Abstract
The “good”, eudaimonic society is characterised here as a society that cultivates the commune bonum, the common good, the commons. The topicality of the issue of the commons does not come as a surprise, because the dangers of an anthropogenic breakdown of our societal life originate from rising dysfunctions regarding the commons. The commons, are according to a social systems view, defined as any emerging synergetic relations, one which converges with defining it as a relational good as relational sociology does. In order to remove frictions in the functioning of the commons, a transformation is needed. Social morphogenesis can transform the current societal conditions into those of a true “morphogenic” society in which a ratchet is set up: the flourishing of the actors conditions the flourishing of the society and vice versa. This transformation has to take into consideration a global, a sustainable and an informational imperative. The global sustainable information society is the concrete utopia of today.
The title is from an exhibition that took place in Vienna 17 November 2015–10 January 2016 in co-operation with Vienna Art Week 2015. See https://www.kunsthauswien.com/en/exhibitions/archive/67-2015/337-creating-common-good.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Actually, it was a lecture by Slavoj Zizek given in the first decade of our millennium in Vienna that made me aware of that idea.
- 3.
That term is used in Linebaugh, P. (Linebaugh 2014) and on https://blog.commons.at/commons/was-ist-commoning/, meaning, approximately, taking care of something together.
- 4.
It is not a coincidence that the term “produser” and “produsage” came up with modern ICTs that made the users of social network sites the producers of the content of the latter – hence “produsers” (Bruns 2006). This is taken here as a metaphor for any social system production and usage on a generic level.
- 5.
Ivan Illich was the first to coin that term in a rather scientific context when he published his philosophy of technology book “Tools for Conviviality” (Illich 1973). In recent years, that term gained new attention when intellectuals in France opened the discussion on a political manifesto for the redesign of agency and structure in the social systems of our time (http://convivialism.org). Conviviality can be traced back to the Spanish connotation of sitting together in peace and enjoying drinking and eating together.
- 6.
Tomasello’s working group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig gives nice ontogenetic evidence of behaviour that resembles that phylogenetic hypothesis. In an experiment young children are prompted by a device to work together in a subtle way so as to receive an award each. The award is given to them after successfully carrying out the task. Now, if and when the awards are distributed in an uneven way, the child who receives a higher award spontaneously shares the excess part with the other child.
- 7.
I’m hesitant about using the term “productivity” which would be rather appropriate if it had not acquired a certain, narrow, economic meaning and lost another one, in which nature itself is productive, and so are humans by harnessing productive forces. “Thrivability” serves to prevent such an association and links up to the lost meaning.
- 8.
In the sociological literature there seems to be a widespread acceptance of evidence of processes of acceleration except for accelerationists. Both stances, however, would need to focus on the fact that acceleration on the micro-level of a social system (the intensification of interaction of actors) as kind of a quantitative increase does not automatically yield a qualitative change on the macro-level of that very system (new – and desired – social relations), not to speak of such changes in systems that rank higher in the hierarchy of nested social systems. What happens on a system’s micro-level is just the precondition for the emergence of something new on its macro-level and what happens on one system’s level is also precisely the precondition for the emergence of something new on the next higher system’s level.
- 9.
For Wallerstein the world system had already emerged some 500 years ago. In my view, it was only the interdependence of the social systems comprising different parts of humanity that had reached its utmost extension but was followed then by a phase of intensive growth until the systems’ externalities – that the systems tried to get rid of as if any of them were still independent – began to block their own development. In my view, a world system does not deserve the name until the systems in question are gathered under the umbrella of a new transnational governance. In this view, nation states need not to be dissolved when it comes to the world system; they need only to be reworked. Democracy needs to be strengthened from below, in so far as the global level is not hampered.
- 10.
My term.
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Hofkirchner, W. (2017). Creating Common Good: The Global Sustainable Information Society as the Good Society. In: Archer, M. (eds) Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing. Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49469-2_13
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