NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND - NINETEEN

 Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land - NINETEEN

 The Ghost in the Machine:

Pragmatic Science & Self-Indulgent Man

 

         JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

Originally © August 20, 2016/© August 16, 2021

 

We live today in a globally interconnected world, in which biological, psychological, social, and environmental phenomena are all interdependent.  To describe this world appropriately we need an ecological perspective which the Cartesian world view does not offer. What we need, then, is a new “paradigm” – a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values.

Fritjof Capra (born 1939), Austrian-born American physicist, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (1983)

 

THE GREAT RETREAT

Science through the mechanism of its devices culminates in repeated “Industrial Revolutions.”  We are in the third at the moment finding our collective Western mind locked in its private cubicle sheltering an unknown self, captive to the wilds of the corporate authority as religious influence has retreated into the background.  We are all residence of the Ghost of the Machine.

This fits nicely with the “cut & control” doctrine of utopian optimism while locked in the perennial conflict between the material and spiritual world.  Fritjof Capra puts it succinctly in The Turning Point (1983):

We have retreated into our minds, forgotten how to think with our bodies, how to used them as agents of knowing.

Capra begins by tracing the history of science and economics, highlighting flaws in the Cartesian, Newtonian, and reductionist paradigms that have come to light in the context of a more contemporary empirical understanding of the physical sciences. He narrates how such viewpoints have grown inadequate to guide human behavior and policy concerning modern technology and ecology, then argues that science needs to develop the concepts and insights of holism and systems theory to solve society's complex problems.

In Fritjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975), he writes:

Opposites are abstract concepts belonging to the realm of thought and as such they are relative. By the very act of focusing our attention on any one concept, we create its opposite. As Lao Tzu says, “when all in the world understand beauty to be beautiful, then ugliness exists; when all understanding goodness to be good, then evil exists. Mystics transcend this realm of intellectual concepts, and in transcending it they become aware of the relativity and polar relationship of all opposites. They realize that good and bad, pleasure and pain, life and death, are not absolute experiences belonging to different categories, but are merely two sides of the same reality; extreme parts of the same whole.

Capra concludes:

In my opinion, the time-minded intuition of Eastern mysticism is one of the main reasons why its views of nature seem to correspond, in general, much better to modern scientific views than do those of most Greek philosophers. Greek natural philosophy (precursor to science) was, on the whole, essentially static and largely based on geometrical considerations.

As mentioned in Part Eighteen: The Shattering of Conventional Wisdom, this is consistent with Maltese psychologist Edward de Bono’s “lateral thinking.” He writes:

In the USA there is a strong tendency in psychology to put people into classes, groups, classifications, categories, and boxes.  Tests are devised for this purpose and are administered with proper scientific solemnity.  Very little practical value comes out of this exercise.  People are put into their boxes and stay there.  It is only too easy to devise reliable tests to put people into boxes of any sort.  Indeed, people are only too anxious to put themselves in boxes as a form of self-knowledge. Hence the interest in astrological and zodiac “boxes.”

Perhaps it is not the boxes that are the problem but the arrogance with which we view the certainty of our “boxed view” of the world.  Consider this absurdity.  An aspiring student may spend as much as $250,000 for a quality four-year college degree but then feels it necessary to pay a  testing service an additional $2,000 or more for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) or Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), or some other advanced degree test to improve the chances of being selected at the next level. 

In this test-crazy culture, four years of total immersion in an academic environment is relatively meaningless when it comes to being ready for graduate school.  So, if the student feels it necessary to take one of these mock qualifying tests, what does that tell us about our education program?  It would seem our education system is all about knowing and not about learning how to think.     

In our Western quest for cognitive consciousness, for knowing and accumulating knowledge, intuition is given short shrift.  Intuition is about insight into a situation with the ability to understand something – with our whole body – without the need for conscious reasoning.  Our Western culture asserts with self-indulgent hubris that this is lunacy; that rationality is what must prevail in problem-solving and decision making.  We see where that has gotten us.     

What about that “inner voice” that constantly bombards our consciousness offering a “gut feeling” about the situation?  We are trained to discount this as it is not derived from linear logic and rational thinking.  Consequently, we find ourselves insanely committed to progress failing to recognize this inevitably as a retreat.  De Bono insists:

“In the end, it is the inner world that makes life worth living.  The real purpose of the outer world is to keep us alive and to feed the dreams of the inner world.”  

In retreat, we find ourselves cut off from the natural as we are preoccupied with the synthetic.  In our quest to dominate nature, we have forgotten how to preserve nature.  Indeed, while bent on utopian optimism, despite the evidence to the contrary, we fail to recognize dystopian pessimism is part of that same whole. 

Nonsensically, it would appear that the East, in quest of capitalistic progress, has adopted Western reductionism at the expense of its Eastern mystical holistic heritage.  Consequently, the East is seemingly on the same retreat as Nowhere Man. 

The evidence of Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land is apparent in everyday life as man attempts to solve problems with half his brain (left technological brain) believing the mind exists only in the brain, while the mystical East, more meditative and intuitive knows that man thinks with his whole body, which means he uses his right (social pragmatic) brain as a complement to the right brain in holistic thought. 

Theosophist Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986), born in British India, has an interesting take on this:

We carry on like machines with our tiresome daily routine.  How eagerly the mind accepts a pattern of existence, and how tenaciously it clings to it!  As by a driven nail, the mind is held together by an idea, and around the idea, it lives and has its being.  The mind is never free, pliable, for it is always anchored; it moves within the radius, narrow or wide, of its center.  From its center it dare not wander; and when it does, it is lost in fear.  Fear is not of the unknown, but the loss of the known.

Consider this against Capra’s claim that conventional wisdom is inadequate in light of contemporary empirical understanding of the physical sciences. Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727), known for demonstrating gravitational theory and formulating the Laws of Thermodynamics, soared in a climate of Western progress. He claimed he saw further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler. Newton was however also a man of his times with a fascination with astrology and alchemy.

Newtonian physics would reign supreme for three hundred years. Newton would also claim the title of “Father of Mechanistic Psychology,” a reductionist view of man resembling a precision clock. John Locke (1632 – 1704), a contemporary of Newton’s, advanced this mechanistic universe by seeing the mind at birth a tabula rasa upon which external forces inscribed themselves. The mind, indeed, was seen as comparable to an empty box into which external agents might deposit cognitive particles.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

The Ghost in the Machine is a reductionist concept that Hungarian British journalist, novelist, psychologist, and philosopher Arthur Koestler (1905 – 1983) used with an uncanny skill to illustrate its impact on society for a popular audience, thus exposing the hidden secrets of Western man’s troubled soul.

Previously, he published the sensational novel Darkness at Noon (1940) that disclosed his disillusionment with Communism for the atrocities of Stalinism. This anti-totalitarian work gained him international fame. He went on to write other novels, memoirs, essays, and biographies always bent on exposing political corruption and malfeasance.

He chose the title, The Ghost in the Machine (1967), from Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900 – 1976) coined the expression, “See the ghost in the machine!”

Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) was a critique of the notion that the mind is distinct from the body, a rejection of the theory that mental states are separable from physical states. In this book, Ryle refers to the idea of a fundamental distinction between mind and matter as “the ghost in the machine.

The Oxford don found the central principles of the Cartesian dualism of mind-body relationship unsound, asserting that every person has both a body and a mind; that they are harnessed together, not separately; and even after the death of the body the mind may continue to exist and function.

His premise: bodies exist in space and are subject to mechanical laws, and their state is observed externally; minds are not in space, not subject to mechanical laws, and their work is therefore inscrutable to others.

In "The Concept of Mind," he argues that Descartes makes a category mistake by thinking that there is something called “mind” over and above a person's behavioral dispositions. Many others have argued likewise, but this has not stopped the drumbeat down through the ages of reifying Descartes’ reductionist philosophy.

Arthur Koestler makes Descartes’ category-mistake more understandable to the general reader. For example, one of The Ghost in the Machine’s central concepts is that humanity has demonstrated a tendency to self-destruct due to the faulty construction of the human brain from more primitive brain structures. Koestler believes that this self-destruction reached its apogee with the Soviet Union/United States nuclear arms race.

 

Portrait of John Locke in 1697 by Godfrey Kneller

It is possible to argue that as a global community we are often subjugated to our emotional fears, by denying them, then feeling forced to arbitrarily create bulwarks – such as nuclear arms races – to acquire a faulty sense of security.

Security becomes a numbers game with the proliferation of nuclear armaments, arms never expected to be used, armaments that cost multi-billions of dollars to produce, but once created, represent a hazard to people millenniums into the future as they cannot be destroyed. Reductionism often backfires creating The Ghost in the Machine.

Two observations compelled Koestler to propose the notion of the holon:

· Nobel Prize laureate in economics (1978) Herbert A. Simon (1916 – 2001) developed the premise of “bounded rationality” to show that when people make decisions they are limited by the available information or the cognitive limitations of their minds. Decision-makers tend to seek a satisfactory solution rather than an optimal one. Simon claims “bounded rationality” becomes the alternative to the prevailing fully rational process.

The economist uses the analogy of a pair of scissors to illustrate his point: one blade represents the “cognitive limitations” of actual people and the other the “structure of the environment” for how minds compensate for limited rationality.

· In the analysis of hierarchies, there exist stable intermediate forms in both living organisms and social organizations, concluding that, although it is easy to identify sub-wholes or sub-parts, wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere.

The word “holon” (Greek from holos or “whole”) is used to describe the hybrid nature of the sub-wholes and sub-parts within living systems. From this perspective, holons exist simultaneously as self-contained wholes with their subordinate parts, and dependent parts when considered from the inverse direction. Thus, The Ghost in The Machine goes beyond the mind-body dualism of Rene Descartes to seeing the mind at once whole and as a part. Koestler visualized a hierarchy of forces within each holon forming a continuum of feedback and feed-forward streams of a body suspended in its larger environment.

These streams are being fed by life signals to each group member, and represent the spirit of life, which one senses as a ghost in the form of a complex knowledge set that exists but cannot be explained.

The Ghost emerges from the complexity of group rules and strategies in contrast to the mind-body problem of behaviorism. In other words, beyond rationality and within The Ghost of the Machine, the irrational flourishes, and has always been in the annals of man. To ignore this propensity or to attempt to compensate for it by elaborate schemes of rationality only defeats the effort. Koestler thinks he understands why.

As the human brain has evolved, building upon earlier more primitive brain structures, the head portion of The Ghost in the Machine has developed poor connections with the body portion creating the potential for conflict. The primitive layers of the brain can and may overpower the hold of rational logic. Koestler insists this explains the propensity for hate and anger and emotional distress.

The central assumption in his thesis is that humanity's atavistic brain areas will lead to self-destruction. However, the same areas responsible for hate and anger are also responsible for love and happiness, which tend to be viewed more positively, although they can in themselves foster destructive urges on an individual level.

For example, certain narcotics create euphoria which may be viewed as "positive emotions,” despite the potential for long-term harmful effects. Consequently, people gifted with great intelligence, given this predilection, can do very stupid and self-harming things to themselves and others, and often do.

An author is never far from the speculations that consume his passions. Koestler, after a life of many honors, including being made Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 1972, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1976 and with terminal leukemia in 1979. He and his wife killed themselves at their home in London in 1983.

BEST INTENTIONS CAN GO AWRY

Austrian-born British philosopher and mathematician, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) was an influential and charismatic figure in modern science. He cultivated empiricism but essentially denied the spiritual component in man. He held the view that generalization may be valid, but only when tested by objective techniques to verify sense experience. The final test of scientific truth is the experience of the senses, and only that which can be experienced by the senses is real; the rest is fiction. But is it, really?

Descartes's methodology provided Wittgenstein with a supreme “cut & control” venue for Descartes’ “reductionism,” reducing complex data or phenomena to their simplest terms, and then generalizing as to what data mean and how they can be used. This echoes Roger Bacon’s 13th-century “resolution and composition” technique. His method called for a problem to be divided into its smallest parts so that it could more easily be understood and solved.

Likewise, reductionism proceeds by reducing the complex to the simple with all statements expressed in only non-metaphysical terms of size, shape, and movement. The irony is that sense in this concept has no room for nonsense which ultimately intervenes. Carried to its extreme, the cumulative strategy may nonetheless compound until what it produces is not sense but nonsense.

Since the “Scientific Revolution” (1543 – 1700), this methodology has not been questioned, or if it has, it has failed to weaken the dominants of this “scientific method” down through the ages. American physicist and philosopher, Thomas Kuhn (1922 – 1996) propose in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that paradigm shifts are inevitable, and there are, but thus far without relinquishing the reductionist philosophy.

To wit, reductionism reduces people to data, data is surgically screened with reductionist precision and comes out in mathematical paradigms, representing real people in real situations only now as impersonal numbers, and that is when the nonsense materializes.

Take Obamacare. With good intentions, President Barak Obama launched his Affordable Healthcare Act penalizing those who refused to sign up for this program. Healthy people didn’t sign up and accepted the penalty; unhealthy people did sign up in droves and that is the problem.

Consequently, the insurance industry has been under enormous stress to persevere. Aetna Insurance, alone, has suffered a reported shortfall with a pretax loss of $200 million in the second quarter (2016), and a total pretax loss of $430 million. It is abandoning Obamacare patients in more than 500 countries. This amounts to a 70 percent drop off of coverage:

“The firm said that, after a review of its public health-exchange business, it determined that the nearly $200 million in a pretax loss that it was sustaining on an annual basis was not worth the business.”

Aetna will sell Obamacare in just 242 countries next year compared to the 778 countries it now has on the books. Patient prescriptions jumped 80 percent after the Association of Chartered Accountants (ACA) gave these patients Medicaid coverage.

PRAGMATIC SCIENCE

The “Scientific Revolution” has had a romantic history but seemingly has failed to move beyond the radius of its mind center alluded to by Krishnamurti.

Galileo’s mathematical proofs and Bacon’s empiricism led to Descartes’ systematic doubt and the persuasive argument for the division of man between behaving (material world) and believing (spiritual world).

This would then be followed by Newtonian physics and mechanistic psychology, separating man between thinking and feeling. Wittgenstein would add his value-free scientific perspective placing a clear differentiation between the subjective and objective points of view.

The widespread social effect of reductionism was to generate hierarchies of esoteric specialists creating an impossible void between scientists and everyone else. These hierarchies were mainly of academics with an academy opening in Rome in 1657 with the motto, “Test and test again!” Great Britain’s Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge commonly known as the “Royal Society” opened five years earlier in 1652. Both institutions embraced Descartes’ systematic doubt.

Cartesian doubt is a systematic process of being skeptical (or doubting) of the truth of one’s beliefs. Descartes sought to doubt the truth of all his beliefs to determine which beliefs he could be certain were true. Western science and philosophy adopted this methodology as its modus operandi, sorting out true from false claims in science, and using philosophy's skepticism to question the possibility of pure knowledge.

Early on, most of the raw data for this systematic investigation was in the form of first-hand information from sailors, merchants, and military personnel who were traveling the world. The key purpose of these academies was to defend the status quo of society by marshaling knowledge in defense of deism against atheism, the catchphrase for anti-establishment behavior of the time. The avalanche of new information coming in from around the world made these new experimenters keen to find a way to manage knowledge but still support the public order.

Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), the Irish physicist and chemist, instituted new procedures to objectively test evidence. A devout Irish Roman Catholic, it was his view that science ought to reveal God’s Grand Design and strengthen orthodoxy. He reasoned objective assessment of the evidence was to have every experiment repeated before several society members in an act called “multiple witnessing.”

Only by collective observation and consensus could an experiment’s outcome be safely accepted as a matter of fact. This activity introduced a new entity, “the laboratory,” as the workplace where “priests of nature,” as Boyle put it, could conduct experiments with approved processes and approved equipment. To emphasize their priestly dedication, they convened especially on Sundays.

Boyle was an alchemist, but his alchemy was a logical outcome of his atomism. If every substance is merely a rearrangement of the same basic elements, he argued, transmutations should be possible. Modern atomic physics has proved him correct.

Despite the apparent free range of scientific investigation, it wasn’t the democracy of science it purported to be. This was evident once the vacuum as an instrument of research was discovered. Before that discovery, it would have been heretical to suggest its existence as the church accepted Aristotle’s view that the vacuum was impossible.

Aristotle claimed God created space for solid bodies. If any part of space appeared unoccupied, the omnipresent God would fill that space with light. Space was never empty according to this reasoning, so the vacuum did not exist. Not only Nature but God and the church abhorred a vacuum.

The vacuum led experimentation to the development of the barometer, to understanding respiration and the composition of air, even to the eventual discovery of electricity. The experiments with air pressure laid the groundwork for the development of the steam engine. After the vacuum, the scientific method led to the development of optical instrumentation, the telescope, and the microscope.

When Galileo turned the new Dutch telescope to the heavens, he saw a cosmos that had never been seen before. When he observed the transit of Venus, proving as Copernicus had claimed, orbiting the sun, the telescope unambiguously challenged Catholic doctrine and orthodoxy. This orthodoxy would accelerate the rate at which science would take power out of the hands of ecclesiastical authority.

There would not, however, be the retreat from the dogma that one might expect. Incredibly, science would create its dogmatic authority, feeling the need to husband the secrets of their instruments revealing hidden truths heretofore unknown and unseen. From this point forward, science would embrace social and political power and assume an adversarial relationship with the church, often masked in silent compliance.

The microscope was to reveal an unsuspected world. In 1628, William Harvey (1578 – 1657), an English physician and anatomist, published his views on blood circulation after examining crustaceans, mollusks, and insects. He discovered how the blood circulation system works in the human body. There was a drive to find mechanical explanations for such troubling mysteries.

When England’s greatest poet, John Milton (1608 – 1674), wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and his expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) wrote his Essay on Man (1711) the following century, he paralleled Milton’s work in his opening lines. But then replaced the biblical myth with an original story of the State of Nature, suggesting how man fell through evolution to his present civil state, concluding:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of Mankind is Man

[In the first edition of this poem this second line reads, “The only Science of Mankind is Man.”]

The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductionists, with Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) at the helm, saw human motivation as entirely at root egoistic. Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of laws designed to protect the weak multitude.

Human thought, Hobbes argued, was no exception to universal mechanisms, but was reducible to material causes: This mind will be nothing but the motions in certain parts of the organic body.

A few years later, Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) fulminated against those who regarded the mind as a kingdom within a kingdom, which disturbs rather than follows nature’s orders. For him, the transcendent world does not exist. There is no world except the existing one. In his pantheistic notion, there is only one substance (God) and only thought and physical extension are known by man.

Locke’s “State of Nature” was much less harsh. He thought certain unselfish social impulses were intrinsic from the start, and that the law codified these impulses. It was a time of grand essays in reductionism from poets, physicians, philosophers, and scientists. Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) being the most successful of them all in capturing the imagination of his time.

By the late 17th century, natural philosophy had shed its origins of magic and alchemy and began to look like science as we understand science today. Physicians discovered that when a person looks at a rose, a tiny entirely physical image appears on the retina of the eye, and the image is upside down.

Vague Elizabethan talk of “humors” that determine character began to turn into slightly more grounded discussions of nerves, blood vessels, and the brain. In 1660. Marcello Malpighi (1628 – 1694), an Italian anatomist used microscopic data to complete the proof of Harvey’s blood circulation system by his observation of the movement of the blood capillaries linked to arteries and veins. He discovered the taste buds on the tongue and proved the structure of the lungs, glands, brain, and spleen, liver, and kidneys. He also verified the existence of red blood cells. A good deal of his research was done on silkworms and embryonic chicks.

The microscope had driven knowledge to differentiate several new sciences in which only specialists would be qualified to operate. Biology would no longer be seen as a single discipline, but would eventually split into embryology, developmental anatomy, comparative anatomy, cytology, histology, microbiology, and entomology. The microscope accelerated Descartes’ reductionism by the systematic study of the structure of everything by taking the whole apart and examining its most infinitesimal components, then generalizing about the whole.

The vacuum and microscope also came to be linked with engineering and metallurgy in scientific theories. This led to engineers creating scientific instruments using precision measuring devices.

Precision gauges changed life at sea as well. Transatlantic trade created the necessity for more accurate instrumentation. In 1735, John Harrison (1693 – 1776), an English inventor and horologist, produced a spring-driven marine chronometer that was tested during an experimental voyage to Barbados. It showed the time accuracy within 15 seconds over five months.

This meant that over five months accurate voyage navigation could be accomplished within one mile. More precision instruments came into being to deal with the massive increase in cargos of tea, sugar, and tobacco entering Great Britain. The slide rule was developed to help customs officers calculate taxes. There were now anemometers, pyrometers, and navigational instruments.

Machine tools principally lathes for cutting fine screw threads in brass and iron, which could then be used to turn scale marking devices with great accuracy helped to make all forms of measurement in navigation, surveying, and cartography even more precise. These would be used to plan and build roads, canals, railways, and bridges of the “First Industrial Revolution,” powered by the steam engine, itself generated by the vacuum experiment and built with the aid of precision instruments.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, 1632.

Quantification affected society as reductionist techniques took social management to new levels of defining and controlling. In 1671, a Dutchman developed a statistical life table in which fate annuities could be standardized and offered to investors who were to loan money to pay for the war against the French.

In the same year, England centralized tax collection with the office of Inspector of Imports and Exports, the first national statistical department in Europe. From then on, the figures collected in that department would shape political and economic negotiations with other states. Statistics would next become another tool to maintain social control.

Perhaps the zenith of the new reductionist philosophy came in 1776 when Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), a Scottish economist and philosopher, published his theory on the division of labor in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), generally referred to as “The Wealth of Nations.” It is Smith’s magnum opus work on moral and economic philosophy. It offers the first collected description of what builds a nation’s wealth and was strategically positioned to influence the incipient Industrial Revolution, touching on such topics as the division of labor, productivity, and free markets.

Smith exercised great pains to present a reductionist scientific law in economic terms in which market forces could be controlled and regulated through the economic activity of a country. By showing the interaction of price and profit, economic growth with wages and employment, supply and demand, as well as linking consumption and property with the circulation of capital, he demonstrated that free competition encourages both enterprise and economic progress, and produces the best possible distribution of value upon goods and labor.

Smith likened the consequences of a free market to an invisible hand, which places the equilibrium value upon goods and labor. This was, he thought, a force that could be used for predictable social effects like the other new laws of nature. His ideal of the free market led him to a minimalist view of the role of the state. At the time “Wealth of Nations” was written, his theory was considered extremely radical.

By the middle of the 18th century, the spirit of capitalism was already firmly established in Great Britain, but the eccentric roots of this practice were still buried deep within the aristocratic privilege.

Adam Smith was influenced by John Locke (1632 – 1704), David Hume (1711 – 1776), Francois Quesnay (1694 – 1774), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) and Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.E.). He, in turn, influenced Noam Chomsky (born 1928), Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006), and Carl Menger (1840 – 1921) Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992), William Stanley Jevons (1835 – 1882), Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 – 1834), John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946) and Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831). This demonstrates that economic theory while being essentially reductionist in philosophy represents a symphony of voices that stretch in an uninterrupted continuum into the 21st century.

SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

Essentially using the language of Boyle’s laboratory in his writings on social processes, John Locke had said that Natural Law was at work in governing the affairs of man just as it governed the trajectory of a cannonball or recorded the pressure of a gas. Social law, he claimed, manifested itself in the force of self-interest, a concept that Adam Smith would seize and run with, which would come to rule individual psychology and social economics. The sole aim of government according to this premise should be to make sure that nothing constrained the natural force of self-interest.

Since the most common expression of self-interest was the ownership of property, then the prime responsibility of the state should be to protect individual property owners, leaving citizens to concentrate on increasing their wealth. Thus Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” (1776) and Locke’s “An Essay on Human Understanding” (1689) formed the template for those interested in the dynamics of the modern liberal democratic state.

John Locke’s ideas were born of the scientific method and set in motion by print. The discovery of America would lead to a new society on a new continent which would ultimately embrace both the ideas of Smith and Locke and be reflected in the United States Constitution in 1787.

The United States Constitution, framed with the language of that laboratory, documented the belief that a rational free society should be founded based on natural law, consensus governance, and self-evident truths.

America would become the most powerful nation in history once the “Industrial Revolution” provided the tools for defining and controlling human activity on a societal scale.

Accordingly, in a single generation since the “scientific revolution,” culminating with Newton’s science and technology. Nature could not only be controlled but improved.

The new tools developed pragmatically in the laboratory of the mind as well as in place and space were spreading into this new society giving government and societal institutions the power to change the world with unexpected speed and unprecedented detail.

The first page of the United States Constitution 1787

Already by the 18th century, technology was able to move from creating artificial phenomena within the laboratory to generate artificial forms of nature in agriculture. Technology would then move on to harness nature itself to provide an entirely new kind of power that would radically change the community.

This would occur first in England, which was more open and advanced to change than the rest of Europe, thanks to the constitutional nature of its monarchy and the existence of a vibrant, educated, and relatively wealthy middle class.

European society, at the time, was primarily agricultural, and life on the land had altered little since the first countries of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean created settlements 11,000 years earlier. Nature set the calendar of social activities: plowing, sowing, and harvesting crops. This ancient cycle and the lifestyle of the majority of the population that lived off the land were both to be changed radically by the introduction of the new technology.

When Sir Richard Weston (1465 – 1541), a landowner from Surrey, England, returned from a visit to Holland, he wrote about the crop rotation that he had observed, which successfully allowed Dutch farmland to remain fertile. It was just what English landowners needed. Four crops would be sown on the same land in annual succession: wheat, turnips, barley, and clover reducing the land that was fallow and increasing animal fodder supply. This meant that livestock could be raised, and in turn provide extra manure. Yields increased, as did profits. The system spread rapidly from England and more slowly in the rest of Europe. This in turn stimulated massive population growth.

The new techniques allowed farmers to cultivate infertile or uneconomic land. Patchy land could now be cut up and cleared, fenced off, and closed for use. This would have profound social effects as enclosure cut off the small cottage farmer from his acres and the sharecroppers from common grazing rights. To some landowners, enclosure offered valuable control of mineral rights in quarries, which in turn led to construction booms on the edge of towns.

Further change occurred as small landowners were forced to sell to the upwardly mobile mercantile class whose fortunes were rising due to increased shipping and commercial technology trade. Above all, enclosed land was more efficient land because it lay fallow for shorter periods. The stock that grazed on it was healthier because of the isolation from potentially diseased animals.

Major changes were being made in animal husbandry. Selective breeding began to change the shape of animals for the first time since domestication some 12,000 years earlier.

New large-scale farmers on the horizon in the agri-business would be fatal to small landowners, most of whom were forced to become laborers in the new rising factories or to join the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed poor.

Welfare legislation concerning the destitute, which had always been harsh, now became more so, as the landed gentry's separation from the landless poor became more pronounced. The distribution of wealth, what capitalism promised would be the invisible hand blessing enterprise for all, was skewed to the affluent minority. Economic wealth translated into social, political, and judicial power. The Justice of the Peace, most likely one of the local landowners, had summary power to arrest, prosecute, imprison, whip, or transport the offending party to the colonies.

REDUCTIONISM REDUX

What started innocently and purposefully with Rene Descartes (I think, therefore I am), from a mathematical and philosophical perspective, would catch hold of the mind and conscience of man, being reinterpreted and expanded by scientists, social scientists, economists, and technologists from the “Scientific Revolution” (1543 – 1700) through the “First Industrial Revolution” (1813 – 1898), “Second Industrial Revolution” (1870 – 1914) and into the “Third Industrial Revolution” or “Digital Revolution” (1940 – Present).

Descartes held that non-human animals could be reductively explained as automata – De homine, 1662.

Each has been an expression of reductionism which relates to distinct philosophical positions regarding the connections between phenomena, or “theories,” reducing one or another to simplify what was, to what now is. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy suggests a three-part division:

Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts; Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide explanations in terms of ever smaller entities; Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a new theory does not replace or absorb the old, but reduces it into more basic terms. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three: translation, derivation, and explanation.

Reductionism can be applied to objects, phenomena, theories, and meanings. In science, the application of methodological reductionism attempts to provide an explanation of entire systems in terms of their individual, constituent parts, and their interactions. For example, the heat of a gas is reduced to nothing but the average kinetic energy of its molecules in motion.

American philosopher Thomas Nagel (born 1937) speaks of psychophysical reductionism (the attempt to reduce psychological phenomena to physics and chemistry) similar to physical-chemical reductionism (the attempt to reduce biology to physics and chemistry).

In a simplified and sometimes contested form, such as reductionism is said to imply that a system is nothing but the sum of its parts. A more nuanced view is that the system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have.

Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith (born 1965) writes:

The point of mechanistic explanations is usually showing how the higher level features arise from the parts. Others see the connection provided when the same idea can be expressed by levels of explanation with higher levels reducible if need be to lower levels. This use of levels of understanding in part expresses our human limitations in grasping a lot of detail. In other words, we have “a hierarchy of levels of understanding.”

The point of this discussion is that we have not moved beyond the concept of “reductionism” and have embraced the idea throughout our scientific and industrial revolutions demonstrating an inability to master information from any other perspective. We are still deeply buried in Descartes’ shadow and have not considered it a necessity to escape this confinement.

As a practicing industrial/organizational psychologist for many years, I saw its hold on management and organization thinkers such as Peter Drucker and Douglas McGregor; quality control statisticians such as W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran; and psychologists Abraham Maslow and Chris Argyris, men with good ideas but always within the shadow of Descartes.

As a consequence, now in the “Digital Age” and heading for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” we still view life, process information, and solve problems in the same reductionist fashion. Deductive reasoning or reasoning from the general to the particular still dominates the scientific method.

We seemingly cling to the mechanistic world, the world we inherited from Newton and Descartes, which has brought us perilously close to Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land.

Modern physics increasingly involves inductive reasoning and intuitive thinking, something that Albert Einstein demonstrated in his imagining riding a light beam. Eventually, this daydreaming would manifest itself in his “theory of relativity.” Fritjof Capra addresses this in “The Tao of Physics” (1975) acquainting the reader with the intuitive wisdom and mystical philosophy of the science of the Far East.

In Capra’s The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (2011), we are given a sense of how fast things are moving with the explosion in communication technology. He claims we are already in “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” marked with automation and data exchange cyber-systems in manufacturing technologies with few workers involved. Are we in control or are we still being controlled by Descartes’ shadow?


NEXT: Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land – Part Twenty – Progress and the Growing Divide