This is a very thought-provoking interview with Joe Brewer, a colleague of George Lakoff and how paradigm shifts come about.
I like his statement about diversity: "Biodiversity is actually very healthy for sustainability because one
thing we need is resilience. We need to be able to adapt to changing
circumstances and if all of the cultures of the world are too similar to
each other and if the way they all align is not healthy, then we are
more at risk, and global civilisation could collapse completely. When
we talk about cultural change driving change in economics and politics,
then we can find the strength of culture at different places and bring
them together and drive innovation by plugging into places where
cultures come into contact with each other."
Very interesting read.
-Angela
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
By Bhavani Prakash
Joe Brewer
Seattle based JOE BREWER is one amongst
a rare and emerging breed of interdisciplinary experts around the
world. In an era of specialisations, what’s missing is a holistic view
that cuts across various discipines, whether it comes to addressing
climate change or societal change. Brewer steps in with his unique
perspectives on ‘cognitive policy.’ As Founder and Director of Cognitive Policy Works,
he paints a sweeping and fascinating canvas covering the human mind,
human behaviour, public policy, social media and societal change.
EWTT: Tell us about how you came to be an interdisciplinary expert?
Joe Brewer: Even from a very young age I was
fascinated by two things. One was patterns in the world, and the other
was people. As a people watcher, I was always interested in how the
world works. I was brought up on a farm in the country, so I didn’t
have access to broad education, but when I went to college, I had a full
right scholarship so I could study anything that I wanted. Now, I
actually have degrees in philosophy, physics and applied mathematics.
While I was studying those things, I got very interested in complexity,
which is basically the study of how unexpected things happen, and how
they can arise from very simple inputs.
When I was starting to study complexity, I entered a collateral
program in atmospheric sciences. I got exposed to global warming and
what’s called anthropogenic climate change, which is changes in climate
patterns caused by human activities. Somehow in the midst of it all, I
realised that another physical scientist (I was working as a physicist
at the time) studying climate change wasn’t really going to be the
critical factor in helping us address our global ecological problems.
EWTT: What did you realise to be the critical factor?
Joe Brewer: I realised that the big problem was
human behaviour that is prominent in culture, values and norms of
society, the way our institutions are set up, our politics and economics
– all the things that have to do with how people make decisions every
day. When I left the university with a Masters degree in Atmospheric
Sciences, and a strong interest in learning about human behaviour, I
started taking in what is called
cognitive science.
It’s a cross-cutting set of approaches to understanding the human mind,
human thought and behaviour. It includes psychology, brain research,
linguistics, anthropology, computer science and several other fields.
Universities are mostly set up around disciplines, so you might be a
professor or study a program in history or economics or political
science, chemistry or biology – always within a field of knowledge. I
wasn’t in academia. I was out in the world, trying to solve a very
complex problem. My focus was on asking,
‘what do I need to solve this problem?’
This had me moving across many different disciplines to pull together
insights, analytic techniques and tools toward explaining how human
behaviour works, always with an eye towards sustainability.
EWTT: What have we learnt about human beings in the last
couple of decades about our mind and emotions, especially if we’re not
the calculating, rational individuals that economic models assume?
Joe Brewer: We have learnt an incredible
amount. Before the 1970s, every time a person made claims about the
human mind, they were basing it more on philosophical assumptions than
on observations and science. What happened from the 1970s onward is that
we had got specific enough about different parts of the mind to be able
to study them with rigour using scientific method, as a result of which
a huge amount has been learnt about the mind and about human behaviour.
One of the basic things, if you’re familiar with the works of the
philosopher in the late 1600s, Rene Descartes, is the problem he
articulated that is now known as mind-body dualism. It’s a problem of
saying that if our bodies are physical but our minds (related to the
intellectual and mental) are not physical, how can the mind and body
connect with each other?
One of the big realisations that has come out of many of the fields
of research is that the minds that we have are not separate from our
bodies, they actually emerge from the physical world, and are continuous
within our planet. The general name for that is the philosophy of
‘embodiment’. Embodiment means that our minds are part of our bodily
experience. They arise from the kinds of bodies that we have and the
kind of brains that we have, the kinds of physical and cultural
environments that we have evolved in as well as develop in throughout
our lifespans.
EWTT: How do you link this understanding to something as large-scale as public policy, or what you call ‘cognitive policy?’
Joe Brewer: I call it ‘cognitive policy’ –
cognitive referring to the way people understand. I was working a few
years ago at a thinktank in Berkeley, California called the Rockridge
Institute with a famous cognitive scientist called George Laykoff. He
and I were looking at the language that people use and the ways that
people think about environmental policy and our goal was to improve the
way in which climate legislation is developed. We were working with
members of Congress, members of environmental organisations and in the
midst of our attempts to explain why the human mind is so important for
policy, we found that the language people were using to talk about
policy was too limited. We needed to distinguish between different parts
of policy. The way that we ended up breaking it down was that we
separated policy into the material component and what we call the
cognitive component.
The
material component is the nuts and bolts of how
the policy works and the material consequences of the policy. Let’s say
we’re talking about healthcare policy. The nuts and bolts might be
something like if a person makes a certain amount of money, he qualifies
for a certain service, and there might be a policy mechanism that says
what that is. The consequence may be that people who make less money are
getting greater benefits because they can’t afford health care.
What we call the
cognitive component of policy is
the values, the moral perspective that motivated people to hear about
the issue in the first place and the ways that they understand the
situation, how they characterise what the issues and concerns are, and
how that reflects a deeper set of assumptions about the problems and
what the solutions should be.
The difference is that the cognitive component of policy has to do
with how people think about the world, what their concerns are, what
they are motivated toward, what they consider to be right and wrong and
good or bad in any situation – so basically the deeper motivations for a
particular policy context.
Let’s take another example of climate legislation. One of things that
climate legislation needs to be is popular, by which the majority of
citizens, at least in a democratic country, need to support it. They
need to want the policy to stay in place. The reason for that is that
dealing with climate change is a long term problem. So when the policy
is put in place, it has to last not just for several years but several
decades. It needs to be popular enough that it can’t be dismantled by
an uprising of citizens nodding in a different way that call for it to
be repealed. For them to find it appealing it has to align with their
values and concerns.
EWTT: What happens if the public perceives it as a short
term sacrifice even though there may be a long term benefit? Let’s take
for example a carbon tax, as in Australia. What if the public sees it as
a burden?
Joe Brewer: An important discovery made by
George Laykoff and Mark Johnson in the late 1970s, is when you look at
the way human beings use language we don’t see the world in a literal
way. We understand the world through metaphors. So if you look at
carbon tax, the important thing to think about is what metaphors are
used to think about taxes.
I’ll give you two examples of metaphors that could shape whether a
tax is popular or not. One would be that a tax is a burden, and you
don’t want to be burdened. So a tax is something you want to minimise or
get rid of.
Alternatively if you use the metaphor that taxes are an investment
then it’s a different way of thinking of taxes. Then people might see
that there are benefits that they get from society that only come about
because everyone is investing in the infrastructure of society. You may
say you have an educated workforce if you invest in public education.
You may say you have public safety if you invest in medical science and
hospitals. You have a safe and fair society if citizens invest in
courts, and law and contracts.
So thinking about what makes a policy popular is partly about which
metaphor people understand the policies around. Do they understand tax
policy as a burden or do they understand it as an investment? In one
sense it’s negative and in another sense it’s positive. It’s an
important way of thinking about the carbon tax in Australia , whether
it’s popular or not will probably depend on whether the citizens of
Australia are feeling that they are investing in their future to make
their economy and environment more resilient and robust in a time of
change and uncertainty, or do they see it as needing all the money they
can get now. If they see the taxes as a burden to them now, then it is
taking away their ability to get what they need.
You can imagine the significance now of media and of advocacy where
there will be groups that will advocate for people to think about taxes
as a burden , and another group for people to think about taxes as an
investment. An important thing to keep in mind is that taxes are simply
not one or the other, but how people think about them shapes their
appeal. The advocacy for one way of thinking versus the other will have
significant impact on whether people support the policy or not.
EWTT: Is it possible to make a tax or the removal of a
subsidy, sound like an investment, especially in a developing country
like India where there are huge inequalities of income and where there
are millions of poor people can’t think beyond making both ends meet?
Joe Brewer: There are two important observations
that are helpful in addressing that issue. One observation is that
people have a hierarchy of needs. They are only going to be able to
think of new wants and ideas and take time to build perspective if they
have full bellies and safe environments. If someone is starving and is
immersed in danger including the danger of sickness or the danger of
violence, he or she is going to have a very hard time thinking about
larger, more nuanced issues. So one challenge in addressing the
tremendous social injustices that come about with sustainability is that
many of the people, are also in a position that they are least capable
of doing long term planning that is strategic, as their basic
circumstances is about very hard survival.
Another challenge is that we are hardwired in a way that makes it
easier for us to see simple relationships better than complex
relationships, which are sometimes called systemic relationships. To be
able to change fossil fuel systems and energy systems, as well as
address tremendous inequities in society and deal with the political
ramifications along the way, one of the big challenges is that we need
to be able to see the nuances of the system and then redesign them so
that they begin to work better. That’s a difficult challenge – as human
beings have a very hard time seeing systems. We tend to simplify
systems – in what is called a metonomy.
A metonomy is where a part of something stands for the whole thing.
For example, if you’re at a restaurant where the waitress says, ‘the ham
sandwich didn’t leave a tip’ it doesn’t literally mean a ham sandwich,
but the person who ordered and ate it and left without leaving a tip.
That’s just using the word, ‘ham sandwich’ to represents a person. Or
when one says Delhi talks to Calcutta, it’s not the cities talking to
each other but the leaders. In each case we use a simplification to
represent something more complex. So when we’re dealing with these very
complex problems, we have to basically counter our tendency to
oversimplify. When we talk about poor people , who don’t have access to
quality education, who don’t have the emotional resilience that comes
with safe environments, they don’t know whether they’re going to sleep
tomorrow, these are complicating questions if we are going to approach
the kind of issues you raised.
EWTT: Politics and economics go hand in hand, and
powerful interest groups and lobbies create resistance to change. What
then is going to bring about change?
Joe Brewer: At first pass, changes in society are
always lead by culture, so if you change the culture, you change the
politics, you change the economics. It’s actually much harder to use
politics to change culture. One good example is how in 1865, all of the
slaves were freed. It was a hundred years later that in 1965 that the
Civil Rights Act was passed. There was a legal change, but the culture
hadn’t changed yet. And then it took a hundred years to change the
culture enough to accept a change in policy that would secure the
rights, that would make it legally defensible to protect the rights of
minority citizens. We only started dealing with racial inequalities in a
systematic way since the 1960s onward, so the culture changed first
then the politics followed.
So one thing that is very important for us to think about when we
talk about changing behaviour is that ultimately yes, we have to change
our politics, we have to change our economic systems because the way
they are set up now cannot lead to sustainable outcomes, but to make
those changes in political and economic systems we have to look at
culture, we have to look at the stories that people tell themselves
about where they come from, and what it means to lead a good life.
There has been a major global trend in the last century which has
been the rise of global consumerism and consumer marketing. Consumerism
tells us stories of opulence and material success as measures of
meaning and quality and happiness. So those stories are antithetical,
they are the opposite of what we need to have to lead to a sustainable
outcome. So we need to change consumer culture, that’s something that
gets deep into the lives of people. When we talk on a global scale, it
doesn’t mean we need one big monoculture that’s the same everywhere, but
we can celebrate the unique features of different cultures that are
resonant with sustainability.
India, I discovered during my visit, is an incredibly diverse country
with so many different subcultures and languages and religions.
Biodiversity is actually very healthy for sustainability because one
thing we need is resilience. We need to be able to adapt to changing
circumstances and if all of the cultures of the world are too similar to
each other and if the way they all align is not healthy, then we are
more at risk, and global civilisation could collapse completely. When
we talk about cultural change driving change in economics and politics,
then we can find the strength of culture at different places and bring
them together and drive innovation by plugging into places where
cultures come into contact with each other.
We’re seeing that now in this global social movement, that firstly
has been called the Arab Spring and then Occupy Wall Street, people from
different cultures are describing it in a local way. Members of this
movement in Spain are dealing with issues that have to do with Spanish
culture, people in Greece are dealing with Greek culture, people in
Lebanon are dealing with Lebanese culture, people in the US dealing with
US culture. At a deep level, they are taking the paradigm of the global
economy and they are suggesting a different way that people can come
together to solve their problems, which means they’re suggesting an
evolution of culture.
EWTT: You enjoy studying deep history, and since you’ve
mentioned Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, do you think change comes
about in a disruptive way, or is it a gradual process that leads to a
tipping point? How do you think change is going to come about now when
we most need it, in the face of the climate crisis?
Joe Brewer: Well, the way that big change always
happens is there are periods when it doesn’t seem like things are
changing very much, and then are short periods of time when things
change very quickly. You could think of it as a ‘preparation’ stage and a
‘release’ stage.
Looking at globalisation as a process that goes back to the 1500s,
and even the 1400s, there was global trade and then in the 1600s, we saw
the global rise of corporations and in the 1600s and 1700s we had the
creation of nation states. We had these big structural changes over
several hundred years. And then we had the rise of market economies –
they’ve only been around a few hundred years. There have been markets,
there have been bazaars, the bazaar in Delhi has been around for much
longer than a few hundred years, but the idea of a global market economy
has been fairly new, it’s maybe only four hundred years old.
Given this deeper context, what we’re looking at now is a big change
that has been coming for quite some time. I actually go deeper than
that, and I like to think of it as three major periods of human cultural
evolution. There was the period before agriculture, where we mostly
lived in hunter-gatherer societies, and then we had the period where
people learnt to domesticate plants and grow food, and that allowed
human settlements to form and to grow. An interesting thing about human
settlements is that if you have more food than you need, then you can
grow your population. And if you can grow your population, you need more
land, and that is the dynamics of empire and conquest. So empire
emerged from agriculture.
About 10,000 years into the age of empire is coming to an end in one
of two ways. Either it is going to end by collapse of human
civilisation, that we basically wipe ourselves out and there will be an
Easter Island kind of story. Or we change to a different paradigm that
is not conquest. Now conquest and empire is now called ‘economic
growth.’ It’s the same thing. We have an economic model that requires
that the value of the currency for the economy must grow. And then if it
doesn’t grow it becomes static and collapses just like when your heart –
your heart has two dynamic modes – it’s either beating regularly or
you’re dead, and there’s nothing in between. Once your heart stops
beating regularly it or it becomes rheumatic. You have a heart attack.
Either it starts beating again or you’re dead. For a growth economy it’s
the same thing, it keeps growing at an exponential rate, or it
collapses.
So the changes that have to happen have to happen at a very deep
level, at the level of a paradigm. An interesting thing that can make
us hopeful is that a paradigm level change happens very quicky. It’s
like an earthquake. There’s a slow buildup and then an unpredictable
release, and that change, that dynamic of slow build-up of pressure and
release is how all physical systems change their state of matter. It’s
just like when you start heating up water, the temperature continuously
rises to a level where it very quickly goes from a liquid to a gas and
vaporises the water. That time of change happens over a very small
change of temperature, in a short period of time.
So what we’re seeing now with these global social movements, is an
acceleration of change that goes back at least 3 decades. In a global
sense, we can see the rise of the environmental movement, which started
about a hundred years ago and catapulted in the 1960s with Rachel
Carson, and what’s called the modern environmental movement. We’ve seen
the beginning of the collapse of the empire with post colonialism, from
the independence of India, the rise of nation states, and social
democracies. Going back 70 or 80 years, fairly quick and big changes
have been happening. Now it’s much faster still.
Let’s take ‘Occupy Wall Street’ – it has been incredibly successful,
in a short period of time. It has been only with us for a few months and
it has already changed the way that people talk about the economy and
social issues all around the world. Now maybe Occupy Wall Street won’t
lead to the changes that we need, but the scale of impact would have
been very difficult to predict. Imagine you were sitting and watching
the world in the beginning of August 2011, you probably wouldn’t have
anticipated that something like Occupy Wall Street would have come into
being and have such an effect in the last few months.
That is an indicator of how quickly change is coming and the fact
that change is coming quickly tells us that we are in the middle of one
of those phased transitions. Change is happening very quickly because
the entire system is reorienting itself. I think there’ll be a much
bigger, deeper change in the next few years.
EWTT: Do you think that social media has played a role in this?
Brewer: Absolutely, social media plays many roles.
Even one step deeper than social media is the global digital
communications system- the internet, satellite communication systems,
mobile phones – the whole system, and in all of that, the software that
lets people in creative ways – facebook or twitter or email or whatever
else you’re thinking of in terms of technology.
What that digital communication system does is it democratises
information. If you go back and look at what the printing press did to
organised religion in the 1600s and 1700s, where prior to that the
Catholic Church in Europe did everything in Latin. All the information
was kept secret from people as they didn’t know Latin. They were only
told what the leaders of the church wanted them to know. With the
printing press it became possible for a lot of people to learn how to
read, and share information. That automatically changed the way that
organised religion worked.
A similar change is now happening with the digital communication
system, social media and the internet. Information is now being
democratised just as profoundly as the rise of the printing press. The
fact that we can have instantaneous communication and that we can
organise ourselves at effectively zero economic cost really helps – it
takes very little time, money and energy to send a tweet, or post a link
on facebook, and people can organise themselves around what they are
concerned or passionate about. That ability changes the fundamentals of
the economy, as now the economy is now driven by what is called pull
marketing instead of push marketing. It means that people are able to
seek out what they find desirable, rather than selecting amongst the
choices that are presented to them. It’s much easier to find
like-minded people and we’re seeing that in social movements, that
people are able to organise themselves very quickly, in real time,
sometimes with hundreds of thousands of people organising themselves
over small periods of time, like a few hours. Social media is allowing
that to happen, and the organised powers in the political and economic
system are not that fast , they’re not able to keep up. The pace of
change in that dynamic is faster than they can control, that is what is
causing the breakdown of the systems under control – it is allowing
change to happen.
EWTT: What are your suggestions to become more effective at a community level?
Joe Brewer: One of the frameworks that I was
honoured to get to be a part of was “Identity Campaigning.” The basic
idea of identity campaigning is that people’s collective behaviour in
society is shaped by their social identities. Social identities are in
two forms. One form is the way that individuals see themselves as good
or bad, and the other is at a community level, where there are shared
identities, and where there are role models.
It is important to consider social identities, because they include
emotions. Think about the social identity of what it means to be a good
parent. It’s going to change from one culture to another, one community
to another. But the social identity is understood collectively by the
people in the community. So as you’re thinking about how to be an
effective advocate, be mindful of the social identities that you select,
that you want to highlight, and want to draw attention to, both in
terms of the social identities that are positive , that people will
resonate with, that you think people will want to be like, and also the
identities that are negative, the ones that they don’t want to be, that
they would be against. In order to be effective, you need to orient
people around a different set of social identities than they had before.
With the “rational actor” theory in economics we are taught that
being selfish is good, because if you’re selfish you’re being
productive, and as a trickle down effect, it brings wealth to other
people. Now we’ve figured out, that doesn’t actually work, but
unfortunately that idea is still very common. When people aspire to
serve themselves, the social identities they are elevating is
individualism, and suppressing identities that have to do with their
communities.
One way that comes out is that they feel responsibility to themselves
but they don’t feel responsibility to others. To get people to feel
responsibility to others, we need to remind them that they have
identities that they consider to be already a part of themselves, like
being a good parent. A lot of people will recognise that as being a part
of their identity, that has a social responsibility component, that is
responsive to the needs of others around them.
I think in a deep way, it’s all about activating empathy and
compassion in people. The more that they feel compassion and the
responsibility to act in compassion towards others around them, the more
they will work together to solve collective problems. As you’re
thinking about social identity, one way to answer yourself is, out of
the identities that I am elevating in conversations, which ones are
increasing compassion and responsibility toward others and which ones
are decreasing the same? Just asking that question will orientate your
thinking quite a lot, and help you become more effective.
EWTT: People have good intentions but they seem to be
too preoccupied. The general refrain is, “we’d love to do more for
others and the world, but we’re too busy.” How does one respond to
that?
Joe Brewer: One thing is a lot of it has to do with
design. We’ve designed a global economic system that treats workers
like gears in a machine. Machines tend to get faster with each passing
generation. We’ve seen people find themselves working more and more, and
find themselves engaged in activities more and more which keep them
very busy. One thing to remember is that systems change on their own
time scale, and one thing we’re seeing that a lot of people are busy
working, doing all the things they’re doing in their lives, and they
don’t have time for others. It’s difficult to come out of those
patterns.
They often have really good reasons to be busy. Someone might be
working two jobs as he wants to send their child to college. What we’re
seeing with a lot of the global social movements that are successful
right now like the Arab Spring, is that capable, educated people can’t
find employment and there’s a telling observation that these are people
who would be too busy to save the world, except that the economy is not
serving them.
One thing we have to recognise is that change will happen when the
systems are ready to change. Our economic systems at a very deep level
have been poorly designed. They perpetuate injustice. They make gaps
between the wealthy and the poor larger with time. They eventually come
to a point when they become unstable and break down.
If we want to influence the behaviour of people, we need to engage
people proactively when they are paying attention. But they may not pay
attention if they are overwhelmed with information and they’re already
busy. Our strategies may not be able to operate at a system level scale
to be able to change what their choices are, but when the system starts
to stall and change, and the old dynamics are no longer stable and
people are looking for different ways to be, then there will be
tremendous opportunity to engage with them in meaningful conversations
about deep change.
Joe Brewer can be contacted via info[at]cognitivepolicyworks.com. Follow Brewer’s works through his website Cognitive Policy Works.
