Observations Regarding a Missing Elephant
by Tom Atlee
Founder And Co-Director of the Co-Intelligence Institute
Although I've been off-line, I knew days ago that I wanted to share with you the article below, which ranks as one of the hundred (maybe twenty) most important articles of my life. I'm sending it with no comment so you can get its full impact.
It is a good article to reflect on, over and over. I read it first early in 2001 and immediately searched the Web to learn more about the man who wrote it so I could talk with him. I was devastated to discover he'd died a few months previously. Perhaps his work was done. Heaven knows, he was engaged in some very hot lines of inquiry. It is time for us to carry the torch he lit so brightly.
I'll send you my offering towards that effort tomorrow. For today, let me say I read "Observations Regarding a Missing Elephant" again on my walk in the hills this morning and it seems even more profound now, thirty months after my first reading of it. After you read it, you may want to set it aside to stumble upon it again in a few years. I guarantee you it will seem truly prophetic and even more vitally relevant then.
Coheartedly,
Tom
PS: If you want some more great reading for the day, check out the evocative newsletter of the New Group of World Servers at http://www.ngws.org/service/newsletter.htm . They are creatively exploring many of the themes we explore here.
Observations Regarding a Missing Elephant
by Donald N. Michael
Emeritus Professor of Planning and Public Policy, University of Michigan
I'll begin with the Sufi story of the blind persons and the elephant. Recall that persons who were blind were each coming up with a different definition of what was "out there" depending on what part of the elephant they were touching. Notice, the story depends on there being a story teller who can see that there is an elephant, different parts of which the blind people are fumbling around with. I'm proposing that the storyteller is blind. There is no elephant. The storyteller doesn't know what he or she is talking about.
Less metaphorically, what is happening to the human race, in the large, is too complex, too interconnected, too dynamic to comprehend, in the large. There is no agreed upon interpretation that provides an enduring basis for coherent action based on an understanding of the enfolding context.
Consider this. Take any subject that preoccupies us. Attend to all the factors that arguably might seriously affect its current condition, where it might go, and what might be done about it, and how to go about doing so.
Take, for example, poverty. If one were attempting to comprehend the factors seriously affecting poverty, one would have to attend to at least technology, environment, greed, crime, drugs, family, media manipulation, education, governments, market economy, information flows, ethics, ideology, personalities and events. All of these infuse any topic that we pay attention to and try to do something about. But we can't attend to all of these (and others) because each has its own realm to be attended to.
Poverty is one of endless examples. What we're faced with, essentially, is the micro/macro question -- how circumstances in the small affect circumstances in the large and how circumstances in the large affect circumstances in the small. And we don't know--"butterfly effects" and complex adaption theory, not withstanding--how the micro/macro interchange operates. in specific human situations. And for reasons I shall come to, I don't think we can know. In effect, we do not comprehend the kind of beast that holds the parts together and how they are held together for the human condition we call poverty. There is not any elephant there.
Let me emphasize. I am in no sense belittling our daily efforts to engage issues like poverty or other aspects of the human condition. I would not be writing this if I believed that what many of us are about was futile. Instead I hope to enhance appreciation of the existential challenge we face, the poignancy of our efforts, and the admiration they merit as we try to deal with precarious circumstances. Because if we could acknowledge that we do not know what we are talking about in the large when we try to deal with any of the human issues we face, it seems to me it would entail very significant implications for how we perceive ourselves as persons, how we conduct our activities intended to help the human condition, and, hence, for the possibilities of destroying ourselves. I'll come to those implications later.
But first, I offer some observations supporting my proposal that we do not know what we are talking about in the large, by describing six interacting, mutually defining, characteristics that seem to result in the storyteller's blindness.
One more prefatory remark: I am trying to describe, not to judge, characteristics of the human condition that are integral to the type of world we live in. However, the very nature of my language and what I choose to emphasize convey values, hence judgments, usually unknown to me - part of my ignorance.
The first of six contributors to our ignorance: We have too much and too little information to reach knowledgeable consensus and interpretation within the time available for action. More information in the social realm generally leads to more uncertainty, not less. (Consider the status of the world economy. We need more information to understand the information we have. So too, with global warming.) Obtaining the additional information takes more time. So the time it takes to reach agreement on the interpretation increases. During that time, the information changes as well. We need more information to interpret the information we have, and on and on.
Among the information we are exposed to is that which increases our doubt about the integrity and sufficiency of the information we do have. Nevertheless, there is enough information, (or too little in many cases) to generate multiple interpretations of that information. This then adds another layer of information and interpretation that is required to apply the information.
Related and central, information feedbacks and feed forward's very seldom arrive at the time appropriate for their use. They arrive either too soon or too late, if they arrive at all. So, there is too much or too little dynamic information available when it is needed for comparison with other information. So, the first ignorance generator is inadequate information to reach knowledgeable decisions in the finite amount of time available for taking action.
Second: there is no shared set of value priorities. We make much of the fact that we share values and we frequently say that, well, basically humans want the same things so we ought to be able to work things out. Perhaps, at a survival level, but beyond that, and even there, there is not a shared set of priorities with regard to values. Instead, priorities change with circumstance, time, and group. Here are some examples where value priorities differ depending on the group and circumstance. Short term expedience versus long term prudent behavior and vice versa. Group identity versus individual identity. Individual responsibility versus societal responsibility. Freedom vs equality. Local claims versus larger claims for commitment. Universal rights versus local rights (that can repudiate universal rights; fundamentalisms, for example.) Human rights versus national interests (e.g. economic competition or nationalist terrorism). Public interest versus privacy (the encryption conflict, health information, whether private or not). First amendment limits (pornography, etc.). Seeking new knowledge and its potential benefits vs its potential costs. Who sets the rules of the game and who decides? These are all issues where the priority of values are in contention. There is no reliable set of priorities in place that can be used to choose decisively among actions toward the larger issues.
A third contribution to this lack of comprehension is what has been called the dilemma of context. How much do you need to know in order to feel responsible for actions and interpretations? How many layers of understanding are necessary to have enough background to deal with the foreground? There are no agreed-on criteria or methodology for how deeply to probe. (I should have said at the beginning that these six factors are interconnected and interactive.) So, the question of how much context is necessary in a situation in order to decide what to do about that situation very much depends on what values are held by participants in that decision making. And that raises other intractable context questions: Who are the legitimate participants in the decision making with regard to what constitutes the context? And who says so?
The obvious example we are all living with at this time has to do with what domains of context are applicable to the Clinton impeachment inquiry. Just to remind you of a few: the dramatis personae motives, the world of the media, cultural differences in public responses, political styles and susceptibility to rhetoric, the legitimacy of public opinion as a basis for evaluating the situation, the intentions of the Constitutional founders, and so on and on.
You can choose any issue that is important to you and ask: How much do I/we need to know about, say, that list of topics I enumerated in the poverty example, in order that I can believe I have adequate context for thought and action? This is an unresolved realm. (And it is unsolved for me as well in the very act of giving this talk.)
A fourth item. Our spoken language, the language we read can not adequately map the complexity that I am talking about. Our language, because we hear it or we read it, is linear; one thought follows another. Our language can not adequately engage multiple factors simultaneously. (Poetry can but we have not yet figured out how to use poetry for policy making, resolving issues of context, or value priorities or the like. And perhaps some forms of visual language can help because they can be simultaneously presented in three dimensions.) Our noun/verb structure emphasizes, items, events, staticness, [i.e., is-ness] -- e.g., we say "this is a microphone", rather than engaging it as a multitude of processes in time and space we call a "microphone". Nor can our language adequately map, in our on-going minds the circularity of cause and effect producing causes, producing effects -- nor give the dynamic feel of a system, sustaining itself as a system, by virtue of the in-built, circular, mutually influencing, feedbacks that hold boundaries together. In other words, our spoken/written language does not allow us to examine these complexities in ways that are inherently informative about the complexities. In fact, our language compounds these complexities because it unavoidably distorts a world of simultaneous multiple circular processes.
Fifth contribution to our inability to know what we are talking about: there is an increasing, and, given the other factors, an unavoidable absence of reliable boundaries. Boundaries circumscribe turf, relationships, concepts, identity, property, gender, time, and more. Without boundaries, we can not make sense of anything. One of the Saybrook's forbears, William James, wrote of a boundary-less world as one of "blooming, buzzing confusion". Boundaries are how we discriminate, partition experience in order to create meaning in all those non-material realms, not just turf. But what is happening in this world, for reasons I've been describing (and others as well), is that these boundaries and their reliability are increasingly eroded and disintegrated. The shared and filtered feedback is more ambiguous. No boundaries, no feedback, no self-sustaining quality that we call a system or what in the old story was called an "elephant". All that I've been describing reduces the agreed-on criteria for boundary-defining feedback. Here are some examples, just to remind you -- the blurriness that goes now with those boundaries that are claimed for political correctness, identity, public versus private, intellectual property, biological ethics questions -- all of these are blurred, ambiguous, areas, taken very seriously, that, nevertheless, do not allow the kind of linguistically and behaviorally discriminating boundary defining that would be necessary to begin to comprehend the incomprehensibility of the complexity that we humans live in.
The sixth contributor to our inability to know what we are talking about is the self-amplifying, unpredictable acting-out of the shadow residing in each human; our mostly unconscious instincts motives and conflicts, our extra-rational responses. This situation could be considered a consequence of the other contributors to our ignorance -- though each of them is also a consequence of all the others. (Or so I think.) To be sure, this acting-out allows for more creativity than when we are bound by the exclusively rational but often, in this complex world, the shadow is also in the service of violence, oppression, selfishness, extreme positions of all stripes -- that whole up-welling of the non-rational, the non-reasonable that is so increasingly characteristic of all the world, not just the United States.
There was a time -- a long time -- when this sort of shadow-driven acting out did not well up to the current degree. The elephant depends on constraints, on boundaries, in order to be an elephant. In the past, laws, rituals, repression, and suppression served to constrain such acting out or to quash it entirely; one's social and economic survival depended on playing by many explicit and implicit rules (boundaries). (Think of the up-welling of violence after the collapse of the Soviet Empire.)
These six circumstances make human governance uniquely problematic. By governance, I mean those shared practices by which a society's members act reliably toward each other. Government is one way such practices are established via laws etc. Shared child socialization practices and formal religions are others. For the reasons I am proposing here the processes of governance can only become less and less effective. This in turn increases unreliability and adds it's own contributions to the incomprehensibility of it all.
So much for six "ignorance-maintaining" characteristics. Perhaps they are variations on one theme and surely others could be added. But I hope these are enough to make a presumptive case that our daily activities are ineluctably embedded in a larger context of ignorance -- that we do not know what we are talking about.
So, what to do, how to go on being engaged in a human world we do not understand -- and, if I'm on to something, we will not understand? Here are eight ways I find helpful that respond to the fact of our ignorance. Perhaps they may be helpful for you. I hope so! (In spite of speaking assertively, I hope it is clear that I include myself among those who do not know what they are talking about!) These are not in any particular order, though I think this sequence adds a certain coherence. The first is to recognize that, given our neurology, our shaping through evolutionary processes, we are, unavoidably, seekers of meaning. Recognizing that we are seekers of meaning, we also need to recognize that, unavoidably, we live in illusions -- socially and biologically constructed worlds -- nevertheless personally necessary. (This need, this quest, can evoke the best and the worst in humans.) I am not implying that we can live outside of these constraints, but we need to be self-conscious about the fact that we do live in illusions and there is no way for humans, to avoid this. So, each of us needs to be self-conscious about our deep need that there be an elephant or for someone to tell us there really is an elephant. (Lots of authors and publishers thrive on this yearning)
Second, it seems essential to acknowledge our and our project's vulnerability and finiteness. This is because we will be unavoidably ignorant and uninformed about the outcomes -- the consequences of what we do.
Third, as all the great spiritual traditions emphasize, seek to live in poverty. Not material poverty but rather to be poor in pride and arrogance and in the conviction that I/we know what is right and wrong, what must be done, and how to do it. Nevertheless, we must act -- not acting is also to act -- regardless of our vulnerability and finiteness.
Thus, my fourth suggestion: that one or a group acts in the spirit of hope. Hope, not optimism. Here I draw on the insight of that distinguished member of Saybrook, Rollo May. As he put it, optimism and pessimism are conditions of the stomach, of the gut. Their purpose is to help us feel good or bad. Whereas hope has to do with looking directly at the circumstances we are dealing with; at the challenges we must accept as finite and vulnerable beings and activities; recognizing the limits of our very interpretation of what we are committing ourselves to, and still go on because one hopes that one can make a difference in the face of all that stands in the way of making a difference.
Fifth, this means one acts according to what I've been calling "tentative commitment". Tentative commitment means you are willing to look at the situation carefully enough, to risk enough, to contribute enough effort, to hope enough, to undertake your project. And to recognize, given our vulnerability and finiteness, our ineluctable ignorance, that we may well have it wrong. We may have to back off. We may have to change not only how we are doing it, but doing it at all. And then do so! Tentative commitment becomes an essential individual and the group condition for engaging a world where we do not know what we are talking about.
Suggestion six, then, is to be "context alert" as a moral, and operational necessity. Among other things, this carries a very radical implication, given the current hype about the information society that promises to put us in touch with practically infinite amounts of information. But, if you are context alert you can only be deeply understanding of very few things. Because it takes time and effort to dig and check and to deal with other people who have different value priorities . This means there are only a few things that you can be up on at any given time. But this is a very serious unsolved, indeed unformulated, challenge for effective participation in the democratic process -- whatever that might mean.
Number seven: One must be a learner/teacher, a guide in the wilderness. Be question-askers all the time, not answer givers.
Number eight again echoes the great spiritual traditions (all of which recognized our essential ignorance): practice compassion. Given the circumstances I have described, facing life requires all the compassion we can bring to others and to ourselves. Be as self-conscious as possible, as much of the time as possible, and, thereby, recognize that we all live in illusion, we all live in ignorance, we all search for and need meaning -- and that we all need help facing this reality, help that goes by the name of practicing compassion.
The blind must care for the blind. Thank you!
________________
©1998 Donald N. Michael
From: Journal of Humanistic Psychology Vol 40, No.1, Winter 2000, pages 8-16 Sage Publications, Inc.
DONALD N. MICHAEL was a social psychologist with a background in the natural sciences. Before his tenure at the University of Michigan, he spent many years in Washington, in various positions in and out of government. His professional interests at the time of his death on November 5, 2000 had to do to with understanding better the role of unconscious needs and motives (genetically and culturally sourced) in the behavior of leaders, decision makers, and organization members and their interplay with the social construction of reality. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social issues, and the world Academy of Art and Science; he is also a member of the Club of Rome. His book, On Learning To Plan And Planning To Learn, was republished in 1997 with a new introduction.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is an edited transcript, somewhat augmented of a talk given on the occasion of the conferral of an honorary doctorate in humane letters by Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco, October 21, 1998. Other variations have been disseminated via informal publications; IONS: Noetic Sciences Review, Aug-Nov, 1999; and The ABN Report, Vol. 7, No. 2, March 1999, published by Prospect Media in St. Leonards, Australia.
Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute *
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