[iDC] The importance of neotraditional approaches in the reconstructive transmodern era

[Michael Bauwens]

I wrote this for a international conference on Buddhist Economics.

The 2nd International conference of the Buddhist Economics Research
Platform will be held at Ubon Ratchathani University, Warin Chamrab,
Ubon Ratchathani Thailand Dec. 5-7, 2008. 


The topic of the mini-essay, which is of course rather long for a
blog or email posting is: is there any possible connection between a economic
philosophy which has a premodern origin, and the current peer to peer
ethos and practices.

My answer is positive, but with proviso’s, and I center my
discussion on the concept of a to be re-invented ‘neotraditionalism’
that can build bridges with traditional communities that are intent on
protecting their traditional ways of life.

The text is structured around a series of five key arguments, followed by a conclusion.


Beginning of text:

I see the emergence of Buddhist Economics as part of a broader
canvass of initiatives, thought streams and social practices, that
could be broadly termed ‘neotraditional’. My aim in this essay is to
offer a hypothesis of why their emergence is important, and what role
they could play in movements aimed at reforming and transforming the
current political economy.


The Main Argument: the common immateriality of traditional and post-industrial eras

It is not difficult to argue that modern industrial societies are
dominated by a materialist paradigm. What exists for modern
consciousness is material physical reality, what matters in the economy
is the production of material products, and the pursuit of happiness is
in very strong ways related to the accumulation of goods for
consumption. For the elite, its powers derive essentially from the
accumulation of capital assets, whether these are industrial or
financial. Infinite material growth is really the core mantra of
capitalism, even if it happens through the medium of money.

But this was not the case in traditional, agriculture-based
societies. In such societies, people of course do have to eat and to
produce, and the possession of land and military force is crucial to
obtain tribute from the agricultural workers, but it cannot be said
that the aim is accumulation of assets. Feudal-type societies are based
on personal relations consisting of mutual obligations. These are of
course very unequal in character, but are nevertheless very removed
from the impersonal and obligation-less property forms that came with
capitalism, where there is little impediment for goods and capital to
move freely to whomever it is sold to.

In the more traditional societies that we have in mind, both the
elite and the mass body of producers are united by a common immaterial
quest for salvation, and it is the institution that is in charge of
organizing that quest, like the Church in the western Middle Ages or
the Sangha in South-East Asia, that is the determining organization for
the social reproduction of the system. Tribute flows up from the
farming population to the owning class, but the owning class is engaged
in a two-fold pursuit: showing its status through festivities, where
parts of the surplus is burned up; and gifting to the religious
institutions. It is only this way that salvation/enlightenment, i.e.
spiritual value or merit in all its forms, can be obtained. The more
you give, the higher your spiritual status. Social status without
spiritual status is frowned upon by those type of societies. This is
why the religious institutions like the Church of the Sangha end up so
much land and property themselves, as the gifting competition is
relentless. At the same time, these institutions serve as the welfare
and social security mechanisms of their day, by ensuring that a part of
that flow goes back to the poor and can be used in times of social
emergencies.

It is still a little bit harder to argue in Asian than in the West,
but the current era, despite the rapid industrialization and
‘materialisation’ of East Asia, is undergoing a fundamental shift to
immateriality.

Material goods still need to be made, and Asia is furiously
industrializing, but nevertheless, for the world system, important
shifts have already happened, which are most readily visible in the
West.

Here are just a few of the facts and arguments to illustrate my point
for a shift towards once again a immaterial focus in our societies.

The cosmopolitan elite of capital has already transformed itself for
a long time towards financial capital. In this form of activity,
financial assets are moved constantly where returns are the highest,
and this makes industrial activity a secondary activity. If we then
look at the financial value of corporations, only a fraction of it is
determined by the material assets of such corporation. The rest of the
value, usually called good will, is in fact determined by the various
immaterial assets of such corporation, it’s expertise and collective
intelligence, it’s brand capital, the trust in the present and the
future that it can generate.
The most prized material goods, such as say Nike shoes, show a
similar quality, only 5% of its sales value is said to be determined by
physical production costs, all the rest is the value imparted to it by
the brand (both the cost to create it, and the surplus value created by
the consumers themselves).

The shift towards a immaterial focus can also be shown sociologically,
for example through the work of Paul Ray on cultural creatives, and of
Ronald Inglehart on the profound shift to postmaterial values and
aspirations.

For populations who have lived for more than one generation in broad
material security, the value system shifts again to the pursuit of
knowledge, cultural, intellectual and spiritual experience. Not all of
them, not all the time, but more and more, and especially so for the
cultural elite of ‘cultural creatives’ or what Richard Florida has
called the Creative Class, which is also responsible for key value
creation in cognitive capitalism.

One more economic argument could be mentioned in the context of
cognitive capitalism. In this model of our economy, the current
dominant model as far as value creation is concerned, the key surplus
value is realized through the protection of intellectual properties.
While Asia is still (mostly) engaged in producing cheap industrial
goods (though it is changing fast), the dominant Western companies can
sell goods at over 100 to 1,000 times their production value, through
state and WTO enforced intellectual rents. It is clearly the immaterial
value of such assets that generate the economic streams, even though it
requires creating fictitious scarcities through the legal apparatus.

However, it must be said, and we will develop that issue later, that
this model is undermined through the emergence of distributed
infrastructures for the production, distribution and consumption of
immaterial and cultural goods, which makes such fictitious scarcity
untenable in the long run. The immaterial value creation is indeed
already leaking out of the market system.


The Second Argument: the nature of post-deconstructive trans-modernism

Industrial society, it’s particular mental and cultural models, are
clearly antagonistic to tradition. The old structures must go: religion
is seen as superstition, community is seen as repressive of
individuality, and tradition is seen as hampering the free progress of
dynamic individuals. This makes modernism a very constructive force,
for all the new it is capable of instituting in society, but also a
very destructive force, at war with thousands of years of traditional
values, lifestyles and social organization. It attempts to strip
individuals of wholistic community, replacing it with disciplinary
institutions, and commodity-based relations.

Then comes postmodernism, the cultural (but also structural as it is
itself an expression of capitalist re-organization) reaction against
modernity and modernism.

Postmodernism is above all a deconstructive
movement. Against all ‘reification’ and ‘essentialisation’, it
relatives everything. No thing, no individual stands alone, we are all
constituted of fragments that themselves are part of infinite fields.
Through infinite play, the fragmented ‘dividual’ has at its disposal
infinite constitutive elements that can be recombined in infinite ways.
The positive side of it, is, that along with freeing us with fictitious
fixed frameworks of belief and meaning, it also re-openes the gates of
the past and of tradition. Everything that is usable, is re-usable, and
the war against tradition ends, to make place for pragmatic
re-appropriation.

But as the very name indicates, postmodernism can only be a first
phase of critique and reaction against modernity and modernism, still
very much beholden to it, if only in its reactivity to all things
modern. It is deconstructive, a social regression of the ego that must
receive ultimate therapeutic meaning if it is followed by a
reconstructive phase. For postmodernism to have any ultimate positive
meaning, it must be followed by a trans-formative, reconstructive
phase. A trans-modernism if you like, which goes ‘beyond’ modernity and
modernism.

We will come back to that crucial issue: what can follow
post-modernism, and what kind of attitude towards tradition might this
entail.


The Third Argument: the problematic nature of tradition

Using or returning to a premodern spiritual tradition for
transmodern inspiration is not a path that is without its problems or
dangers, it can very easily become a reactionary pursuit, a fruitless
attempt to go back to a golden age that has only existed in the
imagination.

The core problem is that spiritual traditions all occurred within
the context of exploitative economic and political systems. Though the
exploitation was different, most traditional spirituality and its
institutions developed in systems that were based on tribute, slavery ,
or serfdom. These systems usually combined a disenfranchised peasant
population, a warrior or other ruling class, in which the traditional
Church or Sangha played a crucial role for its social reproduction.
Buddhism only became acceptable to to the ‘mainstream’society of its
time when it accepted to exclude slaves. Despite its radical-democratic
potential, it became infused with the feudal authority structure that
mirrored the society of which it was a part. These spiritualities are
therefore rife with patriarchy, sexism and other profoundly unequal
views and treatments of human beings.

Though the logic was profoundly different from capitalism, these
forms of exploitation, and their justification by particular religious
or spiritual systems and institutions, should prove to be unacceptable
to (post/trans-modern) consciousness.

Perhaps a symmetrical but equally problematic approach would be the
pure eclecticism that can be the result of postmodern consciousness, in
which isolated parts of any tradtion are simply stolen and recombined
without any serious understanding of the different frameworks.

Another problem we see is the following: contemporary communication
technologies, and globalized trade and travel, and the unification of
the world under capitalism, have created the promise for a great mixing
of civilizations. Though contact and interchange was always a reality,
it was slow, and it different civilisational spheres really did exist,
which created profoundly different cultural realities and individual
psychologies. To be a Christian or a Buddhist meant to have profoundly
different orientations towards life and society (despite structural
similarities in religious or spiritual organization). But a growing
part of the human population, if not the whole part, is now profoundly
exposed to the underlying values of the other civilisational spheres.
Thailand for example, is just a much, if not more, beholden to global
capitalist and consumerist values, which originated from a different
civilisational sphere. But Eastern notions have similarly already
profoundly impacted western consciousness. In this context, rootedness
in one’s culture and spiritual traditions can no longer be separated
with a global cosmopolitan approach and a continous dialogue with
viewpoints and frameworks that originate elsewhere. Increasinly global
affinity networks are becoming as important as local associations in
influencing individuals and their identity-building.

With all this in mind, it would therefore seem important to have
some kind of methodology, or methodologies, that can allow some kind of
critical and reconstructive appropriation of earlier insights.


Fourth Argument: the road to differential post-industrial development

I believe it would be fair to say that contemporary capitalism is a
machine to create homogenity worldwide, and that this is not
necessarily an optimal thing. In its current format, which got a severe
shock with the current financial meltdown, which combines
globalization, neoliberalism and financialization, it is also an
enormous apparatus of coercion. It undermines the survivability of
local agriculture and creates an enormous flight to the cities; it
destroys long-standing social forms such as the extended family, and
severely undermines traditional culture. Of course, I do not want to
imply that all change or transformation is negative, but rather stress
that it takes away the freedom of many who would make different
choices, such as those who would want to stay in a local village.

It is here that neotraditional approaches offer real hope and
potential. Instead of the wholesale import of global habits and
technologies, for which society has not been prepared and which is
experienced as an alien graft, it offers an alternative road of
choosing what to accept and what to reject, and to craft a locally
adapted road to post-industrial development.

It reminds us of Gandhi’s concept of Swadeshi and appropriate
technology. He rejected both western high tech, which was not adapted
to many local situations, but also unchanged local agragrian tradition
and technology, which was hardly evolving. Instead, he advocated
appropriate technology, a intermediary level of technology which
started from the local situation, but took from modern science and
technology the necessary knowledge to create new tools that were
adapted to the local situation, yet offered increases in productivity.

I see neotraditional economics as a similar approach, but not
limited to an attitude to technology selection, but to the totality of
political and social choices. In this way, in harmony with local
values, those aspects can be chosen, which increase the quality of
livelihoods, but do not radically subvert chosen lifestyles and social
forms. It represents a new approach which combines the high tech of
globalized technical knowledge, with the high touch elements of local
culture. For example, it becomes imaginable to conceive of local
villages, adapting localized and small-scale manufacturing techniques
based on the latest advances in miniaturization and flexibilisation of
production technologies, and which are globally connected with global
knowledge networks.


Fifth Argument: Adapting to Steady-State Economies in the Age of the Endangered Biosphere

The essence of capitalism is infinite growth, making money with
money and increasing capital. It does not take any genius to realize
that an infinite growth system cannot infinitely perdure in a limited
physical environment.

Today’s global system combines a vision of pseudo-abundance, the
mistaken vision that nature can provide endless inputs and is an
infinite dump, with pseudo-scarcity, the artificial creation of
scarcities in the fields of intellectual, cultural and scientific
exchange, through exaggerated and ever increasing intellectual property
rights, which hamper innovation and free cooperation.

To be sustainable, our emerging global human civilization and
political economy needs to reverse those two principles. This means
that we first of all need a steady-state economy, which can only grow
to the degree it can recycle its input back to nature, so as not to
further deplete the natural stock. And it requires a liberalization of
the sharing and exchange of technical and scientific knowledge to
global open innovation communities, so that the collective intelligence
of the whole of humankind can be directed to the solving of complex
problems.

The first transformation is closely linked to our contemporary
monetary system and is linked with traditional conceptions of wealth in
static agricultural societies.

Let me explain.

Traditional religions associated with agriculture-based societies
and production systems, outlawed interest. There is a good reason for
that: when someone extends a loan with interest, that interest does not
exist, and the borrower has to find the money somewhere else. In other
words, to pay back the interest, he has to impoverish somebody else.
This of course, would be extremely socially destructive in a static
society, and therefore, it could not be allowed to happen, which
explains the religious injunction against interest. 


However, in modern capitalist societies, a solution has been found:
growth. As long as the pie is growing, the interest can be taken from
the growing pie. The problem however, is that such a monetary system
requires growth, infinite growth. Static businesses are an
impossibility, since that would mean they cannot pay back the interest.

Now that we have reached the limits of the biosphere, now that we
need again a steady-state economy, we need interest-free monetary
systems, and paradoxically, the religious injunctions again make sense.

This is just one of the connections between the transmodern
challenges, and the value of traditional, and religious systems rooted
in the premodern era, such as Buddhist Economics.

We could take many other examples: for example, modern chemical
agriculture destroys the quality of the land, and depletes it, so that
here also, premodern traditional practices become interesting again.

However, as we stated in the third argument, and refined in the fourth
argument: since tradition is also problematic, it cannot be simply
copied, it can only be used in a critical manner.

An example of such a critical approach is the appropriate technology
movement. In this approach, it is recognized that traditional
technology as such is insufficient, that hypermodern technology is
often inappropriate in more traditional settings, and that therefore,
an intermediate practice is needed, that is both rooted in ‘tradition’,
i.e. the reality of the local situation, but also in modernity, the
creative use of technological solutions and reasoning, so as the create
a new type of ‘appropriate’ technological development.


Conclusion:  Can the transmodern peer to peer ethos be mixed with neotraditional approaches?

My own philosophical, societal and technical approach is called peer
to peer theory. It starts from the premise that many humans want to be
free to engage in actions and relations around common value creation,
and that this desire has become enabled and empowered through the new
affordances generated by the global distributed (computer) networks.

Thus we see the emergence of the capability of the creation of
common value, through civil society based voluntary formations, i.e.
peer production, but also peer governance, i.e. the ability to manage
such associations, and peer property, the ability to protect the common
value from private appropriation and subsequent enclosure.

These approaches have become hyperproductive, and outcompete
traditional for-profit and industrial era methodologies. It is emerging
in every social field, and has created an emergent but already powerful
social movement that coalesces around three paradigms: 1) open and free
content, software, and designs, as the necessary input for free
collaboration; 2) participatory governance and social design, which
intends to lower the threshold of participation in such projects around
the value of autonomy and diversity; and 3) commons-oriented output,
which cannot be appropriated but serves to regenerate a new cycle of
open and free input. Through this ‘circulation of the common’, a
powerful mechanism is created, that guarantees the social reproduction
and expansion of peer production.

As these communities, which are moving from knowledge and free and
open source software to open design communities that can be linked to
distributed manufacturing, grow and expand, we can see that they
overturn both modern and even postmodern sensibilities. Hence, a new
alliance becomes possible: that between the most technologically
advances open design communities, with the majority of the people that
is still strongly linked to traditional practices. Through such an
alliance, which combines the traditional injunction for a steady-state
economy in harmony with natural possibilities, a differentiated
post-industrial future can be created, which can bypass the destructive
practices of industrial-era modernism, and can create an ‘appropriate
technology’ future, whereby more traditional communities can more
freely decide what to adapt and what to reject. While on the other
hand, transmodern open design communities can learn from the wisdom of
traditional approaches.

Such an alliance needs an ideological vehicle, and I suggest that
this is a road that Buddhist Economics should take, lest it become a
reactionary force rooted in a unrealizable utopian vision of the past.
 The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer alternatives.


Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p 


Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at  http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html; video interview, at http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm