Worldviews, Reality and Design
from ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ D.C. Wahl 2006
Humanity has achieved incredible advances in the differentiation of consciousness … differentiation has produced science, technology, and the unprecedented power of mankind to build up and to destroy its environment.
But the complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this underdeveloped component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with entities around us without losing our hard won individuality.— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in Benjamin & Hanes, 2000, p.196)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, suggests in his book The Evolving Self (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993): “To know ourselves is the greatest achievement of our species.” He argues that in order to understand ourselves “ what we are made of, what motivates and drives us, and what goals we dream of — involves, first of all an understanding of our evolutionary past;” we need to reflect “on the network of relationships that bind us to each other and to the natural environment” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p.xvii). He acknowledges the importance of the emergence of self-reflective consciousness and its role in freeing us from genetic and cultural determinism.
Csikszentmihalyi believes that the next big evolutionary change in human consciousness may simultaneously acknowledge the self as separate from and fundamentally interconnected with the complexity from which it emerges. The individual, its culture, and the natural environment are simultaneously differentiated from each other and united into a larger complexity. He writes:
If it is true that at this point in history the emergence of complexity is the best ‘story’ we can tell about the past and the future, and if it is true that without it our half-formed self runs the risk of destroying the planet and our budding consciousness along with it, then how can we help to realize the potential inherent in the cosmos? When the self consciously accepts its role in the process of evolution, life acquires a transcendent meaning. Whatever happens to our individual existences, we will become one with the power that is the universe.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p.xviii
Csikszentmihalyi speaks of the need to form a ‘fellowship for the future’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, pp.281). Such a network would be dedicated to facilitating the continued evolution of life and consciousness towards higher and more differentiated levels of complexity and diversity, but fully conscious of the universe’s underlying unity.
Human goals and aspirations, the fundamental intentionality behind all our designs and actions will change drastically, if we stop to see ourselves as individual survival units competing against each other and the rest of life on earth, and begin to understand that the survival of individuals and communities, of the human species as a whole, depends on the health and flourishing of the wider whole in which we participate (our ecosystems, the biosphere, the conscious universe). What I am describing is a radical change in our fundamental assumptions about the relationship between nature and culture, a change in worldview.
This thesis argues that such a change in worldview is the most fundamental act of design humans are capable of. The pressing social, economic and ecological challenges humanity faces at this point in human history, will not be solved by technological fixes, a free market economy, or accelerated biological evolution. The only way to effectively respond to these challenges and problems is through cultural transformation and the associated change in consciousness and worldview.
Problems and their solutions will appear in an entirely different light if we dare to re- examine some of our most rigidly and dogmatically held assumptions about the nature of our own existence, of life, and the process we call universe (or the divine). Albert Einstein hinted at this necessary shift in worldview, when he warned that problems could not be solved in the mindset that created them in the first place.
In this section, I will discuss how our basic assumptions and value systems influence our perception of ourselves, and the world in which we participate. I will argue that the most effective design responses to the challenges of sustainability (or the current un-sustainability) are those that affect our worldview and therefore our life-styles. I will refer to these up-stream changes in human culture as meta-design, and introduce the concept of ‘organizing ideas’ to explain how crucially fundamental assumptions affect our perception of the world and all subsequent actions.
Furthermore, I will introduce a dynamic map of possible value-systems and worldviews that have so far been expressed in human consciousness. I suggest that such a map may help us to carefully approach what appropriate participation in natural process may actually mean by integrating the contributions of multiple perspectives and value systems.
The creation of a sustainable human civilization will be based on such a trans-disciplinary, trans-epistemological, and trans-ontological multi-perspective. It will have to celebrate the wisdom of diversity, while acknowledging fundamental unity and interdependence, pointing towards a need for increased co-operation, synergy and symbiosis. Let me begin by exploring the concept of ‘worldview’ in some more detail.
James Sire defines the worldview concept as “a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world” (Sire, 2004, p.19).
The term worldview has been translated from the German word Weltanschauung, which was coined by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his Critique of Judgment, published in 1790. Naugle suggests: “Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy, with its emphasis on the knowing and willing self as the cognitive and moral centre of the universe, created the conceptual space in which the notion of worldview could flourish” (Naugle, 2002, p.59). The German Idealist and Romanticist considered a worldview to describe “a set of beliefs that underlie and shape all human thought and action” (Sire, 2004, p.23).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) made an early attempt to unify the individuated, rational self with the wider whole from which it emerges, without denying its unique identity as an individual who is both separated from and part of community, culture, nature and the “Kosmos.” Hegel tried to formulate a holistic and participatory expression of theWeltanschauung concept:
Reason [consciousness] then unites this objective totality with the opposite subjective totality to form the infinite world-intuition (unendliche Weltanschauung), whose expansion has at the same time contracted into the richest and simplest identity.
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (in Naugle, 2002, p.69).
In my interpretation, what Hegel hints at here is how once Kant’s knowing and willing self has conceptually been separated from the whole through the power of his or her own rational judgment, it will eventually have to come to realize that its own subjective experience of an apparently objective other is only possible through the pattern of consciousness that unites them into a fundamentally interconnected unity. Hegel’s “reason” is better understood as cognition or consciousness. It transcends dualistic logic of mutually exclusive opposites and is quite distinct from Kant’s use of the word reason.
Since then, others have taken up the concept of worldview and developed it in their own ways. Sire reports that Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was the first to use the concept as the central focus of his discourse, and both Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) employed the worldview concept in their philosophical work (Sire, 2004, p.23). I will refrain from a deeper exploration of their work here. My central focus is to establish how crucially our worldview affects our responses to the world we perceive through it. I agree with Sire’s assertion that “how we view life affects the life we live” (Sire, 2004, p.99). This simple fact lies at the root of all human intentionality and therefore all our designs.
Sire highlights one important aspect of how worldviews are expressed and formulated. We are not always fully conscious of the worldview that guides our perception and action. Sire suggests that “our worldview is not precisely what we may state it to be”, rather “it is what is actualised in our behaviour.” Worldviews are thus primarily modes of participation in the wider whole. Their conceptual formulation is crucial for making us consciously aware of the worldview we are expressing through our actions, but whether we are conscious of our worldview or not it fundamentally influences our behaviour. Sire argues that “we live our worldview or it isn’t our worldview”, since “what we actually hold … about the nature of fundamental reality may not be what we say” (Sire, 2004, p.133).
This points at an important caveat when working with the concept of worldview. What fundamentally matters are our actions, our lifestyles, how we relate to each other and our wider environment, how we participate in natural process. Formulating and comparing worldviews can help us to integrate multiple perspectives. This may facilitate the process of reaching a consensus about what appropriate participation in natural process may be. Nevertheless, what we need to change to make a difference are our actions and not just how we talk about them. Conceptual escapism currently dominates the debate on sustainable development.
It is this danger of loosing ourselves in endless discussions and formulations of new and possible worldviews that made the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) reject the notion altogether. For him, it was not the task of philosophy to construct worldviews. He actually considered them “unphilosophical” and a “primary obstacle to philosophy’s true identity” (Naugle, 2002, p.134). Heidegger expressed his true idea of philosophy (phenomenology) by contrasting it to the worldview concept:
Phenomenology is the investigation of life itself. Despite the appearance of a philosophy of life, it is really the opposite of a worldview. A worldview is an objectification and immobilization of life at a certain point in the life of a culture. In contrast, phenomenology is never closed off; it is always provisional in its absolute immersion in life as such. In it no theories are in dispute, but only genuine insights versus the ungenuine. The genuine ones can be obtained only by an honest and unreserved immersion in life itself in its genuineness, and this is ultimately possible only through the genuineness of a personal life.
— Martin Heidegger (in Naugle, 2002, p.135).
While I fully agree with Heidegger that it is possible to become trapped in too classificatory an understanding of the worldview concept, I still believe that behind all human actions and perceptions there is a set of fundamental believes and assumptions that can be usefully referred to as a worldview. To discuss the concept too rigidly and draw up different worldviews as mutually exclusive categories is yet another case of mistaking the map for the territory. Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology tries to get at the territory itself, but by verbalizing it, writing about it, and practising it, he inadvertently turns it into what I would refer to as a worldview.
What we need is a dynamic map of possible worldviews to facilitate communication between people who see the world from different perspectives. Holding such a map lightly, always reminding ourselves not to confuse it with the territory of our collective participation in the same living process, may help us to reach a more dynamic, holistic and participatory understanding that allows us to integrate the perspectives offered by diverse worldviews into the actually daily practice of responsible and appropriate participation.
Heidegger himself wrote: “A world-view is related in its meaning to the particular contemporary Dasein at any given time. In this relationship to the Dasein the world-view is a guide to it and a source of strength under pressure” (in Naugle, 2002, p.137). What Heidegger points to here is the potential that worldviews can have in affecting our mode or participation.
I would argue that a flexibly evolving, multi-perspective worldview could emerge out of the collective integration of a wide diversity of intrinsically valid and at the same time limited worldviews. When I speak of a holistic or participatory worldview I am not referring to yet another category of worldview, I am referring to a dynamic synthesis rather than a newly formulated antithesis of other worldviews.
If we take the lessons of fundamental interconnectedness and unpredictability, as well as our inescapably participatory role in the continued evolution of natural process seriously, we will have to find a way to integrate various, sometimes contradictory, but more fundamentaly complementary points of view.
Rather than relying on the exclusive notion of scientific objectivity, as ultimate arbiter of what is ‘real’, we may more effectively sustain our continued participation in an unpredictable and uncontrollable process by exploring new ways to reach a form of inter- subjective consensus based on a wide variety of different disciplines, worldviews, and epistemologies. Such holistic, multi-perspective based integration is much more likely to guide us towards appropriate participation and sustainability.
The Hungarian scientist Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) highlighted a dangerous caveat of dualistic, objective science and its associate worldview. He provided a critique of “the ideal of scientific detachment” and suggested that it “falsifies our whole outlook far beyond the domain of science.” (in Naugle, 2002, p.188).
Polanyi proposed an alternative ideal of knowledge that acknowledged the uniqueness of every individual’s subjective and embodied perspective. He referred to this conception of knowledge as “personal knowledge” and emphasized how it acknowledges “that into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of this knowledge.” Polanyi explains:
For as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the experiences of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.
— Michael Polanyi (in Naugle, 2002, p.189).
While the detached, reductionist science approach to understanding reality has many useful practical applications, it does not provide a map of reality that has some form of exclusive access to fundamental truths. As with any form of observation, traditional science has a significant observational blind spot. It ignores the observer’s fundamental interconnectedness with the objects of its observations.
Our human tendency to mistake the map for the territory has lead us to adopting a worldview that separates the self from the world, and humanity from nature. The current un- sustainability of humanity’s participation in natural process is a direct result of almost three hundred years during which the reductionist, dualist worldview has become culturally dominant and informed human intentionality in such a way that the majority of our designs and actions have become thoroughly unsustainable.
Polanyi has offered a second major conceptual contribution to understanding the challenges of becoming fully conscious of our dominant knowledge system and its underlying worldview. Naugle explains Polanyi’s idea of the “tacid dimension” through analogy with an iceberg: “Typical accounts of knowledge focus exclusively on what lies above the waterline. From Polanyi’s perspective, however, the greater part of knowledge is hidden from view. It lies so to speak below the waterline. And yet it is enormously influential in shaping the knowing process. There is an unobserved background structure of thought…” Naugle, 2002, p.189).
As previously emphasized, our worldviews are often far more complex than our verbalisation or formulation of them. This holds true for the now out-dated scientific worldview, just as for all other descriptions of a particular worldview that claims to describe an entirely ‘objective’ point of view.
There are hidden patterns of thought and fundamental assumptions that are often not explicit, but nevertheless constitute the meta-design which shape our worldview and through it our dominant knowledge system and mode of participation. Naugle reports: “Polanyi’s alternative epistemological vision … blends objective and subjective factors as the best way of accessing reality” (Naugle, 2002, p.190). Polanyi explained:
Such is the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding. But this does not make our understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is denied as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge.
— Michael Polanyi (in Naugle, 2002, p.191).
The notion of objectivity and subjectivity, as well as the notion of reality itself are all entangled in such a way that it is very difficult to separate them out by verbal description without being caught in the same philosophical dilemma that has plagued the Western mind for more than two and a half millennia.
The metaphor and analogy of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement comes to mind. Quantum theory in its exploration of subatomic particles — the ultimate and most extreme reductionism seeking to explore the fundamental parts of a mechanistically understood and explained universe — discovered at the end of all its separating the universe into constituent parts that they are all fundamentally entangled, not only with each other, but also with the observer who separated them out in the first place, by naming, observing, and describing them.
Like depicted by the ancient alchemical Uroboros, the snake of reductionist analysis came to bite its own tail and turned many of the great physicists at the beginning of the 20th century into mystical holists (e.g.: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, and Einstein). Some of the brightest minds, trained in the methods of reductionist science and logical reasoning, reached a point in their inquiry where the self and the world, subject and object dissolve their identity as mutually exclusive categories and reveal themselves as a set of relationships united in consciousness.
The scope of the overall argument presented in this thesis precludes a more detailed exploration of how our notion of reality has changed through the millennia (see e.g. Tarnas, 1996 or Kingsley, 2003). Polanyi, above, speaks of a ‘hidden reality’. This idea has fuelled Western intellectual debate since Plato. It conjures up the unfortunate assumption that what we are directly experiencing through our senses is not the ‘real reality’ and that there is some more perfect reality hidden behind it accessible only through the human powers of reason and logic.
After more than two thousand years of intense debate, wars and murder committed to defend this notion, we are no closer to understanding this hidden reality. I therefore suggest that we abandon this search and rely once again on our senses and direct experiences to describe the reality in which we participate. Let me emphasize though that we should remain open to the possibility that the spiritual or conscious dimension of this reality may be more fundamental than its material expression.
The classics scholar Peter Kingsley’s book, Reality, provides a very incisive account of how the writings of early Greeks like Parmenides and Empedocles have actively been misrepresented, mistranslated and misinterpreted in order to justify the Western mindset of rationalism, from Plato’s own work onwards until the present day (see Kingsley, 2003).
Western intellectual discourse has reached a point where relativism, deconstructivism, radical constructivism, materialism and nihilism are holding the debate about the nature of reality in a perpetual stalemate, and anybody who uses the words ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ has to justify his or her use of these words in front of an angry host of professional academics and intellectuals, who make their living and justify their existence by critical discourse. Solutions or new beginnings are irrelevant from their perspective, since the perpetual stalemate justifies their own existence to continue a basically pointless debate.
The debate is particularly pointless with regard to its ultimate survival value for the human species and the continued evolution of consciousness. These intellectuals have created a physically and biologically detached noosphere as the arena of their jousting. They ignore the fundamental interdependence of nature and culture, and go as far as denying the biological and ecological basis of human existence by postulating that humans and their creations are not part of nature. This, to some extent, justifies and fuels the utter unsustainability of postmodernity.
I regard it as important to draw attention to the fact that the use of language and in particular the use of the written word predisposes us to a classificatory approach to reality, that identifies details by naming things and distinguishing them from what they are not. The real problem begins when we turn words, as reductions of the overall complexity of reality, and the supposedly separate objects and concepts described by these words, into exclusive categories and apply dualistic logic and rationality to them. We create a purely intellectual territory (maybe the self-fulfilling prophecy of Plato’s hidden reality) and begin to confuse the map with the territory.
To clarify my own position: I believe that there is only one reality and only one truth that can be accessed by everybody through their direct experience. Yet reality in all its complexity of interpenetrating scales is too complex to be fully comprehended by any single perspective. The complexity of the process as a whole is beyond the reach of any individual’s reasoning, logic, and intellectual comprehension. Nevertheless, how we think about reality, and the resulting relationships and interactions we engage in have creative efficacy. Consciousness is an emergent property of reality and simultaneously reality recreates itself in consciousness.
The maps we can create of reality will always be provisional since the immutability and permanence of the whole is expressed through constant change and transformation of the interactions and relationships it contains [the paradox is intentional].
The act of describing that whole from within — as a participator in its process of transformation — creates an observational position and with it an observational blind spot. Within our individual conscious awareness, I believe reality is best experienced as a conscious universal process experiencing itself through our own participation.
Each point of view is a unique and valid approximation of the whole from within the whole through one of its parts. The act of observation implies and reflects the whole. A more comprehensive awareness of the whole can be reached when we begin to engage in a collective dialogue aiming to integrate the multitude of individual viewpoints on reality, by understanding them as reflections of a fundamentally unified reality and truth experiencing itself through diverse individuals.
Such a dialogue that celebrates the contributions of multiple perspectives may help humanity to approach the ground of being in which it recognizes itself as an expression of nature, the universe and the divine. Through the realization, or revelation, that we are the eyes of the universe, of reality, becoming conscious of itself, individual awareness can reach the point where the individual self and its identification with ego, body, community, culture, species, life, Earth, universe or Kosmos dissolves into the self-realization of our own divine nature.
In the years to come, as humanity embarks on its desperate struggle, to undo the spells of its own incantation, as the movement aiming to create a sustainable civilization faces drastic climate change, environmental and social disintegration, as well as the results of irresponsible application of our own technological capabilities, it will be a potential consolation to be able to access this more fundamental ground of being, where consciousness connects everything into the unified whole that is reality.
Umberto Eco’s magnum opus, A Theory of Semiotics, sees the nature and function of the worldview concept as a “sub specie semiotica”. Eco proposes semiotics as a “general theory of culture”, and suggests that “all cultural realities can best be explained and understood under the rubric of semiotics” (Naugle, 2002, p.292).
Eco’s central two propositions are: “i) the whole culture must be studied as a semiotic phenomenon; ii) all aspects of culture can be studied as the contents of semiotic activity”; in other words “the whole of culture should be studied as a communicative phenomenon based on signification systems” (Eco in Naugle, 2002, p.292).
Naugle formulates three possible positions with regard to the relationship between the process of knowing and a corresponding worldview. These three positions are summarized in the box below (see Box 1.5).
Box 1.5: Knowing and Reality: Common Sense Realism, Antirealism, and Critical Realism (Summarized from Naugle, 2002, pp.322–325)
Naïve, direct, or commonsense realism: The understanding that comprehension of the cosmos is direct and accurate, unaffected by worldview propositions or any other subjective influences. This proposition is established on at least four premises:
1) an objective, independent reality exists;
2) the character of this reality is fixed and independent of any observer;
3) human knowers have trustworthy cognitive capacities by which to apprehend this fixed reality unencumbered by
4) personal prejudices or traditions; and truth and knowledge about the world are discovered and certain, not invented and relative.
In short, a realist of this type denies the interposition of any kind of mental entity between the perceiver and a physical object.
Creative antirealism: The understanding posits a radical disjunction between what is there and the multiple views of it. Worldviews in this context are all there are, belief systems that are reified and sustain no real connection to the cosmos. Realityis indeed absent. This position may be summarized in four theses;
1) while an external world may and probably does exist, its objective character remains forever obscure;
2) human knowers lack epistemic access to apprehend the world as it is in itself;
3) what poses as reality is linguistically constructed, an idealistic product of the human mind; and
4) consequently, truth and knowledge about the world are not discovered and certain, but invented and relative.
The speciousness of the so-called ‘given’, the creative power of the mind, the variety and formative function of sign systems, and the multiplicity of symbolic worlds are the chief characteristics of this point of view. Creative realism received its initial impetus in the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. In contemporary, postmodern thought, Kant’s Copernican revolt has evolved into a radical perspectivism in which signs and symbols are the whole show: the world really isn’t anything until it is made into something by language.
Critical realism: This understanding posits an objectively existing reality and the possibility of trustworthy knowledge of it, but also recognizes the prejudice that inevitably accompanies human knowing and demands an ongoing critical conversation about the essentials of one’s outlook. This viewpoint may also be summarized in four basic propositions:
1) an objective, independent reality exists;
2) the character of this reality is fixed and independent of the observer;
3) human knowers have trustworthy cognitive capacities by which to apprehend this fixed reality, but the influence of personal prejudices and worldview traditions conditions or relativizes the knowing process; and
4) truth and knowledge about the world, therefore, are partially discovered and certain and partially invented and relative.
This point of view is something of a golden mean epistemology which seeks to avoid the extremes of commonsense realism and creative antirealism. It is a blend of objectivism and subjectivism, acknowledging both a real world and yet realhumanbeingsinall their particularities attempting to know it. It places neither too much nor too little confidence in human reason, but recognizes what human cognitive powers can and cannot do. This position avoids the arrogance of modernity and the despair of postmodernity, but instead enjoys a rather modest, chastened view of knowledge marked by epistemic humility
Naugle suggest that critical realism is “neither dogmatism nor scepticism, and its mood is neither excessively optimistic nor cynical. In each category it maintains a balance realism” (Naugle, 2002, p.325). In the perspective of critical realism “a worldview partially gets it wrong and partially gets it right. As a semiotic construct, its signs and symbols both obfuscate and clarify, articulate both error and truth.” In this view there is therefore a “persistent need … for interaction with others and other perspectives to challenge or certify an individual’s knowledge of the nature of things” (Naugle, 2002, p.325).
The more diverse the different perspectives we try to integrate by a continuous and participatory dialogue about how to participate appropriately, the more complex the knowledge base from which we can collectively take decisions that sustain our future.
[Critical realism] is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence, ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the things known (hence ‘critical’). This path leads to critical reflection on the products of our enquiry into ‘reality’. So that our assertions about ‘reality’ acknowledge their own provisionality. Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower.
— N.T. Wright (in Naugle, 2002, p.324)
The reality of the fundamentally interconnected, dynamically transforming Kosmos, transcends matter. To spatially separate the knower and the known into material and distinct entities is already a reduction of reality’s true complexity. We simply have to embrace the paradox, that as participants in the process we refer to as reality, we ourselves are both dependent expressions created by this process and co-creators of this process. Professor David Naugle concludes his comprehensive discourse on the worldview concept with the following words.
A worldview, then, is a semiotic system of narrative signs that creates the definitive symbolic universe which is responsible in the main for the shape of a variety of life-determining human practices. It creates the channels in which the waters of reason flow. It establishes the horizons of an interpreter’s point of view by which texts of all types are understood. It is that mental medium by which the world is known. The human heart is its home and it provides a home for the human heart. At the end of the day it is hard to conceive of a more important human or cultural reality, theoretically or practically, than the semiotic system of narrative signs that makes up a worldview.
— David Naugle, 2002, p.330
Naugle asks: “After all, what could be more important or influential than the way an individual, a family, a community, a nation, or an entire culture conceptualise reality? Is there anything more profound or powerful than the shape and content of human consciousness and its primary interpretation of the nature of things? When it comes to the deepest questions about human life and existence, does anything surpass the final implications of the answers supplied by one’s essential Weltanschauung” (Naugle, 2002, p.345)?
All design is fundamentally worldview dependent and therefore the meta-design of organising ideas, value systems and integrative frameworks is the most up-stream and most effective way to facilitate cultural evolution and promote the transformation toward a more sustainable human civilization.
Naugle argues that ultimately “the mystery of a Weltanschauung is the mystery of a heart. A heart-bounded worldview and a worldview-bound heart is the root of that embedded force that determines how lives come and go.” Naugle quotes the wise King Solomon form Proverbs 4:23 in saying: “Watch over your heart with diligence, from it flow the springs of life” (Naugle, 2002, p.345).
Appropriate participation in natural process cannot be guided by the rational intellect alone. Our self-identification and compassion has to extend to the community of life as a whole. We have to adopt a more bio-centric, eco-centric and World-centric ethic (see chapter 3), and reconnect to our inherent love for life (see chapter 6) to create a sustainable and healthy future for humanity and all life on Earth.
William Scott and Stephen Gough (2003, p.78) call for “environmental meta-learning, learning which occurs across the boundaries between different institutions, literacies and practices.” They argue that there is a “need to create learning opportunities through engagementwith worldviews and rationalities which primarily value, for example, hierarchy or competition, rather than through opposition to these.” Scott and Gough identify two important elements of environmental meta-learning: the importance of a vision formulated in a way to united rather than confront different stakeholders and their differences in point of view (e.g. the preservation of biodiversity); and secondly the concept and practice of networks which allows for contextual integration and the formation of alliances across various scales. They emphasize the need for the ability to agree to disagree and still collaborate. While education can facilitate crucially important understanding, by itself it cannot change society:
It cannot be the function of education to solve society’s problems. .. education which sets out explicitly to solve social problems is doomed to fail, since it cannot hope to engage the very people it most wishes to convert. This is not to say that such initiatives contribute nothing, only that they cannot determine for themselves, and in advance, what it is they are contributing to. Environmental learning in the presence of complexity, uncertainty, risk and necessity … must be accepting of multiple perspectives supportive of meta-learning across perspectives, and detached from the making of decisions in its (learners’) own immediate contexts.
— William Scott & Stephen Gough, 2003, p.86
“The challenge for learning in relation to sustainable development is to confront learners with competing accounts of human and environmental reality wherever complexity and uncertainty mean that it is possible for competing rationalities to yield competing versions of the truth.” They emphasize that this trans-disciplinary, multi-perspective approach to learning shifts our understanding of learning itself “from a process which acts on individuals’ characteristics in order to change the world to one which challenges individuals’ views of the world as a means of influencing their characteristics and hence ways of thinking and living” (Scott & Gough, 2003, pp.118–119). Dichotomies and dualistic discussions rigidly cemented into either right or wrong positions and viewpoints limit meta-learning. Dialogue facilitates meta-learning.
The ‘dichotomy’ between competition and cooperation as organising principles is not an innate characteristic of societies, but only an artefact of thought. It is, therefore, unlikely to be helpful to seek to promote ‘balance’ between competition and cooperation. They are not different solutions to social and environmental problems, but rather alternative (but not the only) ways of defining such problems. Balance is not possible between two people sitting on different sea-saws. If we are going to build new capacity and create individual agency for radical change then, to persist with the metaphor, we need to encourage and help learners to look around the playground.
— William Scott & Stephen Gough, 2003, p.119).
… (continues)
[This is is an excerpt from my 2006 PhD Thesis in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’. This research and 10 years of experience as an educator, consultant, activist, and expert in whole systems design and transformative innovation have led me to publish Designing Regenerative Cultures in May 2016.]
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
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