image courtesy of mikebaird

Most of the time, for most of us, life seems pretty consistent. Work, family, and home life may vary from day to day, but for the most part, things chug along remarkable steadiness. Then something happens—a job loss, an illness, a new opportunity—and we realize how tenuous our security really is. No one ever really knows what our lives will look like in a year, but we think we do.

Since I lost my job, I’ve seen how strong this self-delusion of security can be. In reality, there’s no less certainty in my life than there was a few months ago, but it feels like there is. The challenge is the same as it always has been—to be OK with uncertainty, to connect with the possibility inherent in it and not freak out.

This idea figures prominently in Whole Earth Discipline, the new book by Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now Foundation founder Stewart Brand. In it, Brand has a ball tearing into some of environmentalism’s most sacred cows—urbanization, overpopulation, nuclear energy, and genetic engineering. The science he cites and the stories he tells are compelling to say the least, but what strikes me most in his argument is how he looks at things—from a position of not knowing, having his own ideas but being more than willing to change them as new evidence and explanations arise.

Brand addresses this viewpoint head on, and urges environmentalists to approach research and technology without prejudice or pre-conditioned responses. He wants us to stop being hedgehogs and start being foxes.

What’s the difference? Hedgehogs have one stance and they stick with it in all situations—whether they are being attacked by a predator or observed by a child, the spines come out. Foxes, on the other hand, adapt their behavior depending on what works. They experiment and evaluate and adjust. This ability to read current conditions and adapt makes them effective.

The foxy approach makes good sense—of course we should always have another look at our conclusions when we take in new information. But in practice, most of us are much more comfortable sticking with the hedgehog strategy. We make up our minds on an issue and we never reconsider it again. We look at people who change their minds or their course as weak-willed and lacking in conviction. We even mock our policy-makers—people who should frequently be changing their minds based on the data—for being flip-floppers. We say we value change and innovation, and we do, but only after it’s proven right. Though we live in a world that demands foxiness, most of us cling to our hedgehoggy ways.

The problem with this rigid approach is obvious—it stifles growth. If adherence to ideology is more important than empirical testing and iterative development, then it’s not possible for anything to change. We end up with a highly polarized debate in which nothing is actually debated; talking points are merely spoken and then shouted with increasing vehemence. When we adhere to our pre-conceived ideas, we make the mistake of assuming that what’s important is our ideological consistency rather than our effectiveness.

At this point, most of us are still hedgehogs. We like knowing what our response will be to any question. We like feeling as though our worldview is “all done.”

But the truth is that when we value ideological consistency over practicality, we stagnate. Our simple, preconfigured ideas are not equal to the challenges facing us. We need to let go of our fundamentalism, allow ourselves to be unsure of the next step, to stray from the familiar path in pursuit of our goal, which is nothing less audacious than the transformation of our our whole way of living.

This orientation to life feels unsteady at first, but it is possible to get your sea legs with practice. My first day of unemployment felt like staring into the gaping maw of the void itself, but I’m getting more fluent in the unknown every day. My old way of maintaining security by having a lucrative though passionless job worked for a long time, but it’s not cutting it anymore. Neither is our typical picture of what it means to be an environmentalist. We need a new strategy, a foxier one, based less on what we think environmentalism is about and more on what actually works.