Participatory Democracy as a Spiritual Community

We find deep meanings in the practice of participatory democracy, and believe these meanings can support a spiritual community.

What do we mean by these terms?

• “deep meaning” -- we find ourselves strongly responding to the constellation of ideas, interpretations and constructions that we connect to our notion of participatory democracy.
• "participatory democracy" -- the people themselves have more opportunity to take part in the group's decision-making process, compared to a representative democracy where nearly all decision-making is delegated to officials, or an undemocratic organization where only those with the most power can make decisions.
• “spirituality” -- “... a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves [that] typically involves a search for meaning in life” (Delagran, n.d.).
• “community” -- “A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common” [1]. People organizing as a participatory democracy have at least two characteristics in common: a desire to better-equalize access to formal decision-making power over their group affairs, and a common trust in each other’s ability to balance group and individual interests.

This essay describes some ideas we think are related to participatory democracy, and proposes forming a self-governing group called Cybernetic Ecological Stoicism (CEStoicism) [2] to build a community to collectively explore these ideas.

This exploration begins with identifying “means and ends.” This framing comes from Daly & Farley's (2004) book Ecological Economics in which they explain “… the basic definition of economics as the study of the allocation of scarce means among competing ends.” Understanding means as ‘potentials’ and ends as ‘purposes’, we ask the question: what limited potentials should we put towards achieving what purposes? Ecological Economics explains the ultimate means as highly-organized matter/energy, whose degradation makes all activity possible. Some examples include sunlight, foods, fuels and natural resources. Ecological Economics says the ultimate end or purpose is not clear, and is a question considered by religion and philosophy. We do not claim to know the ultimate purpose. While not the ultimate purpose, an important intermediate purpose is survival. We believe that systems which continue to survive also continue their chance to identify and work towards an ultimate end.

Living systems pursue survival with a feedback loop: the system senses aspects of its environment, interprets these sensations by (re)constructing models of its relationship to its environment (in terms of its values and/or goals, one of which is survival), and responds with actions aimed at managing this relationship towards its values and goals. We believe this happens, to varying degrees and coherences, in all biological and social systems from cells, plants and animals to groups, cultures and societies. In a biological context, the term homeostasis refers to “the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes.” [1] But it’s also used in social contexts:

Cybernetics often looks at how feedback loops maintain a certain state or relationship. Homeostasic feedback can be seen in many places: a thermostat turning on the heat or air conditioning to maintain a room's stable temperature, a driver constantly adjusting to the changing road and traffic to continue their progress to the destination, an animal’s endocrine system using chemical messages to regulate the function of other organs in the body, a group of people holding a unifying perspective and gradually reinterpreting it over time to maintain its relevance and attraction as circumstances change.

These regulating feedback loops, and the complexity of the systems they control, evolve together. A philosophical cybernetic group called Principia Cybernetica Project (PcP) theorizes about “the evolutionary process by which higher levels of complexity and control are generated”, which they call a Metasystem Transition (MST). A MST occurs when similar but independent systems come under the influence of some coordination mechanism, making a new more-complex overall system. PcP offers some example sequences of increasing complexity, where a given stage arises when an MST emerges and coordinates systems of the previous stage. Chemical and neurological signaling systems are the MSTs (the "→"s) in between the stages of a biological example: unicellular organisms → multicellular organisms → tissues → organs → complex organisms. In another example, neurological and social signaling systems are the MSTs: irritability (simple reflex) → association (complex reflex) → human thought → culture. Greater system complexity creates evolutionary opportunities for that system to exercise greater control, which in turn creates additional evolutionary opportunities for greater system complexity, and so on.

We believe a participatory democracy is both a regulating feedback loop and a MST. In both cases, the (self-)regulation/coordination mechanism is members' ability to generate a wide variety of possible group actions, and to winnow that variety down in deciding which action to take. Such a group’s self-coordination (if constructive) could allow them a greater[4] variety of ways to sense, interpret, model, and respond to challenges in their collective pursuit of survival. As the Law of Requisite Variety explains, “The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.” If survival involves finding effective ways to deal with disturbances, perhaps a participatory democracy’s inclusiveness widens the variety of ways considered [5].

One way we define 'survival' is as the continuation of a system's organization, of its relationally-defined self, which individuates it as a whole distinct from any of its particular constituting elements. The philosopher Simondon describes 'individuation' as a process by which some elements of one scale form connections (relations) and become an individual whole on another scale, all within a particular context that is partially-constructed by the appearance of the individual. For example, a group of 'preindividual' chemical elements deep in the ground, within the context of their chemical reactivity in various temperatures and pressures, can physically individuate into a rock, which can change further reactivity. The preindividual nutrients of a soil in the context of rainfall, sunlight, temperature and a seed's genetic information can biologically individuate into a plant, which reciprocally influences its context's canopy, transpiration, food sources, ect. The preindividual plants, animals, organic material flows and local climate can individuate into a forest, affecting its own regional context by being a carbon sink, oxygen generator and habitat. Perhaps the preindividual sensations, emotions, pattern recognitions and associations a new-born experiences leads to the individuation of a personality (a psyche), which itself can affect other new-borns' early experiences. Likewise, people and their contextual needs and desires, can collectively individuate into a larger social unit such as a business, social movement, religion, culture or nation, each of which can both partially satisfy and generate additional social needs and desires.

All individuations are incomplete, in the sense that none completely solve the problem of ensuring the individual's survival. For instance, a physical individual is fully exposed to the cause-and-affect influences of its environment. A biological individual can actively compensate for some environmental changes (such as maintaining body temperature, sensing and moving towards food and away from threats, storing energy for lean times ...). A psychological individual might be able to deal with even more environmental variety by creating a subjective interior to better coordinate and direct itself (by expressing and interpreting signs, and making considered choices based on emotional and mental models that provide anticipated outcomes allowing the individual a chance to avoid some costly real-life experimentation). Maybe a collective individual that effectively coordinated itself under a shared and responsive set of norms, meanings and goals could maintain a good fit with its co-created environment and improve it's ability to survive.

Another way we define 'survival' is in terms of the adaptive cycle, which sees biological-, ecological-, and social-systems progressing through four stages: First, the system rapidly grows by exploiting environmental potentials/possibilities. Second, growth gives way to a stabilization and conservation of the system’s accumulated energy/structure. (These first two stages can themselves be composed of many smaller adaptive cycles). Third, structured resources are quickly released when the system can no longer cope with internal/external changes. Fourth, the released resources become reorganized into new or existing systems. The cycle can repeat. These stages are “analogous to birth, growth and maturation, death and renewal.”[6] The growth/exploitation and conservation stages within one cycle could describe an ‘individualistic’ survival, where a particular system maintains itself as long as possible. In contrast, systems or their constituent patterns/processes/meanings that are able to persist across multiple cycles (although likely in somewhat changed form) might describe a ‘generational’ survival. For example, a few particular (and limited) participatory democracies survived in Athens, Greece during the 4th century BCE. But the idea of participatory democracy continues to persist over the generations to the present.

We believe a culture of collaboration is an important resource for a group pursuing collective generational survival. The democratic stewarding of a collaborative culture, as a resource, fits the definition of a ‘commons’:

A commons protects the resource within. For our topic, the protected resources are a worldview and a collaborative culture to nurture the worldview, the community is the democratic participants, and one of the social protocols is participatory democracy.

In our present world, many historic commons (whether concrete like grazing fields or abstract like physical safety) have been enclosed into forms of private property (such as private farms or expensive communities). The enclosure of a once commonly-held resource transforms it into the ‘property’ of a few private owners, and replaces the stewarding community with a market logic by which owners operate under a profit-driven protocol of maximizing private wealth by focusing on commodification and exchange value. Commons and enclosure represent very different values. Because of their inclusive leadership, we believe commons are more likely to prioritize use value, generational survival and shared long-term social/ecological outcomes over individuals’ freedom to limitlessly accumulate private wealth. In contrast, we believe enclosures’ exclusive leadership leads to a prioritization of individual survival and extractive private short-term financial gains (often achieved by externalizing unpriced ecological/social costs onto the public). We believe there is currently a damaging imbalance in which the overindulgent individual survival of a powerful few is achieved by sacrificing the generation survival of many. We believe the raw unchecked exercise of power, under a variety-poor market logic [8], drives this unethical imbalance. We believe concentrated power can be diluted by intentionally structuring decision-making to be more egalitarian and inclusive. We believe decision-making by the affected reflects the Golden Rule (“Treat others as you would like others to treat you”).

The inclusive decision-making of a participatory democracy requires communication between perspectives, which may (re)construct and deepen their understandings or differences by engaging with each other. We define ‘perspective’ using ideas from the cybernetic philosopher Gordon Pask’s Communication Theory. The following quote may overly-reify [9] some ideas, but is still useful. Pask talks of conversation between participants A and B:

We agree with the descriptions that (a) a person can have more than one perspective, (b) a perspective can be shared by many people, and (c) perspectives can communicate with each other across different scales. We also emphasize that a given perspective affects what seems possible and right. Perhaps deliberation within a participatory democracy can be used as a tool to discover, expand, and integrate perspectives aimed towards sustaining our collective survival. Using the Conversation Theory term ‘P-individual’ as a synonym of ‘perspective,’ Boyd (2004) explains, “New P-individuals can be brought into being when agreements in complex conversations result in a new coherent bundle of procedures capable of engaging in further conversations with other such P-individuals.” We hope it is possible to conversationally assemble meanings, through agreement, into perspectives that can productively advance the conversation with other perspectives. We also recognize risk in communication of failing to find agreement, or even of clarifying and magnifying disagreements and fracturing a unified perspective or pushing perspectives further apart. Always keeping this risk in mind, we aim to cultivate perspectives with ever-greater capability to move forward collective-survival conversations and ways of life.

The aim to survive, or the aim to do anything at all, requires a “self” to do the aiming. What is a self? Speaking about the self as a characteristic of life, Sherman (2017) interprets the biosemiotician Terrence Deacon by explaining that, “selfhood encompasses far more than self-awareness, consciousness, ego, or any other psychological characteristics. I'll regard all living beings - and most important for solving the mystery of purpose, the very first living beings - as selves.” Selves have purposive/aimed behavior. “Purpose only applies to selves, but selves include all living beings” (ibid). “... selves and aims originate as one and the same. The self is the aim to self-regenerate; the aim to self-regenerate is the difference between a living self and dead body” (ibid). “Self-regeneration is thus our first and foremost aim. It's our first means and end, and it's circular: the means by which we can regenerate our means, the end or purpose being the ability to continue to pursue our ends” (ibid).

Now, we take a step further, and ask about the material origins of selves. “Aims distinguish means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect events.” (ibid). But how does the cause-and-effect behavior of matter change into the means-to-ends behavior of a self?

By this description, constraints on a system of elements can create new possibilities for the system, including the possibility of a self. At the risk of reification, we wonder if a shared perspective is a sort of distributed self created by mutually-agreeing on constraints (coordinations) of specific values, norms, interpretations, definitions, reasons and methods. These constraints could be worked out by participatory democracy's dynamic interactions (deliberations), and readdressed as needed. We find great meaning in this origin story of selves, and the possibility of creating new perspectives and selves.

Deliberation, and communication in general, involve the crafting and interpretation of signs by selves. What are signs?

Signs can stand for something else either by an ‘iconic’ similarity of appearance (a doodle of a bear), by an ‘indexical’ causing-of or pointing-at something else (smoke indicating fire), or by an arbitrary ‘symbolic’ linking of things (in English it is agreed that the symbols 't'-'r'-'e'-'e' stand for the tall plant with leaves that gives shade). The meaning or information of a sign is that assigned by a self interpreting the sign. As Sherman (2017) says,

Thus, meaning is not some fixed physical attribute contained in a book or bit stream. Instead, meaning is a self’s active recognition and constructed interpretation of something as a sign, and in terms of the self’s context.

We believe understanding signs in this way is deeply valuable for trying to communicate with other perspectives. For instance, creating signs intended to be logical evidence of climate change or social inequality will be seen differently by perspectives that interpret these signs as using faulty logic, misapplied evidence, or ulterior motives. Sign creators can easily (but often mistakenly) assume their audience will interpret the signs just as they do. But one might better communicate by studying their audience's past interpretations (as assessed from their historic response signs), from seeing communication as a feedback process where participants iteratively self-correct the signs they construct based on their sense of how their audience's understanding differs from that intended, and from considering more widely what constitutes a sign and a conversation.

We also find the definition of selves as interpreters of signs to be deeply meaningful, since we as human selves live in narrative worlds of pasts, presents and futures. These narratives are collections of the signs humans use to construct understandings of ourselves and the world, and of what is possible and what is right. Understanding narratives as both individual and generational conversations that involve contextual sign crafting and interpretation means regaining an ability to (re)construct and (re)affirm ourselves and the world, as well as what is possible and what is right.

A realm of thought called biosemiotics sees sign use as a pervasive and partially-defining aspect of life itself, and as a generator of semiotic freedom.

It sees all of life as involved in generating, expressing, sensing, and interpreting signs, to various degrees. Importantly, this sign work may be done with very little, if any, degree of consciousness. For example, bacteria likely sense nutrients without the consciousness that accompany the human experience of smelling/tasting food. Yet both are examples of semiosis, regardless of the level of consciousness. Additionally, living systems have varying degrees of ‘semiotic freedom’ when doing sign work. “Semiotic freedom is a measure of the depth of meaning communicated or interpreted by living systems, so that organisms exhibiting a high degree of semiotic freedom are capable of dealing with more sophisticated, complicated, ‘deep’ messages” (Hoffmeyer, 2010). For example:

Human language has great semiotic freedom because it can be used to relate, interpret, explore and construct infinite combinations of significance about percieved signs, as well as to coordinate infinite combinations of responses (themselves signs). This potential of human language dwarfs its own base existence as a limited system of symbols and rules for their assembly. We hope that a participatory democracy’s inclusion of many voices can help build perspectives better able to use this semiotic freedom to increase the depth of its sign work when engaging with perspectives both within ourselves and held by others.

A use of semiotic freedom is to form questions and answers. One of our questions asks, “How does a person live a good life?” We look to Modern Stoicism's answers to cultivate our ethics.

In the pursuit of these virtues, "Stoics taught to transform emotions in order to achieve inner calm. Emotions – of fear, or anger, or love, say – are instinctive human reactions to certain situations, and cannot be avoided. But the reflective mind can distance itself from the raw emotion and contemplate whether the emotion in question should (or should not) be given “assent,” i.e., should be appropriated and cultivated" (ibid). The Stoics wished to "actively cultivated a concern not just for themselves and their family and friends, but for humanity at large, and even for Nature itself..." (ibid). We think this description of a good life could help both individual and generational survival.

As a group interested in philosophy and spirituality, we also ask "Is there a God?" We find an answer in naturalistic pantheism. "At its most general, pantheism may be understood positively as the view that God is identical with the cosmos, the view that there exists nothing which is outside of God, or else negatively as the rejection of any view that considers God as distinct from the universe" (Stanford encyclopedia). "Pantheism is the view that the natural universe is divine, the proper object of reverence; or the view that the natural universe is pervaded with divinity. Negatively, it is the idea that we do not need to look beyond the universe for the proper object of ultimate respect." [15]

This answer resonates with our skepticism of an anthropomorphic God, and with our awe of a universe containing all the amazing things we understand through science and see in our everyday lives, including selves free to choose their means-to-ends, underdetermined by the cause-and-effect matter from which they arise. Life, as selves, is a unique loosely-coupled feedback loop of the universe, the only one able to experience the world and craft purposeful responses. Alan Watts says, "Life is the universe experiencing itself, in endless variety. Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witness through which the universe become conscious of its glory, of its magnificence." Not only are selves (some of?) the universe's perceptors. Selves' collective meaning- and decision-making is nothing less than the universe working out thoughts and plans through (some of?) its perspectives.

This essay explored a set of meanings that we propose as worthy of being called ‘spiritual,’ and which we feel link to each other through the idea and practice of participatory democracy. We believe spiritual ideas have a great motivational force, and might partially compensate for the weaknesses in large-scale responses to humanity’s existential challenges. While the following quote addresses climate change, we believe its sentiment also applies to other forms of degradation:

We believe self-coordinated spiritual communities may be able to make progress on these four points. We hope these communities can skillfully work with signs to continue humankind’s chance to find an ultimate purpose. We invite the inspired or curious to visit CEStoicism, and consider participating.