On August 24th, I delivered my first (and probably only) commencement address to the graduates of the Marlboro College Graduate School in Brattleboro, VT. I had been teaching in their MBA for Managing Sustainability until last January. I had a chance to watch with great pride a handful of those I taught among the graduates from other programs. I am attaching my address should anyone be interested in reading it. It was very well received.

2013 Commencement Address.pdf

I am off the grid under about Labor Day. Please come back later. In the meaantime buy and read my new book.

I read an interesting piece (subscription only) in the Sunday Globe Ideas section yesterday. With a headline of “The Triumph of Coping,” the article is a conversation with Jennifer Silva, who finds that, “the American Dream is being replaced by a new kind of story.” In a series of 100 interviews with working class people, she found that, in place of the old story of unlimited opportunity for upward mobility (The American Dream), a new tale of struggle against “emotional problems, mental illness, family chaos, and addiction… To her surprise, hard-won emotional self-management was often viewed with as much pride as diplomas or marriage certificates.” The context for this finding is that current employment situation, on the whole, has replaced well-paying, relatively stable jobs with uncertain, low-paid jobs in the retail and food service industry, resulting in “financial instability that hurts community and personal relationships.”

I interpret this finding, based only on the scant information in the article, that success (or finding happiness) in life comes from a sense of having faced the hardships out there today and managed to come through on one’s own. The mythic American dream has been replaced by what I would consider a pathological variant. The positive individualism characteristic of America of old has become a new sort of individualism finding happiness by discovering what’s “wrong with you … and make it your job to fix it yourself.” She calls this process “privatizing happiness.” Wow! I hope she is not right but her work looks to be well-done.

She slips in a paragraph near the end about those in her survey that were “emotionally or economically successful.” Here’s her response.

The few people I interviewed who objectively achieved upward mobility by getting college degrees and then using them to get good jobs, what really struck me about them is that they had good networks. They had people in their community who could help them figure out what kind of jobs and then how to go to school. They have someone translating the tools and knowledge and skills they needed to work their way up. Otherwise people are trying really hard, but without knowing the system they often make choices that set them even further back.

I don’t think it takes a lot of sociological research to come up with her findings. Silva, with a Ph.D. in sociology, is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Humans are social animals. We evolved in families, then tribes, then communities of many tribes and now a global, highly interconnected world. Humans have always coped; happiness and other measures of success in life, except for a very few privileged people, have always come only through human efforts, both toilsome and innovative. The headline writer for the Globe article has little or no sense of our species’ history. Coping is a natural human capability, not something to see as a triumph. I might have written “The Sadness of Coping Today.”

The focus is better placed on the isolated context for those finding happiness through their battles with loneliness, mental dysfunction, family breakdown, and other abnormalities of life for many today. Abnormal because a sense of the normal lurks in the background in the myth of the American Dream: happily married with 2 or 3 kids in a lovely house on a lot with a beautiful lawn and a diploma on the wall, coming home from a great job to dinner prepared by Mom, and so on. I must admit that my own early adult life was a bit like that for a time. But was that ever normal? There’s no such dinner waiting when Mom now is the breadwinner or the only source of money in many homes. For many, there is not even a home nor job.

I’m a child of the Great Depression era that had many of the same features as today, but also some critical differences. Life’s hard circumstances, created by the basic workings of an unstable economic system, were mitigated by relationships. Some were created by the great government programs that put people to work, but in the company of others. In my own case, my parents lived in an apartment that they could not always pay the rent for. The landlord let them stay saying he kne`w that ultimately they would be able to, and they did. There was a sense of care both in the big picture and the small.

Silva’s data show the importance of care. Those in a network of caring relationships found themselves in happier places that those, either by choice or necessity, coped with life all on their own. Taking a leap, I suspect that whatever positive feelings of success or happiness ensue from an isolated, individualistic encounter with life are empty feelings, empty of the satisfaction coming from successful, empathic relations. I hope Silva is wrong in finding that this new story of winning against all odds without help from others is becoming the new normal. The need for and difficulty of coping in the present economic and special conditions of the US is different from that of the past, but it is not necessary to go it alone. A long time ago, people understood that, “Misery loves company.”

I was reading a review of a set of essays by Simon Leys in the New York Review of Books (August 15, 2013) when Confucius jumped right out of the page. Leys is an expert on Chinese history among other interests. Here’s what caught my eye.

When Confucius was asked by one of his disciples what he would do if he were given his own territory to govern, the Master replied that he would “rectify the names,’ that is, make words correspond to reality. He explained (in Leys’s translation):

If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language has no object, action becomes impossible—and therefore, all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless.

He, Confucius, would have had a field day rectifying the meaning of sustainability. As used everywhere today, the word has nothing to do with reality. Our affairs are disintegrating as measured by the ever increasing unsustainable conditions all around us. And further, it is pointless to attempt to coordinate or manage what goes for sustainability today. The very idea that we can sustain our life style and associated economy that provides it is about as far from reality as one can get. The Earth has limits no matter how hard the technocrats and no-nothings keep trying to deny it. Their call for sustainability isn’t even about keeping things the same; it calls for sustaining growth indefinitely. Growth, they say, is the answer to human suffering and inequality. Even this is far from reality. Growth does lift some out of poverty but impoverishes others simultaneously. Who wins and who loses in still a question. This loosely hidden connection of sustainability to unrealistic growth would be at or near the top of Confucius’s list of words to rectify.

Confucius and many other wise men understood what qualities should be maintained and what words should be used to guide the management of people. All had quite similar views of what constituted a good life, that is, a life that exposed the full potential of human being (gerund, singular). Not of human beings (noun, plural), but about the process of living. He might also rectify the word “being.” It does not rightfully refer to an object, a person. It refers to the action of existing, of living. These two words, sustainability and being, are closely connected. All living creatures exist, but only humans be. Being is the act of intentional living, existing but within a meaningful life, and in the case of sustainability, a particular meaningful life, one of caring. Caring is what makes humans distinct from other creatures, except, perhaps, for our primate forebears. Confucius would correct the current sense of being as fulfilling our insatiable needs that has followed our historical trajectory especially since the Age of Enlightenment.

I have been reading the books of Antonio Damasio this summer to learn more about how the brain works. Damasio writes about the connections among, emotions, feelings, consciousness, and bodily actions (behavior). He calls out attention as the primary driver of cognition. It follows that behavioral patterns or routines arise out of whatever most occupies the attention of a human actor over time. Such routines are either instinctive, that is, operating without consciousness, or intentional, the result of some some conscious rational process, that is, the end of a series of linked cognitive acts. An observer looking down on early humans might say that they exhibited care, that is, intentional behavior directed at the various worldly objects that routinely came to their attention. To survive, they needed to care for—interact effectively with—these everyday situations. I can imagine how these cares began to be called simply needs, and over millennia became taken to be part of human nature (another concept needing Confucius’s attention).

The Master’s mentioning the pointlessness of trying to manage the affairs of men and women when the words being used to guide that effort fail to match reality is also relevant today. The primary coordinating mechanism today is the market, which is supposed to magically maximize well-being, another unrealistic term, based on the combined results of everyone acting to fulfill their needs, another way of saying acting in their own interests. But we know that it really doesn’t work that way; there are too many imperfection in both the humans and the system itself. The other primary mechanism comes at the hands of the state, which for us in the United States, operates even farther from the way it is supposed in theory.

As I write, I see that my list of words that need rectification keeps growing. There are many more I haven’t got time or space to add. I try my best to make the words connected with sustainability right so that maybe those who are concerned both about the way we live today and the possibility that we can flourish in the future can try to manage our worldly affairs. After reading the quote above, I will continue to emulate Confucius and his understanding that without the right words, our affairs will disintegrate and we will have little to do about that situation. If you will join me in rectifying our vocabulary, then perhaps we will start to pull our collective lives back together.

CSRwire has always been a good source for information on what is happening in this domain. It has gone from a seemingly random reporting style to a well-designed and clearly displayed format. One added feature is the Talkback columns, presenting the ideas of a wide range of business, academic, and other interested parties. My comments today are directed to a recent article by Giles Hutchins, entitled, “Order Within Chaos: A New Business Paradigm Inspired by Nature.” His principles seemed reasonable, if not a bit generic, but I did not see their connections to nature as clearly as the article suggested.

The context for his work is what he deemed the chaotic state of the world as a more apt descriptor for the broad business environment than the historic machinelike models driving almost all strategic frameworks today. He proposes six principles to enable businesses to create “order within chaos.”

Paradoxically, inspiration for our pressing challenges is all around us in nature. Nature has been dealing with dynamic change for over 3.8 billion years; the more we explore nature’s ways the more we find inspiration for operating in a dynamically changing business environment… Our understanding of nature has evolved over the last few decades, from viewing it as a battleground of competition to one of dynamic non-equilibrium, where an order within chaos prevails due to unwritten natural patterns, feedback loops, behavioral qualities, interdependencies and collaboration within and throughout ecosystems. The more we grapple with the challenges our businesses now face, the more we realize that nature’s patterns and qualities inspire approaches and qualities for our own evolutionary success in business and beyond… Organizations inspired by nature are resilient, optimizing, adaptive, systems-based, values-based, and life-supporting.

Let me take these six items, in turn.

• Resilient-no argument here. In fact, this statement is more or less a bromide or a self evident truth. Resilience is the capability to withstand perturbations without disintegrating. One characteristic of long-lived robust living systems is always resiliency. There is a circularity here. If we observe such long-lived, relatively stable systems, we often define them as resilient, by virtue simply of the longevity. What makes them resilient is a more challenging question and has been the subject of debate among ecologists for a long time. Some argue, for example, for a high degree of internal diversity of the species that comprise the system. The analogy to a company is not helpful in informing us of what makes a firm resilient. Diversity in the market place, as Hutchins writes, has been a strategy that has helped firms survive in the face of changing customer preferences. Diversity may not, however, enable firms to survive shocks from major internal or external disruptions, say the sudden death of a founder or a new piece of legislation.

• Optimizing-Nature does not optimize. That process is entirely man-made. To optimize one has to first designate a set of values. There are no values in the natural world. Some species come and some go, but even Mother Earth does not predetermine the outcomes by applying some optimizing algorithm. Unless a firm includes the entire set of variables that shape its present and future performance, optimizing is always going to be iffy. This may be a useful strategic concept, but it is not derived from nature.

• Adaptive-Another good one coming from nature, and similar to resilient. Adaptive systems or organizations try out responses to changes in the inner or outer context until the new structure provides stability. Natural systems adapt without any intentionality ascribed to the changes. The process of change is simply evolutionary. The situation in human organizations is very different. Responses to perturbations are intentional. Leaving responses to some, more or less, random natural process is usually fatal. Adaptive management might be better called pragmatic and/or nimble.

• Systems-based-This principle reflects the reality of natural systems. They are systems of interconnected living nodes. Their behavior depends not only on the workings of the nodes, but also strongly on the way they are interconnected. “Systems-based” doesn’t tell us very much about the nature of the systems. Everything exists within some sort of systems context. This principle would be much stronger if the descriptor, complex, were added. Nature is complex and fundamentally unpredictable. Except for small isolated chunks, we cannot write down the rules that govern these systems. This means that the analytic, mechanistic models conventionally applied to design and manage business organizations will always fall short. Pragmatic, adaptive schemes must then be used in place of rule-based strategies. Responses to change must be considered contingent and retained only as long as they seem to work, that is, allow the enterprise to continue on the path it set out for itself. The firm must be prepared to change the strategy whenever the outcomes are not satisfactory. This is not an excuse for trying anything under the sun. Pragmatism requires prudent, wise managers, and inputs from the entire community with an interest in the outcomes. Participatory management and design flow from this fact about the nature of the systems firms are embedded within.

• Values-based-Nature has no values so this is entirely a man-made idea. Firms being constituted by human beings always have values, so to itemize this notion is oxymoronic. What matters, however, are the particular values that underlie its activities. Hutchins writes

As the need to continuously change, let go of old ways, seek out opportunities and embrace the new increases, values become the core in which consistent good business behavior is rooted. Hierarchies of management and control slow down organizations’ ability to adapt… Rather than controlling the workforce, a firm of the future empowers the stakeholder community to take decisions locally, based on core business behaviors set down by the values and culture of the organization. Hence, values-based leadership becomes a differentiator for these organizations.

I would and do argue for values based on caring. For firms, this means providing the means for all individuals that comprise a society to take responsibility for the well-being of themselves, other humans, and the entire non-human world. In a word to care. More follows below.

• Life-supporting-This sounds like something nature-related, but here too I would call this another self-evident principle. For natural systems, this could be simply another way of defining resilient. For managers, it means much more than maintaining autopoiesis because human life is more than eating, respiring and excreting. Cultural life is full of activities besides these basic life processes. I think this is a good principle, but what kind of human life is to be supported must be clearly defined

I would add a few principles to this list, after subtracting the ones that appear self-evident. My vision of businesses has them contributing to a flourishing world, one in which nature and human beings live together and flourish. The image of flourishing presumes a world that is autopoietic (self-creating), that is, maintains the structure that supports life while adapting to changes. My favorite biologist, Humberto Maturana defines stable, living systems by this term. Certainly adaptive and resilient are essential characteristics, but are outcome of other processes. Systems thinking, not merely systems-based, is critical, as it is generally impossible to be resilient or adaptive unless you are aware of the whole system in which you operate. It is patently obvious that no one can take in the whole world, but the consciousness that now drives all human activities must expand far beyond the bounds of the models managers use today. Whatever system is identified must be recognized as complex, requiring as I noted above, a pragmatic mindset.

The second principle is that firms have to take responsibility for the system they live inside of. Together this means that business as an institution must be responsible for the whole Planet. They are certainly not the only institution with such responsibility, but must care for the world that they affect, a very large part of it. The market as a place where needs are matched by exchange transactions is fundamentally amoral. A different way of doing business is essential, as without it, the changes that Hutchins sees coming will likely toll a death knell for business firms, along with the ancillary damages their collapse would create.

(Image: “Mother Earth”, the nourisher of all things, from the alchemistic work “Atalanta fugiens” (1618) by Michael Maier. Thanks to Scientific American blogs.)

Nicholas Christakis takes social science to task in an article in the NYTimes Sunday Review of July 19th. He complains that the social sciences haven’t exploded as the natural sciences have in the past few decades.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when I was a graduate student, there were departments of natural science that no longer exist today. Departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology have disappeared, replaced by innovative departments of stem-cell biology, systems biology, neurobiology and molecular biophysics. Taking a page from Darwin, the natural sciences are evolving with the times. The perfection of cloning techniques gave rise to stem-cell biology; advances in computer science contributed to systems biology. Whole new fields of inquiry, as well as university departments and majors, owe their existence to fresh discoveries and novel tools.

In contrast, the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. Such inertia reflects an unnecessary insecurity and conservatism, and helps explain why the social sciences don’t enjoy the same prestige as the natural sciences.

It should not be hard to guess that the article was written by an academician, working in one of these spanking new scientific micro-disciplines. I think he has it backwards. It is easy to probe the non-human world out there and get to know its innermost secrets. With that knowledge, we can and do conjure up all sorts of wonderful new devices. But so what. These new devices titillate us for a while until they are quickly replaced by system 2.0. And while this incessant process continues, the condition of the world deteriorates.

The new sciences have facilitated our move into a new geological era, the Anthropocene where our use of all the new technology (science in action) is changing the worldly context in which we evolved and require for life. Part of the reason for this is the emergence of the wonderful micro-disciplines that Christakis extols. None has the capability of seeing the whole system which the new sciences impact. By becoming ever more reductionist, the production of unwanted and untoward unintended consequences grows and grows. Almost everything, maybe even everything, we lump into unsustainability follows from the failure of the theoretical knowledge produced by scientists and applied by engineers to represent the real systems that form the context for their knowledge-in-practice.

It takes a good, old-fashioned social scientist to point this out. The more old-fashioned the better because these fields grew out of looking at systems in situ, not in the laboratory. Today, new sub-disciplines are creeping into academia, but not near the rate of the natural sciences. Christakis has an explanation for this slow pace.

One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers. Like natural scientists, they should be able to say, “We have figured this topic out to a reasonable degree of certainty, and we are now moving our attention to more exciting areas.” But they do not.

If social scientists would ever be able to do as he says, that is, to claim sufficient certainty to call a halt to their work and move on, we would be in a very bad place. Unlike the worlds of natural sciences that look at a relatively unchanging context, the social world is never the same from one moment to the next. Even about 2500 years ago, Heraclitus knew this, writing, “You could not step twice into the same river.” No “scientist” could make much headway if the topics they study were like the incessant mobile river of Heraclitus. They would be able to make some statements about the expected value and degree of uncertainty of the condition at any time, but could not paint an exact picture.

Social systems are much more like rivers than cells and semiconductors. (At the quantum level semiconductors exhibit uncertain behavior, but not at the macro-level that makes iPads possible.) And because of this, the disciplinary fields that work to explain social systems and the individual human actors that constitute them are perforce broad in scope. If we are to ever understand why the world is in bad shape and getting worse, only the social scientists will be able to unravel the complexity of real systems. One reason for the present condition of Planet Earth is that people like Christakis have done much to delegitimate these fields relative to the natural sciences. Economics, which once tried to explain whole systems, is moving more and more towards a trying to be a natural science, just like physics. It’s a mistake because the humans they study are like rivers, never the same from moment to moment. What I learn today changes the context out of which I behave tomorrow.

What we need to cope with the complexity of today’s crowded and stressed world is systems thinkers, not people who see the world through soda straws. We may not have a new smart phone every six months, but perhaps, the atmosphere won’t heat up so fast. Natural scientists will never find the secret of flourishing. I’m not sure that social scientists will, but I would much rather have them working on the problem.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything in the world looks like a nail (to be banged into something). If the scope expands and all you have is a complicated technological system, than the world looks like a lots of problems waiting for you. That’s my quick appraisal of a provocative article that appeared in Yale Environment 360.

The author, Fred Pearce, reports on the evolution of a group, claiming to save the environment through technology. His article is entitled, “New Green Vision: Technology As Our Planet’s Last Best Hope.” Here’s the abstract from the Yale on-line magazine.

The concept of ecological modernism, which sees technology as the key to solving big environmental problems, is gaining adherents and getting a lot of buzz these days. While mainstream conservationists may be put off by some of the new movement’s tenets, they cannot afford to ignore the issues it is raising.

The article pits classic environmentalists, represented by Rachel Carson, against environmental modernists who would trigger an era of Schumpetarian “creative destruction.”

Schumpeter’s ideas are a kind of economists’ version of the biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s take on evolution as happening mostly in transformational leaps, which he called punctuated equilibrium, rather than through gradual, incremental change. Of course, the modernists see green technologies as the game-changers of the 21st century. In their view, all the planet needs is eco-versions of Steve Jobs… . Martin Lewis of Stanford University, a prominent environmental modernist, calls for the “de-ecologization of our material welfare.” Environmentalism has been taken over by “Arcadian sentiment” and has “become its own antithesis,” he says. “Only technology can save nature.”

These folks want to lock us up in a world disconnected from whatever “nature” is called in the future. Then the mad scientists can recreate the extinct creatures that once roamed the earth by using modern genetic engineering. I just viewed the film, Young Frankenstein, and am reminded of the limits of science and technology. What’s gone is gone. The promise of Jesse Ausubel’s “great restoration” where bison will roam across the American West and wolves overrun Europe or Stuart Brand’s notion of recreating passenger pigeons is just as Arcadian a dream as is that of the mainstream environmentalists they dis.

The modernist approach to conservation is to seek out technological substitutes for crops. We should, they say, give up cotton in favor of polyester or whatever else the chemists can come up with to clothe us. We should turn our noses up at wild fish and embrace aquaculture instead. Farmers should discard organic fertilizer in favor of chemicals.

You really should read the whole article to get the full thrust of the hubris of those who proclaim the death of environmentalism. Pearce does note that technology both giveth and taketh away. A point lost on the environmental modernist. Technology is, indeed, a wonderful thing. I spent eight years at MIT becoming an engineer and for a while thought I could do exactly what the modernists claim. But then I ventured out into life away from the academic cloisters where many of these folks have spent their entire adult lives. Lo and behold, the world turns out to be more complex than the machine that this movement, if that is what it is, thinks it is or fails to accept.

In many ways, the very condition these folks want to cure, unsustainability or some other descriptor that carries the same picture of how we have messed up the Earth, can be traced back to the uncritical, perhaps, addictive use of technology to solve problems it has created or at least can be seen as the proximate cause. But it never the whole cause. Technology is never far from people and its outcomes depends on the combination of human agency and the technical power of the devices and systems they employ.

Perhaps the so-called Arcadian environmentalists referred to in the article do not have the whole story right, but they have enough right not to be so easily dismissed. Humans evolved surrounded by nature (descriptive use, not expressing some value). Our cognitive system has parts that developed out of our interrelationship and experience. I interpret the essence of the environmental modernists as putting human settlements in a bubble from which we can look out through a window on what used to be called nature or environment, but now is only something we view like pictures at a museum. It’s we against them. Somehow I think our humanity will become lost as we become even more modern that we are.

An extract from a the NYTimes article:

WASHINGTON — China’s growth has slowed significantly in recent months. But even its current pace of expansion may not be sustainable, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday, unless China starts making significant and systemic economic changes — and soon. . . “A decisive shift toward a more consumption-based growth path has yet to occur,” the I.M.F. said. “Accelerating the transformation of the growth model remains the main priority.”

Life in China has historically, like many poor countries, been difficult, but is this the way to alleviate it? Continuous grown is not only not sustainable, but it is a primary cause of unsustainability. Ask those living in Beijing about the air they breathe.

Since my book has come out, I have had many readers ask me what can they do about reversing the present trends and put us on the road to flourishing. This is a very tough, but telling, question because the causes lie deep in the unconsciousness of our collective culture and of everyone. We are all part of a complex system whose response to human activities is far from predictable as is the case in any truly complex system.

Here’s my immediate response. Do not continue to apply technological and technocratic solutions based on scientific knowledge. While science can unscramble parts and pieces of the complex world, it always leaves out critical knowledge, knowledge that without which we get the unintended consequences that are plaguing us today. There is nothing new in this statement except to acknowledge that these undesired effects are becoming so great as to threaten the health of the Earth.

I have argued that the cause of our concern is our cultural addiction to two beliefs. One is that the Earth is a machine that we can know sufficiently well to manage it for our human desires. No, as I just said, it is a complex system that will stymie our efforts to control it. The second is our belief that humans operate by fulfilling an insatiable set of wants, creating a secondary, derivative addiction that shows up as hyperconsumption requiring more resources than the Earth can provide with obvious eventual consequences. Some, such as global climate change, are already becoming present.

The causes are addictions, that is, repeated actions using the same “solution” that appears to alleviate the immediate problem symptoms, but 1) fails to address its roots so that the same problem reoccurs, and 2) produces deleterious unintended consequences. Not just side effects, the popular word for unintended consequences that are presumed to be insignificant. These unintended consequences are just as much a response to the “solution” as is the primary response. They are not marginal, insignificant, or “side” at all.

We fall back on science-derived solutions for virtually all of our societal problems. Economists and political scientists, using their “scientific” knowledge, design our political economy and tinker with it when it goes awry, as it did in 2008. It still is not doing what it should if one thinks that unemployment and inequality are outcomes that need to be done away with. Geo-engineering will be the solution to global warming say many engineers. Gene therapy will alleviate or cure many of our dreaded diseases. We tout consumption as the cure for our flagging economy and as the way to human well-being. We measure the health of the economy by how much consumption has occurred. More consumption does not make the problems go away, either to the society or to the individuals that constitute it, but somehow we keep doing the same thing over and over again, with only temporary or no relief. This behavior fits the classic definition of addiction. Both planet and people suffer the unintended consequences.

Breaking addictive habits is very difficult. Rehab can start only after the addict admits to and acknowledges the addiction. Individual consumers can voice their self-knowledge if they become committed to break the habit. This is the first step: necessary, but insufficient. Societal addiction is very much harder to address. The same first step is critical, but who is the voice analogous to the awakened individual? The scientific, machine cosmology is deeply embedded in all primary institutions that make up the modern world: education, business, government policy-makers and even in capitalism and the free market structure. Somebody of authority representing all of these institutions will have to stand up and admit that they and the institution itself are addicted to a set of beliefs that are failing to cope effectively with the worldly context of the present.

This is the essential first step—acknowledgement of the failure of the current beliefs. Ironically, this is how Thomas Kuhn has successfully argued that science proceeds from one paradigm (set of beliefs and ensuing institutions) to a new one. Some scientist admits, perhaps only to him- or herself, that the present beliefs cannot explain the world, and replaces the fruitless pursuit of knowledge with one springing from a new and different fundamental belief. This belief becomes the foundation of a new paradigm, but only after the creator of the new ideas is able to convince the established institutional powers of its practical effectiveness. Franklin Roosevelt and his team knew that the old and “true” ways to runs an economy were the cause of the disaster they faced. They invented many new beliefs, and discovered which worked only by observing the practical results. But must we wait until the world collapses as it did effectively in the 1930s. It came very close in 2008, but not to the extent that public authority figures were willing to give up the old beliefs. They merely tinkered with the old “machine.”

So in answer to those who ask me, What’s next?”, I say, “Admit we are acting in an addictive pattern,” or simply, “I am a belief addict.” Only then, can we individually and collectively start to search for new beliefs that work. I do think I can offer alternatives to the beliefs driving the present addiction. There are just two. One is we turn to a model of complexity, not reductionist complicatedness, to describe the world. The other is that humans are caring, not needing creatures. Like Roosevelt and his crew of pragmatists, we can determine their validity only if we put them into play and watch what happens. So that completes my answer to those who ask what to do about the mess out there. Admit you are addicted to your deep-seated beliefs and try operating on the basis of complexity and care. Try caring first. I am quite confident you will like the results.

I hope you don’t give up on this blog. There is just too much going on to keep blogging on a schedule. There are too many ways to enjoy the summer, which has finally showed up in Maine after a week of pretty constant rain. I was inspired today by an article in the NYTines Sunday review section, entitled, “The Morality of Meditation,” by David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston.

The title is a bit misleading. It’s more about the impact of meditation on acting empathetically than about morals. The example used to relate meditation to enhanced empathetic behavior is an experiment where the behavior of a set of subjects who have practiced meditation for only a short time is compared to a control group that has not done any meditation. The researchers found that the meditators sitting in a chair amid two others (part of the experiment) get up and offer their chair to a disabled person entering the room far more than those that did not meditate. The two in on the game stay in their chairs to increase the “moral” pressure of the experimental subject.

What I found very interesting was the possible explanations offered by the author.

Although we don’t yet know why meditation has this effect, one of two explanations seems likely. The first rests on meditation’s documented ability to enhance attention, which might in turn increase the odds of noticing someone in pain (as opposed to being lost in one’s own thoughts). My favored explanation, though, derives from a different aspect of meditation: its ability to foster a view that all beings are interconnected. The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us. (my emphasis added)

I believe that this explanation can be given to intentional activities other than meditation. Let me extend their arguments to mindfulness, in general, which I define as a consciousness of a world of many interconnected images, rather than a focus on a single or small set of images. I am using images as the metaphor for the mental patterns we produce in the cognitive system, pursuant to the work of Antonio Damasio and others.

I have written quite a few blogs about my experience as a Fellow of the Fowler Center at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case-Western University on a project to investigate the role of spirituality in creating interest in and commitment to sustainability-as-flourishing. Meditation was one of many spiritual practices that our group examined.

The most difficult part of our work, which lasted a little over a year and will be published later this year as a book written by the team, was to settle on what we meant by spirituality. It was critical that we come to some way of talking about it that would not be confused with religion or seen as some New Age fad. I had been thinking about spirituality for some time as I included it as one of the categories of care that, in my work, is the constitutive feature of human being. In my earlier work, I placed spirituality in the domain to taking care of self, along with subsistence, leisure, learning, and authenticity. Partly out of work with the Fowler group and partly because spirituality never fit comfortably alongside these other categories. I realized that spirituality or transcendence referred to a domain of consciousness distinct from those arising out of the material world and the action of human senses. Spiritual experiences and actions motivated by them may relate to material objects, but, in such cases, the objects are but symbols for something unworldly.

What, then was creating the actions of an actor in this domain? The object was not the target in the same sense as oneself or other beings, so the connection itself must be the motivating force underpinning the action. My route to this conclusion is primarily philosophical, and, even more specifically, phenomenological. So, I am delighted to read that this conclusion has been arrived at in scientific investigations. In any case, the importance to flourishing is that any sense of interconnectedness can be logically tied to care. Our cognitive system is constructed such that we respond to any and all perturbations from both inner and external sources. We do this to maintain the integrity of our whole organism. If we fail to respond in a way that does this, we risk being unable to survive.

Care as it appears in this ontological construction of human being is not the affective caring of Love Story or the myriad of sentimental tales that make up the bulk of literature. The ontological, not the psychological, sense of care is rare in that literature. It refers to the attention we place on the world we perceive through our senses and that coming from internal sources that trigger parts of our brains separate from those tied to the perceptual regions. Attention, itself, is a kind of care, and may trigger further cognitive processes ending up as physiological movements. Care is the name I give to the overall process of perturbing the brain, bringing something to our conscious attention and consequently acting. The specific action we take may reflect our emotional state, past experience, and the immediate state of our cognitive system, and so is more or less unpredictable, but any such action is a caring action.

Insofar as our neuronal structures include experiences of interconnectedness, our actions may reflect some intention to act in a way to acknowledge their existence. Further, depending on our emotional state as reflected in our body, our acts toward what we perceive may be empathetic or not. But if we develop a sense of interconnectedness in a positive sense, then we are much more likely to act in an empathetic way, defined as having a sense of what the target of our actions needs to survive or prosper at that moment. Without such a sense of interconnectedness, we have no reason to consider the state of the other in whatever (caring) action we take.

Spirituality, defined as a domain of care directed toward images that appear in our consciousness without apparent connection to our senses, has a meta relationship to the other three domains (refer to the diagram in a recent post). Actions in this domain, which we may call spiritual practices, create a broad consciousness of interconnectedness as contrasted with the explicit ties to the beings that constitute work, family, world, etc. Such a sense is essential to reverse the damage that has been done to the Earth and its inhabitants by our lack of care. Flourishing depends on such a consciousness and an accompanying sense that one can assess that he or she has taken care of all domains, at least for the moment. Spirituality and its practices must be part of the mainstream if we are to flourish.