The social dynamics of basins of attraction

Abstract

In this paper we conceptualize transformations as societal shifts from one basin of attraction to another. Such shifts occur when a society’s information processing system is no longer fit to deal with the dynamics with which the society is involved. To understand when this might be the case, we conceive of a dynamic interaction between two domains, the cognitive one (containing a society’s knowledge, values, language, customs, technology etc. that structure information processing) and the environmental one (consisting of the dynamics of the environment within which a society is embedded), which interact through resonance. The two domains are interdependent and coevolve to shape both the information-processing of a society (its culture) and the environment with which it interacts. Crucial in this dynamic is the process of category formation. We used a model that distinguishes between “closed” and “open” categories, which allows us to dynamically relate, but distinguish, a certainty sphere (closed categories dominate), a possibility sphere (open categories dominate), and a problem sphere (absence of categories). Narratives anchor societies’ values and dynamics and shape the wider culture of society, making phenomena comprehensible. To foster cultural transitions, narratives need to be modified. To do so, one has to search for narratives in which open categories dominate, and then insert new elements in them. This requires an analysis of the narratives to determine their degree of openness. A tentative approach to such an analysis is offered. INTRODUCTION The concepts of “attractor”* and “basin of attraction,”* (see Appendix 1 for definitions of all words with an asterisk) which originated with the emergence of the complex adaptive systems approach (Milnor 1985, Grebogi et al. 1987), are increasingly relevant in efforts to understand how to transform our societies to attain a more sustainable relation between them and the environmental dynamics in which they are embedded (Westley et al. 2011, Carpenter et al. 2019, Schlüter et al. 2019). Yet there is insufficient clarity and agreement on the meaning, function, and impact of these concepts (e.g., https://be-benevolution. com/2020/01/31/attractors/). Here, we present a perspective on the dynamics of societal transformations that details the role of basins of attraction. In studying the Anthropocene it is not effective to separate societal from environmental dynamics. They are deeply intertwined (Reyers et al. 2018). As expressed by McGlade (1995), there is no social (sub)system nor an environmental one; there are only human perceptions of, and actions on, the integrated, dynamic, social, and natural environment. We therefore adopt for this paper a perspective in which societies and their environments constitute a single, integrated system. But within that system, there are societal dimensions, which humans have the capacity to deal with directly (Brondizio et al. 2016), and environmental dimensions over which the system’s influence is more indirect (Steffen et al. 2018). With the introduction of the Anthropocene as a concept (Crutzen 2002), our societies are no longer seen to be (merely) reacting (adapting) to environmental dynamics, but to be interactive, impacting in a major way on and even shaping the nonhuman dynamics. The scale, connectivity, and speed of the human dimension have become a major driver of Earth system dynamics (Steffen et al. 2018). It follows that in order to understand these integrated dynamics, we need to complement an essentially external, environmental perspective with an internal one, conceiving of the dynamics as societally driven. Thus, as the focus of our research is on the intertwined dynamics of human and nonhuman dimensions, we distinguish, for analytical purposes, within the overall integrated system, an interface between these two dimensions. Essential to an improved understanding of our current sustainability conundrum, therefore, is knowledge about the interaction between on the one hand our understanding of the realm of external phenomena, and on the other hand our actions upon that realm. Though important efforts have been devoted to studying the dynamics of our environments and their impacts on our societies (e.g., IPCC 2014), comparatively less attention has been devoted to the internal dynamics of our societies and how they impact on and shape our interactions with the environment (Palsson et al. 2013, Brondizio et al. 2016). Societies selectively define what they consider their environments, what they see as challenges in those environments, and what might be potential solutions for these challenges. Or, as Luhmann (1989:25-26) has phrased it, “societies do not exchange information with the environment, they exchange information about the environment among themselves, in a self-referential manner.” Societies interact with their environment through the filter of their cognition of the phenomena in that environment, i.e., through their information processing apparatus. Only those aspects of the environment that pass through that filter are perceived as socialecological interactions and form the basis for human interpretations, behaviors, norms, and actions relative to the environment. This implies that interactions not captured by a society’s information processing remain invisible to society. Such hidden phenomena often appear later as surprises that feed back onto society, generated by broader scale patterns emerging from interactions of local actors and agents (Holling and Meffe 1996, Levin et al. 2013, Schlüter et al. 2019). Schools of Complex Adaptive Systems (SCAS) and Human Evolution and Social Change (SHESC), Arizona State University, Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University Ecology and Society 26(1): 33 https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss1/art33/ For its survival, any society has to deal with the environmental conditions it is facing, including those it has created itself because of unintended consequences of its earlier actions. To do so, society’s information-processing apparatus must be up to the task. This includes capturing the significant features of the external dynamics and the management and governance of the society’s internal dynamics. That apparatus has itself coevolved with the society and its environment, and we need to understand the role of that coevolution in transformations (e.g., Jørgensen et al. 2019). To apply this to the need for a fundamental organizational transformation of our societies (Westley et al. 2011), we could redefine the current environmental crisis as an incapacity of our societies’ information processing to deal with the dynamics in which societies are involved (van der Leeuw 2020a). This perspective highlights the subjectivity of human perceptions of, and actions upon, the environment and emphasizes societies’ internal cognitive dynamics. A society’s conceptual, institutional, and material organization is seen as part of its information processing apparatus because its ideas, its social organization, and its technology favor certain perceptions and neglect others. ATTRACTORS AND BASINS OF ATTRACTION The focus of this paper is on introducing the concepts of attractor and basins of attraction as tools to investigate the challenge of sustainability, and in particular transformations in the dynamics of social-ecological systems. We borrow these concepts from dynamical systems theory. In the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor* is a set of numerical values toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system. A point attractor is an attractor consisting of a single state. For example, a marble rolling in a smooth, rounded bowl will always come to rest at the lowest point, in the bottom center of the bowl; the final state of motionlessness is a point attractor. A periodic attractor is an attractor consisting of a finite or infinite set of states, where the evolution of the system results in moving cyclically through each state. The ideal orbit of a planet around a star is a periodic attractor, as are periodic oscillations. A strange attractor is an attractor for which the evolution through the set of possible physical states is nonperiodic (chaotic). Most real physical systems (including the actual orbits of planets) involve strange attractors. It is very common for dynamical systems to have more than one attractor. For each such attractor, its basin of attraction* is the set of points from which the system moves toward that particular attractor. That set of points can be represented as the region of the virtual, dynamic landscape in which the system finds itself and from which the system will necessarily, over time, move toward that attractor. Viewing a basin of attraction as such a region in state space, it has been found that the basic topological structure of such regions can vary greatly from system to system. Thus, the qualitative long-time trajectory of a given system can be fundamentally different depending on which basins of attraction the system interacts with. For our purposes, we make a distinction between the dynamics of the integrated societal-environmental system and between the dynamics of the societal and the environmental components within that system, as it is the interaction between the latter two that drives the overall system. We represent that interaction as the articulation of the societal component’s information-processing apparatus with a series of environmental basins of attraction (Scheffer 2009). That interaction takes the form of a coevolution. Transformations between basins of attraction, occurring at tipping points* may steer the system toward very different future states. If the goal is to redirect the system toward another longterm outcome, as is the case with respect to the sustainability conundru