Why try? Why care?

One of my absolute favorite papers of all time is Donella Meadows Dancing With Systems. Yesterday, I was confronted with a need to follow the third practice described in that paper: "Expose your mental models to the open air."

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be shot at. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption with which you might have confused your own identity.

While reading an article in The Guardian, I was exposed to a mental model that was the antithesis of my long-time conscious knowledge or ptemise. I was taught and came to believe that “being smart,” using rationality, was an individual’s domain. The article, about smart books, asserts that’s not so.

The instrumentalisation of reason, in Horkheimer’s view, went hand in hand with society becoming ever more “irrational” in the true sense. “Nowhere does the union of progress and irrationality show up so clearly as in the continued existence of poverty and care and the fear of distress and dismal old age, and in the condition of brutal prisons and asylums in countries with highly developed industry,” he wrote. What this gestures at is what so few modern smart thinking books acknowledge: that rationality is not a private possession but a public institution. Reasoning is fundamentally social, one trivial proof of which is the fact that we all get most of our reliable knowledge about the world from authorities (scientific and otherwise) without doing our own personal experiments.

tools of a systems thinker

Please read the preceding sentence again. "Reasoning is fundamentally social, one trivial proof of which is the fact that we all get most of our reliable knowledge about the world from authorities (scientific and otherwise) without doing our own personal experiments.” Based on my personal experience, that’s true, with  a few exceptions such as fly-fishing or bread baking, and even there I’ve started from the knowledge of authorities before undertaking my own personal experiments.

Now, go back and reread the last two sentences in the mental models quotation: "Consider all of them plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption with which you might have confused your own identity.” It’s the part about confusing  assumptions with identify that caught my eye. Many of those who refuse to accept science appear to be unwilling to expose their mental models to the examination of others, or even to look carefully themselves. As my lawyer friends might  claim, they “presume facts not in evidence.”

The practices listed in the systems dance have a practice that would seem to offer an approach to those who confuse their assumptions with their own identity. It’s this practice:

12. Expand the boundary of caring.

Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.

As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe that which they know.

Expanding my personal boundary of caring is all too often these days frustrating, annoying and unproductive. That doesn’t excuse me from continuing to try because the only way I can fail is to quit, because "No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem.”

The Story of Ferdinand the Bull

By Matt Mason

Dad would come home after too long at work

and I’d sit on his lap to hear

the story of Ferdinand the Bull; every night,

me handing him the red book until I knew

every word, couldn’t read,

just recite along with drawings

of a gentle bull, frustrated matadors,

the all-important bee, and flowers—

flowers in meadows and flowers

thrown by the Spanish ladies.

Its lesson, really,

about not being what you’re born into

but what you’re born to be,

even if that means

not caring about the capes they wave in your face

or the spears they cut into your shoulders.

And Dad, wonderful Dad, came home

after too long at work

and read to me

the same story every night

until I knew every word, couldn’t read,

                                                                              just recite.

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