Being Meta-stable

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?

Something I’ve struggled with for a long time is judging. Judging myself. And judging others.

There is progress, although it’s painfully slow. My current technique is to act ‘as if’, to act my way into who I want to become, to learn by doing. From a macro level, I can definitely feel myself edging closer towards the universe of possibilities, as the Zanders memorably called it, away from the world of measurement that is our dominant narrative. But like most change it’s hardly linear. Some days I’m celebrating a new me… and some days it feels more like 2 steps forward, 2 steps back.

Yesterday was one of those days.

So I reached into my things-that-inspire-me-in-becoming-the-person-I-want-to-be toolbox and dug out this beautiful passage from Ram Dass, who would have turned 89 last Monday:

When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

I’m thankful in the current lockdown to have an unfettered view out across a diverse array of trees, some still bare and shrivelled while others are already blossoming in the northern-hemisphere spring. They’ll be my constant visual reminder.

Whom in your life might you practise turning into trees?