ON EDGAR MORIN

Morin died on 29 May at the glorious age of 104 – for those who don’t know Morin, this is his Wikipedia entry and this wonderful short article does him justice

For those wanting more I recommend this recent collection of  his essays 
The Challenge of Complexity Edgar Morin (2023) edited by Amy Heath-Carpentier

Edgar Morin is a thinker for our times. In a rapidly changing, interconnected world, full of uncertainty, facing what he has called “a crisis of the future,” Morin’s work provides a guide for the complexity of the challenges before us. How can we make sense of this new world, in the throes of a transformation, a world that seems to hover perilously close to the abyss? Morin is fond of quoting the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “No sabemos lo que nos pasa y eso es precisamente lo que nos pasa”. We don’t know what is happening to us, and that is exactly what is happening.

And yet there seems to be an overwhelming desire for certainty. Wherever we turn we see the return of fundamentalisms, absolutisms, and the anxious, at times delirious search to have the feeling of certainty that neuroscience suggests is even more important to us than actually understanding what is going on (Burton, 2008). In many countries, the level of public discourse has become so polarized and profoundly disturbing precisely because in this cauldron of change, punctuated by the horrors of terrorism, pandemics, racism, bombings, wars, poverty, injustice, and hopelessness, so many voices seem to speak with absolute certainty and such unwillingness to listen to other perspectives. It is so tempting to fall back on simple solutions, on scapegoating, on the certainty of solutions whether technological or political. It is so easy to ignore the global and local complexities and reduce multidimensional, systemic problems to one single answer. And it is so frightening to admit we don’t really know what’s going on. In the face of complexity, the great temptation is to simplify to the point of simplification, to seek simplistic interpretations, and simplistic solutions. But simplification abstracts and isolates. It hides the relational nature of systems, their interactions and interdependencies with their environments, with other systems, with time, with the observer (Morin, 1981). And in an interconnected, interdependent world that is rapidly changing, that is at the heart of the problem. A new world cannot be created with the same way of thinking of the world that is dying.

Homeland Earth – a manifeso for the new millennium Edgar Morin (1999)

How to Change the World EBA anthology (2022)

Complex Thought – an overview of Edgar Morin's 
Intellectual journey Mortuori


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