A few years ago this book (Engaging Emergence, Turning Upheaval into Opportunity, Peggy Holman) would probably have been incomprehensible to me—at most, academically interesting, chaos and complexity theory, the human ability to self-organize. Then Mid-Eastern dictatorships began to fall like stacked dominoes enabled by a network of communications as complex as a nervous systems. No one expected it. The abstract became real with a force like rolling thunder.
There is an old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. These are interesting times, uncertain times, chaotic times and if you base your expectations of the future solely upon the past, you’re like to despair for humanity and the earth itself. Holman’s point in this book is that higher orders of organization can emerge from complex systems. There is reason to hope and reason to act, to recognize and embrace what is emerging from the noise and confusion, from the dust of our collapsing expectations. There is no guarantee, no certainty of success, but we need hope in order to act or be paralyzed by fear.
We need new ways to understand ourselves and to act collaboratively. A lot of this book is about the methodologies being developed to do just that. The rest of the books is about why it’s important. Some of her advice may sound paradoxical but our current wisdom is what has brought us to the edge of the abyss. A new wisdom is necessary to lead us away from the edge. That new wisdom may in fact be the oldest of all.
ARK 