Reimagining Deliberative Democracy to Meet the Metacrisis

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Today we face many complex, interrelated global crises, including

• dangers from AI, nuclear, bio and nano technologies;
• environmental impacts of modern civilization, such as climate disruption, pandemics, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, famines, and floods; and
• social disturbances from extreme inequality, social media, toxic polarization and marginalization, authoritarian governments, civil unrest, mass migrations, wars and more.
  
  

This emerging entanglement of global crises is commonly referred to as the polycrisis. Some experts call it the metacrisis, seeking to highlight how all the crises arise together from modern civilization’s defining worldview – its shared assumptions, narratives, values, systems, and so on. This “modernity” worldview maintains that (1) people, nature and everything else are fundamentally separate from each other and that (2) “progress” (especially material progress) is – or should be – the highest cultural value. Close examination reveals these two assertions at work in virtually every facet our individual and collective lives.

To the extent we really get this, we realize that the metacrisis is not so much a problem out there to be solved as it is a predicament in which we are all embedded, impacted, and implicated. We are all co-creating the metacrisis – often obliviously (which is usually not as accidental as it looks) – just by living in the social, educational, economic, technological, political and governance systems that have emerged from modern civilization’s stories of separateness and progress.

And here’s the clincher: So much of modernity’s glorious story of progress involves treating nature’s sustaining, regenerative dynamics as problems to solve to ensure we humans are (a) protected from them (by everything from air conditioning and cars to medicines and electricity) and (b) able to manipulate them for our own benefit. Our collective progress story does not honor the limits that nature places on all organisms – limits such as death, balance, reciprocity, and enoughness. We don’t tend to accept any limits on us humans (especially but not only elites) and we use our brilliance and technologies to succeed at getting what we want. In fact, for thousands of years, humanity has become progressively better at improving our collective capacities to extract, colonize and exploit all realms and at all scales to fuel our exceptional expansiveness and to “protect our interests” regardless of how that impacts others – marginalized humans, species, niches, generations, values…. Is it any wonder that the metacrisis is now revealing intrinsic planetary limits to our expansive colonial solutionizing and the illusory nature of the seeming abundance it generates?

So what do we do?

Unfortunately, it’s highly likely that the metacrisis – and many of our efforts to respond to it – will produce what feels like “collapse”, i.e., the loss of control, predictability, security and material abundance. But the “collapse” framing can easily distract us from where we most need to put our attention, i.e., (a) the toxic dark side of our precious stories of separation and progress, (b) the unsustainable systemic dynamics those stories lead us to create and participate in and (c) the diverse, fractal, and local dimensions of the global “collapse” dynamic we’re experiencing. In practice, “collapse” will probably be – and already is – showing up as very diverse events and instances in diverse places – including right here – not as the One Big Catastrophe the word implies (although that, too, may eventually happen, thanks to some of our most potent existential technologies). As some have said, the Apocalypse is already happening; it’s just not equally distributed.

Of course, increasing public understanding of all of these factors could help us meet and respond to the challenges and opportunities of the metacrisis in life-serving ways, individually and collectively. Citizen Assemblies (CAs), for example, could help us learn our collective way into and through the metacrisis. However, close consideration of what’s actually emerging lead me to believe that our current forms of deliberative democracy – and even many of our field’s fundamental theories and assumptions – will require substantial re-visioning and ongoing evolution if they are to rise to the challenges of the metacrisis. That’s because the nature of the metacrisis suggests we need to actually transform our current systems, stories, and assumptions – and, especially, ourselves – along the way.

In other words we deliberative democracy folks – especially those of us who focus on minipublics like citizen assemblies – need to transform our whole field, our perspectives and practices, in ways called for by the nature of the metacrisis that is now challenging our civilization and making our world unpredictable. We need something closer to wise collective responsiveness in real time than our usual participatory policy recommendations. We are called into fundamental collective inquiries about what we need to learn and do to enable our field’s considerable potential gifts to meet the challenges soon to disrupt every community on Earth, starting with those already being disrupted.

I hope this series of blog posts helps spark a blossoming of professional self-examination and creative R&D. To seed such conversation, I offer below my own sense of some diverse developmental tracks I think we’d be wise to pursue. To augment those offerings and to invite further and deeper explorations, I’ve asked four generative AI models to chime in with their ideas about how deliberative democracy needs to change to meet the metacrisis. I think their responses were insightful – going beyond just answering my question to collectively suggest more realms to explore in this adventure and novel ways to think about it. So I’m hoping – in the spirit of this time of urgent learning and adaption – that we will favor a humble, curious spirit of ever-unfolding discovery and not get bogged down in authoritative articulations of inevitably premature conclusions. I aspire to this because the metacrisis will be evolving around us as we try to keep up….

So below I offer a quick overview of some developmental directions I see for innovating CAs and other deliberative practices as part of that adventure. I will explore each of these developmental directions in more detail in upcoming blog posts – and I invite you to think about them and propose other new directions to further this emerging critical re-viewing of our field. If you wish to see what the AI bots had to offer us, check out HERE. (I made my inquiry to them after I had drafted this post and decided to leave their four voices as independent from mine – totaling five juicy perspectives on where we might move if we choose to shift our work to be more in line with the metacrisis reality emerging in and around us. I hope they will be evocative catalysts for more creative thinking in this inquiry, including yours.)

SOME PATHS FOR REIMAGINING DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Contextualize and/or transcend our “problem-solving” approach to complexity: Our linear efforts to make problems disappear by solving them often backfire when we’re working with nonlinear complex adaptive systems and situations where all the parts and dynamics are interactively evolving. We need to shift towards co-creative resilience, self-organization, responsive co-sensing, and learning from iterative “safe-to-fail” trials. How might we shift our linear problem-solving orientation to a deeper meta-relational “dance” with changes in the complex living world around us?

Explicitly address “systemic drivers of collapse”: Existential risk researcher Daniel Schmachtenberger has identified around 30 dynamics “driving” civilization towards collapse. Since those drivers are embedded in our social systems and technologies, collapse cannot be ameliorated or creatively met without addressing those drivers – at systemic, analytic, emotional and existential levels. What changes in how deliberations are envisioned, organized and facilitated might enable ordinary, randomly selected citizens to address these challenges effectively together?

Integrate citizen deliberations with multi-stakeholder engagements: The scope and depth of realities embraced by the metacrisis suggest a need to engage a full spectrum of stakeholders. If they continually (or iteratively) talk together towards shared understandings that align them towards effective collective action, much of the metacrisis challenge might be met. How and why might such inclusive stakeholder-centric engagements be used to complement the deliberative democracy work done in citizen-centric forums?

Explicitly address the challenge and possibility of collective wisdom: Participatory governance and even collective intelligence are – by themselves – radically insufficient to address modernity’s metacrisis. We need to courageously reorient our governance aspirations towards deep understandings that serve the longterm profound wellbeing of whole communities, living beings and systems – in other words, we need wisdom. How might we co-evolve the orientation of deliberative democracy theory and practice towards increasing societies’ capacities for generating effective collective wisdom?

Move towards non-governmental sponsorship: The metacrisis is generated by our cultures and systems, which thus must be transformed to respond to it meaningfully. Most governments are disinclined and/or incapable of major systemic transformation – especially in the ways indicated by the metacrisis and its systemic drivers. How might we convene, facilitate, and implement participatory deliberative wisdom using institutions and/or resources that reach beyond the governments within whose domains we currently hold our citizens assemblies?

Weave minipublic events into ongoing systems of wise collective response: Currently the vast majority of minipublics are distinct events that end with the delivery of recommendations to the convening authority, government or the public… and that’s it. Ideally, such minipublic events would arise out of – and feed back into – ongoing governance processes as integral facets of those processes – and the citizen deliberators would be involved in ongoing civic activities following their participation in their minipublics. How might existing innovations in that direction expand into the overall evolution of governance to include iterative minipublics and their members as central features?

Accelerate the pace of collective wisdom: The iterative pace of governance must match the iterative pace of developments in what we seek to govern. We need to do this much better than we do now, as exemplified by the lagging policy and collective responses to disruptions generated by climate change and emerging AI technologies. What approaches to deliberative democracy might better enable timely evolution of our collective responses to the metacrisis without reducing the potential wisdom of those responses?

Broaden participation towards “engagement of the whole”: Continue developing sortition, community journalism, generative online forums, innovative group processes and all other approaches to deepening the collective intelligence and wisdom-generating capacity of the broad population. How might we promote and design more salience, potency, visibility and feedback among various facets of “the whole community deliberating”?

Engage the wisdom of the more-than-human world: We need to promote deep understanding and appreciation of our embedded entanglement within the complex evolving communities of Life on Earth and the deep-time orientation needed for long-term survival in healthy ecosystems. How might we weave the voices, interests, capacities and insights of non-human lives, Indigenous peoples, past and future generations, natural and system sciences, and even emerging digital intelligences into public deliberations of, by and for the whole of Life?

Enable diverse, affordable local versions of minipublics: Building collective capacity for wisdom generation capable of meeting the metacrisis in its many forms, locales and scales will necessitate overcoming obstacles to the use of deliberative forums – including expense, limited expertise, and the varied willingness of potential participant populations. (Note: This may include security and confidentiality considerations in the presence of endangered civil rights.) How might we make minipublics affordable, safe, attractive, accessible and fit-for-purpose in widely diverse communities?

Honor, develop and promulgate the field of facilitation and process design: Many of the above developmental directions call for new forms of group process and facilitation, and for promoting widespread skill in the “process arts”. This need exists in both online and in-person settings (and their integration) and will require also the integration of the best of human and emergent “artificial” intelligences. Innovation in these fields could greatly expand the resources available for moving through the metacrisis. What shifts in our capacity to interact, learn and create together might best serve our personal, community and systemic aliveness and wisdom, both today and over the longterm?

In what other directions and realms do you think shifts in deliberative democracy might improve our collective capacity to serve life through our responses to the rapidly emerging metacrisis?

Please share your responses, ideas and resources in the comments section of this blog, for others to reflect on, as well.

Coheartedly,

Tom

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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