Humanity is facing a number of messy problems, with complex unpredictable changes happening in the world. (Richard Bawden in “Messy Issues, Worldviews and Systemic Competencies” 2010). These problems have come about largely as the unintended consequences of the increasing modernisation of societies, as a the wondrous advantages of western civilisation spread around the world. Bawden raises several questions about what we can learn about solving these problems, but also about how we learn to learn. He also raises the question of how our worldview can influence both these levels of learning.
I am glad to be at the end of the Hawkesbury tradition section. On the whole it was great but in the opening and closing chapters 3&6 I found an underlying anti-Western/anti-science tone to it, at times even making moral judgements with the non-Western world. On the positive side it has given me an example of how our worldviews affect the way we perceive the world, which was one of the major themes of the section.
“The tragedy is that the root cause of the majority of these threatening issues lies with much of what we ourselves have been doing in and to the world about us in the name of the development of our Western industrialised civilisation”
I find it frustrating and somewhat ‘colonial’ the way he dismisses the entire non-Western world as uncivilized, and then blames Western civilisation for all the world’s problems. Is he suggesting that the people outside of the West should have been left in their pristine and primitive states? Do they not deserve or wish to develop? Is it up to the West to solve the world’s problems?
He continues further to state that we (i.e. Western civilisation) are seemingly incapable of learning how to improve the world and uses a metaphor of ‘fouling our nest’. Does the planet not belong to the rest of the world? The underlying unstated assumption is that much of the worlds development and progress is as a result of Western scientific tradition, and that it is all bad. Science and modernisation is no longer confined to the West, and there are significant positive aspects to science.
I would re-write his paragraph as:
“The tragedy is that the root cause of the majority of these threatening issues lies with much of what we ourselves have been doing in and to the world about us in the name of the development of our Western industrialised civilisation”
Armando Spagnolo 