Many of you readers know that I am skeptical to to future of traditional hierarchies. I believe the huge change that is happening now (again) is that new communications technology is simply creating another playing field for the basic human capacity to organize and solve problems at hand. A field where the model of traditional hierarchic and static institutions is not the given answer for solving problems, as we have been assumed for some years (read “hundreds of years”) now.
Maybe this thought is at last coming through in a more traditional context? Or am I just exaggerating what my mother recently pointed out to me in the latest issue of Time Magazine? On the question on the chaotic situation in the Japanese government Michael Elliott asks:
Yet on Japan serenely sails. It makes you wonder if most of us have still not figured out the question of 1962 [How do they do it?], or if the answer to it is so radical that we miss it. Could it be that an old society is leading us into a postmodern age, one where the world of politics, something that we have assumed for 200 years was the wellspring of national success or failure, is somehow just not that important?
I am aware of that there are (at least in theory) other angles of attack for questioning the relevance and impact of the national political governing system, but Elliott is pointing at an important issue here. We are assuming that the national political system still is a wellspring of national success or failure. I would say that it is much worse than that: we can’t even use the word society today without bringing along a complete system of assumptions containing the dominance of the nation state model and it’s constituting institutions. In all writing that I read, regardless if it is in an academic context or not, I can track these underlying and implicit assumptions. Assumptions that effectively clouds the discussion of how we should go about organizing the society of tomorrow. A society where the nation state may or may not be the fundamental organizing model.
Is publication of Michael Elliott’s short essay a weak signal that this line of thought is on it’s way to breach into the mainstream discussion? Is it just a call in the dark? Or am I filling in too many blanks myself?
