Mind Matters

Although the quotation which heads the list of quotes (you can find by scrolling down the top right column of the blog) refers to the importance of self-knowledge, that doesn’t mean that I share much of that with my readers! Indeed, I’m normally fairly circumspect about revealing too much of myself in the posts – as one of my school friends complained some years back.

In October, however, I seemed to break that habit with first a post entitled Know Thyself and then one about the Johari Window. But I now realise that psychological matters seem to have been pressing in on me for some time – with posts last year about various books which are summarised in this table  

Book Title	A tentative overview
The Saturated Self – dilemmas of identity in contemporary society (1991) by Kenneth Gergen	I only became aware of this book last year and have, so far, only managed to skim it. I laud the rarity of its avowed attempt to bridge the dreadful divide between specialists and the rest of us.
What about Me? the struggle for identity in a market-based society (2014) by Paul Verhaeghe	starts by contrasting our two basic urges as individuals - the initial sense of "belonging" and the growing need for "separation" - and how this expresses itself in later struggles eg "self-respect" v "self-hatred". It then moves onto a fascinating discussion of values and morality - showing how the Greeks had an integrated view of our character which Christianity destroyed when it placed God as an external power. The Enlightenment dethroned religion to an extent – although Verhaeghe argues that Diderot’s emphasis on reason, passion and empathy was set aside by an unholy coalition of Voltaire and Rousseau who basically helped the French state set up a new religion. He also argues that true rationality started only after the second WW – which fits with the more recent arguments of people like Nicolas Guilhot who are beginning to analyse the role of the military in the post-war social sciences.  It’s the chapter on the Enron Society where he really lets rip – “The west has never had it so good – but never felt so bad!” leads to a discussion on mental illness and the pharma industry. How, he asks, has 30 years of neoliberalism affected our DNA – with its “Rank and Yank” systems of management; Universities as knowledge businesses; anonymous call-centres; CCTV; ubiquitous contracts, rules, regulations, league tables, fear, uncertainty - but no real accountability. It ranges through intellectual history, sociology and ethics before suggesting that the last few decades have seen a radical new self-identity being engineered – which he calls “The Enron Society”. Conclusion very weak.
Commanding Hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril Thomas Homer-Dixon (2020)	A book which takes as read the reality of global warming and seeks to understand our apparent indifference. He outlines his “theory of Hope” here and cites the successful “women against the Hbomb campaign” of the 1950s (which led to a treaty ban in 1963) being started by the determination of a single woman. The 2 megatrends – greater connectivity; and higher uniformity – have to made to work in our favour by challenging what has become in the past 4 years a heavily pessimistic social mood “It’s all in our minds” is one of his central arguments and he stresses  the importance of Worldviews which I’ve discussed here and here. To that he adds something he calls ideological state spaces. The combination of worldviews, institutions and technology (WIT) is powerful  By far the hardest transition will involve getting from today’s (economic growth) WIT to another arrangement that drastically reduces the global economy’s consumption of resources and its output of waste. This new arrangement must explicitly address the three “equivalencies” I highlighted— growth equals happiness, freedom, and peace— because people won’t relinquish conventional growth if they aren’t reasonably sure they’ll be at least as happy, free, and secure as they are under the existing arrangement. The intellectual and scientific foundation of this new WIT will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics—one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities.  Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points paper is used to give the most important part of the book. We need to move from the “Abundance mindset” to the “Scarcity mindset” caused by widening insecurity, migration, climate change and the new pessimistic social mood
Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation (2021) by Hans Burmeister	A very unusual book in that it deals with the changes needed at the level of the individual, the company and society as a whole which are normally dealt with by 3 different fields – self-help, business and social change. His basic argument is that there is a “core self” which warns us when we are going against our nature and that we should listen to it. As individuals, organisation and societies we are too comfortable with the status quo and ignore the multiple signs of stress around us – be it depression, suicide, protest. His section on “things that hold us down” makes some good points. And the point of his title is that we all – at whatever level – need to prepare properly for what is involved as we make the necessary adjustments to our values and behaviour

Worldviews are also central to the work of Jeremy Lent - who writes about the archaeology of the mind and whose The Patterning Instinct – a cultural history of man’s search for meaning (2017) actually calls itself possibly the first “cognitive history”. I’ve only started to read it and can, at this point, simply note that it is a very important book

The worldview of a given civilization—the implicit beliefs and values that create a pattern of meaning in people's lives—has, in my opinion, been a significant driver of the historical path each civilization has taken. But, at the same time, I disavow any affinity with the old triumphalist view of history, which posits some characteristic of the Western mind-set that made it somehow superior to that of other cultures and, therefore, led to the West's “success” over the rest of the world. Instead, as the book unfolds, it reveals an underlying pattern to Western cognition that is responsible for its Scientific and Industrial Revolutions—as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush toward possible catastrophe.

In this respect, the book shares much with the postmodern critique of Western civilization, recognizing those capitalized universal abstractions such as Reason, Progress, and Truth to be culture-specific constructions. In fact, a significant portion of the book is devoted to tracing how these patterns of thought first arose and then infused themselves so deeply into the Western mind-set as to become virtually invisible to those who use them.

 

When drastic change occurs to a given society, its cognitive structures—and, ultimately, its entire worldview—can change equally drastically within a generation or two

(Lawrence Harrison’s The Central Liberal Truth – how politics can change a culture also argued this in 2006 but is these days regarded as beyond redemption)

The last book in the table pointed me to two other interesting references – the first being a very detailed treatment of worldviews The World we create – from god to market Tomas Bjorkman (2019) to which I hope to do justice once I have got through its 400 odd pages. The other is by development psychologist Robert Kegan whose In over our Head – the mental demands of modern life (1994) set out a useful 5 stage theory of personal development – (the video in the title link gives a very short intro to the stages) 

Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)

Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)

Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)

Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)

Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population) 

What has impressed me about all this material is the link they satisfactorily make between the personal, the social and the political – levels that are normally dealt with in compartmentalised study.

Further Reading;

A Hidden Wholeness – the journey toward an undivided life Parker Palmer (2004) a book which has apparently inspired the creation of many reading circles for those seeking purpose

https://www.swarthmore.edu/kenneth-gergen/available-manuscripts

In over our heads – the mental demands of modern life; Robert Kagan (1994)

https://fs.blog/mental-models/