A systems-thinker's response to Anthony Lerman's question; What can religion offer politics? Guardian 90626
Lerman had asked
Can religion provide answers to our social and political
problems, or should we exclude it from the public sphere?
...however advanced the society, the multiple crises of recent
years have shown that rational, secular ideologies don't have all
the answers to social and political problems. Can it be right to
prevent certain religious groups, however doubtful their
democratic credentials, from being heard on such problems?
He went on:
the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, ... argued that it is not the secular state's job to purge the public sphere of all religious contributions. On the contrary, it must make it possible for people of faith, who make no distinction between religious and political convictions, (my emphasis) "to take part in political will formation". .. What the state must do is act as a filter through which any religiously inspired proposals for shaping the common good are translated into secular language if they are to influence the policy agendas of the state.
Willson responded:
Much though Habermas is revered, (in certain circles but not many) on this question he is wrong, and moreover, dangerously wrong.
Habermas and Lerman ought to know, and if they don't then need to learn, that thanks to the work of systems thinkers like the late Horst Rittell and Jake Chapman, we now understand that these problems arise from and are embedded in the hugely complex nature of the socio-political-technological- ecological systems that have co-evolved over the past 400 years.
None of those complex, ill-defined, loose-boundaried systemic problems are 'solveable ' in the traditional conventional sense.
Wasting time and energy on the ill-informed, mystical, moralistic, authoritarian posturings of any brand of religion will be a disaster. Such a regression would make it even more difficult for our societies to understand and respond intelligently to the problems that arise from the very nature of our systems.
As the great British cybernetician Stafford Beer put it, these complex, systemic problems can only be 'dissolved' , not 'solved'.
That will require using the rules of systems and cybernetics in participative processes through which we think, act and learn together to understand and then fundamentally reconfigure the unjust and unsustainable systems that are giving rise to the problems. .
To paraphrase the 1992 Clinton campaign, "Its the system, stupid".
Once that is understood, we can leave the vacuous infantilism of religion behind and get down to the serious work of co-creating viable, humane, sustainable societies for our children and grandchildren.
