A lecture presenting the ideas in Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability. Making a case against the present use of "sustainability."

1. ISE/CHRMS Workshop March 5, 2014
1
Flourishing, Not Sustainability, Should Be Our Goal
John R. Ehrenfeld
Let me start with a question. How many of you have “bad habits?” I see many hands. What
do you think makes them “bad”? In the interest of time, I’ll answer my own question. They are
habits because you repeat them over and over again in response to some internal trigger. They
are bad because while they may do what you wanted, they also produce something undesired,
that is, they have unintended consequences. Some may say that they have “side effects” implying
something inconsequential, but that is misleading. The bad result is just as much a consequence
of the habit as is the desired outcome.
This simple question is very important in thinking and talking about unsustainability. I know
many of you came today to hear a talk about sustainability. I may disappoint you if you did. I
will talk about what’s on your mind, but without the use of the word, sustainability, wherever I
can. I’ll explain why in a few minutes.
What brings us together is, I would guess, a shared concern over a number of worldly
situations that seem to be going badly. Our lists would contain many of the same items, say:
climate change, inequality, poverty, pollution, habitat destruction, and more. Let me call the
constellation of these, as others do, unsustainability. They are all observable signs of the
deterioration of the natural and cultural systems that make our human lives possible. Together
they strongly suggest that Planet Earth cannot sustain itself and the way of life it has been
affording us humans. The dream of continuing human progress toward perfection, promised to us
by Enlightenment thinkers is becoming replaced by a persistent nightmare. There is not much, in
fact, to sustain, I will argue.
Unsustainability is an unintended result of our collective, societal set of bad habits. If we
serious about doing something about the situation, we must break these bad, additive habits. We
know from work on addiction that you can’t fix it simply by willpower alone. You have to
change the underlying story that is being enacted repeatedly. A major challenge is that the story
is hidden deep in one’s cognitive system or in the metaphorical collective consciousness of a
society or organization.
The parallel to individual habits are societal or cultural norms: the behaviors that have
become accepted as the right ones to enact under the immediate circumstances. Cultural norms
are like personal habits. Most of the times we get what we want without untoward outcomes.
Whatever bad outcomes they produce are up close and personal. We recognize them although we
may eventually repress them.
Societal bad habits are significantly different because the unintended consequences often
take place removed in both time and space from the actor or actors creating them. You can’t see
the climate changing while you are driving your car although you are, in fact, contributing to the
effect. You cannot perceive the loss of small businesses or the mistreatment of workers when
you shop at Walmart. Shopping at Walmart and driving a car are typical cultural norms. Now,
perhaps you are beginning to see the hole we are digging.
Unsustainability is an unintended consequence of following the beliefs underpinning
our modern, Western cultural structure; the cognitive system that underpins everything we
routinely do. This fact may be the most important takeaway in this talk. Concern about growing
unsustainability cannot be a concern of just the tree huggers and bleeding hearts. It will
increasingly affect everybody and every institution. Businesses that ignore it do so at their own

2. ISE/CHRMS Workshop March 5, 2014
2
peril. I am not trying to paint a doomsday picture, but rather a description of a cultural disease
that is not so slowly eroding the Planet’s life support system.
Sustaining the current context of action, that is, our particular culture, can only deepen its
pathologies. This paradox may get clearer if we return to the source of the word, sustainability,
the so-called Brundtland Report, published in 1987. Brundtland defined sustainable development
as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own need.” Pay particular attention to the key word, “development,”
because it refers implicitly to economic development, that is, growth. Governments always want
to increase GDP, albeit more eco-efficiently and socially responsibly. Increasing eco-efficiency
may, in theory, counteract increases in GDP, but it isn’t doing that today, and there is little
reality in assuming that it will in the future. In any case, whatever we do will be overshadowed
by the impact of the growing giants, Brazil, China, and India, all growing rapidly, but not using
many eco-efficient processes. Rapidly increasing inequality in the US suggests that corporate
social responsibility isn’t doing too well either. Used an as adjective, as in sustainable business,
the word always focuses attention on the associated noun. In this case, it means sustaining the
business, not the world, and implies continuing growth. “Grow or die” used to be a mantra in
MBA strategy courses. It may still today. Almost everybody using sustainability has forgotten or
repressed its intimate connection to growth.
So that’s the starting place. Addiction is a complex phenomenon. Applying quick fixes,
technological or otherwise, won’t work Please listen carefully to the next sentence. More
growth, however well intentioned, won’t and can’t work to eliminate unsustainability
simply because growth is one of its proximate causes. If unsustainability is, as I believe, a
consequence of normal cultural behavior, it seems obvious remedy to change the culture so that
unsustainability begins to wane and a positive state of affairs begins to emerge. More simply
stated, we need to change the ways we go about our daily business. We have to teach us old dogs
new tricks. We need to implant a new set of beliefs and associated norms, but that’s easier said
than done. Locking the liquor bottle in a drawer doesn’t work for long. The story that is going on
in one’s head will eventually convince an alcoholic that it’s OK to have just a nip or two. To cure
our cultural addiction, two critical changes must occur:
1. We need a new vision of our goals to replace the broken dream of progress through
growth, fueled by ever-increasing scientific knowledge and technological innovation.
2. We need to replace the deeply embedded beliefs in our collective consciousness that have
created and sustain our current societal norms and their unintended consequences.
I’ll continue with the first item, a new vision. I offer flourishing as that vision, that is, the
primary normative goal of cultural and individual action. We must, first, adjust our beliefs so that
flourishing will emerge naturally and routinely. We are so far from that point now that it is
inaccurate and misleading to speak of sustainability. We have nothing now to sustain except
growth. By the way, sustainability is characterized as an empty word devoid of practical meaning
without a referent, I. e., something to sustain. For this reason alone, it and its semantic relative,
sustainable, have become little more than jargon. My position about jargon is shared by many
other concerned people who see most efforts under the rubric of sustainability as ineffective and
as uncoordinated as a fibrillating heart. What is sustainable luxury or sustainable fashion? Only
two of the ways sustainable shows up today, but what is to be sustained? Without a definite
reference, sustainability defaults to the status quo, and leads right back to growth as what is to be
sustained. Without a new vision, we are running in autopilot, guided by the past–driving while
looking at the rearview mirror, as some might say.

3. ISE/CHRMS Workshop March 5, 2014
3
I used to use the compound word, sustainability-as-flourishing, to avoid the emptiness of
sustainability used by itself, but on close scrutiny, even it doesn’t parse cleanly. We might say
that once we have a flourishing world, we would presumably want to sustain it. What really
matters, now, is producing flourishing; only then should we worry about sustaining it. So now I
talk and write about flourishing, by itself, without the baggage of sustainability. This is a little
embarrassing because I have written two books using the earlier phrasing.
Now with the new vision of flourishing in front of us, let’s look at the second part, changing
the belief structure, but before we can, we need to identify the specific mischievous beliefs. The
first of these is the belief that the world is a complicated machine who secrets we can come to
know by reducing it to little pieces and, then, by applying our wondrous scientific methodologies
to each separate part. We owe this viewpoint to Descartes who also gave us the belief that we
acquire a precise image of the world in our minds. Together, these ideas have produced the
dominant view of a separate objective reality out there. This belief ultimately leads to the
existence of singular truths about the world. My favorite biologist, Humberto Maturana, says that
(I quote), “In the … regime of objective reality, a claim of truth is tantamount to a demand for
obedience.” The fate of infidels in history attests to the validity of this statement about the
dominating potential of this belief.
The Enlightenment thinkers who followed and were strongly influenced by Descartes saw
knowledge and its fruits in the form of technology both as means of perpetual progress toward
the perfection of human beings and of the liberation from the shackles of dogma that kept
humanity in the dark for centuries. Francis Bacon, touting the wonders of the new science and
technology is said to have written “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her
children to bid her to your service and make her your slave.” Following Bacon, we have spent
the last 400 or so years enslaving nature, but she will ultimately have the upper hand. This
Baconian optimism lives today in an addictive belief that we can solve any problem, large or
small, with technology and technocratic rational thinking.
Another consequence of the ubiquitous use of technology was pointed out by the philosopher
Hans Jonas. Modern, complicated technology poses a challenge to ethically responsible
behavior. For example, with devices like drones, the outcome of pulling the trigger is far from
the actor in time and space. The ancient ethical idea of responsibility–knowingly do no harm–
becomes problematic. Decisions might be different if the actors were close enough to the
outcomes to perceive the consequences directly. As a consequence, much routine technologically
mediated behavior fails to reflect ethical considerations.
The final root cause of unsustainability is the dominant model of human nature, which is that
Homo sapiens has evolved to become Homo economicus: a rational and narrowly self-interested
person who acts only to acquire goods and services and whose needs are never satisfied. Erich
Fromm, the eminent psychotherapist, argued that we have moved from a being mode of life to a
having mode with a concomitant loss of what it means to be human. The lasting coexistence of a
finite planet and an insatiable predator, human beings, is ultimately impossible. This simple
model of human nature has given us classical economics and its imperative to grow, a market
economy, hyper-consumption, and more. None of these is compatible with flourishing.
So there’s the problem. If we want to move from unsustainability to flourishing, we have to
exchange these old, basic beliefs and norms for new ones. Fortunately we have the right ones
waiting in the wings. Beliefs are particularly important because, as I already noted, they form the
basis for action and lead to the creation of habits, both good and bad. William James who wrote
these prescient words about 100 years ago noted this connection between beliefs and habits:

4. ISE/CHRMS Workshop March 5, 2014
4
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working.
To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the
past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
Changing just two beliefs can create a culture from which flourishing can emerge. The first is
that humans are caring, not insatiably needy, creatures. We exist as human beings, as opposed to
other animals, by virtue of our attentiveness to the world. The idea of human being (a verbal
form) as caring springs from the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who said about care,
that it is “having to do with something, producing, attending to something and looking after it,
giving up something and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating,
considering, discussing, determining, and so forth.’” Care is not a psychological, emotional
affect. We evolved biologically, linguistically, and culturally through our caring interactions with
the world.
Fromm recognized the importance of being, as did other great thinkers. Abraham Maslow,
whose work evolved from the deficit psychology of need to the positive domain of being, wrote,
“Being brings with it ‘a more efficient perception of the world and more comfortable relations
with it.’” Heidegger wrote, “Modern humans have forgotten being and have become rich in
things and poor in soul.” He also wrote, “Authentic being takes responsibility for the world.”
making explicit an ethical dimension missing from insatiably needy behavior.
To begin to imagine how care might show up in today’s technology dominated world, try to
visualize a reverse Facebook where, in place of its present narcissistic design always pointing to
me, me, me, it would provide a means to relate empathetically with one’s “friends.” The current
“like” feature only reinforces one’s sense of neediness. A different kind of care-inducing artifact
is the speed bump that brings you present so that you can take care of yourself, your car, and any
school kids who might dash into the intersection.
The importance of being to flourishing should be clear, but how to make the switch is
something else. I don’t know how, but that’s not a cop-out. That’s a result of the next belief I
want to discuss. Knowing is not what is needed to guide the design of new institutions built
around care. Knowing accompanies objectivism, positivism, and reductionism. What’s needed
instead is an understanding of the world that comes only through reflective experience within it,
which brings me to the last point.
The second belief relates to how the world works. The world is not a complicated machine,
as Descartes would have it. It is a complex, evolving system. It behaves in unpredictable ways
and cannot be described by the same kind of analytic expressions that can describe a machine.
The whole is truly greater that the sum of the parts, so that reductionism is doomed to leave
things out. Perhaps this is why so many technological artifacts, designed on the basis of
incomplete knowledge, produce unintended consequences when they are used in a complex
world.
One implication of adopting complexity as the model of the world is that the scientific
method and positivism are ill equipped for the job of explaining it. James, whom I quoted earlier
about the tie between belief and habit, was one of the founders of pragmatism, a method of
finding “truths” (plural) and understanding. I remember a this quote but not the author, “In
pragmatism, there are truths but not Truth.” Pragmatism might seem intentionally designed for
complex systems. We will always need truths (small t) as foundations for our actions and our
conceptual and artifactual structures, but need a different way to find them. John Dewey, perhaps
the greatest pragmatic philosopher, wrote,

5. ISE/CHRMS Workshop March 5, 2014
5
The mind of man is being habituated to a new method and ideal: there is but one sure
road of access to truth, the road of patient, cooperative inquiry operating by means of
observation, experiment, record and controlled reflection. It is constituted by a method of
changing beliefs by means of tested inquiry as well as arriving at them.
I haven’t time to delve into the details of pragmatism here, but replacing positivism in many
cases will obviate several root causes I mentioned earlier. We still will design computers and
rocket ships using positive science, but pragmatism will avoid its potential pitfalls in dealing
with the complex world.
• Pragmatic truth seeking removes the blinders of objective reality and positivism.
• Pragmatic processes minimize the distortions and omissions resulting from
methodological reductionism and, thus, the likelihood of unintended consequences.
• Pragmatic action minimizes the mindless use of technological quick fixes.
• Pragmatic action reduces ethical blindness by bringing the context of action closer into
view.
Pragmatism is more than an abstract philosophy. The world famous Toyota Production
System is grounded on pragmatic principles, for example, eliminating problems through
continuous cooperative inquiry. Truths emerge through the experience of living with the system
we want to understand. Dealing with a complex world is more like gardening than it is about
driving a car.
If we use these two beliefs, caring and complexity, as our map, I believe the road to
flourishing is clear and open, but the end is a long way off. The cultural forces opposed to
change, especially at the roots, will fight tooth and nail to sustain the status quo. That’s a good
reason to stop talking about “sustainability” and start talking about flourishing. I believe that
once we try out caring, instead of need, we will quickly come to appreciate it. It brings us back
into contact with our primal nature and counteracts our insatiability. For this reason alone, caring
should bring quick results. Dealing with complexity, however, may be harder because so many
of our institutions are built on a Cartesian foundation. Fairleigh Dickinson and all other academic
institutions are examples. I expect it will be more difficult to give up the comforts of positivism
than the emptiness of insatiable need. But no matter. It’s time to get started.
Let me end with another powerful quote from James.
“Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what
concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be
realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief
were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?”
I will leave it to you to calculate the cash value of creating a flourishing world, but I think it’s
priceless. The time to replace our non-working system is long overdue. Your immediate
challenge in realizing the vision of flourishing is to embed the two basic beliefs in your work and
elsewhere in your life and continue to adapt as you begin to see flourishing begin to emerge from
the murk of unsustainability.