
Coronavirus Structure (for source of image, see link)
Although, as mentioned in the previous post, the desirability of us all accepting responsibility for the welfare of every human being, as the Universal House of Justice urges on us, seems obvious enough in theory, unfortunately it proves to be easier said than done. Blind spots, as Ziya Tong explains, are one problem:[1]
To see the world clearly, we must first become aware of the veil; we must recognize our blind spots. The way we’ve come to perceive reality is so deeply ingrained, so socially and inter-generationally rooted, that we’ve lost sight of the manner in which we think. This is important, because what we think creates reality.
Our biases are one such impediment. Jennifer Eberhardt in her book Biased quotes Lippman’s interesting definition of stereotypes as ‘impressions that reflect subjective perceptions but stand in for objective reality.’[2] To create a stereotype, the important link here is between harbouring an impression and mistaking it for truth. Not surprisingly stereotypes can blind us ‘to information that [doesn’t] conform to what [we] already believe.’[3] This ‘confirmation bias is a mechanism that allows inaccurate beliefs to spread and persist.’ It is also not surprising to know[4] that ‘studies confirm that biased parents tend to produce children who are biased as well.’
This problem is so intractable partly because, as Tom Oliver explains in The Self Delusion[5], ‘the moral compass of humans hasn’t evolved to intuitively respond to harmful impacts on such global and long timescales. While in the last few hundred years our transport and trade networks have expanded to encompass the entire earth, our sense of moral responsibility hasn’t kept pace.’
Our primate brains have not evolved to cope with long time scales, vast distances and complex situations, an obstacle to our achieving collectively the necessary level of understanding to motivate us to effective action. Ken Whitehead expresses it better than I can:
This pattern reveals a fundamental characteristic of how our brains work; we tend to focus on the short term, and have little thought of the long-term consequences of our actions. The early hunters devised ever more efficient ways of killing the existing inhabitants of the new lands they occupied. There was no thought of long-term consequences. Why should there be? The supply of prey animals was believed to be inexhaustible. Yet one day they were all gone!
The problems we face in today’s world suggest that little has changed in the last fifty thousand years. In his 2004 book “A Short History of Progress”, Ronald Wright describes human beings in today’s world as running 21st century software on fifty thousand-year old hardware. Our brains have evolved to react to short-term crises, such as an attack by a hungry lion. The more subtle cognitive abilities which would allow us to assess and respond appropriately to longer term threats are much less developed within the human brain. As a result we are very good at responding quickly to an emergency, but we are hopelessly inept, both as individuals and as a society, when it comes to taking effective action to head off threats which are perceived as being distant.
The compass of our compassion therefore tends to be similarly constricted.
It takes great effort to transcend these limitations as Kahneman has explained in detail in his book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. His contention, on the basis of hard evidence and a lifetime’s exploration of the issue, is that we have two ways of thinking. The first, System One, is our default mode. It operates too glibly and too fast, as against more effortfully and more slowly, which makes the understanding of complex situations almost impossible. He writes:[6] ‘associative memory, the core of System 1, continually constructs a coherent interpretation of what is going on in our world at any instant.’ It[7] ‘operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.’ System 1 is no good for long term problems or situations that are unfamiliar and inconsistent. It can lead to impulses and impressions that may be compelling but are also dangerously misleading. His conclusion about its limitations is:[8] ‘System 1 has biases, however, systematic errors that it is prone to make in specified circumstances. . . . . it sometimes answers easier questions than the one it was asked, and it has little understanding of logic and statistics. One further limitation of System 1 is that it cannot be turned off.’
That doesn’t bode well, but there is an alternative.
He describes System 2 as one that[9] ‘allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.’ He adds[10] ‘The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: they require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn away.’
As if that was not enough to confuse us there is also the invisibility factor, as Ziya Tong explains:[11]
Our food comes to us from places we do not see; our energy is produced in ways we don’t understand; and our waste disappears without us having to give it a thought. … humans are no longer in touch with the basics of their own system survival.
We cannot, though, use this as an excuse for carrying on as we are. The system we have created is seriously at fault:[12]
The system . . . is our life support system. . . . The irony is that our survival is merely incidental to the goal of the system: ownership.
We cannot see the system because it exists in our blind spots. . . Today, if we fail to see our connection to the natural world, it’s because most of our products look nothing like it . . . Nature has been transformed into a product. . . . As a consequence, the economy grows, but nature dies.… None of us could have guessed that in the end we will need to pull the plug on our own life-support system, and if we don’t, it will destroy us.
It is clear now beyond all argument that our close connections are with nature, not just with our fellow human beings, and nature can bite back lethally in many ways.
Not just Tom Oliver, but many other writers also, see a deeper identification with our planet as a powerful source of the necessary insight and motivation. Jeremy Rifkin is one such, whose seminal book The Empathic Civilisation I have blogged about at length some years ago. He wrote along these lines:[13]
The more deeply we empathise with each other and our fellow creatures, the more intensive and extensive is our level of participation and the richer and more universal are the realms of reality in which we dwell. Our level of intimate participation defines our level of understanding of reality. Our experience becomes increasingly more global and universal. We become fully cosmopolitan and immersed in the affairs of the world. This is the beginning of biosphere consciousness.
This perspective is the least we should aspire to acquire and internalize as the basis for concerted action. Failure to do so will have drastic and destructive consequences within decades if not sooner. Because I am also writing from a religious and spiritual perspective as well, I question whether even that motivation will be sufficient to persuade enough of us to make the massive and necessary sacrifices and invest the huge and imperative effort to bring about a reversal of our self-destructive patterns in time.Humanity Is Our Business (1/7)Humanity Is Our Business (1/7)Humanity Is Our Business (1/7)Humanity Is Our Business (1/7)2
I suspect we will need the kind of faith in a supreme power that will convince us that, even if cannot do as much by ourselves, we can with the help of the invisible and powerful Great Being, who watches as we struggle to survive, but who, because of the nature of the worlds he has created, can only help us when we begin to help ourselves. The Bahá’í Faith offers a model, not just in terms of the underlying principles such as the oneness of humanity, but also in terms of the organisational patterns that are required. Below are a few links to previous posts that deal with this aspect of the matter.
The Bahá’í Model:
1. Humanity Is Our Business (1/7): The Overall Vision
2. Humanity Is Our Business (2/7): The vision of Civilisation-Building
3. Humanity Is Our Business (3/7): Capacity Building (a)
4. Humanity Is Our Business (4/7): Capacity Building (b)
5. Humanity Is Our Business (5/7): Devotional Meetings
6. Humanity Is Our Business (6/7): The Plight of Children
7. Humanity Is Our Business (7/7): What can we do for our children?
References
[1]. Ziya Tong The Reality Bubble – page 339
[2]. Biased – page 32.
[3]. Biased – page 33.
[4]. Biased – page 39.
[5]. The Self Delusion – page 210.
[6] Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow – Kindle Reference 282.
[7] Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow – Kindle Reference 340.
[8]. Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow – Kindle Reference 433.
[9]. Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow – Kindle Reference 340.
[10]. Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow – Kindle Reference 375.
[11]. The Reality Bubble – page 192.
[12]. The Reality Bubble – page 341-32.
[13]. The Empathic Civilisation – page 154.