Post-Normal Times
Ziauddin Sardar’s term (2010) for the present era — an age “characterised by uncertainty, rapid change, realignment of power, upheaval and chaotic behaviour. We live in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense.” Sardar frames postnormal times around the three Cs: complexity, chaos, and contradictions — conditions under which “the notions of control and certainty are becoming obsolete” and no single model or method can answer our interconnected ills. 1
The post-normal science root
The concept descends from post-normal science (PNS), developed by Jerome Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz in the 1990s for science-policy and risk problems. PNS applies where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent” (Ravetz, 1999) — conditions that break the Kuhnian “normal science” model of routine, paradigm-governed problem-solving. Under PNS the peer community must be extended beyond credentialed experts to stakeholders, because the facts alone cannot settle what to do. 2
Sardar’s move was to generalize PNS from a science-policy frame to a civilizational one: post-normal is no longer a property of certain problems but of the times themselves. In post-normal times, the world has both centrifugal and centripetal tendencies — transcendence and collapse coexist. “Collapse contains the fractal seeds of transcendence.” 3
The creativity question
Alfonso Montuori (“Beyond Postnormal Times,” Futures 43, 2011 — the piece Pickard cites for “peak future”) argues that in postnormal times creativity stops being the province of lone tortured geniuses and becomes “an everyone, everyday, everywhere process” — participatory and collaborative. This is the optimistic counterweight to Sardar’s diagnosis: the same conditions that make the world illegible also democratize the capacity to re-imagine it. (Note: Montuori’s paper has no open-access copy; cited via the manifesto’s bibliography.)
Cross-Domain Connections
- vuca: The military’s VUCA framework and post-normal times address overlapping conditions from different traditions — VUCA from strategic leadership, post-normal from science policy. Sardar’s three Cs map loosely onto VUCA’s four letters.
- gonzo-futurism: Pickard’s manifesto is a response to post-normal conditions.
- security: Cybersecurity operates in inherently post-normal conditions — facts are uncertain (zero-days), values are in dispute (privacy vs. security), stakes are high, and decisions are urgent.
See Also
- gonzo-futurism
- vuca
- ooda-loop
- justin-pickard
- technological-singularity — the limit case of post-normal conditions: models themselves break
- clarke-horizon — a frame for when civilization’s facts become illegible in principle
- unknown-knowns — post-normal conditions elevate the unknown-unknowns quadrant; the unknown-knowns literature asks what we already know but can’t access
Sources
- Ziauddin Sardar 2010 — Welcome to Postnormal Times — the coinage (Futures 2010)
- Jerome Ravetz 1999 — What is Post-Normal Science? — the post-normal-science root (Futures 1999)
- 2012 — Pickard Gonzo Futurist — the gonzo-futurist uptake