Matt Alspaugh
Reading – from “The Starfish and the Spider” – Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
By 1521, just two years after Cortes first laid eyes on [the Aztec capital city of] Tenchtitlán, the entire Aztec empire … had collapsed. The Aztecs weren’t alone. A similar fate befell the Incas. The Spanish army, led by Francisco Pizarro, captured the Inca leader Atahualpa in 1532. A year later, with all the gold in hand, the Spanish executed Atahualpa and appointed a puppet ruler. Again the annihilation of an entire society took only two years.
These monumental events eventually gave the Spanish control of the continent. By the 1680s, the Spanish forces … headed north and encountered the Apaches.
… The Spanish lost. They lost to a people who at first seemed primitive.
Unlike the Aztecs or the Incas, the Apaches hadn’t put up a single pyramid, built a single highway, or even built a town to speak of.
You’d think that against an army like the Spanish, the Apaches wouldn’t have had a chance. But that wasn’t the case. The Apaches continued to hold off the Spanish for another two centuries.
The Apaches persevered because they were decentralized. … In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters. … Basically there’s no Tenochititlán, and no Montezuma.
But without a Montezuma, how do you lead? Instead of a chief, the Apaches had a Nant’an — a spiritual and cultural leader. The Nant’an led by example and held no coercive power. Tribe members followed the Nant’an because they wanted to, not because they had to.
You didn’t want to follow him? Then you didn’t. The power lay with each individual — you were free to do what you wanted. The phrase “you should” doesn’t even exist in the Apache language. Coercion is a foreign concept.
The Nant’ans were crucial to the well-being of this open system, but decentralization affects more than just leadership. Because there was no capital and no central command post, Apache decisions were made all over the place. A raid on a Spanish settlement, for example, could be conceived in one place, organized in another, and carried out in yet another. You never knew where the Apaches would be coming from. In one sense, there was no place where important decisions were made, and in another sense, decisions were made by everybody everywhere.”
… the traits of a decentralized society-flexibility, shared power, ambiguity-made the Apaches immune to attacks that would have destroyed a centralized society.
Let’s see what happens when a coercive system takes on an open system. The Spanish (a centralized body) had been used to seeing everything through the lens of a centralized, or coercive, system. When they encountered the Apaches, they went with the tactics that had worked in the past (the take the gold and kill the leader strategy) and started eliminating Nant’ans. But as soon as they killed one off, a new Nant’an would emerge. The strategy failed because no one person was essential to the overall well-being of Apache society.[1]
Sermon
Introduction
I learned to scuba dive in New Jersey. We didn’t do our check-out dives in warm blue crystal-clear Caribbean waters, rather the cold, murky, gray waters of the Jersey shore. One check out dive was in a bay, in a kind of an old industrial area, with a railroad trestle running through. The water was wetsuit cold, maybe 45 degrees. Visibility was hand in front of the face, maybe two feet. We went through the exercises, my instructor and me, as I proved to him I knew how to deal with problems with masks and regulators and airtanks. Then he motioned me to follow him under the railway trestle and then to get close to the bottom. There, below us, was a carpet of starfish, shades of gold and silver, thousands of them, overlapping, arms on arms. It was amazing, this profusion of life, in a spot where I didn’t expect to see any life. That was the surprise — I had not expected such enduring vitality. I was filled with awe. Then my vision blurred, the water began to shimmer, I was wondering if I was having a spiritual experience! No, it was just a passing train, going over the trestle above us.
Source of Seventh Principle
This is the seventh and last of a series of sermons considering how our seven principles might guide us in these challenging times we live in. Now, our seventh principle ‘Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part’, is perhaps our most cherished principle, the one mentioned, appealed to, most often.[2] And yet, this principle almost didn’t make it to the list!
You see, our Unitarian Universalist denomination decided to rewrite its founding principles in the early 1980s, primarily to address the fact that the old principles had a lot of gendered language — you know, ‘man’, and ‘men’ and ‘mankind’. Instead, a new version, with six principles was proposed. As is so typical in churches, there was a four year study process in our congregations, culminating with votes at two General Assemblies in 1984 and 1985. But some people at that second GA, thought something was missing, about the respect for the environment, or even for non-human beings, but they couldn’t put their finger on the words. But, just as the body was finishing up the debate on these six principles, Rev. Paul L’Herrou went to the microphone and proposed the seventh principle more or less as it is today. After a little word-smithing, it passed with near unanimous support.
This, by the way, is why it’s good for folks to go to GA. Strange and beautiful things sometimes happen at our General Assemblies.
Book: The Starfish and the Spider
A few months ago, Rev. Renee Ruchutze and I were talking about leadership styles and developing effective congregational leaders. Renee serves on our Unitarian Universalist Association’s regional staff, and she is our congregation’s Primary Contact person. Renee will be preaching here next week, exploring “change and the possibility for the future.”
In addition to working as Primary Contact for a number of congregations in this area, Renee is a leadership consultant for the region, and she is a bit of a leadership wonk. She recommended to me the book, “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations”[3], suggesting it sounded a lot like the leadership style I was trying to describe to her.
The book, now a decade old, makes this point: Starfish and spiders look kind of similar, a central part with legs. But they are different; I quote:
“If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.[4]”
Spiders represent centralized organizations, like most businesses and governments. If you want to take them over or shut them down, you go after the head. I know some of us think our nation is living through something like that, right now. Somebody has messed with our head, and here we are, trying to get through, with a dysfunctional government.
On the other hand, the starfish represents a decentralized organization, with no obvious head. The thinking, the control, in a starfish is distributed in the legs. The book gives numerous examples of starfish type organizations, many from high tech. But as I said, the book is a decade old, which in high tech is eons, so many of the examples — Napster, Kazaa — are dated or long gone, and others, designed on the starfish concept, like Skype, have been absorbed into the spider organization that is Microsoft. But I can think of modern examples, such as the anonymity software Tor, or for that matter, Bitcoin, the electronic currency.
The book’s pivotal example of a starfish is not some tech company, but a nation of people. The Apaches, whom we heard about earlier, beautifully illustrate how decentralized organizations can function and prevail for a long time against much larger, more powerful centralized adversaries. In the reading, we learned that the Apaches survived for two centuries in conflict against the Spanish and then the United States.
If I were to search around today for a similar decentralized organization, it might be the Islamic State, or ISIL. Think about this week’s attack in London. One man, one rental car, and one knife, and we have an incident which broadly influences how powerful countries including ours will behave. We are already spent billions, on our military — the classic spider organization — to try to wipe out this Islamic State. More ominously, actions like Trump’s travel ban serve to feed the hostility that will drive more people to support ISIL. Regardless of how you feel about the morality of its actions, I predict the Islamic State will be around a while; it has proven to be very hard to eradicate.
And yet, there are ways to defeat highly decentralized starfish organizations. Consider that those Apaches remained a threat to the United States, after the Spanish, well into the twentieth century. The book describes what happened:
Here’s what broke Apache society: The Americans gave them cattle. It’s that simple. Once the Nant’ans had possession of a scarce resource — cows — their power shifted from spiritual to material. Where previously the Nant’ans led by example, now they could reward and punish tribal members by giving and withholding this resource…. The power structure, once flat, became hierarchical, with power concentrated at the top.[5]
Now the The Starfish and The Spider does note that each organizational form — centralized and decentralized — does have its place. One certainly wants centralized decision-making on, say, a passenger airplane. As the book says,
“You don’t want Johnson, from seat 28J to decide that right now would be a good time to land.”[6]
But the book concludes that, too often, our organizations are excessively centralized, and they could become more effective if they moved along the continuum toward starfishdom, being more decentralized.
Church
Consider how churches work. The classic model has been to have the power vested in clergy or in the church board, or both. Anything that would happen had to be approved. You had to go through a committee, which had to go through the board at its monthly meeting, to do anything. Or you had to ask the minister, who too often would have to ask someone else for permission.
Decentralizing, even by a bit, means giving more power to teams and to individuals, allowing them to interconnect. It means taking risks that people might do things differently than they’ve been done in the past. It means taking risks on letting people emerge as leaders when projects emerge that need leadership. I see this happening in multiple areas in our church now — with our social justice progressive group, our singing group, our building and grounds work parties, the local food lunches — these things are just popping up and being implemented by people who see a need and fill it.
Decentralizing also means that even when a leader departs, as I am departing, the organization can still function. UUYO will likely be without a minister for the summer months at least, and your next minister will have different areas of focus and interest than I did. I have no doubt that you will function well, provided people are willing to step up and fill the gaps that may appear.
Thinking Broadly
Now the Starfish and the Spider is causing me to think more broadly about other structures and organizations that might represent starfish organizations.
So for example, a free market economy seems a lot like the starfish. There’s no central controller. Instead the web of buyers and sellers works to define what’s needed, produce it, and get it to market. And yet I wonder — how long would a free market economy last without the central control of a strong government to police property rights, copyrights, patents, and financial exchange? Cut that head off, and what would happen? Maybe the market economy is more like a spider than a starfish.
Or for example, consider that the environment, the ecosystem, might be a much better example of the starfish. Again, no central controller — though some theists might beg to differ. Cut out great parts of the ecosystem, and it comes back, different certainly, but thriving. The system just evolves, it grows new legs in the form of new genera and species to fill the gaps.
In the earth’s history, there have been at least five mass extinctions, on the scale of the dinosaurs biting the dust 66 million years ago. And we humans may be causing a sixth mass extinction today, through climate change and habitat destruction.
Will we extinct ourselves? We might disappear, but I expect that the ecosystem will evolve, take a different form, and life will endure. The loss will be ours. Our world will have lost a species of intelligent, sentient, communicating creatures.
And what then? Maybe the world will weep.
Maybe the world will weep, metaphorically, because maybe the world, the planet earth, is alive.
Gaia Hypothesis
That’s the idea known as the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia was the creation of the brilliant biologist Lynn Margulis and chemist James Lovelock in the 1970s. They wondered if the line dividing the living part of the earth — the biosphere — from the non-living part — rocks, water, air — was a bit contrived. They wondered if, instead, the whole planet worked together to support life. They noted that there seemed to be patterns of self-regulation, homeostasis, that tended to keep the planet within constraints that could support life. Things like the global temperature, the oxygen content of the air, the pH of the oceans, tend to adjust over time to maintain life. As Lovelock put it,
“[compare] the earth to a giant redwood tree: 99% of a redwood is dead, and only the thin, outside layer—the bark—is alive, and yet the tree itself is most certainly alive.”[7]
The Gaia hypothesis is a brilliant idea, but controversial, and hard to prove or disprove.
However, astrobiologist David Grinspoon now suggests a Gaia hypothesis that might be testable. His version, which he calls the Living Worlds hypothesis, posits that planets on which life gets started adapt to life, and life then becomes abundant. Worlds either end up full of life, or they end up dead. He says,
According to this idea, a planet cannot be “slightly alive” any more than a person can [be] (at least not for long). … An aged planet such as Mars, if it is not obviously, conspicuously alive like Earth, is probably completely dead.
If the little whiffs of methane recently reported by the Curiosity rover turn out to be the signs of pockets of Martian life on an otherwise generally dead world, this would prove that my Living Worlds hypothesis is wrong, and that life can take on very non-Gaia-like forms elsewhere. [8]
As a scientist, being able to offer a falsifiable hypothesis is a big thing. It changes mere speculation into testable theory. If it does prove to be true, we’ll need to change our thinking. He says,
When we stop thinking of planets as merely objects or places where living beings may or may not be present, but rather as themselves living or nonliving entities, it can color the way we think about the origin of life. Perhaps life is something that happens not on a planet but to a planet: It is something that a planet becomes.[9]
What Gaia means is that we are part of a planet that truly is alive. Ours is a planet that is fundamentally different from other planets. What Gaia means to us, as humans, is that not only are we part of a web of life, we are part of a living organism that is the Earth. When we understand this we begin to see ourselves differently.
Conclusion – Seeing Ourselves Differently
Ecologist John Seed writes in an essay, “Beyond Anthropocentrism”[10]
When humans investigate and see through their layers of anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. The human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognized as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and … you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them. … “I am protecting the rainforest” develops to “I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking.” What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature.
And so, as activists, concerned about the environment, about climate change, about fossil fuels, we begin to see ourselves as part of the interdependent web, certainly, but we see that web differently.
We begin to see ourselves not only as part of the rainforest protecting itself, but as part of the Earth protecting itself. We see ourselves as a part of Gaia, of the living planet, protecting itself. We see ourselves as the part of Gaia recently evolved into thinking. And, even in our thinking, we see ourselves as part of Gaia that still has to grow into wisdom.
May we become wise, not just for ourselves — homo sapiens, but for the earth itself. May we become part of wise earth — Gaia sapiens.
Notes:
1 The Starfish and the Spider, p. 17-21 (excerpted)
2 Collier, Kenneth. Our Seven Principles in Story and Verse: A Collection for Children and Adults (Kindle Location 1147). Skinner House Books. Kindle Edition.
3 by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations” 2008.
4 The Starfish and the Spider, back cover
5 ibid. p. 151-152.
6 ibid. p. 19
7 Lovelock, J. Ages of Gaia Norton (1988), quoted in http://nautil.us/issue/12/feedback/the-gaia-hypothesis-is-still-giving-us-feedback
8 David Grinspoon, http://nautil.us/blog/its-time-to-take-the-gaia-hypothesis-seriously
9 ibid.