RESPONSIBLE STEWARDSHIP
Home Page
This Site aims to challenge the globalisation of today's dominant values (worldview) of competitive individualism, market forces and centralised power with alternative values (worldview) based on stewardship, fairness, social pluralism and an integrative approach.
MISSION STATEMENT
To create a complete view of the world we know, act in, suffer in, that makes sense of our everyday experience - and of the insights of sciences and other wisdom, both old and new.
Our major idea is that of Integrative Evolution, which occurs at all levels of existence: physical, biological organisms, animals and plants, colonies and social groups ... leading eventually to the complexities of global human society.
In classical evolution (based on the orthodox interpretation of Darwin) the stages are:- diversity ... competition ... survival of the fittest. In integrative evolution by contrast we understand:- diversity ... complementary interaction ... integration into a greater whole. These latter ideas have been present throughout history but are now finding support from the new sciences.
The 'success' of global human development has led us to a degenerating social and natural environment in which power has not been matched by responsibility. We argue now for Responsible Stewardship as a way of re-integrating human beings with each other and with our natural environment.
The 'struggle for survival' view of evolution ignores the emergent relations of accommodation that develop in real life, even in formally competitive situations. This demonstrates that the integrative principle has very broad application in both natural and social affairs; it reaches its fullest expression in conscious and deliberate co-operation.
IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES WE WILL: -
Understand the philosophy and traditions out of which the dominant worldview - one that we and others have come to call Neoliberalism - has evolved. We must also grasp the historical roots from which the minority pluralist tradition has developed.
Challenge notions of naive equality with the more recent understanding of stewardship, based on complementary human types and the complexity of social reality. This forms part of the new science of Distributive Justice with its contrasts between equality, equity (fairness) and nurture. Conflict Resolution Theory has in turn developed within this science.
Draw on recent challenges from credible thinkers to determinist science, crude Darwinism and the whole enlightenment project itself, all of which have underpinnned the Neoliberal worldview.
Many of the key theme pages are yet to be constructed: those below give some philosophical context to the work and a 'work in progress' on the central notion of types.