What, Why & How do we Know ?
Mentioned in the dear diary entry a couple of days ago on return from the last trip that there is too much too good about the USA, given its short history, that they cannot be allowed to fuck it up for themselves or the rest of the world. We’re not all America, but we all deserve to benefit from their enlightened example, real life isn’t a repeatable experiment.
Here John Stewart says it well.
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John Wilson interviewed Simon McBurney on BBC Radio 4’s “This Cultural Life“ and I only caught it by chance this morning. Glad I did.
[McBurney – privileged life, archaeologist father, born and raised in Cambridge, boarding school, family holidays in Jersey, Eng Lit at Cambridge, the Footlights, Parisian introduction to a creative life in the theatre … and the rest is history.]
Same age as myself give or take a few months and shared a few touch points that pricked my ears up. Sailing round Portland into Weymouth – always an impressive piece of geography to experience close-up – and being part of Rock Against Racism at Victoria Park, Hackney, Sunday April 30th 1978 – the whole goodwill march, chaotic afternoon festival and the bonus evening gig at the Roundhouse oft noted as the best musical day of my life, amidst the whole formative experience.
But the real reason I’m moved to blog is his experience with one of the Xingu tribes in Amazonian South America. Consciousness of identity shared with their forest environment beyond, not even, any self inside their heads. “It’s more complicated“, to use the vernacular for real complexity. That and the archaeological / architectural perspective of time upwards, the new evolved / supervening on the lower older layers, just like our brains and emergence in any complex system. More strings to the West Meets East bow, with “East” being more generally non-Euro/US/Western.
That “Self” being the one invented by the Humboldts and the Jena set in Andrea Wulf’s account of “The Magnificent Rebels” in Prussian Germany from 1749 to 1806 when Napoleon rolled through, with William Godwin’s influence in cultivating it’s wider adoption in the “West” not acknowledged.
This Cultural Life was followed by Ep9 of an audio abridgement of “The Stalin Affair” by Giles Milton. The importance of the (tacit / implicit / “naughty”) interpersonal communications and relationships between Churchill and Stalin amidst the explicit agreements recorded. And despite Churchill’s long stay in Moscow working intimately with Stalin, the latter’s insistence that the final formal meeting between all three – Churchill, FDR and Stalin – be as far East as possible Europewise, in Yalta.
This riff on West<>East world-view connections is itself connected to yesterday’s diary entry, well the connections never end, as I say 🙂
Received this morning Mike Jackson’s (2003) “Systems Thinking – Creative Holism (for Managers)” in which, in response to that previous post, Mike pointed out he had in fact quoted Pirsig in his work, the epigraph to Ch15 of said book, explaining his holistic subtitle:
“This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is about …. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.” Pirsig (1974)
2003 incidentally is exactly the year I pointed-out Dave Snowden drawing on a Pirsig quote. What goes around comes around.
[Andrea Wulf was the first of the Annual Mike Jackson lecturer’s at Hull Uni … sadly no recording exists.]
Onwards and upward (as time would have it).
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Hawking’s “Brief History of Time” (1988) is something I read back when it was first a best-seller – bought as a present for me by a parent or family friend IIRC – long before I discovered the research topic that became “Psybertron”. Sometime late 90’s not long before I did start here, we bought Kate Charlesworth and John Gribbin “The Cartoon History of Time” (1990) possibly as a present for one of our sons (I think) and I inherited that copy over many moves of residence right up to today.
It’s still my go-to resource when relating to any new physics “evolution of the cosmos” style in the 21st C – think Krauss or Carroll or Rovelli or … so thumbed that for a few years now it’s 68 pages – full-colour / heavy-paper / card – have totally fallen apart, held together in a bulldog clip. I spent several days of effort scanning and collating an electronic copy before I noticed that Dover Publications had re-published a 2013 edition and that now included a Kindle copy. Which I have recently acquired:
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Post Note:
And the problem with Hawking’s original, and so many science-inspired people since – is the arrogance of this quote:
“The eventual goal of science
is to provide a single theory
that describes the whole universe.”
Completely dismissing the “more than science” agenda of my recent post / talks / workshops. Gribbin and Charlesworth stick to the physical science.
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This should probably be three or four separate posts, but after a two week hiatus – the ISSS conference in Washington DC and another week touring the wider DC, MD, VA, DE, Chesapeake area – I have so much not written over and above the writing project I’ve already stalled until after my next US trip – the Robert Pirsig Association #ZMM50thRide events in July. So I’m just crashing down notes in a holding post, in no particular order:
“Divided by a Common Language
or The Tyranny of the Explicit”
Workshop by Ian Glendinning,
Tuesday, June 11, 2024 – 4:30 PM-6:00 PM ET
Meta – It actually went OK, got good feedback, and I am collating the notes that will capture its value (recording in the link above), but a missed opportunity on several levels. Technologically the hybrid participation arrangements, the tech support knew their technology but not the human processes of communication and participation – essentially random which devices controlled presenting or controlled audience participation, and which mic’s, speakers, screens and UI’s were in play in which parts of the process in different room set-ups. Made for a shaky start, and I never quite got the clarity of flow – but fortunately I only needed to talk for 15/20 mins before we went into dialogic mode. Though even then, there was no concession to hybrid round-table format. Anyway – we muddled through and some participants were able to give good contributions. Thanks to everyone for that.
More on the specific content later, but generally the experience of the conference (and my topic) followed-on from my last post about the process of properly integrating such diverse and evolving stories of systems thinking. So many perspectives and approaches seeming to compete, and dare I say dismiss / ignore / pigeon-hole / silo each other, when what is really needed is proper integration and consolidation. ‘Twas ever thus.
Funnily enough when I first mentioned my “Tyranny” sub-title here back in 2016 – (and an earlier version in 2010 Hat tip to Johnnie Moore, John Husband and David Gray, and to Dave Snowden for keeping it alive in this complex self-adaptive systems space) – I already suggested “my whole agenda” in here – again – so yet again I really should not delay my own writing any further after July and before the year-end.
Whilst playing tourists after the conference – it was ludicrously hot in downtown DC – but we walked all the obvious places, and found the less obvious connections. The memorials – presidents Washington and Lincoln obvious at opposite ends of the reflecting pool – less obviously Jefferson, FDR & Eleanor, MLK, WWII and Vietnam – monuments all creatively different in their messages and how they conveyed them. Moving – and reassuring – that a nation carves in stone the words and names of those it values. The US short history is a special case the whole world needs to benefit from. Most obviously global unity in place of conflict in the FDR & Eleanor case, but those same values all the way through from Jefferson’s words to the otherwise silent naming of US Vietnam losses, a pointless war of little value. Couldn’t fail to have Jefferson’s words evoke the global ecological ideas of Humboldt.
The Lincoln monument’s monumental impression is currently largely obscured by the construction of a new “undercroft” visitor centre.
Strangely divided – state and federal authorities? – between the monumental and working ends of the National Mall. Loads of drinking-water fountains around the monumental end, none to be found up the hill to the Capitol, Library of Congress and Supreme Court end – see crazy hot.
And then the surprise, despite no skyscrapers, of the monumental scale and style of so many other official buildings of state – Palladian, stone, symmetry – including the many Smithsonian buildings along the Mall. We did of course visit the The Smithsonian Museum of American History too, and specifically the Zen and the Open Road exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. More later.
Visiting the wider Chesapeake area reminded us how much we do love the US after previously living there in the deep south and touring all points south, west and north, but never yet the north-east.
Rural outside the towns – but not the wilderness or parks – shows tremendous pride of place in their homes and produce of their cultivated land. The old-colonial towns like Chestertown. Does everybody own a boat – just so many as far as the eye can see at every water accessible landing or marina boardwalk. (Hat tip to Sevilla King accommodating us a couple of nights at Rock Hall nr Chestertown.)
Hat tip also to Robin Benjamins who provided us with breakfast one day – great to meet-up with him and Marjan – and have them recommend Chincoteague / Assateague islands on the Atlantic coast of Chesapeake Virginia & Maryland.
Largely unspoiled unlike the sprawling Ocean City strip we subsequently drove through 15 miles of out of curiosity – think Atlantic City / Boardwalk Empire of New Jersey – dire ecologically. Elsewhere, wildlife diverse and multitudinous on land, in the sea and air. Dozens of bird species. From Bald Eagle, Buzzard and various Hawks to Fish Eagle / Osprey’s nesting on most available over-water posts, many different Herons and Egrets, Pelicans and Ibises of 2 or 3 kinds, many shore waders, Swallows and Martins and many different Sparrows, Thrushes, Shrikes and Starlings, of the common and exotic varieties, including Redwing Blackbirds, disturbed from rushes and reeds as we passed their marshes. Exactly as described by Pirsig in the opening pages of ZMM.
8th to 13th July I’m supporting the first half of the Robert Pirsig Association 50th Anniversary ZMM ride (in a rented car). Speaking on the 7th before we depart Minneapolis, MN and a couple of times en-route in Oakes, ND and Miles City, MT with tours of the library and museum collections arranged on the Montana State campus in Bozeman, MT. Some preparation to do for all these.
That would be a single chapter in its own right, one planned to be followed by my own writing project, but it’s all connected. Not just my original 2002 inroad to philosophy beyond science and systems engineering, but reassuringly in so many of the contributions to the ISSS conference (*) searching for the Eastern / Aboriginal (non-Western) world-views in our tacit / implicit / embodied engagement with the world. But where is the integration with our default orthodox scientific explicit worldview? The true Tao is not the Tao that can be (explicitly) spoken. The unspoken point of my workshop above, correctly paraphrased by Gary Smith.
(*) I need to summarise more of the contributions, many of which were in fact a surprise to me at the conference despite two years of ISSS engagement via mini-symposia and more – Gary Smith, David Ing and Tomas Wong most obviously, but others more subtly Hrvoj Vančik and Rosa Zubizarreta as well as our Mexican members for example … (A current Pirsig research project is his anthropological investigations in Mexico that pre-dated his post-Korea reading of Northrop’s Meeting of East and West – which also majors on Mexico – before both Zen and “those pesky redskins”.)
I mentioned in my last post, linked earlier above, that I had acquired some more books recently:
Well, I managed to find time to read them.
Ramage and Shipp does exactly what it says on the tin, it’s a fine summary and short history of systems thinking as I already noted. Recommended, if you need one.
Mike Jackson’s book is what you’d expect, knowledgeable, comprehensive, connected and simply written in an easy style – recommended for that alone. Highlights for me are that it included a wide range of source references outside the core subject thinkers, most if not all already covered here. And an overwhelming sense of being positively underwhelming. Can there really be any more to say that hasn’t already been said, any new magic-bullets to be recommended? No, there can’t. All practitioner methods and procedures are context-contingent and depend on the wisdom of selective use. Rules being for guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools, as I would say. That wisdom comes from much wider sources than the explicit subject matter at hand. His “EPIC” methodology – which he assures was partly tongue-in-cheek – is an example of the underwhelming reach beyond common sense when it comes recommendations. The real recommendation is Pragmatism by any other name. I still find branding his work “Critical” ST grates with me, but that’s really all the critical epithet means – use ST, but don’t lose your critical faculties – of wisdom – in appreciating, evaluating and using the theories & methodologies out there. Hopefully not damning by faint praise, these are wise words.
[Interesting shared refs in Jackson – beyond the explicit complex systems subject matter – include: Snowden, Koestler, Wittgenstein, Edmonds, Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch, Kant, Wulf & Humboldt, Blake, (Bob) Dylan, the “getsalts”, Habermas, McGilchrist, Toulmin, Spinoza, Taleb, “Santa Fe”, Heylighen, Boulding, Ulrich and all the US Pragmatists (except Pirsig), Burrell & Morgan, Lakoff & Johnson, Donella Meadows, Mazzucato & Raworth, “the Tavistock”, Ulanovicz, Beer, Espinoza and Morozov, “Rich Pictures”, Deming, Buckie-Fuller, Lao Tzu. No Dennett, no Pirsig(*)]
Siri Hustvedt is clearly on the right side of the of explicit-scientistic vs implicit-humanistic “good fence” countering the arrogance of certainty on the one side, but for me she spends too much time attacking those she finds in error rather than finding constructive integrations. One example is Steven Pinker
In “How the Mind Works”, Pinker has come down firmly on the side of nature in the nature/nurture debate.
In “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, Pinker makes many claims for traits rooted in biology. “Biology” here is weighted toward the built-in and fixed, as opposed to the learned and changing.
Hustvedt, Siri. The Delusions of Certainty
(Kindle Locations 809-810). Hodder & Stoughton.
No he doesn’t. The way we develop, behave and learn are rooted in biology, but he is very clear that – roughly speaking (**) – our traits are only 5/10% genetically determined, 30/40% from parental guidance and formal education and 50/60% from wider life and peer-group experience – but the behaviour and psychology in all of those are also rooted in biology. Nature / nurture is a good fence like all taxonomic / epistemic / ontological distinctions. We’re dealing with complex self-adaptive systems here. As I always say of Pinker, anyone married to Rebecca Goldstein can’t be all bad?
[(**) obviously these overall rough averages vary enormously across different kinds of propensities and traits]
Hustvedt, like Jackson, is meta to the actual subject, about specific methodologies and sciences, not being these.
[As well as Pinker (and Dawkins) many other shared references in Hustvedt, not always positive: – Solms, Friston, Panksepp, (Margaret) Cavendish, Spinoza, Whitehead, Arendt, Goethe, Dowling, Hughlings-Jackson, Wiener, Turing, Freud, Pribram, McCulloch, von Neumann, Deutsch, Bergson, Weil, Maturana & Varela, Edelman, (Andy) Clarke, (Wm) James, Damasio and many of the usual philosophers. (No Wittgenstein or Wulf or McGilchrist or Pirsig and for Dennett, only Consciousness Explained – Jeez!)]
So much writing to flesh-out and join-up in all of the above.
[(*) And the connections never end – already continued here.]
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I formed my own view of how Systems Thinking came to be the umbrella term for what I’m about, and I can be quite dismissive of the choice of labelling given to different approaches and methodologies – which always feel like selling different commercial education and consultancy offerings. And when reading and researching about the evolution of any topic, the reading list is never-ending. We all stand on the shoulders of giant termite colonies as well as individual giants.
Since I’m more of an architect, concerned with the general conceptual topology of my topic, I can pragmatically leave details to individual practitioners, who will anyway, always discover that, however detailed, objectively driven planning rarely survives contact with actual implementation context beyond day one – the essential nature of complexity. Which isn’t to say planning doesn’t have its value, but I’m pragmatically more concerned with setting expectations and understanding of the planned than the plan itself.
A Brief History of Systems Thinking is an article created by The Systems Thinking Alliance shared on LinkedIn. Looks like a great summary to me, well presented in a couple of block-diagrams – original typos fixed.
I was already working-up to acquiring Mike Jackson’s latest “Critical Systems Thinking – A Practitioners Guide” even though, for reasons noted above, the “critical” and the “practitioner” language have previously been a turn-off. Mike was generous enough to like and share the Brief History article and recommend that the main acknowledged source “Systems Thinkers” by Ramage and Shipp was itself valuable. I’ve now acquired both. (Mentioned Mike several times recently, alongside references to Dave Snowden’s “Cynefin” – they represent two aspects of Systems Thinking that I am trying to reconcile, thought clearly the market-place sustains multiple alternative approaches.)
As well as these two named current thinker / practitioners, the article also references Fritjof Capra’s latest and Donella Meadows, both of which I’ve overlooked and will have to pick-up, unlike Alexander Bogdanov whose pioneering work makes the historical text but not the visual summaries. Otherwise a couple of dozen sources all mentioned here previously, one-way-or-another.
Key words for me are Systems, Cybernetics and Complexity – the first two being synonymous at my level of abstraction, and the latter their reason to exist. All else are context-specific detail qualifications of methods and/or processes or are entirely meta, the choices of words like science, theory, thinking, knowledge, understanding are all aspects of human cultural psychology, which are themselves a complex cybernetic system.
(Hence Psybertron and Psybernetics.)
Fascinating to see the whole summarised this way.
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Post Note – one thread on LinkedIn suggesting that the “critical” in Mike Jackson’s work “pays respect to” the view of Edgar Morin’s work – avoiding the explicit disjointed mechanisation of systems and their causal processes?
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“Turning 50: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is a BBC Radio 4 “Archive on 4” edition broadcast last weekend to mark the 50th anniversary of publication of Robert Pirsig’s “culture-bearing” book in 1974. #ZMM50th
The host and interviewer is Dr Chris Harding, the voice of BBC Radio 3’s “Free Thinking” so I really shouldn’t have been surprised at what an excellent documentary the BBC has created. (At the Robert Pirsig Association (RPA) we had helped with existing audio-visual resources and contacts, but I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t properly twigged who “Chris” was until listening to the result. Well done to the production team, Sam Peach and Luke Mulhall for making it happen.)
“Blimey!” was my initial reaction shared with the RPA team “I was waiting with ‘bated breath to hear the result. A truly excellent piece of work, from beginning to end – a whole hour documentary on Pirsig and Quality. Chris Harding clearly knew his subject, empathetic and creative in the selection and construction of content.”
And others responded, some already on their 2nd and 3rd listenings …
“Yes, great job!”
“Excellent selection and mixing of interviews and readings, the overall creative design.”
“It is wonderful! Touching on Quality as the ultimate origin, which is my own #1, life-changing takeaway from the book.”
“The BBC production is indeed excellent !!! ”
“Loved the interview with Jonathan Rowson as well as the creative selection of existing recordings and readings. The exhaustion with the profound, the choice of putting values at the centre, very insightful from Rufus Hound. Great to finish on the same story – told twice from both sides – of Bob and Jim first meeting each other after publication. The whole hour is a great piece of work. The profound in the cliché. Not really mad. Brilliant”
As well as Chris’ own interviews with Bob’s widow and archivist Wendy Pirsig, Bob’s original editor Jim Landis, comedian & actor Rufus Hound, philosopher and chess grand-master Jonathan Rowson and poet & law professor Ann Tweedy – there was a selection of archive recordings from python Michel Palin with reference to playwright Alan Bennett, DJ Johnnie Walker, artist Grayson Perry and more. Fascinating, life-changing snippets of biography woven into a compelling story of why ZMM remains vital for human attention to our relationship with technology, fathers with sons, and with fellow humans in the wider world. Vital to our mental health, individually and culturally.
A gem of a documentary that will be a landmark of lasting value – true Quality.
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See previously on Psybertron:
Jonathan Rowson on “Attention as a Moral Act” and the connection from Pirsig to Iain McGilhrist’s worldview. (Post Note: Jonathan Rowson’s own reflections on the interview and the documentary and more.)
Salman Rushdie and Robert Pirsig – As well as referencing Pirsig’s use of Chautauqua, Gumption and Quality in his latest book “Knife“ in which Rushdie also describes writing and talking about his previous book “Victory City“, he also mentioned the significance of Pirsig’s ZMM when interviewed about “Quichotte“, his book before that.
Rushdie’s 2019 book Quichotte is a sci-fi, magical realist retelling of Cervante’s Don Quixote by way of the American roadtrip novel, influenced in part by Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As Rushdie explains in an Audible Blog interview with Tricia Ford…
“…actually, one of the books that helped me, strangely, was again an old book that happened to have some kind of anniversary, and I picked it up again, which is Robert Pirsig’s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And in which I thought, never mind about the Zen and never mind about the motorcycle maintenance, but in the middle of it, there’s this very beautifully told relationship between him and his son going on this motorbike ride across America to try and get closer. And I thought, mine is also a novel about fathers and sons. And there are two father-son relationships in the book that are both very central to it
… And that was a book that helped me think about that.”
Testimonials from more Pirsig readers at the Robert Pirsig Association (RPA) in this #ZMM50th year.
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More than half-way through May and I’ve not posted since the last weekend in April . Distracted by several things since the Robert Pirsig Association’s inaugural #ZMM50th anniversary Chautauqua on Sunday 28th.
And largely detail arrangements and bookings for two upcoming US trips.
Anyway, although I’ve not written on Psybertron in that time a couple of things have come up in recent weeks and days:
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More (raw) notes on watching the Philip Ball dialogue with Iain McGilchrist:
Philip’s nagging doubts in the productive operations of science as editor at Nature. (Same starting point for me, nagging doubts about something missing in physical science modelling of real-world organic, human organisations.)
“Systems Biology at Harvard” – Same systems response to complexity
Iain – “The barren-ness of the reductive exercise on causality.”
14:26 Philip’s “strategic” reaction to Iain’s first input
Meaning and purpose taboos.
The machine metaphor is the problem. (If we’re going to use computing machine / systems language – as I do – we have to be very clear it’s a very special non-mechanistic kind of machine we’re talking about – above some complexity threshold – an organism.)
What’s missing is something in “informational terms” – a computational metaphor in some sense.
Embryonic development beyond genetics.
Information as “to give form” – a verb.
It’s all there.
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Post Note – I am a fan of Malik in several contexts, and in particular found his “Quest for a Moral Compass” excellent, and yet even then I remarked as “telling” on his “scientistic” tendencies that kept these cultural / moral / values issues distinct from factual truths – something I’d already detected in his engagement in the post-9/11 God vs Science wars (and probably his earlier reaction to McGilchrist). They are distinct – #GoodFences – but that’s no excuse not to understand the true relationship between them, an understanding that it’s nothing so crass as to suggest that one can be explained causally in terms of the other. In fact that’s the point here – that barren-ness!
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Rushdie’s been touring the media shows trailing his latest book “Knife” recounting the story of and recovery from the disfiguring stabbing attempt on his life in New York back in August 2022.
I would at some point get round to reading it, when my writing priorities are behind me, I’ve read and reviewed most of his works, including the previous Fatwa biography “Joseph Anton”. He’s always been a wonderful source of inspiration to me. Latest reading of Victory City here in early 2023 and hundreds of previous references here. I noted when the attack happened it was reported to have been at the Chautauqua Institution where he was lecturing. Chautauqua is a word I know – for public educational touring lectures – originally from reading Robert Pirsig, the original inspirational writer on my own philosophical research and writing quest.
Well, I happened upon the BBC “Book of the Week” abridged reading, the 3rd of 5 parts late last night and immediately re-listened and listened to all 5 parts. Victory City was the book he’d just finished but not yet published when the awful event happened. However, I was stirred into life realising he was using references to Pirsig and his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to talk about Chautauqua, Gumption and – yes – Quality, the root of Pirsig’s metaphysics.
[Post Note: still not read Knife, but a couple of reviews including an excellent one by Mark in the comments below, and I forgot to mention the one surprise element evident even from the radio abridgement. Obviously about the mental as well as physical recovery and the physical power of psychological language – the pen being mightier than the sword as Mark notes. The surprise element is how much Knife is a love story between Rushdie and his current wife. As ever with Rushdie powerful on so many levels.]
We at the Robert Pirsig Association (RPA) have our first on-line Chautauqua this Sunday.
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[Post Note – more on the Pirsig / Rushdie connections in footnote here.]
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I keep noticing and thought I’d share that several things (meaninglessly) coincided in 1991.
Robert Pirsig published his second book “Lila” in 1991
Dan Dennett published his “Consciousness Explained” in 1991
I completed and was awarded my Masters Degree in 1991
None of us knew each other’s work then, and there’s been huge convergence of thinking since – as Dan had noted in 2017.
Bob died in 2017, Dan died last week in 2024. There’s work to be done.
Onward and upwards.
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Ben Taylor responded to a challenge from Katrin Shaw on LinkedIn, and I’m taking it up, and taking a lead, from his response.
Suffering? No, I certainly don’t lie awake worrying about widespread suffering, unfairness and inequality in the world – a question as old as philosophy and theology, and I’m certainly fortunate not to suffer as a victim. Except maybe where it’s more like self-inflicted Stress, the stress of current ongoing commitments made to fellow humans, which are themselves part of an evolving set of wider operational, tactical and strategic priorities. The only time the bigger picture might keep me awake would be a positive complement to stress – those times when you may have stumbled Aha! onto some valuable thought or contribution to solving that bigger picture of “world suffering” – which you need to work out and articulate. In such cases, get up, write it down and forget about it until the next available day.
I spend my waking hours worrying about / working on that bigger picture of suffering – what can I/we do to make the world a better place? Which is of course then part of that conflict between tactical action and strategic intent – specific commitments now and better plans for the future. [If you were to poll my past employers, you’d probably notice a failure to deliver. I already know myself pretty well, so I often warn planners “that’s not really the kind of task you want to give to me? (or plan at all)”]
What is wrong in the world – suffering and injustice, and ineffective / inefficient / counter-productive responses to these – what needs fixing, what our creative-change priorities are, is an evolving and growing list already as long as your arm. Specific global crises, poly-crises, meta-crises, and all their local consequences in context. There is no shortage.
Politics? Ben says it only came to him in 2016 that politics, use and abuse of social power, despite his long-term active political engagement, was where the problem lay. For me that dawning was my first proper understanding the word “Cybernetics” back in about 2002. It is precisely about how we govern ourselves, our applied systems of governance – imperfect democracy, making, enabling and enacting, policy and decisions. Throughout the 1990’s I was already “being kept awake at night” by the thought that “we could do better” – better than my business (tech) systems day job – nagging worries that had no other outlet then than sleepless nights. The trigger moment – we really can and must do better – was 9/11 – consequential but incidental to the actual problem.
The learning since then has been that the problem – “the inability to make and enact good decisions” – applies everywhere from individual to social levels, from the simplest seemingly rational / scientific questions to the knottiest Multi-national Machiavellian scenarios. Left or right, liberal or authoritarian, all parties suffer the problem, a problem that prevents us even hearing each other. I’ve been selective as to which specific “crises” I’ve engaged with, driven mainly by the extent to which these are tractable examples of the deeper “Psybernetic / Dysmemic” problem.
Anger? – “Anger is an Energy” sings Johnny Lydon. [Another poll of past employers and colleagues would tell of my impatience.] I’ve learned a lot since the 9/11 milestone. I’ve learned a lot about where emotion properly fits our decision-making processes. And it really does. Attempts at excluding it are in fact part of the problem. My learned strategy is one of dynamic cycles over time, where, when and how. Visceral live-music events – natural outdoor mindful moments – and cool, spacious, cathedral-like human spaces – are all part of my “Grace” toolbox.
Your experience may vary.
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