What's in a name?

A brief side-trip: how I came to name this blog: emergence. It’s not so much a novel idea. In fact, a quick perusal of some recent book titles indicates how wide-spread the idea is:

• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software , Steven Johnson, 2002.
• Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, Bedau and Humphreys, 2008
• Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence, Barbara Hubbard, 2001
• Emergence: From Chaos to Order, John Holland, 1999.
• Emergence, David Palmer, 1985
• Engaging emergence: Turning Upheaval Into Opportunity, Peggy Holman, 2010
• The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, Harold Morowitz, 2004
• The Architecture of Emergence: the Evolution of Form in Nature and Civilization, Michael Weinstock, 2010
• The Re-emergence of Emergence: the Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion,  Clayton and Davies, 2008
• (I myself have written an extended essay on emergence as the spiritual and moral foundation of human relationships)

What I have found to be a common theme in these explorations, is how conflict, collapse, deterioration, disorder, chaos, are not necessarily negative. In fact, emergence signals rebirth, regeneration, revival, reconnecting, rebuilding – all a part of the creative enterprise. As a mediator, for example, I can attend to the conflict which two persons may have with each other not as a problem to be solved, or reestablishing order, but the creating of a new relationship narrative, a new horizon of possibility.

While most political and religious institutions detest chaos and conflict, there are spiritual traditions which not only embrace such events but recognize the potential for new life, new beginnings in such situations. For example, Taoism affirms that it is out of chaos in which the new is created. The creation story in Genesis 1 is an affirmation of the creative power of chaos out of which comes the unfolding of life itself.

In the list above, Peggy Holman looks specifically at organizations and systems which are moving into a state of decline, even chaos and identifies key methods by which the new can be created, quickly or incrementally revive, restructure, redesign, rebuild that which is ‘falling apart’.

The recent experience of Egypt is another example of emergence, where the old order was seen truthfully for its incapacity to maintain the well-being of the citizens and out of the chaos is beginning to emerge new possibilities, all in spite of the futile attempts of the old order to maintain the status quo.

The emerging church movement is yet another example of those who have gathered around the evidence of the institutional churches growing incapacities to be relevant and are exercising creative options for new forms and ways of being church.

On a personal level, -- and here is where the theme fits in for me – emergence points to new perspectives that shift the landscape in which I find myself. The old voices and values keep tugging at my imagination. Yet, I sense a chaotic disentangling also taking place. Peeking into that vista awakens the possibility for creative discoveries.

Part of making all this more public is the possibility of sharing a larger conversation with you, one that generates a creative engagement with what is ‘emerging’.