Every great advance in human history—the use of fire, the wheel, agriculture, writing, our highest religious ideals, democracy, the internet—starts with a new idea which in turn is based on earlier ideas. Humans live by ideas. What does it mean for us when the ideas we live by are in error?
Living Beyond our Genes
When humans attained culture, we moved beyond genes—or, rather, grew up into a new level of organization and evolution. That happened fifty or sixty thousand years ago, maybe earlier. Until then we evolved like other life forms, primarily by natural selection working on our physical bodies, instincts, and more or less fixed patterns of relating. But now as cultural beings our own ideas are the means by which human life advances, evolves, becomes ever more complex.
Ideas also can hold us back. Wrong or limiting ideas restrict what we do and who we are. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that humans live in webs of meaning that they themselves spin. Living in a world of ideas that we ourselves create gives humans degrees of freedom that no other being on Earth enjoys. But this includes, as I said in an earlier post, the freedom to make mistakes, to be fooled, to be played the sucker, and to wrap ourselves in straight-jackets of limited thinking.
The human mind has freedom to divide, categorize and combine things in novel and creative ways. But we also use this gift to build fences—ones that keep others out, and ones that confine our own minds.
Living according to mistaken ideas can work for a while, even get you ahead. And, your living by mistaken ideas can get someone else ahead (and of course vice versa, depending on the circumstance). But more often, and always in the end, in the complex interconnected ecologies in which we live and subsist, wrong ideas eventually lead to unpleasant or even deadly consequences.
Socrates (or was it Plato?) said the unexamined life is not worth living. For us, with our terrifying capabilities and the large scale of our works, the unexamined mind is becoming a dangerous way to live.
Waking up to both our freedom and our fallibility can be terrifying. Or, more positively, it can bring us home to ourselves, help make us more real, caution us to live with respect on the fragile planet that sustains us.
Ideas We Don’t Know We Have
People have inborn tendencies to take—and sometimes mistake—their ideas for perceptions, their dogmas for truths.
People don’t generally realize that they’re in the grip of a limiting or mistaken idea until a new idea comes along and challenges it. We believe what we believe for as long as we can. The most powerful ideas or ideologies are those we don’t know we have, but rather take for granted as just the way things are. It’s a bit of a stretch and a simplification, but you could even think of a particular culture as one big idea, a world-view. Those big ideas that give form to our world most deeply define who we are, and are the hardest to grow out of, to change.
It’s easiest to “see” ideas we don’t have ourselves. Take the idea of the flat Earth as the center of the universe around which all the heavenly bodies revolve that I mentioned in my last post.
Setting aside those curious few who still believe the world is flat and the round-earth idea a conspiracy (a notion most people today rightly regard as pseudo-science nonsense), the rest of us readily recognize the idea of a flat Earth as a particular idea, even a peculiar idea, because it is not our idea. It belongs to different times, different cultures. We have distance from it. We don’t perceptually and conceptually inhabit a universe that idea described.
But in past times and distant places, without the benefit of Newtonian physics and photos from space, the idea of a flat Earth as the center of the cosmos could be and was compelling because it seemed to come directly from people’s own senses. It was not just what people thought, but what they experienced, as they looked out over the land and watched the sun rise and set, and saw the stars wheel their set ways across the dome of the night sky. They believed what they empirically, naïvely saw—not recognizing it as a belief—and constructed whole religious cosmologies around it. They inhabited that world. They lived within their idea of the world, and they viewed the world from within (from the perspective of) that idea. Therefore, how could they recognize it as an idea? It was not just an idea; it was who they were; it was simply truth; it was how things are.
In the West, that idea of the Earth (and of “Man” created in the image of God), as the literal center of God’s Universe wasn’t widely recognized as a particular idea subject to challenge until Copernicus and Galileo put it in question. At first, it was Copernicus’s notion that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, but rather the Earth and the other planets orbited the sun, that seemed unbelievable. As evidence mounted and it became believable, Copernicus’s world-shifting idea ushered in another large new idea, that of science. And with science a whole new world-view arose as an alternative to the religious orthodoxy of the Middle Ages.
Science is our own big idea; it is how we think, who we are. And, as I said last time, and will also talk about next time, we’ve reached the point in our evolution of ideas where more people can, and should, and in fact more do, think farther in the round—think more consciously about what we think.
(Granted, that’s not a totally new idea either: In examining our thoughts, even making theories about our own minds, we circle in on the essence of being human as captured in the ancient image of the uroboros—the snake swallowing its own tail. But in the world we’re making, we need not just philosophers philosophers and mystics but more everyday people who vote—to keep getting better at it.)
If we take on the task of thinking more consciously about what we think, then our big idea—namely science and technology, and not just science but our whole current world-view that got shaped in the ideas and images of earlier science—is the first course on our plate. But what’s a good angle to approach it from? Here’s just a couple of suggestions. We can look critically at science and the modern world-view it shaped without falling into relativism. And we can see, based in part on later scientific discoveries, when and where early science gave right answers on particulars while larger “pictures” of our world and ourselves based on those particulars were incomplete and even wrong.
Science—Our Big Idea. Is It Our Mistake?
The advent of modern science was in many ways a huge advance in human learning, human understanding, and human life. Lifting Western culture out of its “Dark Ages,” it became the scaffolding for what we, with some basis but also some hubris, call the Enlightenment. Early mechanistic science and the universe that it describes became our big idea, a foundation for our culture. It shaped the big idea of the universe and our place in it that we live by and live within.
But what, exactly, is that big idea? Who has appropriated it, shaped it, and used for their own ends? It has different aspects that have changed through time. Two central ones today are that we can transcend culture and command nature.
Transcending Culture, Commanding Nature. Anthropologist Sharon Traweek memorably and paradoxically describes the cultural world of high energy physics as “the culture of no culture.” The phrase has a catchy ring to it because this is the world-view not just of a clique of specialists, but of science at large—or was until quite recently. And it still is the general outlook of modern Western civilization that has grown up around that earlier scientific world-view and incorporates it in many of its day-to-day practices, institutions, and beliefs. “Cultures” of various strange kinds are what others have. But us—why we’re just folks.
In the minds of those who practice it, as recorded by Traweek and many others, scientific methodology works to transcend culture, to take all cultural influences—dogmas, assumptions, particular perspectives, opinions, prior beliefs emotions, superstitions—out of its equations. In science, or so it is told, we take ourselves out of our work, and out of the world we observe. By taking ourselves fully out of the natural world from which we emerged, we think, we become almost like gods, able to understand nature’s workings on its own terms—and control it on ours. That’s linear thinking. That’s Descartes’ Chasm—the Cartesian split at the heart of the modern world view. What hubris! What a BIG mistake! We forgot and now are having to relearn that we’re always within and part of the systems we’re messing with.
An Ironic Error
Traweek’s wry characterization reveals an ironic error at the heart of the modern scientific world-view: the “culture of no culture” is itself a culture. We humans are by nature cultural beings. Culture is what defines and sustains us as human; we can no more lose culture and remain human than a cloud, say, can lose its water vapor and remain a cloud. Culture is our cat’s meow. Neither can we abstract ourselves from the natural world within which we humans evolved. We’re in the world we think we control, and what we to do to it affects us (remember the uroborus).
Adding irony onto irony, it is the ongoing development of science itself that now more clearly reveals those errors. That in itself is unexceptional: it’s how science works, how knowledge advances, how new theory supplants or sublates (incorporates) earlier more limited theory.
But when new theoretical understanding supplants old theory on which a whole culture developed—when the advance of science challenges earlier scientific viewpoints that continue to underpin a civilization’s institutions, practices, and attitudes—things get more complicated.
That is our circumstance today.