The Obstacles to Holistic Thinking

This is an excerpt from the Worldview dimension of Gaia Education’s Design for Sustainability curriculum.

“There have been significant trends towards holistic thinking in philosophy and science; there have been signs of a major paradigm shift in human affairs. The new economics, new ecology, new politics, new social and cultural thinking, new approaches in education, and the rapid development of social networking…are all part of that shift. This emerging broad unified outlook is based on increased consciousness and awareness, seeks inner development of human potential, has an altruistic cooperative ethic, and expresses genuine concern for the environment and the planet. …The new holistic social paradigm has the potential to provide the basis for healing mankind and healing the planet, in preparation for the next stage of human and planetary evolution.” — Brian Burrows (1991, p.227)

Holistic thinking along with an increased awareness of the different worldviews we employ — the ability to shift between diverse perspectives and integrate them based on a set of shared values, all of this will critically influence our common future. The transition towards sustainability is at one and the same time an unprecedented challenge and an enormous creative opportunity. Political, religious and economic competition are a waste of important time and energy at a point where the real task at hand is to restore the Earth and in doing so give life to a new humanity — worthy of its name. Learning to think holistically will help us to give meaning and justification to a species arrogant enough to call itself Homo sapiens sapiens before it learned the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Burrows et al. identified a series of obstacles to holistic thinking. These are summarized in the box below.

The Main Obstacles to Holistic Thinking
(after Burrows et al., 1991, pp.270–271)

• The materialistic and mechanistic worldview provides a very limited understanding of the nature of life and the significance of the whole human being.
• The Reductionist methodology of analysis of individual parts in isolation that has contributed to many scientific discoveries and technological inventions, needs to be embedded in a more holistic perspective based on synthesis, context and inter-relation.
• The cult of the expert that values highly trained specialists over broadly educated generalists, has lead to some successes, but also has severe limitations in situations where several different problems interact and where interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation is needed.
• Piecemeal thinking leading to piecemeal solutions dominates contemporary management and decision making, as a result of the cult of the expert.
• Short-term thinking makes us oblivious to the long-term dynamics of mutual interaction and co-evolution between natural and cultural processes, as many patterns of events are not understood as whole processes unfolding over different time-scales.
• The non-holistic nature of modern education has left many, if not most, people with conceptual frameworks that are too narrow to allow holistic thinking.

This is an excerpt from the Worldview dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in Design for Sustainability. The course will start on 1 June 2020, so find out more now and book your space!

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