“If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this universe into parts – physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on – remember that nature does not know it!” Richard Feynman. And yes, you can add in all the social sciences and arts as well. We have to breakout of silo thinking and think systems – complex and messy I know but necessary. Again, it’s not about tweaking existing systems, but completely revamping them from the ground up.
When I started developing the ‘Sustainability Studies’ at the university I was at, I had to negotiate with a great many academic departments, not only for their input but for their physical support in offering classes. My vision was more than interdisciplinary, it was transdisciplinary. It was more than simply Environmental Science. I envisaged that my students would have to have a broad knowledge that spanned many disciplines. But more importantly, I was hoping that they would become, what I call dot connectors. They would not only see the bigger picture but also the complex and frustrating interconnectivity that truly describes the world we inhabit.
This was an obvious observation well over a century ago, e.g., in 1911, U.S. naturalist and conservationist, John Muir, expressed this insight with his statement, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe…nothing thing exists in isolation.” Yet, modern academia still insists on silos of hard knowledge as the way to learn and live. Modern social critics on our education models, like David Orr and Ken Richardson, have long told us that our education systems do not teach us how to live well in a place. Only how to best function in a corporate driven world. Our educational systems were set up by wealthy businessmen to serve their needs for useful workers, not ours to find ways to ‘live well in a place.’ They own it, they run it, and they’re not interested in changing it.
I regularly meet people who think that exploring how to become sustainable would revolve around green technologies. They are surprised that despite my being a scientist by training and career, as most of my readers know, I talk a lot about the social and psychological side of sustainability – the side, like the dark side of the moon, that is not looked at. Yes, ecology has much to inform us, but like most disciplines, it is siloed, with only a relative minority of brave academics talking about the big picture. We talk about the big picture, but the human mind seems to prefer knowledge and comprehension that fits into nice cognitive boxes.
One of those cognitive boxes is how we perceive the universe itself. Astrophysicists have made amazing discoveries about our universe, which all fits well within the scientific materialistic worldview. Just one ever so minor a problem. Most of the universe does not does not show up on any of our instrumentation! We know something is there because of peripheral effects, and we can determine its importance theoretically and mathematically. It’s a lot like something I said in past posts, how would you measure and prove electricity in say, the Renaissance period. What we are measuring is not the actually universe but only the 4-5% at most that we can observe and measure. The rest, is dark matter (27%) and dark energy, the 95% that physicists say is the glue that holds the universe together. Talk about uncertainty masquerading as fact.
My point is that a lot exists outside what we think we know and understand. Consciousness comes under that heading, and even on a more limited scale, how our world runs. And outside the academics of all disciplines that ponder truths that seem incomprehensible to the layperson, there still exists many blind-spots that even academics seem to ignore. People still have their beliefs that persist despite evidence to the contrary no matter what educational level is attained. It takes effort, even courage, to look behind the green curtain. (Meaning of the ‘Green Curtain’ in The Wizard of Oz, which is the literal barrier that hides the true nature of the ‘Great and Powerful Oz.’)
When you look at how people gather information these days it is rarely done through deep introspective thinking. Indeed, thinking seems somewhat outdated. Social media has now expanded the ways memes now run our thinking. Memes always have done to a certain degree – word of mouth, gossip, and hearsay were always prevalent through history. And for most of that history, those that controlled the information controlled the masses. But the advent of the printing press, led to the third estates published ‘news’ and process of peer reviewed knowledge that had credibility, even if different versions of that news or knowledge were cherry picked and used for belief confirmation or propaganda.
Knowing this is why I always asked my students to consider alternate conclusions to any information. My favorite class was teaching them about environmental worldviews, because I wanted them to know and understand where their beliefs and values came from, and more importantly, that they had biases and prejudices that always needed to be considered. The basic ways people rationalize about truth are called ‘Epistemics’ – the study of how a mind decides a claim is true rather than false, that being the method behind the judgment rather than the judgment itself.
Blogger Steve Owens comments that, in epistemics, ‘there are four branches worth naming, though only three of them are disciplined methods a person can actually practice. Science sorts truth through empirical testing, observation, and replication, meaning other researchers repeat the same test independently and check whether they land on the same result. Religion sorts truth through faith, authority, and revelation. Forensic reasoning sorts truth through corroboration, weighing independent sources and physical evidence against each other to reconstruct a single, unrepeatable event. It is the method a detective, a journalist, or an intelligence analyst runs when there is no experiment to rerun. Memes sort truth through survival [and need]. A [supposed factual] claim spreads because it is sticky (confirms belief), not because it is accurate.”
And memes as sources of truth are easier to use, because they confirm what you already believe you think you know – no need to think further. Sadly, even the first three epistemic methods are also prone to being reduced to meme epistemics because cognitive dissonance is still alive and well and practiced to allow firmly held beliefs to go unchallenged. People pick up, “fragments of all three, filtered through headlines, sermons, and secondhand paraphrase, and then defaulted to whatever came at them with the most emotional charge. That default is meme epistemics. It is not a fourth method sitting alongside science, religion, and forensic reasoning. It is what happens when none of the three is actually practiced” Steve Owens. And of course, propaganda creeps in with all of them where scientism, dogmatism, and faulty assumptions ally with power brokers where information fabrication and manipulation are used to manipulate general thinking. Being discerning takes a lot of effort!
So our global hierarchies manage information for their benefit. That’s why the political, financial, and social systems that control us are the way they are. Blogger Steve Owens puts it succinctly: “You cannot negotiate a ruling class out of its position. You can’t oust them with elections they fund. You can’t pass legislation they write and expect it to do anything but serve them. You cannot convince them with moral appeals because these people are the creators and perpetuators of a system whose institutional survival depends on not being moved by moral appeals. Power does not reform itself, it absorbs reform, rebrands it, and like a predator waits patiently for its opportunity…Every soft path has been tried. The New Deal [of the 1930s U.S.] came closest, and the ruling class spent eighty years dismantling it the moment labor lost its leverage – [the start of globalization]. The Great Society. Campaign finance reform. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Every instrument of democratic accountability has been litigated, defunded, captured, or simply ignored. The system is not broken. It is working precisely as designed by the people who designed it.”
Our modern global values that drive our westernized thinking and that were imposed on the whole world, were built on five centuries of extractive thinking from feudalism, to colonialism, to modern capitalism. And the crazy thing is that this idea of modern progress was all started during the medieval renaissance when colonialism by a small part of Europe propagated memes that overwhelmed all others.
For over 500 years, European memes and values considered the planet merely a resource to be used and disregarded, and that humanity was destined to rule all of it. There was no reverence of the natural world, and regardless of religions and philosophies they encountered along the way that explained the world in meaningful ways, all was ignored in the mundane pursuit of hedonistic materialism. Indigenous practices along with Eastern philosophies that embrace more a conscious view about the natural world could make the mundane meaningful again – a more spiritual approach to life. An approach that if embraced reveals a more subtle and a vast inner dimension that enriches and deepens connectivity at all levels and makes the global complexities more comprehensible. But that requires all of us make the first step on this path to a truly sustainable world for living well with a real sense of place where mindfulness and wisdom embody deep purpose and meaning.
“I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me” Jane Goodall.
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