Global Challenges – Learning

RELATED TERMS: Global Challenges; Wicked Problems – Wicked Challenges

According to Nicholas Maxwell (2021), humanity is confronted by two great challenges of learning:

• learning about the universe; and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe; and
• learning how to create civilisation.

The first challenge, Maxwell contends, has been addressed by modern science and technology from the 17th century onwards. The second, how to create civilisation, remains problematic.

[Paraphrasing Maxwell’s challenges in terms of the debates ongoing within European philosophy and as applied in this website to design practices, it might be said that ‘creating civilisation’ is similar to, if not equivalent to, the task of ‘world-building’, in its socio-technical, socio-cultural, socio-economc and socio-ecological dimensions, in which design takes up both material and strategic roles. The question of how world-building relates to the Earth systems (or planetary or global systems) in which it takes place, both in harmony and in disharmony, might be a way of paraphrasing Maxwell’s first challenge – learning about the universe and our (changing, evolving?) place within it.

The challenges are inter-related. They may be posed as the challenge of how to formulate and understand the relationship between socio-genesis (development of civilisation) and techno-genesis (technological development). They both seem to precede each other: techno-genesis arrives through socio-genesis; and socio-genesis arrives through techno-genesis.

This brings to attention the socio-technical character of the human, at once animal-social, governed by a milieu that is ecosystemic, and machinic-technical, governed by a milieu that is economic. The animal-human-machinic ternary seems to open a path to a bio-techno-logic, a form of logic that must, but possibly cannot, reflexively take into account its own complex co-genesis. This is because, as a metaphor, it fails to acknowledge that the bio- and the socio- themselves arise from the eco- and that the eco-, perceived through a technical economy, is always mis-recognised because incomprehensible (cannot be wholly encompassed) within technical, economic terms. Clashes of civilisations are expressed as clashes of technologies in the form of weapons.

Maxwell (2021) acknowledges this duality and/or co-determination of the human when he says that,

“In order to promote human welfare, the problems we fundamentally need to solve are problems we encounter in life, problems of suffering, injustice, avoidable death. These are problems solved by action, by what we do, or refrain from doing. When knowledge or technological know-how is required, as it is in medicine or agriculture, it is always what this knowledge or technology enables us to do that solves the problem [address the challenge, AP], not the knowledge or technology as such. Thus, a kind of inquiry that helps promote human welfare rationally would give intellectual priority to the tasks of (a) articulating, and improving the articulation, of the problems of living [challenges of living, AP] to be solved, and (b) proposing and critically assessing possible solutions [possible responses, AP] — possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life, ways of living. Solving problems of knowledge and technology [proposing responses to epistemological and technical challenges, AP] would be important, but secondary. But knowledge-inquiry, in giving priority to problems of knowledge [epistemological challenges, AP], violates both (a) and (b). The two most basic rules of reason are violated, in a structural way.”

For Maxwell, modern universities, by prioritising knowledge creation and acquisition, fail to give priority to helping humanity solve challenges of living and thereby also fail to help the public improve its understanding of what our challenges are, and what we need to do about them.

Challenges of a socio-genetic character, because they necessarily imply techno-genetic challenges, are, or become, design issues. However, as is argued in this website, design practices are not solely or primarily problem solving. Perhaps the position could be stated in the following way: ‘wicked problems’ as ‘wicked challenges’, as that which design addresses, are more than simply problems; they relate to ways of living. Design, in one sense, then, seeks to intervene so as to prevent or avert ‘wicked challenges’ from arising, by proposing and enacting, for example, ways of living that seem to pre-empt certain kinds of suffering, particular injustices and avoidable deaths.

A ‘design practice’ orientation, articulated through explicit design pedagogies, within the university may therefore assist in shifting the academy away from its knowledge-creation priorities towards addressing the pressing eco-socio-cultural-techno-systemic matters, which Maxwell characterises as the creation of civilisation. Those civilisational priorities although woven through the practices of modern science and technology are often not prioritised by dominant techno-scientific practices and institutions, geared as they often are to weapons development in international power politics and to the development of instruments which facilitate the domination of ‘nature’ or Erath systems.

References

Maxwell, N.  (2021) How universities have betrayed reason and humanity – and what’s to be done about it, Frontiers in Sustainability, Available at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2021.631631/full [Accessed 22 August 2021]