No wonder then that the challenge of my young Worldview Change Project
is that most people don’t even know that they have worldviews to
change. The Project’s mission is to promote worldview change from
a systems thinking perspective in order to accelerate society toward sustainability.
Yet no one person actually analyzes all the pieces of the worldview change
story I need to tell. Those who do write different chapters hail from
the outer reaches of public discourse, such as university computer modelers,
theological missionaries, and paranormal practitioners. So what is this
story and why is it so hard to tell?
Ten years groomed my thinking. Despite my writing and editing credits
at Dartmouth, upon graduation I adventured into international development
with writing tagging behind. I served with the Peace Corps for two years
in Costa Rica to help the National Zoo develop its education program.
After graduate school, I moved to Honduras and Guatemala where I lived
for five and a half years developing capacity building programs and writing
training manuals and articles on ecotourism, conservation, and park planning.
Over time these topics, instead of becoming my profession’s mettle,
began to weigh like heavy metal. I grew frustrated with mainstay biodiversity
conservation organizations’ throwing more money and programs at problems
that would not yield. To stem rainforest destruction, for example, they,
including RARE Center for whom I worked in Mesoamerica for the past six
years, employed a battery of interventions targeting local people. These
organizations applied sustainable agriculture, ecotourism, non-timber
forest products, substitute handicrafts, farming cooperatives, land tenancy,
local governance, and others. They assumed that local residents caused
the problem.
That big politics and economics swept local people up in stormy systems
designed to concentrate power and wealth hid in everyone's mind, but conservation
organizations were not designed to handle those issues, so they avoided
them.
With those thoughts and 10 years, I felt a paradigm shift overturning
my career. I decided to bring back writing to promote ideas well beyond
the few people with whom I worked. The first book that coaxed me down
a new path was Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael.
Quinn traces not just the evolution of civilization but the beliefs driving
it as well. My story then begins 10,000 years ago in a part of the world
recently commanding headlines: Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq.
Ten millennia ago many tribes inhabited the Fertile Crescent, all of
whom lived off a combination of hunting, gathering, farming, and herding.
Then one tribe invented a new style of agriculture. Its people farmed
full time while their neighbors only planted as needed. As the farmers
soon discovered, their food surplus generated a population increase.
With more people they needed more food and then more land, but they had
no more to sow. So they invented another historical novelty: taking others’
land. While tribes had always skirmished, none had ever captured another’s
land, forcing its occupants to assimilate to intensive farming, flee,
or die. Most tribes were no match for the farmers’ division of labor
capable of deploying full-time warriors. This re-enforcing cycle of more
land, more food, and more people continued outward, eventually reaching
the shores of America.
Over thousands of years, that culture’s worldview evolved to explain
why they alone promoted conquest, intensive agriculture, permanent settlements,
population growth, technological innovation, hierarchical structure and,
in short, civilization. Being the only such civilized people, they decided
this was the one right way to live and that the earth was created for
their rule. To this day, these ideas underwrite the building of civilization.
And civilizations we do build! Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Ottoman,
and after each collapsed a new civilization grander in size, power, and
problems took its place. They expanded across the planet, crushing indigenous
societies in their path. Quinn argues that our modern problems can be
traced to this origin.
Background of the Worldview Change Project
The Worldview Change Project counts among its inspirations other authors
besides Quinn whose contribution demonstrated that worldviews smolder
much deeper than common usage implies. I draw from Donella
Meadows, lead author of Limits to Growth, who showed that changing
paradigms must support any movement to sustainability from Thomas
Kuhn whose classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions provided
the first effort to document how paradigms change over time from John
Sterman, director of MIT’s System Dynamics Group, whose landmark
text on systems thinking helped me to break the bonds of simplistic cause-and-effect
linear thinking.
In short I started this project several months ago to reinvest myself
with new purpose. What at first rang as too esoteric changed when I considered
authors who had already painted systems thinking into the backgrounds
of bestsellers: Bill McKibben’s End of Nature, Donella Meadows’s
Limits to Growth, and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
As my own worldview has been shifting in the past year, I became aware
that a similar process is occurring in American society. The clashing
of worldviews new and old erupts around us: alternative vs. traditional
medicine, New Age spirituality vs. theism, feminism vs. patriarchy, sustainable
vs. neo-liberal economics, social justice vs. hierarchy, normal vs. paranormal
science, hegemony vs. multi-lateral cooperation. Every day newspapers
splash these conflicts across their headlines.
Indeed as social, environmental, and spiritual problems splash through
the pond of American dominance, we can hear distant echoes of fallen civilizations.
Since nearly 10,000 years ago human population density and the gap between
haves and have-nots precipitated many long-familiar cronies of civilization:
war, crime, corruption, rebellion, famine, plague, slavery, genocide,
economic collapse, and cultural collapse. To that list we add more recently
terrorism, addiction to credit, drugs, junk food, and gambling, new diseases
like AIDS and SARS, obesity, breakdown of cooperative units whether families
or governments.
Under such pressures, people’s faith in the old guard begins to crumble
just as the adherents to phlogiston theory yielded under pressure from
the theory of oxygen combustion. The transition burns especially in developed
countries. Popularity in Eastern religions grows exponentially, along
with yoga, alternative energies, homeopathic medicine, environmentalism,
social justice, interest in the paranormal, green marketing, and organic
roses. Behind these a need rumbles to find new spiritualism and holism
in lifestyles and belief systems. And according to the Natural Marketing
Institute this relatively new US segment is a $230 billion growth market.
Great forces are in motion.
Value of Systems Thinking
Behind every system, great and small, lie hidden assumptions. Every issue
and every policy balance on a teetering scaffolding of beliefs. That is
the essence of the Worldview Change Project which seeks out policies in
the system governing the changing of deep beliefs. Yet compared with psychology
and sociology, system dynamics still drones arcane why then, am I betting
my story on it?
A system is a group of interacting, interrelated, and interdependent components
that form a complex, unified whole. A system encompasses the growing hair
on my head, global warming, recruitment and retirement of congressmen,
or cycling emotions at Christmas time.
Feedbacks pulse at the heart of systems. They are information resulting
from the products of a process, feeding back into the system and changing
it. For example, American oil companies extract oil from Alaskan tundra;
oil burning promotes climate warming, climate warming feeds back and melts
the tundra, shrinking the oil drilling season.
Positive feedback instead of reducing the initial activity increases it.
More food, more people, more land, more food, more people, more land.
This exponential growth is very common but poorly understood. To test
yourself, consider how tall would a stack of letter paper be if you could
fold a sheet in half 42 times? Or 100 times? Our economy grows exponentially,
as well as our population, resource use, technological innovation, and
many other stocks in society.
Systems thinking is a paradigm outside the left-right political spectrum.
Though for people trapped in the spectrum and convinced of no escape,
like the bulk of Republicans and Democrats, I offer an out.
First, while all people carry paradigmatic baggage, those within the spectrum
adhere to patriarchy, theism, allopathic medicine, materialism, hierarchy,
competition, etc. Second, those people are reductionist seeing issues
as fundamentally distinct; they view the world in cause-and-effect events
leading forward rather than in feedback loops. They usually treat effects
(symptoms) rather than causes because they look for causes too close in
time and space to effects. Systems can invoke merciless delays between
causes and effects.
For example on September 11, two skyscrapers and 3,000 people fell. The
government immediately identified those closest to the disaster, the terrorists,
as the cause. They were indeed close (very close!) both physically and
temporally. So the government launched a massive mobilization to eliminate
them. A systemic view would examine economic and social factors and deep
beliefs that originate 1,000s of miles away and perhaps 100s of years
earlier in order to identify policy levers closer to the systemic factors
that actually generate terrorism.
Systems thinkers, then, spend a lot of time fishing for assumptions in
their clients’ and their own mental models. They can never be sure
what will surface in the driftnet. This realization that more assumptions
always await out there in the dark depths bestows a certain humility and
breeds cooperative learning.
Relevance to Public Policy
Systems thinking and computer modeling have become widespread tools in
policy formulation. They are used extensively in economics, weather forecasting,
corporate planning, public management and policy, engineering, and military
simulations. To most people, despite these applications, they still remain
in a black box. Yet the abovementioned authors have succeeded in using
systems thinking to frame public policy discussions, an approach adopted
by the Worldview Change Project. While I am only 10i–20% into my
research, I present my most pressing questions.
1. How can systems thinking be used to increase the quality of public
discourse in America? That is, how do we (re)establish standards, introduce
concepts, dig for assumptions, and imbue some of that humility and cooperative
learning? Today political discourse distinguishes itself by attack politics,
partisanship, special interest biases, competition, ideology, and a vagueness
of language. George Orwell wrote that “Political language… is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give
an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
2. How can we characterize the new worldview? What policy options exist
to accelerate change in deep beliefs of the American public and institutions
to speed the arrival of a new worldview?
3. What policies and strategies can the Project recommend to help other
thinkers break through the mental model that sequesters environment and
education and economics and defense and spirituality into little cognitive
cubicles of the mind?
The Book
I will write a teaching novel and accompanying articles as my research
advances. As many writers have determined, to write outside the normal
frame of reference requires stepping outside that frame. Fiction permits
readers temporarily to adopt a new set of assumptions without threatening
the old. Based on this strategy Orwell wrote Animal Farm, Plato
The Republic, and Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Though my research is still preliminary, already a potentially powerful
story is assuming form. What begins as a pleasant guided mountain hike
for a family's anniversary celebration turns into a tour unlike any they
had ever imagined. A mysterious park guide leads the family through a
series of fantastic interpretive stations, each of which depicts parts
of modern society’s changing worldview process. The family splinters
as the father cannot accept what he experiences while the protagonist
daughter struggles through her own internal transformation and then tries
to help the misunderstood guide escape persecution from the established
order.
Only through fiction can I reach a general audience with ideas both foreign
and at times complex.
So Why Is My Story Hard to Tell?
Donella Meadows used to find solace in her modeling students’ stress
when they faced defensive clients confronting new ideas. She calmed them
(and me) by reassuring that no change in belief comes without the cognitive
dissonance of new ideas clashing old. Defensiveness, anger, and denial
clear the path to retiring well traveled ideas.
I am certain that my story if good enough will provoke anger from those
convinced I’m out of the world, at least to be sure, out of the worldview.
Kuhn said it is important for change agents to understand the cyclical
process of paradigm change, how they must suffer the challenges of institutions
guarding established paradigms. If I can listen to bitter critics, take
note, and keep writing, then the pay off can be worth the effort. As Meadows
wrote, “It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people
throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked
up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and having impacts that
last for millennia.”
