Get real

It's time to escape our abstractions.

I was listening to the Other Others podcast, with Aboriginal academics Tyson Yonkarporta and Chels Marshall. There's something I think I learned. I’m going to expand on it here in my own way. 

It’s about the metaphors and framings we use in strategic development. They should all be closely based on intimate knowledge of natural phenomena. 

We should not rely on obtuse, artificial and geometric abstractions. No more labelled mobius strips, triangles, flow diagrams, spirals, or circles. No more basing our thinking on things that do not exist in the natural world. 

We’re supposed to be environmentalists. We should use nature as our guide. It’s the best way to safeguard us from our programming and prejudices. It stops us imposing mechanistic distortions on the world. That’s one of those things that got us into this mess.

Natural observation links us to landscape. This opens up much more expansive and deeper thinking, feeling and doing. It will help snap us out of the abstract, and back into the real. 

Indigenous people don’t talk about animals and plants in this way to be all folksy and obscure. It’s not because that ‘primitive’ stuff is all they know about. (There’s nothing wrong with primitive as in primary or original, by the way). They do it because it keeps the human brain operating as it should. They do it to avoid ending up in the kind of societal dead end we industrialised people are in. They do it because it's sane. 

Humans have always done this. It’s at the core of our being. Even in England, the worm turning, until the early bird gets it as the crow flies are all remnants of this wisdom. Properly explored, they mean a lot more than we think. 

The next best thing, if you like, is artistic expression based on these natural observations. These might use motifs like repeated patterns or spirals. But they do so in very considered ways. They're linked to particular natural phenomena. They take in and express the conscious experience related to that. 

If we want connection rather than entertainment, we need to wind back the clock. We need to return to art with meaning in the ecologically real world. You can tape bananas to a wall in a whitewashed gallery if you like. It might ask fun and even useful questions. But it isn’t doing much else. 

It's not enough to use a metaphor like a single tree, plant or animal in isolation. We need a much fuller understanding of the relationships and dynamics with other living parts of the system. Such totems are not just badges. They're ongoing, living relationships. This is what makes the meaning sing along with the systems it is intended to work with. What eats what? When? What might sicken what? What works in consort with what? On through the trophic cascades and energetic interchanges.

So let’s stop referring to indigenous knowledge as a “lens”. We can stop barraging each other with “pathways'' and “journeys”. 

If we must use such analogies, we must be more specific about what kind of pathway or journey we mean. Is it a hunting party? Or to a gathering? Or a pilgrimage? What might happen on the way? What is the condition of the path and the walkers? Where does it lead? Most importantly, which actual pathway in the real world does it map over? That's how we can literally ‘ground truth’ our observations. 

The longer we don’t do this, the longer we’ll be fixated with very simplified, artificial maps of our own creation. We will be railroaded into the narrow thinking this entails. We’ll continue to ignore the much more expansive wisdom of actually experiencing the world around us.

The biggest problem with systems thinking, then, is the extent to which we get lost in our own systems. 

For similar reasons, these conceptions must be developed as a community. It must be done while actually living on the land. It's not about clever clogs individuals or small, isolated, elitist groups. It's not about plans from office blocks. 

Computer based models and simulations have even more limitations. They’re abstractions built on abstractions. They’re castles in the air. They only provide a very basic illusion of reality. Our organic minds, with all our prejudices and biases, do their best to fill in the gaps. 

Virtual reality is more virtual than real, and always will be. Artificial intelligence is more artificial than intelligence, and always will be. 

Right now we’re in danger of complete capture in our abstractions. This is likely only to be stopped by the collapse of the technical society required to run the machines. In that way, as in many others, Mother Nature is saving us from ourselves. In the meantime, we’re allowing the most abstracted to dominate society. The techno-Emperors of Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. That’s the end phase of an addiction destroying our world. 

Science fiction fans like me go on about the Matrix or other alternate realities. But much of science is already fiction. Abstract thought is the Matrix we create for ourselves. It’s much more immersive than the Matrix. The glitches are harder to spot. Instead of giving us superpowers, it takes our power away. It can’t be unplugged so easily. It maps so seamlessly over the real thing. 

It’s more like the world’s worst Augmented Reality. It obscures our vision with distorted and useless information. It makes us feel like we’re having an ever deeper experience with reality. It is actually carrying us further and further from it. 

Educating our children in these abstractions in sealed off rooms is insane. But they’re still living in an abstracted, mechanised world. So most of them still need to navigate it to get paid and laid. 

On the other hand, working with life engages the land. It engages the living creatures around us. It connects our minds to all the interrelationships we have with them. 

It’s often said that analogies and metaphors don’t stand up to close inspection. But embedded natural models do. In fact, the more scrutiny, the greater the perspectives applied to them, the better they work. 

This is one of the key differences between indigenous mythology and western science. One is lost in a parallel, imaginary world. The other is indigenous mythology. 

In Aotearoa, people have worked hard to have indigenous knowledge acknowledged as a scientific method. Some conventional scientists questioned this, and got into a lot of trouble. 

All of them are off track. Indigenous knowledge is not science. It does not need to be. It’s beauty and power is in the difference.  

There’s a role for fusing the two. But only if the outcome is indigenous wisdom, backed up by scientific evidence. It’s not about embellishing the crushing logic of science with some indigenous decoration. 

A few years back the sustainability movement was excited by biomimicry. Basically, this meant designing with inspiration from nature. It's yet another example of our sluggish return to sanity. It’s another repackaging of something sane humans have understood throughout our existence. 

Go ahead, have fun with this yourself. Give some basic human trait a snazzy new name. Say, Biogeoethnography. Put it on your LinkedIn profile. Enjoy a few years of career development, consulting opportunities and speaking gigs. Talk an indigenous person into drawing you some pretty pictures with some translatable terms. You’re away and laughing. 

In one way this is a good thing. As Fritjof Capra pointed out, we’re in a slow curve back to the reintegration of science and wisdom. 

On another level it’s fantastically frustrating. We’re so close to the obvious truth. But we still can’t see it. 

In the meantime, the commercial system gets wind of the ‘new’ idea. It bends it completely out of shape, until it actually justifies the status quo. It’s like hearing an alcoholic declare they’ve realised all the glasses of wine are no good for them. Then they pour the wine into artisanal clay mugs and drink it from there instead. 

Science is great. You can do useful things with it. You can split things up into groups. You can take a detailed look at what makes them what they are. You can take that knowledge and use it to manipulate things in a host of ways. It’s so useful it’s taken us centuries to realise that, left unrestrained, it’s going to destroy our world. 

Let's put it another way. Say every time I used my computer something in my house caught fire. I’d eventually start worrying about the computer and how it operates. Importantly. even if the computer itself seemed to be working fine. 

Science is the precursor cult to the cult of industrialisation. It has played a key role in leading us to where we are today. Any system of thought that allows us to make rabbits smoke Rothmans or wear make up should be questioned.  

Remember: when the Manhattan Project was set to detonate the first atomic bomb the scientists didn’t know if it would set fire to the sky. They did it anyway. 

The idea that science is neutral is a misdirection. Science is amoral. That isn’t a good thing. Say I introduce you to my powerful friend. He wants to run the world. “Don’t worry," I tell you. "He doesn’t have any morals...” 

The scientific method has spun away from genuine connectivity and grounding in natural lore. That is, the real law of the land.  

There’s a tendency to blame human failings for this. But this entire system of thought now routinely throws up terrible outcomes. At some point we must reconsider it. We can’t just keep trying to blame it all on some kind of global user error. 

You might claim, as many do, that morals aren’t the realm of science. But that's admitting how half-baked science is. We accept that science is never finished. We call that the wonder of discovery. We forget we’re running our entire society on unfinished ideas. 

‘Following the science’, then, is a lot less sensible than following the wisdom. This is probably why following the science isn’t putting everything to rights. It leaves a lot of important stuff out. That includes a lot of people and what they think and feel about the world. We berate them for not fitting into this narrow band of perception. Shouldn’t we be broadening our approach to include them more?

I’m not saying dispense with science. I’m delighted in a lot of the things it does for us. I’m happy to rely on it in my day to day life, for all sorts of things. That includes my ability to see clearly, and still use the arms I broke when I was 12. I just don’t think we can rely on it to get us out of the mess it has helped get us in.  

The externalities sustainability professionals and environmentalists are constantly battling aren't unfortunate side effects. They're a direct product of this approach. 

We're running on abstractions. That means leaving out, deliberately or by default, lots of possible interactions and interrelationships. It’s in these gaps that these ‘unforeseen’ consequences occur. 

If we don’t find a way to break out of this cycle we’re going to regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of what might be our highly truncated lives. 

Finally, it’s worth remembering that you can draw all the diagrams you like. If you don’t withdraw your votes, your consent and your money you’ll still get ignored.