image courtesy of .candy

“We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game by taking sides .... No one who has read a page by a good critic or a speculative scientist can ever again think that this barren choice of yes or no is all that the mind offers.”

—Jacob Bronowski, host and author of The Ascent of Man, physicist/philosopher, and all around smart guy

I came across this quote in the book “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food,” written by an organic farmer and a genetic engineer who are married to each other and who wonder how their disciplines might be married for the good of both humankind and nature.

Both the question they are asking in their book and the content of this quote are fascinating. How often do we settle for the barren choice of yes or no, even when reality itself teems with untold possibilities? And how often do we make that barren choice unconsciously?

The answer: Pretty much all the time. From politics to the economy to the environment, we generally turn the content of our discussions into a horse race in which the most important thing is whether or not “our” horse wins.

I know that a good deal of my life tends to resemble a game of “Hotter, Colder,” where I move toward and away from individual people, events, activities, and ideas based on my feelings and beliefs, without really considering the landscape as a whole. Republican bad—move away. Organic good—move toward.

But I’m coming to understand the extent to which “my feelings and beliefs” are conditioned and inaccurate. Reality itself is far more complex and nuanced than what my feelings and beliefs can handle. It requires and deserves more than knee-jerk reaction.

Up till now, we are pretty much asked to choose a side. Are you liberal, progressive, fundamentalist, neo-con? Fiscal conservative/social liberal? Hippie? Businessperson? Organic or engineered? In each case, making a choice excludes the other choices, and warfare tends to ensue (i.e., the ongoing health care “debate”).

But it’s becoming clearer every day that we can’t continue to rely on these ideological categories. The world doesn’t ask many yes or no questions. Oftentimes, both yes and no are correct answers, depending on the context. So how do we literally expand our cognitive bandwidth to take in more of what is, so we can make more mature and relevant and useful decisions?

Integral theory (PDF) gives us a context for moving beyond the barrenness of the knee jerk horse race; it starts from the supposition that every perspective is valuable and contains a partial truth, and that much can be learned from developing our ability to shift and discern between perspectives.

This is a huge and new development in the human psyche. For most of our history, other points of view were largely unavailable to us. Even now in the information age, the paradigm is to choose one viewpoint and stick with it. In the process we end up ignoring, devaluing, and/or rejecting the wisdom embedded in other perspectives. By contrast, when we choose an integral approach, we are able to cherry pick the best of every ideological stance and engineer different intelligences into new solutions.

If we want to change the way the world works, this is an incredibly important skill to develop. Not only does it help us craft our arguments in a way that will resonate with a wider variety of people; it also helps us to leverage a variety of “good sense” in our efforts to evolve past the problems we’re facing.

Every perspective—liberal elite, fundamentalist Christian, organic farmer, genetic engineer, even Dick Cheney—has some truth in it. If we want to move past the barren, binary choice of yes or no, we need to listen to each other carefully and mine the genius of other perspectives.