Left brain, right brain, and complexity

Image found on mootblog.

At the heart of this post lies a simple idea. 

The idea that the complexity that envelops our lives today is an asset, and not a liability. And that it is up to us to seize the day, as it were, and use the extraordinary resources of the 21st century that go way beyond anything that was dreamed possible even 25 years ago to create a richer and the richer, more diverse, and, quite conceivably, a more just world.

For this to happen, though, a few collective paradigm shifts must take place.

1. Stop viewing complexity as complication. This is a relatively easy one, at least to talk about. Complication has to do with how we experience complexity when we are afraid of it and worried that we can't see the end of the tunnel. Complexity is, like the sun, the sky and the clouds. Complication is the added layer of our emotional experience of complexity and our instinctive recoil from the additional thinking strain complexity puts on us. The thinking strain comes in part from the fact that indeed, we cannot cope with complexity if we don't use the right tool. And so far, since the dawn of the industrial age when we strated making the world more complex, we have mostly handled complexity with the wrong tool, i.e the left brain. But now, the world's complexity has outfoxed our left brains. We need to start thinking different, to quote no one in particular.
2. Accept that we can build on complexity with right brain activities. Left brain activities will try to dissect it and it will exhaust itself at the task and surrender in frustration: complexity becomes complication. While sounds suspiciously like the previous paragraph, there is one big difference: the vantage point and the value judgment that comes with that vantage point. For many people until today, right brain stuff is for arty people, not real men. Our schools teach us mathematics, reasoning, science, chemistry, even history in analytical, linear and sequential terms. However, as the world is increasingly telling us itself, it is non linear, patterned and parallel and requires synthetic, creative and big picture approaches from the next generation.
3. Create an educational system that is up to dealing with the challenges of the 21st century (and the points mentioned above). They are huge, diverse, and complex and therefore require huge, diverse and simple approaches to solve them. The way our Western type educational systems are set up tend to create dysfunctional people unable to master the skills required for the new age. 
4. Understand that we are inextricably a technological society, and that, as such, we must embrace technological evolution and not fight it. There is much to dislike about the technification of the world. But there was much to dislike about the agricultural world order with its short life spans, hard labour and poor living conditions and there was much to dislike about the industrial age with its labour exploitation, ruthless taylorism (Ford example) and smog pollution. So on the whole, I believe, we are much better off this century than at any other time in history.

Therefore, right brain thinking, a new type of education and creative use of available technologies will produce a radically different world that what we have known. 

And here again, the process is not linear. Like in any major societal endeavour there will be (and there are already) many dissenting voices, many (legitimate) concerns and a few luddite resistors. In the societal evolution process of the coming 25 years, many will feel left out, many will be left out for fact and many will fight.

I don't think that it will hugely impact the change process that we are experiencing. Because of its inherent diversity and non linear evolutionary process, the upcoming century will be hugely more resilient than any preceding age. It can include the resistors, the nay-sayers (as well as the overzealous) and will take on a life of its own. 

Once again, the collective will be bigger than the individual. Individualism comes from left brain thinking. The sense of belonging, of being part of a bigger something that underpins and guides our existence is, in my mind, right brain stuff. 

However, I would not like to create the impression of a new dichotomy where left is bad and right is good (although all our Western languages do already convey that impression…). I also do not want to glorify the right brain over the left brain or to castigate the history of the past 250 years since the beginning of the enlightenment (the rise of the left brain).

I see more of the third phase of a dialectic movement whereby the 21st century will use the whole mind - both left and right brain functions equally well and as mutually completing and complementary (if not complimentary) tools. In order to achieve that, we need to resolutely refocus the left-brainers of this world towards the opportunities that the more powerful usage of our intellectual resources can contribute to our understanding of the world (left), the creation of the next generation world (right) and the powerful integration of the new concepts and realities (left and right).    

Now let's think about that creatively, in a more complex way.