Social Provisioning within a Culture-Nature Life-Process (original) (raw)

The Bubbles or the Boiling Pot? An Ecosystemic Approach to Culture

Problems of difficult settlement or solution in the contemporary world cannot be solved by segmented academic formats, market-place interests and mass-media headlines; instead of dealing with “taken for granted issues” (the apparent “bubbles” in the surface), public policies, research and teaching programmes should detect the issues and work with them deep inside the “boiling pot”. The conceptual direction and the legitimacy of development strategies should be examined in view of a comprehensive framework, not surrendering to specialisation and fragmentation, but promoting a multi-level approach. The present crisis breaks through the core of different societal institutions –governance, justice, education – and reflects a disordering of thought, perceptions and values, embedded into the prevailing power-driven ethos and anomic individualism, which diverts human concern into unlimited material consumption and production and business embedded fragmented technologies. Policy discussions and policy making require a comprehensive ecosystemic approach, in view of new paradigms of growth, power, wealth, work and freedom embedded into the cultural, social, political and economical institutions (more critical than individual motives and morals). The emphasis on human rights, rather than collective political action, only reiterates individualistic approaches: the fundamental change is economic, social, cultural and political; priority should not be given to growth, but to sustainability, human development, order and stability in civil society. “Social inclusion” only accommodate people to the prevailing order and do not prepare them to change the system; once “included", a new wave of egocentric producers and consumers reproduce the system responsible for their former exclusion. Peace building, rights and duties should be understood as the culmination of a process in which the acceptance of ethical standards derive from a set of morally relevant social experiences throughout life, in which “cultural capital”, personal identity, are not the result of the "privilege" of belonging to groups seeking mastery through ruse, violence and crime, but of new forms of being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is more than living on it; a process of change demands a comprehensive approach in the socio-cultural learning niches, as new structures emerge and develop critical capacities to operate changes in the system, exploring new ways to understand things in view of new paradigms and meanings. Changing the dominant perspective of powerful political and economic groups imposes a reconfiguration of state control and political authority on a transnational basis, on ethical grounds. For problem solving, dynamic and complex configurations intertwining four dimensions of being-in-the-world, should be considered, as they combine, as donors and recipients, to induce the events (deficits and assets), cope with consequences (desired or undesired) and contribute for change (diagnosis and prognosis): intimate (subject’s cognitive and affective processes), interactive (groups’ mutual support and values), social (political, economical and cultural systems) and biophysical (biological endowment, natural and man-made environments). Public policies, a multitude of agents in different areas (education, culture, health, environment, politics, economics), should commit themselves to an integrated ecosystem approach in order to foster the connections and seal the ruptures between the different dimensions of being-in-the-world in view of their mutual support and dynamic equilibrium.