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Interview with Spring Conference 2020
Guest Scientist John M. Gowdy, PhD

The Bowen Center has invited Dr. John M. Gowdy to speak at the upcoming Spring Conference 2020: Creating a Climate for Change on April 3 and 4. This conference will be offered in-person and as a live webcast.

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As Emeritus Professor of Economics and Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Gowdy devotes much of his current research toward the impact of human economic and social institutions on the natural environment.

Center for Family Consultation faculty member and clinician Stephanie Ferrera recently interviewed Dr. Gowdy about the implications of ultrasociality in humans for sustainability and the intersections of his research with Bowen theory.

Dr. Gowdy notes that the ways in which people make a living can bring out different sides of their nature – out of the broad range of social, antisocial, and ultrasocial behavior.

“There’s a paper published in Science a few years ago about rice farming and wheat farming in China. These are two villages in China that were close to each other – same ethnic groups and so on. One grew rice and one wheat. The researchers found that the people in the rice cultures were more cooperative on the questionnaire scale of attitudes than the people who grew [wheat]. Rice is a more cooperative, more communal kind of farming – you have to work together to plant and harvest more than you do with [wheat].”

Dr. Gowdy on the idea of a “minimal bioeconomic program”:

“People who are more secure economically, studies have shown, are more likely to be more empathetic to others, more willing to support public policies to increase fairness in the economy and so on. So it seems to me if you have some basic progressive programs: universal healthcare, minimum income, a guaranteed education, secure old-age programs. People are more secure; they don’t have to worry so much about temporarily losing their jobs…They would be more sympathetic to policies that could begin to get us off this sort of runaway train that we’re on.”

Ms. Ferrera observes that Dr. Gowdy and Dr. Bowen share commonalities in their analysis of forces that drive human behavior:

“The other interface between the economic forces that drive human behavior and the emotional forces that drive human behavior – Dr. Bowen talked about how individual autonomy declines as people become more anxious and group pressure increases. So when I read your idea of ultrasociality being a superorganism that subjugates the individual to the service of the larger organism, that really resonated with me, because I’ve already been thinking that way and then you put the economic foundation underneath it.”

Further reading on ideas discussed in this interview:

Ferrera, Stephanie J. 2017. “The Evolving Relationship between Humans and Earth“. Family Systems Forum.

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