How do we handle such accusations and reality-checks? Can we go back?
No, and yes.
Perhaps it is true that we cannot return to a time
when there were: no cars, no refrigerators, no large shopping malls, no television,
no mobile phones…
However, we can go back in another, more useful, and
more valuable way. We can go back to a
former way of thinking. Albert Einstein
is credited with perhaps the most famous quotation regarding our thinking.
“We
cannot solve problems using the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Einstein never actually said this, although he was the
Chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists who sent a telegram to
prominent Americans in May 1946, in the wake of the dropping of atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That telegram
included the phrase,
“…a
new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher
levels.”
In neither case did Einstein mean a thinking that
simply produced different results. He
did not mean that we should apply our current way of thinking to come up
with new ways of dealing with problems.
Einstein was advocating an entirely different way of
thinking. He was advocating for a
thinking placed within a much wider understanding of our human place in the
world:
“A human
being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and
space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated
from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion
is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to
affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves
from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
A similar understanding
is suggested by indigenous peoples who exhort us to use different thinking
processes and not simply steal the results of indigenous thinking.1
It is almost
seventy-five years since Einstein bemoaned our way of thinking, yet we continue
to think – in the same way we have been thinking since at least the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution (and possibly much earlier.)
We are still trying to resolve conflict using combative
thinking and the strategies of warfare.
We are still trying to make political decisions based
on adversarial debating procedures from centuries ago.
And, crucially, currently we are trying to solve the
problems of climate chaos using the same technological thinking we used when we
began building steam engines.
Such ways of thinking must change. We must find ways of thinking that do not
rely simply upon information and knowledge.
It has been said that “As information doubles, knowledge is halved,
and wisdom is quartered.”2
Changing our thinking requires us to let go of our
desire for control, mastery, and even of outcomes. We need thinking that admits to our being “…a part of the whole called by us
universe.”
Can we do it? We do have thinking that is based in
patterns, holism, and complexity. We
have forgotten them. Let’s go back and look
for them.
Notes:
1. See especially: Tyson Yunkaporta, sand talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 2019.
2. Ervin Laszlo & Jude
Currivan, Cosmos: A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World, Hay House
Inc., 2008.
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