The Emerging World

By changing the foundation for knowledge, we change knowledge of the world in which we live…. This is as good as changing the world itself.

Whilst it is easy to write and understand how the world may change in this way; it is not at all easy to live through such a change. The reason why this is so difficult is because we have so much knowledge and understanding derived from the old world. It is not so much the big ideas that we find difficult to change: it is the small, everyday, assumptions that we hold to be true about our world and about ourselves that keep us embedded at heart in the old world.

Children may be more easily introduced to the new world – indeed children always enter a new world, one of our and their creation. Students too may vigorously enquire and challenge the world in which they are growing intellectually. But nonetheless the established world, the world that is embedded in existing institutions, practices, cultures and beliefs is hard to displace.

In the ISD book (Intrinsic Sustainable Development, World Scientific Press, 2011) the two main characters take a life-time to leave the old world and discover a little about the new. The book is in this way a journey through knowledge; it is also a journey through the physical world. In the following extract from the book these two characters, the older boy and Grey Beard, are in Helsinki, Finland. They take the 14.10 ferry from the jetty at Skatuddskajen to the island fortress of Suomenlinna, a world heritage site.

“The Older Boy had Diagrams

In the plastic sleeves that now lay inside the cases of QC and Grey Beard were a series of diagrams and notes. They had been taken directly from teaching material that the older boy had used to illustrate the development of the Primal episteme and its consequences to management and accounting undergraduates.

In Figure 1 the older boy had wanted to show something of ‘Worlds in Transition’. He used this diagram to provide a basis for discussions. It was based on Venn diagrams in which the area occupied by an item was representative of the importance of that item.

Adapted Venn diagrams showing how the world of business is changing

The first part of Figure 1 shows the Inherited Business World in which an important, white businessman (for the older boy also intended to draw attention to the dominance of males in establishing traditional business practice) in a large, hence important, self-made area. The Natural World is located at a distance — quite separate from the Inherited Business world. The area of the traditional business world has a regular, formal shape to represent a little of its assumed certainty and control.

The second part of Figure 1 shows the Business and Environment World in which we currently live. The Natural World has here grown in importance but it has been transformed into the Environment. It overlaps the Business World in the small oval of environmental economics and business but much of the Inherited Business World remains unaffected.

The third part of Figure 1 shows the older boy’s vision of the emerging world of Primal Business in an Economic Ecology. Here, the Business World has been embedded in the ecosystem and the areas defined by all worlds have become uncertain and irregular. In this

part, the older boy introduced non-whites and females to represent increasing diversity of participants and the end of the dominance of the white businessman.”

The emerging world is based on the scientific knowledge that we now possess. This knowledge is very different from that which was available when the old world was established. It is time to move on.