A wicked problem defies contemporary or traditional solutions

A wicked problem is one which worsens when subjected to contemporary or traditional solutions.

The Queensland bushfires gave us
some remarkably unusual scenes.

Here in Shepparton, we were comfortably geographically remote from the hitherto unseen bushfires in Queensland, but metaphorically living next door in a climate-changed world.

The fires that were unquestionably aggravated by our disrupted climate system and many even say “caused”.

The solution, interestingly, was to fly firefighters and equipment in from all around the country using fossil-fuelled energy sources that further enrich the damage caused by a conflagration with their direct links to climate change.

And so the fires caused by climate change - not at all, according to the business a usual brigade, or almost totally in the minds of climate change advocates - fell directly into the “wicked” realm as in fighting them, that’s the solution, we added significantly to Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Let’s accept for a moment we are facing a wicked problem (we are), but that is rather difficult to grasp here in Shepparton as life appears OK, beyond, that is, a striking absence of rain and severe temperatures.

The Goulburn Valley has fortunately avoided, certainly, of late, the headline-grabbing climate change-driven events that have brought catastrophes to many communities throughout Australia, and the world.

Writing in “Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene” the Australian author and public intellectual, Clive Hamilton, said, “The greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy”.

The Professor of Public Ethics at Canberra’s Charles Sturt University, said: “The indifference of most to the Earth System’s disturbance may be attributed to a failure of reason or psychological weaknesses; but these seem inadequate to explain why we find ourselves on the edge of the abyss.”

Interestingly as some sort of hint, the America news website has said that: “It’s almost easier to despair or to will oneself into ignorance than to begin to grapple with the future”.

During a recent discussion, it was suggested that the way ahead, the way to deal with this wicked problem, was to embrace meekness, and idea that contradicts the essence of the capitalist economic system that champions aggression.

And turning again to Clive Hamilton, he points out that the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilized place – personal freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological power – are in truth paving the way to its destruction.

Albert Einstein’s suggestion that madness was doing the same thing repeatedly an expecting a different result seems to equate with the solution to the Queensland fires - using fossil fuel powered devices to solve a problem caused by a disrupted climate system that has been primarily unsettled by humans dumping excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

A Yale professor of law and psychology, Dan Kahan, says climate change had become a symbol of whose side you are on in a “cultural conflict divorced from science”.

That adds to the wickedness of the problem and so one solution is the immediate change in our behaviours to encourage adaptation, along with a more restrained way of living.

Idea festival exposes a parallel universe

Much of a recent week was lived in a parallel universe.

It was a world of ideas, hope, imagination, dreams, the impossible, concepts beyond the status quo and although exciting in the extreme, it was tiring.

The latter, of course, was not unexpected for once we step beyond what is familiar and embrace the new, we find ourselves entangled with fresh intellectual rigour and through just being different, it induces both physical and mental weariness.

Contemporary society does not encourage us to abandon the familiar rather; the market system prefers us to have a somewhat narrow view of value, worth and the causes of contentment to ensure the mental poverty of most enriches the elite.

Spending much of the week and the University of Melbourne’s biennial Festival of Ideas is an indulgence; gastronomy for the mind, a reminder of how little we understand, how remote we are from wisdom, knowledge and intelligence and how distant we are from having any real grasp of how, what, where and when.

Some would argue such pursuits irrelevant to their lives for they know who won the footy finals, what’s filling the movie theatres, what’s on the television tonight and what they need to do to ensure the pay checks keep rolling in.

But life is more than that, it is more than bread and circuses for human flourishing is about engaging with an idea that is bigger than you, an idea that both expands and demands more of your thinking and it is an idea that at first seems without rationale, but then becomes the solution.

Many things now are humanity’s staples were once ideas resident on the fringes of society or only thought about in moments of lucid madness.

We need more such festivals and maybe that is a project for the new Committee of Shepparton – Shepparton’s own Festival of ideas.

Ideas, no matter how vague, poorly articulated or inadequately thought through were not, according to the founder of Minds at Work, Jason Clarke, to be discounted or allowed to wither for all should be considered and welcomed to the conversation.

Victor Hugo.

Shepparton is in urgent need of a new idea as the 20^th century inspirational drivers of several decades are dying and maybe a universe in which fresh ideas are abundant will be found at our own ideas skirmish.

Melbourne has its Festival of ideas, Sydney its Festival of Dangerous Ideas and we should have our own agora, that ancient Greece marketplace-like concept where people met talked, considered and determined for their community, the best way ahead.

It was Frenchman, Victor Hugo who said: “One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

Let’s initiate that “invasion” and find a new idea for Shepparton.