STREET DOGS

The “illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn” — Alvin Toffler.

[But] unlearning is not how life works. We don’t unlearn first and then learn something new. Life is always engaged in learning. Period. Whether we are conscious humans or wondrously adaptive bacteria, we are always engaged in taking in information and reacting to what we perceive. We perceive the world according to who we are, how we’ve perceived it in the past. If we want to see the world differently, we do have to break out of our perceptual filters and habits of seeing. We do need to break with our past and actively strive to see things differently. But I wouldn’t call this unlearning. It’s active learning, wrestling ourselves out of the confines of our world view, actively engaged in taking in new information and then interpreting that with new eyes. We’re not undoing our world view, it’s not deconstruction we’re involved in. It’s creation and the evolution of newness, which is what all life engages in. Living systems are synonymous with learning systems. We can’t help but be learning; we never pause to unlearn before we engage in learning and adaptation.

There is a second dynamic at play in all living systems, that of emergence. Emergence describes the sudden appearance of a new insight, a new capacity. It is the core organising dynamic of life, what happens when disparate parts, ideas, people become connected. Always, what emerges comes from what’s already present. Emergent systems, ideas, capacities can never be deconstructed, we can’t work backwards to figure out what exactly caused it. In life, you can’t undo anything. You can change, but not through unlearning. —