The New Book has Arrived
I will only say it once, I promise.
In 1995, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted that by 2025, America would be in a crisis, labelled the 4th Turning. In 2023, Neil Howe published, The Fourth Turning is Here, confirming that the crisis had arrived on schedule. His description of today’s United States confirms their predictions and is frightening, powerful, and complete. (p 225 – 247) The crisis is really here, and there are serious questions whether America has the social and cultural resilience to survive and thrive. This manuscript outlines a path towards not just survival but Thrivancy, guided, in part, by Gregory Bateson, and Stafford Beer.
The premise is that, as individuals, we have some amount of resilience to maintain our identity and function in the face of change. Our resilience can be increased or decreased by the number of alternative paradigms we have available to us, fewer paradigms, less resilience. Since the 1950’s, there has been a reduction in available, alternative paradigms and an increasing rate of socio-cultural change. Every reduction in the paradigms available to the individual is a reduction in choice. A reduction in choice is a reduction in control with a parallel reduction of resilience. Without resilience, you cannot thrive in the face of change. For fifty years, there has been a dominant cultural paradigm, driving others to the margins, and slowly devolving into an ideology. All ideologies truncate resilience and preclude Thrivancy.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1, INTRODUCTION. - This is a brief description of the present crisis. There is a pervasive sense of unease about the state of the Nation. The American Idea is being challenged as it has not been for the last eighty years in ways that have not been seen before.
Chapter 2, HOW DID WE GET HERE? - S&H predicted that by 2010’s, we would be entering a period of crisis predicated on generational change and culminating between 2025 and 2030. The generational crisis has been exacerbated by the development of five mutually causal drivers of socio-cultural change; COVID-19, In-Your-Face-Technology, the Lying-for-Dollars Business Model, White Supremacy, and Climate Change.
Chapter 3, WHAT IS RESILIENCY AND HOW DOES IT DEVELOP? - Resiliency is defined as the ability to respond to change in a manner that maintains identity and function. Why do we care whether individuals demonstrate resilience? So much has changed and yet we still need to make life work, take care of children, and must still interact on some level, in some way, with others.
Chapter 4, PARADIGM DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTION. - There is a dominant, hierarchical, white, male, cultural paradigm that forms an umbrella over much of American culture and history. This paradigm has been legalized and socialized at an increasing pace, truncating of the rest of the resilience system.
Chapter 5, HOW DO WE CHANGE PARADIGMS TO BUILD RESILIENCE? - The question is can we rebuild American resilience to address the extraordinary rate of change coming our way? The answer is yes, we can, but we will need to undergo a massive paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are always gradual until they aren’t.
Chapter 6, A NEW BASIS FOR CREATING NEW PARADIGMS – What is called for is a dramatic paradigm shift about how we teach and what we teach. We need to move away from a paradigm where Math is somehow different from French and different from Art or Music. Where Science is different from History and English literature. Where writing a sentence is in a different universe than skipping rope. Nature is minute and universal. Nature is physical, and not. Nature is patterned and chaotic. Humans and crabs share patterns, and don’t. The schizophrenic and the primrose are both natural, with different natures.
Chapter 7, CREATING THE RESILIENCY PARADIGM. - The real power of the Natural History Paradigm becomes apparent when it is combined with the more structured Systems Paradigm. The Systems Paradigm depends on recognition of connections and patterns. The Natural History Paradigm has become an interface between the technology of computers and the beauty of Nature. Woven together, they harness the power of the computer in a humane and regenerative fashion as the computer has generated whole new ways of seeing, understanding, and describing the World. Both allow the incorporation of the Reductionist Paradigm to confirm the reality of patterns and connections. This combination is The Resiliency Paradigm.
Chapter 8, THRIVANCY EDUCATION. - This chapter braids together three extant approaches to schools and schooling. The three approaches are: Outward Bound’s Expeditionary Learning, Fulghum’s All I Really Needed to Know, I learned in Kindergarten, and the Lewis and Clark Expeditionary model.
Chapter 9, THRIVANCY EDUCATION MANAGEMENT. - Ashby’s Law, the First Law of Cybernetics, says that the more complex the system, the more complex the management must be. Thrivancy Education will be both complicated and complex, requiring a delicate balance of autonomy and control. Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model is the starting point, but the chapter is devoted to Evaluability Assessment and Management by Wandering Around as the basis for the requisite Trust needed to effectively manage the system.
Chapter 10, CAN THE AMERICAN IDEA SURVIVE? – This chapter is all about the good news that is happening all around us. The crisis is delayed. Gen Z is riding over the horizon and a thick wooden stake has been driven through the zombie, Trickle Down Economy. We are building from the bottom up and the middle out. Thrivancy Education can play a huge role in making the lights from the City on the Hill bright and shining.
And here is the paradox of hope: as we move beyond empty optimism and choose to live the lives we believe in, hope becomes transformed into something else entirely. It becomes stubborn, defiant courage. It becomes principled clarity. And when courageous-hearted, clear-minded people find one another, it becomes a powerful creative force for social change. K.D. Moore