Global Journal of Science Frontier Research, H: Environment & Earth Science, Volume 22 Issue 5

Michael Bonnett’s collective works, especially his 2013, Normalizing catastrophe: sustainability and scientism. Environmental Education Research, 19(2), 187-197 is insightful in this regard. Heoffers reasons for the normalization of our views and work (i.e., convention). Bonnett notes that “normalization” constitutes our conventional (both thoughtful convention and thoughtlessness) views. 10 Both Arendt and Bonnett provide clarion calls to recognize and address sides of the same problem: thoughtlessness and thoughtful convention, hereafter convention. Convention vitiates against effective engagement with the natural environment, ourselves and our cultural world, and our problems. It does so by subverting our sensitivity and attentiveness to our own existential, social, and value directed character (on to our everyday conventional selves). Convention tells us what to understand – ourselves, society, and the environment or nature – and what to make of our everyday experiences. It tells us who and what counts or matters in an appropriate relationship to nature, other people, and the world. It tells us what is ethical and practical. It tells us what are the problems we should recognize and attend to. This limits our understanding of our own perspectives, values, and actions. Functional interconnections are often overlooked by those who uncritically and unreflectively use convention. Convention frames thought and reality in a way that collapses any questioning of it back in to convention, and as such questions appear absurd to conventional citizens and colleagues. 11 When Arendt’s accounting is combined with Bonnett’s argument, we have an explanation for shortfalls in addressing our problems. Taken together, combined with other observations, this explanation says our underperformance is due to “normalized thoughtless convention.” This is not to denigrate vast efforts by millions of people and national and international leaders and governments undertaking actual cases or activists’ movements to address problems. Many gains have been made. Breaking the bonds of normalized convention is a meta-challenge for us to advance to more sustainable futures, most likely. This normalized convention (thoughtless or not) leads to at least some of our problems. Bonnett develops this view more deeply than space allows here. Underlying considerations of this thesis including: (1) our limited self-awareness and self- understanding that is too often blocked by our own ego defensive psychology, existential coping, and our conventional culture, (2) our finding in hard for those reason and others to deal with the discomfort we experience when we think about the magnitude of the problems we have created for ourselves and the scale and scope of what is needed to address them, and (3) our beliefs, expectations, and the lives – and cultures – that we have come to live within. I bring this literature together to interrogate a multi-dimensional of convention. 12 IV. P roblems: W rit L arge Problems are really a reflection of how we view the significance of possible harmful futures. Or put another way, what is the foreseeable consequences of ongoing trends and conditions in society and environment, if we do nothing. For example, what happens to humans and civilizations, if we do too little to 1 Global Journal of Science Frontier Research Volume XXII Issue V Year 2022 2 ( H ) Version I III.“ C onvention,” its “ N ormalization” as a P roblem An Inquiry into “Convention”as a Problem and what we Might do About it? © 2022 Global Journals What might explain our “shortfall” in addressing diverse social and environmental problems? Hannah Arendt’s label for the problem or arguably a big part of it is our overreliance on “convention,” or “thoughtless convention.” 8 The term, “thoughtless convention,” means that we humans tend to just go along daily with the mainstream, averaged off thinking, status quo in our respective fields, communities, and cultures. It suggests that we do not question basic assumptions and we tend to stay within frames of accepted citizenship, professional, and cultural thinking and practices. 9 Arendt’s books and writing include On Origins of Totalarnism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and the Life of the Mind (1977). Also, she wrote Arendt and the Eichmann Trial (1961-1963) and Men in Dark Times (1968). Can we move beyond this problem to the extent it exists? Convention instills a very deep pervasive framing of who we are as a species, as individuals, and as collective cultures that set us in a particular version of reality or system of meaning making. 13 Our genetics, evolution, and social-conditioning through acculturalization, socialization, and institutions, such as family, state, and educational and media systems all come together to shape our views of reality. Views of reality – conventional or otherwise serve as a metaphysics (i.e., an ontology, epistemology, axiology, ordination, and pragmatist approach). 14 As such, views of reality function to normalize both thought and thoughtlessness, which can come to dominate our sense of self, our agency, and our individual and collective efforts to address our social and environmental problems. If we narrowly stay within the bounds of convention (as normalized), we likely miss much of the richness of the world, a deeper awareness of self and other life, and limit our understanding and options to respond to our growing interconnected problems. What are we to do? legal, social, and political thought. 7 This distinctive approach is focused on “human dignity” for all in healthy environments.