Welcome to The Middle Way Society

The Middle Way Society was founded to promote the study and practice of The Middle Way. The Middle Way is the idea that we make better judgements by avoiding fixed beliefs and being open to practical experience. We challenge unhelpful distinctions between facts and values, reason and emotion, religion and secularism or arts and sciences. Though our name is inspired by some of the insights of the Buddha, we are independent of Buddhism or any other religion. We seek to promote and support integrative practice, overcoming conflict of all kinds.

Patrons: Iain McGilchrist and Stephen Batchelor

The MWS Podcast 136: Alex Beard on Natural Born Learners

Education, Podcast,

Our guest today is Alex Beard. Alex is a former English teacher at a London comprehensive and is now a senior director at Teach For All, a growing network of independent organizations working to ensure that all children fulfil their potential. He is fortunate to spend his time travelling the world in search of the practices that will shape the future of learning and has written about his experiences for the Independent, Guardian, Financial Times and Wired. His book Natural Born Learners is a user’s guide to transforming learning in the twenty-first century and this will be the topic of our discussion today.


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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)

The MWS Podcast 135: Anthony McCann on the Garaiocht Manifesto

Business, Culture, Podcast,

We’re joined this week by the creative and versatile polymath Anthony McCann. As a keynote speaker, after-dinner speaker, consultant, coach, trainer, and facilitator, he inspires people to reimagine and redesign their relationships, working environments, and communities through a better understanding of proximity, power, and possibility in their lives.
His work is based on 20 years of original research and teaching across the humanities and social sciences, and also of practitioner experience in leadership, community development, and performing arts. He’s here to talk to us today about ‘The Garaiocht Manifesto’ . More an invitation than a message. When it comes to professional life, trust your humanity. The Manifesto offers a human-scale and humane set of principles for sustaining the heart of being human in the art of being human in professional life.


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