The Ecology of Openness

Abstract

Discourses on ‘the Open Society,’ especially since Popper’s World War II book,2 have tended to share four characteristics. They have assumed the distinction between Open and Closed Societies to be a clear and meaningful distinction corresponding to something in reality. They have assumed that an Open Society was good and a Closed Society was bad. They have assumed that ‘we’ (moderns, Westerners, Anglo-Americans, etc.) live in a more-or-less Open Society, which, however, is threatened by forces of closure (fascism, communism, barbarism, etc.). Above all, they have tacitly selected certain elements of the overall system of social control for attention, ignoring others. To the extent that these assumptions have gone unexamined, talk of ‘the Open Society’ has been more the defensive ideology of a Liberalism-turned-conservative in the face of threats, than it has been political or social philosophy. My thesis is that the challenge posed by the contemporary ‘ecological crisis’ forces us to become more philosophical, to make explicit, reconsider, and radically redefine the formerly tacit dimension of the Open Society paradigm.