On February 9th we announced our intention to celebrate, on August 9th, the anniversary of the Automatiste manifesto Refus Global, with a new Manifesto and bundle of ancillary probes modelled on the old. It will be called “Total ReForm” although our part would be better called ‘ReThink’, as we aspire to visionary re-thinking. We call the spirit of this exercise FOURFOLD VISION, and the required cast of mind TETRADICAL.
Stephen Leacock, in his writings on political economy, called for “sane, orderly, and continuous social reform.” We have added “resolute” to make one of our tetrads. He also identified the tetrad of
Knowledge + Imagination + Compassion + Humour
as a good fit for the job.
We have identified RE-IMAGINATION as an essential precondition. Reform must be a thoughtful process and the mind cannot think about what it has not imagined. The social, economic, cultural, and natural environment is complex, to say the least, which in practice means full of
All vital elements in this kaleidoscape are contentious or can be if disturbed, as indeed they must be if we are to prosper, even perhaps to survive.
The symbol we have adopted for this memorial endeavour comes from the French visionary architect Etienne Boullée (1728-1799). He believed that a visionary architect,—and he taught his students to aspire to be visionary,—would build not by practicality but by inspiration. The visionary design, the inspiration, pulls the practical design towards itself so that the latter finds its limitations in a positive way and achieves its full potential.
Such is the process we aspire to emulate. Our fourfold visionary re-imagination of ways of life, social organisms, institutions, public services, and the rest will not begin by listing the constraints. These will declare themselves soon enough. The process of visionary re-imagination will ignore them, recognizing full well that they will be encountered as the visionary design, if allowed, pulls on the practical one through the humane process of resolute, sane, orderly, continuous social reform.
August 9th is three months off. Our preparations unfold gradually. We will keep you informed of progress.
On August 9, 1948, a variegated group of sixteen artists in Montréal published Refus Global,—‘Total Refusal’,—a manifesto. Despite the title this was an Affirmative Action. Seventy-five years later Canadians still bristle with affirmative urges, even as we find ourselves surrounded by a dense cloud of negation. Find ourselves? We may, we can, although under these conditions we are more likely to lose ourselves. This will never do!
We believe Canadians must take advantage of this important anniversary by launching ourselves anew towards TOTAL REFORM. Enough tinkering! Our societal juggernaut has run amok, crashing through the foundations of our cherished edifices, flinging devastation everywhere, undermining our health, our prosperity, our sense of justice, our very survival. We need fundamental, not incremental change.
Canadians can no longer ignore the need for TOTAL REFORM and we must think together about what that would mean. We cannot think, however, about what we cannot imagine. Re-imagination comes first. The task is complex, like the society we have created. Complex tasks require complex thinking and a cast of mind that is up to the job. On the other hand, over the past two centuries we have created and adopted for ourselves a battery of amazing intellectual and imaginative tools. These, if we use them properly, with enough energy and in the right spirit, are powerful for good beyond our wildest dreams. That spirit is integrating, ruthlessly optimistic, imaginative, fearless. We are calling the spirit FOURFOLD VISION, and the cast of mind TETRADICAL.
Refus Global was, and is, a literary collage, radical for its time, consisting of the manifesto itself and eight supporting essays. Four hundred copies were mimeographed and enclosed in wittily decorated folders. Sixteen artists signed the manifesto, most of them young, all members of the informal Automatiste group, led into this particular manifestation by Paul-Émile Borduas, who under the political regime of Maurice Duplessis lost his teaching job as a direct result.
We need a new manifesto and are getting ready to have one. A new Group of Sixteen, mostly no longer young and therefore largely indifferent to authoritarian retaliation, is assembling under the leadership of figures vastly more obscure than Paul-Émile Borduas. A new radical collage will blossom on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the old,—that is, on August 9, 2023.
We flourish a tetradical flag, blazoning TETRADS such as Knowledge + Imagination + Compassion + Humour in the cause of Prosperity + Generosity + Liberty + Security and a whole flock of other tetrambunctious desirables. In the best contemporary practice we are creating a ‘model’ to aid the thinking required.
It has been rightly said (by one Agnes Laut in 1908) that “Canada’s story is one of men and women and things doing.” And what interesting, bold, progressive, and sometimes deplorable things we have done! That story evolves, and must so continue. It is time for us to be DOING consistently better, for each other, for the earth, for posterity, and for ourselves.
August 9th is six months off. We will keep you informed of progress.
For the next few months this blog will advocate for Fourfold Vision, for the cultivation of Complex Minds for Complex times. In my eightieth year I am on a pilgrimage for this cause. I am an elder, and becoming more elderly.
I read many articles found on the internet, and I faithfully both read and listen to “the news”. I try to imagine the cast of mind encouraged by this wealth of material. If I were to characterize it in a Tetrad, as is my wont these days, I would describe it, on the whole, as: Encyclopedic + Opinionated + Verbose + Sensational.
I call it Encyclopedic because it speaks most often of one topic at a time, be that a person, place, event, phenomenon, etc., without any reference to context or interconnectedness. This is the manner of encyclopedias.
I call it Opinionated because although it may or may not dwell on facts, it almost always turns them into opinions, often in the form of predictions, which are never facts, even from the most expert voices, even though often presented as if they were.
I call it Verbose because it is. If one were to count the words passing daily before the eyes and through the mind of a conscientious observer of this discourse, the total would be tremendous, a torrent of e-print impossible to encompass. Electronic tools have made it easy to spew out verbiage and publish it on line. An exception is Twitter, of course, but even there the average writer’s skill in condensation is so limited that the result is too often not a miracle of concise statement but a mere tumble of loosely connected words and abbreviations, at best pointing a direction rather than leading with any light, kindly or otherwise. Then there is the academic lady I follow who strings together chains of these devices, thus obscuring her intention and meaning, well-founded though they often may be.
I call them Sensational because they often are that too, due no doubt to the extreme difficulty all voices find in making themselves heard above the multitudinous clamour of words and opinions.
I make no claim concerning my own ability to integrate materials into what I call ‘wholesome’ images or impressions of reality, although I have been trained for the job, and have been obliged to practise it, as many people in political, policy-making, consulting, and managerial jobs must, for a considerable number of years. I think that anyone who makes a conscious effort to think, write, or speak wholesomely, to integrate information by thinking about it in that way, is bound to be better at it than the average.
The problem lies in the fact that most people in political, policy-making, and consulting jobs, and even many of the managers, are not expected to make up their own minds about what ought to be done, using whatever criteria they choose. In public affairs certainly, and in a great many private ones, including all those with power, a public interest is necessarily in play, and to find out what that is one must listen to the public. There the average level of skill in multi-dimensional, even two-dimensional thinking and speaking is sadly lacking. There single vision reigns, with the dire consequences so shrewdly and eloquently identified by William Blake over two hundred years ago, and so often in evidence today. It reigns also in the advocates, journalists, and pundits, who imagine they are serving that public by giving them what they want.
Of course consumerist ideology insists that people deserve what they want. There is nothing wrong with that, in balance. Is it possible, however, that we can protect a little space for giving them what they truly need? Must we take what they want now as definitive? Are we allowed to work for the day when more of what they want is what they truly need, or beyond that, what society and the world needs of them?
Ay, there’s the rub, because it is not obvious that individual people need Fourfold Vision. Many if not most can get along quite happily cultivating their own particular simple, single vision. Those with, or striving for Fourfold Vision often appear confused, although I would argue that such appearance is superficial, and has more to do with their listeners’ impatience with complex explanations than with the vision itself and its understanding. To cultivate Fourfold Vision is an act of generosity towards society and the world, riven as they are by the recurring devastation of single visions ruthlessly imposed.
I am asking people to sacrifice, or at least complicate, their cherished single visions for the common good, no matter what that single vision may be. There remains plenty of room to advocate for particular causes within that matrix, in pursuit of balance.
There used to be, and maybe still is, a slogan that went: “If you’re not confused, you’re insane!” Confusion is not, however, a sign of sanity, but the mark of a pilgrim in search of Fourfold Vision and a more complex mind. In complex times, even a small portion of arrival feels like coming home.
The Mudl Model calls itself a “hypodeigmatic device”, which means simply that it is a model, in three conventional senses. First, it is a small thing representing something much larger, too large to put in the space available. Secondly, if you turn it on it works the way the larger thing is supposed to work. Thirdly, it serves as an example, an ideal.
The Mudl Model is a tool for the humane cultivation of the kind of mind human beings are going to need if they are to survive the world they have formed for themselves, a world packed with many virtues but whose vices bid fair to overwhelm them. Through routine application of the Mudl Model humankind may pursue what is good, resist what is bad, and find moderation where that is what is good. Most people want to do that, but the contrary voices have become so dominant as to overwhelm the intention.
The Mudl Model does not find that these contrary voices want to pursue what is bad. They do so through simplification of complex matters, often by picking one strand out of the bundle of what is good, and pursuing it to the exclusion of all others. They also often do so by arguing that the past ought to govern the future. The past contains many lessons of course, the first being that it ought to be kept in its place. Evolution has given human beings the capacity to think ahead. There is an art to doing that which needs to be cultivated, and like all forms of cultivation the job needs tools, complex tools for complex times.
The Mudl Model consists of an articulate matrix of 33 Tetrads arranged in a visible pattern. It needs an audible form too, of course, but does not yet have it. That is a work in progress. It works by repetition, using a simple algorithm, which is also a work in progress.
The 33 Tetrads consist, naturally, of 132 terms. There is no secret about these: they appear in other places, most notably in the pages of KnICH Magazine (www.patreon.com/knichmagazine) where much of their development has taken place, and will continue to take place. What is presented here in the months ahead will consist of progress reports only. The real work, necessarily incremental, will continue to be done in those pages, where the context, energy, infrastructure, and algorithms of the Model are evolving through the deliberations, reported weekly, of the Canada Fourfold Re-Imagining Committee.
To summarize progress, then: the Model exists in one dimension (visible text arranged in a pictoverbicon). Work continues to give it an audible dimension, suitable for repetition through recitation, and to elaborate on the context, to infuse the energy, to build the infrastructure, and to create the algorithms.
All this is work requiring Knowledge, Imagination, Compassion, and Humour. These four terms, in all their complexity, form the foundational Tetrad of the Mudl Model, inspired by Stephen Leacock, who had them all.
Please follow this blog for progress reports or, even better, subscribe to KnICH Magazine so that you can engage more closely with the Mudl Model and its associated Re-Imaginings.
In Chapter XII I laid out a framework of Recommendations into which I was led by the pursuit of a Tetrational approach to the Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, a problem which I self-inherited from Stephen Leacock. He, you will perhaps remember, viewed public affairs and education (although not everything he wrote about) through a tetrad lens. At some risk of repetition I remind you that his Tetrad was Knowledge + Imagination + Compassion + Humour. In the previous chapters to be written in the coming months of 2021 I will present a becoming array of tetrads useful to my purpose. The universe of tetrads is much larger, of course, and of immense antiquity. I imagine my aboriginal ancestor sitting around the winter campfire brooding on Hot + Cold + Light + Dark, trying to make sense of their simultaneous presence and importance, and to decide what to do about it. That is what Tetrationality is all about.
N.B.: In speaking of an aboriginal ancestor I am not indulging in that reprehensible practice of suggesting Indigenous Canadian ancestry when I don’t have any, or at least don’t know that I have any. One strand of my ancestry goes back a long way in this land; not all of its ramifications are remembered. My aboriginal ancestors hunted and gathered in the forests of what are now called northern Europe and the British Isles. Their even more aboriginal ancestors presumably came out of Africa.
I have become convinced that it will be easier to talk about tetratiocination, the technique of thinking in tetrads, if I relate the practice to some other practice that human beings of my time and place use habitually. I draw your attention, therefore to the functioning of the human eye, an organ which the vast majority of us use all the time and without thinking about it very much. In preparing for the practical recommendations presented in Chaper XII last month, I am going to suggest that the movement and functioning of the mind when engaged in tetratiocination is parallel to the movement and functioning of the eye when engaged in looking.
As we go through this exposition, you and I, we must remember the admonitions of William Blake, that the “ratio”, that which we can perceive with our natural organs, be they sensory or intellectual, is not the whole of what is accessible to us. We also have access to “the Poetic or Prophetic character”, the power to leap beyond our “natural or organic thoughts” and the perceptions behind them, although we may have to cultivate it both individually and collectively. The Leacock Tetrad starts with Knowledge which is immediately and integrally joined by Imagination, tuned with Compassion, and leavened with Humour, to achieve a True Understanding of what needs to be done. I submit, however, that this is not a solo piece, flourishing in solitarity, but an ensemble, a conversation, arising from a sense of solidarity, a sense of the Common Good we ought to be pursuing deliberately.
But on with the eyes. Let us begin with an article called “Types of Eye Movement and Their Functions” from the second edition of Neuroscience, and found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10991/, which begins: “There are four basic types of eye movements: saccades, smooth pursuit movements, vergence movements, and vestibulo-ocular movements.” For the purpose of tetratiocination, I think we ought to be particularly interested in saccades, which are, I am told, observed not only in the vision of eyes human and otherwise, but in the touch of star-nosed moles, and the hearing or sonar of bats.
“Saccades are rapid, ballistic movements of the eyes that abruptly change the point of fixation. … Saccades can be elicited voluntarily, but occur reflexively whenever the eyes are open, even when fixated on a target.” In other words, if I understand the idea properly, as we look at a scene our eyeballs jump around both under and out of our conscious control to allow us to take in the whole of the scene, to comprehend it in an holistic way. We also have the capacity at the same time, through the other kinds of movements, to focus on particular objects or segments of the scene, to shift focus, and in general to scan the depth, width, and height of it while keeping the whole in view. We take it for granted, of course, as we do many of our natural functions. The marvel of it emerges when we think about it, and about the possibility that we can cultivate the capacity and thus grow it.
I think it entirely possible, although I cannot do it myself, that with training we can achieve the same capacity with our hearing. The ability of choral conductors to hear both the separate parts and the whole harmony never ceases to amaze me. I have known chefs and connoisseurs who could do something comparable with taste and smell. I am not sure about touch, which is usually so very up-close and focussed. Perhaps something of the same thing can occur when we are in direct and intimate contact with something or someone who is diversely tactile.
This capacity to gather together diverse data to create an holistic impression that includes impressions of individual details or sets of details creates, I believe, the capacity for “true understanding” or , and is what I am going to call, expanding on William Blake’s fourfold, threefold, and twofold visions, Multifold Comprehension. Blake asks God to “keep us from Single vision …”, which I believe to be a prayer highly relevant to our time.
If our five “natural and organic” senses can work that way, then why not our minds?
It is clear, however, that our contemporary minds are strongly disinclined to work that way, that Single Vision has become our instinctive recourse when presented with a multifold situation. For example, the name of US President Bill Clinton has become associated with the slogan, “It’s the Economy, stupid!” How many of us know, or care, that the actual governing instructions for his campaign were threefold: the Need for Change, the Economy, and Health Care. The association of the second with stupidity might well result from a concern that it would be neglected.
Our own Federal Government, in its recent Throne Speech, laid out a tetrad of needs for attention in the months ahead: Health, the Economy, Equality, and the Environment. If I had written this speech I would have added a fifth imperative, which is to keep all the other functions of government running smoothly. If the real challenge we face, as well we might, is the urgent necessity to act on all these at the same time and with the same emphasis, to apply Fourfold Vision to these five imperatives and act thereon, then how are we doing?
Before I address that question, if I do in this column, I will ask whether our contemporary tendency to side-slide into Single Vision, which we see and hear all around us in the public media and political discourse,—the actual reality may be far more complicated than it appears,—whether it is natural to us as human beings with human minds, or something cultural which has recently evolved. I want to suggest that it has evolved, for reasons we can observe, that there are forces pushing it to evolve in the same direction with further intensity, and that we need to encourage it to evolve in a new direction, not back to something that may have existed in the past, when life was simpler, but forward into something suited to contemporary complexities.
For reasons having to do with a sick cat and a damaged license plate I must suspend the flow for the time being, but will return, when I will contrast the simplicities of the past when our casts of mind evolved with the complexities of the present and future, for which they must adapt. I will draw attention to the awesome power of specialization in thought and initiative and the trap it has set for us, and to the cast of mind that led to the recommendations outlined in Chapter XII. I believe that Fourfold Vision can be taught and cultivated, although of course before that happens the need must be recognized. We do recognize it practically in public affairs, but not nearly well enough in discourse. And because we are a democracy our discourse has the capacity to pull our public affairs in its direction. This tendency is hazardous to our health in many directions.
January 2021 (first posted on the 7th; minimally revised on the 22nd)
Since this article begins as the first in a year-long monthly series, and in the natural unfolding of a blog will end up as the last, it is perhaps worthwhile to begin with some conclusions and let the text evolve towards its natural beginning. Where would preoccupation with the Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, Fourfold Vision, and Complex Thinking for Complex Times take us if we gave it free rein? How would it be if we hypothesize the following and see if it stands up as we fill in both articulation and rationale month by month on a weekly schedule of revision?
To clarify: I intend to start a new chapter each month, progressing backwards from conclusions and recommendations through analysis and examples to first principles. I will review the current chapter each week and make whatever additions, subtractions, clarifications, and revisions seem necessary. This means that you, the reader, if you wish to keep up with me, will read each chapter four, occasionally five, times. (April, July, September, and December are the fivers this year, since Thursday is the official (not necessarily the actual) posting day.) I see no harm in that, even some good, as repetition assists retention, more profound thought, and creativity.
Here goes:
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS:
(1) Make a Mantra of Social Justice. At present, at least before Covid-19 came along, it seemed that the words we heard most often in public discourse were “The Economy”, meaning economic growth of the common, quantitative kind, measured by a very small number of indicators, such as GDP, the stock market indices, or (un)employment. We should elevate ‘Social Justice’ into that dominant position, and think of economic affairs as simply one tool in the box.
An anecdote of natural regression from more complex to simplistic thinking: You are perhaps familiar with the phrase, “It’s the Economy, stupid!” sometimes believed to have originated with Bill Clinton, campaigning for the presidency of the United States in 1992. In fact, the idea began one of a triad that came from one of his campaign strategists, James Carville, and the actual phrases were: “1. Change vs. more of the same. 2. the economy, stupid. 3. don’t forget health care.” The transition from a three-fold vision to a one-fold slogan was apparently immediate.
I propose that one of the fundamental tetrads in our eventual Social Justice portfolio could be: Prosperity + Health + Security + Freedom.
(2) Nature As Our Partner Not Our Servant. We need to consider, and act on, the possibility, which looks more and more like a reality, that Nature in some holistic sense is feeling her survival threatened by our actions, particularly by our dumping of garbage and effluents. These are causing her systems to clog and her regulatory systems to weaken or fail. A fundamental drive of Nature is survival, and her pursuit of survival can be ruthless and cruel by our enlightened standards. We need to be afraid of what she can do if we abuse her. On the other hand, she is generous and forgiving. She will cooperate with us if we cooperate with her.
A sense of partnership with Nature, much closer to what humanity has always respected under aboriginal conditions (not having any choice), needs to be infused into our industrial, commercial, technological, and consumer cultures, as a fundamental condition of Social Justice. We need a tetrad for that, but don’t have it yet. Ideas?
(3) Complex Thinking for Complex Reality. The cumulative effect of democratic, industrial, and commercial progress in the past few centuries has been a hugely complex, interactive society, or set of societies, seeking to satisfy individual, local, national, regional, and global imperatives. In order to make those our servants rather than our masters we need to think as complexly as they are. Simplicities, however consoling, cannot do the job.
(4) Resolute, Sane, Orderly, and Continuous Social Reform. There is no magic formula. If something needs improvement, work to improve it. If we try something that works, we should do more of it. If we try something that doesn’t work, we should try something different. We may in fact work that way naturally. We need to trust the process, and distrust those who are impatient, dogmatic, or authoritarian.
(5) Education. All advancement of any kind begins here, and not only with schooling, important as that is. The humanaculture of learning and teaching needs to permeate public discourse and private aspiration.
(6) Social Safety. We cannot call ourselves socially just as long as anyone is in distress through no fault of their own, and we need to be very careful in our judgements about fault. What looks like fault is often our lack of understanding. In particular children should not inherit the misfortunes of their parents.
One of the lessons of Covid-19 is surely the importance of governments in responding to emergencies, and the importance of their infrastructure in tools, expertise, and legislation when the emergency strikes.
(7) Fitting Taxation. In order to provide the public services and protections so essential to Social Justice, we need to tax whatever creates or manifests material wealth for individuals and corporations, using a set of largest possible bases and at steeply progressive rates.
(8) Guaranteed Incomes. The Big Four pillars of Social Justice are, or ought to be: Income, Housing, Health Care, Education. If people have incomes they can help with the other three. If we don’t guarantee the income we pay a huge price trying to provide the others.
(9) Right Œvirsagas. Œvirsagas are the macro-stories we tell ourselves in order to know who we are, where we are, where we have been, and where we ought to be going. They are the propaganda we generate for ourselves, in order to keep us focussed and energized.
HOW GOOD WE ARE WILL DEPEND ON HOW WE THINK!
A Tetrad of Post-Covid19 Specific Measures based on lessons learned:
(1) A Guaranteed Annual Income. If we had had that from the beginning the social safety net it would represent would kick in automatically for those in need.This measure would require higher taxation of the progressive redistributive kind.
(2) Massive Reform of Elder Care. Towards Home Care and minimally institutional forms of residence; away from large institutions especially those of the warehousing kind.
(3) Sophisticated Understanding of Risk. Covid19 is a new risk and we don’t know how to think about it. We take risks all the time in our daily lives, especially with disease and accidents, and we know how to think about them. We need to apply the same kind of understanding.
(4) Journalism for Our Time. The present whip-saw oscillation between sensationalism and sentimentalism, along with grotesquely inadequate expertise in statistical interpretation on the part of journalists, is making any kind of contextual thinking extremely difficult for those who rely on regular journalism for understanding.
HOW DO WE GET HERE?
Much of the discussion that will take place in this backward-progressing, forward-looking succession of articles now under construction will revolve around: the meaning of the Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (that is, what we mean, or must mean, not what Stephen Leacock meant a century ago when he coined the term); grinding and polishing of Tetrads which are the glasses through which we may view all the complexities involved; methods for converting the Tetrads from aids to observation and contemplation into frameworks for action; and translation of all the above into ideas for resolute, sane, orderly, continuous social reform. We have laid out some ideas. Next come the methods.
As 2020 began I tried to launch what I am now calling the Fourfold Vision Quest. I don’t remember what it was called then, and it doesn’t matter. It sputtered along in small weekly bursts without gaining much momentum. Other projects demanded my attention. As 2021 begins I intend to try again.
Today I inserted into the Voyageur Storytelling web site, the focus of much of my internet attention for the past nineteen years, a few thoughts that might serve as an orientation to the quest. As I begin to transfer the locus of contemplation from that site to this, I took a screen shot of one of the panels there, to give you an idea of where they start.
The promised ‘recalled pictoverbicon’ is not here; you can see it there at http://www.voyageurstorytelling.ca, if you are curious. It is labyrinthine, cluttered, and somewhat out of date. A new version will appear here before too long.
Two ideas are worth a little more verbiage today. First, the idea of “Complex Thinking for Complex Times” is fundamental. Our news media, politicians, and advocates, do a splendid job of presenting us with a running mosaic of simplistic, one-fold impressions,—they can hardly be called visions,—usually mutually contradictory, but give us no help with integrating them into some coherent understanding of how the world is turning and what needs to be done. The term ‘no help’ hardly does justice to what they give us. They cultivate confusion, either deliberately in pursuit of their myriad single visions, or as a by-product of their clumsy, ad hoc, disorganized efforts to keep us informed. Their noisy disparation drives the mass of us, their hapless listeners, straight into the lives of quiet desperation that Henry David Thoreau so stigmatized.
The Fourfold Vision Quest is a response to this deplorable situation. It may or may not yield a method. It will yield a way of thinking, a guide to coping with the inescapable plethora of points of view arising from our contemporary life. It will do that, I promise you, although probably not right away. The Quest will require contemplation, deliberation, conversation, and the more the better.
As the next push is for 2021 which has not yet quite begun, I will simply display the pictoverbicon for the last day of 2020, and sign off, pausing only to wish you a prosperous, healthy, safe, and unfettered year. Here is the pictoverbicon:
Sincerely,
Paul Conway, Northern Bruce Peninsula, Ontario
(the background picture, by the way, is our front yard at this time of year)
Today I sent the following letter to the leaders of the four parties in the Canadian House of Commons:
Respected Sirs and Madam,
I am writing in response to the Throne Speech and to recent reports of Mr. O’Toole’s stated concerns about “social experiments”, as reported this morning by the CBC.
I am writing to all of you because I am hoping that you will all embrace one political experiment, which is to work together for the common good and not try to make partisan hay out of our current misfortunes and challenges. Of course I recognize that there is plenty of room for principled disagreement about “the common good”, and that the people you serve probably hold a muddled view of what that is. Still, it’s pretty clear when you are being principled and when you are being partisan, just by the way you speak and the amount of thought evident in what you say.
Neither fulsome boasting on the part of the Government, nor carping negativity on the part of the Opposition, can be seen as principled. Those kinds of speech are clearly partisan, and have no place in the current predicament.
I would identify that predicament as primarily four-fold, at the broad strategic level:
(1) The current pandemic coronavirus, and the lively probability of future ones;
(2) Excessive waste and the indiscriminate dumping of its effluents into the air (climate), water, and land;
(3) Inequality and injustice in all forms;
(4) Violence and strong-arm tactics in all forms.
The last three, in all their diverse variations, have become firmly embedded in our ways of life and institutions, as we can see from the huge resistance we see when they are challenged. The insidious thing about those three is that while it is abundantly clear that the whole of society is being hugely damaged by them, perhaps even terminally, someone is benefiting from every single element of each one of them.
The people who are benefiting have power and voices, and do not hesitate to use them. They may even have rights, or at least legitimate interests, often broadly distributed, including the right not to have the whole basis for their lives overturned or blasted into oblivion without some kind of due process. This whole immense and complex system of resistances erects huge barriers against fundamental change.
The virus is different. It doesn’t care about our rights or legitimate interests or due process. It does what it wants, and has forced us to overturn our ways of life to an extent previously unimaginable. I don’t need to belabour that point. You all know what I mean. To a considerable extent we have made those changes, with what is actually, when you come to think about it, a commendable amount of grace. The virus has taught us something about our capacity to change, if change we must.
I suggest that the degree of change and willingness to change that the virus has imposed on us, and our success in changing, ought to give us the courage to tackle the other three in the same spirit. We can drastically reduce waste and dumping. We can address inequality and injustice. We can do away with violence and strong-arm tactics. And when we have done all that we will live very differently from the way we do now, or did before the virus.
And I would say to Mr O’Toole and those who agree with him that the way to get there is through Social Experiments, also Economic Experiments, Political Experiments, and Individual Way-of-Life Experiments of many different kinds. I would say that an Experimental Way of Life is exactly what we must adopt in order to deal with our Four Predicaments, both broadly and in detail.
I think we are doing that, to a commendable extent, in dealing with the coronavirus. More experimentation is yet to be done there, but the process is rolling.
I suggest that it has two principle implications. First, that we need not pretend that all experiments will work. I suggest two principles, adapted from the school of counselling called “Solution Focus”: If you try something that works, do more of it. If you try something that doesn’t work, don’t do more of it, do something different. Experiments sometimes fail. We must not play “Gotcha!” with the people who undertook them, or lay blame, or question their motives, or seek to take mean-spirited advantage of their discomfort, or any of the other practices so dear to us. An experimental culture must be a generous one. It will do us all much good if we simply cut each other a little slack.
Second, I suggest that this kind of process cannot carry on without catastrophic disruption and huge injustice unless our governments are heavily involved in the regulation of it. This is not an environment for unregulated “market” solutions, although ingenuity and initiative may play important roles, as they always have. If we want to cultivate experimental approaches that are effective, humane, and democratic, we must cultivate a vibrant Public Sector, which means among other things being prepared to pay for it. Resources are going to shift away from the comfortable practices of the past into new ones. The old ones are going to scream bloody murder, and we are going to have to deal with them resolutely, using due process of course.
Please notice that I assign to our governments the job of “regulation”, not “control”. Individual initiative remains a huge experimental resource and should be cultivated in the humane way we all know about but don’t always respect.
Please notice also how easily we learn when we must. We learned a long time ago to drive our cars on the right-hand side of the road. That is a severe restriction which we accept. We are learning to wear masks and keep our distance. There may be limits out there somewhere to what we can learn, but they are a long way away.
I have suggested that we are adapting to the coronavirus because it doesn’t care about our complex of resistances. With respect to the second predicament, the one caused by waste and dumping and exploitation, I suggest that Nature doesn’t really care either, although she is a lot more generous than the virus. But if Nature decides she has had enough, she will retaliate very hard indeed, and far more widely than the virus. We do well not to make her too angry. The same might be said for the victims of inequality and injustice, and of violence and strong-arm tactics.
Experiments forever!
Thank you for reading.
Sincerely, Paul Conway Northern Bruce Peninsula,Ontario October 4th, 2020
PWC: The following article appeared on the web site “The Conversation”, https://theconversation.com, sometime this past week, along with an invitation to republish. Since the general thrust of what is said there reflects what I have been trying to say, I am doing that.
I first took part in a multidisciplinary academic project in 1971 and have, to the extent possible, been practising the approach in my own research and management ever since. Multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary is certainly better than monodisciplinary in dealing with broad humane issues, although I believe transdisciplinary or holodisciplinary to be an even higher ideal, and what senior managers of all kinds struggle to be when they are trying to act humanely. Each academic discipline has its own particular lens, ground so as to illuminate the questions that discipline likes to ask. The task of humane senior management, in all fields, is to find a lens for its questions, which are often broad and complex. Too often, in my experience, when they try to put everything together, they end up flying by the seat of their pants, without any help from the disciplines who are, in fact, often critical of their decisions, sometimes aggressively so, on the grounds that they have given insufficient weight to one disciplinary perspective or another. It is easy to state general principles on how such weighting ought to be done. They are the commonplaces of decision theory and the philosophical principles behind it. Plugging the numbers into the formulas and dealing with the stochasticities surrounding them is another matter altogether.
When I advocate for “Fourfold Vision”, I mean a way of thinking, a cast of mind, that includes and transcends particular academic disciplines to create a holism greater than the sum of their parts. Whether that can be done in any except general terms remains to be seen.
The University of Toronto’s project, described here, is commendable. Any comments I might make, interleaved in italics below and marked “PWC”, are intended to build on what the authors have said and not to detract from their ideas in any way. They and their project are on the right track, in my opinion. I would simply like them to go beyond interdisciplinary into that even higher intellectual, perceptual, and practical realmwhere Fourfold Vision prevails.
My comments will evolve gradually in the days ahead.
Here is the article in question:
‘How to live in a pandemic’ is the type of university class we need during COVID-19
PWC: Why only in university class? It is what we all need. The Madness of King Us, in this context, is the strident chorus of particular perspectives all trying to tell us what to do. The most common theme, in my limited viewing range, says that we should all be “kept safe”, meaning we should not catch the current virus. Whether the things we must do to achieve that in some global way do in fact “keep us safe”, or even “keep our children safe” (the idea behind much immediately current discourse) is another matter. “Safe” is one of those easy four-letter words that is a lot more complicated than appears on the surface.
Health is a complex issue that requires an interdisciplinary approach to study and teach. (Shutterstock)
Currently, we are all bombarded with headlines on the latest research related to COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that health is a deeply interdisciplinary issue, demanding expert responses from a cross-section of fields: the arts, public health, social work and K-12 education among them.
As an interdisciplinary collective of academics trained in a range of fields from the arts to social science to clinical sciences, we have witnessed first-hand a crucial problem in how health is taught and communicated at the post-secondary level. What is often missed, but is critical to contextualizing scientific findings, are examinations of the assumptions and methods used to conduct health-related research.
This omission reflects a problem in Canadian colleges and universities, which generally deliver post-secondary curriculum using a single-discipline approach. A single-discipline approach to health education does not engage the full picture nor provides the groundwork for innovative, equitable solutions in the future.
PWC: Health is of course only one element in the complex of contemporary human needs and desires which I believe to usefully expressed by the following tetrad: Prosperity + Health + Security + Contentment. These authors are dealing with the complexities of diverse perspectives about health. Each of the other elements in the tetrad present the same order of complexity, and can be approached in a multi-disciplinary way with equal validity. The larger human problem is to put all the elements together, with all their complexities, in order to decide how to live, and how best to conduct public affairs.
Multidisciplinary approaches
At the post-secondary level, for example, a microbiology course might focus on lab-based methods used to diagnose whether someone has developed antibodies to a disease like COVID-19, while a typical public health course might focus on the mechanics of contact tracing.
Deeper understandings of health require a co-operative investigation of the various frameworks, techniques and assumptions that guide research practices and how they are communicated.
Universities must fundamentally change their approach to teaching health-related knowledge. It is time to commit to what we call “radical interdisciplinarity”: a sustained inquiry into interactions between biography, arts, culture, history and societal organization that contributes to debates about political, social and economic determinants of health.
Complex issues, complex research
From local to global health issues, traditional, single-discipline approaches are inadequate training for our future carers and health workers. Along with the specialized, deep knowledge that characterizes most undergraduate education, we need to train students studying health issues to respond to the interdisciplinarity of health itself.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic can be used to illustrate this radically interdisciplinary approach; such an approach informs a new team-taught course, “How to live in a pandemic,” being offered at the University of Toronto Scarborough’s department of health and society.
Quantitative approaches, which focus on numeric data, are suited for research focused on the development of treatments using experimental designs, particularly randomized controlled trials. Projecting the number of infections and deaths resulting from the virus is done by statistical models of infectious disease, using secondary data.
Beyond qualitative and quantitative approaches, arts-based health research methods are gaining traction. Creative arts — including music, theatre, writing and visual arts — have been increasingly integrated into more conventional forms of health research and education.
Canada’s first undergraduate program in health humanities was launched in 2017 at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Integrating these insights with arts-based methods can further illustrate the diverse expression of these issues in the creative lives of everyday people.
Social distancing and health inequity
One of the challenges of the current pandemic is addressing how COVID-19 is experienced differently by individuals and communities. Lessons from previous epidemics show that we are not created equal in terms of exposure to and consequences of disease: racialized, poor and sexual minorities are examples of communities that have suffered disproportionately.
It is crucial to disentangle the social, environmental and economic influences of the COVID-19 pandemic across different age, gender and class lines. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing, self-isolation and other practices aimed at controlling viral transmission may have a particular impact on the mental health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit and intersex (LGBTQTSI+) people.
Better understanding the impact of responses to COVID-19 on the mental health of LGBTQTSI+ people can help ensure that all members of our society — regardless of sexual and gender identity — receive culturally appropriate and inclusive care.
Living and learning in a pandemic
As university-based health researchers and educators, our approach to the study of COVID-19 differs from conventional health education approaches. We lead with the principle that it is valuable, and in fact ethical, to commit to radical interdisciplinarity inside and outside the classroom.
A basic understanding of the research methods generating the body of pandemic scientific knowledge is essential to critically appraise the evidence, by recognizing the methodological strengths and limitations of any specific disciplinary approach.
Universities must find ways to model the multi-sectorial, interdisciplinary solidarity required to face the escalating complexity of 21st-century global health. The COVID-19 pandemic gives us a moment in time to overhaul health education — and perhaps to teach us all how to better prepare to live in the midst of this and future pandemics.
A recent article by John Stoehr on the web site Agence Global (https://agenceglobal.com/2020/07/27/are-americans-rethinking-who-they-are/) talks about that moment in recent history when Americans began to “think of themselves more as consumers and taxpayers, instead of free and responsible citizens.”
“Thinking of themselves as consumers and taxpayers — instead of citizens endowed from birth with rights, liberties and responsibilities — lent itself to thinking about the federal government as separate from the citizenry. “Government” was something done to people. It wasn’t of, by and for them.”
Mr. Stoehr believes that the present “crisis” may be presenting the opportunity for Americans to revert to an earlier, more generous vision of themselves, as “citizens who consume and who pay taxes” because, “as citizens, we are much more than consumers and taxpayers … we are the ultimate sovereign. … The confluence of national and constitutional crises seems to be forcing some people, perhaps most people, to rethink how they think about themselves.” Americans will be fortunate people indeed if subsequent events reveal that Mr. Stoehr knows what he is talking about.
The ideal of “smaller government” is less popular in Canada, although certainly not absent. We have a highly developed sense of governments at all levels as engines that ought to be doing things for us: providing us with goods and services, protecting us from the myriad evil effects of our economic and social practices, and even changing people’s minds on basic issues of social justice. I live in a deeply conservative part of the country. I often marvel at how quickly my neighbours demand government action when something occurs that they don’t like. I even recall one entrepreneurial person who insisted that the government, having provided infrastructure that made the family enterprise possible, now “owes us a return on our investment.” That is a sweeping assignment of responsibility indeed!
We in Canada are blessed indeed with the range and variety of political and social ideals we have inherited through our diverse ancestry. We can, quite legitimately in accordance with our history, pursue the American ideals of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. Stephen Leacock himself urged these upon us in his probe into The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, and quite justifiably so in my opinion. These are noble pursuits. The British bequeathed us with “Property, Stability, Conformity”, perhaps not exactly in those words, but quite effectively. The French gave us Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, perhaps not as effectively. We ourselves added Peace, Order, and Good Government. All these add up to a fine portfolio of ideals for individual and collectual well-being, and we would be ill self-served if we ditched any one of them.
If anyone pointed out to me that we do not live up to those ideals,—and someone would surely do that,—I would reply, as I said earlier, that ideals are made to be flawed. The virtue lies in believing in them, and striving for them. The grotesque short-comings that we see all around us come from those who do not believe and do not strive. The outcry against “systemic racism” and all movements of similar weight seem to centre on demands that governments do something about them. I put “systemic racism” in quotation marks not in any judgement against the movement, quite the contrary, but because I have quibbles about definitions that are of no importance to the victims. They may have importance when it comes to taking action.
The late prophet Isaiah Berlin opened our minds to an understanding of two types of Liberty, or Freedom,—he explicitly used the two words interchangeably. He called the two types “Negative Liberty” and “Positive Liberty”, complex ideas encapsulated briefly and respectively by Michael Ignatieff, in his biography of Isaiah Berlin (p. 275) as “freedom of action or thought”, and “the capacity to develop [one’s] innermost nature to the full”.
When I was a young research director working for a government and agency that I will not name, I commissioned what came to be called “the problems study”. This was a deliberately naive piece of work, viewed only as a starting point, arising from the frequently voiced observation that the people in the field where I was working faced many problems. Exactly what are those problems? I asked, and was authorized to find out, as systematically as possible within the budget approved. After a duly diligent process of selection, I sent two qualified people out into the field to find out what the problems were by asking people whose job it was to deal with them. Fortunately for my reputation, career prospects, and self-respect, I added a sufficient number of in-person household interviews to verify the perceptions of the professionals.
The results were consistent: the doctors and nurses said that illness was a huge problem; the addiction workers said that addiction was a huge problem; the police said that crime was a huge problem; the child protection workers said that too many children were being abused or neglected; the social workers said that family life was problem-ridden, and the schools backed them up; the financial counsellors said that money problems were everywhere; the clergy said that spiritual problems were rife. And so it went, through the entire panorama of the helping professions. Everyone said their agencies needed more money. The households interviewed, on the other hand, while acknowledging that not everything was rosy for everybody, said that on the whole life was pretty good, and that most people coped well enough with the hardships of the region, which was a northern one. Later on, in some subsequent research, we were able at least to sense the situation accurately. The number of people on the wrong side of the “problem” divide ranged from 5% to 15%, depending on situation and demographics, and appeared to be distributed randomly. It was the visibility of the “problem-laden”, especially to their articulate helpers, not the number, that created the perception of a society in serious trouble.
I am wondering how to apply the lessons of that research, and its successors, to the two big demands of our immediate present: that the authorities conquer the Covid-19 virus and mitigate its effects, and that they do away with “systemic racism”.
In trying to think and talk about all that, I am finding that Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, while admittedly useful to the understanding of what he meant, inhibits a clear conception of what it means we should do. Both terms contain double negatives. To speak of expanding or contracting negative liberty is confusing. Is it the negative or the liberty that is being expanded or contracted? Positive liberty in any social situation clearly must connote a strong element of moral choice and self-constraint. It is time, I believe, to invent some words, and for that it is traditional in the English language to turn either to the Latin, or to the Greek.
In this case the honours go to the Greek, I believe. I propose that negative liberty be called “adeia”, or more simply “adea”, from the Greek word for “permission” and related things, and that positive liberty be called “eleutheria”, or “elutheria”, from the Greek word for “liberty-freedom”.
This adjustment in terminology will allow us to consider dealing with Covid-19 unambiguously and positively through pursuit of a higher rather than a lower “adealism”, and “systemic racism” through “elutherial” rather than punitive measures. In both cases we would therefore be talking about mitigating evils through positive instead of negative measures, by expanding rather than contacting something, by moving forwards rather than backwards. If we think and pursue that way, we are less likely to incur harmful side-effects, or to emerge from the endeavour with our society in even worse shape than it was before.
As to what all this might mean in practical terms, I promise that I will continue along these lines and report progress as I go along.
I write this article as part of the Fourfold Visions Projectile (see http://www.voyageurstorytelling.ca), out of my beliefs in complex thinking about complex matters, and in the positive usefulness of diverse points of view, openly expressed.
Fourfold Vision: Cultivating Complex Minds for Complex Times 