Dear All
Thank you for your indeed interesting contributions during the past week. I
have the impression that we have got a bit of the main road - from the
earthly problems related to organization, development and environment which
were outlined in Bob's and mine text to the more philosophical questions
about final causes in the Universe. I would like to invite everybody to take
a step back and address the main theme. In this context I agree with Loet
that "Sustainability is mainly a political program; it is vaguely defined.
One never hears a specification about "sustainability" for how long? Ten
year, hundred?"
This problem has long history in ecological economics discourse (see the
overview and the possible way out of this tangle: Robinson, J. (2004).
Squaring the circle? Some thoughts on the idea of sustainable development.
Ecological Economics, 48, 369-384.). Because sustainability or sustainable
living is so vague and the environmental and human problems involved in
development so pressing, Bob and myself wished to throw this hot issue in
the FIS framework with the hope to get fresh ideas and perspectives.
I'll just throw down few remarks on some last week contributions that may be
related to the core issue of our discussion. I found Stan's thoughts about
causation and entropy as the final cause of the Universe very intriguing and
provocative. However, from the point of social sciences the attempt to
reduce social action to entropy production is unacceptable as reductionist,
in the same vain as evolutionary psychology cannot be taken as a plausible
explanation for every possible dimension of individual human behavior.
Following the arguments expressed by philosopher of science Dupre (Dupr�,
John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
(2001).) I believe that human behavior, and especially collective behavior,
is very much contextual and emerging and it cannot be meaningfully reduced
to genes, physiology or for that matter to quantum mechanics, although genes
and physiological processes certainly influence the mind and our behavior.
Stan's views are, however, directly relevant for the discussion of
sustainability, when he relates entropy production for the Universe and its
role as the final cause of violent human behavior:
" We cannot resist warfare because we cannot resist the most prominent law
of Nature. As long as we engage in war while denouncing it at the same time,
I am entitled to say that we build in order to burn so that we may rebuild
again -- endlessly, with the ultimate result (after our superstructures lie
in the sand like the pyramids) of having satisfactorily contributed to
Universal equilibration. ... In warfare we only destroy our own things, in
building we destroy everything.
Compared to this views economics, which has been long labeled as "dismal
science", appears as a fairy tale. The humanity appears to be doomed between
two options: to destroy endlessly its own civilizations or to destroy
nature. I don't believe that world is that much deterministic but I agree
that Stan's two options are perfectly real and do play part of our own
history. Perhaps it is the bias of myself coming from social sciences, that
I have to believe that a third option must be allowed to exist - that of
sustainable living. We may fail to reach this option, but I believe that we
should allow it the possibility to exist at least in principle. If social
sciences were unable address human problems from that normative, value laden
perspective, they would be useless for the society as whole. Therefore, I
think that Stan put the problem of sustainability in a strikingly sharp
perspective by proposing its alternatives: endless wars or environmental
collapses, or both of these at the same time.
The key question that arises quite naturally is whether we as scientists are
able to find viable, systemic solutions to avoid the latter alternatives.
The immediate second question is, even if scientist are able to find an
answer, will human societies be able to implement it via political
processes and on time to avoid ecological catastrophe (and probable
consequent violent conflicts (see for example works of Thomas Homer-Dixon on
that issue).
>From the discussion so far, it appears that knowledge based economy, for
reasons related to entropy production and its inherent metastability, may
not be the solution to the problem. In that sense we moved some steps from
where we started. What may be the next step?
All the best
Igor
Dr. Igor Matutinovi�
Managing Director
GfK - Center for market research
Dra�kovi�eva 54,
10 000 Zagreb, Croatia
Phone: 00385 1 49 21 222
Fax: 00385 1 49 21 223
E-mail: igor.matutinovic@gfk.hr
www.gfk.hr
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Received on Tue May 10 10:53:32 2005
