Monday, August 3, 2009

on relationships

Who is this Margaret Wheatley, and when did it occur to her that our scientific leap into quantum mechanics is fundamentally changing the way we think and work in the world?

Each of us lives and works in organizations designed from Newtonian images of the Universe...Things can be taken apart, dissected literally or representationally (as we have done with business functions and academic disciplines), and then put back together without any significant loss. The assumption is that by comprehending the workings of each piece, the whole can be understood. The Newtonian model of the world is characterized by materialism and reductionism--a focus on things rather than relationships.

The quantum mechanical view of reality strikes against most of our notions of reality...It is a world where relationship is the key determiner of what is observed...Particles come into being and are observed only in relationship to something else. They do not exist as independent 'things'...These unseen connections between what were previously thought to be separate entitites are the fundamental elements of all creation.


First Grace Lee Boggs put me on to her in the interview, and then, I read about her again in this RJ book by Kay Pranis, The Little Book of Circle Processes. Weird. And fascinating.

I suppose this is just another take on what Marx was saying, that the smallest unit of political significance is not one person, but two.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, but...

    This is an oversimplification of scientific principles to understand social phenomena. to say one social approach is quantum or Newtonian is to confuse the matter with buzz words.

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  2. Sorry, buzzwords?

    Wheatley doesn't sound like she's aiming to encapsulate things neatly or oversimplify anything, whether scientific or social.

    I don't think she's even saying that these are different 'approaches,' where you can look at things in one way or another way.

    I see as her as pointing out the lenses we use to examine our world, that these change and evolve along with our world, and that developments in science are not divorced from this process. In fact they are often crucial. An example frequently alluded to (by Al Gore among others) is when human beings saw the first photographs of the Earth, taken from space, some 40 years ago. A very simple but elegant way of illuminating human beings with a sense of perspective, something we had always had before, but these photos evolved our lenses a few notches. We observed our world differently, we started asking new questions of home, of place, of responsibility to one's environment, in ways we could not have anticipated prior to these photos.

    My Dad has been reading a book, The Problem With Physics, which evolves our lenses even further. It's one of many recent works that explores a reality that science is uncomfortable with: uncertainty. The 'problem,' by the way, is the irreconcilability of string theory with our current understandings of the world (relativity, quantum physics). Interesting stuff. Brings up other questions: how does uncertainty in physics inform/echo/contradict/mirror uncertainty in humanity, in the social realm? How does uncertainty affect our understandings of mortality, of time, of categories and ideas, of change and stasis? How might our lives change the more we grapple with uncertainty, or will we grapple at all?

    I think this is what Wheatley's getting at. We know that science, humanity, social change, all of this is messy and complex and contradictory and often unpredictable, and we have to reckon with that. Our history--what we think of as history--is really the history of our reckoning. We arrive at certain notions--the Earth is the center of the universe, women who act up are witches, Black folks are not fully human, things are made up of particles, light is a wave--to provide some temporary clarity, no matter how illusory. But it is important, as laws, policies, creativity, imagination, actions, art, and development follow the line of this clarity, until we come to see things differently. And then new reckonings happen. And so on.

    These aren't uniform shifts or reckonings that everyone undertakes at the same time; we're all over the place today, often to our infuriation. But that's pretty damn exciting, too. So much vibrancy! Who knows what the hell will happen next? We keep learning from each other, and recognizing all the lenses there are out there, and if that helps us reckon and act in our lives easier than hanging onto one prominent but confining lens (what she calls Newtonian, meaning, thing-based), then we move in that direction.

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