Today, we live - still, after several decades - in a world where time is out of joint, because we fail to broaden our perspective and recognise the necessary relationships across difference.
"[Tomorrow] we shall know a little more by dint of rigour and imagination, the two great contraries of mental process, either of which by itself is lethal. Rigour alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity. ...
'Time is out of joint' because these two components of the steering of evolutionary process are mutually out of step: Imagination has gone too far ahead of rigour and the result looks, to conservative persons, remarkably like insanity or perhaps like a nightmare, the sister of insanity. ...
... in cultures and social systems ... there is no [evolutionary] barrier. Innovations become irreversibly adopted into the ongoing system without being tested for long-time viability; and necessary changes are resisted by the core of conservative individuals without any assurance that these particular changes are the ones to resist. ...
Individual persons may favour one or the other component of this dualism and we will call them 'conservatives,' 'radicals,' 'liberals,' and so on. But behind these epithets lies epistemological truth which will insist that the poles of contrast dividing the persons are indeed dialectical necessities of the living world. You cannot have 'day' without 'night,' nor 'form' without 'function.'
The practical problem is of combination. How, recognising the dialectic relation between these poles of contrast, shall we proceed? To play one half of the adversarial game would be easy, but statesmanship requires something more and, truly, more difficult. ...
It is difficult for an adversary to see further than the dichotomy between winning and losing in the adversarial combat. Like a chess player, they are always tempted to make a tricky move, to get a quick victory. The discipline, always to look for the best move on the board, is hard to attain and hard to maintain. The player must have his eye always on the longer view, a larger gestalt. ...
The wider perspective is about perspectives, and the question posed is: [How] do we... foster those wider perspectives which will bring our system back into an appropriate synchrony or harmony between rigour and imagination?"
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, 1979.