Montuori Gylany and Planetary Culture

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Gylany and planetary culture: A personal explorationAlfonso Montuoriaa California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California

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To cite this Article Montuori, Alfonso(1997) 'Gylany and planetary culture: A personal exploration', World Futures, 51: 1,165 181

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DISCUSSION NOTEGylany and Planetary Culture: A PersonalExplorationALFONSO MONTUORICalifornia Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California(Received May 8, 1996; accepted May 17, 1996)Th e em erg ing planetary cultu re is viewed from an a utob iog raph icalperspective. The author discusses the importance of complex thought(Morin) and the notions of gylany and partnership (Eisler) to addressthe need to develop a heterogeneous, diverse context which supportscreat iv i ty and mutual ly benef ic ia l re la t ions . Sys tems- theoret icaland feminist approaches are brought to bear on the need to developan ecology of creativity, which focuses not simply on individual geniusbut on the potential for creative collaboration. Ecological concernsare viewed in the context of our understanding of gender, creativityand progress.KEYWORDS: complexity, creativity, gylany, partnership, planetary culture,systems theory, social creativity, social change.

The "plane tar iza t ion" of our wor ld poin ts in two d ivergent ,dialogical directions, cap tured by the photo of the Earth from space,and in the creation of worldwide "global villages" thro ugh the use ofcommunication and transportation technologies: our increasingawareness of our world's heterogeneity and complexity is coupledwith an increasing awareness of i ts uni ty . Our future is notdeterm ined, and could range from a planetary MacDonaldization toan explosion of tribal warfare, from totalization to fragmentation.But there is also the possibility of moving beyond the dialectic ofdomination.

World Futures, 1997, Vol. 51 , pp . 165-18 1 1997 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association)Reprints available directly from the publisher Amsterdam B.V. Published und er licensePhotocopying permitted by license only und er the Gordon and Breach Publishers imprint.Printed in India.165

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166 A. MON TUORIIn Origini di Storie, Mauro Ceruti and Gianluca Bocchi (1993)

present a narrative of the origin of our stories about ourselves andthe world we inhabit. Darwin's revolution, they point out, is thatorganisms are their history. We co-create ourselves with ourenvironment in what Morin (1994) calls auto-eco-organization, arecognition of the dialogic unitas multiplex of self and environmentinteracting over time. Our awareness of seemingly opposing trendscalls for us now to trace our own roots, our own histories. We can atonce pinpoint our own trajectory and location in the larger time andspace of Earth's voyage, and recognize that we are indeed part of alarger whole, tracing the events of a path we have laid down inwalking. We are crea ting a world that creates us.Today, much of the popular "postmodern" emphasis on themultiplex, on he terogenei ty , re la t iv i ty , mul t ip l ic i ty , and theburgeoning "little narratives," (Lyotard, 1979, Rosenau, 1992) hasthrown the baby of unity, of unitas, out with the bath water ofhomogeneity and metanarratives. But, as the tragic collapse of theformer Yugoslavia has shown us, with the collapse of metanarratives,simple stories are reconstruc ted with a reductive, disjunctive thought(Morin, 1994), for purposes of domination. The little narrativesknow of only one way to interrelate, and explode in the ethniccleansing of forced unity, unitas simplex, in a continuous oscillationbetween totalization and fragmentation. As I was to discover later,

the concept of gylany (Eisler, 1987) offers an alternative way ofrelating, beyond domination, and expressing Morin's idea of unitasmultiplex.

The Space of Knowledge

Everything that is said, is said by an observer, Maturana and Varela(1987) tell us, and every history, whether planetary or personal orboth, is told by a storyteller. The observing system's knowledgeemerges in a certain time and a certain space, and here are mycoordinates.I was born in Holland. My father served in the Italian diplomaticcorps, and married my Dutch mother in Portugal. When I was 6m on ths o ld we moved to Be i ru t Bei ru t the m ul t ina t ion a l ,

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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTUR E 167multicultural Paris of the Middle East. At age 4 I moved to Greece,and then age 11 to England, where I went to high school andeventually to the University of London. During this time, I was luckyenough to be able to spend my long summer and winter holidayswith family in Holland or Italy, or Switzerland.

The issue of planetary culture is, perh aps naturally, therefore, onethat is very close to my heart. The 20th century has offered mepossibilities and circumstances, relatively common today, which even100 years ago would have been unthinkable. I have never lived inItaly, the country that issued my passport, but I have lived on threecontinents, and experienced a right-wing dictatorship in Greece,market socialism in England, free-market capitalism in the USA, andcommunism in the People's Republic of China. I now live in theUnited States of Am erica, the lan d of individualism, b ut having livedin China, one of the countries that the West most associates withcollectivism, I am aware of the vast differences in the way peopleconceptualize who and what we are . Profound cultural differenceshave always been a part of my life. The North/South split is almostbuilt into me: the Dutch/Italian split has replayed itself historicallyin the English/Greek split too. The East/West split was not farbehind.

W hen I was growing up, the first days away or back h om e after theholidays were always the strangest. It would typically take me threedays to adjust to the new cultural reality. When, much later, I was tostudy the phenomenon of culture shock in graduate school, I wasstruck that almost all the research focused on ways of either avoidingculture shock altogether or minimizing its effects. Perhaps this canbe t raced to the fact that visi tors to foreign countr ies havehistorically been warriors, merchants, and diplomats, with anunderstandable desire to avoid psychological disequil ibrium.Academia has likewise entertained a somewhat avoidant relationshipwith disorder and disequil ibrium, refusing unt i l recent ly toacknowledge its potentially generative nature. Yet literature isreplete with stories of perso nal transformation "on the road ," fromGautama the Buddha to Herman Hesse, from Alexandra David-Neelto Jack Kerouac. My own experien ce, and tha t of many of my friendsand col leagues , indica ted tha t cu l ture shock and psychicdisequilibrium created by an encounter with difference could lead

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168 A. MONTUOR Ito fresh understandings about ourselves, our culture, and about theway we are shaped by our culture. We understand ourselves inrelationship, and we become ourselves in relationshipbut thequestion then becomes the kind of relationship. This is where,without knowing it, my-search for what I later found in the conceptof gylany began.

Identity and IdentificationPostmodernists proclaim the death of the self and the "end of man"at the close of the 20th century, and similar claims are being madefor the na t ion-s ta te . Others a rgue tha t what i s dying i s theunderstand ing of self and state as simple, closed systems, replaced byan appreciation of open, evolving, complex systems, changing overt ime, and in constant interaction with their environment in aprocess of auto-eco-organization, shaping, and being shaped by,their environment . But perhaps what is a lso dying is the oldunderstanding of relationships limited by stereotypical ideas of"human nature."Any search for a homogeneous, stable historical 'entity' seems tofall apart when we remember that there was a time when, defyingpopular stereotypes, no tomatoes could be found in Italy, no tea inEngland, and no potatoes in Ireland, Holland or Germany. And wecan trace times when, as Bocchi and C eruti (1994) and Morin (1987,1993), have done, diverse interwoven cultural, ethnic, political fiberswere weaving the complex web that is Europe, when, with Eisler(1987), we see them recede further and further into a past thatradically challenges not only any kind of notions of ethnic purity,but the very foundations for the accepted social relations andorganization. The historical complexity of evolving systems, whetherselves or nation states, becomes apparent as we trace the polyphonicnatu re of the whole.If hum ans become hum an in relationship, rather than being staticessences, then our att i tude towards others can take on a verydifferent coloration. We can let go of the foundations of superiorityor inferiority, and value the actions and events in history. If the storyis not already written, but written in the living of it, the story can be

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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTU RE 169very different. We do no t judg e ourselves by how we comply with theabsolute script, but by how we choose to write our own script withothers.

Two fundamentally different systems outline themselves: oneclosed, with hard boundaries, static, simple, and yet fearfullydetermined to control and dominate its environment. This systemwould never accept the possibil i ty of personal growth in theexperience of culture shock. The other is open, complex, withpermeable boundaries, flexible and in process, in a mutualisticrelationship with its environment. This system would actively seekout opportunities to explore the destabilizing effects other cultureshave on our sense of self...

Barron (1958, 1968, 1995) has developed the important conceptof Ego-strength, which paradoxically suggests that the strong ego canbe secure enough to allow itself to fall apart, strong enough tobecome vulnerable, closed enough to be open, developing andgrowing through an ongoing process of dialogue with the world,continuously interpreting and reinterpreting the world, activelycourting disorder to destabilize the existing order so as to establishthrough that interaction a new form of organization... Dialogue andparadox seem to be at the heart of this creative process, anintertwining of dualities that m ight not be conceptually resolved, bu tenac ted in the moment of choice . The encounter wi th o thercultures can therefore be seen as a creative encounter, in which wecreate our experience as our cognitive maps are disorganized andreorganizedan opportunity for discarding stereotypes of what areand are not human possibilities.

The Time of KnowledgeSpace shaped my knowledge of the world in a particular time. I wasborn in 1960, and grew up with Vietnam, the Kennedys, the Moonshots, the ecology movement, the first American TV shows in Europe(Star Trek, Lassie, Com bat, Bew itched, Lost in Space), 1968 , s tuden trevolts, the women's movement, the English TV shows (the Avengers,Danger M an, UFO ), Pra gu e, the civil rights m ovem ent, and theBeatles providing an insistent and often subliminal background.

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170 A. MON TUORIWhen a man walked on the moon I was 9. When my Grandmotherwas 9 there were no cars, and when she died, twenty years after thefirst moon landing, planetary exploration was already almost adistant memory. The drama of the simultaneous explorations ofouter and inner space of the 60's had given way to the political andeconom ic challenges of the 80s.

The North/South split was paralleled by an East/West split: whileideas, technology, and the spirit of capitalism had streamed fromWest to East, ideas from the East were also flooding Europe andAmerica, with Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other remarkableworldviews which at t imes appeared radically "other" to thesupposedly ban krupt W est... T he spiritual hu nger was paralleled bya political hunger. China and Vietnam exported their own brand ofCommunism, and the West also looked with trepidation at thedevelopments in the Red Zone. The East was both nemesis andsalvation.Just as I was getting old enough to grapple with these questions, inthe unusually hot London summer of 1976 the hippies made way forpunk, and the M odern/Postm odern split appea red in my life. Peace,love, and understanding were replaced by Anarchy in the UK. Thecu l ture of my ge ne rat i on was pro fou nd ly in f luen ced by thistransition. The bright day-glo colors, flowers and toothpaste stripesof hippy clothing were replaced by 'basic black', and cynicism

replaced the optimism of the 60s. In the late 70s and early 80s, Iperformed throughout Britain as a professional musician. I saw first-hand how my generation, which had been too young to fullyexperience or understand the 60s, turned cynical, growing up withfewer economic prospects, more blatant corruption, political unrest,and , above all, the greatest disparity between what could be and whatis, precisely because it was living in the shadows of the dashed hopesof transformation and youth power of the 60s. For my generation,1976 was really the moment when the boundless optimism and faithin the future of not just the 60s, bu t perha ps m odernity itself, finallyend ed. Progress was no t som ething to look forward to, but the veryreason for the pollution, unemployment, alienation, and industrialwastelands we were seeing. The image of the future I had grown upwiththe sanitized, sterilized technological worlds of Star Trek and2001: A space odysseywere b eg in n in g to m ake way for the



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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTURE 171nightmarish worlds of haves and have-nots in Blade Runner,Neuromancer, Mad Max...And yet... In 1976 at the height of the punk explosion the largerecord companies br ief ly lost their monopoly on successfulrecordings: My band, like many others, self-produced a recording onour own label. But the music we performed was not nihilist punk atall, but worldbeat, a confluence of different rhythms, styles, andinfluences from all over the world. Propelled into music by my earlylove of the Beatles I had started playing in rock bands, and becomefascinated by how music expressed not simply form or emotion, butalso social organization. It seemed to me that the classical symphonyorches t ra , wi th i t s h i e ra rch ica l s t ruc tu re and f ragmentedredundancy of parts, paralleled industrial factory organization. Theorganization of an improvising group performing Jazz or progressiverock had not be translated into industrial organization yet, but itstruck me as having great potential for new models of organizationwhich were somehow more democratic, capable of expressing adifferent rela tion ship betwe en ord er and disor der , a form ofemergent interaction and collaborative creativity (Montuori, 1989,1990; Purser & Montuori, 1994).

Knowledge of IgnoranceThe fragmentation of contemporary knowledge is reflected in aneducational system that is fragmented and disjointed. But despite anobsession with methodology, ostensibly for purposes of gettingknowledge 'right', the fundamental premises and method of thesocial sciences remain largely unquestioned. In graduate school inthe United States I found an unwillingness to consider culturalcontext, which I had already found in the 'new criticism' I hadstudied at the University of London, an unwillingness to considerrelations, connections, wholes. Isolated variables, quantified actors,values and voting patterns in an were all measured effort toreplicate the method of the natural sciences, while at the sameti m e t h e r e l a ti o n s h i p b e tw e e n t h e h u m a n / s o c i a l / n a t u r a lsciences was left unchallenged. In an effort to find simple order,the complexi ty of l i fe was destroyed, and the knowledge




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172 A. MON TUORIgenerated was often of little value to 'real life'. And the pristineimage of the natural sciences the social sc iences sought toreplicate was ancientcorresponding to around the t ime whenthey had severed the i r re la t ionship wi th phi losophy, theabandoned m other of them all...My intere st in systems theory, which I discovered read ing theworks of Buckminster Fuller, Arthur Koestler, and then, in its mostdeveloped and ground-breaking form, with Ervin Laszlo, developedout of the conviction that reality does not divide itself up into neatdisciplinary categories, and that fragmentation leads to conceptualmutilation. I did not understand how useful knowledge could begenerated about U.S.Soviet relations, for instance, while nottaking into considerat ion cul tural , histor ical , psychological ,economic factors to complement the political dimension. Perhaps asa musician, my attraction to systems theory was obvious. After all, theholistic gestalt psychologists had shown that the notes in a melodymake sense because of their organization, as a whole. The sound of achord can be seen as an emergent property, and in a piece of music,a melodic figure sounds very different depending on the harmonyon e plays be hin d i t the contex t . Perform ing in a ba nd , theimportance of interaction was paramount, the music an emergentproperty of the organized interactions of the musicians. And yet allthese crucial elements were exactly what I was told to eliminate frommy inquiry as 'no ise '...

Gylanic ThoughtMy en co un ter with Gylanic thou gh t, in the work and pe rson ofRiane Eisler, provided me with a conceptual framework to integratemany of my concerns. Eisler 's rewri t ing of history shows i tsimportance in shaping who we believe we are, and w here we believewe can go .

The con t ingen t na tu re o f h i s to ry and many o f our mos tfundamental assumptions became even more apparent.Exploring the concept of gylany in a period of intensive researchleft me with the realization that "the nature of man" studied in muchpsychology, and addressed in the political discussions of "rational



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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTU RE 173economic man" I had come across, were indeed discussions of themale of the species (cf. Elshtain, 1981). My study of InternationalRelations had led me to question the fundamental assumptions ofhum an natu re in political and social theories, in an attempt to ferretout the way political theorists and policy makers were conceiving ofthe ir subjects. My father, a scholar of Greek ph iloso ph y, wasimmersed in the work of Plato, and my reading of the Republic withhim showed me the intimate interconnection between the 'conceptof man' and the concept of the state. I was intrigued to see that thehis tor ies of poli t ics , anthropology, and psychology began toconverge the further back one went into history, and slowly butsurely the great players of this adventure converged in the fieldcalled philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, but also Machiavelli, Hobbes,Locke, Mill, Hegel, Nietzsche were part of the same stream ofinquiry, which broke apart into almost water tight compartments asdisciplines successively split off from philosophy.

But the problem in this quest for disciplinary independence wasan unwillingness to examine the historical roots of knowledge, thetrajectory of knowledge in time and space, therefore leaving manyassumptions unchallenged. Most working psychologists I asked didnot feel there were political implications to the dominant "image ofman" in psychology (Sampson, 1983). Most political scientists Iasked felt there were no worthwhile psychological or cultural factorsat play in the dominant "realpolitik" approach to politics and policy.These intertwined roots in the source of philosophy had formed thesource of the now fragmented knowledge being generated inacademia . And now the feminis t c r i t ique argued that thesediscussions could not be anything but extremely partial, and indeedreflecting an almost pathological polarization and concomitantexaggeration of masculine and feminine traits both in humansthemselves and in their endeavors.Eisler (1987) differentiates between two fundamental forms ofsocial organization: the dominator or androcratic and partnershipor gylanic systems. The former is marked by a high degree ofinstitutional violence, great disparity between genders, and apreponderance of hierarchical organizations. The latter is markedby little gender disparity, a low degree of institutional violence, andless hierarchical, or "heterarchical" organizations. The gylanic



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174 A. MONTUO RIprinciple her e prese nts two fundam ental temp lates for hum anorganizat ion and coexistence. I t incorporates the cr i t ique ofdomination found in many different approaches, but also presentsan alternative in the concept of partnership, and stresses theimportance of gender equality in making that alternative possible.

Eisler's concept of partnership articulated the world beyond theparadigm of domination, which is taken by so many as the oneand true reality of human relations. Whereas much debate hadfocused on the nature and necessity of domination, few had outlinedthe alternative in such a clear manner. I recognized that therelationship between culturesand personswas largely definedin terms of domination. Furthermore, what was crucial to thisperspective was i ts gender-holist ic nature: to my North/South,East /West , Left /Right , and even Up/Down, Inner/Outer spl i t ,Eisler had added Male/Female. Human beings obviously come intwo types, male and female, and almost all the academic discourse Ihad been exposed to (written by, and concerning, men) essentiallyignored this.The concept of gylany suggested a fundamentally different wayof ar t iculat ing the polar i t ies I had e nc ou nte red . Ra ther thanwh at M orin cal ls d is junc t ive th o ug ht , w here we f ind therelat ions hip of D om inat ion as we see on top ei the r N orth orSouth, either Man or Woman, East or West, a new way emergedwhich allowed for thinking about them together, dialogically,in partnership. The result is not necessarily a synthesis, but theabi l i ty to hold both points a t the same t ime in a dialogicalre la t io ns hip , and the im po r tanc e is con t inuin g, ra th er thanterminating, the dialogue, unlike our traditional forms of debateand discourse.This powerful concept of partnership or gylany brings together inone fell swoop many of the concerns developed in this paper. Itforces a fundamental shift in our thinking which parallels Morin'sconcern for a complex thoughtbecause today partnership can onlybe created through complex thought, with the kind of thought thatis no t reductive, disjunctive, and unidimensional (Montuori & Conti,1993; Morin, 1991, 1994). A whole oth er side of the coin I had beenstudying became apparent to me, as research stressed the tendencyfor wo m en to be ed uc ate d to thin k mo re hol is tical ly , m ore





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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTURE 175contingently, mo re relationally, to focus on relationship-m aintainingabove goal-seekingand at the same time, wom en were educated forsubmissiveness in social relations (Baker Miller, 1976; Chodorow,1978; Code, 1991; Gilligan, 1982; Hare Mustin & Marecek, 1988;Salner, 1985,1989).

Women and CreativityAware of my interest in creativity, Eisler asked me to look intowo m en's creativity. My ensu ing research op en ed a new world ofinquiry for me. I remembered my Grandmother, a leading Dutchtheater actress before her marriage to my Grandfather. After hisdeath, I remember her going through an old shoe box full ofphotos and newspaper reviews from the first decade of this century,and her disappointment, expressed to me for the first time, athaving to give up her career. I remembered my mother tellingme she had wanted to study design, but had been prevented fromdo ing so by my G ran dfa the r, w ho felt this kind of ed uc atio nwould expose her to the wrong sorts of people. I have ended upmarrying a jazz singer, and now share my life with a very creativewom an. My first quest ion beca m e, assuming tha t our pre sen tdiscourse and practices of creativity had developed in the context ofthe dominator system, what would a gender-holistic creativity looklike, I wo ndered one that did not jus t include wom en in th epresent discussion, but questioned that discussion's fundamentalpremises?

Germaine Greer's (1979) The Obstacle Race, among many otherworks, showed so clearly women that had been prevented fromentering the arts and the sciences. Evelyn Fox Keller's (1985)biography of Nobel-prize winning biologist Barbara McClintockshowed what many feminists came to believe was an alternative,feminine approach to doing science at the highest levels. But theabsence of women in most historical lists of creative composers,architects, novelists, scientists surely could not mean that womenhad not been creative all this time?Since the Renaissance and the rise of the concept of the artist,creativity had been confined to a number of select domains, none

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176 A. MON TUORIof which women could freely participate in until very recently. Andthe a t t i tude to those domains where women were app ly ingthemselves was quite ambiguous. Albert Einstein (1956, p.227) w rotethat "one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science isto escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopelessdreariness." Perhaps Einstein was right. But my mother had stayedwith me (like it or not, and I like to think she did), and made myeveryday life as a child a joy. Was this not a creative act on he r part?Had she not transcended "painful crudity and hopeless dreariness"?But then, was / her creative product? Or was there something else,something left out of typical understandings of creativity? My motherwas performing the function typically assigned to women in agender-polarized society: she was creating the supportive contextfor my existence. And the context she created for me was, as Ilook back on it, an extremely generative context, and an aspect ofcreativity that our Western understanding has typically ignored.She had transformed "everyday life," and filled it with a creativerelationship.

Whereas the Taoists speak of creativity in the same breath as the'ground of sympathy', with their view of inextricably connected,intertwined dualities (Chang, 1963), we in the West have focused oncreator and creative product at the expense of ground of sympathy,what David Loye (1988) has called the feminine, nur turin g matrix ofcreativity, its generative context, which historically has been up towomen and minorities to provide. Living in the shadow of systems ofdomination, our discourse and practices of creativity have emergedmutilated, with creative individuals at times driven to madness bytheir isolation and separation from their environment (Montuori &Purser, 1995).A crucial difference is the fundamentally trust-based nature ofpar tnership systems, and the fear-based natu re of dominator systems.The research of Erikson (1963), and others, has shown that childrenare more willing to take risks and explore their environment if theyhave a bas ic t rus t and con f iden ce in themselves and the i rsurroundings, generally obtained through positive initial relationswith the m oth er or o the r caretaker. In oth er words, ther e is adialogical relationship between trust and fear, security and risk.When there is basic trust, security can be threatened, risks taken,




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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTURE 177and some degree of fear experienced. If there is no basic trust, thenthe outside world and the self are perceived as fundamentallythreatening, and fear is a chronic state. If risks are taken and creativeenterprises engaged in, Barron's research indicates that they areaccom pan ied by a gre ater ne ed for control and exp ression ofaggression.

Social CreativityExplorations of collective creativity, can, I believe, assist indeveloping a set of models for human possibil i t ies, inasmuchas they can complement the role models establ ished by theachievements of great individuals. In focusing almost exclusively onthe achievements of the individual, we have lost the ability torecognize and reward the achievements of creative teams, groups,and collectives. From designer labels to director's films, we fail torecognize the triumph of collaboration, and the possibility forhuman creative collaboration in which we transcend dichotomies ofpa r t /whole , i nd iv idua l / co l l ec t ive , l eade r / fo l lower , bu t a l soequilibrium/disequilibrium , harmony/conflict, order/diso rder. Andit is precisely in the area of human collaboration where the greatestamount of creativity and partnership is required...

Studying the social dimensions of creativity requires payingattention to context and interaction, rather than isolating singlevar iables , and a lso suggests the need for col labora t ive ,interdisciplinary research addressing social, political, economic, anda hos t of o t he r fac tors (M on tuo r i & Pu rser , 199 5) . Andinterdisciplinary work and creative collaboration is not rewarded inthe US university tenure system. Co-authored papers are lookeddown upon as indicative of the inability of the authors to go it alone,rather than as examples of the ability to collaborate, a strikingexample of how the social context does not support social creativity.Th is poin ts to the fact tha t the issue does is n ot ju st o ne ofindividualism versus collectivism or communitarianism, but gylanypartnership versus domination or androcracy, and i t is indeedgro up s of wo m en re se arc he rs who are taking the lead inchampioning collaborative inquiry.



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178 A. MONTUORIThe Ecology of Creativity and the Creativity of EcologiesAlong with downplaying and indeed blocking the possibilities ofcollaborative, social creativity, a one-sided view of creativity has also,I suggest, led to the ravages of the unchecked creativity of 'progress',a paradoxically destructive creativity that has not recognized itsecological, and social consequences because unable to recognize therole of the ground of sympathy.

The connection made by the dominator system between womenand nature, both at the bottom of the culture/nature, man/womanpolarities, has led to relationships of domination and exploitation inwhich no effort is made to the social and natural context from whichcreativity emerges. The gender polarization of this system has putwomen into a certain role which appears 'natural' for them, andinvolyes relationship- and context-maintaining, primarily in thehome. But this role is absent in those areas of policy-making wherewomen are absent, and furthermore there is nothing at all thatsuggests it should 'naturally' be divided up on the basis of gender. Aswe break down the disjunctive relationship between man/woman, wecan begin to explore a much vaster realm of personhood, and payatten tion to a much larger ecology of creativity and ecology of action .The disjunctive relationship between creativity and conservation,innovation and tradition, needs to be rethought as a dialogicalrelat io nsh ip: W hereas presently there is an und ers tan din g ofcreativity that is captured in Picasso's statement that every act ofcreativity is also an act of destruction, we must expand that conceptfrom a dyad to a triad, from creativity/destruction to creativity/destruction/conservation, recalling the Hindu trinity of Brahma,Shiva, and Vishnu. Creativity occurs in, and is made possible by, acontext that is both social and ecological. Destroy that context andwe destroy the possibility of creativity. Therefore, we must be able toconceptual ize crea t ive conservat ism, crea t ive ecologies andecological creativity.

Planetary KnowledgeA planetary culture will require more from us than ever before. Itwil l cer tainly force a radical reconceptualizat ion of the very

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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTURE 179foundations of thought, from a simple to a complex thought, fromdomination to partnership or gylany.We need a knowledge capacity to deal with the improvisus, theuncertain, the aleatory, with the times when established ways ofthinking and doing fail, and we are left to ou r own devices. We n eedto develop knowledge of our own freedom, our own creativity,knowledge of our capac i ty co-crea te our wor ld and takeresponsibil i ty for our part icipation in our future. But such aknowledge has, almost by definition, to be of a different kind thanthe knowledge of certainty, of the already known, based on solidfoundations. Knowledge shifts from a pure abstract realm of order tothe continuous, embodied interplay between order and disorder,interaction and organization. From a discovered, static, never-changing perfect ion to a co-created, f lowing, ever-changingcontingency.

Buddhists speak of Prajna and Karuna, Wisdom and Compassionas our two guiding lights, and the "fall into time" from the celestialorder to the world of Darwin and history (Bocchi & Ceruti, 1993)calls not for a bloodthirsty survival of the Fittest, but for an evergreater awareness and creation of partnership, since, as Bateson(1972) reminds us, the unit of survival is the organism in itsenvironm ent. If our world is made in our living of it, if we know thatour history creates us as we create our history, then the spirit ofgylany can invite us to collaborate to create worlds together, toexpress our solidarity as we learn together how to live together. Thesearch for wisdom in complex thought needs to be augmented bythe compassion of trust-creation, s ince trus t is an em er ge ntproperty of a quality of interaction, rather than an essence or intrinsicnatu re of this world...The challenge of the observing system in a planetary culture is torecognize h is or her own fundamenta l par t ic ipa t ion in theevolutionary process. And once we are not bystanders anymore,observing observed systems, but participants, observing observingsystems, and once we cannot call upon timeless and eternal laws andregulations, what we can do is participate as best we can, in anattempt not to enact the rules, embody in our actions the spirit ofpartnership and complexity. My exploration of gylany and planetaryculture continuesindeed has jus t begun . The challenge for me isno t only to understand and develop the conceptual frameworks, bu t



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GYLANY AND PLANETARY CULTURE 181M ontuo ri , A. and Purser , R. (1995). Dec onstruct ing th e lone genius myth. Jou rna l of

Humanistic Psychology. 35, 3, 69-112.M orin , E. (1994). La complexit humaine. [Human complexi ty] Paris : Flammarion.Morin , E. (1991). Introduzione al pensiero complesso. Milano: Sperl ing & Kupfer .M orin , E. (1987). Pensare l'Europa. Milano: Feltrinell i .Morin , E. (1983). Il Metodo. O rdine disordine organizzazione. [Method . Order d i so rder

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