GLOBAL AUTOPOIETIC UNIVERSITY
AS FIDES ET RATIO
Postovani!
Saljemo Vam materijale projektu Global Autopoietic University, putem kojeg se zalazemo da Hrvati
dobiju od katolickih sveucilista u svijetu besplatno najbolja znanja.
Srdacan pozdrav,
prof.dr.sc. Ante Lauc
Op-ed
I wrote a song called "Have a Reason , Have a Faith" that premieredoff Broadway this January in New York City on the show called "SameDifference". I recommend everybody to read this text below. Croatianversion will be posted soon. It can only help you to renew your beliefs,whatever they are or it is.
Nenad Bach
Editor in Chief
CROWN
Prof.dr. Ante Lauc, Osijek University, Osijek, Croatia
Mr. Josip Milicevic, Osmjeh NGO, Croatia
Mr. Ivan Seso, St. Maria House, Centre for Spiritual Renewal, Slavonski Brod, Croatia
Zorislav Sojat, prof., Zagreb, Croatia
GLOBAL AUTOPOIETIC UNIVERSITY
AS FIDES ET RATIO
«Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation oftruth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2).»
These are the words of the Holy Father, the supreme pontiff John Paul II, to the bishops of the Catholic church on the relationship between faith and reason from his last Encyclic “Fides et Ratio”.
Motivation:
Letter FIDES ET RATIO
The encyclic “Fides et ratio” is an attempt to make a bridge between heart and mind, between love and truth, between chaos and freedom.
We, Catholics from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina do strongly believe that only God had saved us throughout the last 12 centuries in our beautiful countries. From this experience we want to start applying as much as possible the synthesis between religion and science, between spirit and matter, between supernatural and natural, between mind and brain.
Vision:
A society of free and moral, loving humans
«God is Love, through love you are in truth, truth will make you free.»
From these inspiring words of St. John we also draw our inspiration. It is the feeling of love, truthful thinking and thinking of truth, free and full communication and understanding, and deeds of love and freedom we wish to help develop.
We do believe in the power of our traditional values, based on Christianity. And our vision of future is an autopoietic society through integration of this power with scientific and technological achievements.
However, the only true freedom is the freedom based on morality.
Without ethics there is no real freedom, only an illusion of freedom.
Without ethics there is no creativity, only an imitation of creativity.
The only way to be “Imago viva Dei” is to combine contemplation in prayer and action in work, to combine the peace of heart and the richness of mind, to integrate moral and ethical values with scientific theories and technological products.
Our chance, as we believe it, to overcome Modern age, where people tried to live without God, is something we call ‘postmodernity’.
In the same way historically agrarian, traditional societies evolved into the industrial, “modern” ones, now the time is coming of another evolution, the evolution into a postindustrial and postmodern society and culture, a society of free and moral individuals in a free and moral world. We have a strong belief that autopoiesis is the key to the evolvement of such a society.
Almost everywhere in the world it can be seen that seeds of a new, post-capitalist, post-nationalist and post-socialist love and knowledge based society, with its specific economy, are being sown and the sprouts are growing rapidly. Our is a great wish to help with all we can and know in helping such a society to grow.
The key of this transformation is the emergence of the understanding that a human being shall be the strategic agent and processor of knowledge acquisition, production, and dissemination. The human being is again to regain the central position in a free world, joined by love and faith in God.
As the supreme pontiff John Paul II says:
«It is not just that freedom is part of the act of faith; it is absolutely required. Indeed, it is faith that allows individuals to give consummate expression to their own freedom. Put differently, freedom is not realized in decisions made against God. For how could it be an exercise of true freedom to refuse to be open to the very reality which enables our self-realization? Men and women can accomplish no more important act in their lives than the act of faith; it is here that freedom reaches the certainty of truth and chooses to live in that truth.»
Mission:
Freedom through love, truth and knowledge
Knowledge, the crucial commodity, knows no boundaries. But only with the power of contemplation and prayer the knowledge can be true. And only with true knowledge all human visions and missions are in harmony with God.
Throughout the ages the balance between religion and science passed many tests. Before “Modernity” the religion dominated over science, in “Modernity” the science dominated over religion. Those processes and their corresponding structures produced wars and poverty. The consequences of science dominating religion in “modern” times were low social and personal motivation, for the real motivation of humans as God’s creatures is for eternal life. Science does not know real love and without the connection with the soul can produce no real freedom.
Our mission is an ecumenical mission, striving towards and attaining (self-)producing of honourable life, work and love in accordance with God's and natural laws. We do sincerely believe in the power of humans, the human capital that consists of a moral, intellectual and social component. Only through the application of moral and ethical principles, through love, truth and knowledge may we attain freedom, personal freedom, social freedom, and freedom as the human race, living in accordance with all God’s creation.
Project Goal:
An Autopoietic University towards an Autopoietic Society
The goal of our project is to create an autopoietic University where we will all together learn how to live and love, where we will all together learn how to apply «ora et labora», where we will all learn how to integrate the oldest truths from Bible with the most recent scientific and technological achievements.
Coming from small countries, which strived for ages, and still strive, through difficult times towards a fuller life, we realize that neither Croatia nor Bosnia and Herzegovina invested enough in the human capital. As true “modernists” we preferred to invest into material capital. Owing to the war this material capital is largely destroyed now. Now we see that more and more people learn to prefer to invest in themselves, rather then in material posetions.
The project is presently planned to be initially grown in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our plan is to establish a Global Autopoietic University (GAU) for Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This Autopoietic University shall be grown by people from around the world. We wish to mobilize exceptional individuals, those with the combination of best mind and heart, from all streets of life, be it Nobel Prize winners or exceptional craftsmen, priests, artists, scientists, businessmen or politicians. These distinguished individuals would teach, by giving lectures (audio, video, text), by individual mentoring and by teamwork with the pupils, a large population of students via the Internet.
This knowledge transmission base would be integrated in the Global Autopoietic University. This University, linking all the teachers and students in anself organizing structure, shall actually be a ‘virtual’ university, where through the use of most modern communication and presentation technologies, through the Internet, and specifically through an Educational Grid, the integrated knowledge of teachers and students shall be accessible throughout the towns and villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, throughout the towns and villages of Croatia, and, naturally, throughout the towns and villages of the world.
The Internet is a miracle in this sense, as it allows a huge and growing population in the world to be ‘virtually’ on any place they wish. The emerging Educational Grid technology will be able to actually link all those people into one great project team, allowing not only common meeting ground or scheduled common lectures, but also, through the integration of e-science and e-learning, teamwork of the highest quality in all kinds of distributed experiments. The emerging e-society will be an autopoietic society, based on love, truth and knowledge, and will empower each such individual to express his personal freedom in a best possible way for all.
Companies, organizations and communities which will participate in this project will gradually, through the interchange of knowledge and experience, become learning organizations, which is a prerequisite for survival through the “modern” chaotic economy.
It is obvious that the better the human potential of the lecturers, employing the wisest moral, honest and knowledgeable professors and teachers, the better the students’ demand for knowledge and for learning. However, no professor or teacher can know more alone than with his students. Therefore it is obvious that a teamwork of teachers and students will produce the best new teachers, former students, in a purely networked autopoietic way, and will produce the best true knowledge and experience for the furtherment of mankind. And we all know that a good teacher is only the one which has pupils that surpass him or her.
Methodology:
Autopoietic self organization through true knowledge
The development is produced and consumed whenever and wherever educated, free and creative people come together. In the world today we have a new quality, the Internet, which can ensure much faster development and much faster knowledge dissemination around the world than it was possible in any time of the past.
Internet, specially through the development of Scientific, Social and Educational Grids, will become a catalyst of globalisation in a positive sense. Knowledge and experience transformed through the power of communication will reshape every product, every service, and every job throughout every country and the whole world community.
The key strategic resource necessary for future prosperity has become an ethical and knowledgeable worker. Added value is produced by the difference between the private and the social rate of return of knowledge. This obvious relation is, unfortunately, still not properly recognized in non-Christian economics.
The key question in economic development and investment strategies is: “what is the rate of return from investment in human and/or physical capital?”
The “modern” Chicago school of economy insists that the rate of return of both the investment in human and in physical (material) capital is the same. Following this theory, we have to invest 50% in each of these resources (intangible and tangible assets).
However, the “postmodern” Osijek autopoietic school has shown that the social rate of return is 3-25 times (depending on other variables) higher then the private rate of return.
The methodology of this project is designed in such a way as to compose a strategy that will confirm and validate this discovery on a large scale. We shall be ready to invest more in the human capital (moral, intellectual, and social capital) to get a higher investment return rate, leading to development and prosperity.
The ABCD model of the consumption/production of a society shows that there can be seen four types of individuals involved in social organization (economic, knowledge or other):
In the world today, not only in transition countries, but also in the most “developed” ones, we can see a strict stratification between the individuals of type C, which do not produce much, but consume a lot, and individuals of type B, which produce a lot, but consume meagrely. This stratification is obvious not only inside different countries, but even much more so in the stratification between communities, populations and whole countries in the global economy.
Our aim is to attain the state A from the above model for all willing individuals, primarily not in the material, physical sphere, but in the sphere of knowledge, and through true knowledge in the sphere of full human freedom. We wish to attain a society where individuals produce a lot of freedom for others and consume a lot of freedom for themselves in an balanced,self organized autopoietic way. The physical reality will soon follow this development.
This we feel to be possible by reprocessing and restructuring acting entities and relations between them.
To accomplish this goal we use an autopoietic approach . The autopoietic methodology enables the projecting and control of the growth and development of aself organizing network of free individuals and societies. Such a system, from its very beginning starts being vital,self-supporting. The aim is to attain self-sufficiency as early in the process as possible. This, naturally, presupposes high total quality management, just in time production, ethical and, naturally, legal ways of protecting knowledge throughout the networks, and assuring of privacy of producers and consumers in general.
In this project the greatest challenge for the lecturers and the recipients of knowledge will be to develop a spirit of learning instead of the spirit of teaching. Out of a generally allopoietic society, the result of an allopoietic approach currently operational, where everything is defined by outside forces (Capital and/or Government, pyramidal power distribution throughout the economic and social life), by using the power of computer networks we are able to design autopoietic organisations where almost everything is designed from inside (own heart and mind as the channel for God, own company, own country and state).
In autopoietic teams and organisations consumers and producers will be selforganizingly operationally closed owing to the knowledge base and the networking of people and resources. Our main objective is to, as much as possible, develop the level of knowledge necessary for competent decision making in the technological, economic, legal, and political area.
A team of individuals, organizations and institutions, a team network, a grid of teams will be developed, dedicated to the improvement of higher education through the effective and efficient application of information technology following the rationale of the autopoietic theory (development of motivation, knowledge, teamwork etc., based on the idea that a true prosperous society can exist only if each entity gives more to the community than it takes from it).
True knowledge can be achieved by education networks linking best providers of knowledge with the best learners. The teams shall consist ofspecialties (psychology, technology, economy, law etc.), and the projects they develop for the GAU, before and during actual implementation, shall be verified in workshops and conferences on national and international level.
Some criteria for estimating the quality of the individual projects, as well as for the whole Global Autopoietic University could be:
o Reliability – does the project actually work and give positive results?
o Validity – does it improve the quality of everyday work and life?
o Accessibility – is there the technology available making the knowledge accessible to everyone?
o Cost – are the results free of charge or with minimal fee, is the project self-sustainable?
o Freedom – does the project liberate rather than enslave? Create free time rather than soak it up, create quality of life (having, loving, being – according to Maslow)?
o Universality – is the project autopoietically spreadable through achieved communication, or is it just producing more chaos (producing an allopoietic situation)?
Phasing:
Autopoietic method of project development
The project of the Global Autopoietic University as a whole, and the individual sub-projects will unfold in a series of (generally four) phases per cycle. However, the exact duration of the evolvement will depend upon participants, their motivation, knowledge, as well as the group dynamic, and the quality of the emerging network.
It is obvious that, specially at the beginning, the teams and projects should need the help of the spiritual, academic, political and economic leaders. In the last phases the links and the network established between the project and the spiritual, academic, political and economic leaders will enable aself sustainability of the project, without an explicit conducting effort on the side of the project leaders in that area.
Therefore the full project cycle is actually defined in phases divided into kairological units (the right time to do something), and not linearly or chronologically defining dates or occasions. It is important to note that an autopoietic project can evolve only through cyclical implementation of kairological moments.
From our past project experiences we did effectively project an autopoietic phasing plan of proper kairological moments, which will be introduced into the linear timing depending on the variables known to bound the chronological timing of intended and intending individuals, using the autopoietic development method, with the stream of proper moments.
Conclusion: Towards a better future
«Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. » (Matthew 7:7-8)
As our act of faith we submit this project.
