Earthlinks

Philip Franses

Introduction

There is a growing undercurrent of opinion that the reductive methods of the old paradigm are in some way not serving human needs as they should. This unease is to be found in science, in its failure in the last thirty years to make a new leap forward; in the oil and climate change crisis; in the standing by ineffectually alongside modern day conflicts. We pick up the newspaper and there is a story of discontent, which presents some part of the situation, commented on by experts separated from its context, giving us enough insight to disturb us without giving us the responsibility to act.

Seeing, knowing, renewing locates the issues within our own attitude of being to meet with them, understand them and resolve them.

Seeing principles

Truly seeing means caring about an issue, feeling its depth, touching its landscape, being empowered to make a difference. Seeing is the first step, one sees that the problem that seemed external, objective out of one’s hands is actually about the human beings and their attitude of engagement. In changing oneself, one’s own perception, in believing in the seeing that is personal, the problem shifts to something manageable, tackle-able and knowable.

Knowing is bringing this intuitive understanding into the light of the actuality of the current debate. How does the attitude of inner caring find voice into the institutionalised, fenced-off, partitioned public guardianship of the issue? Often a superficial layer of doing-good hides that a public body, the supposed caretaker of a situation, is only involved in keeping the status quo for their own benefit and are actually keeping apart the people who could really put the situation back into its wholeness. Knowing assesses this landscape of the situation in the tension between the caring seeing and the objective stewarding and finding that the personal attitude of seeing is the vital element that is capable of taking the whole issue out of stuck-ness on to renewal.

Renewing is to seek a consensus in what might be a common step towards changing the dynamic. It might mean community action, or beginning a dialogue, or moving underlying attitudes. Renewal is bringing back into balance a situation through understanding of its real unity. What one undertakes is then the subject of a new round of seeing, knowing, renewing, as one again assesses the reductive/ holistic tension of attitudes.

Knowing cases

First, science itself. Science is waking up fast to the inability of reductive objective tools to realise a unified theory of physics, a model of DNA capable of explaining life, a cosmic world-view that will align with the data on dark matter from the furthest reaches of the universe that are now within grasp. The first step of seeing new ways to do science, is well under way… examples abound in the foundation to quantum theory, complexity and chaos theory, of approaches to science that involves feeling the web of relationships that instead of explaining the world explore the living dynamic, of freedom, creativity and formation. The problem lies more in the knowing, that the attitude of science still rests with the old ambition from pre-1920’s of explaining the world, of putting its knowledge in an encyclopaedia that we could share with our children and give definitive learning to the natives of our conquests. With globalisation, this attitude is long redundant, we need to come together as mankind and pool our ways of seeing, of caring about the world so that we can come up with a view of living in rather than imposing on the world. The scientists themselves are the ones now breaking free from the grasp of funding and peer-pressure (that encourage an unimportant detail to be debated round in circles) to risk bringing to the forefront the overview that exposes the impoverishment of the old way of doing science. Renewing means doing science with the attitude of caring about the world and its predicament.

Secondly, the technocracy. What is the real story about oil and the carbon emissions that are threatening to destabilize the world climate? Recently it was revealed that the government long knew about the smoking hazard to individual health before they went public with the evidence, afraid of losing their tax income. An institution that it is thinking business-like will always weigh its own interests first. Similarly, the governments sit upon a democratic technocracy that is founded upon fossil fuel and it is in their interest, to keep the question of oil within a constant hazy turmoil that never allows the question to settle… why are we with all our technological expertise so dependent on this one form of energy to make our society mobile, networked and mechanically supported, to the extent that the health of the whole is in danger? Knowing is then to put in the public domain the notion that it is people with ideas, company managers, city mayors, that are the ones who are going to change this. Renewing is the network of people with ideas coming together to realise change between them out of the actions born of seeing and knowing. The businessman meets the community meets the local initiative at renewal and things change.

Thirdly, Middle East. Western policy is heavily implicated in the Middle East impasse of Israel/ Palestine, the last two fated cards dealt from the reductive pack of a strategy born of division and rule. In the early 1900’s Britain first promised the Arabs as a whole a unified self-government, when encouraging the overthrow of the Ottoman rule. However secretly Britain and France carved up the Middle East into an artificially conceived map of countries, where Britain or France would each maintain a measure of colonial control over locally established governments. Britain in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration then took this virtual map and offered a piece of the Palestine, still a figment of their own scheming to Israel. The result has been a constant stalemate between the two where animosity to the other has only served to increase the humiliation of their position and so aggravate their aggression. Being able to step back is to see the universal bankruptcy of the reductive strategy that imagined that it could place the world in boxes and rule it in enlightened rationality, meanwhile burying all indigenous feelings and character beneath the machinery of controlled administered cold supervision. We know that on both sides there are leaders willing to address the humanity of the situation afresh away from the injustice done to each and every authentic element with a voice to speak. The repressive measures of Israel against the Palestinians reflect their own frustration that the land they have been given is nothing but a political tool for others and actually denies them their own voice. Renewal involves starting a debate from the perspective of humanity, with heart enough to allow an authentic vision to appear from within.

Renewing outcomes

Seeing is becoming open to the personal possibilities of caring about the world one lives in. Knowing is finding oneself in the landscape of this dynamic of change. Renewing arises out of the realization that there is a collective dimension to one’s responsibility.

Our democracy embraces a freedom between people, but stops short of acknowledging the freedom that emerges out of responsibility for the collective. The result is that long term orders are imposed and that people band together in their vision of science, or business or world-politics providing the answers. The commitment to discovery, on the other hand, looks to the journey itself to realize the direction that is meaningful.

The conference cycle will follow in succeeding years a journey of its own, through different venues in UK, Italy, Greece, Israel and Egypt to explore seeing, knowing, renewing and its challenges in the modern age. A key part of holistic learning is the sense of place of one’s investigation as one explores the consequences of a participatory science. The project aims to build into its inquiry an actual journey to match those of the issues being explored. The journey begins in the UK with our technological challenges (unresolved paradoxes in physics, genetic mysteries in biology, peak oil, climate change, economic disparity, strategic legacy) moves to Italy, where one looks to the New Renaissance through the eyes of the old, joining science and art, then to Greece into the mythological basis with its mathematics of harmony; then to Israel at the focal point of the spiritual and now also embedded in the technological age; finally to Egypt, the cradle of civilization and the holder of the journey. Each stage of the journey then encourages the participants to develop tools that will carry the message of one round of exploration on to meet the challenges of the next. In exploring the West, the journey also welcomes the visions from the rest of the world for the West, that gentler, more vulnerable wisdom may lighten the hard road of established reason, on which the West tries to manoeuvre its way.