07 January 2012

Mental Complexity, corporisations and The Powers

I found myself with one of those moments of recognition -someone else has articulated something I've been thinking about albeit in a different arena. The recognition was in a couple of sentences here:
Mental Complexity and ‘The Astonishing Naivety of Policymakers’ : RSA blogs:
a growth in social productivity requires people to be able to disembed themselves from certain social and psychological influences that undermine autonomy, responsibility and solidarity, so that they can relate to those influences more flexibly and constructively.

This, I think, relates to one of the things I've been thinking in relation to the Powers or 'corporisations' as I've been labelling them. You see, one of my issues consequential on seeing corporisations as emergent beings arising from human (plus other 'stuff' -taking on board the insights of Actor-Network Theory) bounded complex interaction is whether humans or corporisations should be seen as more ultimate. The issue arises because if we recognise the dignity and agency of corporisations, then the question must arise as to whether they subsume individual human rights and dignities. A model for this would be the way that a brain or a human body takes priority over individual neurons or cells, or perhaps the way that the nest or the hive seems to with social ants and bees.

My reading of scripture, informed by Walter Wink, is that in God's economy humans are to be served by corporisations rather than the other way round. If that is the case, then the quote above captures also the ethical imperative in relation to the corporisations (that is the Powers). Indeed this seems to be part of what Paul is claiming for the gospel: that it enables human agents to do this -recognising that we are all to prone to ceding our agency and responsibility before God to the corporisations /Powers.

Of course, part of the issue (not really touched on by Paul) is that unlike neurons or other cells, we can 'belong to' or form part of more than one corporisation. I sense I need to consider this more fully too...

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