About Global Warming? Of course not. I am talking about the system that has helped produce Global Warming. The system that has also brought us inequality, endless war, agribusiness, fracking, education that is failing, and political theater to cover the absence of democracy, and so much more. There are many names for the system. "Capitalism", "plutocracy", "oligarchy" yet we are prisoners of words at this point in history. The concepts we need are not adequately framed by these words for we are using a new paradigm and old words.
There is a simple explanation for how we got here. Jim Coffman and I wrote a book about it. The idea is not that difficult to understand. It is rather disturbing once you stop denying.
We just finished a paper which should appear in Telos in the not too distant future. In it we explain why denial is so prevalent. Read on below and I'll talk about denial and the system.
Long ago I realized that when faced with a tough problem that had me stumped there was a necessary step I had to take before I could hope to see the problem in a perspective that allowed me to break out of the bind. This is not easy. It requires abandoning your pet ideas and trying ones that you were not comfortable with. Few of us are willing to do that. Yet that very failure is at the heart of denial.
I spent my life as a scientist and therefore was constantly up against brick walls trying to understand the world around me. It took a very long time to reach a point where I was able to step outside the box and ask whether or not it was the science that I had been taught that was the problem. Once I was able to do that the answer fell out immediately. Since then I have worked at using the insight gained from doing that to join with others who shared the freedom that came from breaking out of the confines we had built for ourselves.
The formal description of what we are doing is "paradigm shift" but once again we are prisoners of words. I have been able to gain much from the cognitive linguistics George Lakoff gave us.
Cognitive linguistics is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.
Finally, cognitive linguistics argues that language is both embodied and situated in a specific environment. This can be considered a moderate offshoot of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, in that language and cognition mutually influence one another, and are both embedded in the experiences and environments of its users.
I have come to the same point by a different route using the complexity theory we developed after Robert Rosen died.
The paradigm we had up until then was the legacy of Descartes, Newton, and so many others. It prescribed a methodology and made claims about "objectivity". If you read what is said about language above and then realize that there can be no objectivity coexisting with an embodied mind you have to look for a new paradigm. The grounding of this idea is deep. It digs into the very way we process incoming sensory data.
Sensory data is supposedly "objective" information and the rules of the scientific paradigm are supposed to allow us to process that data without becoming subjectively involved. This is all fine at the conscious level and a game we can play fairly convincingly in science.
Lakoff makes clear, as did Rosen, that the mind is largely operating at the subconscious level. Raw sensory data, like language, is meaningless without a framework with which we can give it meaning. That framework is in our mind. Our perception is subjective from the start. We really know this when we see different people observe the same event and yet assign totally different meaning to what they have witnessed.
Once this is understood the entire paradigm based on this mechanistic "objective" view of the world has severe limits. It is great for certain things and science has served us well in that context.
Where the trouble arises is precisely where we need the most help. The world is full of complex self organizing systems that are not going to be understood by treating everything as if it were a machine. In fact we can demonstrate that the knowledge of machines that science has given us is actually misleading with complex systems.
Now let's see what denial of these findings is all about. It means that we treat "issues" as if they can be isolated from the myriad connections they are linked to in the real world. The very tags we use for these diaries are products of that kind of reduction.
The new paradigm reverses this reduction and asks and answers questions at a "systems" level without isolating the various parts to simplify the study. This gives an entirely different answer to the questions we believe we have political answers to. It introduces the concept of system stability as a first principle. Either a system is stable or it changes to something else. There is no in between. This is a tough concept if you are used to reducing complex things in order to understand them. If the system is stable it can change in many ways but it remains the same system. When stressed with agents that have the potential to change it to something else it has two automatic responses it "uses" to resist the assault. It either absorbs the agent using it to actually strengthen itself or it destroys the agent eliminating the threat.
I began by pointing out that the system that produced Global Warming and other ills is real and has had many names. I also assert that our political system is an integral part of that system. That means that progressives and conservatives each contribute to the stability of the system in a way that is interpreted as conflict.
These are hard concepts to expose in a diary and I have written about them in many different ways. Our book develops the ideas in a much more scholarly manner with lots of documentation and examples. The follow up paper is an explanation of why denial is so universal. Denial is something the system favors for denial allows the system to grow and prosper.
My guess is that most who will bother to read this are deniers. There are still only a few who have made the necessary effort to step out of the box and look at things afresh. One thing is certain. Once you do this you can never go back.