“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it” Robert Swan
At the core of everything, as I said in several posts recently (Coming Back into our Sovereignty {March-June 2021}), is our individual sovereignty. Do you seek to be told what to do, or do you trust yourself to be control of your own creation of your life? Authoritarians want a hierarchy to tell them what to do and keep them safe – they lose themselves in the power structure. As such they tend to be more dogmatic in how they approach the world. They also feel so isolated that they gain comfort in being part of the ‘group’ and lose themselves within it. They seek to control their world or more likely to let ‘powerful others’ (see prior post Richard’s Research on Worldviews and why he is optimistic about a transformation {June 2018})control the world. Even their spirituality is group based and all too often focused on approval from the group. Sovereign individuals seek to let people think for themselves and to work cooperatively in creation of a better world. As such they tend to be more flexible and accepting of diversity in all its forms. Their spirituality comes from within. The two different perspectives, however, clash at this time. It’s not about challenging those who do not agree with you. It’s about you doing what you know to be right. It is not just a battle of values but also of how we think about systems, and more importantly, our place within systems. Are we a part of the system or outside of it?
When I look at the research about changing mindsets and paradigms, a continual problem is one that Einstein said quite simply, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” What he was emphasizing is that we created our problems with rational thinking based on the mindset of that time, but to solve them requires changing established thinking patterns and switching into a creative state of mind. A big push in recent years has been to think in complex systems, which is a good start at thinking in complex inter-rational terms, yet the problem is that we have been taught to think linearly and rationally. At the core of our problem is also the implicit separation between humans and the natural world. If humans are always placed in a dominance position of isolated hierarchical structures, then humans are always given priority in any thinking.
We like to dichotomize everything such that decision making is made simpler as we choose between two options with one having better outcomes than the other. Where life really that simple. But it doesn’t matter whether you change just your values putting life over economics, or some other more moralistic outcome over a less moralistic one. Putting things in neat boxes or categories is still the problem since it promotes a choice about where to create a division. The Green Revolution for instance saw a potential to feed the world using advanced hybridized crops (later GMOs) and chemicals to produce more food, but failed to look at the big picture of relationships within the ecological world, which is about continually unfolding processes and complex multi-interactions rather than interactions between entities. This is where Relational Research comes into play as a new method of productive inquiry and intervention in a complex world.
Critics of this methodology of course like to point out that at some point choices and decisions have to be made. Yet, that merely circles us back to the inevitable same problem we had before – it continues to be based on scientific dualistic, reductionist thinking, that places the researcher ‘outside’ of the world they are studying. The consequence is that it continues the problem of keeping humanity separate from their environment.
The definition for Harmony is agreement; accord; harmonious relations, which is OK until you try to connect this to humanity and the natural world. Throw into this the idea of human dominance over the natural world. Even if you accept you are ecocentric and feel a part of the whole, it can be difficult to accept that humanity is not the apex of creation but merely a part of it, even if we can make the major changes that we do. And that is the crux of the situation we find ourselves within. Relational researchers (e.g., Jamila Haider, Maja Schlüter, Carl Folke, and Belinda Reyers) comment: “Although many projects are designed with the idea that issues such as poverty or hunger are multidimensional, complex issues, the interventions that are in the end implemented may not reflect this. Rather than celebrating diversity, poor regions like the Pamirs are commonly subject to development interventions that look for linear solutions to poverty or hunger. These linear interventions focus on maximizing efficiency in the short term without taking longer term resilience into account. There is a constant need for reflexivity and care in the way that we do research, and respecting a diversity of perspectives is vitally important for doing rigorous science.”
Most sustainable development interventions prioritize short-term economic goals to benefit humans and so undermine the very resiliency we desire and observe within nature, but rarely get in human development. It’s not that humans’ have to take a back seat, but rather that we accept that while we may drive the vehicle, there are a bus load of other passengers (species) in the ecological vehicle with us that must also be considered. As relational research points out: “Adopting a coevolutionary perspective encourages a radical rethinking of how resilience and development are conceptualized and practiced across global to local scales.” The key term here is co-evolve – considering social (society, cultural, spiritual) and ecological dynamics as constant interplay. As indigenous peoples have done for millennia, humans can influence what is selected and retained within the natural world, but always with the knowledge that they are tinkering with a massive and complex system in which they are a working part practicing harmony, not as a dominant controller.
There is this concept of service that commonly means, ‘the action of helping or doing work for someone,’ yet for successful sustainable living needs expanding to include life as a whole. When we serve, we help everything else as well as ourselves instead of being simply self-serving. This doesn’t mean we lose ourselves in serving but we find our authentic selves even as we serve everything and understand the interrelated nature of everything. A search of true harmony. That needs explaining more. To be Continued ……….
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