We live in extraordinary times.
Although the human condition at any moment is unique, we’ve much evidence that ours are extraordinary times. Our population is larger by a factor of ten than it’s been for 99.9% of human tenure and larger by a factor of a hundred than it’s been for 99%. Speed, scale, novelty, and in many cases persistence or even permanence of our impacts on each other and the rest of our surroundings are without precedent.
Business as usual or radical change?
Whatever our assessment of the promises and perils inherent to these exceptional aspects of our current situation, we can marshal justification for it and for prescriptions grounded in it to shape a future good for us and others. Indeed, we’re surrounded by, and in our own ways small and large are almost certainly contributing to a cacophony of exhortation to everything from ramped up business-as-usual to radical changes of a thousand stripes.
We’re mistaken.
Contradictions and incompatibilities among our respective assessments and among courses we advocate evidence that we’re mistaken in some. Though we might wish that errors be confined to others’ views, we know from experience that we, too, are fallible.
Let’s stop and question.
Yet rarely, if ever, do we stop, breathe deeply, step back, and persistently question how we might reconsider our current ideas and actions and their sources to become better able to evolve them to adapt successfully. With this writing and subsequent entries to this blog, I invite you to join me in doing this.
Import of worldview
Each of us has constructed over the course of a lifetime a worldview founded on responses to six questions: What is? How did it come to be? Where are we headed? What do we want? How can we secure it? How do we know? That worldview is foundation, framework, and backdrop for thought and action. Our diverse characterizations of the current human condition and prospects are grounded in our worldviews. Only by attending to worldview can we bring more fully to awareness and contemplate changes to this central element of our analyses, visions, and proposed actions.
Alter information to adapt.
Worldview is a foundational component of a larger complement of information encoded in our genes and acquired through experience, much of which has been cultural—lessons learned directly and indirectly from the behavior of other humans. While extant genes and culture have been sufficient in adapting as necessary to arrive at the present moment, we’re without assurance that they’ll suffice to adapt in the future. To meet the challenges of surviving and thriving, we’ll alter our information in ways commensurate with the rate and quality of environmental change. This adaptation is imperative for us to forestall claiming our place in the fossil record.
Bring values into science-based worldview.
Today we’ve broadly accepted science as means to inform every aspect of worldview except, “What do we want?” This we deem a question of value and values, which we have learned are ours to choose or decide. With our responses to it we indicate strength—the meaning of the root “val-”—of preference.
Whatever we value entails a configuration or movement of matter and energy in space and time within us, in our surroundings, or both. It’s subject to the same laws as all natural phenomena, and we can understand it more fully in the same way that we’ve come to understand them: with science.
Word: foundation and constraint
Because we’re engaging in this and subsequent posts in inquiry deeper and broader than is typical in much of everyday life, we’ll pay greater attention to our medium, word language, than many of us usually do. I anticipate delving more deeply into examining a handful of critical words early and into reconsidering less central words in numerous subsequent posts. Word is both a foundation for, and a constraint upon thought and perception. With an extra measure of precision with word, we can clarify both.
Crippling disintegrity of language
I view the aforementioned attention to world to be crucial to ability to communicate valuescience, which entails substantial departure from long-held, often subconscious assumptions. As members of the Anglophone community have evolved our common tongue, we’ve introduced myriad anomalies, stripping words of meanings they carried when first introduced and sometimes imposing upon them connotations, even definitions that obfuscate those original meanings.
In doing so, we’ve shaped thought and perception to make selected ideas more readily accessible and others less so, and to degrade the integrity of language by undermining commonality of meaning in roots, prefixes, and suffixes. We’ve also favored syntax born of, and reinforcing worldviews acquired largely by accident. With all of these distortions, we’ve impeded evolution of adaptive thought.
Prison of “newspeak”
Perhaps more importantly, as we’ve thought and acted, often publicly, on ideas we favor by our definitions, connotations, and syntax, we’ve become identified with them, sometimes to the point where we consciously or subconsciously view their surrender as more akin to a fearsome prospect like losing a limb than to a more superficial, routine event like a haircut. Like characters in George Orwell’s 1984, we’re so effectively imprisoned by “newspeak” that we imagine we’re free.
Liberation by deconstruction
If we’re to see possibilities inherent in suppressed meanings, we’ll somehow at least temporarily displace others. As a foretaste of what is to come, here’s a partial list of words I’ll recharacterize with intent to foster continuity in etymology and to achieve greater congruency with related terms: value, science, environment, ecology, culture, wealth, capitalism, and communism. We deem careful consideration of all of these important to furthering an ongoing paradigm shift to valuescience and to reaping its gains.
Common framework for evolving consensus
As we deconstruct and reconstruct language and worldview, we become better situated to examine afresh from an ecological and evolutionary perspective our individual lives and those of fellow humans. Without pretending to final truths or absolutes, we shed new light on personal and collective challenges, identify constraints on possible futures, and provide basis for choosing which to pursue and by what means. In place of today’s myriad contradictory and incompatible strongly held views which we devote so much energy to defending and advancing, even imposing, we propose a common framework for seeking evidence with which to evolve continuously a loosely held consensus.
Shared information is basis for cooperation.
In any circumstance, successful human adaptation depends upon some mixture of competition and cooperation, even if one of these be only minimally present. In a world with more humans more tightly interconnected than ever before wielding technologies sufficiently powerful to effect our own extinction, persistence may require extraordinary cooperation. Shared information is a basis for cooperation.
Valuescience for common good
With science we’ve arrived at common understanding of phenomena spanning 60+ orders of magnitude of space and time. We can science to achieve greater consensus about value—what we want and means to secure it. By doing so, we’ll lay a foundation for greater cooperation for common good. Thank you for your partnership in this existentially important endeavor.
