Sullen DeclineBarry Oshry says of Encounters with the Other (published in a new edition in March 2024):
“This book may be the last and smallest of my offerings, yet it is the most personally precious… it grows out of the life force that created all the rest.” He starts with this assertion: Many cultures may look strange to us, but not to the ‘others’. And our culture may look strange to the ‘others’ but not to us. That simple fact is the beginning of understanding. It’s a reminder of Richard Rorty’s idea of a final vocabulary: “the set of words which [people] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives”. These words, which may describe things that we see as ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘right’ or ‘beautiful’, are somehow incontestable. People who hold to their truths as inescapable and universal will by definition find the final vocabulary of others false, bad, wrong or ugly. That’s how it begins. It ends in bigotry, racism, oppression and genocide. Oshry describes that sullen decline into genocide beautifully. In time, we and the ‘others’ learn our rules so well that we no longer experience them as rules, they become the lenses through which we view the world. As Bill Tate would say, they become the water that we swim in. Oshry continues: When we encounter the ‘other’ Since our cultural rules are experienced as the way to live, to survive, to be, the cultural behavior of the “other” is experienced as upsetting of our culture, as weakening it, or coarsening it, and, potentially, as threatening its survival. And we react. The reactions are predictable: Sometimes, out of Looseness or Liberalism, the ‘other’ is allowed to co-exist in the host culture, in a tolerable state of tension, with various restrictions and limitations… This is a culture’s tolerance solution to the encounter with the ‘other’. Sometimes, out of Tightness or Conservatism, the forces to reject the ‘other’ overwhelm the forces to accept them. The ‘other’ is experienced as too different, foreign, dangerous. The solution is to protect and preserve the culture by confining, suppressing, exiling, or destroying the ‘other’. This is a culture’s purity solution to the encounter with the ‘other’. Then, reverting to a lifetime’s interest in the role of power and love in organisations and society, Oshry asks: What do we see when we see the “other”? Do we see them as like us or as different from us, as connected to us or as separate from us? Power seeing is seeing difference and separateness. The ‘others’ are different from us and unconnected to us. Love seeing is seeing commonality and connectedness. The ‘others’ are like us and connected to us. But, he asserts, It is possible, theoretically at least, for our experience of the ‘other’ to be grounded in both Power and Love; where we experience our differences from the ‘other’ and our commonality with them, our separateness from them and our connectedness with them. Robust seeing is a possibility, yet it is a possibility too rarely realised… Oshry explains why with a neat summary that will serve as an answer to anyone who is ever asked ‘what is systems thinking?’: Here is what we need to know: The patterns we fall into shape how we experience ourselves and others. When we are blind to systems, we believe that our experience of the ‘other’ is a reflection of reality – This is who they really are. When we have system sight, we understand that how we experience the ‘other’ is a consequence of the pattern we have fallen into. Change the pattern and our experience of them will likely change. When we are blind to systems, we think that the realistic way to deal with our relationship with the ‘other’ is to dominate, oppress, suppress, exile, or destroy them. Who wouldn’t do this to such people? When we have system sight, we think that the realistic way to deal with our relationship with the ‘other’ is to change the pattern of relationship we have fallen into. In this case, this means infusing Love into ‘Power without Love’. Oshry’s concluding list of the 20th- and 21st-Century ‘catastrophes’ that have been brought on by systems blindness is justification enough for anyone interested in systems thinking to pursue that interest into politics, education and society at large. (There is no need to read this partial list. You can, instead, bury the rag deep in your face, for now is the time for our tears):
Enough. Encounters with the Other: Barry Oshry Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: Richard Rorty The Search for Leadership – Bill Tate and multiple thanks to Rajan Rasaiah for inspiring and sharing ideas that filling the Idioticon. |
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