TRANSFORMATION: A LITERATURE REVIEW WITH THE POSSIBLE HUMAN IN MIND APRIL 2012 Prepared by: Michael Bopp, Ph.D. Four Worlds Centre for Development Learning Phone: 403-932-0882 Email: [email protected] The Transformationalist View of Human Development Every knowledge enterprise, every research project, every development strategy, every conceptualization of curriculum and pedagogy—all are rooted in fundamental assumptions about the nature of human beings. These assumptions are entered into as one assumes the standpoint of one’s culture, without critical consideration or intent. As A.N. Whitehead once remarked Our consciousness does not initiate our modes of functioning. We awake to find ourselves engaged in process, immersed in satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and actively modifying [the world]…(Whitehead 1967:46) That is, we awaken one day to discover ourselves already immersed in thinking and feeling and doing in that particular pattern of thinking and feeling and doing that we have inherited from our cultural history. Alvin Toffler (1980) coined the term “indust-reality” to describe the reality system that I, as a stepchild of industrial culture, am immersed in. Immersion is indeed the operative word. Man lives in the moist air of earth like a fish in an ocean. He walks not so much on the earth (separated from it) as in the earth, textured into its rhythms, its vitalities, its laws. (Novak 1978:26) But as Joseph Chilton Pearce underscores for us in his example of the Balinese children who walk on fire, the mind-brain “knows” that certain laws are operable in a shared universe of meaning. We would like to say that there are observable, measurable, objective and immutable principles that govern the physical world. Of these we mean to gain knowledge so that we can control that world to our ever-advancing advantage just as Francis Bacon had promised us. But we are beginning to realize that such hopes are somewhat misplaced. Pearce writes if the firewalkers: At this point, our western logic breaks down before an irresolvable paradox. To us, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot dance on the coals without even a blister while beneath those coals pigs and pineapples or whatever are roasting. (Pearce 1980:185) Fire, by definition, burns. That certainly is a principle that can be counted on, is it not? But add idea or abstraction and you add mind-brain. Add mind-brain to the world and you have, not reality as it is in the world, but reality as a construction, a created reality. Human reality experience and the world as it is are not synonymous phenomena, although they partake of the same substance. This is why they laws of one operation cannot possibly fit the other, why ordinary scientific testing, which is designed to discover the world’s principles, is not appropriate for a study of earth plus mind. (Ibid) The study of human cultures is necessarily a study of a phenomenon that is constituted in the relationship between earth and mind. In order for me to approach an adequate understanding of human development and how education can assist in that process, it is imperative at the very first that the assumptions lying at the root of the culture I myself dwell in concerning the nature and potential of human existence in the 1 world be unearthed and examined. These assumptions will of course shape my interactions with people of other cultures. The problem inherent in such an examination is that it must be conducted from some standpoint. “Precisely because different conceptual paradigms provide differing standards for evaluation” (Markley and Harman 1982:163) it is not possible to prove that one standpoint is ultimately better than the other. A paradigm is an explanatory system or model that integrates thinking about a particular aspect of reality. It is the image of “reality” we use to guide our thinking and action in science or in life. When information comes to us that cannot be explained by our model, the model itself begins to stretch and eventually to crack up. As Thomas Kuhn (in “The Structure of Scientific Revolution”) suggested, when a paradigm of reality is no longer able to accommodate the frontiers of human knowing, a new paradigm eventually emerges which can incorporate both the known world, and the questions currently being raised about what lies beyond the frontiers of human theorizing. (Kuhn 1962) The most fundamental of paradigms, the paradigm of paradigms, is the image of human nature and purpose that is operative in the theories, policies and practices of any civilization. In 1974 the Stanford Research Institute conducted a study at the request of the U.S. Office of Education that examined alternative images of the nature of man in relationship with the universe, how past images have led to the current crisis in industrial culture, and “what types of images appear to be needed as we move into a post-industrial future”. That report was not generally published until 1983 (Markley and Harman 1983), yet its limited edition in 1974 became a classic in what may be called the literature of transformation, a growing body of writing dealing with the emerging global phenomenon of human transformation as a new image of the human condition. What is fascinating about the Stanford study is its eclectic incorporation of a vast field of contemporary scholars and researchers, as well as the insights of many non- academic sources of wisdom ranging from the Bible and Sri Aurobindo to the American human potential movement. What the study suggests is not that we should somehow adopt and promote a different image of man because it is preferable to some other image. Indeed, the authors refer us to the image makers of the German government prior to and during World War II who deliberately attempted to create, through rational manipulation, a particular image on man, and a myth of the emergent destiny of the German nation that ended in catastrophe. What Kinser and Kleinman (1969), authors of the provocative “The Dream that was no more a Dream: A Search for Aesthetic Reality in Germany 1890-1945” make terribly clear is that the dream came true. The myth (albeit artificially fabricated) shaped perceptions, which in turn produced policies that set into motion a dizzying chain of events. And somehow through it all, the image grew and took on life of its own, fed by events to which it was symbiotically linked, until it became impossible to tell which caused which—the myth, the event or the event, the myth. The literature of transformation is suggesting quite apart from the rational manipulation of the human psyche that has been the fetish of totalitarian hopefuls throughout the ages. What is being observed, as opposed to promoted, is that collective human consciousness is evolving a new relationship with the universe. 2 As systems theorist Erich Jantsch (1980) suggests in his “The Self Organizing Universe”, the basic unit of survival is not an entity, but a relationship between organisms and their environment. The “evolutionary transformationalist” image of man (Markley and Harman 1983) is seen to be an emerging phenomenon of the collective human psyche. One way to understand what is being suggested here is to consider the development of the capacity to use language that is latent and hidden within the just-born human infant. Certainly no examination of the “wiring or the bellows or the plumbing” (Vonnegut 1974:12) or a baby will reveal the hidden potential that is unfolding in that child to enter into the abstraction of language usage. The Persian prophet of the last century, Baha’u’llah, poses another example, that of the fruit that is hidden (in the form of potential) within the fruit tree. The tree, He explains, can be cut into a thousand pieces, and no trace of the fruit will be found. But in the proper season and given the necessary environmental conditions (sunshine, rain, the nutrients of the soil, etc.) the capacity of the tree to bear fruit will manifest itself, and there will appear, gradually, the buds, the blossoms, and eventually the luscious fruit in the fullness of its beauty. (Baha’u’llah 1971:155) What is being suggested by the evolutionary transformationalists is really an image of human beings in relationship to the universe that may be summarized as follows: 1. The human species is engaged in a perpetual process of emergent becoming. 2. This evolution is fundamentally a cultural and spiritual process, but is expressed simultaneously in many dimensions of human activity including the personal and psychological, social, economic, geo-political, ethical, legal, technical, biological, ecological and philosophical-theoretical domains. Hence a wholistic approach to understanding human processes is indicated. 3. Human beings can be conscious participants in our own evolutionary process, and as such can help to direct the course of human development on this planet. 4. The emergent outcome of the human evolutionary development process is the transformation of the relationship between human beings and the universe (see Pearce 1980:185-86) which is, in effect, the transformation of the “world”. 5. The human evolutionary transformation process can only be understood in relation to the wholeness of the universal context of which humanity is a part. This context includes the ultimate unknowns underlying the ordering of the universe. Again, a wholistic perspective of human processes is indicated. 6. The ongoing of human transformation necessarily subsumes and incorporates all previous human development (just as Thomas Aquinas pointed out that the number 5 does not prelude the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, but subsumes them) into current stages of the process, but that entirely new dimensions of human possibility, not pre-figured in previous stages, are constantly emerging.