Comprehensivity
Description
- "What is Comprehensivity?"
C.J. Fearnley:
"Comprehensivity is our ability to comprehend our worlds broadly and deeply.
It is a facility in questioning, conceptualizing, interpreting, and acting to build a multi-perspectival yet integrated understanding of the world, how it works, and how it changes.
It is the quality of our lives that shapes all we have learned in breadth for context and all we have learned in depth for clarity to form, as Buckminster Fuller put it, "adequately macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive" considerations to better engage our worlds and its peoples with understanding and effectiveness.
It implies developing a large set of subjects about which one can effectively inquire, contextualize, interpret & assess, and creatively re-imagine and re-combine for meaningful insights and the forging of new possibilities.
It entails developing a faculty for helping self and others build a broad range of interests and concerns, comprehensive knowledge, and skills, that is, a faculty for comprehensivity awareness and competency.
It involves recognizing its inherent pathologies including analysis paralysis (an endless accumulation of information), value paralysis (an unrestrained accommodation of everyone's values), and the paralysis of wholism (an unlimited expansion of the whole). So it requires cultivating judgment to stay incisively relevant.
Since it is impossible for any one person to understand all of humanity's accumulated knowing and doing, comprehensive learning may seem unachievable. The idea is that our individual and collective effectiveness in understanding the vital issues of our times will be improved through the dynamics of groups of people effectively exploring many different topics as broadly and deeply as possible over an extended period of time."