The challenge of assembling pieces into insightful action
Anthony Judge asks the question:
"Why is it that the many contributions to wisdom, and wise contributions, remain as pieces of a puzzle that we are so challenged to assemble to enable more insightful action?"
238 comments:
1 – 200 of 238 Newer› Newest»In a recent email, Anthony Judge asked the question which is the subject of this post. Below is the slightly-edited text of my response. (Click for information about Judge and his work.)
You asked: "Why is it that the many contributions to wisdom, and wise contributions, remain as pieces of a puzzle that we are so challenged to assemble to enable more insightful action?"
It seems to me that among the various impediments to enabling that "more insightful action," a couple of them dominate. The first is the incredibly diverse way that people see, interpret, "make sense of," and respond to, the information that they encounter. Each of us is a product of our genetic endowment and the experiential path we have trod so far in life. As the work of Ruth Benedict and her protege Maslow made clear, we all start with a roughly similar set of potentials -- among them being potentials for caring, wisdom, cooperation, and helpful creativity as well as potentials for hateful behavior, foolishness, strife, and destruction. As we grow and interact with family, culture, and life experiences, some small set of those potentials are developed into actualities. In response to the sea of influences in which each person is immersed, each of us acquires
· a set of assumptions about how things are (a worldview),
· an array of concepts and explanatory schemata,
· certain psychological capacities,
· a hierarchy of internalized values, and
· a modus operandi for processing new information.
People subjected to similar sets of influences are likely to have somewhat similar ways of interpreting and dealing with the world around them, leading sometimes to a group or "herd" mentality. And while there are not as many herds as there are people, there are many, many herds. The result is that pieces of the puzzle that you and I would label "wise," and worthy of implementation, do not make that same kind of sense to members of many of these groups.
People can and do develop new worldviews, values, and ways of evaluating situations. Occasionally, there comes a personal flash of insight that results in permanent change from that moment on. But changes in outlook tend to happen slowly, gradually, in response to changes in the matrix of influences to which the person is subjected. And there are powerful forces at work to see that the matrix of influences remains as it is, or if it must change, it changes very, very slowly.
One of these powerful forces is the mainstream media -- their control over access to information, and their manipulation of it. Most people are to some extent information junkies. You and I both have investigative, exploratory natures. Early on we made life choices to acquire information in a relatively intense way, and from a wide variety of sources. But the great majority of people do not have the time or the inclination to do that. They have not made it a priority in their lives. Consequently, as you and I know so well, they get information that has been selected, filtered, and spun by mass media organizations that have a vested interest, not in changing things for the better, but in maintaining the status quo. So, influenced by the "spin of the day" or "spin of the era" from may sources, people are given little reason to assume that their worldview and value set is out of whack.
This is, of course, at its extreme in the US, where many people have no interest in what is happening in the rest of the world unless it directly affects Americans. Most days I watch TV news from CNN, the CBC, and BBC World, and it is so interesting to see not only the BBC's broader scope of interest, but the different ways in which the same story is handled. (For a significantly deeper, more informative look, there are, of course, sources like commondreams.org. But that is not where the average American goes for news.)
Most people are like the fish in the bowl who can't really see the water. I grew up in the US and, like most Americans, was thoroughly brainwashed by the mainstream culture. Then in my mid-30s I took a 13-month backpack trip around the world. Returning to the US I saw the American superiority complex in bold relief for the first time. What egregious bullshit! Yet without stepping out of the fishbowl I might have gone on thinking that America was not only God's gift to the planet, but the only place where anything significant was happening. Today I'm an American and a Canadian, and I long to see all my fellow citizens open up to the world outside of North America with deep interest, respect, and compassionate concern.
Sometimes individuals have been able to break through the obfuscating mass-media wall. The young people of the 1960s did it with their music. Money-centric radio stations played that music despite its anti-status-quo messages because it attracted listeners. Michael Moore and Al Gore have to some extent broken through with their movies. You and I are both in the information dissemination business, doing our bit to break through or get around the wall. But the larger challenge is to find a way to change the water in the goldfish bowl: To change the kind of information that the mass media disseminates (thereby changing nature of the mass media's cultural influence). To find ways to change the educational system and its field of influence. And to find ways to change the economic system.
There is a chicken-and-egg quality about the present situation. We want wise institutions -- institutions that embody wise values and influence people to become wiser. Yet it is only through the efforts of people who already hold wise values that the desired institutional transformation is likely to take place. Consequently, in my writing and The Wisdom Page I focus on both transformation toward wiser modes of institutional functioning AND the development of greater individual wisdom.
As I see it, personal wisdom requires that we be open to new information and insights, that we look at factual situations from a variety of illuminating, meaning-conferring perspectives, and that we have internalized a set of harmony-fostering, cooperation-fostering, empathetic, compassionate values. On the personal level, this is the sort of thing I'm trying to sell. (Example: Last Spring's Rollins College talk.)
Addendum:
I don't know how to deal effectively with these issues. But I feel that there is great promise in serious issue-focused conversation about them. I suggest that bringing minds together in a spirit of searching humility just might lead to something. The idea behind LIVING THE QUESTIONS is that approaching meaningful questions -- not with solid assurance that we have the answers, but with openness to new ways of thinking about them -- can have positive results. My hope is that pondering these questions and then entering into a conversation about them could help draw us out of our self-focused "individual change-maker" roles into the widespread cooperation, group cohesion, and creative collaboration needed to bring about high levels of planetary well-being.
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