Retrospective 2020-04

This is a summary of last week’s reading and painting.

Painting

There’s an old tree close to where I live. Below are three paintings where I have explored its shape.

Reading

I’ve continued reading Sidney Dekker’s The Safety Anarchist. Dekker describes how a single-minded pursuit of rationality — hierarchical decision-making, centralized control, measurements — gives rise to its own form of irrationality. Focusing on behavior, making people to comply, may actually increase the risk of major injury and fatality. Managerial bonus schemes for safety performance make big disasters more likely, because people start to manipulate their numbers to get the bonus. The (safety) management system is incapable of capturing the inevitable subtleties and nuances of actual work-as-done, no matter how alluring the possibilities of management control may seem. Quiet, below-the-radar, insubordination is going on all the time. What matters is not compliance but resilience. Work is full of rules and regulations, yet full of necessary adaptations and interpretations. Diverse voices are important! However, bureaucratic organizations are not very good at tolerating dissent. The more bureaucracy there is, the more formal opportunities there are for silencing deviation. Wherever you go, whatever you do, your belief system envelopes you.

I’ve started re-reading Mae-Wan Ho’s Meaning of Life and the Universe: Transforming. The book is a selected collection of essays from about a thousand works written over a period of almost fifty years. Compassion is antecedent to life in organized society. It doesn’t arise through externally imposed social order. Hate arises when love is lost, frustrated, or thwarted. Creativity and play, organism and environment, are intimately interconnected. There is a mutual enfoldment and unfoldment between the implicate and explicate. Whatever insult is perpetrated in one part of nature have repercussions globally. Knowing nature requires not only analytic intellect, but also sensitivity. It requires undivided being fully participating in knowledge. The imposition of order derived from mechanistic assumptions, results in the disenchantment of life. The abstraction of reality is mistaken for reality.¹ Organisms have a spatiotemporal order which is stably maintained in the face of constant change. Biological order is a macroscopic order. A key notion of living organization is coherence, which suggests a relationship between local and global. A coherent state is one of maximum global cohesion and maximum local freedom!² An intuitive way to think about coherence is in terms of a jazz ensemble, where each part is free to play while also listening together for the music which integrates them with the whole.³ The implicate unfolds into the explicate, and the explicate enfolds to further implicate potential, through the actions and intentions of the organism. An organism always has its own way of doing things and resists what is imposed on it. A living system doesn’t have to be pushed or dragged into action like a mechanical system.⁴

Notes
1 Mae-Wan Ho, Meaning of Life and the Universe: Transforming, p. 40.
2 Ibid., pp. 23, 62.
3 Ibid., pp. 62, 259. See also Michael Jones, Artful Leadership, pp. 36–37.
4 Ibid., pp. 83, 91.