Draft - 8/29/2014 Copyright Earon S. Davis 2014
Note: Pardon me while I work on improving the formatting of this paper.
Congratulations
on being open to understanding the concept of transdisciplinarity, which is
central to some perspectives on facilitating human sustainability. As one who has unsuccessfully struggled to
understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, I want to acknowledge that
transdisciplinary can be a difficult concept.
Much of this difficulty is explained by another difficult concept, cognitive
dissonance.
Sometimes,
concepts are difficult for us to grasp because elements of their world view are
inconsistent with important aspects of our world view. This brings dissonance into our psyche that
we are generally not trained to resolve.
When confronted with a dilemma in which we must choose between two
competing values or needs, it is typical of human nature to choose the most
familiar path and rationalize away the other choice as inconvenient,
conflictual or “new.” So, we unconsciously
resist understanding challenging new concepts.
And that’s what transdisciplinarity is.
Another view
of the conflict comes from Upton Sinclair’s observation that it is difficult to
understand something when your livelihood depends upon not understanding it. In our universities and our industries, our
jobs depend upon an analytical framework that empowers separate disciplines and
has us trained in a single discipline, or a couple of different
disciplines. Even when we work in a few
different disciplines, we generally identify each individual primarily with one
or two out of scores of different disciplines.
So, since our professional world is already organized by disciplines,
transdisciplinarity is not an easy thing to grasp. It seems to indicate a desire to abandon
science, but it is really aimed at putting the science we know into perspective
rather than giving marginal information more weight than it warrants.
In a world
that is based upon reductionist learning, valuing and celebrating what we know
and devaluing what we don’t know, transdisciplinarity just doesn’t fit because
it requires that we operate in areas of uncertainty in a holistic manner. Rather than seeing the world through the
filter of biological sciences or astrophysics or accounting or poetry,
transdisciplinarity asks us to transcend all of the disciplines and look at the
broader picture. As we zoom out to a
transdisciplinary perspective, we see each discipline as a set of data points
rather than our whole universe. Even
multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary perspective are not as radical as
transdisciplinarity. They integrate
information and personnel in two or more disciplines, definitely not
transcending all disciplines, not creating enough space for new observations
and thinking to break through the traditional boundaries of our disciplinary
approaches.
Transdisciplinarity approaches all possible data points in all possible
disciplines. Mind-boggling, indeed! It is a highly creative adventure, requiring
an equal measure of discipline, which seeks to use the tools of all disciplines
to find new truths, to uncover new data that give rise to different approaches
to understanding our situations and our challenges. It combines a proficiency with science and
logic along with the openness of a child in a candy store, or some adults at a
new hardware store or a sale at a huge thrift shop. Through these new perspectives, being open to
the vast array of available tools and fabrics, we may find new solutions, new
relationships that we may never have discovered using the tools in just one or
two or three departments.
In that
sense, a single discipline presents us with one complex filter with which we
see the world. We are trained in a
discipline, mentored by a senior person in that discipline, and often inducted
into a long lineage within that discipline.
Sometimes, our studies are multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, but
those generally involve limited numbers of disciplines and sub-disciplines,
excluding a far larger number of disciplinary tools than they include.
Imagine a
box with thousands of those filters.
Each allows us to see a limited portion of the spectrum of radiation and
light. Some filters allow us to see a
somewhat wider range of the spectrum, but none allows us to view more than,
let’s say, 1% of the larger reality. Our
filter may be the “reality” in which we specialize and in which we are an
expert. It may be the filter through
which we earn our living, but it is only a small part of the larger
reality.
The quest of
transdisciplinarity is to combine many, many different filters (disciplines) so
that we can see larger pictures, views that more closely represent our larger,
more complex and intricate, reality. So,
the task is formidable, indeed. It is no
wonder that we unconsciously resist putting down our favorite lenses and
venturing into a multitude of new fields with which we are unfamiliar. Our old views are comfortable, and they have
gotten us this far in life, so even the brightest among us can remain strongly
attached to them.
Peer
pressure is also an important aspect of the unconscious resistance. Transdisciplinarity reshuffles the deck of
the academy’s cards in ways that challenge the importance of any one card, even
the cards that we’ve held in our hand for decades. It may challenge our allegiance to our
discipline, our profession, our department, our school or college, our
university. It will challenge our
relationships with our colleagues and our role in our departments. We humans often respond to such
considerations with ambivalence and approach-avoidance behaviors.
In the study
of human sustainability, which is a rather large task requiring all of the
various skills, tools and knowledge we can find and develop,
transdisciplinarity is essential. We are
still learning how our world is interconnected, how our perceptions are biased,
how difficult it is for us to anticipate the consequences of our actions. We are still feeling hurt about how our
attempts to solve one problem may cause several different unintended
consequences that put us in a worse situation than had we done nothing. Clearly, we don’t currently have the
knowledge and wisdom to become sustainable in ways that also enable human
flourishing. We are beginning to
envision different ways of living, but this takes time, and time is in short
supply.
There are
barriers to understanding changes in the scientific bases of our current
reality. The colleagues of each of the
great minds to whom we attribute major advances in science, philosophy or the
arts generally took decades to catch on to the new perspectives that were
emerging. Many of the great minds lived
and died in a mix of rejection and obscurity, marginalized, while their ideas
were slowly taking root.
What are the
obstacles to seeing new paradigms?
- 1. Inertia. We cling to our worldviews and all of the odd
notions that get grandfathered into our mindsets along with the old notions. It is in our nature to reject new paradigms until
they somehow gain a “critical mass” to appear mainstream. However, before that time, we may
(individually or collectively) put them into distant elliptical orbits around
our consciousness rather than integrate them.
When exploring new concepts, we do tend to have some “fear of the
unknown.” We do not know what conflicts
may arise with our various ideas, disciplinary lineages and values, so we are
cautious.
- 2. Nausea. We can actually feel physically ill when we
contemplate dissonant topics, so much so that we tend to resolve the conflict
through rationalization, rather than embracing the dissonance and learning to
tease apart our feelings of attraction and avoidance.
- 3. Confusion. As with the physical symptoms of dissonance,
like nausea or “that sinking feeling,” we are uncomfortable entering into
realms that challenge our basic belief systems.
The easiest way for us to deal with this confusion is to block our
attempts to understand the dissonance and move on to other activities.
- 4. Peer Groups. Our nature is intensely social, so we depend
upon the creation and maintenance of shared realities, supported by colleagues,
friends, partners, etc. We derive
pleasure from these relationships and from “fitting in” to a peer group, a
department or college, etc. Leaving the
shared reality of our close associates is uncomfortable, potentially depriving
us of pleasant company, and this can be scary.
- 5. Proportionality. The more the basic values and “truths” are
different in a new paradigm, the more assumptions that are challenged, the more
intense all of the above obstacles can be.
Our traditional
disciplines are vital to our future.
Transdisciplinarity will not replace them. The best known advocate for
transdisciplinary, Basarab Nicolescu discussed in his article, “The
Transdisciplinary Evolution of Learning1,” the “Declaration of
Locarno,” adopted by the participants at a 1997 UNESCO International Congress
on “What University for Tomorrow?”2 The group’s proposal “recommended to
devote 10% of the teaching time in each discipline to transdisciplinarity.”
To the
credit of our existing educational and disciplary-based systems, new
multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary fields are emerging to fill in some of
the large gaps in between the silos of academia. However, at the same time, we are digging
deeper into sub-specialties and sub-sub specialties as if the answer to being
stuck in a hole is to dig deeper. In
order to train ourselves and our top students to be able to see outside of the
existing assumption-based (disciplinary) options we have, we will need to
cultivate transdisciplinary thinking.
There are patterns and relationships, concepts and perspectives that can help
our species live sustainably that we cannot yet envision. Interestingly enough, one group that most
readily engages transdisciplinary thinking is entrepreneurs. Not wedded to any given discipline, small,
local businesses, especially when partnered with relevant technical
specialists, are in a position to identify new opportunities, new ways of doing
things. One of the tasks of our
universities is to facilitate and cultivate such problem-solving.
It may well
be that our educational efforts are most critically directed to our young
people. Rather than cultivating
reductionist education (e.g., STEM) for everyone, we should encourage creative
thinking across all groups in society.
Honestly, we cannot afford to continue to reinforce narrow visions and
group think when it is increasingly vital that we have leaders at all levels of
society able to grasp the “big picture” and influence society towards mindful
and rational decision making. By the
time one gets to graduate school, there is strong pressure to specialize and
carve out a tiny area of competence rather than generalize and round out the
varied skills necessary to be an effective, thoughtful global citizen.
Will we be sufficiently open-minded to let go of the “tried and true” so that
we encourage the thinking and research that will open up the new
possibilities? Consider the
anthropocene! Today’s young people are
growing up in an era that is far more aware of the impacts of humans on our
world. They have already experienced a
quantum change in consciousness and we need to build upon that. Otherwise, we can keep our heads buried
inside the traditional disciplines with which we and our predecessors have
painted humanity into the corner in which we now find ourselves.
As Einstein
remarked, we can’t solve our problems by thinking in the same ways that created
them. Transdisciplinarity is the process
by which Einstein synthesized his revolutionary ideas using the tools of the
disciplines he knew, but using his imagination to create ideas and
relationships that would not have been imaginable to the average physicist of
his day. And, as I can attest, his
larger theory is still not fully imaginable to some of us today.
Additional Resource
The most thorough set of references for transdisciplinarity
involve the work of Dr. Basarab Nicolescu,
author of
“Transdisciplinary Theory and Practice.”
3 Dr. Nicolescu is President,
Centre International de Recherches
et d’Etudes Transdisciplinaires
(CIRET), International Center for Transdisciplinary Research, located in Paris,
France. Their website is:
http://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/index_en.php.
Note: There is
background information, but this may or may not mend the cognitive dissonance
issues that can make this concept of transdisciplinarity difficult to grasp/accept. Transdisciplinary is not a specialty or a
discipline. Like systems thinking, it is
a perspective, a reformulation of reality that removes some of the
irrationality the proponents feel permeates the world views of even esteemed
scientists and intellectuals.
References
2International Congress
What University for Tomorrow? Towards a transdisciplinary
evolution of the university. UNESCO, Locarno, Switzerland, April 30
- May 2, 1997. Translations available at CIRET,
http://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/index_en.php
3Nicolescu, Basarab, Transdisciplinary Theory and
Practice, Hampton Press, U.S.A. 2008.