We watched a video about a book by Joel R. Primack, Ph.D., one of the world's leading cosmologists, and Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher and writer. Primack and Abrams use recent advances in astronomy, physics, and cosmology to frame a compelling new theory for understanding the universe and our role in it.
I find writing up this evening more challenging than any of the others. Partly the cosmological context they describe is boggling but also the implications of how precious human life and our place in the universe is and how crucial the next decades may be for the continuation of the evolutionary journey of consciousness in human form is scarey.The images they created to help describe their views of the universe and our place in it were helpful and somehow also frustrating. I wanted to be able to comprehend the whole of what they were saying and there was so much condensed into so little. I'd been reading Lloyd Geering's summary of the I - Thou theology of Martin Buber and was excited by the idea that God or Love or whatevery is found in between us, in our relations with each other, a little like the dark dark matter of the universe described by these scientists as what holds apart and gives structure to the known light parts of the universe. It shouldn't be suprising to a psychotherapist that there is a lot more that we are unconscious of than what we know. If any of you others can remember our discussions or have points to make about this evening please help me out here. I think I need a bigger brain! Lynne
Their website contains links to the video and you can access The View from the Center of the Universe book here.
Author Robert Wright explains “non-zero-sumness,” a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the “game.” Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress — a move toward empathy — is our only hope.
Robert Wright — Non-Zero Sumness
Wright is an historian who, although pessimistic regarding the world today, maintains that civilisation is improving. He points out that several thousand years ago, people in one tribe or city-state didn’t even consider people in other tribes or city-states to be human. Nowadays, while racial and religious prejudice persists, it is not to the level of denying people their humanity and this is certainly progress.
Wright has created a model he calls Non-Zero Sumness that he maintains helps describe civil evolution. The opposite of Non-Zero Sumness is Zero Sumness, which is a description of win-lose, a system that balances to zero. In contrast, Non-Zero Sumness describes how both sides of an “equation” rise and fall in the same direction, they go either up or down together. He points to an example of an increasingly violent American foreign policy (trying to snuff out Muslim extremists in Iraq) to an equally rising and violent Muslim response to this policy.
Wrights major messages are that:
•because of technology, and global communication and interaction, everything that happens in the world has a radiating effect. Civilisation is now so complex and interconnected that parts of it can’t be isolated. We can’t expect interventions to remain localised.
•to improve the world (or to avert catastrophe) we need an improvement in morality.
•the pathway to improve morality is to appeal to people’s self-interest. This means, in Non-Zero Sumness, what is good for you is also good for me (as is what is bad for you is bad for me).
How do you promote improved morality? Wright says that understanding the “other side” or creating empathy is essential. If people act in their own self-interest, then explaining to them that (given the model of Non-Zero Sumness) it is in their best interest that the other side does well. Wellness begets wellness. Illness begets illness. He promotes learning about those with whom you are in opposition.
Our discussion:
How you go about creating moral improvement. Harnessing people’s self-interest, bringing them to realise we are all connected and what hurts “them” will be bad for “us” as well. This is true in all natural systems and it is only recently, now that we have the technical ability to see the interconnectedness of the Earth’s people is no different to any other living system.
To improve morality, people have to learn about those who are different, understand others so they can empathise, and recognise that our fates are intertwined.
Manipulation. We talked about ways to change people’s minds and behaviour. Is getting people to understand something a form of manipulation? Some of us thought yes. Some of us had difficulty with the term. Is manipulation a bad thing that is used by shampoo marketers to convince you of the benefits of buying their product? Isn’t manipulation also bringing people around to understanding something, isn’t it one way to describe teaching children? In the end, I think we agreed it was a matter of semantics.
Truthfulness. How does being truthful intersect with improvements to morality. Is speaking the truth self-evident? Is there a line between truthfulness and manipulation? Why would “the truth” carry the day, given that the truth may well be subjective and illusive?
Doing good for the sake of doing good. Does the idea that “people act in their own self-interest” deny that people do good for the sake of good? I think we came up with: perhaps some people do. But for a model about human behaviour, self-interest is a more reliable premise. We noted that religions, the things that promote morality, utilise self-interest (Christians and Muslims: do good and you will go to heaven. And Buddhists: all your acts of goodness improve your karma and you chances for a better position in the next incarnation) and is a good example of Non-Zero Sumness.
How to influence change. In relationships (personal or in groups) modelling behaviour can be an effective way of making your point, rather than telling. Modelling listening in a relationship can be effective because it: a) lets me hear what the other person is saying and therefore better informs my response, and b) informs the other person they are being heard and they will be more likely to respond in kind.
Perhaps the idea of morality is tied to leadership, that our leaders need to model morality. The value of raising morality can be communicated by our leaders in terms of enlightened self-interest— and Wright’s Non-Zero Sumness.
Dave
You can find Patty Griffin's "I Don't Ever Give Up" on Children Running Through and it is available on her website.
Crowded House's "Heaven that I'm Making" from the CD Time on Earth is available via their website
I found this Pop!Tech website and it includes many videos similar to the TED talks. Here's how they describe what they are about:
Pop!Tech is a one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas.
We started with an overview of how the Monday nights are going for us. We are enjoying having the focus of the video and all the richness and depth of the TED talks. We appreciated the connectedness between one week and the next and the weaving of ideas. We also acknowledged the way we are now thinking as a group and are practising a way of talking that is much closer to our collective understanding of dialogue than we have had in previous years. We all feel we can take responsibility for how the conversations progress. We talked about how group thinking has been proven in research to be more creative than individual thinking or two people in discussion.
Some believe the Monday nights are having a direct impact on their ChangeMaker activities in that they feel more sure about the type of work they want to do and how they are approaching it. Others find the learning friendships are more worthwhile to their 5-10-5-10 projects allowing them to focus on their already established plan of action. We talked about how all the seemingly small activities we are doing are actually capable of making quite a difference when you look at them collectively.
Some time was devoted to the exploration of systemic thinking. We talked about the difference between the band-aid approach to fixing a problem and really getting to the underlying cause of the problem. When we related this to our personal experiences we realised band-aids do have their purpose, it is just important to identify them for what they are. We talked about the things that encourage systemic thinking and they included being present, putting some distance between yourself and the issue and separating off your emotions. We saw the parallels between these ideas and the group thinking we are doing on a Monday night. Being present was very much like the intent listening involved. Distancing yourself from the problem was like creating a space for weaving of ideas. Separating emotions from the problem was like putting your preferences in front of you and acknowledging them.
We talked broadly about oppositional thinking, staying open to new ideas and the pleasure we have had when the Monday night videos had completely upturned what we believe to be true. We also discussed the social impact of the Pill and how the focus on the individual has only come about within the last couple of generations. We considered how having to care for children later in life impacts on your capacity for empathy. We also talked about whether the social impact of recent advances in the medical world has been given full consideration.
Finally Tom has a new bike called an Evolve, made by Ellsworth, which is very very wicked.
Bennett runs a design company, Ideo. He used an example of a hospital client asking for ideas on how to improve their patients’ experience. His theme began with the need to reconcile the big (what the organisation/system/country) wants with what the small (the individual) wants.
He started with “the blinding glimpse of the bleeding obvious” or noticing. There is great value in making ourselves conscious of those things going on around us that we often overlook that may be part of the problem and/or part of the solution.
We talked about the concepts Bennett brings to creating good physical design and what we could learn from these. We identified that we need to understand the overall intention — and keep that big picture objective in view. We concluded that this overall intention must be fixed. If we find that it changes (that it isn’t fixed) then we probably haven’t explored or defined it well enough. We would therefore need to go back and widen our view further and grasp the bigger system of which our problem is a subset. If we don’t have the biggest picture we are capable as a background we will probably end up addressing details that might not address the problem.
Bennett was also clear that once you have the big picture in mind, then start trying to solve the problem incrementally, rather than assuming you will find a powerful, single solution. An overall solutions will tend to be made up a many small solutions.
What we understood of Bennett’s design approach:
•observe what is happening (be objective with fresh eyes)
•consider the issue from the user’s perspective
•keeping the big picture in mind, consider each aspect of the problem and consider how to address that one, rather than striving for a big fix-all solution
•make use of what is already known — ask the people who have experience
In summary: keep in mind the big picture and look to a variety of small steps to fix it from the prospective of the user.
We also talked about Jamie Oliver and his food in schools programme that some of us had seen on TV. Oliver identified a problem (children eating unhealthy food at school) and thought he had some solutions. As he tried to apply these solutions he found his initial attempts didn’t work and that he had to keep trying different things. By trying different things he learned more and more about what underpinned the problem. In the end, he determined he needed to understand why people and children eat the unhealthy ways they do. To do this he needed the big picture, he needed to think systemically.
By questioning and listening, he identified that people were disconnected from their food, that they had no relationship with where it came from and how it was produced. Once he understood that this was the basis for their poor eating habits, he had something to work with and began to think about ways of connecting people to what they were eating, so they understood their food. Until he understood the systemic issues, he was trying to solve details that just wouldn’t be solved because his solutions didn’t address the fundamental problem.
Both of these are very good examples of systemic thinking. They aren’t contentious, in that we didn’t have significant disagreements as we discuss them. But they are revealing and useful to apply to our work and lives. Dave We played Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man - A Mass for Peace "Save Me from Bloody Men"
The Live Earth concert weekend was an inspiring planetary event ... 22 hours of music screened on C4 from Saturday evening to Sunday evening.
Al Gore was inspirational ... emerging as a hologram on the Tokyo stage to open their part of the concerts ... and then later appearing on the New York stage (after Melissa Etheridge) to personally deliver his seven-point pledge to work for change.
The other inspirational speech from New York was cut from the international broadcasts. It was a clear call from Robert F Kennedy Jnr to get involved in the political process. You can watch the speech here and read his full speech here.
I was also very much taken by Paul Kelly's group performance of his Aussie classic on the Gurinji land rights struggle of the 1970s ... "From Little Things, Big Things Grow". (Missy Elliot is the new Australian pop diva).
Taranaki ChangeMakers is one of several New Zealand groups that have been developing a new style of community group which aims to inspire and support a greater citizen engagement on social, economic and environmental issues. Our group follows a 5-10-5-10 framework of active citizenship.
We watched a video about a book by Joel R. Primack, Ph.D., one of the world's leading cosmologists, and Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher and writer. Primack and Abrams use recent advances in astronomy, physics, and cosmology to frame a compelling new theory for understanding the universe and our role in it.
Bruce Springsteen's CD We Shall Overcome: The Seager Sessions is available from Amazon
