Stop the World, I want to Get Off!

I’m at that stage in my life and career (just about 50 years in) when reflection on one’s past and the nature of the journey to now is more frequently triggered by a sense of deja vue

The title of this post is derived from a musical that was enjoying considerable success when I left high school in 1966. Is it so ironic that it expresses my sentiments now?   No, I am not contemplating suicide personally, but I do share the assessment of psychiatrist-philosopher, former Oxford literary scholar, Iain McGilchrist, that collective suicide is what we’re currently engaged in. We're certainly going round and round a merry-go-round avoiding the changes needed or the work to be done.

What I am asking for is the impossible – for the world to slow down the rush to the abysss ahead.  I had hoped that Covid 19 would have provided a sufficiently loud wake-up call or a long enough punctuation point between the sentences of our existence to enable humanity to do a u-turn. Some 19 months have passed since nature in the form of Covid19 imposed that “full-stop” and my hope is fading fast. 

Since the Brundtland report introduced sustainable development in 1987, there’s been no shortage of activity, declarations of intent, calls to action, goal statements, world summits and, more recently, a seemingly infinite number of zoominars, op-eds, action plans and technological fixes from a rapidly rising population of experts - the focus of whose expertise shrinks proportionately to their increase in number. Since the pandemic, that activity has intensified. Now that the western world has vaccinated itself and COP26 is occurring next week attention is turning to climate change positioned by UNWTO as “the greatest challenge of our time.” Even though my inbox and newsfeed is full of messages urging me to “sign a declaration and play my part,” I am inclined to decline and here’s why. 

Climate change is not the greatest challenge of our time. 

It is one of several symptoms of a much bigger challenge and that is us, yes, you and me. 

And by that I am not defining or confining the challenge as the sum-total of human actions that directly or indirectly inject additional CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. 

I am stating that it’s our individual and collective way of seeing ourselves and making sense of the world that is at fault, and that is the root cause of all the wicked problems we’re trying to solve. Until we become aware of our collective consciousness, the premises on which it is based and understand its consequences, we’ll continue to go round in circles and generate similar results.  

I haven’t deviated from this position since I started Conscious.Travel in 2010.  I vividly remember trying to introduce the topic to an audience of “industry association members” in British Columbia in the 1970s with the title “Where’s Copernicus When you Need Him?.  Even though I have been repeatedly told since that I am too philosophical; that the industry neither “gets” nor is interested in this worldview stuff; and I need to be more practical, I have persisted – albeit less and less sure in a “post truth” world that it will be any better received.

For many years my learning has focused on the two most frequently described paradigms or worldviews – a reductionist, materialistic, mechanistic worldview of analysis and fragments that emerged from the so called “Enlightenment,” the birth of western science and the Industrial Revolution, as compared to a holistic Living Systems/ecological worldview which enjoys many similarities with both indigenous, oriental and classical ways of seeing & being. The former sees nature as an object to be manipulated. The latter views nature as kin, as the meta body in which we all belong and that embodies all life. 

It wasn’t until I came across Dr. McGilchrist’s work a few years ago that I began to understand the relationship between how our brain has evolved and the paradigms we use to make sense of our world. His masterpiece, The Master and The Emissary describes just how bi-polar we humans are, having a brain that comprises two very different hemispheres that have evolved very differently. Thanks to several decades of research – often learning from patients with damaged brains – we now can see how our perception of so called “reality” is influenced by the hemisphere we are using.  

At its simplest, the left hemisphere sees parts and provide a narrow focus on detail without understanding the larger context. It’s in charge of the left hand that manipulates tools. People and things are not perceived as unique individuals but grouped into categories that can be sorted and filed based on rules and connections. The right hemisphere sees wholes; understands relationships, metaphors, body language, humour and facial expression. It provides the capacity to integrate. The left hemisphere recognises and works well with things that are complicated (the electrical wiring on an aircraft for example) but is less able to handle complexity that’s found in the workings of an ecosystem where there are multiple, changing relationships between different parties. The cartoon to the left would suggest that most members of our current society prefer to use the faculties of the left hemisphere!

Dr. McGilchrist suggests that mental health requires an integration of views derived from both hemispheres but that the western world, whose paradigm now dominates the globe, relies increasingly on the left hemisphere. There’s an internal feedback loop in as much as the more our culture exhibits the characteristics of the left hemisphere (its need for definition, focus on parts, straight lines and squares, linear cause and effect etc) the more the left hemisphere (The Emissary ) colonises our perception and shuts out insights that only the right hemisphere (The Master) can perceive. The neurological research confirms Einstein’s intuitive observation:

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

The book is 500 pages long and likely few of the readers of this post will be able to create the time to read it in its entirety. Thankfully, an updated version of the superb documentary  The Divided Brain, and an RSA animate exist to aid our understanding. If this material is new to you, I guarantee the rental cost and the hour required to view this documentary will be very well spent. 

The good news is that somehow Dr Gilchrist has managed to write what looks like another great gift - a new book titled The Matter of Things which is published on Nov 9th. It’s very exciting that someone with such an enormous and diverse intellect has applied his knowledge and wisdom to how we see the world – a prerequisite, in my opinion, of any attempt to become regenerative. 

Dr Gilchrist is clearly a highly -original thinker – a “lets’ start with a blank sheet of paper and think this through” kinda guy. He is not riding on the back of any particular thought trend and recycling others’ observations and musings. That’s what makes his conclusions so encouraging for those of us trying to understand the regenerative perspective that clearly has emerged from the neglected right hemisphere. For example, he suggests the right hemisphere enables us to see that:

·      Relationships are more important than parts

·      Wholes are primary to parts

·      Consciousness and matter are phases of the same phenomenon

·      Animacy (seeing the world as alive) is the norm

Dr. Gilchrist introduces the book by observing “if we’re to survive, we have to have a radically different view of the world” so his  book is trying to expose the weakness, the ignorance, the simplicity of the prevailing worldview held by many scientists and philosophers who assert humans are nothing but machines and not very good ones at that - an assertion based on assumptions he believes need to be tackled. 

There’s no doubt in my mind that this book has the potential to shake the rigid foundations of establishment thinking even more effectively than his first. Those of us committed to helping a new and better world emerge had better be ready to take advantage of some softer, more receptive ground to sow the seeds for a regenerative future. 

I’ll conclude this post with a short clip from the master himself and sincerely hope this post will stimulate some deep thinking and discussion.