Living Evolutionary and Educational Processes

By Alan Rayner and Jack Whitehead

Prescriptive Learning and Competition – The Paradoxes and Conflicts of a 'Whole Way of Thinking' about Evolutionary Processes, Which Dislocates Subject and Object Out of Spatial Context

The implications for human conflict and tragedy of objective discrimination between material existence and immaterial absence are evident in the famous soliloquy of William Shakespeare's Hamlet: 'To be or not to be, that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?' The poetic imagination of William Wordsworth (1815) recognised the fallacy of this opposition when saying, 'in nature, everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness'. C.S. Lewis (1942) went so far as to allude to it as giving rise to 'the whole philosophy of Hell...the axiom that one thing is not another thing and, specifically, that one self is not another self.... to be means to be in competition'. Yet this axiom, also known as 'the law of the excluded middle' has for thousands of years been the basis for definitive systems of propositional ('either/or') and dialectic ('both/and' in mutual contradiction) logic that are deeply embedded in the foundations of mathematics, science, theology, education and politics.

Nowhere is such discrimination more capable of inducing human distress and environmental damage than in the paradoxical evolutionary interpretation of human and non-human nature in accordance with the competitive Darwinian notion of 'survival of the fittest' espoused by modern-day pioneers of the field of sociobiology (e.g. Dawkins, 1989; Wilson, 1989). The very idea of biological evolution arises from recognising the kinship of organic life forms in a common flow, and is overwhelmingly supported by biochemical, morphological, physiological, geographical and fossil evidence. But the putative mechanism of natural selection, as what Darwin called 'the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life', inconsistently sets these forms apart from and in conflict with their neighbourhood.

To accept our human kinship with other life forms – and so feel ready to learn how to apply knowledge of their patterns of behaviour to our own systems of governance – seems thereby to imply that we have to accept what we perceive as their cruel, harsh, selfish 'Law of the Jungle'. Indeed, such acceptance is evident in the emergence during the twentieth century of Nazism and hard-line monetarist policy-making based on competitive Game Theory.

But such acceptance doesn't tally with what many of us regard as lying at the core of our humanity, our caring, compassionate conscience, which is often associated with one kind or another of spiritual belief. So we may find ourselves becoming living contradictions between what we may believe rationally to be true and what we feel emotionally to be right. As ultra-Darwinist and atheist, Richard Dawkins (1989) ironically put it, 'Let us try and teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish'!

Such inconsistency both arises from and reinforces the paradox of making a subjective or objective exception of 'self' as a discrete individual from its natural neighbourhood and evolutionary origin. We thereby end up both elevating and alienating human consciousness out of spatial context, which not only leads us to deny and hence ignore the possibility of learning from our affinities with non-human life but also profoundly prejudices our observation and interpretation of the natural world and one another.

In order to avoid what is ironically regarded from this objective standpoint as subjective bias, an attempt is made to achieve consensus by removing all the varied insights that come from viewing the same situation from unique local perspectives. In the process, not only unique locally embodied information but all empathic sense of the observer for how it feels to be in the place of the observed is smoothed out of the picture. The irony here is that it is this very objectivity, which regards itself as the epitome of unprejudiced observation and judgement that is actually the source of the profoundly restrictive thinking and discrimination that comes from dislocating the observer from the observed and so ignoring local dynamic situation.

The upshot is that most of us are ready to accept a linear, prescriptive model of evolutionary process and allow this continually to be reinforced in our educational and social systems. Wittingly or unwittingly, we treat and teach ourselves as if we and all other creatures are born selfish as independent 'units of selection' into an objective environment where we must compete to succeed. Even where we accept the benefits of co-operating, we do so only to be more competitive as a group.

Correspondingly we continually pre-set and strive to attain objectives, goals and deadlines. Then we measure, reward and penalize our success and failure relative to others in terms of how quickly and exactly our performance matches up to expectation.

In conventional Darwinian evolutionary theory, such prescriptive targets are described as 'niches', fixed environmental destinations that organisms and their genes must adapt to and compete for if they are to gain exclusive rights of possession. Once occupied, these destinations become 'sticking points' or 'adaptive peaks' that successful units of selection must stay on top of at all costs, running on the spot like demented Red Queens to stay in the same place whilst warding off all comers and vicissitudes. No descent into lower adaptive fitness is possible to reach another peak, for to lose place is to lose the face of individual or corporate identity in the desperate struggle for existence. Progress up 'Mount Impossible' is therefore only possible if a new peak miraculously appears adjacently as a 'step up' from the current one. The whole process stalls or at best stutters from peak to peak in fits and starts, within organizations that are anything but creative.

Meanwhile, unconcerned with such rigid human rationalizations, the real living energy of evolutionary creativity finds shelter and flows in real valleys of receptive space amongst the peaks that wear down into them in an ever transforming – not fixed – landscape of opportunity.

Open Space – a 'Hole New Way of Thinking' About Evolution and Learning as Dynamic Relational, Co-creative Processes of Natural Inclusion and Communion

The fallacy upon which objective rationality as a whole way of thinking is predicated becomes obvious as soon as space is recognised to be a dynamic inclusion of natural flow form, and not just a void externality or internality. Far from passively surrounding and isolating discrete material objects as an immaterial 'absence of presence' that in itself both counts as and accounts for 'nothing', space is a receptive omnipresence that non-locally permeates everywhere and hence pools all dynamically together in a natural communion. No self-identity in this communion can hence be regarded as purely local and totally independent of its spatial neighbourhood or any other self-identity. Instead, every identity is locally distinguishable as a dynamic configuration of space – a dynamic relational place somewhere local within everywhere non-local. That is, every self-identity is a complex of mutually inclusive, mutually shaping individual (particular) and collective (general) aspects, as in a river whose stream pattern co-creatively shapes and is shaped by the landscape in which it flows. No absolute definition of one or/and other is possible because each dynamically includes the other in inseparable relationship. No dynamic identity can be totally alone, an absolute All One, complete in itself.

A 'hole new way of thinking' hence becomes possible based on concepts of 'inclusionality' and 'natural inclusion', which offer a fluid geometrical and logical foundation for understanding the dynamic relational nature of living systems in a more realistic and contextually aware way. Inclusionality can be described, but not defined, as a comprehension of nature as a fluid continuum of mutually inclusive informational (material) and spatial (immaterial) phases in which all form is flow-form, a dynamically receptive-responsive configuration of everywhere in somewhere, with no fixed centre. Natural inclusion is the co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context, whereby self-identity arises within the context of, not in isolation from natural neighbourhood.

Within this context, evolution and learning depend for their creativity and enhancement of understanding on continual receptive-responsive interplay or improvisation, not on competition and prescriptive objectives. Any mechanism or system that removes the space vital for this interplay is ultimately stultifying – evolutionarily unsustainable.

We are beginning to focus on the issue of:

The Inclusional Nature of Evolutionarily Sustainable Organization, and What This Means both in Theory and Practice.

This week (17 March 2008) Jack is presenting the following ideas from his research programme on living educational theories at a conference on Cultures in Resistance.

How Are Living Educational Theories Being Produced And Legitimated In The Boundaries Of Cultures In Resistance? Presentation for the Cultures in Resistance Conference. The 7th Conference of the Discourse, Power, Resistance Series, 18-20 March 2008 Manchester Metropolitan University. Retrieved 3 March 2008 from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jack/jwmanchester250208.htm