[This piece is based
on an article I wrote in 2012. It will
take the reader through a process of systematic reasoning and help him/her to
understand the nature of the problem identified in my writings which had
created much havoc to humanity while none the wiser and had likely eluded thinkers
since as early as the Greeks first started philosophizing two-and-a-half
millennia ago about the nature of the world and humanity’s role in it.]
Ever since I returned home after
my first degree and started working in the Maldives government in December
1978, I have been experiencing a growing unease for the lack of meaningful,
constructive dialogue among colleagues, myself included, that lead to positive
outcomes. For years, I had no clear idea
of the underlying reasons for this failure.
Then, in 1997, I did some systematic thinking, which lifted the fog from
my mind. (Having obtained a Master’s
degree in 1992 also helped this thinking.)
I began with a physician – how
he/she manages to achieve positive results, ie, cures an ill patient. Obviously, the answer lies in his/her ability
to understand the intricacies of the functioning of the human body and how
outside agents intervene to disrupt physiological functions of its
systems. Thus it is the theoretical
knowledge and practical experience acquired by the physician through academic
education and training that enabled him/her to solve the problem of the
patient’s illness. The same basic logic/reasoning
is applicable for professionals in other fields of specialization.
Given that it is the high-level
knowledge we gain that enables us to unravel the complexity of any situation at
hand, it follows that a person without the appropriate knowledge will not be
able to bring about such positive outcomes.
As a result, persons versed with knowledge in one field also cannot
apply it to other fields to bring about positive outcomes. Stretching this logic further, it should be
clear now that there would be significant barriers, at the very least, for
people knowledgeable in specialized fields to engage in meaningful/constructive
high-level dialogue that are necessary for effective cooperation among
themselves to solve complex problems of today’s world, since each person’s
knowledge would be limited to his/her specialized area and since their
overlapping areas would be hazy for most of them – as they are usually unlikely
to have knowledge of those areas.
This thinking is dwelt-on in my
1997 paper labelled “Integrative Planning” (article #6 on the blog) in which I likened the behaviour of
specialized people trying to unravel a complex problem (in that paper,
“planning”) to that of seven blind men trying to describe an elephant after
each one touches only one part of it.
This is a global problem in today’s world in which education transcends
national / geographical boundaries, and has roots in world education which
currently lacks the awareness that such a problem even exists, let alone its
devastating impacts.
How world education is partially
linked to this problem is spelt-out in that paper. Notwithstanding this awareness, and in spite
of the awareness of the psychological connotations involved (explicitly
dwelt-on in that paper) in the earlier years following the paper, my efforts
were limited to the local context, in trying to convince local political cadre that
included an increasing number of people with college degrees from abroad of the
nature of the problem we have at hand.
An assumption implicit in that effort was that when the nature of the
problem was spelt-out explicitly and in irrefutable terms, people would begin
to see the light of the day. Not so,
definitely! Further, despite the
psychological and sociopsychological nature of the problem, both the psychologists
and sociologists with whom I talked were not cognizant of the fact that a
significant part of the problem falls into their domain, thus that it is their
responsibility as well to find a solution to the problem. This failure in turn
led me to delve into psychology, and also sociology, which effort paid handsome
dividends.
It began to be clear that our
problem has much deeper roots than it appears.
More specifically, it became clear that the problem, although much
aggravated by specialized education, is fundamentally rooted in the way the
human mind works. Given that what is in
the 3rd & 4th paragraphs above can be generalized further to state that humans
make sense of the world based on the information bases in their brains (and how
that information is conceptualized) the implications at the societal/global
level became staggering. Not only are we
born into very different cultures and sub/microcultures with wide variations
among them and thus with different information bases due to them alone, each of
us is also different by virtue of our brains being structurally unique in spite
of many broad similarities.
These structural differences in
turn lead to truly unique experiences; no
two person’s subjective experiences of a given event are thus likely to be the
same. All human experiences and subjective, in turn becoming an integral part of
one’s information base, and so on ...
Variations in the information bases arising from these processes
lead to unique human beings, thus to unbridgeable mental gaps among people. I can think of no way (in 2012, when this
article was written, but was later expanded to include what is below) than to at
least partly counter the downsides arising from these mental gaps than to equip
people with the tools for narrowing those gaps in their encounters with fellow
humans.
The
account below is an extension to the above article based on an email I sent in May 2024 to an
associate professor of education at a US university with 14 years of experience
and an EdD to her name. This extension
elaborates and sheds further light on the nature of our problem.
Attached at the end of this post is also yet another piece based on
an email I sent to the senior academic staff to the Maldives National University
in November 2024 that will shed still more light on the elusive nature our topic .
It could be
concluded from the account given in the above article that we understand the
world based on what we have in our knowledge bases. And the higher the level and quality of
knowledge bases in specialized areas, the higher the outputs become. This is the foundation of what we call
progress.
Unfortunately, the
higher the level of people’s knowledge bases the hazier gets their
understanding of what is beyond their narrow specializations – see quote from
Professor Will Durant’s book The Story of
Philosophy attached at the end.
Their mindsets become, to evoke an adage from local Maldives context,
like that of “the frog in the well.”
Frogs (that spawn and die in a well) would understand a lot about the
state in their own wells, as would specialized people about their own specialized
areas.
This is the malaise
that afflicts the modern world which in large part exacerbates our problem
since it compounds the barriers to communication that are the outcomes of our
natural disposition (see fourth and fifth paragraphs of the last/top-most
article on my blog, labelled “Helpful Suggestion” beginning with “The Problem in a Nutshell”).
This is by no means
a criticism of specialization, but only to highlight the downsides that arise when the members of specialized groups have to
deal with each other – not that there are no disagreements about issues
among those specialized in the same field, but that is not the focus of our
discussion. In a world that is becoming
more complex by the day, interaction among those in different professions is inevitable
and has become the norm. The advanced
conveniences of the modern world are based both on increasingly higher levels
of specialization and interactions among diverse disciplines; they are also the
basis of the evolution of life on Earth – it is, for example, by the unerring
functioning 24/7 of the thus evolved vital organs of the human body that an
individual can continue to be alive.
A critical consideration
to keep in mind is that our material progress is based mostly on precision/ mathematics-based
natural sciences while addressing societal issues is based on imprecise/murky
human languages. Thus while interactions
among those with natural science backgrounds will be relatively easy, interactions among those with social
science backgrounds are severely handicapped.
This is besides the lack of a common effective
language for communicating among all
professions.
Communication downsides
are found not only among the highly specialized fields; they are the norm among
the ordinary folk as well. As elaborated
in the last paragraph of the original article above, the uniqueness of the
information bases in our brains with which we all make sense of the world is the basic/central source of our
problem and is the root cause responsible for creating the plethora of the barriers
to communication, in turn making
it the source of multitude of human misunderstandings, which in their turn lead
to much of the societal ills that we witness daily – ranging from
disintegrated families to intergroup, ethnic, religious, intra-national, and
international conflicts.
To make matters
worse, most people are not endowed with, or more precisely, they have not
learned, much logical / rational thinking; their minds being clouded with beliefs
of one kind or another, be they sociopsychological-political or “spiritual” in nature,
lending to biases/prejudices that we encounter daily in societal
interactions. And these in their turn
make us susceptible to and easy prey of every charlatan in the book – be they
commercial peddlers or sociopolitical manipulators or evangelists. In the past, people’s more-or-less stable life-conditions
compelled them to get habituated to the kind of thinking / behaviour they found
useful/adequate to get by and there was no need for them to seek any
“objective truths.” Most likely, they
were not even aware that there is such a thing called “objective truth.” All these puts people on “autopilot,” making them unable to go beyond their limited mindsets to anything new. As our habits / behaviour are formed mainly
unconsciously since we are children and are based largely on societal thinking we
had inherited from the past and cannot be changed on a whim, these realities become a barricade in the modern world in which we are overwhelmed with
information that requires precisely that very skill, namely, a capacity for
deciphering the onslaught to arrive at objective truths.
Given these deficiencies,
it is only natural that societies do not function the way they ought to. Also, they function in an increasingly complex
world and no individual can master all aspects of a complex set of problems,
however knowledgeable he/she can be. Moreover,
people do not work alone; they work in interaction with others in the same
and/or several other organizations. To further
complicate matters, societal decision-making settings consist of people with
highly diverse backgrounds. From all
these variations we can conclude that complexity resulting in interactions in
such settings virtually guarantees that their outcomes will be anything but
viable, let alone optimal.
The statements in
the above paragraph could be better understood if we look into their “probabilistic”
aspect. That is if, for example, one has
20% of knowledge about what constitutes a problem, chances are, or the
probability is, that he/she would likely know only 20% of that problem. The same applies to others involved in the
process. As a result, if there are, say,
five individuals involved in solving a given problem and each has 20% of the
knowledge about that problem that the others don’t have, and given that none of
them has the telepathic powers to impart what each knows to the others,
resulting interactions among them could generate only “half-baked” knowledge
and would therefore lead to only ineffective and thus unfeasible outcomes.
Then there is the
psychological aspect. As a specialized
person, be it in an institution or academia, climbs the “social ladder” and
attains the limelight, a barrage of psychological “blinders” materialize, the
outcome of which being that such persons get removed from the reality of the
world in numerous ways, the outcome of which in its turn is that an aura of
infallibility sets in, giving rise to an “I know it best” mindset – although in
reality, one cannot actually “know” all aspects of a given problem as per the
account mentioned above. Thus any other
option/opinion however good or feasible gets side-tracked and ignored. Such people unconsciously put themselves on
such high pedestals that they are unaware of the reality beneath on the ground;
“success has gone to their heads,” as the saying goes.
Of course, there
are many other psychological aspects to such interactional settings, including
those arising from psychological defence mechanisms in particular, not to
mention ingrained biases and prejudices as well as downsides arising from the
lack of a shared (technical) language.
The above are all various aspects of human
interaction, by no means comprehensive/exhaustive, and downsides thereof that
make societal functioning so very ineffective. All
is not lost, however. While we cannot change human nature that resulted from our
biological evolution over millennia, and how we make sense of the world that
sprang from those processes, we do have realistic measures that can effectively
counter and minimize much of those crippling downsides. Outlines of the specifics (the whys and the
hows) of what we can realistically do to put things on the right track are
explored in some detail in the writings on my blog www.rifatafeef.blogspot.com.
I hope that the
above accounts provide “food for thought” and help you to enact a mindset that will
enable you to face your moral responsibility as an educator – making a concerted effort to become aware
of the situation being the first meaningful step in the right direction. As outlined at the outset, the world’s educators
are, even if unwittingly, the single biggest stumbling block to rectifying the
deplorable condition of the humankind – I said “unwittingly” because they are
in the same boat as those in other specialized fields. But the difference is that it is only
educators who can change the situation by changing current curricula that better
reflect today’s human needs instead of blindly following centuries-old and
ineffective formulae.
Two More Cases Additional to the Above
Downsides to Further Clarify the Dynamics Involved
One is about how
our ingrained attitudes and habits are formed and lead to single-tracked
mindsets. This could perhaps be best seen
by visualizing how spring snowmelt meanders down mountainsides taking the path
of the least-resistance to form minor streams converging into bigger streams
and minor rivers and ultimately into raging rivers that carve deep and wide
into earth. The neural signals in our
brains underlying destructive attitudes/habits function in a similar way – the more
and longer a certain way of thinking is engaged in, the lesser becomes the
resistance to signals in that pathway and the easier that way of thinking
becomes. And in the same way that
snowmelt follows the path of the least-resistance down mountain slopes to carve
the earth, so does an initially innocent line of thinking becomes an
ingrained/fossilized habit, so to speak, and changing the course of either a
deep-dug river or ingrained attitudes/habits becomes virtually impossible –
that is, without enormous effort and expense.
In fact, it seems to me through long observation and experience that
while changing the course of a raging river is practically possible, altering
one’s ingrained attitudes/habits does not lend easily to that possibility. And this has far-reaching consequences in the
realm of societal interactions.
A second related
example is about the way decisions get made by elected bodies of
representatives. My own
observation/experience is, once again, that the realpolitik of today’s world
is, more often than not, heavily biased towards the self-interest of the ruling
elite to the detriment of the electorate who voted for those representatives
and thus that of the greater good of the society. In addition to behaviour driven by insatiable
greed, such outcomes are also due to the reasons described above – due to the
lack of a proper understanding of the complexity of how the world really
works. Apart from the limited
understanding, the decisions that get made are often reactionary, and have
rather short-term horizons. And contrary
to popular belief, this is true in the US in particular and in the West in
general and other democracies – as well as the vast majority of other nations. While the freedom to elect public officials
gives one a feeling of empowerment, the electorates are more often than not
indoctrinated by the media that are usually controlled by powerful interests of
one shade or another that are not aligned with the greater good of the society,
and thus the perceived “freedom” is, in reality, no more than an illusion, a
mirage. I would not be the first person
to punch holes in the concept of “democracy” idolized by the masses. The famous philosopher of ancient city-state
Athens (where democracy was “born” but where women had no voting rights and, as
per Professor Will Durant’s book The Story of
Philosophy, of 400 thousand inhabitants in its heyday, 250 thousand were
slaves) Plato, for example, described democracy as “the rule of the mob.” He may have had his reasons for that harsh
judgement, but while in his day two-and-a-half millennia ago, it was only the
fluent orators who led the masses astray with their hollow eloquence that did
not amount to much, today’s powerful elites have a firm grip on the mass media
that distort public opinion, oftentimes in surreptitious ways, to whatever ends
they desired – for example, by omitting truths that are contrary to their
interests or even right-out lies, thus misleading the public. In this regard, I believe that of the Western
nations, the US especially, is at an extreme, due largely to the dynamics
arising from an unhealthy belief in an all-encompassing benevolence of “free-markets”
where “money is king” and “anything goes.” (Those interested in my foray into the
downsides of the way decisions get made in the US government along with the
toxic sociopsychological milieu that currently underlies its detrimental
functioning, which in turn arose from pervasive public ignorance that is
exploited by the ruling elite – who are not versed either with how the world actually
works – for their own ends, and how the resulting momentum can be transformed
and diverted into a more positive direction for the betterment of both the US
and the world at large given its global impact, both positive and negative, may
want to refer to my sister blog www.rifatafeefuspolicy.blogspot.com.)
****************************************************************
Summary: It is the
dissonance embedded in the human condition described above that is the source
of our troubles: on the one hand we
humans are individuals in interaction with the outside world and such
interactions make us unique individuals, and on the other hand it is that very uniqueness itself that acts as a
wedge/barrier to smooth interaction between other equally unique individuals –
whether such interaction is between two individuals, or at inter-group or
intra-national or inter-national levels.
This is the problem. The solution
is to dissolve that wedge/barrier and facilitate smoother interaction – at
least to the extent humanly possible.
The mechanism for achieving this is outlined in the articles on my blog,
particularly in article #13 labelled “World Basic Education System.” That mechanism, however, is targeted at the
younger generation, and the reason for that choice is outlined in numerous
articles: that adult mindsets are inflexible, or “fossilized,” as I call it,
and given that the phenomenon cannot be easily changed, that focusing on adults
would not facilitate smoother human interaction.
A Prominent Reference in Support of the
Argument Presented Above
Some Theoretical Aspects That Lend Our Problem Its Elusive Nature
[Based on an email I
sent to the senior academic staff of the Maldives National University in November 2024.]
Towards introducing the topic, I would request the reader to
Google the phrase “genome comparison, human vs chimpanzee” and the answer
you’ll get would indicate that humans share 98.9% of their genes with
chimpanzees. And yet, given the vast difference in appearance between
humans and chimpanzees, hardly any of us would think that we humans have much
in common with the chimps.
To understand this, we have to conceptually reverse above
example. Given the commonalities that we apparently share, as our
nationality, language, religion, customs, etc, not to mention appearance, we
would think that individuals of the same people are largely the same. Unfortunately,
we are not.
Since our birth (in fact, since the final weeks in our
mothers’ wombs) we start making sense of the world based on what we
experience through our senses; we attribute a meaning to each sound, event,
etc, that we encounter. Even if we later came to share a common language,
the nuances we attribute to every word, event, etc. will be different
for each individual; they get “individualized,” so to speak. As a
result, even if we live in the same society, apparently speaking the same
language, believing in the same religion, etc, the nuances in our minds or the
attributions we attach to each of these aspects, and thus our perceptions of
them, will be quite different, making us unique individuals.
Indisputably, there would be commonalities: a book is a book, hot is hot, but
such aspects would likely represent a minority of cases, given a lifetime of
our attributing/conceptualizing; perhaps only about 15% of our perceptions can
be common? Thus while we may think that
we speak the same language, we actually have a very inadequate language to
communicate among ourselves. This is
notwithstanding any of the technical languages we need to engage in in
specialized areas such as medicine or engineering, or even in public policy
formulation, which encompasses a plethora of specialized areas as economics,
finance, management, not to mention sociology or psychology, etc, etc. If this is the state in a given society, then
there cannot be any effective language for
interacting among diverse peoples, since the attributions/conceptualizations
that have taken place would be vastly different among those groups. And it won’t require a fertile imagination to
figure out that these processes heavily contribute to the societal and racial
prejudices that underlie much of global strife and disastrous consequences
thereof.
Thus in the same way that we
humans share 98.9% of our genes with chimpanzees but the 1.1% that we do not
share makes us so different, differences in our attributions/conceptualizations
would make us different/unique individuals, although we take it for granted
that people in the same society speak the “same” language, believe in the
“same” religion, have the “same” customs.
We do not. There are nuances of
meanings in every word we utter, every belief and custom we think we share,
etc. And specializations necessitated by our modern way of life take us a notch
apart, in the wrong direction.
This is the root
cause of much of humanity’s problems. There are also
innumerable other factors that contribute to the chasm, such as the pressures
arising from the incompatibility of the way of life that we inherited from the
past with current realities. It is on the one hand the outcomes of these
and a host of other factors and on the other hand a lack of awareness of societal
policy makers about those realities and their resulting impotence to take
effective remedial action that is responsible for societal fragmentation and
disintegration. Viewed from a broader
perspective, it is such sorry state of affairs at the national levels that
paves the way for global conflicts.
Given the increasingly effective means of killing each other that we
ceaselessly invent, the spectre of annihilation of the entire human race is very
real indeed!! And the world’s
educational setup has a lot to do with that unfortunate outcome.
While there is not much we can do about the innate factors that arose from
our biological nature and lead to the deplorable state described above, there is much we can do to minimize their
downsides. And the world’s
basic education that is attuned to
humanity’s actual needs is the means to that end. Articles on my blog www.rifatafeef.blogspot.com, particularly
the broader picture provided in article #13, along with the first paragraph of
article #12 on methodology and last paragraph of #9 on values, further analyze
the problem and suggest practical ways for achieving this seemingly impossible goal.
