Guided Evolution of Society: A Systems View (Contemporary Systems Thinking) [Hardcover]

Bela H. Banathy (Author)

Book Description

Series: Contemporary Systems Thinking | Publication Date: November 30, 2000

Based on a comprehensive review of human and societal evolution the book develops an approach to conscious, self-guided evolution. In the course of the evolutionary journey of our species, there have been three seminal events. The first happened some seven million yeas ago, when our humanoid ancestors entered on the evolutionary scene. Their journey toward the second crucial event lasted over six million years when - as the greatest event of our evolutionary history - homo sapiens sapiens, started the revolutionary process of cultural evolution. Today, we have arrived at the threshold of the third major event, `the revolution of conscious evolution,' when it becomes our responsibility to enter into the evolutionary design space and guide the evolutionary journey of our species. The book tells the story of the first six million years of the journey in just enough detail to understand how evolution had worked in times when it was primarily biological, driven by natural selection. With the human revolution some fifty thousand years ago, with the emergence of self-reflective consciousness, the evolutionary process transformed from biological into cultural. From this point on, the book follows the journey with detailed attention, in order to learn how cultural evolution works. The book is organized in three parts. Part One commences with an exposition of a brief history of the evolutionary idea through time with a focus on a review of the science of general evolution and specifically social and societal evolution. Next, the book unfolds the `evolutionary story' of our species from the time when the first humanoids entered the evolutionary scene to our current era. Part Two develops a systems view of evolution, explores the ways and means of how evolution works, characterizes evolutionary consciousness and develops the idea of conscious evolution. Part Three builds upon the knowledge developed in the first two parts and sets forth the key conditions of conscious, self-guided evolution, elaborating the core condition, which is the acquisition of evolutionary competence through evolutionary learning. The focus of this part is on an approach to the design of evolutionary guidance systems that our families, neighborhoods, communities, organizations, social and societal systems can use to design the future they aspire to attain. The work is set aside from other statements in three important ways. It provides: (1) a comprehensive review of how evolution has worked with a focus on socio-cultural evolution, (2) an explanation of evolutionary consciousness and the conditions of engaging in conscious evolution, and (3) most significantly, it develops a detailed approach and a methodology to the design of evolutionary guidance systems.

Editorial Reviews

Review

` Professor Banathy is the world's foremost expert on evolutionary design. In this benchmark work he trances our immense human journey from the earliest hominoids through the emergence of self-awareness and culture, and down to the present moment when we as a species must take our evolutionary heritage into our own hands. With the skill of a lifetime of research and application, Banathy guides the reader through the principles of evolutionary learning and design toward a tomorrow in which evolutionary competence can replace humankind's present blind rush into the future. This is a superb work that will be of interest to theorists and advanced students alike.' Professor Allan Combs, Author of "The Radiance of Being", co-author of "Changing Visions: Human Cognitive Maps, Past, Present and Future" `People all over the world aspire to practicing democracy, and yet the democratic ideal of participating in planning and designing any social system, from cities to national health care, is compromised by the inability to engage the stakeholders in a meaningful and productive dialogue. By (re)asserting the fundamental right of human beings to participate directly in making decisions that affect their lives, and to guide their own destiny by applying evolutionary competence and evolutionary epistemology, Banathy's book is a major achievement! Guided Evolution of Society is going to change the way democracy is interpreted in an evolutionary context; it could very well also alter how it will be practiced in the "New Agoras of the 21st Century."' Aleco Christakis, Ph.D. CEO, CWA Ltd. `There is no more important task for humanity's future than consciously taking charge of our own evolution. Our times are unique in that we are being pushed by ecological necessity as well as pulled by evolutionary opportunity to a higher level of functioning and purpose as a collective human organism. Bela Banathy brings pioneering scholarship and multiple modes of learning to the most important and exciting challenge of our times &endash; becoming self-directed agents of our own evolution.' Duane Elgin, Author of "Voluntary Simplicity, Awakening Earth, Promise Ahead" `In this remarkable book, Bela Banathy introduces his readers to conscious evolution, an emerging phenomenon in the twenty-first century. One could not ask for a wiser, more dependable guide into this uncharted territory.' Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Saybrook Graduate School, Co-author, C-editor, "Broken Images, Broken Selves" `An outstanding guide to the practice of evolutionary competence, crucial in these times of change and transformation. Should be read &endash; and followed &endash; by everyone.' Professor Ervin Laszlo, Founder of the General Evolutionary Research Group and author of "Whispering Pond, The Consciousness Revolution, and Macroshift" `Guided Evolution of Society is a highly significant achievement by one of the foremost scholars of systems science. In it Bela H. Banathy does a marvelous job of tracing the biological and cultural development of human species, so clear, complete, and compelling that the reader's sense of time will never be the same again. He leads toward and concludes with the finest articulation yet of mechanisms by which individuals and groups can gain control of their future. This is a very powerful book.' Professor Gordon Rowland, Ithaca College, Author of "Tripartite Seed: The Future Creating Capacity of Designing, Learning, and Systems"

Product Details

• Hardcover: 426 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (November 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306463822
• ISBN-13: 978-0306463822
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,562,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Probably the only real design guide for cultural evolution, May 21, 2001

By 

Doug Walton (Campbell, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Guided Evolution of Society: A Systems View (Contemporary Systems Thinking) (Hardcover)

Dr. Banathy has written what is probably the only work in existence on an evolutionary epistemology. He contends that humanity needs to take charge of its own cultural evolution, and to do that requires co-creative design of our future. His book provides powerful tools for accomplishing this.

The first part of the book takes the reader through the human evolution from a systems perspective. The latter half focuses on the methods for engaging in collective, participative design creating an evolutionary guidance system that can carry us forward. This work builds on Dr. Banathy's classic previous work on social systems design, "Designing Social Systems in a Changing World."

In the latter half of the book, the reader is taken through the design process of creating an evolutionary guidance system. This process begins with the establishment of common ground and continues through the determination of the functions and components of systems that can learn and grow toward and ideal future. The book talks about both the process and dynamics of design, highlighting that social systems design is both an iterative and a complex process of movement forward and recursive revision to what has been done. We cannot know the end state, but we can move toward our best vision of it.

The unique and intriguing aspect of Dr. Banathy's work in general, and this work in particular, is the emphasis on the process of social systems design. No prescribed future is proposed; rather, Dr. Banathy seeks to provide the methodological tools for humanity to create a better future. In this sense, the work does not try to advocate any other values than that people must take charge of their future and that everyone should be involved in the design of the social systems in which they will inhabit. It is thus, in a sense, a work about how to be a responsible citizen in the modern age.

It is a book about democracy, but not about government. Rather it is a book about focused, meaningful, and productive public dialogue, both generative and strategic. As a metaphor, Dr. Banathy reminds us of the citizen democracies of ancient Greece, where public issues could be debated in full view.

This book is an essential manual for people who are serious about social change, because the book talks about how to engage a large system in meaningful dialogue. And it is only through meaningful dialogue that the system will be change. Despite the plethora of proposals about what our future should be, it is impossible to sit back and determine it from an armchair. Rather, as Dr. Banathy describes, we must engage together and let that future emerge through our genuine, focused, and open dialogue.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile but forbidding read, August 23, 2009

By 

Philippe Vandenbroeck (HEVERLEE, BELGIUM) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Guided Evolution of Society: A Systems View (Contemporary Systems Thinking) (Hardcover)

I tackled Banathy's "Guided Evolution of Society" - a scholarly, forbidding 400-page tome - just after having completed an (at first sight) more accomodating read: in "Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?" twenty (British) opinion leaders ruminate on the question that is provocatively encapsulated by the title of that book. By linking up the environmental challenge posed by climate change with the insights from the newest science on personal wellbeing (in a nutshell: beyond a certain point more money and stuff doesn't make us happier) it raised a number of tough questions: how will we in our postindustrial society downshift towards a more thrifty, simple lifestyle? What is the relative contribution of personal commitment and macro-level policies? What capabilities do we need to make the transition and what institutions will embody them?

Against the background of these questions, Banathy's "Guided Evolution" is a very useful, thought provoking read. Indeed, Banathy confirms, we have entered the anthropocene: man has become the most influential force shaping the long-term future of the planet. This endows us with a historical responsibility: for the very first time in seven million years of our evolutionary saga it is within our power, indeed it is our moral duty to become the designers of our future, the guides of our own evolution and the evolution of life on earth and possibly beyond (p. 204).

It is a huge task for which, at present, we are ill equipped. Banathy evokes a fable of an imaginary visitor from space: "The visitor, looking at the `landscape' of our current state of evolution, most likely would tell us that we have an enormous task ahead (...) The task is enormous, he would say, because - on the one hand - we are at a crossroads between two generations of our species and we are faced with great uncertainties. On the other hand - having `eaten from the tree of knowledge' by knowing how we evolved - we have the gift and the burden of this knowledge, and we have to make crucial and risky choices that will guide our evolution in the next millennia." (p. 191).

With his book Banathy has the ambition to provide us with a disciplined methodology to help us intervene more effectively in our own evolutionary design space. A key underlying assumption is that this is a skill that should not be the prerogative of specialist `social engineers' and politicians. According to Banathy (and he gets it from Kant) it ought to be a fundamental right of every human being to " to guide their own destiny, to create authentic, nurturing, sustainable communities, to control their resources, to govern themselves and guide their own evolution (...). If people learn how to exercise this right, then they shall have the power to create a truly democratic civil society: a society that is motivated by voluntary commitment, in which people can design and organise their lives for the development of their full potential, and individually and collectively serve the common good."

Hence Banathy's book aims to be a basic manual for evolutionary learning. It is organised in 12 chapters, formally grouped into three parts. However, I feel it is more helpful to think of the book as being laid out in two equally sized parts. The first halve (Chapter 1-6) provides a basis for evolutionary consciousness by retracing the evolutionary history of humankind through three leaps (or "generations": the emergence of Cro-Magnon, the agricultural revolution and the scientific-industrial revolution). The conceptual backbone for this discussion is provided by an expanding series of evolutionary markers (e.g. economy, relationship with nature, goverance), arranged in three clusters (`consciousness', `intellect', `way of life'). As evolution proceeds, the number and complexity of markers increases, as well as the intricacy of their relationships, leading to ever more complex cultural models. Banathy condenses the learnings from our evolutionary story into nine organising principles of evolutionary consciousness. An example is the `principle of a sudden evolutionary leap' which holds that a new evolutionary generation does not come about from gradual improvement or reconfiguration of evolutionary markers but through sudden leaps, a sudden unfolding of a new generative order. Knowledge of these principles is a prerequisite to develop an evolutionary epistemology which can be applied to intervene into evolutionary design space.

The first part of the book closes with a survey of the current evolutionary landscape. Our species finds itself on a bifurcation point, with one sociocultural system degrading and another generation tentatively emerging. Our evolutionary journey has brought us to a point - the disintegration of the Third Generation of Homo Sapiens Sapiens - where our civilisation has "immense drive but virtually no sense of direction beyond sheer accumulation. It is a dynamic with no moral anchor or guiding ethic - an economic engine with no idea where it is going beyond the drive to acquire material things and material power." This obviously constitutes a negative value judgment that is foundational for Banathy's project. It also very much chimes with the assessments and warnings of contemporary `downshifting' proponents.

In the second part of the book (Chapters 7-12) Banathy comes to the heart of the matter: how can we equip ourselves to make that fourth, self-designed leap in human evolution? The author's aim is emphatically not to sketch out a particular future perspective (that would be tantamount to persisting with the ideological excesses of the scientific-industrial paradigm) but to provide us with a disciplined, enabling methodology to intervene in human evolution.

The discussion starts with a survey of the fragmented knowledge base on conscious evolution (including ideas from D. Elgin, Barbara Hubbard, Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama and, perhaps surprisingly, `flow' psychologist Mikail Czikszentmihailyi; thinkers such as Ken Wilber and Don Beck (`spiral dynamics') have been omitted). The epistemological survey expands into Chapters 8 and 9 with discussions of the contribution of (hard, soft and critical) systems thinking and complexity science.

A familiarity with systems thinking is beneficial in working through the final chapters in which Banathy develops a practical, generic approach to supporting self-guided evolution. I found myself more particularly making sense of his approach by overlaying it with a soft systems framework. Banathy clearly acknowledges his debt to the core ideas developed by West Churchman, but it was the "soft systems methodology" pioneered by Peter Checkland that provides to my mind an elegant way to frame Banathy's take on shaping Evolutionary Guidance Systems.

In Chapter 10 (titled "An Epistemology of Conscious, Self-Guided Evolution", to my mind more appropriate to refer to the substance of the preceding three chapters) Banathy lays out an approach to design a generic Evolutionary Guidance System (EGS) that has a core purpose of guiding the work of people in the various human activity systems who are engaged in creating their own evolutionary future. It is important to appreciate that this EGS is generic and can be adapted to different functional and cultural contexts. An EGS basically has to do three different things: a) transcending the existing evolutionary state, b) envisioning an image of a desired future state, and c) transforming our system by bringing the image to life by design (in Checkland's parlance we would say that we have an activity model consisting of three key activities). For the former two activities some practical - but still very general - guidelines are discussed. Banathy also suggests an overview of possible underlying "dimensions" that constitute an EGS: a moral, scientific, aesthetic, socio-political dimension and six more. I would frame these dimensions in a soft systems framework as the constitutive elements of the system's underlying worldview (the W in the CATWOE mnemonic that formalises a system's root definition). The chapter closes with an example: what if we would engage in purposeful evolution in the context of the most basic human activity system, the family. Banathy answers that question by briefly sketching a representation of family EGSs in terms of these ten dimensions.

Chapter 11 focuses on the third of the three basic EGS functionalities: the design of alternative representations of the future system, which includes devising criteria by which to evaluate those alternatives, selecting and describing the most promising alternative and preparing a plan for the development of the selected design as subactivities. In fact, these activities taken together constitute the Design Inquiry System (DIS) - a submodule of the generic EGS that iterates between five component spaces - the definition space, the knowledge space, the design solution space, the evaluation and experimenation space and the modeling space. The design philosophy encapsulated by the DIS is applicable at different recursive levels, i.e. at the levels of the EGS as well as at the level of individual Evolutionary Systems (ES), which are unique embodiments of an EGS within the scope of a given community.

The final chapter then asks: "how would an evolutionary community work in the 21st century?" and in formulating an answer grasps back to a themes, dimensions and values that have been largely discussed in previous chapters.

Banathy's "Guided Evolution of Society" is a valuable contribution. Its basic message is of utmost importance and throws a very large shadow ahead into humanity's future.

But it is a pity that the book is such a forbidding read. I am convinced that the argument could have been presented more elegantly and accessibly. The... Read more ›

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What a wonderful price, December 12, 2010

By 

David Emme - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Guided Evolution of Society: A Systems View (Contemporary Systems Thinking) (Hardcover)

As a Christian investigating various spiritual quests, hopefully this will shed some light on this book and worldview. As often consumerism and capitalism is deemed evil-funny that books teaching this have prohibitive prices. So much for we are the world-what a scam.