Edgar Morin has been advocating a shift towards complexity thinking for many decades. In doing so he has laid down a tantalizing challenge to think more complexly about everything from self to society to planet, while suggesting a creative, dynamic view of the world. His contribution to the paradigm of complexity depends on the fusion of Western and Eastern thinking. .

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Albert Einstein: [Many problems] cannot be solved from the level of consciousness which created [them].

Edgar Morin: "A Mental Revolution of Considerably Greater Proportions than the Copernican Revolution."

"Will the struggle for the survival of humankind be transformed into the struggle for the birth of humanity? Always and everywhere, domination and exploitation have prevailed over mutual assistance and fellowship. Until now, religions of love and ideologies of brotherhood have brought more hatred and disagreement than love and fellowship. Throughout history, madness and unconsciousness have more often than not swept away reason and consciousness. Why should folly and unconsciousness, one more time, not settle our destiny?"

Introduction

We have been thoroughly conditioned to look to the external world for the answers to our problems. Likewise, we have been taught to forgo the kind of introspection that enables us to observe our very own thought processes, which, on a global basis, have set our problematic situations in motion in the first place.

Edgar Morin, age 100, is one of the leading systems theorists alive today. He has originated and popularized the term "complex thinking," and his writing exemplifies this fresh approach to thought. Complex thinking can be thought of as a "kissing cousin" to critical thinking.

Morin presents an alternative to the traditional assumptions and methods of inquiry in our time. He argues that our very approach to solving problems is fatally flawed.

Morin's method outlines a way of approaching problem-solving that does not reduce or separate, and does justice to the complexity of life and experience. In his sociopolitical works, such as his prescient studies on the USSR and totalitarianism, the nature and concept of Europe, and his "manifesto for the 21st century" - Homeland Earth - Morin applied this method to the global crisis, which he calls this "planetary Iron Age."

Complex thought involves a meta-re-organization of knowledge that goes against the grain of our accepted habits of mind, which emphasize analysis, reductionism, either/or thinking, and the quantitative over the qualitative.

Complex thought brings in the knower, circularity, systems, uncertainty, and possibility, all of which are not part of the education of the average western student; indeed, they are all-too-often the very things they have been discouraged from exploring.

"Meta-vision" and Oversimplification

Morin has clearly articulated that one of the most crucial dilemmas facing our world today can be described as "meta-problem" - a problem that is not limited to "real-world" issues such as world hunger or poverty, but which is revealed in the way we think about and formulate solutions to these external problems.

He takes to task our widely practiced thought-pattern: the sort of "good guy/bad guy" cartoon caricature of events and processes, which in reality are multidimensional - involving a multitude of forces and recursive loops.

Yet, as Morin points out, whenever this kind of oversimplification occurs, another vicious cycle is set in motion, for, "the more problems become multidimensional, the less chance there is to grasp their multidimensionality... Incapable of seeing the planetary context in all its complexity, blind intelligence fosters unconsciousness and irresponsibility. It has become the bearer of death."

Morin describes what he calls "disjunctive (either/or) thinking" as - a myopic kind of intelligence that "nips in the bud all opportunities for comprehension and reflection, eliminating at the same time all chances of corrective judgment or a long- term view."

Morin's blunt description of this compartmentalized, linear mindset as: "... mutilated thinking that considers itself expert and blind intelligence that considers itself rational."

Speaking of humanity's desperate need for "a reform in thinking," Morin describes the all-too-common "black/white," "right/wrong," "either/or" approach to solving problems as a mode of thought that is "simplistic in the extreme, which underlies so many dialogues, [leading] inevitably to dead-ends... [This occurs in part because it is] blind to inter-retro-actions and circular causality."

Instead, we need a type of thinking that tries to discern interdependencies - a radical thinking (which gets to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and an organizational or systemic thinking.

Morin argues that, whether we realize it or not, problems are spatially and temporally interdependent; therefore, only a complex kind of thinking (which he also describes as "holographic," "recursive," and "dialogic") can deal with the "inseparability of problems... in which each depends on the other." Such a reform in thinking, Morin summarizes, implies a mental revolution "of considerably greater proportions than the Copernican revolution."

Implications

Morin continues inviting all human beings to contemplate another vital dimension: the reality of runaway positive feedback, an acceleration that is currently "overtaking all sectors of life... The rate of change is itself accelerating. The question now becomes whether we have crossed a critical threshold in the process of acceleration/amplification that could lead to an explosion or implosion involving any number of deadly global threats."

Morin's work does not come from an ivory-tower attempt to escape life, or to control it through intricate theoretical frameworks and maps, but rather to enable us to immerse ourselves in it more deeply, and to provide the sciences with tools to account more adequately for the lived complexity of life.

He describes his work as developing a method that does not "mutilate," does not fragment and abstract, does not do violence to life, and is not unidimensional, anemic, or antiseptic.

Further Implications of Complex and Simplistic Thinking

Morin's complex thought does not provide a "quick fix'. A quick fix is precisely what is not needed at this point, although it is very tempting to opt for it. The problems humanity is facing are themselves the result of a kind of thinking that is reductive and disjunctive - of a machine-like thinking that simplifies, assuming that problems should be neatly framed, answers should look rational, and results should be quantifiable.

But this knowledge is limited and limiting. It eliminates the complex - and eliminating complexity is precisely what we cannot afford to do in this moment. Complex thought leads us to metacognition - it is not about an identification with our thoughts and their content, but rather observing how we think and why.

We are living in a time when many, if not all, of our concepts seem to be failing, a time of conceptual emergency. This can be called a "post-normal" time of great change and uncertainty exacerbated by "fake news" and a "post-truth" condition.

Hyperspecialization

Morin notes that our current trend of hyper-specialization keeps us from seeing the global (which it fragments) and the essential (which it obscures). According to Morin, essential problems are never fragmented; yet, tackling global problems has never been more essential.

Our general culture strongly leans toward abstracting all ideas and information and seeing them in the absence of context. Morin states that disciplinary scientific and technological culture fragments, disjoins and compartmentalizes knowledge, "making it increasingly difficult to place it in context. Cutting thought up into disciplines makes us unable to grasp 'that which is woven together' or, in the original meaning of the term, the complex."

Reduction and disjunction

Morin writes:

Up to the mid-twentieth century, most scientific disciplines obeyed the principle of reduction of the knowledge of a whole to knowledge of its parts, as if the organization of an entity did not produce new [emergent] qualities or properties with respect to the parts taken in isolation.

The principle of reduction inevitably results in reduction of the complex to the simple. It applies to living human complexities the mechanical determinist logic of artificial machines. And it may obscure the truth and eliminate all elements that cannot be measured and quantified, taking the human out of what is human, the passions, emotions, sorrows and joys. Further, when the principle of reduction is applied in strict obedience to the determinist postulate it obscures what is fortuitous, new, inventive.

Because we were taught to separate, compartmentalize and isolate learning instead of making connections, the whole of our knowledge forms an unintelligible puzzle. Interactions, retroactions, and complexities, lost in the no-man's land between different disciplines, become invisible. The major human problems disappear, obscured by specific technical problems. The inability to organize scattered compartmentalized learning leads to atrophy of the natural mental disposition [to see things in context].

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Morin writes: "Fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanized, disjunctive, reductionist intelligence breaks the 'world-complex' into disjointed fragments, fractures problems, separates what is connected, makes the multidimensional unidimensional. This intelligence is nearsighted and often goes blind."

Thus, we find ourselves in a vicious cycle of increasingly multidimensional problems, and an increasing incapacity to think multidimensionally; the crisis worsens as fast as the incapacity to reflect on the crisis increases; the more planetary our problems, the more they are left unthought. Blind intelligence, unable to envisage the planetary context, makes us unaware, unconcerned and irresponsible.

Edgar Morin: Background

At the beginning of the 20th century, Morin's family migrated from the Ottoman city of Salonica to Marseille[18] and later to Paris, where Edgar was born. He is of Judeo-Spanish (Sephardic) origin.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Morin assisted refugees and joined the French Resistance. Morin, the Jewish resistance fighter, lived in mortal danger during the war years. While a member of the French Resistance he adopted the pseudonym Morin, which he continues to use. He joined the French Communist Party in 1941, which he eventually left.

In addition to being the UNESCO Chair of Complex Thought, Morin is known as a founder of "trans-disciplinarity" and holds honorary doctorates in a variety of social science fields from 21 universities (Messina, Geneva, Milan, Bergamo, Thessaloniki, La Paz, Odense, Perugia, Cosenza, Palermo, Nuevo León, Universite' Laval à Que'bec, Brussels, Barcelona, Guadalajara, Valencia, Vera Cruz, Santiago, the Catholic University of Porto Alegre, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, and Candido Mendes University (Rio de Janeiro)).

The University of Messina in Sicily, Ricardo Palma University in Lima, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the French National Research Center in Paris, have established research centers based on his transdisciplinary methods and philosophy.[25] In addition, the Multiversidad Mundo Real Edgar Morin, a university based on his work, was established in Mexico.

He has been recognized for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology[B1] , ecology, education, and systems biology. Though less well known in the anglophone world due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Europe, and Latin America.

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Clearly, if we wish to preserve humanity and the biosphere, we need to expand our awareness to be able to observe and change our ingrained thought processes.

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Authors Bio:

I work as a psychotherapist with an emphasis on transformational learning - a blend of psychoanalytic and transpersonal approaches, and am the author of Self Actualization and Unselfish Love and co-author of Families Helping Families: Living with Schizophrenia, as well as Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation. My interests and life have taken parallel courses, which together have woven a complex tapestry: spirituality and meditation on the one hand, and political psychology on the other. I have studied and practiced with Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Mata Amritanandamayi and Gurumayi Chidvilasanda, and continue a daily practice of meditation. My early political education began with the writings of the founding fathers. Over time this led to involvement in the anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear movements. I was interested in the powerful molding of prevailing political and economic dynamics by what C. Wright Mills called the military-industrial complex. In time I have come to the conclusion that, despite various interest groups' attempts to minimize or trivialize the concept, the deep state is a reality - decisively and covertly shaping events on both the domestic and international fronts. I am interested in an exceptionally promising alternative source of energy that has yet to see the light of day. I see the current period as a precarious form of initiation rite into the beginning of adulthood for our species, and hope to do whatever I can to help us reach this goal. Meanwhile, I seek daily to recall the reality that the same awareness (the Ever-Present-Origin) looks out through all of our eyes, and actualize this in my relationship with other beings.