My friend,
I found the article on Karl Popper’s ideas interesting the other day. But, they left me dissatisfied as well. And I’ve thought more about my reaction since then.
“So lost in the trees that one cannot see the forest”, is the aphorism that comes to mind.
A friend in the U.S. just referred me to Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized. I haven’t read the book; though I did read a Wikipedia summary of it.
Not unlike Popper’s thoughts, Klein’s book is a deep analysis of the world that Klein find himself in. I.e., the world of U.S. politics and the deep and widening gap between the liberals and the conservatives there.
And wasn’t this, again, just the same with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?
And can we not think of others, again and again, trying to decipher their world and their times to make sense of things?
Just pick a country and a period of time. And there will have been someone in that place trying to understand and make sense of their local world. I think that implicit in each of their attempts to understand, was an assumption, that if we can understand, then we can have some hope of solving the problems described.
But there’s another aphorism that comes to my mind at this point: “Arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”. And this fits into the earlier aphorism; about not seeing the forest because of all the trees.
Systems thinking has come far enough now to be ubiquitous for most intellectuals. We all know now that we live within systems within systems.
For those of us, who really want to be effective at working on the world’s problems and not just to end up as footnotes redolent of the small times and places we found ourselves in nationally and philosophically, we need to refocus on our world’s problems on the largest scales.
We need to think about transcending nationalism, local-ism and ‘isms of all kinds.
If we cannot refocus on and strive to solve our global system level problems concerning how humanity can adapt to live within this planet’s resources sustainably, then we are simply rearranging the deck furniture, pointlessly. And, in the end, all that we do and all the excellence that we do it with, will be wasted.
There are an abundant number of reasons why we humans are poorly equipped for refocusing like this.
I’m thinking now of core issues to do with our human nature, which is, itself, derivative of our evolutionary heritage. (see: https://samadhisoft.com/transcending-our-biological-imperatives/)
And I’m thinking now also of our minds and our perceptions; which we are inordinately proud of. But which we really understand the limitations and shortfalls of so very poorly.
I’m not at all confident, my friend, that we are going to manage the refocusing I am saying is necessary. But I am utterly certain, that more books composed of deep analysis of local problems and local systems are not going to help.
As always, I am interested to hear you thoughts in response to all of this.