Independent Thinking in an Uncertain World

A Mind of One's Own

Valerie A. Brown, John A. Harris, David Waltner-Toews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429760860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Any effective response to an uncertain future will require independently thinking individuals working together. Human ideas and actions have led to unprecedented changes in the relationships among humans, and between humans and the Earth. Changes in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the energy we use are evidence of Nature – which has no special interest in sustaining human life – looking out for itself. Even the evolutionary context for humans has altered. Evolutionary pressures from the digital communication revolution have been added to those from natural systems. For humans to meet these challenges requires social re-organisation that is neither simple nor easy.

Independent Thinking in an Uncertain World explores workable, field-tested strategies from the frontiers of creating a viable future for humans on Earth. Based on research results from hundreds of social learning workshops with communities worldwide, many of them part of Australian National University's Local Sustainability Project, authors with diverse interests explore the gap between open-minded individual thinking and closed socially defined knowledges. The multiple dimensions of individual, social and biophysical ways of thinking are combined in ways that allow open-minded individuals to learn from one another.

Part I

Ideas

1

Thinking for oneself

Outside the square

Valerie A. Brown

Every now and then a new idea spreads throughout human society. The collected thinking of the world slips a cog while it absorbs the new idea into its everyday life. We humans have already faced the dramatic changes of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Both of these permanently altered the relationships that link individual humans, their societies and the Earth. A revolution of our own times brings with it the challenge to establish new long-term collaborations between humans and humans and between humans and their only planet. For this, we look to a mind fit for the task.

Just this morning, my social media carried pictures of a warming planet: a free-floating iceberg as big as a small city, ice sheets crisscrossed with large cracks and a starving polar bear. The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, tweets that the world is getting cooler. Facebook’s founder moans that his wonderful tool is being used to service a confused world of ‘alternative facts’. Floods and droughts predicted for over 30 years still catch people unprepared. Refugees from intolerable living conditions are shunted from place to place, with no foreseeable solution. Governments fail to face up to the extent of the social and environmental change. I, as an individual, am left to interpret this complex world for myself.

There is no shortage of confident explanations of this complexity. Professions, disciplines, political parties and people in the street all have their own versions. More important is to ask, what is the question? Nobody seems to be sure. There is, however, one question that I keep asking myself. In these uncertain times, why aren’t we drawing on the immense capability of our own minds? Some people are singled out to give us the answer, some as geniuses, some as powerbrokers, others as heroes. The rest of us are expected to leave the too-hard questions to them. As human beings, however, they are no different from any of us. We all have the same brain structure and ability to think that allows us to think for ourselves. To go back to a question about the question: How can we draw on the full capacity of our minds in addressing the issues of our time?

Climatologist Will Steffen has argued that the formal title for our time in history should be the Anthropocene. The ‘Anthro’ part is a reminder that human ideas have led to unprecedented changes in our social lives and physical environment. Changes to the air I breathe, the water I drink and the energy I generate are our environment’s response to human actions. These changes are not primarily addressed to us humans: They are the Earth looking after itself. As an individual, I must respond on my own behalf, hoping to find companions to help me. However, to address the necessary social reorganization will be neither simple nor easy. I cannot do it by myself: It is too vast a canvas.

Once I applied my mind to the emergent issues, I could see for myself the crucial need to negotiate our way to the solutions, solutions that we can all share with one another and with the world. Otherwise we will all continue to be deaf to this changed world speaking in its own voice. The Earth will activate its own feedback systems whether we like it or not. We need to learn to listen. Communities do the best they can with the resources they have. Worldwide experience of working with changing communities has taught me that there will always be those who try to avoid the issues of the Anthropocene. Others will take a one-eyed view, fixing their minds on one problem and one solution. Belief in one right answer can lead to a single source of authoritarian control. At one extreme, this singlemindedness leads to the mass Jonestown suicides and the terrors of the Nazi regime. At the other, it produces individuals alienated from their own society. The planet has been dealing with immense changes over many billion years. Whether we humans act wisely on the issues or not, the planet will survive. Unless we can escape our society’s current focus on one right answer, we humans may not.

After working with communities all over the world, I came to realize that existing organizational structures and current ways of thinking could not be expected to break new ground. They have established interests to protect. This often means that they work actively to prevent change. Why should I be surprised? Key social institutions such as education, law, health and government have been building walls around themselves ever since the 17th-century scientific revolution. Thinking has shrunk to considering only one’s own section of the social network. As I have described in previous books, in Western culture our knowledge making has been divided into different specialized compartments, each of which protects itself from change.

The communities I was working with were looking for whole-of-community change. In the next chapter, Chapter 2, I give an account of the research team, design and overall outcomes of a series of collective learning workshops. Here, I describe the steps toward learning to recognize multiple dimensions in each individual’s thinking. I was leader of the Local Sustainability Project (LSP) at the Australian National University over 1990–2015, responding to issues of whole-of-community change. Our research teams found that the Local Sustainability Project workshops were successful in bringing diverse groups together on shared tasks. However, when the workshop members went back to their usual social environment, it was a different matter. The old barriers returned. It made me think of the proverb: You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

During the early workshops the team identified different knowledge cultures developed by individuals, communities, specialists, organizations and holistic thinkers. Each knowledge culture had its own aim, language, content and set of practitioners. To my surprise, the crucible for significant change did not arise from any one of the knowledge compartments. Rather, change came from certain individuals who stood out in each of the workshop groups. These individuals acted independently of their colleagues and thought more broadly across the issues.

Following this unexpected behaviour, the research team and I redesigned the workshops. The aim of the new workshops was to learn more about the individual’s desire for independence and their capacity to think beyond the square. In debriefing sessions after a workshop, members of the research team and of the groups identified different dimensions of the individuals’ thinking: the physical, social, ethical, aesthetic and sympathetic dimensions of their individual minds. The physical dimension was accessed through objective observations and measurements; the social dimension by shared stories and symbols; the ethical dimension by action on moral principles; the aesthetic dimensions by recognition of patterns and style; and sympathetic dimensions in the warmth of one-on-one communications.

The recognition of multidimensional thinking demanded further investigation. Once recognized, I began to find signs of the multiple dimensions of mind everywhere. I was in the position of someone who buys a red car and then suddenly sees red cars everywhere, when they had never noticed them before. Once the multiple dimensions of mind had been identified in the workshops, I found these multiple dimensions whenever independent individuals were thinking for themselves. In Chapter 2, I explore the relationships between the closed minds of the knowledge compartments and the open minds of independent thinkers. For now, I report on some examples of the value of the contributions made by multidimensional minds to difficult times (see Box 1.1).

BOX 1.1 A REGION IN CRISIS

A remote region in Australia’s far north was suffering a severe drought. Drought is usually associated with a lack of rain, a meteorological drought, a physical measurable dimension. But social life is hard to carry on when the view out the window is red dust and empty paddocks. Politicians and city people focus on the images of dying cattle and sheep, failing to understand that everyone in these remote rural communities is affected. Yet the sense of place is strong as local people love the aesthetics of the red sand hills and open spaces of the region where they live. They are also strongly connected, sympathetic to one another’s problems and with a strong ethical tradition for helping one another.

The impacts of drought on the whole region has been devastating. Everyone in this remote community was affected. Farmers and their children, shearers, fencing contractors, hairdressers and local grocery stores suffered an economic drought, as no money comes into the town. A social drought developed as large numbers of people leave town looking for work. Services decline, schools close; sports clubs struggle to find enough people for a team.

Nevertheless, people changed the way they did things and diversified their businesses. Local people volunteered to keep social events happening. Local charity groups provide credit cards for people to spend locally. Innovative local businesses developed in response to drought, often based on people’s love of the area. One cattle family turned tourism operators take visitors on a Cobb and Co coach ride, providing a genuine heritage experience. Strong social capital and networks helped. Individuals wore many hats, volunteering with Rotary, the Drought Committee, helping the homeless, working in schools and sitting on the hospital board.

Comment: Paradoxically, the needs of remote regions are often ignored; yet distance gives them freedom to consider their own and other’s perspectives and to think and act outside the square. Independent thinking is especially valued in times of hardship, such as this drought in Longreach, where people were able to access all dimensions of their minds.

Source: Kelly, 2018

The many failures of orthodox methods to resolve the issues of the Anthropocene: carbon emissions, violence in the cities and the obesity epidemic, had already made me wonder whether there was another way. From the LSP workshops, I collected a list of possible ways of responding to the complex issues (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Responses to the issues of the Anthropocene

During the Local Sustainability Project workshops, each of the options in Table 1.1 had its own champion. There were hot debates within each option: right versus left politics; community sociology versus classical economics; industrial versus regenerative farming; specialist versus holistic thinkers. Different responses to social and environmental change brought fiery advocates into the fray. No wonder people rolled their eyes in frustration. Some workshop members expected that those in power would accept the responsibility of making the necessary decisions. Others looked for fresh ideas from separate knowledge cultures, only to find that each knowledge culture rejected the solutions suggested by the others. Now realizing the multidimensional minds each individual brought to the table, we asked workshop members to introduce the idea of ‘and’ in the list in Table 1.1 and so bring their energy to understanding each other: collaboration rather than confrontation.

When the project team asked the independent workshop members to switch from the idea of ‘or’ to the idea of ‘and’ to the list in Table 1.1, this produced an unexpected response: combining the options. Workshop members agreed that each option had some value and held some element of truth. The idea of combining all the options, of introducing ‘and’ between them was considered strange, although not unreasonable. Once the ‘and’ was introduced, general discussion revealed the same multiple dimensions of thinking in individuals in previous workshops. The responses in Table 1.1 included that resources are endless (physical dimension); we can take what we choose (social dimension); we are responsible beings (ethical); we appreciate universal patterns (aesthetic); and we are part of nature (a sympathetic/unsympathetic world). Once combined, the responses stood out as multidimensional and collaborative, making good use of the ‘and’.

As the multidimensional learning from the workshops grew, I tried to apply my own multidimensional mind to major social changes and their individual participants. My list included the international space race (with highly trained humans walking on the moon); reunification of a divided nation (both sides dancing on the Berlin wall); collaboration among normally competing multinational organizations (humans protected from the polar ozone holes); and the birth of the open source worldwide web (explosion of the use of Facebook and Twitter). A closer examination of these events uncovers a consistent pattern in their success. Each of these events was the result of individuals acting independently outside the bounds of their society. Each of these changes involved individuals drawing on the multiple dimensions of their minds.

Physical, social, ethical, aesthetic and sympathetic ways of thinking made up the individual mind. Going back to Table 1.1, each of the options for responding to issues of the Anthropocene, considered separately, could lead to conflict and denial. The same problem arises in considering the multiple dimensions of mind. The common practice is to expect each individual to draw preferentially on only one or two of the dimensions. Individuals are asked to think objectively, socially, ethically, aesthetically or sympathetically, according to the context. This is where ‘and’ is needed again. Human minds are whole, not divided. As we shall see in the examples that follow, when all the dimensions are involved, a synergy develops that embraces the whole of an issue. There are, however, serious barriers in the way of bringing them together.

Current Western society separates the physical, social, ethical, aesthetic and sympathetic dimensions of mind. Although all dimensions of mind are present in everyone, everyone’s thinking is asked to be primarily objective. Since the scientific revolution in the 17th century, there has been pressure to interpret the world through impartial observations. The revolution was called the Enlightenment from the glaring light of its objectivity being directed onto one thing at a time.

The result was summed up by William Wordsworth in 1798:

The primrose by a river’s brim

A yellow primrose was to him

And it was nothing more. (Peter Bell: A tale)

This small yellow flower is variously considered as a physical object, the first sign of spring, a thing of beauty, a unit in an ecological niche, a botanical title, a symbol of England, a step in the evolutio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Independent Thinking in an Uncertain World
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Prologue: the bat cave
• Part I Ideas
• Part II Practice
• Part III The Future
• Index