The Western mind

our own ways of thinking and doing and shapes our meaning-making and action. We can only then start to integrate different ways of knowing that will serve to help create a more integrated world.

The separation of theory and practice is false; they are not opposites but two sides of the same coin. We cannot act wisely without making sense of the world and making sense of the world is in itself a profoundly practical action that informs our reality. (Wahl, 2016: 20)

As we make the deep dive into exploring the underlying mindset that needs to change and the reconfiguration that is needed before we can be embodied participatory practitioners, bear the above quote in mind. As Skolimowski (1994) argues, the nature of our mind is the nature of our knowledge and the nature of our reality. In other words, ontology, a theory of being, and epistemology, a theory of knowledge, are intimately related. We are socialised into a particular mindset which creates a particular form. Hitherto, that mindset has been largely a monological approach to the world. What is needed is a multidimensional one. So, let us start by unpicking our old ways of thinking before we take on new ways of thinking and a more participatory mindset.

The Western mind

Man [sic] faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe. And he faces the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view – ie in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomised, soulless and self-destructive. The crisis of modern man is essentially a masculine crisis. (Tarnas, 1991)

Even those of us who think we have moved towards a participatory view of the world are often not aware of how Western ideological perspectives pervade the very essence of our existence. Beneath the forces of domination and subordination, alienation and fragmentation there is a worldview that came to dominate globally through European colonialism, but also through scientific development and patriarchy. This worldview has affected the way we view what knowledge is and how it is created, and also how we see ourselves in relationship to nature and each other. In both cases, the dominant worldview has been one of dualism, or opposites – of separation of mind from matter, subject from objects, parts from the whole – and a search for linear causality to develop simple solutions to problems. The above quote comes from The Passion of the Western Mind (Tarnas, 1991), which traced the development over the last 300 years of this approach to making sense of the world and its implications. While the mechanistic reductionist methodology of science and the associated continuing separation of knowledge

into specialisations did lead to an explosion of technological innovation, it also came to be seen as the only legitimate way of generating knowledge about the world, against which all other forms of knowledge generation were to be assessed and found wanting. Although often branded as Newtonian and Cartesian ways of thinking, there are philosophical connections that are innately European and go back to Plato and Aristotle, among others. Philosophers in other civilisations, in India, Japan or China, and indigenous groups in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere developed other systems of thought. It is important to recognise that certain aspects of contemporary scientific thought and social theory are embedded in Western European culture and have been imposed through colonialism. This is not to say such thinking is wrong: it is an extremely useful tool or frame, if used with awareness. For example, in understanding poverty we need statistics, and in understanding the causes of problems we need systematic analysis. Our argument here is that such a view has come to dominate our systems as part of a grand narrative, creating a worldview that is fundamentally unbalanced: an unbalancing that is reinforced by neoliberalism, as discussed in Chapter 2.

What are the elements of the inherent dualism that are so embedded in mainstream ways of thinking?

So-called objectivity and the downgrading of emotion and experience

We lost the Poetry of the Earth under the illusion that the sciences, in describing to us the physical functioning of the natural world, were revealing to us the true reality of things… We have lost the dream world, the mythic world, the sacred world, the spirit world. Ultimately, we lost the vast world of meaning without which humans become unbearable, even to themselves. (Berry, 1988)

One element is the notion that reality can ultimately be explained in terms of basic laws, discovered only through precise measurement. In other words, there are objective facts about the world that do not depend on interpretation, and it is through improved forms of measurement we will reveal real ‘truth’. Moreover, that ‘truth’ can only be revealed if the observer of the ‘facts’ is detached from nature and the object of interest. The difficulty with taking this approach, however, is that you also strip away the essential nature of things and their meaning. It fails to acknowledge humans as whole beings that not only think but also feel, and who need to experience meaning. Damasio (1994) was one of the first neuroscientists to demonstrate that those who have no emotion act irrationally and that emotional engagement is essential to how human beings make decisions and live in the world. For the fundamentalist scientist, however, any way of understanding reality other than through ‘objective’ science is dismissed as ‘magic’ or ‘biased’ (for example Dawkins, 1976). Indeed, there are cases where the assumption is

made that the objects of mathematically formulated physical laws are more real than the phenomena they are describing. In other words, the abstract models for the supposedly hidden reality behind experienced phenomena take on a higher ontological status than the experiences themselves.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in many parts of the world the general population are alienated from science when their emotions and experiences are dismissed as irrelevant, and are attracted to populist leaders who play on those previously unacknowledged emotions. However, the discounting of emotion and experience has long been a concern. Dewey argued that to really understand nature we need to look at the world in an integrative way, combining different perspectives and knowledge, including science (Dewey, 1925b). For Dewey, knowledge is derived from embodied intelligence, not from the mind alone.

How do you balance measurement with experience and feeling?

Separateness and parts

Most of us live in a society where there is an emphasis on the individual. This is reinforced by dominant economic discourse and also arises from the inherited belief that humans are separate from nature, often referred to as dualism. But is this an illusion?

Think of a time when you have felt ‘at one’ with the world. It may be laughing with friends, being in a soccer crowd when your team scores a goal, singing in a choir, watching a glorious sunset while in nature or that occasional time when you meditate where you seem to dissolve. Often these moments are fleeting but it is as if our consciousness has recognised we are all connected with each other and our environment. We are relational beings, psychologically, spiritually and socially. It is the human need to connect with each other that underpins the popularity of social media, social connection is as important for health and well-being as lifestyle choices, while the physiological and psychological benefits of being in nature are now well attested. It is not just an experience of the mind but of our whole being.

The notion of separation in dualistic thinking manifests itself in several ways. First, there is the idea that the mind is separate from the body. This has historically been the main driver of medical science with its emphasis on the physical and the downgrading of the emotional and psychological. Arising out of the notion of separateness and objectivity there is also the tendency to focus on analysing problems by drilling down into the minutiae of particular knowledge areas. Many institutions, such as universities, are still very much structured to encourage specialisation into discrete areas of knowledge. So is the case with

medical science. How often has a medical problem been exacerbated as you are shifted from one specialist to another because your illness is chronic and not restricted to one organ? While breaking down a problem scientifically or otherwise into smaller and smaller components to understand its nature is useful, such a culturally dominant worldview fails to identify what Capra (1996) calls the hidden connections between things.

Nor does this fragmentation make sense physiologically. As Pert (1999) has shown, peptides, the biochemical manifestation of emotions, are not just found in the brain – all bodily functions are emotionally connected. More recently, it has been recognised that our emotions are influenced by our gut’s micro-organisms. Cognition, or our understanding of the world, is a phenomenon throughout the body, operating through a system that integrates mental, emotional and biological activities. This has been recognised by non-Western healing systems. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the dominant Western medical model has meant that those who can afford it have sought these alternative, more holistic modalities of healing outside state-funded health care. Two of these modalities, Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, have their roots in Eastern philosophy and are based on observations over many centuries. Others have their roots in indigenous knowledge and often inherited women’s wisdom that was denigrated by the patriarchy during the early years of modern medicine in Western societies. Intrinsic in all is the notion that you cannot heal the part without consideration of how it is connected to the whole. A visit to a qualified practitioner in any of these modalities will involve questions relating to a person’s symptoms, including those other than physical. Diseases, within this view, are seen as dis‘ease’, or lack of balance, so physical symptoms may be reflecting emotional or psychological imbalance.

Although Western medical science is changing, albeit slowly, so pervasive is the medical model of health in Western society that it underpins several assumptions held by different professional groups, their responsibilities, how they behave towards one another and their expectations. In community settings, it has often been a real uphill struggle to persuade those working in a community that health is more than medical care, and just as central to community development as it is to the so-called ‘health’ sector. Similarly, it is difficult to persuade health professionals that they do not hold the remit for all health work. Medical hegemony (ScottSamuel and Springett, 2007) pervades all government documents, research and project funding. Until recently, projects directed at promoting health and well-being had to demonstrate that they were directed at heart disease, diabetes, specific cancers or suicide or that they focused on an individual lifestyle factor such as smoking, physical activity or weight control, or lifestyle diseases such as obesity or alcoholism. Where well-being was considered, it was differentiated as mental health promotion, tying it closely to mental illness.

This dominant approach to the promotion of health does not pay real attention to the complexity inherent in how people negotiate their everyday lives. It also objectifies people into categories such as class, socio-economic, gender or ethnic groups, labelling them as members of target groups, ignoring the relational aspects

of their lives and therefore decontextualising so-called ‘health-related behaviours’ from everyday life. Instead, the different elements of lifestyle are separated out rather than seen as real issues that face people in their lives, with physical health as part of a larger whole of well-being and community, and ordinary people as thinking, feeling beings. The downgrading of the emotive, value-based aspects of thinking processes is perpetuated by privileging the rational and ignoring the meaning systems people share as a result of sharing the same social world (Bolam et al, 2003). In fact, the failure to understand and value different knowledge systems and cultures in a broader context has led to the differential impact of public health interventions, increasing the very health inequalities that they are trying to address. Yet practices that create health and well-being are embedded in a co-creation process involving both the individual and the collective. This is often revealed in people’s ‘knowledgeable narratives’ (Popay et al, 2003).

Consequences

Interventions in the context of health promotion that ignore the everyday reality of people’s lives litter public health history. A classic example is smoking cessation. In the late 20th century getting people to give up smoking became the focus of government policy. Evidence-based interventions were the prerequisite for local funding but these were based on the so-called ‘gold standard’ for those which had been tested through randomised controlled trials, leading to a list of cost-effective options including counselling by a GP and nicotine patches. Actual implementation was less successful in poor communities because interventions failed to take into account why people smoked and, in some ports, the availability of cheap black-market cigarettes. The more successful programmes involved peer support from volunteers who had themselves given up smoking and to whom people could relate, rather than a White middleclass professional who ‘talked posh’. Subsequently, a number of places have involved local people as health champions, engaging them in ways to adopt healthy lifestyle practices, despite contexts that act against them. (See https://www.altogetherbetter. org.uk; Atkinson et al, 2020.)

We are using health as an illustration, but there are similar examples in other areas, such as transport, housing and regeneration, where a particular perspective dominates and where the part is not seen as connected to the whole. Many social and community interventions treat a particular issue as an isolated phenomenon, acting on an isolated individual, operating in vacuum. Moreover, when ‘evidence’ is being collected to measure its impact, data collection is restricted to the isolated phenomenon. If there are consequences beyond the immediate intervention – the ripple effect (Trickett, 2019) – these are rarely picked up.

Dualistic thinking around how we should act in the world also creates the notion that scientific knowledge or evidence is something created separately

and is then ‘translated’ or ‘transferred’ into practice. Underlying these debates on evidence into practice or research translation is a failure to realise that the evidence that is being transferred into practice is only partial; real understanding can only come from an interactive process of engagement with practical reality, involving what Polanyi (1958) calls ‘subsidiary awareness’. This is intuitive, or first-order, perceptual knowing. Instead of seeing the world as something out there, we need to view ourselves as embodied participants of a greater whole, and thereby become more responsive. In other words, our inner and outer worlds are connected and cannot be treated as unrelated. This also puts a different spin on the issue of generality. The craving for generality in a traditional scientific sense, when applied to society, often leads to an imposition of general principles in inappropriate contexts: for example, we have tested this solution in Salford, UK, so we can apply this to the whole of Canada. This ignores the necessary variety of human experience in specific contexts. As we see later, diversity is important for the survival both of humanity and of the planet.

Human–nature relations

According to neo-Darwinists, evolution is a product of fierce competition, with each species pitted against the others in a vicious battle to survive. A quite different perspective now accepted by mainstream science is called endosymbiotic theory. This theory proposes that important steps in our evolution have occurred through cooperation between species, even to the point of separate organisms joining together to create entirely new forms of life. (Macy and Johnstone, 2012: 98)

One of the insidious effects of the idea of separatism has been that nature is seen as separate from humans and only there for the latter to exploit for their own use. In other words, the planet is there for us alone, a belief reinforced by many religions. As a result, ecology and nature are seen as something that can be taken from without consequences, a perception that has placed us in the current sustainability crisis. This is further reinforced by the encouragement of individualism and othering, as well as a sense of competition and scarcity. This separation from nature and the primacy of competition are intimately related to the current climate crisis and to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Both have brought into sharp relief how erroneous this worldview is and how such a perspective has created those crises. Under the dualist mindset, though, technological development, science and economics can deliver a more rational, efficient and productive life for all and solve all such problems. Yet the rules of classical economics go against the basic rules of long-term survival of the planet. Land and nature are treated as a potential commodity for the market, a raw material for exploitation by capital, effectively validating a utilitarian approach to nature, which has led to an increasing detachment from nature reinforced across the planet by the history of colonialism. Nature is something out there

to watch in an environmental documentary, not something of which we are a part, especially in highly urbanised society. Our place in the living world is also absent from many economic and social theories and the associated solutions to social problems. However, social justice is intimately tied up with environmental justice; they are not separate issues (Adebowale, 2008). The Doughnut Model of Economics (see p 195) goes some way to address this relationship.

What other examples are there where economic thinking has changed to incorporate nature?

The dangers of mechanistic thinking

In the 1970s cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig (1974) compares some organisations to a motorcycle and argues that they share systemic qualities in that they are sustained by structural relationships, even when they have lost their meaning and purpose. However, to tear down the organisation, like pulling apart a motorcycle, is to deal with the effects and not the causes when the real cause is the system of thinking. If you tear down an organisation but do not change the thinking, the patterns of thought that created it will repeat themselves. For the character in Pirsig’s novel, the separation of subject and object is an artificial interpretation imposed on reality that destroys its quality or essence. In the case of the motorcycle, this is embedded in the craft that created it:

Man [sic] is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he [sic] the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man [sic] and his environment. He [sic] is a participant in the creation of all things. (Pirsig, 1974: 368)

Values, spirituality and consciousness

There is no place in the Cartesian worldview for values or for spirituality and consciousness. Indeed, there is an innate dialectical relationship with spirituality. Moreover, objectivity implies value-free, although that, in itself, is a value. Leaving everything to the invisible forces of the market implies a set of values that privilege the economy but in a particular way. Rarely are values discussed or questioned in political debate or, indeed, in many contexts. More often they are taken for granted or assumed. Similarly, spirituality is talked about in hushed voices and is rarely part of any mainstream conversation, along with moral values and meaning. Religion and spirituality are also often conflated. Spirituality is a way of being that flows from a certain profound sense of heightened aliveness experienced