All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Fiddling while the planet burns

Climate Change, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics, Systems Theory,

The world is burning, burning, burning…. Yes, with greed, hatred and ignorance, as the Buddha pointed out about 2500 years ago in his ‘Fire Sermon’ (also found in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’). But it is not just burning ‘metaphorically’. The world is burning quite literally. There are, or recently have been, wildfires in Greece, the US, Canada, Sweden, even Northern England… In 1997, massive fires in Indonesia added 40% to the world’s CO2 emissions. Such fires should add to anyone’s sense of urgency as regards climate change.

What the two kinds of fire have in common is that they are both part of closed feedback loops. The literal fires create more CO2, which adds to the Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming, desiccating the forests and creating more fires. The ‘metaphorical’ fires, on the other hand, burn in our reptilian brains: our striatum (craving) and amygdala (anxiety) create stress responses that interfere with our ability to understand and respond to the complex systemic problems known as ‘global warming’. The more stressed we feel, the more we reach desperately for shortcut absolutisations to contain it or dismiss it, the less adequate our response becomes, and the more we continue to behave in ways that exacerbate the situation – in turn increasing our stress. Runaway climate change could very easily happen inside people’s brains as well as in the world at large.

It is a feature of closed feedback loops that they tend to become ‘runaway’. The self-feeding causal loops create more and more of the same effect, taking us further and further away from any degree of equilibrium or stability. The ways in which the ecosystemic phenomena of the planet are getting caught up in these runaway loops is increasingly understood by those who pay any attention to climate change. We know that the melting ice caps reduce reflectivity of the sun’s radiation back into space, thus accelerating global warming. We also know that melting permafrost releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that also accelerates the process. Both of these runaway loops are already well under way. We also know that higher CO2 levels acidify the oceans, which in turn reduces their ability to absorb carbon. Those are just the headlines of these complex ecosystemic loop effects. Many of them are well described in this excellent article by David Wallace-Wells.

But the runaway feedback loops are not limited to ecosystemic phenomena. They are also found in our psychological responses to them. Runaway feedback loops are particularly found in the mentally ill, the ideologically possessed, the addicted, the traumatised and the desperate. They are created by responses that our forebears probably developed to deal with short-term crisis situations that can only be resolved by rapid action, like fleeing a predator. But when the ‘predator’ keeps coming again and again without being decisively escaped, we replay the crisis response again and again in our heads. Our behaviour then turns to extremes, because we can only then act in shortcut, desperate ways. We may fight someone other than the source of danger because of a false association. We may deny that there is any danger present, or we may keep fleeing in the wrong direction. We will do anything as long as we feel we are doing something – anything but assessing and responding to the situation adequately. To do that we would have to understand more of its complexity and take long-term action. That would require a more balanced, stable, aware state of mind.

To understand global warming at all requires systemic thinking, in which we don’t restrict ourselves to one type of phenomenon or one way of studying it, but rather try to see all the processes in relation to each other (as far as we can). Nevertheless, many discussions of global warming seem to pay insufficient attention to the ways that the same feedback loops occur in our psychological responses to it. So, I have tried to combine the ecosystems with the psychosystems in this diagram. Like any attempt to represent a complex system, it is bound to leave a lot out. Even the phenomena mentioned will be related to each other in ways that aren’t represented by arrows, and then there will be lots of other phenomena involved that aren’t mentioned. But hopefully it is complex enough to show a variety of important closed feedback loop relationships (and related one-way causal effects), thus raising awareness, without being too complex to understand.

Whilst creating this diagram, I was reflecting on the ways that simply making this range of connections may be sufficient to understand the most important elements of the issue, without the necessity for detailed knowledge of exactly how strong any of these causal relationships are at any one point, or of the detailed evidence for that strength. Of course, that kind of knowledge is desirable, but perhaps the importance of acquiring it is often over-rated. If you focus too much on the evidence for one of these links (say, the causes and extent of the melting ice caps), you may end up building your entire response to global warming on that evidence (which may offer various potentials for disputed interpretation) and losing sight of the larger web of systemic connections that it is part of. However, even if you were to cut out the melting ice caps there are still plenty of other closed feedback loops at work, carrying the potential for serious runaway effects.

Simply understanding the systemic connections, and the ways in which these causal processes may operate to varying degrees, is enough to raise our awareness, when we realise how much many of them are mutually reinforcing. Many people, however, make the mistake of only thinking about some aspects of these mutually reinforcing loops whilst assuming that everything else will hold steady. This is particularly the case for the psychological (and thus political) effects. When we imagine humans responding to increasing climate change threats in the future, we tend to imagine humans living in the relatively stable, liberal world of Western democracy, where the more highly educated still have a fair amount of influence and there is still a fair degree of consensus between the educated and the powerful. What we need to take into account is that in all probability, the massive instability, widespread trauma, economic collapse and conflict that will be created by global warming will also massively degrade the capacity of human societies to make effective decisions in relation to it.

Central to recognising this is the relationship between absolutisation, bias, polarisation and stress responses that have been closely related to my interests in developing Middle Way Philosophy. The development of the mindfulness movement has made society increasingly aware of the negative effects of stress and the ways it can be counteracted, but not yet sufficiently of the ways that stress interacts with bias and polarisation, and there is very little awareness indeed that absolutisation can be recognised as a factor in all this. However, the more stressed we are, the more we are likely to rely on prefabricated mental shortcuts (absolutisations), rather than slowing down either for more careful conceptual thinking, or to take in more information, or to consider new models or ways of interpreting that information. Our current represented conceptual formulations are likely to be assumed to be enough, however limited the awareness on which they are based. Thus, at the very point when we face a crisis of unparalleled complexity, for which we need the maximum of awareness and reflectiveness, we are likely to start losing it. David Wallace-Wells points out that even the rise of CO2 levels itself directly degrades human cognitive capacity. Even those individuals who retain higher levels of awareness are likely to lose influence, when ever greater numbers of people in society as a whole are going into absolutising mode.

The most frightening thing is that this is no longer just a debatable prediction for the future – it’s happening already. That Brexit and Trump have occurred at the very point in human history when something resembling a halfway adequate worldwide political response to climate change had developed (in the shape of the Paris Agreement), can hardly be a coincidence. Brexit and Trump mark popular revolts against liberalism and the loss of identity and communal security it is perceived as bringing with it. These popular revolts, compared to the establishment consensus liberalism that they have usurped, are more strongly marked by heavy confirmation bias, single cause fallacies, straw men, ad hominem attacks and other such shortcuts. Whilst Brexit is wielded by neo-liberal ideologues who are prepared to use nationalism as a tool of influence, Trump is an endlessly manipulable pawn in the hands of similar ideologues in the US. The nuanced thinking of expert civil servants is being sidelined both in Washington and in London. This revolt is not yet primarily about climate change, but it is certainly directed against the liberal culture that was capable of doing something about climate change, and maintains the short-term interests of those with most to lose from its recognition – the rich. As such, it offers a foretaste of what is likely to follow when climate change strengthens, and when a collapse in food supply and the economy, coupled with increasingly extreme events, create greater panic.

As to when this will happen, it’s crucial to recall the properties of complex systems. Complex systems appear robust up to the point when they suddenly collapse, because their complexity gives them lots of adaptive options for new conditions. But each of these new adaptations adds more complexity and thus more vulnerability to any threat to the basic conditions that keep that whole system going. Thus, we can expect that when food scarcities arise from drought, flooding and other extreme weather events, the complex worldwide trading system will keep compensating by bringing food in from anywhere in the world, as well as finding new sources of food and more economical ways of producing it. However, that system can also suddenly collapse when there is no longer enough food to immediately support the people who maintain the trading systems. At that point, the inventiveness ceases and is replaced by desperate conflict over the remaining resources. When the system goes, it will go quite suddenly, along with all its inter-connecting dependent elements: food, economy, government, social support, security, basic trust and confidence. We may still have faith in that system until the moment it collapses.

The danger in writing in this vein is that this, also, may contribute to the very same closed feedback loops that the Middle Way is concerned with trying to avoid. When confronted by climate change, the most common response is denial of one kind or another – either theoretical denial or mere denial of practical responsibility. Much publicity about climate change often seems to accentuate this effect. On the other hand, it can also produce extreme positive responses. A friend of mine going back to childhood, Roger Hallam, has recently been involved in hunger striking against the third runway at Heathrow, and is now leading an ‘Extinction Rebellion’. Desperate times, we may feel, justify desperate measures. The trouble is that desperate measures are another form of shortcut – they simply do not work, because of the mental states they have to be pursued in. I greatly agree with everything Roger says about climate change, and even his assessment of the urgency of the situation, but I won’t be joining his rebellion.

By contrast, the Middle Way is not likely to work quickly enough, even if it was much more widely adopted. But the practice of the Middle Way depends on a more or less liberal political context, a tolerant society, and a weight of population that is both well-educated and secure. When we lose these, the chances of practising the Middle Way will become very slim indeed. Yet, despite this, as far as I can see, the Middle Way is our only hope. Extreme lunges tend to be based on rigid ideological assessments of the situation, or alternatively on a single-minded pursuit of the interests of a limited class. Their effect is to create more conflict and add further to our difficulties. Only the capacity to re-assess, adapt and persuade as we go along can possibly help us address this situation, and that depends on awareness, not rebellion. If the conditions for the practice of the Middle Way decay, all we can do is try to build them back up again.

Our sanity in the difficult times to come seems to me to be sustainable only by a feature of human brains that in other times has often served us ill: the shallow optimism of the left hemisphere. Even when Western civilisation is collapsing, we may still keep looking for the next opportunity round the corner. There is always hope, because, unless we are predisposed towards depression, hope is our default setting. It is not based on there being reasons enough for hope. At times, too, that hope may become more integrated, and we may reconnect with a basic contentment arising from our bodies. If we can slow or stop the closed feedback loop in our own brains, perhaps we will be able to live out our lives doing our best, however hopelessly, to maintain the earth.

Sources

There are many sources of information about climate change. David Wallace-Wells’ article, which was one of the catalysts for this one, has a fully referenced version. I’d suggest that his references offer a good place to start when checking on the factuality of any of the (widely accepted) factual assumptions about global warming in this article.

Many of the psychological elements here arise from my own work in Middle Way Philosophy. The relationship between absolutisation, biases and polarisation is particularly explored in Middle Way Philosophy 4: The Integration of Belief. This work synthesizes various other influences that are reviewed on this site, such as Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Master and his Emissary’ and Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’. Paul Gilbert’s ‘The Compassionate Mind’ is a good source on the disruptive effects of the Reptilian brain and how they can be soothed.

On systems theory, I have also recently reviewed an excellent new introduction by Capra and Luisi. This includes some good material on ecosystems, but also puts these in the context of systems theory as a whole.

The diagram was created by me, and may be freely used by others for any educational purpose.

Retreats Update

Society events

Two important new announcements about Middle Way Society retreats:

The Autumn Retreat 2018, ‘On the Horns of a Dilemma’, led by Nina Davies in Sussex UK, Nov 9th-11th, is now open for booking! Please click here  for full details.

The Christian Middle Way Retreat, July 20th-22nd 2018, is available at a 50% discount on a single room for the final month of booking. Please click here for details.

Systems Theory and the Middle Way 2: Self-organisation and Emergent Properties

Middle Way Philosophy, Systems Theory, , ,

Chemistry is a subject that I really don’t think much about, and haven’t studied since high school. Yet recently, reading Capra and Luisi’s compendious book on systems theory, I found myself really enthralled by a piece of chemistry. It was an explanation, at a molecular level, of how self-organisation occurs. Self-organisation, or autopoiesis, is the rather mysterious property of living things to form themselves into a relatively independent, self-sustaining system, setting up a boundary against their environment and maintaining their existence within that boundary. We do it. Single cells do it. But how do they do it? It turns out that even non-living molecules can do it, and their ability to do so seems to give us some basic clues not just about systems, but also about the Middle Way.

The chemical experiment you can do is extremely simple: just evenly distribute some oil over some water. After a short time, as every witness of the Deepwater Horizon or other such disasters knows, the spread out oil will clump. It will clump a bit faster if the water is warmer. I had never wondered before exactly why it clumps, but it turns out that the reason it clumps is that oil molecules are polarised. One end of them is hydrophilic (water loving) and the other end hydrophobic (water hating). Thus, purely through the agitation of molecules produced by warmth, the hydrophobic ends will be attracted to each other rather than the water, and clump together with their hydrophilic ends pointed outwards, like a circle of wagons in an old Western as the Indians approach.

What I found fascinating about this is that it shows how self-organisation can happen quite straightforwardly at a simple chemical level. The oil molecules have effectively organised themselves into what is technically known as a micelle – more commonly known as an oil droplet. They have set up a boundary so as to sustain themselves against their environment, just like we do. It is also very interesting that they do so through polarisation: this behaviour is only possible because of the contrasting tendencies of each end of the molecule, which in turn is due to the asymmetrical chemical structure of these molecules. Those drops of oil immediately reminded me of human behaviour where polarisation also produces defensive clumping: say, Trump supporters on the internet. The Trump supporters have liberal-phobic heads and liberal-philic tails, so in a liberal environment they will clump their heads together, leaving their tails to face the wider environment. Of course, one can stretch this analogy too far. Trump supporters are living human beings, far more complex and varied than oil molecules. But the resemblance tells us something about a basic pattern that can apparently be applied at many different levels.

The self-organisation process also involves closed feedback loops as opposed to open ones. In a closed feedback loop, the same kind of response to a stimulus keeps getting repeated so as to exaggerate the total effect in one unbalanced direction. The oil molecules are in a closed feedback loop because whenever they encounter another such molecule they form this defensive formation. The oil molecules are not capable of open feedback loops, because they are rigidly polarised. They can’t change their behaviour so as to mingle freely with the water. You can stir them up to break up the clumps, but as soon as they encounter new oil molecules their polarisation will make them clump together again. If one can talk of oil molecules having beliefs, they have absolute beliefs. They will carry right on doing the same thing regardless.

We living organisms are far more flexible than that, because we all contain some tendencies towards polarisation, but also some capacity for open feedback loops, whereby we allow conditions beyond our boundaries to modify our structure. To do that we will have to avoid polarisations of response whereby we always reject or embrace a given condition, and allow more complex responses. A constant movement between closed and open feedback loops is part of our most basic behaviour. At the complex level we have evolved into, the left hemisphere of the brain specialises in the closed feedback loops, maintaining rigid beliefs about our environment, whilst the right specialises in stimulating modifications of the left.

Oil molecules can’t follow the Middle Way – they are stuck in absolutisations. But we can. The more emergent complexity we develop through open feedback loops stimulating and changing us at helpful points in our development, the greater the capacity we can develop for avoiding polarisation and responding in different ways to different stimuli. Life is sometimes about rigid insistence, but also sometimes about flexible adaptation. But it is that flexible adaptation that produces emergent properties like representation, consciousness, judgement, responsibility and moral awareness: properties that we can neither assume emerged magically from somewhere else, nor that they are only the sum of their simpler parts. Any fool can circle the wagons to fight off the Indians, but it takes emergent awareness to question that defensive response, talk to them and even learn from them. 

Click to read the previous post on systems theory and the Middle Way

Pictures of oil slick and wagon circle both public domain

New review of ‘The Patterning Instinct’

There is now a new review (by Robert M. Ellis) of this book about the relationship between the metaphors dominant in different cultures and Western responsibility for the eco-crisis.  Click here to read the review. This was also the subject of a recent podcast interview with its author, Jeremy Lent.

Systems Theory and the Middle Way 1: Beyond the Loop

Middle Way Philosophy, Science, Systems Theory

I have recently been thinking a good deal about systems theory, following my reading of the detailed textbook created by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, which I have reviewed here. There are a great many ways that their application of systems theory to all sorts of subjects can also enrich our understanding of the Middle Way, so this could well be the focus of a whole series of blogs encompassing the relationship between systems theory, the Middle Way, and everything from chemistry to economics. However, the first thing to explore is the basic relationship between systems theory and the Middle Way itself. Systems theorists do not seem to use the term ‘Middle Way’ or be aware of it, but it seems to me that it could also add a helpful dimension to their thinking.

As I see it, systems theory requires the Middle Way, and the Middle Way requires systems thinking. What they most basically have in common is a focus on relationships between things rather than linear processes, an attempt to take the complexity of total conditions into account, and an appreciation of the limitations of closed feedback loops. Each of these is worth exploring a little:

  • Focusing on relationships rather than linear processes means that we do not identify one ‘thing’ and treat it as though it was independent. For example, if we are concerned about a recent wave of knife crime in London we do not just look at police levels and assume that the rise in crime must necessarily be solely due to police cuts. We see crime as a complex phenomenon with lots of relationships to changes in family life, youth facilities, education, economic conditions, the internet, and individual psychological states. All of these, in turn, are complex networks of relationships between ‘things’. The boundaries that we give to things are conventional and ever-shifting rather than final, so rather than pretend that they are fixed by our language we need to try to talk, instead, about ongoing types of relationships. We can note, for example, that there is an interaction between some types of crime and the ability of the criminals to video the crime and put it on the internet. It’s not that ‘the internet causes crime’ or that ‘crime causes the internet’: rather these two networks are in a mutually reinforcing loop relationship.
  • An attempt to take the complexity of total conditions into account means that although we can’t have an omniscient total view of everything, we can at least take into account the limitations of the view we have now compared to such a total view, and compensate for it as best we can. We can justify our beliefs in more or less adequate ways. If we simply assume that the view we have now is total, then this is absolutisation, an inadequate way of thinking. If we make allowance for as wide a range of conditions as we can practically manage before we make a judgement, that will aid our adequacy. Best of all, though, is to maintain provisionality in the judgements we do make, so as to take into account the possibility of unknown unknowns.
  • An appreciation of the limitations of closed feedback loops. According to systems theory, living systems rely on closed feedback loops, which amplify the effects of a particular unique feature in that system. By maintaining a particular process without adjusting further to the world around it, an organism maintains its distinctiveness and its boundaries. Thus, for example, genetic reproduction involves a largely closed feedback loop by which living organisms create more living organisms of nearly the same kind, and genetic faults as well as helpful features are perpetuated. Factories, in a closed feedback loop, produce more and more of the same goods, in dependence on the economic system that produces demand for those goods. At a psychological level, an obsession with football has a tendency to produce more obsession with football. Closed feedback loops are the basis of life, but they are also rigid and interfere with adaptation to new conditions. Thus genetic reproduction became sexual so as to incorporate some new genes and produce an open, adaptive element in the feedback, factories need to redesign their goods from time to time, and football obsessives have to pay attention to their jobs, partners and houses.

The Middle Way is an approach for us, in our particular embodied situation of judgement. It involves avoiding closed feedback loops and cultivating open ones, because sticking to closed loops is the constant easy temptation for us – the shortcut that makes things worse in the long run. Yes, in the bigger picture, all life needs closed feedback loops as well as open ones. In our specific situation of judgement, however, and our practice as humans in an advanced civilisation, it’s open ones that we have to work to achieve. That’s because closed feedback loops are the easy default, constantly reinforced by group pressure, tradition and authority. To engage in an open feedback loop in our judgement is to change our minds in response to a problem we have recognised in our previous view, leading to us revising our view. That’s uncomfortable but necessary.

I think it is interesting to try to restate the Middle Way entirely in the terms of systems theory. When doing this I came up with a list of principles. The last five of these are equivalent to the Five Principles of the Middle Way but using different language.

  • Absolutisation is the attempt to treat a complex system as linear.
  • The Middle Way is an attempt to respond to complex systems as such.
  • All systems are to some extent complex, and thus basically unknowable from our finite position – though their degree of complexity varies (principle of scepticism).
  • Recognising complexity entails constant recognition of the limitations of our understanding of conditions, actively applied through openness to alternatives (principle of provisionality).
  • Complex systems can be nudged but not reprogrammed (principle of incrementality).
  • Linear reductions of complex systems may either take the form of conceptually reducing the whole system to a linear process (positive absolute), or denying the working of the system (negative absolute) – both of these need to be equally avoided (principle of agnosticism).
  • Disruptions in complex systems are resolved by stimulating further complex development (principle of integration).

Every time we think we have got ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’ nailed down, it is only because there is complexity that we haven’t taken into account. That applies to some extent in every judgement, but particularly in relation to living systems (including everything human as well as biology and ecosystems), because their complexity is so much greater. Every element of a complex system is adjusted to every other element (like each member of a flock of birds that wheels together) so if you change one element it will change the others in ways that are not entirely predictable.

So, complex systems cannot be reprogrammed, because you can’t just redesign a complex system from scratch – it has to gradually evolve in relation to the other elements of the system, together with all the other systems. Engineers get away with building things (like cars or bridges) from scratch to some extent, until entropy sets in and things start going wrong, but you can’t engineer genes, for example, without threatening all those complex inter-evolved relationships. That’s why living systems can only be nudged, and why change in the complex systems we call ourselves has to be incremental.

Every time we over-simplify our experience into an absolute, we’re taking some element of our experience and interpreting it in a way that may be justified under a given set of assumptions, but does not take into account that complexity. If you take the example of the complex system known as religion, you can reduce that to a linear system in one way by assuming that it is essentially all about the truth or falsity of particular beliefs (such as the existence of God), or by dismissing the entire system, ignoring the role it has developed to fulfil in relation to lots of intersecting systems. Either way, your approach won’t be adequate to the complexity of religion and the relationships it has with everything else.

When we experience some sort of conflict, that can also be seen as disruption in a complex system. Up to a point, that disruption may be handled by the checks and balances in that system. For example, a bit of stress may result in a minor illness, but then we recover. However, if you create too much conflict in a system it can go past a tipping point that destroys it: whether you’re talking about a person overwhelmed by stress or an ecosystem overwhelmed by human activity. Integration in Middle Way Philosophy is the kind of development we can make, as individuals or as social systems, to heal conflict and thus avoid that danger of destruction. As we become more integrated our system becomes ever more complex – for example we develop greater levels of awareness that enable us to regulate stress by recognising when we are in danger of being overwhelmed, and using relaxation or meditation before we reach that point. It requires further brain development to have the neural connections to develop this awareness.

What I find missing from the systems theory I have read so far is sufficient focus on the experience of those who are engaging with it. What exactly should we do in response to the recognition of systems and complexity? Middle Way Philosophy starts from this place of immediate experience, and considers the universal question of where to go next. Systems theory as a whole, however, often seems to focus on overall systemic description of aspects of the universe, whether or not that is relevant to individual judgement in our current situation. Starting from where we are in a world of systems, we need the Middle Way, or at least something like it that fulfils the same functions.

Picture: Flock of birds by Chris Rasmussen (public domain)