Author: Selena

Six years ago, I participated in a roundtable focusing on one of the recommendations of the Oxford Martin Commission’s excellent (and still relevant) report Now for the Long Term: to establish through dialogue a set of shared global values, which would guide us to fulfil our collective vision for how we want our world to be.

I remember feeling deeply inspired at the same time as I grappled with its enormity, saying that what we were aiming for was nothing less than extending our in-group to go past our family, our organisation, our profession, our community, our nationality, our ethnicity, our ideology, to encompass all of humanity. I added that it would require a deep understanding of how we evolved from hunter-gatherers who cooperated only with people whom we knew personally in our tribe to the web-based communities today who work together to achieve a common goal with people whom they’ve never physically met.

Having an all-consuming day job that had nothing to do with this meant that I didn’t progress much further, but the tantalising idea that we might one day build a universal set of shared values for humanity – transcending everything that divided us – kept bobbing up from time to time in my head.

There may well be a set of global values – or even ubiquitous virtues – that are shared by all of us. But I’ve changed my mind about it being desirable to ever aim for a single configuration of those values. Julian Baggini’s metaphor of the mixing deck is one that I find particularly helpful:

In the studio, producers record each instrument as an individual track, playing them back through separate channels. By sliding controls up or down, the volume of each track can be increased or decreased. The moral mixing deck works much in the same way. Almost everywhere in the world you’ll find the same channels: impartiality, rules, consequence, virtue, God, society, autonomy, actions, intentions, harmony, community, belonging and so on. The differences between cultures is largely a matter of how much each is turned up or down.

Just as we can appreciate different melodies and rhythms, so can we appreciate that there is more than one good way to live. Baggini warns against confusing pluralism with relativism, though:

Just as in the recording studio, it simply isn’t the case that anything goes. More than one moral mix can work but many more than one won’t.

[For example,] it is impossible to turn everything up to ten: some values clash with others, at least when they are at equal volume. Similarly, when some values are turned down low, they become inaudible, which may be the price to pay for a harmonious overall balance.

He goes on to write that navigating thoughtfully across cultures requires a “good ethical ear”. As in music, we do this by increasing and widening our exposure to the full range of moral concepts:

The goal is not to come up with a mix that will be the favourite of everyone in the world but to make our own the best it can be.

What values might you experiment with in your moral mix?

How do we think?

This is the question that philosopher Julian Baggini masterfully explores in his mind-expanding, beautifully written and researched book, How the World Thinks. Using an analogy reminiscent of Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Matrix, he articulates how much “assumptions about the nature of self, ethics, sources of knowledge, the goals of life, are deeply embedded in our cultures and frame our thinking without our being aware of them”:

Just as a riverbed builds up sediment comprised of that which washes through it, values and belief become ‘sedimented’ in cultures. In turn, those values and beliefs begin to sediment in the minds of people who inhabit those cultures from birth, so that we mistake the build-up for an immutable riverbed. Through these channels of the minds our thoughts and experiences flow, not noticing how they are being directed.

His motivation is to challenge the beliefs and ways of thinking that he takes – that we take – for granted, noting wisely that becoming less certain of the knowledge we think we have is always the first step towards greater understanding and away from dogma. In doing so, he warns against empathic shortcuts:

Getting to know others requires avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we have in common or how much divides us. Our shared humanity and the perennial problems of life mean that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others, no matter how alien they might at first appear. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle. If we assume too readily that we can see things from others’ points of view we end up seeing them from merely a variation of our own.

Western philosophy – in which the idea of ‘science as the search for the truth irrespective of consequences’ finds its home – is one of the most extreme among world philosophies in claiming to be truly objective, transcending any particular time or place, independent of history or culture. This is the construct in which I was educated as a theoretical physicist. And yet I’ve often been uneasy with this, perhaps because of some Eastern philosophy sediment that lies deep in my riverbed, and also as I grappled later with the ethical issues facing scientists who choose to participate in endeavours such as The Manhattan Project.

Baggini urges us to accept that the view will always be from somewhere:

We can build a more complete picture of the world and a more objective understanding of it by taking multiple perspectives. […] Rather than trying to create a comprehensive, single map, we can view a terrain from various places: from within it, from the sky, from a distance and so on. Rather than a view from nowhere, we seek views from everywhere, or at least everywhere that is accessible.

Where are you currently standing, and what different views are you curious to explore?

I’m excited to share with you this week a longer article that touches in particular on my meta-stable exploration between acceptance… and change.

It’s published in Third Factor, a magazine that popped up in my internet search on Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration for my very first altMBA prompt last year.

How are you balancing acceptance and change in your journey towards better?

If I could magically decree the top 5 skills to teach our children, somewhere in there would be how to resist the pull of dogma. To stay stubbornly open-minded.

It’s not easy. One reason for this is the aptly named confirmation bias: that we’re wired to think in ways that favour our existing point of view, to take in information that confirms our existing beliefs, and to discard any that doesn’t. (This comic by Matthew Inman does a fantastic job of illustrating the associated backfire effect.) The first step to overcoming this and our other biases is, as usual, to notice that we actually have them. By educating ourselves about how our mind works, then actively practising to ‘correct’ for our biases.

OpenMind is an online, interactive and evidence-based platform that helps us do just that. It was founded by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and aims to “help people cultivate intellectual humility and open-mindedness while equipping them with the skills for constructive disagreement”. A concept I love that’s explored in the program and that comes from Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind is the Moral Matrix, in reference to, yes, that Matrix:

Many moral matrices exist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders. […] Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.

Many people choose the comfort of the metaphorical blue pill. Haidt encourages us to choose the red pill, to step out of our matrix, to explore new ones. It doesn’t mean agreeing with everything we see. But merely acknowledging that there may well be more than one good way to live is a crucial step towards being able to constructively disagree. To being able to hold a discussion that respects the inherent dignity of every person.  

I was lucky to grow up understanding and seeing different moral matrices, but I’ve still struggled over the years with finding the right balance between having a clear preference at any given moment of what ‘better’ means (when I go on about making myself a better person and the world a better place) and keeping a genuinely open mind. Haidt’s vision might be a direction to aim for:

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

How are you resisting the pull towards dogma?

One of my modern-day heroes is Christiana Figueres.

If you don’t know who she is, you can check her out here. Short version: she played a crucial role in engineering the historic 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change in which 194 states agreed to (grossly simplifying here) reduce their carbon emissions in order to keep global warming well below 2°C (and ideally 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels. (To date, the only state that has activated the process to withdraw its agreement is the United States.) I still remember the moment when I heard that it had finally been signed. I had not been involved one bit in that signature, but I cried – tears of relief after the huge disappointment of Copenhagen 6 years earlier which I had followed at the time, and tears of joy, of feeling uplifted by what humanity can sometimes collectively achieve for the benefit of us all. So little (it doesn’t go far enough for most people in the know), and yet so much (having seen the energy that can go into debating one sentence in contract negotiations with just one other party, I can only imagine what it must be like to get 194 heads of government – coming from different cultures and speaking in different languages – to agree on 25 pages of text).

Since stepping down from the Secretariat of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), she’s continued to lead globally through the climate crisis, including co-writing The Future We Choose, that seeks to inspire and empower each of us to contribute to “moving beyond the climate crisis into a thriving future”. (It gets a rave review from Yuval Noah Harari too, whose brain I have had a serious crush on since 2013 when I first encountered him via Coursera.)

I haven’t read the book yet (I’m waiting to get my hands on the paperback version) but I have started listening to her companion podcast, Outrage and Optimism. In the past few weeks she and her co-hosts have started a series on how we can emerge stronger and better from the Covid-19 crisis. If you want to start with one, I can recommend the latest episode which features an interview with Joseph Stiglitz (2001 Nobel Prize for Economics). There’s a lot to take away from the frank and stimulating discussion that ensues, one of which for me is the need for us to develop a coherent systems approach to tackling the multiple interdependent crises that we are facing as humanity: the two that are front of mind right now – health and economics – of course, but also climate and, underpinning all that, inequality between and within nations.

It also got me thinking about the need for both outrage and optimism in making change happen. Certainly on the emergency that is the climate crisis, which seems just too far away from our everyday lives for many of us to actually take action to change our behaviour. How many people across the globe have been inspired into action by the single-minded outrage of Greta Thunberg?

But perhaps, also, in any change that we want to make happen. I’ve often found myself frustrated at feeling frustrated when I see something I perceive as flagrant injustice, lack of moral backbone, unashamed self-interest (yes, I’m still working on turning people into trees). What if that frustration were somehow part and parcel of making change happen? What if, instead of being frustrated at feeling frustrated, we can thank it for showing us that we care, then marry that precious energy together with optimism to fuel positive change?

What do you feel most frustrated about? And how might you leverage that into creating the change you want to see?