| How Most of What We’ve Been Taught to Believe is False, and How a New Understanding of Our Place on Earth Could Change Everything Introduction: The Journey This Weblog1 describes a personal intellectual and emotionaljourney that began for me in 1999. This journey stemmed from a profoundsense that there is something terribly wrong with the state of our planet,and that a mental illness has plagued the Woodstock generation since theheady days of the 1960s (and perhaps our whole species for millennia). A steadily growing collection of writings in the 1990s, in the arts and sciencesand particularly in the new discipline called Cultural Studies, describe boththe physical malaise of Earth and the emotional malaise of people oppressedand paralysed by guilt and grief over our species having caused it. The writers are beginning to articulate holistically the long-term causesof the problem, and that the key solution lies not in religion, or technology,or economics, or politics, or self-improvement, or social programs, but ratherin a revolution in the way we think about human culture and our place on Earth,and the creation of a new shared vision for the future of the world. The reason that such a revolution will be so difficult (if it occurs atall) is that it will require each of us to un-learn almost everything wehave been taught to believe, both overtly and subtly, since our birth. That does not imply that there is some great conspiracy at work. Instead,just as a rumour with the appropriate seeding and cultivation can become sowidely accepted that it becomes an unquestioned myth, so have we come toaccept as indisputable a huge cultural myth about our species and its purpose. This myth permeates everything we do, shapes our goals and ambitions, limitsus in truly horrifying ways, and is perpetuated from generation to generation. The revolution will require many people working in coordination to persuadeenough others why most of what we believe and do is based on a fundamentalmisunderstanding about who we are. By questioning and correcting thatmisunderstanding we could change our culture and hence we would change everything,since our understanding determines what we believe, and what we believe determineswhat we do. I’m not naive enough to believe, despite Margaret Mead’s encouragingand often-quoted reassurance: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thingthat ever has.” that this fundamental new understanding would be easyor quick to achieve. This change is not like the Industrial Revolutionwhere a rapid and sudden change of thinking arguably produced rapid and suddenchanges in human organization and behaviour. In fact I seriously doubtthat this fundamental change of thinking will occur soon enough, or in largeenough numbers, to save our planet from an ugly, brutal and miserable cataclysm. But there is a chance, and there is now, I believe, a credible set of strategiesthat could save us from ourselves. That’s what this Weblog is about. My purpose for writing this is two-fold:
I have no pretensions to make anyone think like me, or to start a movement,or a political party, or (even worse) a religion. All I hope to do isshare the thought process I have been through, which has liberated me froma kind of prison that my unconscious acceptance of the pervasive myths ofour culture had kept me in all my life. I am merely planting seeds ofdoubt about accepted myths about our culture and purpose on Earth. The two dozen writers and thinkers referred to in this document have independentlycome to a remarkably consistent understanding from very different backgroundsand points of view. For everyone this journey must be different – weall think differently and come to believe things differently. I thinkit is possible that, if enough people begin to think critically and considerthe possibility that our history, our purpose and our nature are not whatwe’ve been led to believe, and spread the word, and if enough people startto agree on the goals, roles and processes needed to change our future, andtruly believe the change is possible, then by many different, individual journeyswe might come to a common understanding and a shared vision, and save theworld. Chapter One: Full House: Homo Sapiens as a Cosmic Accident In 1999 I read a book by Stephen Jay Gould, a palaeontologist who died recently(May 2002) of a disease that was supposed to kill him 20 years ago. The book was called Full House 2, and it presented some controversialhypotheses about the history of life on Earth, drawing on our planet’s fossilhistory and on the theory of probability. Some of these hypotheses areas follows; if you are skeptical about any of them, please read his book:
Gould’s theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists andthe religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other evolutionistswho would like to believe evolution and the dominance of the human speciesis a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose, result or guiding hand. Gould distained what he considered the muddling of natural philosophy (science)and moral philosophy (religion and ethics) as he explained in his final bookRocks of Ages 2, in which he argues there is room for both philosophiesbut that attempts to integrate them (as Edward O. Wilson did in his book Consilience)are both futile and unnecessary. Gould ‘s view is shared by Wade Rowland,who, in his book Ockham’s Razor and in his 2001 radio interview withRick Vassalo3 says that both natural and moral philosophy haveanswers to important, but mutually exclusive questions. Many people find Gould’s theories cold, mathematical, and unsatisfying,but to me they were a revelation. Instead of looking for meaning inscience, he said we should look at science as an interesting, and sometimesuseful, exercise in pattern-recognition and model-building, and an attemptto understand the relationships and nature of the ‘natural’ physical world. Nothing more. The obsession with single integrating theories about the physical universestrikes me as way too serious, forced and illogical. My observationis that the physical universe is incredibly simple (even bacteria can figureout how to cope with it very successfully) and at the same time infinitelycomplex. It seems counter-intuitive to me that there should be a beginningor end to space, or time, or any ‘dimension’ of our universe, that there shouldbe a finite number of universes or dimensions, or that more than a tiny pieceof the physical universe should be within our physical perception or ourintellectual comprehension. The perception that the world was made of earth, air, fire & water,and later ‘elements’, and later ‘atoms’ and later ‘sub-atomic particles’,were all valid, useful, interesting models of reality that served us verywell. Each of these models involved a small and finite number of basicconstituents of matter, and within our limits of perception accurately describedour universe in useful and interesting ways. But now we have scientistsmaking up staggeringly complex, tortuous theories (like the 11-dimensionalstring theory) hammering ever-squarer pegs into ever-rounder holes and expoundingthat theirs is, or will soon be, the ultimate expression and explanationof the entire physical universe. I don’t think so. Scientific observation is human nature and natural to all sentient creatures.Our dog Chelsea will sit alert and motionless for hours on the hill behindour house just observing life on the nearby ponds and wilderness forest. For her this is an exercise of scientific investigation, not motivated byany survival instinct; the combination of sights, smells and sounds are endlesslyinteresting, and the data are clearly studied, learned and memorized for potentialfuture application. So if science is merely an interesting and sometimes useful study of thephysical world, I realized I would have to look elsewhere for the causes of,and solutions to, Earth’s problems. Chapter Two: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Life of Animals At the same time I was reading Gould, I was also reading Jeff Masson’s workon the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When ElephantsWeep4. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observerof cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animalswere almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us tobe different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentallydifferent. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsureof, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate. Masson’s extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not onlydispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, asapologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, labelanimal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do soin total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidencethat animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of profound emotion, long-lastingmemory and astute reasoning. I have since read other works that have deepened my convictions, and appliedthem to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravensand other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich’s book Mind of the Raven 5, which was brought to my attention by BC naturalist and freelance writerBill Atkinson, is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). Atthis point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance andinaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I hear arguments that “we need to solve the problems of humans first”or that “you can’t equate the life of an animal with a human life” I am incredulous- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fearand hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of ‘all thingsnatural’ is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind acceptanceof religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can’t fathom such a position. I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs,but I can only hope that, with people like Masson systematically debunkingthe myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will atleast move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what otheranimals have to teach us, and to say to us. Chapter Three: Saul, Jay, Dyson & Daly: Economists and PoliticalScientists Explain How We Lost Our Way, and Offer Some Difficult Answers In university I found Economics (the ‘dismal science’) and Political Sciencedry, often wildly inaccurate and of limited relevance. In the past fewyears I have learned about some new, broader approaches to economics andpolitics that suggested they might yet be useful, and perhaps even worthyof being called ‘sciences’. I started with John Ralston Saul’s The UnconsciousCivilization 6, in which he argues the following:
As a senior employee of a large corporation, I can attest that this is notan issue of class struggle: most corporate executives live a lifestyle ofservitude to their organizations, working absurd hours to earn more moneythan they could ever hope to spend, and sacrificing their personal and familylives and often their health to the corporate mission. The corporationswe originally created 500 years ago to improve the efficient flow of goodsand capital have become tyrannical masters over all of us. The resulthas been massive global physical, psychological, and intellectual poverty.Still, like addicts seeking yet another fix, we believe that more globalization,more ‘free’ trade and less government intervention will somehow bring humanitythe prosperity, peace and freedom that eludes us. The accountants (of which I am one) are no help either: They define wealthand prosperity for us with yardsticks that take no account of the true costs(environmental and psychological) of material ‘success’ (the Exxon Valdezoil spill and the AIDS epidemic were both positive contributors to GNP). They preach a gospel of prosperity through endless growth that, like a pyramidscheme, cannot possibly be sustained. They measure our welfare by theaccumulation of ever-greater quantities of over-priced, wasteful, shoddy junkby ever-more humans crowded ever-closer together, rather than by our health,happiness, the prevalence of peace, justice and learning and the sustainabilityof our civilization. Ralston Saul’s arguments are echoed by other counter-culture social commentatorslike Noam Chomsky (in Profits Over People and Manufacturing Consent). Though Ralston Saul persuasively diagnoses the political and economic malaise,he is much less successful at suggesting solutions, and the experience ofreading his work left me even more depressed than I was already. SoI tried some other economic works, starting with UK economist Peter Jay’sThe Wealth of Man 8. Jay takes a novel approach to economics,starting with pre-history instead of ancient Egypt and Greece. I foundhis arguments even more disturbing than Ralston Saul’s:
Jay concludes his book by hoping (rather than predicting) that future generationswill be much more astute at political management than generations past, ifeconomic disaster is to be averted. In other words, unless we are ableto better control human nature, we are lost. Since the book was writtenbefore the full reality of the 1994 holocaust in Rwanda had been revealed,when the savagery in the Balkan states and the Southern ex-Soviet republicslooked as if it might finally end, and before the horrendous events of September11, 2001 allowed countries everywhere to justify any acts of war against anyenemy real or imagined as ‘anti-terrorist’ activities, I was not reassured. Still looking for solutions, I read a brilliant interview in Wired magazinewith scientist/futurist Freeman Dyson9, by Stewart Brand. Dyson was upbeat:
I was, and am, sceptical that these developments will come about, becauseof all the vested interests that would be obviously opposed to them, and becauseof the meekness of ordinary citizens to see through the myths they are fedabout how well off they are and how powerless they are to change anythinganyway. But more importantly, I was not sure how development 3 couldcome about even if there was political will to do so. Only an enormousdissatisfaction with the status quo could produce such a change. Ibegan to wonder how such dissatisfaction could be fomented. In the meantime, I read some of the work of another dissident economist,Herman Daly, most notably an interview with him on the Developing Ideas 10 website, about his new book For the Common Good. His majorarguments are:
My reaction to Daly’s ideas was the same as my reaction to Dyson’s: Thesolutions make good sense, but what will it take to bring about the enormouschanges needed to make them happen? Chapter Four: In My Own Words: The Role of Innovation in AchievingChange Specifically, I believe innovation could develop important new technologiesthat could do the following six things:
These scientific & commercial measures, when combined with four socialand political measures:
together constituted my first prescription for healing the world by reducingour impact on Earth and allowing our ecosystem to re-establish its natural,rich and diverse balance. At this point I began to sense that we have an emotional need to heal ourselvesas well, to re-attune ourselves to nature and re-integrate ourselves backinto the ecosystem of which we are inextricably a part. As a resultof our disassociation from the rest of nature we were, I concluded, sufferinga kind of mental illness on a grand scale, possibly the same kind of mentalillness that one human separated for too long from other humans suffers. I had a sinking feeling that without this major large-scale healing of thehuman psyche, all attempts to persuade people of the need for massive political,social, scientific and commercial changes to heal our planet would prove futile. Chapter Five: The State of the World The WorldWatch Institute issues an annual report called State of the World12. In the year 2000 report, the authors identifiedseven environmental trends that, uncorrected, could lead to ecological disaster. They were: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinkingcropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the extinctionof plant and animal species. That report also described the 50% declinein life expectancy in much of sub-Saharan Africa due to the scourge of AIDS,illustrated the cascading effects of ecological disruptions, described themassive impact on marine populations resulting from destruction of coral reefs,and explained the alarming persistence and accumulation up the food chainof toxic chemicals. This report is only one of a massive number of recent credible studies ofthe cataclysmic effects of our ‘management’ of the planet. Recognizingall this evidence, in 1992 a World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity 13was signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries. It stated”Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No morethan one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats wenow confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is requiredif vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet isnot to be irretrievably mutilated.” A decade has since passed and the warning has been ignored (in factit was not even covered by most news publications). The opportunityto begin to address these problems was squandered as George Bush and otherleaders reneged on their countries’ commitment to ratify the remarkable KyotoAccord in the face of powerful corporate interests that pressured them toabandon the legacy for our children in favour of short-term profits. Highly compelling, actionable reports on how and why to improve our environmentquickly, efficiently and without economic hardship were ignored as businessleaders and the media instead irresponsibly and gleefully glommed onto theunsupportable, unscientific, head-in-the-sand denials of so-called ‘skepticalenvironmentalists’, even after their claims had been debunked by mountainsof evidence and hundreds of credible experts. There seems to be something perverse in human nature, a ‘holocaust denialsyndrome’ that causes us to prefer to pretend that difficult and tragic eventsdidn’t happen and aren’t happening, instead of facing them and dealing withthem. Perhaps that’s borne out of our sense of helplessness to do anythingabout these events – if we can’t do anything, what’s the point in knowing? I believe that many corporations and political machines encourage this senseof helplessness to stifle dissent, stabilize markets and entrench their power.And sometimes knowing is just too terrible to bear: if most consumers sawwhat happens in slaughterhouses and factory farms they would become vegetarians. But to some extent this sense of helplessness is valid. To get a massiveship to change direction takes enormous patience and skill and a lot of timeand effort, and, as in the case of the Exxon Valdez, sometimes there is justnot enough time, and there is nothing to do except get drunk and turn away. In his book The Sacred Balance 14, David Suzuki says there aresome things you can do, and one of them is to not feel guilty, since guiltjust saps energy, creates and deepens mental illness, and accomplishes nothing. What is needed now, he says, is “exchange of ideas, to spread the word aswe all work towards reducing our effect on the planet, so we can live sustainablyand create public support that will ultimately change political priorities.” He also says we need to put new effort on a fourth -R- (in addition to reduce,reuse and recycle) – redesign to produce things using less resources, thingsthat in turn use less resources in operation. In addition, he recommends thatwe spend more time ‘out in nature’. And he also quotes an unorthodox theologian, Thomas Berry, from his bookThe Dream of the Earth 15: “We are in trouble just now becausewe do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The oldstory, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yetwe have not learned the new story.” The old story is about man being the centre of a god-created universe, aboutthe Earth and its creatures being here for man’s benefit, and about the constantstruggle between good and evil and the chance of salvation through livingright and working hard. If Gould was even half-right about how idyllicand simple life was for millennia before man ‘learned’ this story, it is notsurprising it has lost its appeal. The question, then, is what is thenew story? Chapter Six: A New Story: Ishmael and the Story of B David Jones, who like me works in the field of knowledge management, readmy Website and suggested I read the book Ishmael 16 by Daniel Quinn. Quinn has spent most of his life trying to find answers to the problems thatthis Weblog has described. He chose to document his assessment of theproblems, and suggested solutions, in stories, which I found somewhat disingenuous:If you have something important to say, say it, don’t beat around the bushor cloak your message as something else. Ishmael tells thestory of a telepathic gorilla who explains how humans have got their ownhistory terribly wrong, and offers his services as mentor to rewrite thathistory. The sequel, The Story of B, re-tells the story, only thistime the hero/mentor is a disgraced theologian, and the messages are at lastpackaged up in straightforward form in an 80-page appendix called The Teachingsof B. To those of you that are not put off by the convoluted delivery, I wouldhighly recommend either book, since the messages in both are profound, important,and provocative. Following is a flat and unjust simplification of thesemessages, which should at least give you a sense of how they answered severalof the questions I mention above:
Quinn proffers some solutions, and some good news,about all this:
I found Quinn’s re-writing of history very credible and useful, and devoidof the dubious romantic ‘back to nature’ rhetoric that pervades most radicalenvironmentalists’ work. He argues persuasively that there is no wayback to the garden (and in fact the garden is the perfect symbol of the problem).I’m even willing to buy some (but not all) of the ‘cut food production’ prescription,for reasons I will relate later in this Weblog. I’m just not patientenough to buy the rest of the solution: spread the word, and just as the IndustrialRevolution transformed society from the seed of a radical new idea, so canwe save the world by collectively re-learning a radical (millions of years)old idea. So with the problem and its causes better articulated, but still in searchof more plausible solutions, I journeyed on. Chapter Seven: The Axemaker’s Gift and the Fight to Be Oneself Another book that David Jones recommended to me is James Burke (the Connectionsguy) and Robert Ornstein’s The Axemaker’s Gift17. This bookavoids all issues of moral philosophy and lets the science tell the story,a story much like Quinn’s:
I don’t have any objections to any of these solutions, except that theyassume that enough of the people who have the power and resources to do thesethings actually understand the problem and have the will to commit theirpower and resources to doing these things. I wouldn’t bet my life, or thelife of our planet, on this assumption being true. The argument about how our culture and our technologies actually changethe way we think recalled to me some arguments I had in my youth about howour culture (in those days we called it ‘society’) has so effectively brainwashedus that we are all now inmates of a vast human cultural concentration camp(or asylum). Our culture also effectively prohibits escape from thisprison: suicide and mind-altering drugs are sins, non-conformity results inbeing shunned or treated medically, and radical ideas are scorned and theirperpetrators jailed (a prison within a prison). Our culture attemptsto indoctrinate us all ever-deeper into homogeneous zero-diversity group-think,or, as e. e. cummings put it more articulately:
I see this not only as a problem of imagination (as Burke & Ornsteindemonstrate) but also a problem of cultural agility: How can we expect enoughof the 7 billion brainwashed, constantly-indoctrinated people of this worldto be able to overcome the massive social, political, cultural and religiousdogma that has been drummed into their heads since birth (to the point wherethe physical structure and patterns of the brain have actually evolved tobetter store that dogma), to see the problem and to have the courage to takeunpopular action? My sense is that each of us will have to fight two huge cultural strugglesat the same time: The first struggle is to unlearn human history andre-learn our species’ true place on Earth, and the second is to courageously,tirelessly and actively counter the (both deliberate and innocent) misinformationwe are fed every day, about everything from globalization and corporatismto genetic engineering to terrorism to the state of the world, and re-couchthe corrected information in our new sense of who we are and why we are here. Only through these twin struggles, only by reinventing our sense of ourselvesand at the same time challenging everything and thinking critically abouteverything can we hope to overcome the intellectual poverty that pervadesour world and draw together the resources and creativity and energy neededto do something. That’s what I think moral philosophy is all about: not whatis right and wrong, which to me are nonsensical and culturally biased constructs,but about what needs to be done to make our world better, or at least well. In other words, an Agenda for Action. Fundamental to this is the need for a new benchmark to replace ‘progress'(another culturally biased construct). I’d vote for the term ‘well-being’,which, although it’s awkward is less ambiguous and more inclusive than theterm ‘health’. If the presence of more and more material wealth (in aggregateand per capita) is the current barometer of the current benchmark of progress,I’d nominate absence of suffering and diversity of life as the new barometersof the ‘well-being’ benchmark. And perhaps since the goal is to minimize oneand maximize the other, the ratio of (diversity of life / extent of suffering)could be the replacement for GNP. Anyone for RWB, the ratio of well-being? Chapter Eight: How Bad Is It? A Language OlderThan Words
Chapter Nine: More Thoughts on Separateness, and HowWe Got Here The main unanswered question in my mind at this stage is understanding whatmotivated the aberrant and now dominant human culture to lose its roots andtry to create a separate, human-centred reality, or as James Taylor put itin his song Gaia: Turn away from your animal kind Quinn’s claim that this cultural aberration was an improbable accidentaldoesn’t ring right with me. My best answer is this:
Peter Jay would seem to argue that striving/greed for more than a reasonableamount of anything is an inherent Darwinian trait to ensure that all resourcesthat maximize each individual’s chances for survival are acquired and protectedto the greatest possible extent. But surely a species that accommodatesmore of its kind at a healthy but not rapacious level of consumption and possessionshould stand a better chance of surviving and thriving than one that insatiablysteals as much as it can from its own kind? Geese, for example, are fiercely protective of their selected turf, butnever to the point of depriving other geese of the basic needs for survival– when populations rise, they somehow figure out that they’ll have to makedo with less acreage per goose and shrink the territory they protect accordingly(within certain limits), a perfectly Darwinian behaviour. They relyon other species to cull the herd if it gets too big, rather than doing sothemselves. What’s more, geese travel a lot and have both winter andsummer ‘homes’ and, barring illness or accident, mate for life. Theyalso explore a fairly wide area around their territory to assess threats,alternate food sources etc. However, they don’t always nest in exactlythe same place every year. Their ‘flock’ (or whatever the goose’s tribeis called) first searches for a summer or winter territory that is large enoughto accommodate the entire flock, and then each individual pair stakes outtheir family space, which entails squabbles until roughly equal-quality areashave been ‘agreed upon’. Sometimes that’s the same space as last year,sometimes another flock has arrived first and staked that out so they picka new area. Apparently if it’s the same space as last year each familyhas ‘dibs’ on last year’s plot, and otherwise they select in pecking order. And there’s a maximum space beyond which they won’t occupy even if there’sno competition — it’s left for the next flock. It’s very much likethe settling of the old West. It’s also intrinsically tribal, whichraises the question about whether human culture is (was, still is, couldbecome again) tribal. For all kinds of reasons I think the answer is’yes’. So if it’s not Darwinian and not hormonal, what accounts for these dysfunctionalgreedy human behaviours? I suspect that they are caused by a mental illness due to overpopulation. In other words, just as the law of limitedcompetition breaks down under situations of extreme overcrowding (even geesewill fight other geese to the death under such circumstances, killing enoughoutsiders to get the total number of geese per acre back within what theyintuitively know to be limits under which all members can thrive), our ‘humannature’ breaks down under unbearable stress, isolation and deprivation. I cannot and will not believe that the depravity that Jensen describes isthe true nature of our culture. We cannot have become so fundamentallydifferent from life on Earth in only thirty thousand years. If some alien species suddenly culled our human herd and our fertility rateand set us up in evenly-spaced neighbourhoods, like geese, with all our materialneeds comfortably looked after, would we then ‘cultivate the arts’, as Jayputs it, or ‘go on striving’ to the detriment of our peers and us all? My answer would be that we would probably go on striving, not because thatis our basic nature, but because we have been conditioned for millennia tobelieve that is the human way to behave, and (if you believe Burke) some ofthat conditioning is now hard-wired into our brains and must be unlearned. Living as I do with a non-human animal, in an area that teems with non-humancommunities (beavers, birds, deer, coyotes, rabbits etc.) that seem to survivejust fine without all the baggage of laws, wars and religions of civilization,and which seem genuinely happy, contented and at peace (and there’s now lotsof scientific evidence I’m not just anthropomorphizing here), it seems tome that the start of the answer is to study and learn (or perhaps re-learnafter a few millennia of forgetting) why they’re so much better at livingthan we are (sacrilege, eh?). I really can’t make myself believe thatour brains get in the way. I have to acknowledge that most animals havebeen around much longer than we have (we’ve been around several million years,while our beaver’s ancestors date back at least 60 million years) so it shouldn’tbe surprising they’ve learned a lot more about living successfully than wenewcomers. What are some of the lessons they have for us?
There has been a lot written recently about how systems, including communitiesself-organize. A consultant I met at a Herman Miller consortium on leadershipand the future of business a few years ago had a simple but brilliant summaryof how business operates: ‘It’s all about goals, roles and processes. People in business want and need to know what they’re striving for (goals),what part they are expected to play in attaining those goals (roles), andhow at least in general terms they should go about fulfilling those roles(processes). Good management and leadership are all about articulating thosethree things and then getting out of the way.’ Since this is a very non-interventionist approach to running a ‘communityof practice’, I wonder whether ‘natural’ communities might not function effectivelythe same way. In nature the goal is clear: survival of the community(not the individual) and diversity of life in the larger ecosystem (reallyan extension of the first – diversity optimizes ecosystem agility and henceenhances the likelihood of each community surviving as a part of the greatercommunity of all life on Earth). In nature the roles are also clear: parental and supporting (in most speciesa minority of each community are breeders), teaching and nurturing, feeding,learning and recreation (ravens love to do aerial barrel rolls, ski down roofsand sing to themselves especially at the end of the day). In the rarecases where each individual’s role isn’t crystal clear, the pecking orderwill step in and make them so. And in nature the processes are also clear: they are learned from parentsand from peers, passed on from generation to generation, and sometimes madeup in innovative response to unique problems (ravens quickly learn to pullup a string, talon-over-talon, while sitting on a branch to retrieve a well-securedtreat that cannot be obtained any other way). Do we know our goals, roles and processes? We certainly have enoughpundits (priests, writers, politicians and editorialists) giving us conflictingmessages about what they should be (which in business, as in nature, is asure-fire road to failure). It seems to me that if there is a need fora ‘new story’ (as Thomas Berry says), that story needs to tell us what ourgoals, roles and processes should be, in an intuitive, inclusive and persuasiveway, not a dogmatic way. So here is my attempt to do this: Chapter Ten: How to Save the World:
I have already hinted at what our goals should be: Healthy communities ina healthy world free of suffering, and Stability and diversity of all lifeon Earth (following the law of limited competition). On the followingchart, I have used a process called systems thinking, developed by Peter Sengeand others, to try to show the processes of three types (technological andinnovative, social and educational, and economic, legal and political), thatcould lead to the achievement of these goals. Arrows point from causeto effect. The chart also shows two intermediary goals (achievementof which in turn leads to achievement of the primary goals) and one by-productgoal (which is achieved by virtue of, and as a consequence of, achievementof the primary goals. Since the chart shows a positive, life-affirmingand self-sustaining system, Senge calls it a ‘virtuous cycle’. The chart is sufficiently complex that the on-line reader is encouragedto print it out and read it, with the accompanying explanatory notes, inhard copy. A current state of the world can be similarly described by simply convertingthe description in each box to its opposite as shown in the second chart below:Goals then become End Problems, Solutions (leading to the Goals) then becomeCauses (leading to the Problems), and the ‘virtuous cycle’ then becomes ourcurrent ‘vicious cycle’. It is both enlightening and frightening tosee just how all these negatives work together to sustain and reinforce ourcurrent unsustainable culture. Ultimately our task is how to convert each negative box in the second chartto the corresponding positive box in the first chart. Since most ofthe boxes have more than one arrowhead pointing to them, this requires a multi-prongedapproach. If we were for example to replace today’s laws and religions,laws that subvert the rights of non-humans (box P6 on the second chart),with laws that supported animal rights (box P6 on the first chart),that change by itself would be insufficient to achieve any of the goals,because all the other technological, social, political and economic forceswould continue to sustain the vicious cycle. What is needed is a coordinatedeffort to change all of the negatives to their corresponding positives together. That is where Roles come in. We need scientists, technologists andinventors to work on converting the processes shown in red, economists, lawyers,politicians (and even accountants) to work on converting the processes shownin black, and teachers and the rest of us to work on converting the processesshown in blue. Only by working collaboratively and simultaneously onall parts of the problem can we solve it. We are just like hospitalworkers trying to move and heal a horribly overweight and reluctant patientwith multiple related injuries. Except that the patient is us. That is my prescription for saving the world. Before it can work weneed to do two other things first:
There is a third prerequisite for change. Some of the solutions andprocesses I’ve suggested in this Weblog may appear quite bloodless. We cannot win the debate for the validity and necessity of these actions bypurely intellectual argument. Only a small part of the enormous collectiveenergy that must be engaged to turn our world around will stem from the factthat this is rationally, analytically an appropriate set of actions to achievea logical goal. Much, most of the energy we must galvanize must beemotional, visceral, born from the innate knowledge that beyond logic andreason this is a cause that we are ready to commit totally to, it is inherentlyjust, moral, human, a way to recover what we instinctively know is missing,to correct what we sense, with all that makes us what we are, is terriblyand grotesquely out of balance on our planet. We did not end the VietnamWar by brilliant intellectual argument, we ended it because our passion,more than our ideas, outshone and outlasted the passion of the other side. Only through that kind of passion can we save ourselves from ourselves. We must not only heal the disease, we must feel the disease. We are hospital workers in the ER trying together against incredible oddsto save a horribly ill patient. And we are doing so in tears. If we can do these difficult but not impossible things we can change everything. The patient need not die. The patient must not die.
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| Explanatory Notes for ChartOne above Primary Goals: G1 Healthy Communities, Healthy World, End to Suffering: Both physicaland emotional health for all of Earth’s creatures; Well-being not Wealth G2 Stability & Diversity of All Life on Earth: Return tothe law of limited competition (no destruction of creatures that eat the samefood we do, or their food supply); Greatly reduced human population to allowa return to diversity of life on Earth Indirect Goals: By-Product Goal: Technology & Innovation Processes: Social & Educational Processes: Economic, Legal & Political Processes Reading the Chart Chart Two: Root Causes of the Earth’s Problems |
| Links and References
Those reading this Weblog in hard copy form will not be able to access theselinks. If you are such a reader, please take a look at these links thenext time you’re online. I can only touch the surface in 25 pages, andmany of the writers and authors are much more articulate than I am.
Listen carefully. Challenge everything you’vebeen told. Change your mind. Believe. Spread the word. Choose your role.Together we can save the world. |
