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Bringing a “Whole New Mind” to the BP Oil Catastrophe
I picked up and couldn't stop reading, author Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainer's Will Rule the Future, because I reside with three of his so-called "R(ight brain)-directed" thinkers, and as a scientist I've lived most of my professional life in a "L(eft brain)-directed" world. So, though I was motivated by personal reasons to entertain Pink's hypothesis, I was surprised to find currency in his book for two domains that preoccupy me: Buddhism and earth science. Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore argues that we now live in the dawning of the "Conceptual Age"-that which has succeeded the information and industrial ages respectively-and the skills necessary for survival in this age are, roughly put, art and heart.
Pink draws on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, well-known to Buddhists interested in neuroscience, that show how the left and right hemispheres divide their labor: the left hemisphere handles logic, sequence, literalness and analysis while the right hemisphere processes and synthesizes emotional expression, metaphor, context, and “the big picture”. R-directed talents including artistry, empathy, taking the long view, and pursuing the transcendent that were undervalued during the information age, are now essential. Pink asserts that the requisite abilities-he characterizes them as "Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning"-are fundamentally human attributes, things we do out of a sense of intrinsic motivation, that reside in all of us and need only be nurtured into being.
In the chapter "Meaning", Pink refers to the Dalai Lama's comment at a Mind and Life Institute press conference: ""Science and Buddhism are very similar," he said, "because they are exploring the nature of reality, and both have the goal to lessen the suffering of mankind." Pink aims to urge the importance in the Conceptual Age of taking spirituality seriously. He offers up examples of ways of doing so-medical schools that teach their students to take "spiritual histories" of patients; village greens, prisons, universities, and hospitals with incorporated labyrinths; employees who articulate hunger for bringing spiritual values-meaning and purpose-to their workplaces as documented in a University of Southern California business school report A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America.
I bring up spiritual values and business because BP replaced Tony Hayward, the company CEO who presided over attempts to cap the Gulf of Mexico deep sea oil gusher, with a new CEO, Bob Dudley, who says he will put safety at the center of future exploration. Dudley spoke of the need to restructure and reorganize in order to advance this goal. But safety is a value-a deeply held belief that is beyond compromise; if my reading of Pink is on target, BP's new CEO, and other oil professionals are going to have to enlist "whole minds" to embrace truly safety as a value. Robots run by computers, inventions of the information age, have worked to cap the well but it took months. Many reasons explain the absence of a fast fix, among them the fact that robots and computers can feel no empathy, don't see "the big picture", can't handle context, and don't work creatively; and approaches to the calamity sprang primarily from L-directed thinking of oil professionals-logic, sequence, and analysis.
If BP enlisted R-directed thinkers and what Pink calls their "high concept-high touch" abilities-emotional intelligence, imagination and creativity-could the company (and others like it), move "Beyond Petroleum", its one-time marketing brand? In The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane write that the future belongs to people who excel at expert thinking-solving problems for which there are no rules-based solutions - and complex communication-persuading, explaining, and conveying information. The solution to the BP disaster and others that will be forthcoming is not a new design for deepwater drilling. Rather we need imaginative, emotionally intelligent, R-directed professionals working alongside L-directed professionals in the oil industry. But that's not all. And in order to make the point I'll refer to the myth of Pandora, a story I've previously found useful in connection with the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe.
According to the legend, Pandora opened her jar - a gift from Zeus-and the evil it contained escaped and spread over the earth. Pandora hurried to close the lid, but the entire contents of the jar had escaped, except for hope. I'd like to argue that the analogous gift that Pandora's well might still release is human valuing of right hemisphere brain functions-synthesis, emotional expression, metaphor, and context; if so, with regard to human use of fossil fuels, we have the possibility of acting on "the big picture" with a whole, new mind.
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40 Comments so far
Show AllEvery action begins first on a spiritual level of thought --
What does it take to understand that patriarchy is at war on nature? And still at war on women and children?
This is the bird with one wing --
and it is suicidal --
It's economic fraud - capitalism -- is based on exploitation and is suicidal.
"According to all myth, the female - not the male -- gives life"
Indeed, katrine.
And if i may add....The ability to destroy, is power. Another of the unsustainable myths.
The hostility to some of the points the articles raises is interesting. The ego jealously guards its sense that it has all the answers... the uncharted right brain, where the great mysteries live, is not a comfortable place for those who believe they have already intellectually arrived.
The solution to oil spills doesn't take a whole lot of intellect, and it's not about ego. Causing rapacious and repeated environmental harm (i.e., repeatedly spilling oil, decade after decade) should elicit something like the pain response in humans. It hurts all life, human and otherwise. Why must intellectuals always psychoanalyze to the enth degree?
NORTH: Living in Florida, "Ground Zero" to the ecological debacle still underway (as it will be for years) in the Gulf (and being a nature-girl), you don't have to lecture me about pain. The article was partially focused on BP's modus operandi, but also spoke of the more diffusive qualities associated with the right brain hemisphere.
It doesn't surprise me that this forum is mostly hostile towards that concept.
Since the article covers more than one subject, it's understandable that some would post in response to the more immediate logistical concerns. The need for that type of implemented logic does not make a case against the equal need for growing our nation's "spiritual IQ." Each holds necessity for different portions of our shared existences and experiences.
And I get the feeling the message of my original post passed you by... you completely misunderstood my reference to the ego.
But I only see a single posting of this post.
Pardon my dumb joke.
I'm making a note to skip any future article written by Jill Schneiderman, someone very taken with their own essays apparently. I found the content in the same vein as Thom Friedman's new economy gobbledygook, with a touch of Lakoff and/or Luntz.
Barf.
Your comparison insults Lakoff unnecessarily. He is an order of magnitude more serious than Schneiderman.
My admittedly impressionistic take on Lakoff's framing arguments for the little people not yet aware of their own world view 'metaphor', has always struck me as a bit Straussian…but there I go again.
Democracynow.org reported a few days ago that 3 out of 4
oil and gas lobbyists in Washington, DC are former government
employees or Representatives. The Oil industry has paid
scientists to confuse the issue of climate change, accepted
US tax breaks of $79 Billion and up, supported Oil Wars.
Who do you think helped scuttle the admittedly flawed cap and trade bill in the US Senate?
When BP admits the planet is running out of oil, that cars, trucks and Wars use of oil is a major cause of climate change
then they will be doing wise thinking.
Until then they are just trying to get better tactics to protect their billions and billions of profits at the planet's and all ordinary people's expense.
I don't know what is worse... this pile of steaming shit of an article with it's compulsory "New Age" gobbleygook, chrystal gazing nonsense - or the fact that such an idiot is a professor at a pampered wealthy college... teaching nonsense to a new generation of do/know-nothings.
Perhaps the worse article posted on CD this year to date. Pure, unadultrated bullshit!
Your choice of words made me laugh uncontrollably. "Pure, unadultrated bullshit!" Is there any other kind? LOL Good show...
Actually, i understand the premise of Pink's thesis here. It really is about humanism and maturing as a civilization. And i agree. And there are psychological process that are involved here and are very real.
However, the author uses this in relation to bp in the most naive and insipid ways possible. Just plain silly, in my opinion.
I'm with hue_sir_name, readytotransform, and kalki (so far) on this one.
I incorrectly guessed that this was another "Yes" magazine contribution.
To be honest, though, unlike hue_sir_name I lack the intellectual discipline to "skip any future article written by Jill Schneiderman".
I'm more inclined to cynically skim through articles from dubious authors, mostly to confirm my first-impression prejudice. And see whether the blind pig may have accidently turned up an acorn THIS time. ;)
Uh...you got me. I'll do the same thing honestly.
Simplistic article.
The right-brain creates the scientific breakthrough---that Eureka moment (attributed to Archimedes but also to Bertrand Russell while pondering the Principia Mathematica co-written with Alfred North Whitehead), then the left-brain labors at corroborating it.
Consider Edison. He had the bright idea that electricity introduced to a resistant metal wire could produce light, but then it took months or years to determine that tungsten in a near-vacuum was most efficient (at the time). (And then other engineers figured out how to make the tungsten fail almost exactly to the hour, requiring that you purchase another light bulb.) Most of what is called scientific work is drudgery---one per cent inspiration, 90 per-cent perspiration as the old saying goes.
This right-brain/left-brain/corpus-callosum thing is just sooo academic. It even has its own fads. For example, the claim that males are inferior to females because our corpus collosum is smaller than that of females and thus our hemispheres don't communicate as well so we are less mentally "integrated."
To the extent that the hemispheres of the brain fail to communicate internally, one real answer is speech, and chanting, and drum beating. Talking out loud, to yourself or others: the sound and the vibration hits both ears and thus both hemispheres. In theory, at a certain level, there is no need for the corpus callosum.
As for applying a "whole new mind" to the BP gusher, I am reminded of the Manhattan Project, when several serious theoretical physicists feared that a nuclear explosion might set up a chain reaction that could burn up the atmosphere. Were they taken seriously or was it "damn the torpedoes"?
Is one hemisphere more risk-averse than the other? Would it have helped if BP had phoned Steve Jobs for advice? Capping a gusher a mile beneath the sea? There must be an app for that!
-30-
OLE MAN: It's not a matter of inferiority. Consider this analogy: if a trail is not forcibly cut through wild undergrowth, the greenery will expand across the entire landscape. At one time the brain's hemispheres were connected. Perception was about a kind of "becoming other," and was strongly based on empathy. Many females have retained this emotional quality (and some have not, arguably those who identify with "the man's world" and shelf their feelings so they can advance in cold career structures) in part due to its biological necessity: empathetic care of the offspring.
I've read that men from Indigenous cultures also have a strong bridge that still remains. In biological terms, it's that corpus collusum.
When societies became patriarchal, and arranged themselves in top-down heirarchies where males had to be hard, strong, and frequently on call for military subjugation, the feelings function got cut off. Behaviors long-held become part of our biological structures. And so, over time, many males having shut down their own feelings, essentially and unwittingly cut off access to the right side of their brains. (With the trail cut, it's hard to grow all that "undergrowth tissue" back.)
I like this article because I have been personally attacked in this forum for perspectives that issue forth from a very active right brain. I do not say that one is better than the other. Each has its tasks and functions. What I advocate is a more balanced society, and that would result if the faculties associated with the right brain hemisphere were more valued by society as a whole. Until more females become active agents of change, power, and decision-making, I would not count on that positive outcome. (And I do not mean females who have adapted themselves to patriarchal systems and values exclusively.)
On a higher note, there are mysterious phases known as the Great Ages, and we are near the "tipping point" to a new inception. Right brain will indeed become celebrated as the old approaches brought us to the brink of numerous disasters. And as Einstein related, the thinking that brought the problems about is not the thought process that can formulate solutions... our inner lives are about to become the next frontier. After all, it's alleged that we only use about 10% of our brains. Imagine the possibilities when the collective reaches for that elusive 11th percentile!
It appears that "growth" stops with death or after a thing reaches its full potential but we must needs define what we mean by "progress" and to where.
Stagnation never happens in an ever expanding universe, or as some are saying - multiverse. Actualization is ongoing. There is no limit. It is a process rather than and endgame. Although people do choose to not even attempt to grow. And then that natural impetus takes on another, perhaps painful or even destructive form, and creates part of our histories - both individual and social. Which plants the seeds for the events that form our most likely futures.
For what its worth. Some sharing.
I hope this was said in a way that is understndable.
peace
The worriers were taken seriously, but it was clear to most that a chain reaction in the atmosphere can't happen; the neutron captures don't occur often enough because of the cross-sectional area and all that. It was a pretty obvious question; I asked it myself at age 12 at a lecture on atomic physics given in Portland, OR at the main library.
I'm curious about this: When an oil firm executive makes a poor choice between costs and safety, which of his hemispheres do we blame for the ensuing disaster?
The late Kim Peek, for instance.
No Jill Scheneiderman, what we need are mature people giving notice to the oil companies to leave the oil in the ground; given the ecological catastrophe we are all witnessing these oil professionals need to find another occupation: they need to find a mind to begin with and a conscience before they can possibly seek a "whole " mind--safety will only happen when this insane and nature disconnected civilization is buried; and I would worry less about robots and computers but worry a heck of a lot more about the people who act as robots and computers.
It took a BP disaster for the author to think spiritually on the matter? Plenty of people have been thinking spiritually on energy usage ever since the oil crisis in the 1970s but who listened to them? We have alternative energy solutions that are available and/or could have been used a long time ago to prevent another Pandora's box tragedy but who wants that? No, we're just going to keep the jar open until the last drop of oil is extracted and then we'll "close" the jar. It's not a right vs left issue either.
"The solution to the BP disaster and others that will be forthcoming is not a new design for deepwater drilling. Rather we need imaginative, emotionally intelligent, R-directed professionals working alongside L-directed professionals in the oil industry."
No. The solution is simply no drilling in water, or better yet, GETTING OFF OIL!
This article calls to mind the piece written by Margaret Wheatley for "Yes" magazine in which she pleads for the need to stop the blaming and come together to find a solution. She quotes an oil industry insider as saying he was talking to some friends in the industry and they just didn't understand how this could happen!!
What utter tripe! Of course we know how this could happen. BP is a criminal organization who placed profits before the lives of its employees or the health of the planet we live on, not so different from all the other corporations that these new apologists strive to embrace.
I would be much more open to hearing of BP's new regard for "holistic" thinking and placing safety first, if we hadn't heard much of the same drivel from Exxon after the Valdez spill in Alaska. The same we will make it right, spare no expense lies that they had no intention of following through on. And the new man at the helm of BP is an industry insider, not some visionary saint, and I expect his goal is the goal of all corporate CEO's: profit above all. One can note that many of these writers are consultants to the corporations that they plead for understanding of and compassion toward.
If BP had voluntarily stopped all operations in the light of this disaster and immediately set up a transparent fund for the compensation of all those affected and soon to be affected by their shortsightedness and disregard for the environment I would be more than willing to view them with understanding and compassion. But they acted as they did, obfuscating data, banishing reporters and photographers, lying about "full" compensation, all the while attempting to bypass any safety regulations for the drilling of new wells in the Arctic. How then can we be expected to believe this new "spiritual" incarnation of BP as anything more than a misguided attempt at PR?
As far as solutions to this problem, as many others have said, it is simple. STOP DRILLING, NOW. Recognize that capitalism is a failed experiment. Understand that this planet is the only home we are ever likely to know.
Ya'll should just put away all this spiritual bullshit and get off the grids yourself and stop driving or flying if you plan to boycott BP. The article and most of the comments are bullshit. Real progressives don't talk spiritual shit. 20 years ago, you were warned about the coming oil crisis and none of ya listened. Here's a punishment. Keep your mouths shut and get used to catastrophes.
I think this tripe is clandestine BP PR.