Prior to Copernicus and the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, the preponderance of human knowledge was, in essence, “winging it”. Aristotle’s theories and world views held sway over the west for more than 1500 years, an incredible duration. The process for us to get from Aristotle’s brilliant but terribly incorrect theories to modern insights into quantum mechanics spans most of the recorded history of the western world. However, the path to getting to this nice, tidy place was not itself nice and tidy.
The most celebrated scientist of the 17th century is someone you probably have never heard of. Athanasius Kircher was a fascinating Renaissance man, interested in almost everything and with fascinating theories on many things. His participating in the ecosystem of 17th century thought was integral to a variety of advances. The problem is, most of what he had to say was eventually proven wrong. He thought and produced at light speed, participating in that fertile period of human knowledge exploration and definition. Kircher, and many other ultimately “incorrect” thinkers were essential to establishing an ecosystem of exploration. And while scientific authorities such as the Royal Society spanked them for ultimately being incorrect, the overall culture of the time did not. They were celebrated, encouraged and rewarded. People were interested in their ideas; the drawings and publications of Athansius Karcher, as just one example, represented cherished artifacts to people of the time. Even as the alchemists continued trying and failing in their attempts to turn other materials into gold, they were encouraged to do so.
The scientific revolution was borne from the renaissance and the reformation, two massive, continental movements that shifted Europe from a tightly controlled dark age, into an emergent and open society, finally propelled into freedom of thought and idea by the organized challenge to the Catholic church. Those massive cultural shifts – over nearly 200 years – were required to get humanity to a moment from which the scientific revolution could develop. The scientific revolution, then, represents a miraculous ~150 year period in human history that has forever changed the composition and outlook of the world.
But as we’ve maximized and optimized the learnings of that period over the subsequent 300 years, a funny thing has happened. Like the Catholic church and unsophisticated social systems before it, the structure of the scientific method and establishment has straight-jacketed future, potentially remarkable, progress. For, even as we have developed incredibly detailed understandings of the world around us, and even the physical system operating inside each of us, our degree of understanding about our essential selves has evolved relatively little since the time of Aristotle. Why? “Hard” science is the problem.
Why do people call psychology, sociology and other social sciences “soft” sciences? Because they are hard to “prove” in the ways accepted in the “hard” scientific community. That reality is being used as a crown of thorns to repress and discourage individuals, organizations and movements from deeply exploring, theorizing and hypothesizing on essential truths in the human condition. Read about even those methods which do have decades of research and legitimate “hard science” validation behind them – such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – and they are surrounded by language and caveats that remind us they are not necessarily valid. While part of that, certainly, is the product of our litigious society and Byzantine issues with the legal system, the larger culprit is the institutionalized expectation that, in order to explore and publish about knowledge, it needs to resemble and pass tests borne from the scientific tradition. This is a fatal, fundamental flaw.
As many of you are aware, I’ve spent more than a year deeply researching these so-called “soft science” fields. I’ve easily learned more during this time than in my 6 years of university, which saw me get bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In the process I have been discovering absolutely remarkable things about the psychological, sociological and behavioural human condition. I’m developing theories that I can’t prove are correct, might turn our being absolute wrong, but at a minimum are very interesting and in the best case could be part of a larger movement that fundamentally changes the human condition. Yet, publishing many of them would be impossible. I would be attacked from all sides. People and organizations would haughtily question if the ideas met criteria expected in the “hard” sciences, which they most certainly would not. I would be dismissed as a dilettante. And perhaps I am. However, the very fact that attempting to explore these intellectual places – things that I consider the very most important questions and issues of and for humanity – is criminal. It is every bit as oppressive as the same Catholic church that the scientific revolution itself fought with such vigour to emerge our of. What an irony that the oppressed now so closely resembles its old oppressor.
To this day, Sigmund Freud serves more as a punchline than a person who dramatically advanced human understanding. When I, as a matter of routine, talk about the work of Carl Jung and ask if people are familiar with him, most aren’t. These paragons of knowledge are dismissed or ignored because what they provide insight on is “soft” and cannot be A-B-C proven as with the “hard” sciences.
I challenge humanity to do better. I challenge us to re-frame and create spaces of exploration that encourage people to tackle the most knotty problems of all – how we behave, why we behave, how we inter-relate, on our internal structure, on relationships between human essence and existence – and do so without the compulsion to destroy those who do. Yes, ultimately we need to be driving toward some kind of “hard” truth. But the process to get there, as it was in the so-called “hard” sciences, is necessarily squishy, imprecise and not immediately provable. It is the only way by which will we understand ourselves as well as we understand the plants, planets and rocks that we’ve spent so much intellectual energy on. I think we’re well worth it.
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“We don’t know ourselves, we knowledgeable people —we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there’s good reason for that. We’ve never tried to find out who we are—how could it happen that one day we’d discover ourselves?” Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887).
There’s still the dogma of pragmatism in USA. The problem isn’t the pragmatism (that continental Europe often needs) but the “dogma”. If you don’t survive you can’t make a better world but if you see the world just as hunter-gatherer you are too simple in your needs and intelligence.