we can support unexpected leaps forwards, but we will nonetheless primarily have to endure change for better or worse. Adherents of the passive perspective would argue that we live our individual lives, after all, within the contours of a society that ‘happens’ to us. This is proved by the fact that the current transition phase is happening to us and it’s hardly being managed at all.

The active attitude answers the question of whether we can improve our world with a diametrically opposed ‘yes’: of course we can experience, examine, and tackle societal challenges and opportunities together. As humans, together we have the exceptional ability to understand our situation in time and to use our experiences up to now to think through and design new and better futures, and by testing them out along the way, to try to make them a reality. And if we can do this on the small scale of our daily lives, then why not on the larger societal scales, working closely with each other? Although our track record so far may not be impressive, the fact that we now explicitly view problems like the environment, hunger, and war, which hit individuals the hardest, as global issues is certainly a huge step in the right direction.

In this book, I will make a case for a way of thinking and working that can help us go into our future optimistically and with clear minds. I will provide supporting evidence for why a loud and clear ‘yes’ is the answer to our central question, and I also provide a framework for how to make this transition. And although I may be doing this partly from an optimistic viewpoint, it’s mainly based on a philosophical, theoretical, and practical interpretation of the development of our human society.

1.1.1 A remarkable path

In my opinion, not only are we capable of improving our world even more, but we have actually been doing so already for quite some time now. We’re doing it by trial and error, and most consciously on smaller scales so far, but these scales are growing steadily. Since our very beginnings as humans, we’ve been following a remarkable historical path of improvement.3 I call this the path of humanity. It’s easiest to see this path over the very long term; it’s completely invisible on short timescales. Our journey along the path of humanity begins at the dawn of human history and extends through the present and into the future. No one knows how far it goes. The figure below gives a general idea.

The path of humanity to the present day.

A fine, if somewhat arbitrary starting point for the path is the Laetoli footsteps, fossilized footprints left by a small band of early hominids about 3.5 million years ago, in what is now Tanzania.4 The set of tracks is a poignant echo from this distant and primitive human past. The presence of both large and small footprints, indicating adults and children, and the impression it gives of a shared, somewhat slower pace also give us, even today, an iconic and impressive picture of the essence of community. Modern humans (Homo erectus) came onto the stage barely 2 million years ago and acquired food through a combination of hunting and gathering berries, nuts, fruits, pulses, and seeds. These first people could easily carry all their possessions, knowledge, and experience with them; they lived a hypernomadic existence in small autarkic (self-sufficient) groups. The path of humanity starts from this distant nomadic hunter-gatherer past and leads, through agricultural communities, city-states, and nation states, to the late-modern present.

The path shows that this is not the first time we’ve been in a time of transition, and it won’t be the last. Once again, we set out from a present day and take the step towards an uncertain future that has yet to unfold. Whether or not we’ll be moving up or down in the short term or will have to keep muddling on for a while is an open question; we’ll have to see. But sooner or later the path will return to its upward course.5 This book will tell you why I think so.

Our route along the path of humanity is quite obscure now and then. We take great steps or even leaps forward, sometimes we virtually stand still for a long time, and now and then we also fall back along the way. It is certainly not a monotonic improvement, since we are barely aware that we’ve been following the path until now, and there is plenty of room for the fall downwards. But in the long term, the upward trend will win. The fact that the path of humanity up to the present day is clearly observable, etched in history, is the best evidence.

Although the path may be very dimly lit during our journey so far, at the same time it is crystal clear that seen from the perspective of history, something is happening with the very structure of our collective societies. The structure itself is developing, and this upward movement has to do with an increase in the numbers of experiential worlds, actors, and coherence. This increase is accompanied by changes in scale, usually upwards but frequently downwards too. Currently, in the Netherlands, we’re testing the European-level and global-level societal structures and learning to appreciate local structures again.

In general, up to now, the path has primarily led us towards better societies. It’s therefore worth the effort to look at the path of humanity in more detail, so that we can follow it more closely and more consciously from now on, and take the next steps into the future together. The diagram above implies that there is an intriguing opening for society at the question mark in the upper-right corner. This book aims to fill in the details as well as to help bring it about.

In a nutshell, this book explores the potential of the path of humanity as a guideline for improving society even more and for making societal innovations consciously. We can further improve our world by studying the path more and understanding it better. If we understand it better now, we can follow it more consciously in the future, and we’ll have the best odds of doing better in the future as well.

1.1.2 Blind naïveté?

‘If a baby zebra loses its mother, no other zebra will look after it.
But elephants are different. They mourn their dead, they comfort each other,
and they do care for babies whose parents have died.’
Elephant expert Marjo Hoedemaker talking to elementary-school students.
De Volkskrant (newspaper), 18 November 2014

‘Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.’
Albert Einstein

This discourse has a positive and optimistic character. I think that we as humanity – speaking on average and in the long term – are slowly progressing forwards and that the path of humanity shows this progress. Pessimists, who call themselves ‘realists’, think that it’s naïve to believe that human development follows a path. According to them, the world is much too big and complex to draw constructive lessons for society from it.

Personally, I’m much more optimistic. What is my optimism based on? After all, thinkers who have stated that there is a progression in human development (such as Augustine, Hegel, Marx, and Fukuyama) get ‘debunked’ time after time by the ‘realists’ just mentioned. According to them, there are several developments that point straight in the opposite direction.

People are hardly ever nice to or behave fairly with each other. That’s a euphemism – we frequently slaughter each other, on increasingly larger scales and in more and more refined ways, as demonstrated by the world wars of the previous century and the recent beheadings and bombings in Syria and Iraq. We are now capable of bombing the whole world to smithereens. Famines caused by political quarrels have claimed millions of victims. For many people, the last century was no picnic at all, and the question is whether this century will be much better.

Prophets of doom predict that an ecological disaster will destroy our society. United in our complacency, we’ll all be killed off by climate change, resource exhaustion, and pollution.

Or we may crack under growing administrative incompetence. Who among our politicians and leaders can still cope with the increasing complexity of our late-modern societies? Are the classic forms of leadership still adequate? Epidemiologists are predicting new diseases; as I write these very words, Ebola is just waiting for a chance to do its disastrous work on an ever-greater scale as a contemporary bubonic plague. Every picture of its victims in Africa is a slap in the face for humanity, because even family ties, the most beautiful and powerful social practices we know, crumble under this violence. We cannot provide the most basic human healthcare, not even to young children. It’s an appalling failure.

The same ‘realists’ above also point out subtly that well-known politicians, administrators, economists, technologists, and scientists who do believe in improvement are looking for it in a thousand different directions. In addition, one person’s improvement is another’s horror scenario. For some people, this is why the conclusion is negative and pessimistic: our environment is unfathomably complex, and humanity is intrinsically small-minded, selfish, divided, tending towards evil, and doomed. A path for improvement? Moving forwards? Blind naïveté. Get real!

I know all this, and it’s not entirely untrue; I do not want to shut my eyes to these arguments. But the fact that many other paths are being walked, that we take a wrong turn en masse with some regularity, and that now and then we completely lose our way, in no way alters the reality that first and foremost, the general outlines of the path of humanity reveal themselves magnificently. History clearly shows that we have by and large been following this remarkable path of societal improvement for many hundreds of thousands of years, but hardly aware of it. In the last hundred years, perhaps the last few centuries, the vague outlines of this path have been becoming sharper in our consciousness.

This book recommends that we continue to study this path and start to follow it consciously, and it describes the first steps towards doing so. The subject of the book is as vast and far-reaching as the ideas presented in it. These ideas are certainly not isolated random thoughts. They have deep roots in the experiences of many people. Many ideas are in line with the insights of past and present thinkers and build firmly on them. At the same time, the basis of these ideas is still highly intuitive. They have the status of initially substantiated hypotheses, if they can be called that, since hypotheses must be experimentally falsifiable. This is hard to do on a societal scale. Although I provide rudimentary foundations for these ideas, the foundations need to be worked out in much greater detail. The ideas must be firmly confronted; they will arouse controversy, and much is certain to change.

This book is my attempt to add to the methodological insights that make further societal improvement possible. I’d like to stay far away from dogma and instrumentalism about content. I’m personally wary of people who think they know what’s better for others within the discourse about society, and who want to convince others that they’re right at all costs, even subjecting them to their opinions if they can’t convince them otherwise. What underlies these attitudes is often either a fairly random collection of cultural and personal experiences or pure short-term self-interest. These attitudes are not unique to missionaries or tyrants, of course, and may apply to us all at times.

That’s why I prefer to appeal to your own life experience. You and I both experience what ‘societal competence’ means every day, live and in person. Your own life experience has made you an expert in it by virtue of your participation in many societal practices, from the large scale (you are part of humanity) to the small (you live your life as an individual, and as such you participate by playing various roles in many different societal practices).

Starting from our shared life experiences in society, we can look together at the historical practice of societal development. And then, in my opinion, we mainly see this: coherence and cooperation may not grow at the same rate all the time, but they are certainly growing in general. And this increase in coherence and cooperation – again, speaking on average – is causing an increase in prosperity and well-being. This growth takes the form of the path of humanity. The path is clearly delineated over tens of thousands to millions of years, through wars, natural disasters, pandemics, political blunders, and a multitude of selfish individual actions. The path also entails huge shocks and setbacks, but it is unmistakably developing.

The path of humanity is the product of a wealth of life experience, namely that of the whole of humanity up to now. It shows us the route to improvement that we’ve followed thus far, even though we’ve often stumbled along it and have generally been virtually unconscious of it. We don’t understand the lessons the path shows us very well, and thereby we are oblivious to a huge force for societal improvement. It’s time that we realize this more deeply and let this permeate our shared consciousness. Once we understand the path better, we can connect it to societal consequences. This will help us step into a better future. This book will end with methods that support this entry into the future. Some extra sense of finding societal direction, and some footing in finding it, is after all appropriate here, precisely in this confusing late-modern era, on the eve of a new leap forwards – or perhaps, on the contrary, a great fall backwards.

1.2 The structure of this book

‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal:
it is the courage to continue that counts.’
Sir Winston Churchill

1.2.1 Painting at different levels

If you look from close up at a painting, such as a late Rembrandt (with less detail), then you see mostly just different-coloured areas of paint. At this micro-scale, the picture as a whole is missing. Once you move farther away, then a majestic and miraculous painting arises out of the chaos.

In a similar way, the path of humanity emerges out of human history.6 If you look at it too close up, it’s hard to discern a path through this history; it comes across as fairly chaotic. That’s how most of us live our individual lives: in a sometimes-bizarre mixture of anticipation and confrontation, on a small scale with our noses right up to the canvas. Life is experienced and lived its most intensely like this. You see a different pattern at a different distance. And if you look at human history from as far away as possible, then you can see the entire path of humanity. It’s quite hard to look from such a great distance, because it combines the insights of many individuals and disciplines across an enormous span of time and space. Necessity compels you to make huge abstractions. But if you look in this way, the path becomes clear. The progression of human development and societal improvement are hard to miss on this huge scale. As a humble human being trying to lead your own individual life, though, you’re literally out of the picture at the scale of the path of humanity.

Rembrandt put paint to canvas sometimes intuitively and sometimes methodically, always looking from different distances. He created wholeness from separate elements, beauty out of chaos. He added a few more things and then a few more details, and what he created this way was stunningly good and still is today. This ability to understand different scales in conjunction with each other and to work with them is the mark of a great painter.

Here, comparisons between a painting and the path of humanity are meaningless, of course. Humankind does not ‘get’ the greater societal scales, and it is hardly aware of them. The whole of human development just seems to be charging ahead like a blind horse, with us clutching the saddle. Even in the view of religious people, who suspect a divine hand behind this (where else would all this organized complexity come from, as the creationists among them would say7), we mortals cannot fathom this style of creation.

1.2.2 Does society paint itself?

‘METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL’
Computer-generated sentence from The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins

We are quite blind to society as a species. There is no human master painter working on larger societal scales. Only once things have got hugely out of hand, like after World Wars I and II, do great minds stand up and dare to name the wider societal connections and explore them in practice. ‘It’s too late to fill in the pit once the calf has drowned’ is a fitting aphorism on a folksier level. The League of Nations and the United Nations were the results of World Wars I and II, conflicts on an enormous scale. As these wrongs sink further away into history, our interest in them decreases, and we throw away the paint rollers and coarse brushes and go back to work with finer brushes, with our noses up against the canvas. That’s just how we lead our lives. The blind horse continues on its way.

It is a fortunate coincidence that the path of humanity seems not to be so terribly prone to human societal myopia, at least in the longer term. I don’t mean to trivialize the directions some people have taken us in so far, since historical figures and other societal actors do throw their stones into the river and slowly change its course. But for them someone else. Again and again, larger societal structures develop along the path, even if no individual is able to comprehend or watch over this process. The path of humanity can be seen on different continents in variants and phases that strongly resemble each other, without any advance coordination between the actors.8 Again and again, people unflappably ascend as an unconscious collective higher along the rubble-strewn, messy path of development, with all its accompanying ups and downs.

1.2.3 The human urge to improve as a driving force

The path of humanity is virtually invisible to the individual people who constitute it, largely unaware of doing so. It transcends the human scale. What is the driver behind this remarkable societal process?

In my opinion, the driver is the human urge to improve. In the light of the path of humanity, it is just not that relevant whether you’re a creationist or evolutionist, religious or atheist or agnostic, conservative or innovator, whatever your political leanings, or wherever and in whatever era you live on this planet. What connects us, and what ultimately brings about the largest societal practices (for better or worse) is much stronger: all people are improvers. Improvement is the most distinctly human condition.

Improvers reduce unwanted tensions. They seek out, recognize, and create value. Value is just what people think and feel is important, and therefore what they will work for. Value can be material or immaterial, and it can be for yourself or for someone else.

Perhaps we’re not always looking explicitly for value. Sometimes we ramble aimlessly. Sometimes we act from our subconscious, and then we’re looking for value without knowing it. But the moment a person seeks shelter from the rain or cold, goes in search of food or a better job, cares for the children, or gets together with the neighbours to build a dyke, so the village doesn’t flood (a typically Dutch practice from the past that still informs political practice today), he or she is showing signs of the urge to improve, of life force, of attempting to reduce tension and seek value. People doing this are showing that they (and those near and dear) won’t easily be beaten by chaos, indifference, or the forces of nature.

Of course, the world around us can feel overwhelming, and we cannot be completely up to dealing with the scope of the evil we sometimes face. We may give up if we can’t take it, or surrender with an extreme final act of resistance. But seeking to improve our lot is a very fundamental human quality. Even if we’re merely content or idling away for the moment, we’ll oppose any deterioration or decline in our situation.

What is better or worse in our minds can take on all sorts of forms and gradations. There are matters that attract us; we attach enormous value to them, and they can move us to tears when they occur or make us angry when they don’t. And there are other things we prefer to avoid. We often don’t understand why others think something is valuable (or not) or how they think they’ll get (or avoid) certain things. There are also extreme forms of better and worse. People can be tired of life and just end it; for them, that’s an improvement. People can brutally murder members of another ethnic group or faith and call it an improvement. Sometimes it seems that the more fundamental the group is by nature, the greater its aggression. Something you see as an improvement at one time in one context can be deeply regrettable at another time and in another context. And once you’ve secured something of value, or definitively and irrevocably let it slip through your hands, you’ll usually focus your attention on something else. If you’ve been frantically busy, you want to give your mind a break and just do nothing – and for you, that’s an improvement.

All these variations and nuances do not change the fact that Homo sapiens is first and foremost an improver, from within any and every experiential world (experiential worlds will be discussed in section 5.1.1 of chapter 5), in any situation and context, over and over. For what would the alternative be? Sitting passively against a tree, no different from the rock next to us, waiting for the end? Even leaning against a tree and waiting would indicate an orientation, if a weak one, towards ‘better’.

1.2.4 Improvement perspective on a dual track

This human power to improve is essential, and in this book, it is cast completely in terms of actors and their improvement perspectives. That has a magical quality to it, because this process starts as soon as we start to experience the first improvement perspective and act on it, which is when we really start to live consciously, and it keeps on going. And it will stop when the last human consciousness is extinguished.

Like Baron von Munchhausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair, actors wrest themselves from the unimaginable chaos and indifference of the cosmos that we cannot understand, by means of formulating and creating improvement perspective, and together we create society. This is why as prehistoric people we built primitive shelters and went to gather and hunt for food. This is why we’re also developing the largest and most complex societies in this age.

Where this improvement perspective comes from is a question I cannot answer. That’s also not that remarkable, since the deepest nature and origins of other fundamental concepts, such as thought and matter, are also a huge and perpetual mystery. Improvement perspective is no different.

We can describe the concrete details of improvement perspectives – for instance, going to the greengrocer if you feel like eating an apple, or fixing the present problems of economic development by moving to a climate-neutral economy free of problematic waste products (a more circular economy). This route will be discussed copiously in this book. Societal practices are very easily understood as interrelated concrete perspectives of different actors. The farmer grows apples, the greengrocer sells them, and the customer eats them (and the criminal robs the till). The scope of our late-modern societal practices is becoming huge due to the enormous number of actors (and their perspectives) that they entail, so enormous that we no longer comprehend them at all. I explored this track in my previous books. In this one, I’ll also elaborate it more in terms of qualitative societal strata (see the various illustrations). This book will explore this subject matter even more deeply.

Yet, in addition to this ‘content’ track, this book will go more into another one adjacent to it: the structural. I primarily conceive of perspective as the building block of the content of all societal practices. Going a step further I assume that although motives can be vague and ambiguous, and can greatly differ, actors will deal more or less efficiently with the perspectivist capacity available to them. A consequence of this (which results in the structural point of view) is that although perspectives may greatly differ as to content, statistically speaking they will have very similar properties when it comes to general structure. For example, perspectives all require an input of effort and produce a valued output. Of course, it will take more work to make a transition to a more circular economy than it does to buy an apple, but the economic shift requires the use of more connected, coherent perspective than the purchase of an apple. And, of course, as people, we all have pleasant surprises and disappointments, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that we still experience them against the background of our average experiences with regard to effort and results.

The assumption that a single type of building block, i.e. perspective, is the basis of our societies, and in fact, our human consciousness is a far-reaching one. It continues a line of thought that was already in my doctoral dissertation and that I continued in earlier volumes of this Society in Perspective series. Now and then I feel a kinship with the first alchemists, who in amazement began to suspect that the enormous variety of material things could be made from only a few chemical elements. They must also have sometimes found the enormity of their assumptions to be bizarre. Today it’s all child’s play.

The many intuitions that can be explained by perspectivism, and the insights that this explanation produces, make it a productive avenue, and one I will continue to develop. Using improvement perspective as a recursive building block of societal practices, I will take both a structural, quantitative look and a substantive, narrative, and qualitative look at the development of our societal practices, and thus at the path of humanity. These two tracks will entwine into a colourful double spiral in this book, leading you to a deeper understanding of the path that we as humanity are on together, and giving you tools to help further develop and provide a more focused improvement to our societies.

1.2.5 The lesson of the path of humanity

The Path of Humanity outlines in abstract and with broad brushstrokes the cumulative result of all of our small-scale power to improve, all our improvement perspectives, all our improvement activities, over time – the good and the bad moves. And then you won’t be able to miss it: the heart of the matter is that even the entire path of humanity, the path that we are largely taking unconsciously but in increasing interaction with each other is, in general, a path to improvement. The fact that we as humanity are barely conscious of improving things on this enormous scale, that the actions of even formidable individuals are nothing more than a little rustle along this enormous path, doesn’t seem to matter at all. The history of humanity is, of course, partly competition pure and simple, written in battle and blood. We can see this in the fierce competition that characterizes today’s business world and economy, as well as from the battle scars on prehistoric skeletons and in the world wars of the last century. I can never look at poppies without thinking of the generation of young men who lost their lives in the trenches of Belgium and northern France in the First World War.9 In this negative sense as well, we experience leaps of scale together. Nevertheless, the path of humanity clearly shows that we make progress neither through increasingly bloody competition with each other, nor with increasing selfishness. On the contrary, the path shows that we are actually operating on increasingly greater scales of coherence and cooperation, which is precisely what on average causes prosperity and well-being to increase the most.

Our human history is a widely distributed experiment, in which many societal practices great and small have been examined. This history is marked by human happiness and human suffering. In a puzzling way, many small-scale improvements and random experiments add up to large-scale societal development, to the path of humanity. This is not because we as humanity made a plan and carried it out. It is because we as individuals and groups recognize something that would be an improvement, carry it out, then support and perpetuate it, even if it has been largely created by chance out of many small contributions. From building a dyke to founding the United Nations, we perpetuate societal improvements, if we can just see their value clearly and broadly enough.

For the first time in human history, we can look back at the path leading up to today, thanks to the scientific revolution. And the lesson here is unmistakable. Competition and conflict must sometimes create space, remove barriers, and support choices. Thus these two forces certainly play a role in the process, even if they are not constructive by nature and even if we tend not to treat the losers fairly. The route we are following may be stained with selfishness and soaked in blood, but the dominant route to societal value is that of ever-greater coherence and cooperation. The path of humanity is a path of coherence and cooperation. Once we start to understand the path of humanity better and start to follow it more consciously, we and our societies will reap the benefits in the future.

1.2.6 The main structure of this book

This book consists of a methodological foundation and three main parts. The Methodological Foundation explains the methodological basis underlying this book. Part 1, Humanity’s Path of Improvement, discusses in detail some events along the path of humanity. This part takes a first look at the possibilities of societal improvement and gives a more narrative explanation of the societal path that we are on together, from isolated groups of hunter-gatherers to our common future. It emphasizes our current position in late modernity and the particular issues and decisions that this position entails.

Part 2, The Perspectivist Landscape, clarifies that the path of humanity is not just a random path through the world’s disarray. Humans as improvers develop their societies in a perspectivist landscape of improvement that is and has always been there (a priori). In this landscape, we’re always looking for the highest peaks and see them as improvement. The fact that we can see the path of humanity through all of history’s noise and randomness is due to the a priori inherent structure of this perspectivist landscape.

We have quite a handicap as we travel along this path. First of all, we’re barely aware that this landscape exists. Second, what we do perceive of this landscape is right in our vicinity – we’re terribly short-sighted. Third, to make matters worse, this landscape consists of lots of peaks and valleys if you want to walk through it step by step, and these peaks and valleys show up when you least expect them to.

Therefore, you can compare our journey along the path of humanity to walking along a mountain ridge with deep, unexpected gorges and valleys, and ever-higher peaks, while you are extremely short-sighted. You try to climb up and you see the peaks, the possibilities for improvement, in your immediate surroundings. However, you frequently take a wrong turn, deviating to the left or right, or dropping into a deep canyon (now and then) or a shallower gap (all too often). Or you climb back up after falling, back up to previously scaled lower peaks that you see around you, so of course you keep climbing.

We don’t know in advance precisely which route we will take. Nevertheless, the landscape more or less determines where we’ll emerge. This is a matter of trying it out enough and having enough time. It’s like rolling a dice over and over again. Exactly what will happen is unpredictable, and it’s possible that you’ll roll a six 100 times, (the odds are very small by the way: (1/6)100). But it’s quite certain that the more you roll the dice, the closer the average will approach 3.5. We don’t know the exact average, but we know it approximately, because the dice is seeking a peak in a landscape of possibilities (a phenomenon explained in Part 1). This is how the path of humanity evolves in the perspectivist landscape. The perspectivist landscape has managed to hide itself very well until now. It’s not readily apparent, you have to really unveil it, unmask it. You have to wrest the structure of societal practices and societal progress from the content. And that is just what happens in Part 2.

Part 3, Societal Innovation, uses the path and landscape to follow the ridge more consciously and with greater focus than before to even higher societal peaks. Although this will never become totally simple, we can navigate much better than we’re doing in our current state of flagrant ignorance of both the path and the landscape.

First, Sustainable development will be situated on the path of humanity. Next, four general methods for societal innovation will be discussed. The first is multi-actor process management, a form of societal improvement that emphasizes the actors, their intentions and changes, and their coherence. The second is the Innovation Cube (also known as the improvement cube), a perspectivist cube that reveals the existence of six societal value orientations that when combined make it possible to climb along the path of humanity with additional and focused societal innovation. Third, we present the Backbone, a way of seeing and working that does justice to the nature of societal multi-actor networking. The Backbone has various closely connected layers, each with its own focus, and in this way, it provides structure and support for even monumental societal innovations (such as the path to climate neutrality). Fourth and last, we present five Proficiency levels that make it possible to better check and ensure that the requirements for adequate societal innovation are established and worked out as well as possible. This way, we get a clearer grasp and view of the path to a society of even better quality, and together we can bring about further societal improvement with greater focus than before.

2

Methodological Foundation

2.1 Methodology

‘I'm preachin' dis sermon to show,
It ain't necessarily ... so!’

George Gershwin / Bronski Beat

This book aims to improve society by catalyzing societal innovation. By this I mean creating added value, consciously and with greater coherence and cooperation, that is also experienced as such at the individual level. How can we sensibly approach such a vast subject as this?

First, a word before I begin. I’ve never felt especially well equipped to tackle this subject. Its scope and depth are still frequently intimidating for me. It sometimes bothers me that although I speak to a lot of groups about change, I can’t deal with it myself. I know that I’m not exempt, somehow, and that the lack of improvement that I see everywhere also applies to me.

Still, I’ve been working on this subject for decades, and I’m continuing to work on it. That’s because I think that we can still improve our society much more. Early in my life, I saw the outlines of how this could happen, and I’ve continued to work on making these outlines sharper and more specific. I also think that it’s especially appropriate to innovate our society more consciously and more daringly, particularly in this late-modern era of transition. There’s a lot at stake – the very quality of our society – and if we act together, we can take enormous steps.

My idea that society can and must improve is based on several foundations. Education and work experience play an important part, but they do not tell the whole story by themselves. The roots are in my life as a whole, including some very personal life experiences. And that’s quite a challenge for the accountability of this book. They can’t be scientifically substantiated, since most of them are not at all reproducible, traceable, or verifiable. But I’m not trying to make them so. Societability is simply not scientific rigour. Other people’s individual lives and the societal development of the world are not repeatable, traceable, or verifiable either, and that’s a good thing too. The scientific viewpoint offers a remarkable but overly specific, overly oppressive look at society. I take a wider view myself, and I therefore call this book an essay.

I can, however, justify my methodology. It will clarify the foundations on which this work stands. It makes it clear (at least I think it will) that such a vast and scientifically elusive subject as societal development and improvement can certainly be explored using nameable frameworks. I firmly establish this basis in this chapter. Once I’ve outlined my fundaments, I’ll present the three main parts of this book: Humanity’s Path of Improvement, The Perspectivist Landscape, and Societal Innovation.

2.1.1 Education and work

First of all, education in its different forms plays an important part in my approach. Natural-science and social-science programmes at various universities gave me the scientific tools to go exploring widely and deeply, and both will be recognizable in this book. This basis is not only interesting but also formative for this subject. A well-rounded academic foundation, preferably including social and ’hard’ sciences as well as humanities, is in my opinion essential if you seriously intend to tackle societal improvement. That’s why I frequently accept a part-time job in a university. I feel at home having one foot in science, because of the intellectual climate there (yes, it’s still there, but less and less) and the interest in theory formation and reflection.

At the same time, I perceive science as overly fragmented into narrower disciplines, too detached from the rest of society, and too focused on its own ends. There are outstanding exceptions I could mention, and I certainly don’t want to tar all scientists with the same brush, but that doesn’t detract from this general picture. It’s a sad situation, and it’s why I have trouble fully connecting with current scientific practice (which explains that one foot). I see it as a microcosm of the same self-centredness that is weakening society at large today. This may simply make sense, because after all, scientists are people too, no better and no worse than you or me. But I think the bar needs to be higher precisely for these people who exercise their powers of reflection. I expect them to acknowledge the weak as well as the strong in an internally-oriented and disciplinary culture, and – crucially – to go and do something about it.

The fact that, in my experience, this is only occurring to a slight degree doesn’t make me feel very positive about giving traditional scientists and traditional scientific knowledge a major role in improving society. That would still only amount to rummaging around at the margins of society. At the same time, science has actually broadened my views about the possibilities for societal improvement. Maybe everyone should be part scientist. I’m not talking about prevailing scientific practice, which is obsessed with publishing for colleagues. I’m talking about people who together consciously explore how relevant parts of societal practice function and how we can improve them, in both a reflective and generalizing way. How we deal with the losers created by the improvements we make, and even strip the whole notion of ‘loser’ of its negative consequences, is another crucial aspect that must be sorted out.

My professional activities also play an important part in the approach. As a young man, I started working for a research institute for ‘social technology’. I chose this very deliberately at the time, as I felt ‘social technology’ to be an especially appealing name. The appeal didn’t last very long, though, since the discipline’s powerhouses have quickly taken over the business of naming things. That is a terrible waste of a name that is close to a missionary calling. After ten years there, I had learned a great deal of academic content as you’d expect, but even more about the various cultures and motives of research institutes, businesses, universities, and government ministries (in terms of both civil service and politics). I wanted to return to practice and stand on my own two feet. I’ve now had my own practice in multi-actor process management for twenty years. If a direction needs to be explored and created somewhere in a complex playing field, I see it as my job to help people do it. I’ve worked on multi-actor project and programme management, innovation strategy and management, sustainable entrepreneurship, coalition building and cooperation, strategy development and policy, consumer information, and the positioning of organizations. The areas I’ve worked in have included construction, sustainable energy and energy conservation, education, healthcare, emissions of industrial processes, agro-food, indoor environment, biotechnology, water, advisory infrastructures based on multiple information-technology expert systems, and many, many more.

This has provided me with a wealth of experiences. The greatest things are created and accomplished in professional practice. At the same time, I also observe that, like scientists, the professions are too much divided into isolated disciplines, too separate from the rest of society and focused too much on their own goals. And yet maybe everyone should be a bit of a practising professional. Not in the sense of the rather stereotypical ‘do-er’ who takes pride in blindly rejecting theory; that’s just as limited as the stereotypical scientist, just the other way round. Where the scientist overvalues theory and undervalues practice, the practitioner conversely overvalues practice and undervalues theory. But if everyone more consciously worked in a profession that could explain its principles, theories, working methods, and concrete contributions to society to people outside the field, then practice would no longer be closed and limited, but open and multifaceted. It creates much more space for a powerful and conscious societal practice.

I’ve encountered both utopians and doomsayers in my work. By now you can probably see it coming: I perceive them as too isolated in their own disciplines, too detached from the rest of society, and too focused on their own goals to accomplish anything. But perhaps everybody should have a modicum of utopianism and a little talent for doom-saying. The latter helps us to understand where we absolutely don’t want to end up. And utopianism does precisely the opposite: it broadens our consciousness to include what we might be able to have together. It’s good to think about what we could accomplish with each other, if only we could … (fill in the blank). That inspires, gives energy, and guides this energy in better directions: away from dystopia and towards utopia.

2.1.2 Life as learning, society as artwork

Although education and professional experience were both important for my understanding of how societies improve, I’ve neglected the most important source.

Society as an artefact

Our society is in the first place not a subject for study, or a work area. Our society is first and foremost the matrix in which people like you and me and other actors live their entire lives. Conversely, actors, the provisional condensate of all these lives, all together form society, at every moment, continually.

We experience our society, and at the same time, together we are its components. This last idea, that our society is an artefact, a work of art that we make with each other, often gets lost with all our fragmentation and short-sightedness. Yet it’s precisely this insight that gives us a route to societal improvement.

The reciprocal relationship between society and actors.

Three principles of societal competence

‘Like dissolves like’, says the chemist. This is why table salt dissolves in water.10 Oil and vinegar do not get along. If you put them both in a glass, the oil will rise to the top. But a good cook can make an excellent mayonnaise from oil and vinegar, adding a little egg yolk and some seasonings. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To put together something really tasty, then, the ingredients can’t be all alike, but neither can they be totally different. A good mayonnaise is unity in diversity, an ingenious balance.

Life in society is the same. An important principle of societal competence is that people who differ from each other as actors can also come together to form another identity, another actor.11 It’s also known as solidarity, or coherence between actors. What this is, and what the driving force behind it is, has been answered in different ways by different political and sociological schools of thought. For example, you can find that force in mutual benefit, where everyone is different but has complementary roles. The farmer feeds the agricultural university employee, and the agricultural university ‘feeds’ the well-being of the farmers through agricultural study programmes. Or you can find it instead in shared standards and values, where everyone is the same. You can also find it in power or authority, which brings everyone together into one whole.12

The great sociologists such as Max Weber and Émile Durkheim studied this interrelatedness, but they were not the first ones to see things this way. For example, the motto of the French Revolution was ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. Liberty indicates that everyone can choose their own way, equality expresses the idea that everyone has equal status, and fraternity means that together we also are an entity. Although some great crimes against humanity were committed using this slogan by the revolutionaries, it was and still is an inspiring motto.

In my opinion, both the sociological schools of thought and the French Revolution motto emphasize three principles of societal competence:13

Actors are all the same; this is precisely why we can understand each other and empathize with each other.

Actors are all different; this is precisely why we can each set our own course and mean something for each other, and make a difference for each other.

Actors together are a single entity; this is precisely why we can achieve a quality and power that we can never achieve in isolation as individual actors.

I think that all three of the above qualities contain an element of societal practice.14 Although they appear to be mutually exclusive, together they form a special mix, as I will explain.

These concepts are not at all theoretical for me, but rather principles of societal practice as I experience it first-hand every day. All three occur simultaneously, in varying proportions, and this proportion is what characterizes a societal practice. A healthy society is always recognizable by a balance between these three aspects. The path of humanity is nothing more than (our) unconsciously abiding by this balance. This balance can be expressed by giving a name to the building block of societal competence. I call this building block ‘improvement perspective’. If a society systematically deviates from this balance on a large scale, it pays the price in terms of quality. It will encounter impassable obstacles that limit its further progress. The motto of the French Revolution said as much, centuries ago.

Personal existential experiences

‘Nothing lasts forever, nothing is lost forever.’

My first realization of these three principles began to dawn on me while growing up with my father, mother, two sisters, and a brother in a mining village in the south of the Netherlands. The family was one close-knit unit, in which we were all related and thus the same, but we were all individuals as well. All the same, all different, together as one – well in balance.

I also saw this idea shining through on larger scales at an early age. I can still clearly remember standing on a hill as a boy of seven or eight, looking in desperation at a field where two groups of kids, one from the next village over and one from my own village, were approaching each other to play ‘war’. (Just to be clear: this wasn’t urban gang war. I lived on the outskirts of the village, and we played a lot in the fields and orchards. Our favourite game was cowboys and Indians, ‘fought’ between about forty of us.) I felt caught between a rock and a hard place. I couldn’t fight on the side of my own village because I also had friends in the neighbouring village. Even though it was only a kids’ game, a spectacular battle for dominance was already being fought in my head between being different, being the same, and being something together. As a result, I became an involuntary third faction, a bit cowboy and a bit Indian. I can still see myself standing there on the hill, and I experience it all over again. All different, all the same, and all together a single entity. But different won the day, and I was not at all in balance then. I felt that people didn’t understand me, and I was somewhat lonely.

Philosophers sometimes talk about existential experiences, and about how it’s these experiences that can give us the deepest insights. We all have existential experiences. I can testify first-hand to their ability to lead to deep philosophical insights. I’ve made great leaps of philosophical insights into societability under personal circumstances that were marked by either happiness or misery.

In 1981, when a relationship with the woman who is now my wife was looking very likely, the first thing I did was to go away from her for a week. I wanted to really think about the ramifications of what was clearly taking form before my eyes. This may be a much-too-rational reconstruction; you could also say we had something together that was larger than the two of us, and things were going much too fast for me. But after that week it was clear to me and I took the plunge, and we’ve been together for 35 years now. When my mother died quite unexpectedly less than a year later – I was 19 – it felt in some ways the other way around. I felt almost physically pulled apart, torn, crushed.

I wanted to understand what grew quickly in one case and in the other was pulled, torn, and crushed. I began to see the contours: it was a partly shared life, a shared identity, a shared consciousness. Together my wife and I were a collective actor. When our first two sons were born in the years after, new connected identities and new collective actors arose. I became a father, we became a family, there were reciprocal relationships with the boys, together as well as individually, and between the two of them – all sorts of things happened. It was a situation I recognized from my youth, but not from this end. Different, the same, one together.

The deepest insight came to me during my most intense experience up to now.15 My wife was seriously ill and had been operated on several times. She was being kept in a coma in a soulless little room in the intensive care department of a teaching hospital. She was also pregnant with our third son. It all turned out to be too much for her, and he was stillborn in intensive care, physically already a complete little person, but what did he understand about life?

He was lying on a cloth in a steel tray, at his mother’s feet. I knew that his life had already ended without even having started properly, but his mother was still in a coma and didn’t know yet. Whether she would ever be able to realize that was still a question. I couldn’t move; it was as if I was trying to cross an intersection where every traffic light was red. I felt it was important to reflect on his death, for him, for her, for me, for us. But I got bogged down in doing so.

His unborn life existed mainly in the shared consciousness of his two parents. How could I say goodbye to him alone, when he was so intrinsically from both of us together? How could we do that together, if she wasn’t conscious of it? And where was he, as a part of our family, after all the anticipation and expectation? Where and how did my two sons fit into this story – the oldest, just three, who had sat on my lap comforting me a few days before, and the youngest, not even a year old, who had no idea of what was going on? I couldn’t say goodbye alone, and we couldn’t do it together. It was a traumatic and incomprehensible experience. No-man’s land. Schrödinger’s cat in the flesh, and squared.

In a flash, as if hit by lightning, I suddenly understood something that I already had a vague understanding of, but now a couple of layers deeper. It’s not at all about individuals in a shared, material world, but about partly shared consciousness. An actor is characterized by a coherent consciousness. A societal actor is characterized by a coherent societal consciousness. A societal consciousness like this is a highly dynamic thing that acts from within one consciousness and continually plays with the boundaries between many consciousnesses. If a baker and his or her customers enter into a societal relationship, they share part of this societal consciousness but are different regarding other elements of it. A father, a mother, and children form a family and share a consciousness but are also different in their individual capacities as father, mother, and children.

Thinking more about this later on, I understood that we act mentally on a material world, in other words as thinking people in a physical world, but that human being and world are not already there beforehand. We must first create what ‘is’ mentally and materially while experiencing. I also understood that there are many more identities than just individual ones, both greater (collective actors) and smaller (roles). I understood that, once we have reached a certain age, we may have experiences within temporal and spatial frameworks (the shadow cast by Immanuel Kant), but that these frameworks do not exist beforehand (moving away from Kant). They must first arise in experience and emerge from it. I saw the relativity of facts and opinions; how can they already be there beforehand and forever, if their distinction is completely based on what you have experienced up to the present?

I’m not sure whether you completely understand what I’m getting at, or whether I’m being clear enough. I’ve written about this extensively in a previous book.16 But how can education, science, and professional practice ever compete with experiences like what I’ve described above? Scientific requirements of repeatability, traceability, and objective distance – professional requirements of method and discipline – are out of place and irrelevant.

I don’t want to make life more intense or complex than it already is, on average. Most people live their lives not thinking so much about what goes on around them. Most people don’t take an interest in philosophy, let alone study it in any depth. But if you want to improve society, it has to be all of society. Since we assemble society out of our many identities, by definition we improve society together, based on a shared understanding of these many identities. Our position on the path of humanity sets some strict requirements for how we look at ourselves, together and as individuals. If you’re going to make the world a better place, you have to take this societal consciousness seriously, or else you might as well keep quiet.

2.1.3 Flexible frameworks

I’ve learned the most about how societal practices function by participating in all sorts of ways, as a whole person, as a student, as a professional, and as a private person, and thinking about it afterwards. I did it partly on the basis of the insights described above. The best and the worst experiences depend completely on the degree of coherence and cooperation, on the way things are arranged between actors, in my experience. And I experience it every day.

In the best situations, people and things seek and find each other naturally. If it’s routine, it occurs so smoothly that we’re barely aware of it. Simone de Beauvoir expressed a side of this idea very nicely: ‘The only time when problems have a solution is when they don’t occur.’17 In the worst situations, we don’t find each other, while we should be able to. It makes a world of difference whether we work together or work at cross-purposes. That difference is the better world. That difference determines the quality of a society. That’s how simple it is, in my opinion.

The advantages of specialization: focus

As humans, we have many faces. Dividing ourselves into the roles we play and adapting our personas to the situation has advantages in daily social intercourse. A hardware-store employee knows different things than I do. If I need screws, he or she can supply them, even though neither of us can make screws. Where does the store get the screws? I have no idea. And if I’m waiting in the queue at a hardware store because I need a yardstick, I don’t need to hear all about the problems the cashier’s teenage daughter is going through, as much as the worries of parents of teenagers are something close to my heart. I just want to buy a yardstick. You also take on many different roles over a day, a month, and your whole life. It’s this focus that enables you to excel in certain roles. We train in, focus on, and join a nearly boundless and flexible set of specializations and thus together form the largest societal practices as well. This is downright impressive.

The disadvantages of specialization: a double schizophrenia

At the same time, I see that humanity is suffering more and more from what I’d like to call a double schizophrenia: one that is both personal and societal. It holds true for scientists, professional practitioners, philosophers, prophets of doom, and utopians. If an actor stands out as only one role, not paying attention to the others they play, he or she stands out as an incomplete person. If a society stands out using just one of its actors, without an eye to the other actors, it stands out as an incomplete society.

Personal schizophrenia expresses itself like this: we look into the test tube like a chemist, while it’s also important to know why we are looking at the test tube. We do things as an employee or contractor that we would never consider as private persons in our private lives. As consumers, our purchases support production methods that we have a huge aversion to as citizens. As politicians, we do everything and anything to get votes despite once having felt called to serve the public. We no longer vary our roles, in the full realization of the connections and coherence between them, but split our personalities, so that they have too little contact with each other. This is one half, the personal side of this schizophrenia.

With this personal schizophrenia, in one and the same movement, we also compartmentalize our entire society with meters-high walls; this is the other half, the societal counterpart of this schizophrenia. As consumers, we buy cheap clothing, closing our eyes to the sweatshops in the Far East. We don’t want to know and we don’t make the connections. We buy the cheapest chicken without wanting to know about the corresponding factory-farming conditions, and by doing so, we make our antibiotics worthless. We step over the schizophrenic tramp sleeping at the train station. In fact, he shares our fate, and we should not only help him, but also learn from his condition. We keep building physical walls – the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, the Berlin Wall, Israel – and are now contemplating one around the European Union, as well as internal ones separating its nations. But we build many more walls in our minds. Ultimately the path of humanity will break down these walls, sooner or later, in the way the fall of the Berlin wall was predestined. With the exception of Berlin, however, the walls are still there, and their presence does a great disservice to society.

Without placing any blame at these people’s doorsteps, it’s only logical that practitioners, scientists, philosophers, utopians, and doomsayers are not whole people and do not hold the keys to societal improvement. The roles they overemphasize are also played, but in a balanced proportion with other roles, by whole people. By ‘whole’ people, I mean people who can see both their operation in their partial roles and their participation in larger societal connections in some coherence, from within a consciousness of connection. Thus they consciously understand which actor’s identity they are taking on. An actor can be a small role played by an individual, like you when you buy a loaf of bread from the bakery. An actor can also encompass a great many human activities, for instance, humanity causing the enormous emissions of CO2 and thus the greenhouse effect that is so very disturbing. The concept of actors thus covers an entire spectrum from the smallest individual focus to the whole of human actions.

Together, one flexible unit

Since people form a society together, they (we) should improve it together. ‘Together’ implies actors who are different from each other but who nonetheless are all recognizable as actors and also form a single unit. The important thing is thus to increase our societal consciousness. This won’t happen with tears in the fabric of society caused by ignorance, or deliberately constructed walls between actors who independently practice philosophy, science, professional practice, or any kind of business in isolation. Then people barely know of each other’s existence, let alone each other’s potential, wishes, and needs.

As actors, we cannot act towards something that we as actors do not experience. But we do for a large part have control over what we experience. We thus can improve our world by raising our societal sensitivity, taking an interest in each other and in the actors around us.

Of course, our professions and educational backgrounds play a part in this, but we can only bring about focused improvements in society as whole people working from a clear and articulated societal consciousness, and from a clear and flexible use of the concept of an actor.

2.1.4 The foundations of this book

‘… we can finally count all the books in the world.
There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday.’
Google, 5 August 2010

This book is about societal improvement, and it relies heavily on the path I’ve taken so far in my life. I collect, bundle, process, support, and expand on what seems useful to me. Besides a deep appreciation for professionalism and drive in themselves, I also strongly criticize isolated professional attitudes, such as those of practitioners or specialists or scientists once they make their knowledge and expertise absolute. I incorporate some highly personal experiences. So isn’t this book just the chance opinion of a loner, someone somewhat averse to rules and conventions? Why should you read it? There are 7 billion more people like me and 130 million other books!

Eclectic, anarchistic, casuistic, and anecdotal could all be fitting descriptions of this book in the eyes of a sceptical reader. At first glance it looks hard to make a general and methodologically responsible whole of all of this, you might say. I’ll deal with these charges one at a time.

First of all: the book is unmistakably eclectic. An eclectic combines the best of many styles without committing too much to the prevailing ones. Eclecticism is therefore not a widely appreciated method of doing things, in particular from within the prevailing styles (and this is an understatement). So I don’t see the label ‘eclecticism’ as a complete condemnation. On the contrary, eclecticism is a strength. Society has, after all, many different styles. This is one of the three basic properties of societal competence: all different. Societal styles are also all the same in a certain way, as members of a category, and that is the second basic property: all the same. And when they’re combined, you automatically have the third basic property: together, one whole. This is why a modicum of scepticism is not out of place with regard to books about societal competence that are not eclectic, or people who condemn eclecticism. A special-interest group or a culture that is not very reciprocal is sure to be hiding behind a dominant or absolutized style. Indeed, what is called for if society is the subject is to acquire a wide range of information and to use what’s appropriate. Eclecticism is an underappreciated quality, above all when our society is involved. It is an especially relevant societal condition! Thus, this book is eclectic, and you should be glad that it is, even though it undoubtedly requires a certain flexibility of mind from you as a reader. The argument frequently jumps from alpha thinking (about culture, e.g. history, philology) to beta thinking (about non-human nature, e.g. physics and mathematics) to gamma thinking (concerned with human nature and behaviour, e.g. psychology, sociology, and economics), and just as easily back again. And that’s also a good quality in a book about societal development. It doesn’t require bias and pre-occupations, but it does require a sense of direction, and a mentality of connection underlying it, and they are provided by the path of humanity and recursive perspectivism, respectively (more about this later).

Next: the book may sometimes seem somewhat anarchistic. It may appear to have little respect for systems of rules and order. But if this impression persists after you have finished the book, it means you have misunderstood something because I haven’t done my job properly. The book certainly takes a critical look at all kinds of existing orders, rules, and practices. I’m hesitant about people who blindly and adamantly conform to preconceived and defined mores. Among them, I include the more rabid practitioners, price-driven consumers, power-mad politicians, rules-driven civil servants, profit-driven businesspeople, publishing-obsessed scientists, armchair philosophers, and other examples of fundamentalism. But it’s not because I reject their orders, rules, and practices out of hand. It’s mostly because we are in a period of transition, and these previously defined orders do not (or no longer) offer the societal added value that our position at a ‘crossroads’ on the path of humanity requires. Outdated societal orders, or orders that create little value, must therefore be clarified and structurally modified, sometimes even radically replaced by better ones. The path of humanity gives an impressive look at these kinds of changes. Until now, we’ve been stumbling through them, largely blindly, enjoying benefits but also experiencing a lot of pain.

I’m certainly not going to call myself an anarchist, but instead a supporter of an open, transparent, shared, and adaptive order. With this, I give one and the same rebuttal to the anarchist (who rejects order), the disciplinary specialist (who works within a limited order), the conservative (who cherishes the order of the past), and the fundamentalist (who nails the order down). They’re allowed to exist, as long as they don’t go overboard; we all have them inside us to some extent. And who am I to forbid them? However, I don’t think that with these attitudes, isolated from each other in their respective corners, we can rise to the challenges posed by our period of transition. We need an order of the future, an order of coherence and cooperation, and it must indeed be broad and diverse, shared, forward-looking, and flexible. Cautious, explorative curiosity is a quality we’ll have to use a lot.

Then the last point: casuistic and anecdotal. If one person writes a book about the path of humanity and improving society, relying heavily on his personal experiences to do so, doesn’t that make this book very casuistic, perhaps too anecdotal? Doesn’t the conflict between the one-sidedness of the source and the breadth of the subject matter become much too great? I’m highly aware of this very pitfall, and that’s why I make sure that it all is represented here in several ways. Of course, I do this by reading a large and wide selection of sources, and thus I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn’t say everything. I safeguard the foundations of this work in other ways.

First of all, besides my highly personal experiences, I work from broadly shared experiences. I often discuss societal improvement with my audiences at workshops, lectures, and classes. Some of these are students, but more often they’re adults with a secure position and a lot of experience. I assess their attitudes about societal improvements, and I use the results to make mid-course corrections. Very few of my ideas are based purely on my own experiences, since I usually draw on those of many other people as well.

Secondly, I base my work on fundamental concepts that are familiar to everyone. I only use one building block for improvement as a foundation, one that we all intuitively recognize: an actor-based improvement perspective. Similar models for improvement have already been discussed by many philosophers, scientists, and practitioners in many other different idioms, in many subforms, and on many different scales. But I will prune it back to a barebones version, which makes it very widely applicable. Improvement perspective relies on the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. Perspectives can connect in many ways, for example in the way that dominos or Lego pieces combine to form a new, larger pattern. Many connected improvement perspectives form a societal practice, on many different scales and in all kinds of domains, and on the scale of the whole. This coherent use of improvement perspectives is what I call ‘recursive perspectivism’. Precisely because this book is constructed from one extremely flexible building block, improvement perspective, it can incorporate very different specific experiences and still be highly universal.

Thirdly, I develop my ideas within a particular methodological framework. This framework is based on the building block for improvement introduced above, and it covers practice, theory, and philosophy. It can certainly withstand a certain amount of eclecticism, anarchism, casuistry, and anecdotes. Above all, it supports the continual search for a new, coherent, transparent, and flexible order, with high societal quality.

Below I’ll shed some light on the main ideas of all three aspects: the broad dialogue, improvement perspective, and methodological framework. I’ll try to show you that this path is not just in my head. That the path of humanity retains its structure, remains broadly rooted, and can boast of a high degree of representativeness. That it won’t stay something we’re unaware of, but that it can be a deliberately taken path of humanity in the future. The following elaborations of these three aspects form important methodological foundations of this book.

2.1.5 A broad dialogue: the improvement dilemma

The question of whether we can improve our society is one I regularly ask in lectures, workshops, and classes for professionals, managers, and CEOs. The people I meet there are well educated, hold positions of responsibility, and have a range of experience. Their answers lie somewhere between the two extremes of absolute ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (see figure below), but ‘no’ generally carries much more weight than ‘yes’.

Can we improve our world? (Many possible positions)

Then I go into more depth. After some consideration, many people think that there is something to be said for and against both extremes if I challenge them to justify their initial positions. My next question, asking them to explain in detail, often leads to the observation that there is a distinction between theoretical and practical ability. Our current societal practices give us many advantages. But people know and at the same time keenly feel that we are far from the theoretical peak of our societal ability. Social injustices are widespread throughout the world, and right around us too – just follow the news media. We immediately recognize these injustices for what they are, and they touch us emotionally. We also realize that many more practices in society are less than optimal and in theory can be much better. Examples are education, healthcare, packaging waste, the food chain, working in a huge uncaring company, politics, the greenhouse effect, mortgage lending, the question of corporate executive salaries, and the social performance of scientific research. And this is just a random selection.

That’s why the question of whether things can theoretically be better can really only be answered with yes. Whether we’re capable as humans of achieving it in practice, whether we have it in us to truly improve our society, is a much trickier facet of the central question to answer. There can be very great differences of opinion about this. The majority of my audiences are usually pessimistic.

If I look at the discussion over the years, it leads to the following situation. Generally speaking, people answer the question of whether a better world is theoretically conceivable with ‘yes’, and the question of whether it’s practically possible with ‘no’. Here there’s a gap created between theory and practice, between desire and reality, between thinking about the world and acting in it. We’re in a predicament I call the ‘improvement dilemma’ (see figure).

Can we improve our world? The improvement dilemma as provisional consensus.

Although societal improvement is desirable and theoretically conceivable, it’s impossible in practice, according to many of the well-educated and influential people, most of them Western, to whom I speak in workshops, classes, and lectures.

2.1.6 Improvement perspective as a pragmatic building block

The above is another example of how theory and practice are different things. There is often a distance between the world as we’d like it to be and the world as it is, between how we like to see things and how things are. We all recognize this distinction, at many different scales. I’ve made our relationship with this distinction operational, in the form of improvement perspective: a concept that I think lies at the basis of all (conscious or unconscious) improvement, including societal improvement. Below is an introduction and explanation. I’ve gone into quite some detail here, because further on in this book, perspective will turn out to be the conscious building block of all societal competence. Our societal landscape is composed of it, and it will turn out to be the vehicle of societal improvement, at any and every scale.

Object–subject tension

The most general way to talk about the difference between reality and desire is as an object–subject tension. Objective refers to how something is in and of itself, how it appears to us from the viewpoint of our environment, from outside. Subjective refers to how we look at something, what we think or feel about it, how we appreciate something from within. If you feel like having some ice cream, this is a subjective interior experience of something objective.

Our entire society is one big ocean of object–subject phenomena. In some places and at some times, it’s nearly smooth as a mirror, and at others turbulent and wild. If there’s not any object–subject tension, then nothing is going on. Literally nothing: we’re not aware of anything. If there is object–subject tension, it expresses itself in (and as) consciousness. The more tension, the more aware and alert we are.18

Object–subject tension occurs in many ways in the foreground, for example in the distinction between thinking about a society and living in it, between opinion and fact, between intention and action, between knowledge and matter, and between humans and world.

Object–subject tension: the greater it is, the more aware we are (and aware of it).

For many people, the distinction between object and subject in daily life is always plain as day. These people are the inveterate dualists among us.19 Subjectivity is an inherently personal experience. People who are aware of their subjectivity can take a step away from it. Subjective opinions can be doubted, considered, and revised. You can toss them around without changing anything ‘real’. By contrast, there is no doubting objective facts; they’re always observable, since they’re in the material environment around us and accessible to us all. Something objective is obvious, clearly there, and true, in the world around us.

That’s how it is for the dualist. I personally think that the distinction between object and subject is not at all as clear-cut as that. It moves, we toy around with it, we play leapfrog with it. You can consider your own subjectivity (your opinion) for example, as an object, and adjust it from this higher level of subjectivity (consciously changing your opinion). You can also reassess something that you thought was objective. In hindsight, it turns out to have been subjective. Playing with object and subject is the essence of learning, developing, and living. Dualists glue their shoes to the road while we need to go further ahead together.

Proving that object–subject tensions are not absolute is simple. For example, two actors can see completely different things while looking at ‘the same’ thing. Actors can experience ‘the same thing’ in totally different ways, each thereby thinking that these are different things. Two actors can see a young woman in their family having her first relationship with a young man, and one can support her with love while the other can stone her to death. Object and subject can even change places over time. Galileo had to stop propagating his ideas about the earth revolving around the sun (in essence a material system) to avoid a conflict with the Catholic Church, which at the time was the ruling authority and held that the earth was at the centre. However, what was once the opinion of a loner is now seen as objectively true, and what was then the (virtually) undisputed truth has now become a remarkable idea of eccentrics. The earth now revolves around the sun (at least that’s a convenient way to look at it; Einstein also looked at relativistic foundations this way). This shift took some time and came about gradually; obviously all sorts of interim forms of it also occur.

The mind–matter issue is a subject of deep philosophical disputes. The following observation is important for the purposes of this book: our societal development up to the present refutes rigid and absolute dualism – see the examples above. In my opinion, dualism allows very little space for any further development, and thus object and subject, mind and matter, are anything but set in stone.

Nevertheless, object–subject tension is an extremely pragmatic notion. This tension continually makes us, as intentional people (subject), aware of an environment in which we find ourselves (object). Again and again, object–subject tension situates us as subjective actors in objective environments. Objectivity and subjectivity are not absolute notions, but relative ones: something is objective from a related subjective viewpoint. The place where the object–subject tension is the greatest is the place where we still direct our attention and live most consciously.

Reducing dissonance

‘If horses worshipped gods, those gods would look like horses.’
Xenophanes, ~500 B.C.

As far back as the 1950s, Leon Festinger had clearly expressed how people cope with what I call object–subject tensions, in the form of his cognitive dissonance theory.20 This cognitive psychological theory, in a nutshell, says that when the factual (objective) environment does not match the (subjective) wishes, views, or convictions of an individual or group, it is experienced as a cognitive dissonance. The core of his theory is that people perceive these dissonances as undesirable and will do their best to eliminate them.

In essence, there are two routes for minimizing dissonances. You can modify your environment to bring it in line with your taste and convictions. That’s why you decorate your house in your own way. You are bringing object into agreement with subject, say, by painting the walls in colours you think are pretty. You can also work the other way, and adapt your taste to your environment. If you really love exclusive limited-edition designer furniture but can’t afford it, you can start to appreciate IKEA furniture more as well-designed furniture for a mass market, and appreciate exclusive design less. You’re (often partly subconsciously) bringing subject into agreement with object, because the route doesn’t look feasible to you otherwise. You could also start to work harder to earn more, and focus on creating a lifestyle more compatible with exclusive top design as another way of bringing object into agreement with subject. All three of these examples reduce dissonance in their own ways. The first and third bring object to subject. The middle brings subject to object. These are the extreme variants; all kinds of hybrid forms can exist in complex situations. We make a compromise with ourselves and think it’s good enough.

I’ll give another few examples of reducing object–subject dissonance. When we see something repulsive, we physically turn away, and we may clap a hand to our mouths or even cover our eyes. Something really terrible has to stay as small as possible, and cannot and may not be spread, or grow. And if we run into something extremely dangerous, we walk away. Mentally speaking, we do the same thing, pushing away unwanted thoughts and thinking of something else. And we want something we like to be near us; we like to look at it, and think about it, and talk about it as if we want to reduce the distance between it and us. Out of the abundance of the heart, speaketh the mouth, as the saying goes. In all these cases we’re reducing object–subject dissonance.

Rationality and irrationality

‘The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective
towards all others, terribly objective sometimes – but the real task is
in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.’
Søren Kierkegaard

A sensible person allows rationality to dominate in reducing object–subject dissonance. The rational, cool, objective view should prevail over the irrational, warm, subjective view. No reasonable person would be opposed to that, would they?

But what exactly is rationality? Synonyms in the dictionaries are reasonableness, soundness, and measurability. It’s a tricky concept that bridges the gap between what is measurable and what we think is reasonable. It has to do with objective reasoning – acting on the basis of reason and facts. It’s easy to find specific examples of rational behaviour, especially if you’re resistant to their irrational counterparts. However, if you want to define rationality more broadly and rigorously, it’s easy to fall into philosophical pitfalls. The mind–matter problem will also let its imposing shadow fall here.

I personally hold a view of rationality and irrationality based directly on the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, and more specifically, on the balance between them. This view shows that rationality is firmly based on the objective world around us, and why, conversely, irrationality supposes a great distance from this objective world.

Rationality has to do with repeatable and reasoned behaviour. Think before you act, you’re thinking based on observable facts about your environment instead of opinions, and act only on this basis in your environment. This is something we all recognize. There’s little sense in denying the existence of a dog if it’s biting your leg; you need to do something about it. And if a bus is racing towards you, you’d better take an extremely rational action and get out of the way. On the other hand, you don’t want to run away from a bus that will take you where you want to go – that would be downright odd – but rather to wait for it at the bus stop. In concrete situations like these, the distinction between rational and irrational action is crystal clear. Avoiding an angry dog, staying out of the way of a bus headed for you, and waiting for the right one at the bus stop are all rational actions. Running at an angry dog, walking into the path of an oncoming bus, and leaving the bus stop without boarding the bus you wanted are irrational. This is because both the distinction and the relationship between objective and subjective are clear here.21

Rational behaviour supposes that you know what is objective (what is ‘real’ and ‘true’) and that what you think and feel (subjective) is determined by objectively perceivable observations and results (truth). Objectivity thus forms the basis for subjectivity, or to turn it around: subjectivity is founded on objectivity. Still, circular reasoning creeps in here. Isn’t what you objectively experience actually based on subjective choices? Don’t I determine where l go? Doesn’t that mean that objectivity is also based on subjectivity? Objectivity and subjectivity presuppose each other and need each other (see figure). They are nothing without each other.

Objectivity and subjectivity need each other and presuppose each other.

We’re touching firmly here on philosophy and on the philosophy of science. Dualists value the existence of subjectivity and objectivity, calling it ‘mind and matter’, without acknowledging this circular reasoning at all. They postulate a hard and absolute distinction between facts and opinions, knowledge and matter, and subject and object. There is incontrovertibly an a priori (i.e. it was already here) objectivity independent of us humans, thus a material world, and a human-linked subjectivity, thus a mental world. This is what dualists build their rationality on. However you only have to remember Galileo, and you see that this hard and absolute separation isn’t there at all, in this same societal practice within which even the dualists live their lives. It isn’t in science or philosophy either: theories and philosophies keep replacing one another. If the history of science has made one thing clear, it’s that facts can become opinions, and vice versa. A hard and absolute preconceived separation between object and subject does not exist, in my opinion. I’m not alone in this position, by the way: many philosophers, especially of the pragmatic and phenomenological philosophical schools, have already presented this to me. Antidualism is one characteristic of a pragmatic–philosophical view of life.22 I actually don’t believe that this is absolutely and a priori true. I’ll give up my view for a better one, but for the time being, this view absolutely works best for me.23

Therefore, my view of what is rational and what is irrational is as follows. Rational behaviour entails that you (as an actor) assign more weight to what takes place outside yourself (objective) than to what you wish and experience from within yourself (subjective). ‘Outside’ is then where other actors can join you, while ‘inside’ is only for yourself. You always base your opinions, your decisions, and your wishes (subjects) as completely as possible on facts and observations around you (objects). Objectivity is dominant – the subjectivity that you allow is strongly based on objectivity and is used to adjust this objectivity (see figure below, left). You align yourself with your environment, which determines what is possible and feasible. Of course, the world remains surprising and uncertain as always, yet this seems to be the most careful and secure route for many people. The boundaries of what you can achieve as an actor are then largely determined by your environment as it is, as it appears.

Pragmatic determinations of rationality and irrationality.

Seen from this perspective, then, irrational behaviour is precisely the opposite. As an actor, you give more weight to what you think and feel yourself than to what is happening around you. Subjectivity dominates, and objectivity has to align with you (figure above, at right). This doesn’t seem very smart, because it’s uncertain, unsafe, and careless. In most cases, your environment will correct you very harshly. In extremely irrational cases (in the best Spanish tradition), you’ll be tilting at windmills.

The Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman recently wrote a book about two dominant and diametrically opposed ways of thinking: fast and intuitive, versus slow and rational.24 In this book, he shows that we are not nearly as rational as we think we are (or would like to be). He specifically discusses irrational mechanisms that people use to deal with what I call (to extend Festinger) object–subject dissonances. He calls these deviant, non-rational variants cognitive biases. Psychologists have identified dozens of cognitive biases, particularly in the last fifty years.25 They cover areas such as decision making (for example, the use of anchor points: the luxury car in the middle of the showroom isn’t really for sale, but it makes your purchase seem cheaper and therefore smarter), social practices (such as the tendency to overestimate your own role in positive events, and to underestimate it in negative ones) and memory bias (such as the tendency to reconstruct coincidental and slow developments in yourself as well-thought-out, deliberate, and bold when talking to others).

Thus, many cognitive biases can generally be understood as mechanisms for reducing the tension between convictions (subjective) and environment (objective), or keeping them manageable by adapting the convictions.

Object-subject tension is everywhere: in daily practices, in science, and in philosophy. In practice, we act immediately to minimize the distance between wish and reality. We buy that ice cream and eat it. In difficult situations, we think about the problems first so that we can solve them later. This enables us to see clearly what the starting situation, action, and results are. In science, we make the distinction between what are sometimes called the beta disciplines oriented towards matter and observation (objective experience), and the gamma disciplines oriented towards knowledge and a subjective experience. Here people attempt to splice experience, to separate object from subject in an absolute manner, but that is doomed to failure. In philosophy, the mind–matter or mind–body problem is known as one of the discipline’s real hot potatoes for good reason. Distinguishing knowledge and matter as two distinct spheres, both with the right to exist, is called a dualistic position. Dualists rightly have a massive mind–matter or a mind–body problem, since what are these two spheres without each other, how do they relate to each other, and what happens in between knowledge and matter?

Object-subject tension is how improvement begins. Underlying every conscious improvement is an unwanted discrepancy between beliefs and circumstances, a gap between potential and achievement.26 This also explains why two people can experience the ‘same’ (objective) situation differently (subjective): they have had different past experiences and thus have different beliefs. That’s why they see different potentials and experience different tensions.

This tension results in an imbalance in the actor who experiences it. This actor will try, even if only for a moment, to try to restore the balance by eliminating the tension. In a multi-actor situation, not everyone experiences the same tensions, but that does not change the fact that every actor wants to get rid of any experienced object–subject tension. This creates value that the actor would otherwise go without.

With really unexpected improvements, people are only aware of the tension after the fact, but the general mechanism is not that different – the tension is identified retroactively. This is not unlike the situation that you start to feel hungry when you smell a restaurant as you walk past it.

One famous example is the discovery of penicillin in 1928 by Alexander Fleming. While working on a type of bacterium called Staphylococcus, Fleming accidentally discovered the antibacterial effect of this mould, which became the first general antibiotic. Scientists call this serendipity: recognizing a chance event as a discovery because you’ve been trained to watch out for it.

Subject–object tension is at the basis of our capacity as improvers. A conscious improvement is, after all, nothing more than bringing a world we experience objectively a little more in line with how we want it to be (or vice versa).

Terms like cognitive dissonance (Festinger) and cognitive bias (many psychologists including Kahnemann) express the idea that in our cognition (beliefs, ideas), we deviate from objectivity (our actual surroundings). These terms give the dissonances and biases a cognitive character, implying a rational psychological position, i.e. with rationality as the standard. Cognitive biases point out the sometimes-bizarre and extremely irrational ways in which we deal with dissonances, and how they can fool us. We are apparently much more irrational in how we construct and minimize dissonances than we think, as these rational psychologists have made us so keenly aware. It is ironic that they use rationality to point out our innate irrationalities.

On irrationality, little steps, and big leaps

It’s a good thing that we’re becoming more aware of the irrational, more intuitive sides of our thinking and its effects on our actions. If we’re armed with this knowledge, we can prevent these effects (or use them, as they do in the advertising and public relations world, with a thin line dividing use and abuse) and leave irrationality out in the cold, neglected. But that’s unfair to irrationality, since it has a very remarkable quality. It allows us, not our environment at that moment (how it is experienced), to determine the limits to what we think we can achieve. It gives human intuition, the human power of imagination, free rein and allows it to take over. This is a very wonderful and woefully underappreciated aspect of irrationality.

Rationality and irrationality are not each other’s antagonists, with the former desirable and the latter undesirable, but rather each other’s complements. Rationality is conformist with regard to its environment. Rationality leads to small, gradual steps towards improvement, with the existing environment setting the tone. Just be normal, don’t rock the boat, and everything will be fine. On the other hand, a certain degree of irrationality, unconventionality, or nonconformity in our attitude towards the environment can lead to real leaps of improvement. This is something we can all recognize: the point when you’re completely stuck is when you try ‘something crazy’. To be honest, most of the time the crazy solution doesn’t work. But now and then some real gems are created. This is how we separate the many crazies from those rare geniuses who find those gems that give us huge leaps of improvement. Since we only recognize the gems after the fact, the boundaries between crazy and brilliant are thin.

What is actually the use of irrationality and taking leaps into the unknown? Do we really need leaps? Don’t the many little and more secure steps to improvement still add up to a very big leap? But think about it yourself: if you look at the course of the path of humanity, is it mainly characterized by many small, gradual steps, or by the big leaps? Or let’s say you follow the stock market indices and exchange rates as an indicator of economic growth. Is it the small, gradual steps that dominate, or the big shocks? Look at your life: is it the small steps that most determine a life path, or the leaps (meeting a partner, moving to a particular city, losing someone you love, changing your working environment)?

Many small steps to improvement make significant progress by definition. But the chances you’ll be able to take many small steps in a row towards improvement are very small. We’re quickly approaching the limits – the irrationality – of rational thinking. I sometimes compare this with someone who wants to climb as high as possible and starts at the bottom of Mount St. Peter (‘Sint Pietersberg’), a hill near Maastricht. All this person can do is take small steps, since this is all he or she can see. But baby steps won’t take you far. In the best case, the climber will finish at the highest point in the immediate surroundings, 171 meters above sea level. If he/she encounters a gorge, even this summit will be impossible. This person will never know about the Rockies, the Alps, or the Himalayas, and flying in space is inconceivable. The highest attainable peak is limited by the use of rationality. Someone who only thinks step by step will not get any higher than the highest peak in the immediate environment that is manageable, doable. This is how rationality always and inevitably creates its own prison (see figure below).

Rationality creates its own handicaps, its own cage.

I’d like to share two experiences that helped me to better understand this. The first involves an impressive story I heard in a castle in the centre of Utrecht many years ago. A former monk told me about helping the struggle for the emancipation of small coffee growers in Central America who were being brutally exploited by coffee traders. It could rightly be called a struggle: the coffee traders refused to give up their position, blood was shed, and it cost human lives. But I’ll never forget what he said was one of the strongest obstacles. It was the coffee growers’ total lack of any inkling at first that things could be different. Initially, I concluded, the monk didn’t join the growers in their struggle against the traders, but struggled just to convince them they could improve their lives. But that didn’t make the efforts or the results any less relevant. The small-scale, exploited, impoverished coffee growers only knew about Mount St. Peter, to use the metaphor above, and they were already at the peak. The monk could see the higher peaks from his perspective and gradually was able to get the growers to share his wider view. Ultimately it was the growers themselves who made the journey, because they could see these ‘new’, higher peaks better and better.

Once the higher peaks are clearly enough in sight and the paths to them sufficiently apparent, the genie is out of the bottle. Then we set out, and the climb takes place (virtually) by itself. We cannot help it, it’s the human condition: we’ll always be improvers. The famous mountain climber George Mallory tried, again and again, to climb the summit of Mount Everest unsuccessfully in the early 20th century. Asked why he kept climbing this unattainable peak, he gave his famous answer, ‘Because it’s there.’ The mountain’s compelling presence cost Mallory his life, in the obvious way, given his pronouncement: on his way to the top. Making improvements is the same way. Once possible improvements are experienced, the seeds have been sown. The improvements are compellingly present, and we’ll try to make them. The important thing is to learn to see more and greater possible improvements.27 Then the change will not be without some trial and error, but it will happen by itself. Because we are what we are: incorrigible improvers.

The second experience involves a class in multi-actor process management that I taught as part of the Advanced Management Programme at a business university. These professional programmes are expensive. There is usually a range of types of people who attend. Two familiar categories are successful heavy-hitting CEOs who are being rewarded with the course so they can theoretically refresh their ideas, and – more commonly – the up-and-coming new generation of ‘very high potentials’ who only need to take the final step in their career path. Altogether they are a critical audience, and you can’t pull the wool over their eyes.

I do have concerns about the many business universities in the world. I’m a great supporter of an entrepreneurial and creative way of thinking and working. I’m acutely aware that value (including societal value) is something that above all must first be created together (and shared after the fact). However, many of these business universities teach an entrepreneurial style that makes it necessary to look at corporate social responsibility as something separate. If you have to take corporate social responsibility and sustainable business as an extra course on the side in addition to ‘regular’ entrepreneurship, what then is that regular entrepreneurship? What kind of entrepreneurship becomes the standard practice for the students who graduate from these universities?

I see the world, and the Advanced Management Programme as well, as one large laboratory, and I was given (or perhaps I took) full freedom to do something with the foregoing thoughts. I tried two different styles. The first time I approached it from the participants’ own position and focused on how they could advance their own objectives by dealing more consciously and actively with the playing field in their environment. In short, I was appealing to their view of only the peak in front of them that they were climbing. That is also the filter on which they were selected and recruited for this course by the private sector and the business university. I presented it mainly as an investment in yourself. My class was highly rated.

The second time was for a different but similar group. Partly encouraged by the success of the first course, I approached this one from the angle of common interest. I stressed that the accent had to be less on one’s own objectives, and more on the connections, the coherence between the actors. It was a more societally focused approach, seeking the much higher peaks for many more parties, and looking further into the future. The theme was precisely the same in every other way: multi-actor process management. I began full of enthusiasm, but that turned out to be naïve; they rated my class much lower, just above ‘fair’. To be honest, I hadn’t expected such a difference, and for some time I had a real case of the blues.

I had given the first group a top-level class, but the second group considered it a mediocre performance. For me, it was exactly this combined experience that was so especially valuable. Ultimately, although the participants were certainly talented, and motivated to learn and improve, they weren’t interested in the broader landscape. Even intelligent people, successful people, experienced people, up-and-coming people turn out to be short-sighted in terms of society, or at least that was what I observed.

As a result, I had a more profound realization about a lesson that I already theoretically understood. If you cannot see the wider landscape and the possible routes through it, if you have no idea that there are other, higher mountains, how can they ever capture your interest? If we cannot explain our position to others in the broader societal landscape, then we won’t get very far. At best we’ll end up at the top of the hill that we happen to be climbing, and only by chance will we notice a higher summit. It’s exactly this process of chance that makes the path of humanity rather bumpy.

There is a very simple principle, one that is too rarely understood even by intelligent and passionate people in crucial positions. Attention for each other has a huge payoff in societal value, but you need to dare to take a broad view of things.

And then you have to dare to look ahead together. You can experience it on the very small scale, say within a relationship or a family. You can experience it in professional situations: if you do something with several parties, consulting closely with each other and ensuring that the group is coherent, the resulting quality is so much better. However, the enormous power of this principle is best seen at the largest human scale of all, that of the path of humanity. With greater and greater coherence and cooperation, things are going better and better. Until now, we haven’t been conscious of being on the path. If we become more aware of this path and follow it in a more focused way, it can be so much better for us!

The greatest blockages to further societal improvement are not in our environment. They are within us, because we conform to our immediate surroundings, the environment we know objectively and well. Many people today think we're too irrational. They are rightly concerned about issues like overpopulation and environmental problems. On the contrary, we’re much too rational. We’re all climbing our own little manageable peaks. This limits us tremendously, and it even threatens us in this time of transition. We have to open the blinds much wider! Helping this happen is one of the ambitions of this book.

Towards a new balance

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I’m not advocating irrationality. If I have the choice between objectivity and subjectivity, I’ll probably choose the former, the rational variant, even though many psychologists tell us that we overvalue our rationality. Blind obedience to subjectivity, the irrational variant, carries enormous risks. Our surroundings will then attack and hit back in totally unexpected ways, much more than is already the case now, in natural ways. We are dancing on a volcano that could erupt any minute, and we’ve chosen this place ourselves in complete ignorance.

Yet the rational relationship also has its major limitations. Rationality creates its own prisons. We must not close our eyes to this. As I expressed it in an earlier book, too SMART quickly becomes a bit DIM.28

I know that I just said that ‘I have the choice between using objectivity and subjectivity.’ But I don’t really have this choice. What I mean is that of course I can choose to a certain extent, but the choice is in no way between pure rationalism and pure irrationalism. That is an idée fixe of rigid dualists. There are many possible mixtures in between.

The rational perspective considers objectivity as compared to subjectivity. The irrational perspective considers subjectivity as compared to objectivity. By doing so, both perspectives miss the opportunity for maximum societal value – a really high quality of society. What I am advocating for is (on average) a more even balance between objectivity and subjectivity, between what our environment shows us from outside, and what we think, feel, and wish from inside ourselves (see figure below).

The most value is created with subjectivity and objectivity in balance in the middle-to-long term.

We badly need more balance between what we think we observe in our environment and what different actors subjectively want and wish for from the inside out. It’s precisely when we can’t find what we want in our objective environment that we go looking farther afield. We explore out of curiosity, and then the higher peaks further away come into sharper focus. Once we can see these peaks and the paths to them clearly enough, we’ll climb them automatically along the way. After all, we’re improvers. That is our human condition.

According to the prevailing ideas, rationality is good and irrationality is bad. As an actor, you have to align your wishes to your surroundings, your subjectivity to your objectivity, since that’s the rational way. Don’t draw attention to yourself, just be normal. Yet that’s not what Galileo Galilei did. He thought that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around, which was the prevailing reality, and he ignited a raging dispute with the Catholic Church. Max Planck also won the Nobel Prize for an idea that the vast majority of his fellow physicists felt was completely absurd: that energy is radiated in fixed ‘packets’ and not continuously. The result was quantum mechanics, one of the most ground-breaking and fascinating theories in physics. Albert Einstein also turned the world of physics upside down with a number of especially controversial ideas, even though he was a patent-office clerk from outside the establishment. For example, he postulated that energy was equal to mass. And what about John F. Kennedy, who believed we could put a man on the moon? In retrospect, it’s amazing that he wasn’t taken away in a straitjacket (his assassination in Dallas in 1963 shows just how great the resistance to him was). I think that we will truly be able to appreciate the enormous value of his visionary views in a few hundred years, or maybe a thousand (I say, with an eye to the future).

Invariably, the most innovative leaders, thinkers, and artists behave irrationally at the beginning of their careers, at least according to the prevailing objective standards. Of course, you could also say that these very people are acting especially rationally. Rationality and irrationality are after all eminently actor-based values. Galileo was completely convinced that he was right by his observations. When the ecclesiastical court’s judgement turned out to go the other way, he cried out, ‘And yet it moves’, referring to the Earth (as legend has it). However, we would have to conclude that the whole of humanity around him was irrational, and that’s not how we normally talk about irrationality. What is rational is determined by how heavily the surroundings are taken into account. Society’s opinion won handily over the observations of an isolated individual. The opinion of the masses was objective, the facts subjective. Until it was proved otherwise anyway, that’s obvious, but we only know these things after the fact.

Our late-modern society is made up of more and more actors, who are all scaling their own individual peaks (or standing there, trying not to slide downhill) while the gaps, walls, and tensions between them all are unmistakably increasing. This is keeping us far too close to sea level. We have to explore and scale new peaks together. The path of humanity shows us that we’ve been doing this unconsciously for many hundreds of thousands of years: following a path of balance, without realizing it. In the future, we’ll be able to follow this path more consciously, but to do that means we have to find a new balance. Then we’ll scale higher peaks better and faster.

The unity of balance

Balance implies that we can slide along a scale with units, from objective to subjective and back again. Think of grains of rice on a scale, for example. I’ll go into exactly what the rice means later, so I’ll use the neutral word ‘units’. Imagine that we have 10 of these units to distribute between objectivity and subjectivity. The possible distributions between objective and subjective are clear. They go from completely objective through interim states to completely subjective. The sum of the two always has to add up to 10:

Objective | Subjective |
10 | 0 | Material
9 | 1 | Objective/environment
8 | 2 |
7 | 3 | Rational actor
6 | 4 |
5 | 5 | Balance: optimal actor
4 | 6 |
3 | 7 | Irrational actor
2 | 8 |
1 | 9 | Subjective/human
0 | 10 | Mental

Different proportions of objective and subjective.

We can now very easily situate the rational attitude (the rational actor), the balanced relationship, and the irrational attitude (the irrational actor). If something is completely, 100%, objective, then we place it completely outside of us, in our environment. According to the dualists, we’re talking about the material domain: if it’s not mental, it must be material. Take the chair you’re sitting in, or our planet revolving in space. They’re there, say the dualists, regardless of what you may think of them.

Conversely, if something is completely, 100%, subjective, then we situate it completely deep inside us, as wishes or thoughts. According to the dualists, we’re talking about the mental domain. After all, if it isn’t material, it must be mental. Take what you’re thinking about your child, or that annoying squeaky door. Whatever you may think or feel about them will not alter the environment, say the dualists. The squeaky gate won’t change just because of your opinion about it. (Festinger might raise an eyebrow at this.)

Mental and material, neatly separated from each other – that all sounds familiar and obvious, until you go a layer deeper. Properly speaking, 100% material cannot exist. How would we know about this matter if not a shred of subjectivity is involved? After all, you are sitting on your chair, and we are on the earth, revolving. We have knowledge of matter through the grace of our subjectivity. Take away subjectivity, take away you and we, and objectivity has also disappeared. Take away thinking, and we’re no longer aware of matter. Who is there to enjoy the sunset then?

The same is true for 100% mental. If there is no objectivity at all, no matter, what would thoughts be about? A consciousness is still conscious of something. Aren’t you thinking about something now, perhaps about your dog, or something else? Mental things exist by the grace of the matter that they ultimately are about. Take away objectivity, and subjectivity disappears as well. Take matter completely away, and mind disappears too. In what surroundings, and to what purpose, should we get up when we wake up in the morning?

Object–subject tension is completely absent at the very top and bottom. There is no more tension, since it only involves half (one) of the complements, and you can’t cut through the object–subject continuum at the border of objectivity and subjectivity. There won’t be any tension left. One half needs the other to exist. At the outermost edges of the distribution, there is zero object–subject tension, since one of the two vanishes. On one side there is something we do not think or feel anything for, thus something that we do not experience (100% objectivity), and on the other side we have thoughts or feelings about something that does not exist at all (100% subjectivity).

The object–subject tension is therefore the greatest at the balancing point, where objectivity and subjectivity are equally large (see table above). Consciousness is greatest at this point. Here is where people experience things. There is clearly something there (objective) that we have feelings about or think about, and want to act upon (subjective).

Compare this with a foot race between two individuals: if one racer can run very fast and the other is crippled there won’t be any tension, and it’s not a contest at all. If one of the two is stronger than the other, then it may be a contest, but in name only. The most value is created if the two runners are equally good and both want to win. This is the case in the state of balance. As soon as one party has won, the tension is gone.

The things most keenly experienced in our environment (objective) are the things we feel or think the most about (subjective). At the edges, either object or subject falls away, and there’s no tension left.29 In the middle is where humans and the world are the most in balance, and that is precisely where the tension and thus consciousness are the greatest.

The balance axis

The possible shades between objective and subjective can also be depicted using something other than a table. Take a graph with two axes. The horizontal axis represents the degree of objectivity, and the vertical axis represents the degree of subjectivity. In principle, you can now place every desired ratio of objectivity to subjectivity in this field, and also on every desired scale. The angle of the line going to the point determines the ratio of objectivity to subjectivity. The length of the vector determines the scale.

A diagonal view of balance: the balance axis.

At the upper left, the subjective proportions dominate, in other words, the degree and scale of irrationality increases as it goes towards the upper left. At the lower right are the dominantly objective proportions, thus where the degree and scale of rationality increase. I’ve also shown two random rational and irrational lines of proportion: the number of units increases the farther from the origin you go, but the proportions are the same at all the points on the line.

The optimal proportion is right on the diagonal.30 The diagonal is thus a (continuous) balance axis, where you organize your environment (objectivity) optimally based on your own wishes (on the basis of your subjectivity). And because wishes and potential are perfectly in balance, on average, this is where the maximum value is generated, as I will establish and explain in this book. What we normally call rational is thus actually a bit too conservative. Too over-optimizing, and too under-exploratory, to use another but related kind of jargon. Here, we see only the lower peaks in our immediate surroundings.

Where objectivity and subjectivity are most in balance is precisely where the object–subject tension is the greatest. That’s where we are the most aware, we have the best view of the peaks around us, and we are most capable of making improvements. This is true at all scales, including the societal.

Tension gets actors moving

Object–subject tension is always – the name says it all – a hybrid. It consists of a share of subject and a share of object, a share of human and a share of world, and a share of mind and a share of matter, says the dualist. Recalling the chemist’s rule of thumb ‘like dissolves like’ it is obvious that object–subject tensions are experienced and acted on by ‘something’ that must be from both of these domains.

That ‘something’ that experiences and acts on the basis of object and subject is an actor. An actor unites subjectivity and objectivity, mind and matter. The moment there is even a glimmer of object–subject tension, an actor has already awakened. When the tension is at its highest, this actor is in full glory: he/she/it will and shall do something, i.e. the actor is intentional. Once the tension has gone away, this particular actor will have disappeared from the stage.31

When I say that an actor is of both domains, I mean it very literally and concretely: take a furniture maker in the workshop. A furniture maker is nothing without a workshop, and the workshop is nothing without the furniture maker.32 The furniture maker in isolation is capable of being subjective, and the workshop objectively exists, especially according to the dualists. But to form a consciously improving actor, in the sense of one who takes action, furniture maker and workshop are required together. The furniture maker without a workshop is useless and cannot act (not as a furniture maker anyway). The workshop without the furniture maker is also useless, since it has no intentionality, no subjectivity. There is no tension to eliminate. Exactly the same applies on the large scale to humans and our world: together we form society. This is what makes society a multi-actor practice.33 In normal speech, we are rather cavalier with the concept of an actor. We often name the person, possessed of a body and mind (mind–body), but usually we mean their environment (the rest of their entire context). For example, we say we’re going ‘to the doctor’, but in fact, we walk into the doctor’s office, where the doctor also is. We say the cabinet minister, but we mean their ministry and the machinery of regulations and operations behind it. Conversely, we sometimes name the workshop. We take the car ‘to the garage’ (where there is also a mechanic who will fix it); or we go ‘to the shops’, while there are real people walking around in the shops who help make it worth our while to go there.

An actor is of both domains, according to this book. An actor is both mind and body, according to the dualist. An actor experiences both objectivity and subjectivity, says the pragmatist. That already provides much more flexibility and power to change. The actor experiences both objectivity and subjectivity most consciously when the tension, thus the balance, is the greatest. Once a furniture maker experiences object–subject tension – say, a squeaky chair – he/she will try to eliminate it, or at least reduce it – something he/she experiences as an improvement, using the possibilities in the workshop (remember Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory).

Object–subject tension is completely in the eye of the beholder: it is an actor-based phenomenon. A century before Festinger, John Stuart Mill had a pithy way of expressing the reduction of dissonance: ‘We avoid pain and seek pleasure.’34 We want to avoid misery, we want to get rid of it. A potential improvement, however, is something we want to grab. Whether it’s seizing opportunities, or avoiding misery: a potential for improvement represents an object–subject tension that must be got rid of, capitalized on. Something is going on, objectively, and we have a feeling or opinion about it, subjectively, and the objective environment has to be brought into harmony with the subjective wish. If we do this, we experience it as creating value (experiential value).

Perspective

The experience of object–subject tensions depends on actors. Conscious improvement, both solving problems and capitalizing on opportunities, reducing trouble and increasing pleasure, always revolves around eliminating object–subject tensions experienced by specific actors. That what has great value for one actor can be worthless or even represent negative value for another actor. I myself have creaky stairs, but I actually feel they’re one of the charms of my house. My positive (subjective) experience resolves the object–subject tension, so I’m not an actor in fixing the noise. This certainly also has to do with the fact that fixing it will cost a lot of effort and money, since the stairs actually need to be replaced. It’s a job for a good carpenter who is itching to do the job. If I were to run into a carpenter who could do the job in some way that doesn’t involve replacing my entire stairs, then I would probably start to see the creaking as a problem. A carpenter who comes to my house will call the creaking a problem. It’s all about the details.

Improvement can be made concrete by naming it in terms of a specific improvement perspective, experienced by a specific actor. I use the term perspective in this book and in all of my work with an unusual meaning that is at the basis of how I see experience in general, and societability and societal improvement in particular.

Every perspective consists of three components: an initial situation, a resulting situation, and a process of change between the two situations. As an example, take a glacier (the initial situation), which melts (the change), resulting in a shorter glacier (the resulting situation, see example 1 in the figure below). Many people who know glaciers will be in agreement that this is a summer-winter effect: for them, it is an objective, rational, and realistic perspective. It’s even material, physical. Everyone can see that, can’t they?

A general perspective, an accepted perspective, and a controversial perspective.

However, a perspective can be both mental and material, and it can differ for different actors. If the melting is caused by an increased greenhouse effect due to CO2 emissions (see example 2 in the above figure), then this perspective will be seen very differently by different actors. Climate activists will call it an objective and rational perspective in their material environment. And in the social environment of a shrinking group of climate sceptics, this is, in fact, a subjective and irrational perspective – a figment of the eco-fundamentalist imagination that must be suppressed. It’s interesting to observe that the degree of melting seems to partly depend on the nature of the belief.

People cannot agree on the facts, says a scientist sitting on the sidelines. The cognitive biases are enormous here, says the psychologist standing next to him or her. The reflective pragmatist only concludes that in his or her environment there are different object–subject tensions, different experiential worlds, and works with them, of course using the pragmatist’s own object–subject tension. This tension determines what he/she is aware of and it’s this tension that the pragmatist will want to reduce.

The perspective of one actor can contain the actions of another actor. Different actors can have different beliefs or opinions about the same perspective. Actors can be working in completely parallel universes, and unknowingly be on a collision course with each other. The fact that object–subject tensions can tumble over each other, gnaw and tear, and be completely separate from each other is a property of societability. Things can quickly get terribly confusing. This explains why we are so bad at understanding large-scale societal practices. Our society is a kaleidoscopic, dazzling object–subject game. However, by staying alert to which perspectives are experienced by which actors, we can come to understand societal multi-actor practices much better. Actually, everyone who works professionally with societal practices should receive a thorough training in this. Otherwise, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. This is the case with most of today’s leaders, politicians, and activists. It’s enough to make you conservative, if it weren’t such a one-sided position by itself.

Improvement perspective

‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the
other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. What a sentence. No matter how deeply you think about it,
ultimately our earthly life will never be completely understood, precisely because I can never get enough
peace to take in that position: backwards.’
Søren Kierkegaard

An improvement perspective is an especially interesting variant of a perspective. Improvement perspective consists of the same three components (initial situation, change, and resulting situation), after all, it’s a perspective. But now we’re talking about the actor as well, who has a belief or opinion (in the subjective sense) about the perspective (for the actor, objective). The actor is an integral part of it, experiencing the starting situation as worse and the resulting situation as better. And the change may be actively caused by this actor. Since the actor belongs to both domains, he/she35 can intervene, in the objective sense, based on his/her wishes, in the subjective sense. The change can be genuinely and objectively carried out by the actor, in that actor’s environment, where this perspective is (in the actor’s experience). This makes the change an action of improvement (and subject becomes object). This is illustrated in the figure below.

An improvement perspective introduces an intentionally acting actor. He/she has an opinion or belief (subjective) about the environment, and because of it, changes something (objective). The arrows in bold denote a temporal order.

The experience of an objective perspective in terms of better or worse means that a subjective actor is present, who because of this subjectivity is experiencing an object–subject tension with the perspective.36 This actor will want to eliminate or reduce tension (in line with Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory). There are two extreme ways to do this, as I’ve just described (aside from the many, many hybrid forms). The actor can decide that the current environment is acceptable and modify his/her subjectivity, or intervene and thus bring the objective environment into harmony with his/her wishes. How does this look in terms of actors and improvement perspective?

In the first scenario, the actor decides that the effort doesn’t actually really justify the outcome. The wish to improve vanishes, the subjectivity resolves, and with it the object–subject tension as well. The objective situation remains the way it was, with no further intervention by the actor.37 The subjective situation changes, from worse to better.

Abandoning the desire to replace furniture (subjective) eliminates the object–subject tension. Without the desire, action is no longer necessary.

I already used the example of someone who loves exclusive designer furniture, but since it’s too expensive, has a house full of IKEA furniture (see figure above). Although she thinks IKEA design isn’t as good, she can’t afford the exclusive top designers she actually prefers. If the actor decides that IKEA furniture is actually well designed and attractive, the object–subject tension – the notion of worse and better – is gone, without anything having happened in the objective environment. It is subjectivity that makes the adaptation, as it saves the actor doing something (in this case something expensive). Now that energy can be turned to something else.

The second way of resolving the tension is to actually carry out the action. The actor acts in her objective environment. The conflict between object and subject is now resolved by bringing the objective situation in the subjective actor’s environment in line with her subjective desire.

Painting the window frames (objective) eliminates the object–subject tension. Wishing is no longer necessary after the action is completed.

Let’s imagine you think red is a hideous colour, but the new house you just bought has red window frames (see figure above). Since you think white window frames are nicer, the present situation is worse. So what do you do? You hire a painter to paint your window frames white. Now it’s objectivity that you adjust: you bring the environment in line with the way you want it. The dissonance, the object–subject tension disappears, and with it the actor who wants to modify the red window frames.

If an actor decides to act, he/she needs to know objectively when the goal has been achieved. At that point, the actor has created the value aimed at by performing the action. In the example of the window frames, the goal is achieved once the window frames are white. That change is valuable for this actor.

Thus, in theory, there are two roads open for minimizing object–subject tension. The subject can be brought into harmony with the object. This is sensible (from the actor’s point of view) if the value of the result is less than the effort and consequences of the intervention, as with the IKEA furniture. Or the object can be brought into harmony with the subject. This is sensible (from the actor’s point of view) if the value of the result is greater than the effort and consequences of the intervention. And of course, a hybrid form (a compromise) is possible too.

The examples above are still fairly dualistic. Here, subjective is mental and objective is material. But the environment can also be mental, of course. Suppose you find out that a colleague you thought was unfriendly is actually very nice, so you adjust your opinion. This is a mental intervention in a mental domain. The opinion to be changed is the objective part and the wish to adapt is the subjective part.

These days, subjective is more and more often conceived of as material. People think that we can understand thinking by studying the brain. Although there’s no doubt that brain research is shedding new light on how we think, I don’t think the nature of mental processes can be understood with material concepts. It denies the essential nature of object–subject tension, namely that ‘objective’ is outside in the environment and ‘subjective’ is what happens inside us. If we all go and look at a brain, this is objective and not subjective. We’ve seen here how the subjective experience and the objective environment interact with each other in intriguing ways.

Recursive perspectivism and multi-actor models

Let me summarize. An actor emerges once he/she experiences the first glimmer of object–subject tension. The tension increases, creating an intentional actor: a subjective actor with an objective perspective, who wants to minimize the increasing object–subject tension, this reduction being experienced as valuable. This is the essence of improvement, the essence of consciousness. The actor can make an improvement by adjusting subjectivity (doing nothing with the objective environment but disappearing from the picture as a subjective actor), or by acting (following his/her subjectivity and adapting the environment, as an objective, achieving actor). In both cases, the object–subject tension is reduced, until the actor has disappeared. An actor emerges on the scene, and then disappears from it.

Our society is characterized by a huge number of actors and improvement perspectives. According to recursive perspectivism, society is made up of actors, working together to reduce dissonance and create value. Recursive means repeating itself, also on different scales: actors and improvement perspectives occur on all kinds of scales and in all kinds of complex forms of coherence. It’s like Lego: you can keep on adding things, and you can think of several blocks together as a larger block. Recursive perspectivism sees society as a complex multi-actor practice.

Societal practices link subjective actors through their objective perspectives. Actors and improvement perspectives are highly scalable concepts that are easily linked. This is the foundation of recursive perspectivism. They range from the smallest improvement to the largest. Clashing perspectives, because of one scarcity or another, can result in huge conflicts. Unfortunate convergences of perspectives can result in serious accidents. And many interconnected, coherent perspectives and many actors working together result in the healthiest societies. The notion of composite and actor-based improvement perspective takes us to the concept of societal coherence and cooperation. It also leads to the possibility to design and develop focused coherence and cooperation.

Using models can help us to understand this better. The multi-actor modelling language developed to do this is described in my doctoral dissertation and in Volume IV of this Society in Perspective series.38 This language is capable of describing even complex societal practices in terms of actors and improvement perspectives. On the following pages are some simple examples that express the enormous recursiveness of actors and perspectives on a wide range of scales. The heights of the various rectangles in this and similar models do not refer to different value scales for the actors concerned, since they cannot be maintained graphically in more complex models.

The first example shows two intentional actors: a carpenter making a chicken coop, and the whole of humanity that is developing our late-modern economy into a sustainable society. The carpenter is, of course, part of humanity and its own development perspective.

Actors and improvement perspective on entirely different scales.

The example on the next page shows how one composite actor (myself) getting the garden ready for winter can also be described in greater detail as two (and many more) actors who prune the yew hedge and clean up the trimmings together. If I do it alone, the lines illustrating the coherence are short, since they are within my own consciousness. I could also do it with my sons. The one pruning and the one cleaning up may have different competences, but to be able to act coherently they nevertheless must be aware of each other’s perspectives. In that case as well, a shared consciousness is required. This shared consciousness is expressed by the upper part of the figure (there is one coherent actor with one partly shared consciousness).

Linking improvement perspectives at different levels.

The third example links me to the carpenter and my next-door neighbour. First I communicate that I’d like a chicken coop, and then the carpenter builds me one. I check that the work has been properly done, and I pay him. The carpenter’s object–subject tension disappears when he receives his payment. However, the smell from the chicken coop bothers the neighbour, and she complains. But the carpenter is not losing any sleep over it.

Linking improvement perspectives by different actors.

The above model can easily be expanded into an enormous societal practice by including other actors. The building materials come from production chains, I need a licence to keep chickens in this densely populated country, the chickens still have to be bought, the complaint can be received in various ways, and keeping chickens results in a range of after-the-fact activities from enjoying the eggs to calling a veterinarian. We can also unravel the carpenter’s tasks easily into a coherent mass of interconnected mental and material actors and improvement perspectives. Societal practices have a strong tendency to remain invisible, since actors see their own perspectives best, and at most will consider the actors and perspectives in their immediate surroundings. It’s as if we’re using a powerful magnifying glass to look, right around us, at the small piece of an enormous, vibrant landscape of actors and perspectives. It’s not surprising that we don’t see higher peaks in our future. Looking farther afield and with a wider gaze, together with others, requires consciousness and practice. Thinking and working in terms of specific actors and specific improvement perspectives helps enormously. (See Volume IV of this Society in Perspective series for a more detailed explanation.) Then the higher peaks will automatically appear in view. I’m not saying this only from blind faith. I’m saying it because I’ve seen the contours of the perspectivist landscape.

The multi-actor models above show how we can understand society as an enormous, multifaceted, recursively linked patchwork quilt of actors, each with their own specific improvement perspectives, who depict emerging and disappearing object–subject tensions. On one scale, you can place actors and perspectives next to each other like dominos. You can also work on multiple scales, the way you do with Lego pieces: several actor-perspective combinations together form one larger one, and conversely, a larger piece can be broken down into component actors/perspectives. This illustrates the recursive nature of actors and improvement perspectives.

If problems and opportunities arise, then object–subject tension is created. If the problems are solved and the opportunities are seized, then these specific tensions are reduced to zero in coherence and cooperation, and when possible, action is taken to create value. See the example of hiring a carpenter to build a chicken coop. The carpenter sees an opportunity and seizes it, the tension increases and then decreases. Then the chicken coop bothers the neighbour: a problem arises for her, and she wants to do something about it. For the time being, her tension is created and exists at the edge of our model.

Improvement perspective as a societal building block

That was a long ride. Passing through object–subject tensions, the mind–matter problem and a reassessment of irrationality, we’ve arrived at an actor-based improvement perspective. Improvement perspective entails a new societal building block based completely on object–subject tensions experienced by specific actors.

Improvement perspectives are the steps taken by actors towards improvement. They range from virtually 100% mental to virtually 100% material (and everything in between). They can be both small and sizeable, and can exist in both time and space. They are modular, connected like dominos, and they can form larger and smaller blocks, like Lego pieces can. This is precisely why I talk about a recursive perspectivism (recursive means self-repeating): it occurs on many scales and in wide networks. Actor-based improvement perspectives can be easily understood as the component parts of arbitrarily complex societies, and this is precisely how I will use them in this book.

I investigated this in more detail in Volume IV of this Society in Perspective series.39 I describe how to more clearly identify both what is in the actors’ landscape(s) and improvement perspectives in their immediate environment(s), so that professionals can achieve concrete goals working together. This is the toolkit of the multi-actor process manager who aims to improve very concrete situations involving many parties (actors). This book also goes into the structural side of the process. Since the path of humanity is a journey through a perspectivist landscape, the structure of complex networks of improvement perspective explains how the path arises. The path is not deterministic, that is, we cannot know exactly what steps will occur in our future. We can, however, learn to understand the perspectivist landscape much better and see what opportunities it harbours for finding and climbing higher societal peaks together. Among other things, this understanding results in six value orientations that together use the perspectivist space and can keep us on the path. They create a framework for focused societal innovation, on the small and large scales.

2.1.7 A methodological framework

‘Nothing is as practical as a theory based on a clear philosophy.
And nothing is as philosophical as a theory that works in practice.’

While writing this book, I was very much aware of how important it is to have a recognizable methodological foundation. I’ve already mentioned two ways I’ve tried to create it: by entering into dialogue with people, and by using the idea of a recursive societal building block: perspective. Now it’s time for the third way: the methodological framework.

Scientific circles attach a lot of value to clarifying one’s position with regard to one’s discipline, and following a scientifically recognizable method. Modern science is all about reproducibility, traceability or verifiability, recognizable research methods, and delineated disciplines. Today, this method mainly results in publications in the appropriate scientific journals read by a small group of colleagues within one’s discipline. This is why I’m sometimes asked by academics which discipline my work fits into, what particular research methods I use, and in what journals I’ve published.

In essence, these are questions about the methodological foundation of my work, and so, of course, it’s appropriate to ask this type of questions. However, the way a scientist asks these questions doesn’t fit well with the way I work. It is hard to define my work in terms of a particular academic discipline, scientific journals, or particular research methods.

This narrow scope neglects too many of the essential aspects of societal practice. I’m curious about new experiences and keep seeking them out, and I involve all the experiences I have had that could be of help in my efforts to understand societal practices better. These experiences are professional as well as personal. They are scholarly as well as practical. I’ve learned the most profound and confrontational lessons in societal competence in situations that were, besides being personal and highly subjective, (fortunately) very difficult to replicate in some cases. It’s precisely these experiences that inform me the most and that have catalyzed my understanding of the nature of societal competence.

For someone more firmly embedded in the framework of a discipline, the flexible ways in which I’m developing and learning to understand society may seem to be unstructured and eclectic at first, superficial sight. I began my academic career as a chemist, which is why I thought the way I naturally worked wasn’t scientifically proper. I only discovered in my mid-twenties, when I considerably broadened my academic foundation, that there were now schools of thought that considered the free but definitely not unfocused way I acquired knowledge as the most important way. One example is the work of the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget on the development of human expertise. Viewing knowledge and expertise as by-products and inextricable parts of a practice, or even a life process, was something I recognized with joy.

At the time, I was working as a knowledge analyst. My task was to verbalize and model the expertise of top experts, in close consultation with them, so that others could benefit from it. For example, we would diagnose and solve problems involving the indoor environment (i.e. problems with the air, carpeting, and other factors affecting the environment in homes and office buildings). The vast majority of human expertise is difficult to fit into the ideal scientific model. I’ve worked with people who could tell what the indoor environmental problem of a house was by simply cycling past the front door. They could barely explain how they had done it when we first talked about it, but their diagnoses and remedies were almost always spot-on.

Several times now I’ve experienced that this admittedly rather unstructured way of developing knowledge is also dominant in productive scientific groups: science is a thin veneer over an infinitely broader and deeper, and less structured, social process. I hold scientists in high esteem. They’re often the most intelligent people I know, and I wholly endorse their mission of developing, articulating, and exchanging knowledge to improve our lives. Yet sometimes I can’t help suppressing a grin when I see how some scientists hide their real selves behind a scientific façade, especially when they say something is true because it’s been researched. After all, research is largely based on very ordinary human motives and drives. The result is that the scientific journals of some disciplines are full of research results that are difficult to replicate: the drive to score points by getting published is stronger than the desire for quality.

It is the fact of our being human and our urge to improve things that drive our individual and collective action in the context of a multi-actor practice, and scientific insights play a part in it. But the role of science is just that, a role played within a larger societal framework. The same holds true for all the roles we take on in the societal discourse: they are functional veneers over something larger. The rudest-sounding person at the telephone helpdesk can be a caring mother to her children. The most money-grubbing banker can take action on social issues as a member of the Lions Club. This is the schizophrenia that I mentioned earlier (see 2.1.3).

I gain the most understanding about societal practice by participating in it and then reflecting deeply on it, using all my experiences, not by studying it in a classical, more reductionist and contemplative sense. This is the attitude of a highly reflective pragmatist. Life is inherently partly subjective and partly irrational, largely (the vast majority) not replicable or verifiable. At the moment there are about 7 billion of us here, each with our own viewpoint. That is something we must take seriously.

Although solving the methodological problems of improving our societies will certainly be no picnic, what will help in any case is allowing the whole, integrated human being behind all the roles we play to come more to the forefront. This person is usually hidden, because we encounter actors in their particular roles. If we can start to understand more of the ways these various roles are interlinked, we can strengthen our bonds as a society.

The path of humanity paints the whole of human development on the appropriate timescale, using broad brush strokes, and that’s how the next possible step in our societal development emerges the most clearly. The path of humanity by far transcends the scale of the individual. No one can get a clear view of the entirety of human history (past, present, and future). Not even I feel especially skilled or competent for the task, although I’ve devoted this entire book to it. A lack of knowledge and understanding has often forced me to use a wide roller instead of a fine brush. I’ve even felt somewhat intimidated occasionally by the enormity of the task I’ve given myself with this book and this series. Specialists from a range of disciplines and practices will think somewhat regularly that more detail or accuracy would have been appropriate here, and often they will be right.40 As a child of the late-modern network economy, I have the advantage of being in a better starting position than thinkers of all the generations before me, as many sources of knowledge and information are only a mouse click, e-mail, or phone call away. And my education and work as a multi-actor process manager, as well as my consultancy and teaching positions, have enabled me to study many practices in depth.

Helped by these circumstances, I write about the essentials of societal development, using a firm perspectivist substrate that combines practical, scientific, and philosophical contexts in a methodological framework.

What is the relationship between philosophy, science, and practice (1)?

For us all to see and follow the path of humanity, it’s a good idea to become well aware of deeply and broadly attached intuitions, and thus to stay close to human practice. Beware of absolute innovators, who are just as biased as arch-conservatives, and neither type comes anywhere near half human, let alone whole!41 With this all in mind, I have spoken intensively over the course of several decades with many practitioners about societal improvement. These conversations were about improvements in many different sectors and on all kinds of scales, as well as the question ’what is the essence of an improvement?’

The people I talk with are usually smart people (some of them extremely smart), well educated, and often holding key positions – certainly not your average bloke. They come from all kinds of circles and countries, but mostly representing the Netherlands and Western ideas (and of course this leaves its traces). A complex and multifaceted dialogue has taken place, encompassing lectures, workshops, classes, e-mails, webinars, group and bilateral conversations in offices, university lecture halls, meeting rooms, restaurants, operating theatres, living rooms, cafes, on Central-American boats and African market squares. Most of these people had ideas with regard to what is needed to bring us closer to a better world (which they feel is both important and difficult).

They have reinforced my idea that there are deeply experienced and broadly shared intuitions about the central themes of this essay, and that has turned out to be very valuable while writing this book. I would never have been able to formulate the thoughts and concepts around the path of humanity (to be discussed in the following pages) so well without the interaction with all of these people from societal practice. On top of that are my own life experiences. Thus, this book is heavily based on societal practice. At the same time, it will disappoint people who expect only a discourse on societal practice as they know it. ‘Practice’, after all, comes down to simplification. Different people (actors) can value (subjectively experience) the ‘same’ object very differently. This is even the essence of societability. One consequence of the primacy of this object–subject question in the societal discourse is that philosophy pervades our societal practices, albeit discreetly. Accordingly, the book will use a framework strongly rooted in philosophical tradition to interpret the path of humanity: the recursive perspectivism previously described.42

Philosophy literally means love of wisdom. Philosophers reflect on the fundamentals, the most general and universal aspects, of existence. Many professional philosophers feel that a concrete objective of societal improvement is an odd and even undesirable use for philosophy. Philosophy should be done purely for the sake of philosophy, they say, making philosophy a cousin of the arts (think of ‘art for art’s sake’). This looks like a respectable standpoint in any case. Practitioners don’t mess with philosophy, do they? For this reason, professional philosophers will knit their brows here and there, since this book does not subscribe to philosophical mores and only follows the philosophical hermeneutical tradition a tiny bit, and yet it still makes some strong philosophical pronouncements. I do this certainly not out of a lack of respect for the philosophical tradition, on the contrary, but rather because I am working from a methodological framework (see below).

I am also heavily indebted to science. I do complain about it a bit (or more than a bit), but that’s mainly because I cherish it so much. Universities are:

the carriers of traditions, the guardians of deep knowledge. They should be the centres of innovation where research takes place without regard to profit or immediate application.

This is a citation from The History Manifesto,43 on the whole a brilliant plea for ‘thinking about the past to see the future’, with a special accent on temporal scales of dozens and hundreds of years. If I complain, it’s because too many scientists are deleting ‘immediate’ from the quote above. I personally would prefer advocating research ‘with regard to short-and long-term societal benefits’. We need the sense of wholeness that long time scales provide more than ever in this postmodern era of fragmentation. This is, of course, exactly what the path of humanity revolves around, on the greatest possible human timescale (you can see virtually none of the path of humanity over a span of dozens or even hundreds of years). It is inevitable that we build on the ideas from many scientific disciplines and of many thinkers and writers. Yet this book does not play by all the scientific rules of the game either. It is more eclectic than monodisciplinary, and it does not shy away from mixing personal introspection and anecdotal experiences with the most highly abstract considerations.

Practitioners, scientists, and philosophers all have their own legitimizations, claims, and rationales. If you scratch the surface, it turns out that professional practice, science, and philosophy each fall apart into many subcultures and schools that can barely agree on anything. The parcelling of the notion of ‘knowledge’ – itself already half of a dipole, along with matter at the other end – over spheres with clear boundaries and temporal scales, such as ‘philosophy’, ‘science’, and ‘practice’, may provide disciplinary frameworks. However, our society doesn’t fit everything neatly into these categories. Frameworks emphasize specific kinds of knowledge such as practical, scientific, or philosophical knowledge, and corral them into reserves that correspond badly with and differ greatly from each other. In the same way that mind–matter dualism creates a mind–matter problem, these reserves create a practice<=>science problem, a science<=>philosophy problem, and an enormous (since it combines all three areas) practice<=>philosophy problem.

Practice is focused on actions in the here and now, and thus it directs attention to a short time scale. Practice seeks immediate value. Science is focused on generalizing theories and has an average time frame of, let’s say, years to a few centuries. Science mainly promises value. Philosophy focuses on the foundations of experience and has a hermeneutic dialogue several thousand years old.44 Philosophy is the foundation of value (literally as well – think of the field of ethics, what is ‘good’). The problem is shown in the figure below. There is strong resistance to the other fields at the boundaries. It goes without saying that there are some fine exceptions, that we are trying en masse to bridge the gaps (certainly those between science and practice), and that we must not overgeneralize. However, we often see science and philosophy rejecting practice, as well as detecting strong anti-intellectual tendencies in societal practice.45

What is the relationship between philosophy, science, and practice (2)?

But why can’t practice use long timelines and generalizing reflection? Who still looks back at where we came from and at where our transactional production–consumption machinery is taking us as a species? Practice is fully trapped in the issues of the moment. And why should the generalizing scientific view not have an eye for the personal needs of individual practitioners? Why have case histories and personal well-being lost the scientific argument to statistics, generalizing models, and efficiency, even in the knowledge that all these things are important? Why do we give so little consideration to our philosophical a priori assumptions as participants in society? Right now our society is screaming for these connections. The key to solving many of the great problems of our age – such as environmental and sustainability issues, financial and economic disruptions, poverty, and disease – can, I think, be found in reconnecting these differing domains and even letting them overlap even more. We can tackle climate problems and pollution (at the core, all forms of scarcity) on a global scale, and our healthcare and school systems can handle the needs of individual patients and students better. Rigid categories with impassable boundaries are wholly undesirable; the remedy is a dynamic and shimmering spectrum extending from local, subjectively situated experience to foundational, general objective experience. Society in its full breadth is in between the two ends.

This book unmistakably shows the strong influence of an academic mentality. ‘Science’ is far from a monolithic entity; it has many flavours and mixtures. Concerning culture, tradition, and methods, a distinction can be made between more hermeneutic, more empirical, and more conceptual disciplines. They can be divided into those focused on the products of human endeavour, such as history, linguistics, and literature (known in Dutch as the ‘alpha’ disciplines), more focused on matter and nature, such as biology, physics, and chemistry (the ‘beta’ disciplines), or more focused on the nature of human activity, for example, psychology, sociology, and economics (the ‘gamma’ disciplines). They can be placed on a spectrum ranging from the more theoretical, touching on philosophy, to the more practical, touching on practice. Compare epidemiology with string theory, or technology with fundamental science.

Science ideally encompasses the four-pronged combination of:

−a sceptical attitude towards what we think we already know;

−a careful interest in what scientists of the past and present are doing and thinking, supported by a ‘publication regime’;

−an irrepressible urge to theorize and activate, then to further validate and build on existing knowledge; and

−a continuous, public, and repeatable process of observation and testing, to know what happens and to refute what is not sound.

I therefore consider a scientific attitude to be one of the most powerful prescriptions that humanity has ever written. However, this method is not at all restricted to scientists. Skilled workers of all sorts used a very similar method long before the scientific revolution, and are still doing so on an ever-larger scale, even far outside the groves of academia.

Although ‘refuting the theory that is no good’ may mean ‘confirming practice that works’ here, they both produce generalizing knowledge. A scientific theory is usually more abstract, its depiction involves more language, and its underpinnings are ideally more repeatable.46 Conversely, a practical understanding usually is closer to practice, is built up and transmitted within the same practice, and its underpinnings (its development) are often a practical process of trial and error, for instance, the way the first churches were built, or how a hunter-gatherer Hadzabe father in Tanzania teaches his sons and nephews the principles of hunting.

Although a practice augmented with theory and a theory with practical use (oxymorons according to very rabid practitioners and theoreticians) may have different starting points, ultimately they greatly resemble each other and are probably the same thing within their pragmatic limitations. In this way, science (especially empirical science) and practice are closely related to each other. Philosophy gives them a framework, a position, and points the way to greater leaps towards improving society. We can only move the world by using an approach that combines all of these.

I’m personally a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a scientist, and a bit of a practitioner, and perhaps that’s why I’m not particularly accomplished in any of these three areas. I don’t play any of these games often enough, according to the rules in force in their respective reserves. I do this deliberately, since separate silos are less and less appropriate to our current societal position along the path of humanity. We have to play a new game if we are to make progress. That’s why I step over the neat lines of division and ignore category boundaries. With this book, I’m focusing on improving our societal practices, and I use everything that I deem appropriate, with the attitude of a respectful, strongly reflective pragmatist. This is why the way I work fits best on the scale of the path of humanity, since it’s already difficult enough for a specialist individual to write a cogent narrative about this scale.

Of course, there will still be room in the future for pure philosophy, fundamental science, and practice for its own sake. However, what is most urgently needed right now is that we place philosophy and science, along with practice, together within a single methodological framework aimed at improving society.47

Ideally, a methodology encompasses the full spectrum from the most basic and broadly valid philosophical principles to daily experiences in practice in a specific place and at a specific time.48 For example, it contains a philosophical and ethical basis, explanatory and method-supporting theories, goal-seeking methods, supporting tools, and a practical application. This methodological framework is shown as a diagram on the next page. The elements of the methodological framework have many links with each other. Although the notion of experiential worlds and the object–subject question are placed at the layer of philosophy and ethics in recursive improvement perspective, they occur at all levels, and consequently, recursive perspectivism provides a base for all layers (see the figure on the next page).

The methodological framework of this book and this series

A populist usually gets no further than appealing to the gut feelings of one of the group actors in the upper layer of practice, a practitioner covers the top three layers, a scientist feels most comfortable near the theory layer, and a philosopher in the philosophy and ethics layer. However, much can be said for the argument that everyone striving for reflective, structural, and articulable societal improvements can outline and organize their activities using one methodological framework or another, even if their accents and colours are different.49 Or, formulated in a slightly different way: a professional societal practice of improvement requires a broad methodological framework.

The methodological framework undermines the idea that primacy in improvement, and thus the last word, is reserved only for practice (the three upper layers with the focus at the top), science (in the middle, with the focus around theory; since science aims to provide validated theories), or philosophy (at the bottom). This idea only pits practitioners, scientists, and philosophers against each other. Each of them knows too little of the others’ experiential worlds and pursues their own ends on their own temporal scales in their own part of the methodological framework. It places scientists and philosophers too far outside of normal society, which in my opinion is a highly undesirable situation. From a methodological viewpoint, having the practical, scientific, and philosophical perspectives work closely together is precisely what we urgently need to create a functional practice of societal improvement.50

The Society in Perspective series attempts to cover this framework. Originally written in Dutch, Volumes I, IV, and V have been published in Dutch under the series title Samenleving in perspectief . Only Volume V, The Path of Humanity (published in Dutch as Het pad van de mensheid) has thus far been published in English translation. Volume I, Een filosofie van de maatschappelijke praktijk (2009, unpublished English translation A Philosophy of Societal Practice) aims at the lower left corner (what is true, what do we dare to trust), and introduces recursive perspectivism. Volume II will be about societal ethics (Een maatschappelijke ethiek; what is good, what direction should we favour, in other words, the lower-right corner), and Volume III about societal pragmatism (in Dutch Maatschappelijke pragmatiek, the question of how it is even possible that we can improve on the basis of ideas about what is true and good, thus connecting the lowest with the highest layer). Volume IV, Multi-actor procesmanagement in theorie en praktijk (unpublished English translation Multi-actor Process Management in Theory and Practice), was published in 2011 and mainly discusses the top three layers.

This book, The Path of Humanity, explores the entire framework, with as a point of departure the wish to improve our society in a targeted way at least to some degree. Although I call it an essay, I certainly don’t mean that it is a precursor to an academic book, in the sense that it should ever be labelled as such. It should be seen as a contribution to the immense and valuable task of improving our societies, a task that, in any case, has our continual interest (or should). After all, we’re improvers by nature. We show this on a small scale all the time, but we can also do it on larger societal scales. It’s just the human condition.

2.1.8 The improvement perspective of this book

Recursive perspectivism provides us with a methodological building block that attempts to describe, explain, and guide social and societal action. Writing a book is a societal action par excellence. Thus it makes sense that we also must be able to describe the writing of this book using this methodological building block.

What, then, is the improvement perspective that I am trying to achieve with this book?51 To explain, I’ll draw on the ‘improvement dilemma’ mentioned earlier. It expresses the somewhat powerless feeling we have when we can see a better world before us but don’t know how to make it a reality. Or how it grates when we see all that’s wrong around us, or in the news (especially the news; after all, it’s newsworthy). Remember the famous photo from the Vietnam War of the girl with napalm burning her body as she runs naked away from the village. Or think of the migrants coming to Europe on dilapidated boats. I’ll show the improvement dilemma again below:

Can we improve our world? The improvement dilemma.

I am mostly a positive person, yet I experience this quandary every day. Of course, I try to do what I can, but my reputation as a world improver is not very impressive, certainly no better than the majority of you readers who have got this far in this book. This dilemma grates all the more on me, precisely because I can see clearly that it should be possible to improve the world in theory, but that it happens too seldom in practice (mine included).

I observe a double standard: I myself do not act the way that I think other people should. I don’t even come close. I drive a car; although it’s a semi-hybrid, I drive a lot, even though I’m more aware of the dangers of an extreme greenhouse effect scenario than most people. I don’t like public transport, because I find it inconvenient (even after trying it a lot) and I don’t like the disrespectful way the monopolist transport companies act. I buy myself and my family presents, even though I know that others are in great need of help. I’m not as much of an activist as I could be. To be honest, I sometimes even feel that not a small proportion of the activists are know-it-all-ish, myopic, narrow-minded utopians who love pointing out others’ faults. A double standard can degenerate into cynicism, but I have little of that. Nevertheless, I do not experience this double standard as pleasant: it complicates my life and doesn’t do much for my self-image either.

A societal dissonance

In my opinion, Festinger put a general and fundamentally human mechanism in the spotlight with his theory. Replace actual environment with societal practice, and beliefs and convictions with societal theory, and Festinger’s ideas also apply excellently to societal improvement on larger scales. The improvement dilemma is a dissonance on the scale of society. And the greater and stronger the distinction between practice and theory, the louder this societal dissonance sounds (see figure on the next page). When it grates on me, I experience, to use Festinger’s words, a societal cognitive dissonance.

Can we improve our world? A societal dissonance

In the light of the earlier discussion, the improvement dilemma is an object–subject tension on the scale of society. My audience (the people in the dialogue referred to above in section 2.1.5 of chapter 2) recognize this societal object–subject tension.

People do not like dissonance – dixit Festinger – and they eliminate it in astoundingly creative ways. My enormous appreciation for Festinger is partly based on the fact that you can see his theory working so well in practice. Improvement means reducing object–subject tension. And the attempts to eliminate the societal dissonance are thin on the ground.

Here as well, the two basic mechanisms mentioned earlier are open. You can adapt the beliefs to the environment (like getting IKEA furniture), or the environment to the beliefs (like painting the windowsills in your favourite colour). And in societal-scale situations, the former is seen as much simpler.

The conservative pseudosolution

This is why a majority of my audiences interpret the societal dissonance as a conflict between a vague utopian possibility for societal improvement (theory) and a concrete impossibility that is obvious to everyone (practice). They are rational people who are considering the objectivity, the current practice in their environment. ‘Maybe it could happen, but most people simply put themselves first’, they tell me. And ‘That’s just the way the world is.’ And ‘Keep it simple’. And ‘You just have to be practical’. What they’re actually saying is that Mount St. Peter is good enough for them, or perhaps that it’s all they see, and that the path of humanity is a delusion. Although they call this attitude realism, it is conservatism. In what to me is the worst variation on this theme, the response is ‘You shouldn’t want to improve mainstream society, and you mustn’t pay any attention to other people, because it’s downright bad for us.’ Taken to a political level, this statement degenerates into clearly self-serving populism.

For the theoretical doubters, the dissonance can now easily be eliminated. They declare the theoretical possibility, impractical by its very nature since theory and practice are complementary, to be impossible. The theoretical ‘yes’ is shifted to the left, and suddenly it is next to the practical impossibility already there as ‘no’. The theoretical improvement hypothesis is rejected as a pipe dream, since after all, we have to be realistic. The result is double no, the conflict is solved, and – wholly in line with Festinger – the dissonance no longer sounds. Conservatism, pseudo-rationalism, realism, populism ‘prevails’.

The conservative pseudosolution for the dissonance is antitheoretical: societal improvement may be desirable but is theoretically impossible.

In my opinion, this only looks like a solution, hence I call it the ‘conservative pseudosolution’. Only an extremely superficial observer could conclude that shifting theory to the left puts it in line with practice. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shifting to the left does not give us an explicit and worked-out realistic theory that can explain why society cannot be improved. At least, I don’t think that statements like ‘people are selfish’, ‘that’s just the way the world is’, ‘things have to be simple’, and ‘you have to be practical’ in any way add up to a theory. They are as blunt as they are ill-considered, and they are astonishingly simple to refute. People are capable of extreme altruism, the world is continually and enormously changing (witness the path of humanity), and our societal practices are more than ever supported by formidable theories in all relevant fields and sectors. The conservative pseudosolution makes existing practices the standard. This is contrary to our history up until now, and therefore we must reject it.

The conservative, ‘realistic’ pseudosolution does indeed resolve the dissonance, but this is because in one blow it strips the theory of substance and power and makes it subservient to practice. It is an anti-intellectual and an antitheoretical fake solution. It results in a society that flaps around in circles, like a bird on the ground with one useless wing. The antitheoretical solution condemns the bird to scratching around on the ground, while it could have taken to the air.

I encounter this antitheoretical and anti-intellectual attitude frequently in my professional practice. ‘Let’s be practical’, say people with a less-well-articulated view of society. Or ‘let’s stick to the subject’ or ‘let’s keep it concrete.’ ‘You’re making it so complicated’ is another particularly nice one. It may be that I’m practising third-rate psychology here – maybe I just am impractical, can’t stay with the subject, and think too abstractly – but I don’t think people make these requests to keep it practical, simple, and concrete because it’s the way to help us make progress. It’s a request not to fuel or revive the societal dissonance. It’s a request to stop asking questions that challenge business as usual, not to understand the issue in context because that context is inconvenient to them. It’s a request not to articulate the needs of actors we haven’t heard until now, and not to shine any light on routes to improve the societal situation (such as that of those poor coffee growers). It’s an attempt to nail our feet to the road, while we can – and must – walk the path of humanity. In short, it’s a request for stagnation, a call to exclusivity.

If the theoretical position of improvement disappears, then the societal dissonance is resolved just like that – this much is unmistakably true. If everyone agrees that society just is the way it is, we don’t have to work on improving it, and no one can accuse you of doing nothing about it. You’re on the top of Mount St. Peter, and not only do you not see any higher peaks around you, realistically speaking they don’t even exist! You can go back to business as usual and sleep well at night. How restful it is! And what a flagrant contradiction of the dynamic development that we can see on the path of humanity and in our own history.

The utopian pseudosolution

Another group, the minority of people I talk to, responds in precisely the opposite way. They see the huge possibilities for improvement on the right end of the scale. The only thing that is necessary is for us not to do the wrong things anymore, and thus for everyone to have good will. They’re willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work making the world a better place, which they think will shift the practice to the side of theory. They think that referring to the difficulty of changing societal practice on the left end is negative: you shouldn’t talk about that too much, that’s negativism. At the risk of making a caricature of well-meaning people who really work very hard, they close their eyes to the ‘objective facts’ and would prefer to confine themselves to the utopia of their own little practices, away from the big bad world outside.

The utopian pseudosolution to societal dissonance ignores established practice: it focuses on one’s own practice and ignores the inertia of mainstream societal practices.

This is also a pseudosolution to societal dissonance, namely the ‘utopian pseudosolution’ (see the figure above). Practice is pulled over to the right. This seems to resolve the dissonance, but in the same way that the rational solution pays too little attention to theory, the utopian solution pays too little attention to the nature of the vast majority of established societal practice.

This established societal practice is not at all the result of selfish people making the wrong decisions. It is the result of the actions of clever and passionate people who are trying to improve their situation, since they can really see and influence it. In short, it is the result of many improvement logics together. If people really could envisage a better world and the way to it, they would be on their way already and would have been for some time. As I’ve said before, we are inveterate improvers; it’s the human condition. As soon as a real perspective for improvement comes into view, someone will try it.

I’m slightly more favourable to utopians than I am to conservatives, but I must say this: utopians shut their eyes too much to the inertia and improvement logics of established societal practice, as well as to how deeply embedded these are.

Working on a methodological solution

At the beginning of the introduction, this book gets straight to the point about the methodology used in it and in this series:

‘My position is neither that of a utopian, say, or a populist, but a strongly reflective pragmatist. The book calls on your will and your ability to look at our entire human development practically, theoretically, and philosophically.’

By now you will understand that I was referring to the methodological framework and the existing dissonance just presented between theory and practice of societal improvement.

The utopian pseudosolution is blind to the stubbornness of current societal practice. Its mirror image, the conservative pseudosolution, is blind to the power of theory and prefers to maintain the status quo.

I personally think that there is only one robust way to really resolve this societal dissonance – by working on a methodological ‘yes’. This ‘yes’ entails being philosophically, practically, and theoretically capable of answering ‘yes’ to the question of whether we can improve societal practices. This is illustrated by the figure on the next page.

Practice plus theory plus philosophy together add up to methodology

By using a methodological approach, we can robustly resolve the societal dissonance. In concrete terms it means that we will have to flesh out all the elements of a practical, theoretical, and philosophical methodological framework, working together.

The methodological solution to societal dissonance gives a practical, theoretical, and philosophical ‘yes’ as the answer to the question of whether we can improve our society.

This will require the efforts of many people, and indeed, there are already many people working on it.52 Although it is an enormous task, I can certainly do my part, and I am doing so, with this series and this book. If I were to outline the rationale for this book in terms of improvement perspectives, it would look like this:

This book aims to make a modest contribution to further improving our society.

From now on, you may call my rationale optimistic, but hopefully not utopian any longer, because perhaps by now you understand my position in life as a strongly reflective methodological pragmatist.

I have now finished accounting for the methodology. This part is lengthy, but I think that is appropriate, given the subject. It helps us to understand the design and the connections between the following three parts and four themes, which will be introduced as a coherent unit in the next chapter.

2.2 One foundation, three parts, and four themes

In keeping with the preceding methodological foundation, the remainder of this book consists of a prelude (the first theme), three parts, and in addition to the prelude three more themes that go into greater depth. In total, this adds up to a short kick-off and a methodological foundation (that you are almost through reading now), three parts, and four themes (including the prelude).

The prelude (Theme 1) sends quite a firm shot across the bow. It shows a first glimpse of the perspectivist path and landscape. In the three parts, the path of humanity will first be outlined (Part 1), then situated in a landscape (Part 2). Then from this foundation, theoretical and practical consequences for our future societal innovation will be derived (Part 3). The themes in between the three parts will explore in depth relevant aspects of recursive perspectivism and clarify how the path of humanity is based completely on perspectivist hypotheses. The figure on the next page shows the structure of the entire book.

The structure of the entire book

The structure of the book corresponds to an image for a societal practice that I will use throughout the book, that of a rough diamond with various facets. I look at the path of humanity from the viewpoint of recursive perspectivism, and I think it would be helpful if I choose several different viewpoints that shed light on several different facets. At this point we have to call it a diamond in the – very – rough; I’m quite aware that this book is a preliminary perspectivist exploration of the path of humanity and that some polishing will still need to be done in the future. Nevertheless, here is the kick-off, here in your hands. Its various facets show totally different viewpoints, but as a whole, they provide the first more complete picture.

Below I’ll give brief summaries of the four themes and the three parts, with the emphasis on the exposition of the book as a whole.

Theme 1: Path and landscape (prelude). Recursive perspectivism offers a remarkable way to view our world and our society. It helps us to see human experience in a new light. To clarify this, the prelude presents two intriguing, even downright mysterious pattern laws that have amazed people for many years: Benford’s law and, more recently, Zipf’s law. They show that there are some very specific patterns of distribution in our world, while there seem to be no mechanisms that can either cause or explain them.

The population numbers of counties and cities of the United States show such an astonishing pattern, while neither the people who live (or move) there nor the companies who have offices there nor the respective government authorities really do anything to drive it. Or take the words in a book: the frequency of occurrence of all the words in a random book usually shows a surprising amount of regularity, an astonishing order while it would be impossible for a writer to write following this ‘rule’. A writer is completely unaware of causing this impressive regularity; it’s a by-product of writing.

I call Benford’s Law and Zipf’s Law ‘pattern laws’. This is an unconventional name, which I am introducing as an umbrella term. They are examples of a broader category of collective pattern laws, which I suspect covers many natural-scientific, sociological, and psychological laws. The path of humanity is also a member of this collection: it is a law of patterns, a particular kind of arrangement, a regularity that we cause unknowingly as a by-product of our combined lives. The path of humanity is the vastest pattern law that we can imagine as human beings. It is so vast that we can hardly experience it. Benford’s law and Zipf’s law are its little brothers.

These pattern laws are special, because they give us an unexpected glimpse of a previously invisible, misunderstood, and unexplored perspectivist improvement landscape. Pattern laws are the logical consequence of the presence of this improvement landscape, based entirely on improvement potentials, and thus on coherent improvement perspective.

This first theme, the prelude Path and Landscape, gets straight to the point since I show some of this mysterious perspectivist improvement landscape straight away. I use both a continuous and a quantum-theoretical interpretation of this recursive perspectivist landscape.

In the continuous interpretation, this landscape underpins the common-sense intuition that – in the long term, and in general – it is better to have more perspectives and thus that more perspectives represent more value. And also that we as people can make slow but steady progress on the macro scale.

However, an average-theoretical interpretation on the microscale pulls the rug squarely and thoroughly out from under this gently rolling macro picture, because it reveals a rugged mountainous landscape with high peaks that rise unexpectedly before us, and equally unsuspected and nasty deep gorges and pits. And that is much more in line with the way we sometimes experience our lives.

So this prelude gives us a very first glimpse of this quantum-theoretical perspectivist mountain landscape, in which humankind, the improver, finds itself positioned, wearing a blindfold and earplugs. Up to now, people have been unaware of this landscape and have been groping to find their way in the dark.

Plato gave us the tale of a Thracian servant girl who made fun of the ancient Greek astronomer Thales who fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. I will use this story as a metaphor to show how the Thracian servant girl’s short-term practical approach and Thales’s long-term consideration together form the key to societal improvement. Alone, neither Thales nor the Thracian girl can make any difference in terms of progress, improvement, or innovation. The Thracian girl would still be sitting at the edge of the well, laughing, and we would have to find Thales at the bottom of that well, sadly, with his neck broken. But together it’s a very different story. ‘The lame man helps the blind man’ is a proverb that characterizes their potential collaboration, if somewhat sneeringly. Yet sneering at the proverb does this mechanism a great disservice. We should remember that differing faculties, both a sense of direction and a keen sense of one’s immediate environment, coordinated by or in a single consciousness, characterize a healthy vibrant being.

This book will go into quite some depth in explaining the deeper nature of pattern laws, with the path of humanity as its most prominent exponent. This requires a recursive perspectivist view. Its most significant result is a new light on societal innovation (in Part 3).

Part 1: Humanity’s path of improvement. Theme 1 above classifies the path of humanity as a pattern law. But what exactly does this path entail? Part 1 describes the path of humanity in more detail, explains the societal steps comprising this path, and what would be the appropriate next steps along it.

First, the way that coherence and cooperation are related to societal improvement will be explored. There is a correlation between cooperation and quality, and many think there is even a causal relationship, i.e. increasing coherence and cooperation improves the quality of society. This will be briefly illustrated using a societal balance model, which has intriguing parallels with statistical thermodynamics and information theory.

Next, we will take a first look at the path of humanity. Striding along with seven-league boots on, as it were, we will see how our development as humanity has progressed up to now. For the time being, I will be using broad brush strokes – a roller is perhaps a better metaphor – and cultural anthropologists, historians, and representatives of many more particular disciplines may furrow their brows. Although I have great respect for these disciplines, what is important to me at this point is the big picture, and it will be put on the canvas with big gestures.

We are on the brink of a possible next step forwards along the path of humanity: towards the global society of Team World. This move has a huge amount of potential for growth, but right now, there is also a genuine risk of societal decline. Team World is characterized as ‘plurimodern’: a remarkable spectral (i.e. covering a spectrum) combination of small-scale pluriformity and large-scale modernity, and all the forms in between.

To flesh out this societal development somewhat more, I have drawn up a more detailed description of the path of humanity, working with many people from many different sectors of society. I emphasize an autarkic (self-sufficient) phase, a modern phase, and a plurimodern phase. It involves sectors such as building and construction, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, and food. Preliminary sketches have also been made for a number of other sectors, such as energy, teaching and education, defence, and (hardly a coherent sector, but a very important one) societal management. Plurimodernity combines the strengths of autarky (internal coherence and cooperation) and those of modernity (scale and specialization).

We can only take the step to plurimodernity if we increase even further our societal consciousness, our sensitivity to others, and our understanding of and respect for how we exactly create coherence and cooperate with each other. I call this shift the plurimodern transformation. But is a plurimodern transformation even possible? Are we as people actually capable of making it?

Theme 2: Society in perspective. It’s time to depict the path of humanity as a whole in terms of recursive perspective. To do this properly, however, it is a good idea to first gain a deeper understanding of what this would involve – a recursive perspectivist picture of society. This will be provided with Theme 2.

Our late-modern societies are teeming with actors, each with their own experiential worlds. On the one hand, this offers all kinds of possibilities and opportunities, but on the other hand, it also leads to all kinds of tensions and conflicts. After all, it is difficult to be able to really see so many different actors, and especially to see all their mutual connections and how they work together as well. From a bio-evolutionary standpoint, we’re not even geared to see this.

Experiential worlds are nothing other than experiences, in terms of perspective, by actors. Thus you could say that an actor is a label on a specific collection, an adaptive bundle of coherent perspectives. Once an actor consciously makes an improvement, he or she completes one of the improvement perspectives in this bundle. If the improvement is successful, the actor has converted improvement potential into experiential value.

This results in a concept of society in which a societal practice consists of actors interacting with each other, who each live in their own experiential worlds consisting of perspective. Or, in a nutshell: society as a perspectivist multi-actor practice. Thus every actor is characterized by a collection of connected perspective. Actors form an intermediary layer; they bundle perspectives, and in their interactions, they also form the largest societal practices.

That is a different philosophical view of societies than, say, the more conventional mind–matter view, of ‘cerebral’ people who populate a physical world in different forms of social relationships. Therefore we will explain, from a philosophical perspective, the relationship between the perspectivist multi-actor society and the more conventional dualistic mind–matter or mind–body worldview.

Recursive perspectivism has little use for fixed dualisms like mind and body, time and space, or confrontation and anticipation. It always considers the enormous field in between two end points of the spectra that these dualisms create, and it even questions the absolute existence of these end points. It thereby reveals itself as an offshoot from the trunk of both phenomenological and pragmatic philosophy.53

Also discussed will be the question of how an actor can have a recognizable identity on the one hand, and on the other hand can change this identity over time. Time and identity also turn out to be a matter of perspective.

Theme 2 concludes with an initial exploration of the intriguing principle of perspectivist balance: the fact that a perspectivist consciousness (and thus humanity too) abhors strongly dissimilar relationships in terms of recursive perspective, and that a consciousness will do anything and everything to put these relationships back into proper balance.

Theme 2 provides a firm understanding of the recursive-perspectivist picture of society, including its philosophical anchors. We are now ready to explain the path of humanity completely in terms of perspective and situate it in a perspectivist space.

Part 2: The perspectivist landscape. Recursive perspectivism presents a view of our society based wholly on the human drive, and power, to improve. Part 2 then works out what the required plurimodern transformation presented in Part 1 means. This section starts with apes, families, and politics, and then heads towards an understanding of the basic principle of any societal organization: perspectivist societal balance.

We are living in multi-actor practices that are increasingly complex, in which more and more actors are living their own truths and realities. Perspective is a basic notion of experience that links things up as if they were Lego pieces (and thus is recursive54), and it can therefore create a spectrum of differing experiential worlds, from small to large. Experiential worlds are experienced by actors interacting with each other. This way, a picture emerges of society as a multi-scale, multi-actor practice based entirely on recursive perspective.

Since this all sounds somewhat abstract, we enlist the help of anthropology and game theory. We look at apes, children, and computers, and see the most basic and elementary societal processes at work. The ways they cooperate (the computers as well as the apes and children) teach us something about the enormous power of coherence and cooperation. Of course, now and then fierce competition and conflict have a place, but as value-generating processes, they take second place, far behind coherence and cooperation.

Various aspects of our society will be viewed through a perspectivist lens, including team-building, political currents, and the dominant role of economic thinking in our current era.

If we are talking about cooperation, we are talking about team spirit. Just what is team spirit? Recursive perspectivism provides a clear foundation with which to identify and compare totally different team configurations. This applies to the scale of a family, a football team, and Team World. You can even situate political currents in this way, since they look like societal team configurations. And they differ in team spirit.

Three basic dimensions in team configurations are acknowledged: similarity, pluriformity, and unity. When actors resemble each other, they share perspectives. In extreme cases, we call them a homogeneous group actor; they then become more and more uniform. When actors differ, they have different perspectives. In extreme cases, they are entirely different, sharing nothing, and become more and more pluriform. When actors together are one, they interact through shared perspectives. In extreme cases, we conceive of them as one collective actor: a unit.

There is one conclusion that can be drawn quickly: in all three of the extreme cases, societally speaking, things are far from ideal. It is advisable to find balance, since doing so uses the strengths of all three dimensions and avoids their weaknesses (these strengths and weaknesses will be identified later).

The analysis also gives us a remarkable view of societal chains, the greatest achievement of modernity. Chains have enormous advantages, as they organize things efficiently and on a large scale. However, they have a distinct disadvantage: in combination with modernity’s enormous scales, they can pose a real threat to our society. And they have become a threat too – just look at the rapidly growing problems concerning non-sustainable societal practices. Well-designed, well-monitored, and well-organized chains on limited scales have their particular advantages, but taken to extremes, chains are highly off-balance. Excessive use of chains makes a society very vulnerable and will lead to stagnation or even a regression back down the path of humanity.

This also applies to every form of imbalance. In terms of society, we must return to seeking perspectivist balance, since this is what the path of humanity has been showing us for many thousands of years already. That path of humanity transcends the human scale: even though we constitute it together, we are certainly not aware of doing so. We also make a big mess of things while en route. Different actors experience different elements of the societal-perspectivist tissue. The recursive-perspectivist image of society makes it possible to still capture this large-scale, unconscious improvement process in frameworks.

Societal improvement is driven by distinct perspectivist principles of balance that have been invisible until now. These balance principles situate the path of humanity entirely in a three-dimensional space, a three-dimensional landscape of perspective. They are what ensure that we find our way through this landscape – a perspectivist landscape in which the paths of choice are somewhat established beforehand.

To clarify how we can perceive this balance, we will bridge the relativist gap between objective and subjective experience. The core concept here is experiential value: the value that actors assign to experiencing particular perspectives. Experiential value is actualized improvement potential. It explains social and psychological phenomena such as loss aversion and habituation. It also describes where the path of preference is in the perspectivist space, and why we as humanity are continually drawn back to this path.

Our societies keep seeking perspectivist balance, forming recognizable and even predictable tracks through the perspectivist landscape, subject as we are to the balance principles mentioned above, even though we are only dimly aware of it (actually, we are completely unaware of it on the larger scales). In the long term, we cannot get away from this balance, and we will be forced into it by circumstances. In the end, this balance results in societal structure and societal quality. The path of humanity, which so majestically emerges from the course of human history, is nothing other than the product of our unconscious pursuit of balance in the perspectivist landscape, on increasingly larger scales, and thus on the scale of humanity as well.

Nothing is blocking our way to consciously exploring this balance, or consciously seeking it together in the future, and thus harvesting the potentially enormous fruits for society that it provides. We’ll also be following the path of humanity into the future. This sets the course for a better society and gives us a better grip on it.

Theme 3: A closer look at dice. Invisible improvement landscapes, unconscious balance-seeking processes, paths of preference on a societal scale – doesn’t it all sound rather like, well, hocus-pocus? Are we not, as human beings, uniquely free and able to go wherever we want to? With all this free will, is our future not inherently unpredictable? As a child of the Enlightenment, these were my first thoughts while thinking through the consequences of recursive perspectivism.

However, it is important to keep in mind the fact that recursive perspectivism says only the minimum about the individual nature of perspectives or the short-term choices we make. It can only say something about statistical averages and large-scale, long-term structural balances. Recursive perspectivism says little to nothing about how we create the content of our paths, in the short term.