VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. Part 4

NELSON MANDELA’S THEORIES IN USE.

Is anyone feeling a bit uncomfortable? Wondering whether you should make an excuse and leave? I ask, because if you are highly educated and/or have enjoyed a successful managerial or academic career, you will probably have agreed with both the world view of the power elites AND the alternative, ecological world view.

I can see heads nodding. It’s odd isn’t it. Here we have world views that are incompatible, yet many people can happily agree with and argue for both of them. What’s going on? Well here’s where our Theories of Action split into two parts. “Espoused Theories” and “Theories in Use”

Theories-in-use govern our actual behaviour and tend to be so internalised that we don’t really know they are there. They are a complex set of analytical rules we have acquired since the womb and use to understand ourselves, other people and the world we live in and decide what actions to take. Deep down, our ‘Theories in Use’ provide us with a set of what we take to be practical guidelines, rules, methodologies, that add up to a science of everyday life.  The more educated we are the more complex  our Theories in Use are likely to be.

Our Theories-in-use always determine the extent to which we can act upon our Espoused Theories.

Thus we can espouse an ecological and/or socialist or even anarchist world-view, but live by theories in use that make it impossible to turn our alternative world view into a reality.

The more radical the world view we espouse, the more important it is to examine the world view we actually use to go about the business of our daily lives. Going back Mandela for a moment, was INVICTUS any use when it came to choosing his economic Ministers and advisers? Many of the years he and his fellow-prisoners had spent reading and discussing the great thinkers would have been dominated by the ideas of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Gramsci, Che, Castro and other revolutionary theorists.

Then, just as they got the chance to put their ideas into practice, the whole Communist-Socialist project implodes and turns to the USA and its allies for advice as to how to adopt and implement free-market policies. What a bummer!! All the theories in use they had been acquiring in their prison university had been shown to be useless in the real world.

The only other alternative, Keynesian social democracy (aka capitalism-lite), had been more or less abandoned in the USA and its friends and satellites in the 1980s. So, Mandela’s speeches on economics – like Obama’s today – reflect the hard-line free-market Theories in Use that have dominated the USA and its friends since the 1980s.

The failure of Mandela, and every other would-be radical leader to deliver the revolutionary agendas that they genuinely believe when they espouse them, stems from their lack of Theories in Use that fit with and enable them to implement successfully, their ideals.

And this applies at every level and in every sector of society. None of us could have reached maturity without Theories in Use that are mostly rooted in the distant past, a past dominated by the ideas of – to name but a few – Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, J.M. Keynes, and a few dozen other great thinkers. But all of those great thinkers were theorising at a time when no-one had articulated, still less adopted, a world view in which human societies had to learn how to co-exist with the ecological systems on which they depend and are a part. Concepts such as ecology,  theories of action, viability, systems thinking, complexity, self-organisation, participatory democracy, problem-posing dialogues, learning organisations, sustainability, were totally unknown to them.

Yet those concepts and methodologies need to be the core components of the “Theories in Use” through which we can co-create Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

For the moment, we don’t need to begin to  discuss how our current Theories in Use have affected the way we act and behave and think.  That  can wait to our next meeting. For the rest of this evening we just need to run through what we mean by Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

Let’s start with “GAIAN” after we’ve stretched our legs and had another glass of something.

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VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. Part 3.

ESPOUSED THEORIES vs THEORIES IN USE

Before the break we looked at the dominant world view of today’s power-elites and an alternative world view that relates the survival of our societies to their connection to a functioning ecological base. Duh.

This opposing world view is so sensible and understandable that you’d think that any sane and intelligent member of society – and especially those highly-educated and nurtured members of the power-elites – would adopt it as the basis for their policies and decisions.

But of course they don’t. Why not? Because – unlike any of us – they’re cowards? And/or deeply corrupt and dishonest? Many of them, probably, but there is another explanation that we need to be aware of and think about before we cast the first stone.

The more likely explanation for the failure of our power-elites to adopt and act upon an ecologically-based world view is that their unexamined mental maps, their “Theories of Action” stop them learning how to do so.

These are not just ideological issues. We all have world views, mental models, “Theories of Action”, that can stop us from learning how to tackle complex issues and when you start coming to VIGDEOC network meetings they will be the first things you’ll talk about, explore, evaluate.

Of course, not all world views, mental models, get in your way. Without them we couldn’t get through a normal day at home or at work or with our friends. They are what enable us to fit in, feel comfortable, have confidence that we’re doing the right thing, that people will trust and respect us.

So where do those theories and mental models come from?

Think who or what has shaped – and is shaping – the way you think? Parents, teachers, friends, films, books, plays, newspapers, blogs, radio and TV, sports people, neighbours.

We all have them. You don’t have to be an intellectual. Jenni Diski the British writer tells this story of teaching in a tough London girls’ school.

Most of the pupils were planning to get married or pregnant as soon as they left school, and they were worried about Ms.Diski’s future. One day, a sixteen year-old asked ‘Miss’ :

‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Why aren’t you married?’
‘I don’t want to get married.’
The rest of the class joined in.

‘At least have a baby, miss. Because it’ll look after you when you’re old.’
‘At least get engaged, miss, and get a ring. Then you’ve got something to sell.’

Those girls – and millions like them – had such powerful “Theories of Action” that nothing said by their teachers, had any relevance to their mental models of the real world, and the Theories of Action that shaped their behaviours and actions.

Or think for a moment about sports. If you spent your formative years playing American Football, Ice-Hockey and Basketball, your world-view would be very different to contemporaries brought up on soccer, hurling, cricket, tennis and even rugby.

Which brings me to the film about the South African team’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup: INVICTUS. Did you see it?  Why INVICTUS? Yes, its the poem that President Mandela recommends to the team captain, François Pienaar as a guiding philosophy that sustained him through 27 years of harsh imprisonment.

INVICTUS starts

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

And ends

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

Powerful stuff. And we see Pienaar inspired by words that had sustained Mandela to lead his team of underdogs to victory in the competition – and in the process seemed to create a joyously united nation out of the bitter embers of the apartheid system.

But noble sentiments, goodwill and sporting success can take you only so far. Fifteen years later, South Africa is falling apart: economically, socially, culturally, ecologically. No doubt, Mandela and his successors have done some good things. However the Theories of Action they brought to the vast array of problems and opportunities they inherited have not enabled them to transform the fortunes of the vast majority of their fellow-citizens.

Whatever they may say about justice and change and however sincerely they say it, they, and every other democratically elected leader in the world today operates within something similar to the mental models that John McMurtry outlined.

Often, like Mandela, their mental models operate alongside a quasi-spiritual view of their role in the world. Yet, in another part of INVICTUS we see Mandela making a speech that almost explicitly endorses the dominant power-elite world view that:

• Each country is first and foremost a competitor in the global market and should act according to its own interests.
• All states have a right to use all resources within their reach.
• Governments should encourage trans-national companies to play a full part in all national and international decisions affecting global trade and development.
• Permanent economic growth is desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limits to the conversion of life into saleable commodities.

Remember that Mandela was a brilliant lawyer and had spent thousands of days in mutual-education classes with his fellow-inmates during his 27 years in prison. If, after all that, even a great man and a good leader like Mandela shares the same world-view as the rest of the global power elites, we have to start by trying to understand the limitations of our own Theories of Action before we can co-create Viable, Innovative and Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations and Communities.