Challenging culturally-expected ways of thinking.

Challenging culturally-expected ways of thinking. This paper will serve as an introduction to a session whereparticipants in small groups will discuss these questions: How could weinitiate an evolution in human evaluating? What challenges mightinitiators face? What social, economic, political, educational, andother problems, might such an evolution create? Representatives fromeach group will be invited to present a summary of their proposals andconcerns to the whole group. Relative Invariance in��var��i��ant?adj.1. Not varying; constant.2. Mathematics Unaffected by a designated operation, as a transformation of coordinates.n.An invariant quantity, function, configuration, or system. Under Transformation .... any group of people who possess physical means for destruction and still preserve infantile standards of evaluation become a menace to the culture of the whole race. --Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity If we live in a modern world, but keep the 'emotional attitudes' of primitive bygone days, then naturally we are bound to be semantically unbalanced, and cannot be adjusted to a fundamental primitive 'civilization' in the midst of great technical achievement. --Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity In the First World War (1914-18), the Polish generals The following is a list of Polish generals, that is the people who held the rank of general, as well as those who acted as de facto generals by commanding a division or brigade. , quite proudof their renowned cavalry, sent horses and men to do battle with Germantanks. Men in tanks won that battle. Warfare had been transformed frommen on horses with swords, to men in tanks with guns. The generals hadnot updated their ideas about warfare. Their thinking in this arearemained relatively invariant (programming) invariant - A rule, such as the ordering of an ordered list or heap, that applies throughout the life of a data structure or procedure. Each change to the data structure must maintain the correctness of the invariant. . In this 21st century, warfare, conflicts, etc., have beentransformed. One man or woman (or child), with box cutters, guns, orbombs around their persons, viruses in bottles, and with cell phones,computers and global positioning devices, can now do great harm tohundreds of thousands of people. Governments and military personnel,with much pride and confidence in their military might and skills,continue to fight battles the old fashioned n. 1. A cocktail consisting of whiskey, bitters, and sugar, garnished with with fruit slices and often a cherry.Noun 1. old fashioned - a cocktail made of whiskey and bitters and sugar with fruit slices way--with men in tanks, withmissiles and bombs. Their thinking about warfare seems to me to haveremained relatively invariant. Through time-binding (the human ability to learn from past others,present others, and oneself; and to build on what has been learned),science and technology have given us tremendous powers. Men walked anddrove around on the moon. Our skills in resolving our international andother conflicts have lagged way behind. Using cell phones, computers,the Internet, and other technological devices, it's now possiblefor some we could label "mean low-down varmints, thugs, rascals,bandits, murderers, crooks, rascals, misfits, criminals, gangsters, andother unsavory types," all over the world, to organize againstother humans. Throughout history, there have been humans bent on Adj. 1. bent on - fixed in your purpose; "bent on going to the theater"; "dead set against intervening"; "out to win every event"bent, dead set, out to worlddomination “World conquest” redirects here. For other uses, see World domination (disambiguation).The concept of world domination (sometimes world conquest) has long been a popular theme in both history and fiction. . Now these types have the technology to propagate prop��a��gatev.1. To cause an organism to multiply or breed.2. To breed offspring.3. To transmit characteristics from one generation to another.4. and act outtheir beliefs, and do great damage. We (those of us not numbered among the varmints, etc.), have tostart thinking differently--and soon. Our present way of thinkinginvolves among others: one-valued (it must be so); two-valued (it'seither this or that, either for us or against us, believers andunbelievers, etc.); elementalistic (ignoring interrelations); identity(what I think, feel, believe, etc., is so); allness (lack of awarenessthat we don't know Don't know (DK, DKed)"Don't know the trade." A Street expression used whenever one party lacks knowledge of a trade or receives conflicting instructions from the other party. everything). This thinking scheme is entrenched en��trench? also in��trenchv. en��trenched, en��trench��ing, en��trench��esv.tr.1. To provide with a trench, especially for the purpose of fortifying or defending.2. in our individual conscious operations (sensing, thinking-feeling,evaluating, etc.); and in our way of relating with ourselves and witheach other. We have created institutions, national policies,regulations, and laws based on this scheme. We seem not to haverecognized the increasing complexities of our human relationships. So wepersist in Verb 1. persist in - do something repeatedly and showing no intention to stop; "We continued our research into the cause of the illness"; "The landlord persists in asking us to move"continue attempting to resolve our highly complex international humanrelationship problems and conflicts, in our usual relatively simplistic sim��plism?n.The tendency to oversimplify an issue or a problem by ignoring complexities or complications.[French simplisme, from simple, simple, from Old French; see simple ,elementalistic (forgetting interconnections), short term, political,economic, and militaristic mil��i��ta��rism?n.1. Glorification of the ideals of a professional military class.2. Predominance of the armed forces in the administration or policy of the state.3. way. We have not yet, it seems to me, recognized or valued theimportance of basing our policies and negotiations, on historical,anthropological, psychological, scientific, commonsensical com��mon��sense?adj.Having or exhibiting native good judgment: "commonsense scholarship on the foibles and oversights of a genius"Times Literary Supplement. ,philosophical, tribal, cultural, and other perspectives. Ourinstitutions, policies, regulations, laws, etc., all maintain andfacilitate old ways of thinking. In many societies, the majority ofinhabitants :This article is about the video game. For Inhabitants of housing, see Residency Inhabitants is an independently developed commercial puzzle game created by S+F Software. DetailsThe game is based loosely on the concepts from SameGame. are adjusted to their particular 'culturally expectedways of thinking' (CEWT CEWT Corporate Embedded Web TechnologyCEWT Culturally Expected Way of Thinking ) and doing things. To 'succeed'one has to go with, and adapt to 'cewt.' So, many suggestionsfor significant change will be vigorously resented and resisted. Manypeople benefit from the way things are going--and would like things tokeep going that way--thank you very much. We have to find ways toencourage an evolution in evaluating, to match our technologicalaccomplishments. (For more on "cewt": See my article"Conscious Abstracting" athttp://dfwcgs.net/milton/index.html.) To meet the challenges of an increasingly complex world, we have tostart thinking differently. We have to start thinking in terms of thewelfare of the species--not in terms of immediate benefits to ourparticular tribe. We have to include long-term possibilities in ourplans and decisions. We have to start thinking in terms ofinterrelationships and interdependence. We have to think in terms of"co-evolution": If one nation moves, or is thought to bemoving too fast ahead of others, it must expect resentment. If onenation appears to be too powerful, some will try to bring it down. In anincreasingly complex and ever changing world, we cannot afford to holdour present ways of thinking relatively invariant. Our technological accomplishments have raced far ahead of ourwisdom to manage our human problems (many of which resulted from saidtechnological achievements). Our education systems have not addressed toa significant degree our uncritical use of language. We have not as aspecies evolved to a higher level of self-consciousness andself-evaluation, and we find our record in resolving internationalconflicts over these many centuries shameful. To minimize disasters and continuing human misery we have torevisit, and when necessary, revise our ideas, theories, and beliefs, tomatch new realities. We need an evolution in human evaluating. In a fastchanging, increasingly diverse world, we could use the method of scienceand the approach of mathematics as our guidelines. Most cultures believethat science and mathematics work. Bernard Lonergan Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J. (17 December 1904 – 26 November 1984) was a Canadian Jesuit Priest. He was a philosopher-theologian in the Thomist tradition and an economist from Buckingham, Quebec. , S.J., in his book Insight: A Study of HumanUnderstanding wrote: "A method is a set of directives that serve toguide a process towards a result." General semantics gen��er��al semantics?n. (used with a sing. verb)A discipline developed by Alfred Korzybski that proposes to improve human behavioral responses through a more critical use of words and symbols. (based on the approach and method of science andmathematics) provides us with a method and many guidelines to help usimprove ourselves as human beings. We can do better than we have beendoing. The challenge for us humans: How to initiate an evolution inevaluating--without creating many more problems.