The Right Way to Flourish

Reconnecting to the Real World

John Ehrenfeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367244255
• eBook ISBN: 9781000011647
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Business General

In this ground-breaking book, pre-eminent thought leader in the fields of sustainability and flourishing, John R. Ehrenfeld, critiques the concept of sustainability as it is understood today and which is coming more and more under attack as unclear and ineffective as a call for action.
Building upon the recent work of cognitive scientist, Iain McGilchrist, who argues that the human brain's two hemispheres present distinct different worlds, this book articulates how society must replace the current foundational left-brain-based beliefs – a mechanistic world and a human driven by self interest – with new ones based on complexity and care. Flourishing should replace the lifeless metrics now being used to guide business and government, as well as individuals. Until we accept that our modern belief structure is, itself, the barrier, we will continue to be mired in an endless succession of unsolved problems.

1 Why now!

First the bad news… The last few years have been the hottest on record. 2016 and 2017 were nearly one-degree Centigrade warmer than pre-industrial levels. Average global sea level has risen about 3 inches over the same period. Carbon dioxide levels have increased from about 350 ppm in 1987, the year of the UN report that defined sustainable development, to over 400 ppm today (Jones, 2017). It continues to grow at even faster rates. The 2017 hurricane season in the Western hemisphere was the most destructive in history. Tropical storm Harvey dropped 51 inches of rain, breaking the previous record for North America. Polar bears are endangered as their ice-flow habitat melts. The list is long and globally widespread.

According to a widely cited report (Steffen et al., 2018), three of the nine critical global risk boundaries are already exceeded: flows of nitrogen and phosphorus from human activities and genetic diversity. Changes in the land surface and climate are in the zone of uncertainty. Basically, the report argues we are playing with fire because we do not know what the consequences of these changes will be, other than they are certain to upset the globe ecosystem and the human societies it supports.

Socially, humans are not doing well either. In the US, inequality is growing even as the economy keeps growing. The gap between poor and the rest of the US population, according to Robert Putnam (2015), is widening to such an extent that the likelihood that the very poor can move up and out of their circumstances is small and falling with time. The widening gap is not just economic, but includes many facets of everyday life, including important social factors, like: school sports, obesity, maternal employment, single parenthood, financial stress, college graduation, church attendance, and friendship networks. In an earlier book, Putnam (2000) chronicled the disappearance of activities, like bowling leagues, which connected people, resulting in the loss of what he termed social capital—a measure of the stability and health of the society. His finding is all the more significant with respect to the famous 1835 work, Democracy in America, in which the author, Tocqueville (2003), claimed that the key to the strength of the new republic was the prevalence of just such community groups. The dialogic process on which democracy relies is badly broken. The new digital media confuse truth with nonsense. The time is, indeed, out of joint.

The 2016 Presidential election in the US exposed deep fault lines in the society. A recent book by Patrick Deneen (2018), Why Liberalism Failed, argues that our basic political philosophy, liberalism, which springs from the Enlightenment thinkers and earlier sources, is systemically flawed and is not so slowly collapsing under its own weight. I find his work is not merely a critique of liberalism, but is essentially a deeper critique of modernity, itself. He arrives at the same set of constitutive beliefs I have identified in my past work as the root causes of the present failures. The first of two key beliefs is the mechanistic model of the world and the emphasis on its parts, rather than its whole organic context. The second is related, describing human beings as autonomous, separated, and self-interested; modern individuals are simply parts of the system, separate from each other and the world. His work, I believe, adds urgency to the continuing critique and reconstruction in this book.

Unfortunately, there is not much good news to counterbalance the bad. Sustainability programs in academia and industry have increased. Many companies have a CSO, Chief “Sustainability” Officer, and many more business schools offer “sustainability” minors. I use scare quotes to indicate that these developments have not changed much: profit still rules the roost, and trends in technology are themselves contributing to the commoditization of people. Robots, for example, have both positive and negative impact on employment and on the economy as a whole. The wealthier countries are outstripping the rest of the world in progress toward meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but their gains are exerting large negative spillover effects, making it more difficult for the others to achieve their goals (Sachs et al., 2017).

Some sixty years ago, Erich Fromm applied his psychoanalytic skills to the whole of modern Western society and found that it came up short in supporting the existential needs of human beings. In his book, The Sane Society, he argued that modern societies, especially the US, were exhibiting symptoms of insanity (Fromm, 1955). Using the language of psychology, he concluded that the present culture is highly pathological in terms of providing a proper home for human beings. I have extended his argument to all forms of life.

Fromm claims that what has become normal behavior in modern societies is in fact pathological when contrasted to his notion of “human needs,” which concept is close to what I call flourishing—the attainment of the full potential of living creatures. He notes “if he (sic) lives under conditions which are contrary to his nature, and to the basic requirements for human growth and sanity, he cannot help reacting; he must either deteriorate or perish, or bring about conditions which are more in accordance with his need” (Fromm, 1955: 19). Iain McGilchrist, in discussing the divided brain model that I will later elaborate, argues that modernity is driven by an unbalance of the two brain hemispheres and exhibits similar pathologies (McGilchrist, 2012).¹ Under the excessive influence of the left-brain, human beings have become separated from one another and from the natural world, risking to pull down the wonders of civilization that were constructed when the two sides were more naturally balanced.

We always eventually become blind to cultural pathologies because normality is defined by an insidious tautology, that is, by referring to what is currently culturally accepted, whether healthy or not. I have argued and continue to claim that the underlying (modern) social paradigm is the cause of the observed pathologies. Like Fromm, I believe that the persistent problems of individuals and collectivities of individuals can be traced to the stories—the beliefs and associated norms—used to construct everyday behaviors. Change the story at its roots and the behaviors will change. In this and others of his works, Fromm set out to examine the role that society (culture) plays on the mental state of individuals, looking particularly at “recurrent conflicts between human nature and society—and the consequences, particularly as far as modern society is concerned” (Fromm, 1955: 21) (emphasis in the original).

I remain convinced that flourishing should be taken as the primary goal or vision of humanity around the globe. This book adds grounds to the arguments I have made previously. Other grand social visions have failed badly and our vision of continuing progress is sputtering. The absence of flourishing and the opposing presence of so many failures can be traced to the consequences of building societal superstructures on faulty beliefs. The world we inhabit is shaped by workings of both the “laws” of nature and by the network of rules that constitute human institutions. We can’t do anything about the facts we use about the former and their worldly manifestations; they have been at work for billions of years. These facts followed the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, according to the most accepted scientific theories today.

We humans are here, however, and the world is not the same as it would be in our absence. We have intervened and interfered with the workings of the natural world as we have become civilized during the evolution of our species. Our tools and technology reshape the natural world in ways that are guided by the activities of human cultures. The human species, Homo sapiens, roamed the Earth long before it developed language and lived in coordinated cultures. By culture, I mean persistent patterns of rule-driven behavior, coordinated by language. Once language evolved beyond a rudimentary capturing of facts about the world, humans acquired a capability for design: the creation of new material and social forms. Early humans had some inherent ability to create purposeful objects intentionally, which capacity became greatly amplified with the development of language.

As they evolved, H. sapiens developed language-symbolic representation of worldly phenomena, a development that expanded intentional action and social coordination. About 35,000 years ago, in a period known to anthropologists and archaeologists as the “Great Leap Forward,” human cultures boomed. Jared Diamond, a noted author, writes, “Anatomically modern people appeared in Europe and, suddenly, so did sculpture, musical instruments, lamps, trade, and innovation … It was then but a short further step to those monuments of civilization that distinguish us from all other animals” (Diamond, 2008: 15).

All these “monuments to civilization” are constructed on a myriad of beliefs about the world. Beliefs is the name given to the structure of facts about the world as they are represented in our brains and mental structures. We do not use facts directly in the cognitive processes underlying our actions; we use beliefs about them. For example, I may believe your upset-appearing actions are a response to something I did when you were simply reacting to a stubbed toe. In one way or another, beliefs often depart from the facts themselves. We cannot do anything about this; it is simply a fact about being human, but it is critical to remain aware of this difference.

If either the facts or our beliefs about them are wrong, our intentions will not be fully met. The real world always ultimately wins. As Keynes famously wrote, “In the long-run, we are all dead.” If we build our civilized worlds on the backs of erroneous facts or beliefs, cracks are going to appear sooner or later; some are certainly apparent today. In my work and that of many others, these cracks are called unintended consequences and, recently, big ones have been collected under the name of unsustainability. I have argued and continue to argue that modern societies are trying to fill the cracks with the wrong stuff. Our fixes now virtually always come from the same set of beliefs about the world that have created them. So supposedly said Albert Einstein “The world we created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.”

We have looked largely to technology as the answer to the growing threats to the Earth. Increasing eco-efficiency (more value with less impact) will allow continued growth. And, related to this, growth is always taken to be the right answer to everything that fails to meet expectations. That path will never take us to the desired destination: a flourishing planet. My past work has argued that our concerns can be traced to the beliefs that constitute modern cultures and their institutions. Little will happen to change the trajectory we are on until these are changed to better reflect reality, but even that is not enough. Our failures to realize our visions come from a lack of understanding of and focus on ourselves, Homo sapiens. Fortunately, I have the advantage of access to extensive new knowledge about the human brain that allows me to take that inquiry to a new level.

My own experience adds urgency. I spent eight years at MIT in pursuit of my Chemical Engineering degrees (B.S. and Sc.D.) With the assistance of a few compliant advisors, I managed to exchange most of my Humanities requirements for more science. I left as a very competent engineer. Gradually as my work took me out of the laboratory into management and policy concerns, I started to recognize how poorly I was prepared to deal with them. At some point I began a self-generated program to fill in what I found were vast and critical gaps. It is now almost seventy years since I graduated, and I think I have done a pretty good job, but I wish I had had a much earlier start. I am very concerned that my experience is being exacerbated by the demands of an increasingly technological world.

It is one of the great wonders of human civilization that we create lasting order in the world simply by opening our mouths and making sentences come out. We will see that a certain kind of sentence creates the rules constituting and governing all the cultural structures (institutions) of civilization. If we string all those sentences together, we will have, in essence, written the story behind life today. We can change the story by adding new rules and replacing old facts with new ones. Modern civilization is bogged down. It is time to rewrite the story.

Why this book?

This book follows my two earlier books and other writings in pursuing answers to two important questions (Ehrenfeld, 2008; Ehrenfeld and Hoffman, 2013).

1. Is there an intrinsic purpose to all life, and, if so, is human life different from other forms?
2. How are we (as a species) doing to realize our purpose, and if we are not doing so well, how can we do better?

Modern thinkers have answered the second part of the first question, but have neglected the first part for life other than human beings. In our case, they have focused on how we should live, inventing the idea of “good” as a criterion for choice among different possibilities. The “why” aspect of the question has most frequently been shunted off to theologians who seek its answer in the workings of some supernatural god. Others attribute life to some miracle—recognizable, but inexplicable. I am in the latter camp. Life did just happen. We now recognize life as an instance of emergence, the appearance of order in an otherwise chaotic (complex) system. Order can be defined as the appearance of stable patterns in space or time or both. The temporal aspect is critical for life because, if the particular order that creates life reverts to chaos, life vanishes. Life is associated with action. Living entities act in various way. The take from and egest materials into the surrounding milieu; they move; they utter sounds. That is just about all they do, but we humans distinguish among these actions according to the functions we ascribe to them in the context of living.

To the extent that we can and have given names to what we observe, the answer to the first part of question one is yes: living does have an intrinsic purpose, and that purpose is to continue to live. Notice I am talking about the process of living, that is, acting from moment to moment; that is all that we can ever observe without cutting into our bodies. Loyal Rue, a philosopher whom I have found to be exceedingly helpful in examining the first question, called this purpose, viability (Rue, 2011). The purpose of life is to keep on living, once the molecules that constitute all living bodies create the magical structures from which life emerges.

Most life forms, which have existed since the first living entity emerged from the primordial muck, have no clue about their purpose, even if such a purpose exists. They possess no way of stepping out of the process of life itself, a distancing that is essential in being able to observe the process from moment to moment, and to compare one of those moments to the next. Time with a past, present, and future, as human beings know it, does not exist for them. They simply are.

This idea that life is all about living is not restricted to philosophers. The biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Maturana and Varela, 1980), gave it another name, autopoiesis—a fancy name for self-reproduction.² If viability or autopoiesis is the name for the basic purpose of living, how might we describe an organism that is successfully acting out that purpose? By success, I mean continuing to reproduce itself from the moment of birth to death. If enough individual living beings of a species can do this, the species, as a whole, will be preserved because there will be enough survivors to offset the inevitable losses due to whatever terminates life. Both the genes and the world are involved in determining success or failure.

We can observe such successes or failures or imply them from historical evidence. It is fair to say that we can also use the words “good” and “bad” to describe the conditions associated with success and failure, respectively. A successful life is one where the environment is “good” for it; conversely, organisms fail when they become overwhelmed by situations that are bad for them, like lurking predators, illness, lack of food, intolerable environmental conditions, and so on. Good conditions are species-specific and may change as the world changes. The extinction of species comes as the “bads” start to outweigh the “goods,” and reproductive success dwindles until no one is left. The generation of new species follows the opposite trajectory. Genetic variations produce individuals that are better able to survive.

Rather than use the la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1. Why now!
• 2. The power of flourishing
• 3. The brain’s hidden secrets
• 4. Two non-facts that run our modern world
• 5. Freeing the right-brain
• 6. Finding the real me
• 7. Creating Homo curitans
• 8. Navigating the mazes of complexity
• 9. Building institutions for flourishing
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Putting Sustainability in Its Place
• Index