Arguing for Our Lives: A Users Guide to Constructive Dialog

Jensen patiently, honestly, and rigorously exemplifies the highest virtues of a public intellectual. Meanwhile decades of advertising, sound bites, PR, filtered information, and internet trolling have numbed us even more. But we don't have to live this way.

Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue

We could immediately start living in a better world, one in which every conversation was an opportunity to learn more about ourselves, others, and the precious little world we all have to try to live on together. To do that, though, we would have to re-learn how to think and talk, how to agree and disagree. Resurgent Politics in the Age of Disposability Paradigm, The "news" has degenerated into sensationalist sound bites, and the idea of debate has become a polarized shouting match that Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialog.

Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System "Debating, discussion, engagement with ideas that matter—these are all supposed to be left to professionals, specialists who talk to each other in mutually incomprehensible ways. The lesson is pretty clear: The knowledge we humans can acquire, while impressive in what it allows us to build, is not adequate to manage the complexity of the world.

Arguing for Our Lives: Critical Thinking in Crisis Times

No matter how smart we are, our ignorance will always outstrip our knowledge, and so we routinely fail to anticipate or control the consequences of our science and technology. When we analyze, the subject becomes an object, as we break it apart to allow us to poke and probe in the pursuit of that analysis.

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4. Arguing for Our Lives, A User's Guide to Constructive Dialog.
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To "differentiate," in this context, means the act of perceiving and assigning distinctions within a system. Thinking of the universe as an undifferentiated whole recognizes its unity, providing a corrective to the method of modern science that breaks things down to manageable components that can be studied.

Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialog

That "reductionism" in science assumes that the behavior of a system can be understood most effectively by observing the behavior of its parts. At first glance that may seem not only obvious but unavoidable.

How else would we ever know anything? Imagine a pond in the woods. No one person could walk into the scene and offer a detailed account of all that is happening in that ecosystem, let alone explain how it operates. Even a cursory description of the ecosystem requires knowledge of meteorology, botany, zoology, geology, chemistry, physics.

To make sense of the complex relationships and interactions among all the players in that one small ecosystem, experts in those disciplines would observe, experiment, and explain their part of it. First, if we claim to understand the system through its component parts, we have to be able to identify all the relevant parts. How much do we know about the microscopic organisms and their role in that ecosystem?

Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialog - Robert Jensen - Google Книги

We know the things we have identified, using the tools we have at our disposal. But is that all there is to be identified, that which we can observe?

For all that scientists and farmers know about soil, for example, most of what happens in the soil is at the microscopic level and unknown to us. Second, while that pond ecosystem can be broken down into its component parts and studied, that study cannot include the dynamic interactions between all the parts, which are too complex to track. In short, the whole is more than the sum of its parts and considerably more than the sum of the parts we can observe.