In the world of Hyper-change and Hyper-connectivity we cannot afford to evolve human consciousness one person at a time?
“The most important task today is, perhaps to learn to think in a new way.”
(Gregory Bateson (1972:462)
We live in a time when our collective human actions are putting the very existence of our species at threat, but also a time when we have the potential to destroy most of the living world of this planet along with our own species. Tim Smit the founder of the Eden Project for sustaining biosphere diversity opened a speech to the UK Institute of Directors with the line: “The next thirty years are possibly the most exciting time to be alive in the whole of human history. For in that time we will either discover if we deserve the title Homo Sapiens, or we will all fry.” (Smit 2019).
Reg Revans the founder of “Action Learning” (Revans 1982) often used the powerful formula L= E.C. (Learning must equal or be greater than the rate of the environmental change) as a way of awakening those who would listen to the Darwinian law of organisational survival. It is only through learning in relation to the contexts we find ourselves in that individual, teams, organisations or species co-evolve, flourish and survive. Bateson (1972), a contemporary of Revans, would also point out to those that would listen the problems we have created by choosing the wrong unit of survival.
In accordance with the general climate of thinking in mid nineteenth century England, Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution, in which the unit of survival was either the family line or species or sub-species or something of that sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.