Enough – Answers, and the case for good judgement

Humans seem to have given up on debate as contribution in favour tweetable, simple answers and memes, or just the right to have whatever notion is stuck in our heads or passes by it, heard.

“What’s the answer”, “the science tells us”, “proper evidence-driven…”, or what does the rule book say. A simple answer, that’s what we need and since Twitter, it’s got so much worse. Answers, when it comes to humans. Simple, tweetable sentences or phrases, memes even, are a ridiculously inappropriate and unreasonable concept. Yes, I am being deliberately provocative, but bear with me.

Religious social codes aimed at basic common sense, getting along, and coping with the world without a better explanation, are overlaid onto the natural world where it gets most of it wrong. For example, the solar system, people lifting up hills, land masses being formed by clan chiefs, Giants (really big ones), parting of seas at will, immaculate conception, that kind of thing. Of course, religions also regulate humanness and human experience.

In a similar way, natural sciences have been overlaid on humans; how they think, what they think, how they feel, what they’re doing and what they will do, what they can describe etc. In other words, trying to turn meaning, experience, thoughts, values, feelings, and wisdom into numbers, to get ‘answers’.

Answers are the domain of either the natural sciences (maths, physics etc.) or religion. The problem with answers is they are put up as absolute statements and knocked down as such. Usually with a petty insult to boot. Answers from the natural sciences are a best guess based on a rational process and from religions are a guess, or just made up. Perhaps if we could get to see both as possible answers and ways to help us make good decisions, things might be a bit less adversarial?

However, we have largely forgotten our natural curiosity and the ability to debate intelligently. We have largely given up on the love of wisdom – philosophy. We are losing an entire language and way of relating in favour of ‘answers’. We have been sold either religion or science and forgotten our human abilities to be complex and nuanced.

Humans need philosophy, the ability to seek wisdom and come to good decisions. We need to be able to think deeply, debate, disagree and come back and contribute some more. We need to be able to include the natural sciences and religious ideas in our discussions, rather than taking a side.

The scientific method

By this, we mean rational natural sciences, what we in the English-speaking world call “science”, maths, physics etc. As I’ll come to later, German has a much better word – Wissenschaft or ‘a’ science. We have been persuaded that ‘science’ will explain everything, given time. The scientific method is one of problematization, experimental design, experiment, results, conclusion, and discussion. For its output to be accepted by recognised scientific peers the output must be, within a given tolerance; reliable, accurate, and repeatable. These are the three tenets of scientific research, and they are used to predict outcomes.

As ideas, answers, results, theories, and things that science makes become accepted they may be properly refuted by further scientific investigation. In this system, there are not supposed to be ‘ad hominem’ attacks (because a particular person said it, it must be wrong), but there is certainly a ‘you can’t be taken seriously unless you have a particular academic status’ thing. Hence rather like the judicial system, there is an adversarial situation where one side must be right and the other wrong. Broadly.

Science must be as right as possible so it can predict outcomes.

The trouble with people

With people, it gets way trickier. Answers for humans need to be more binary. The scientific certainly gets a bit fuzzy at this point and we’re only just getting started. Predicting what people will do, how they will feel about it, and what it will mean or feel… we are in trouble with the reliable, accurate, and repeatable tenets of rational science. We can’t even be sure how a person of people did feel, what exactly they did do, or how it felt or what it meant. Most of the time we can’t be entirely sure ourselves.

THUS, the overlay of rational science, the natural sciences, the science of ‘things’ cannot be justifiably overlaid upon humans. Yet it is, and we have been conditioned to think that’s not only acceptable but required.

Or… that we have faith in a rule book and may not test whether it is correct, we must ask only for guidance on how to comply… Do I mean Communism, Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism, Capitalism, or Religion when I say that...?

Humans are not constantly stable units. However, businesses would like them to be, and they do strange things like telling you that behaving a certain way will override your own thinking and values. Businesses require a great many people… REQUIRE a great many people, to lie to each other, all the time. The ones that are best at sticking to this are the most successful, usually. People that endure this are paid off, that’s the deal. The military beats people up and reprograms them to be things that comply or react predictably, with a few exceptions. Industrial/ Organizational psychologists and peddlers of psychometric personality tests – usually infested with ex-military people purporting to sell ‘leadership’ will tell you they can predict people and organize them into the most efficient teams. Religions attempt to enforce compliance and the more extreme of them will take over your bodily agency as well as test your thoughts for compliance.

The case for philosophy – and NOT the name droppy nerdy kind!

What we have done, certainly in the English-speaking world, is to allow rational, natural science, to over-run and usurp our ability to apply wisdom, judgment, perspective, nuance, complexity, flexibility, and understanding, to justify, explain, and suggest. We have allowed the love of wisdom – literally Philosophy, where we can think and debate fearlessly, to be killed off in favour of ‘answers’, and if we can’t get a simple answer by overlaying natural hard sciences like maths, geometry, and physics onto humanity. In German there is a much more universal and flexible word with which I strongly suggest we English speakers become acquainted and adopt –

Wissenschaft

Wissenscaft is ‘a’ science, not ‘science’. It means a way in which a particular subject can be talked about, the rules around the language of discussing different human experiences of things rather than discussing the things themselves. For example: art, painting, music, architecture, education, and fashion. The natural sciences will have a part to play in each of these, but they will not provide answers for them with an expectation of universal acceptance.

Humans are moody, complex, and nuanced. Yes, they can think and behave according to certain trends but there is a limit to that which is met very quickly. There are trends in human cultures which can apply broadly but they break down at an individual level to a greater or lesser extent.

The purpose of rational natural sciences was to predict or explain the mystical world that had previously given concrete answers to questions of the natural world. It was a replacement for religious guesswork, myth, legend, stories, parable, mysticism etc. It was to make sense of the world in a factual way rather than in a dogmatic faith-based way. It was to provide a factual sense, the best suggestions based on a scientific method. It was to step out of the largely made-up or presumptive, superstitious rules of religion.

In accepting that this is a good thing, we have lumped human experience, what it is to Be, in with religious mysticism. We have come to expect an absolute answer that only ‘science’ can provide. I say that in doing so we have set ourselves up to pick teams and have at each other. Most people that throw ‘science’ around, and make ‘scientific’ proclamations don’t have any more than a cursory knowledge of what science (natural science) is, or how it works. Certainly, when it comes to humans and inter-personal matters, matters of the soft sciences like art, literature, education, aesthetics, music etc. people who want to know ‘what the science tells us’ are completely missing the point of what it is to be the unique species we are.

We must rediscover debate, contribution, reasonable logical justification for ideas and make good decisions. We should enjoy our humanness, our Being, and not reduce ourselves to being things to be counted, measured, and predicted. Worse still, we should not be so easily persuaded by slogans, tweets and memes and definitely we should understand that search engines are just marketing tools that curate information which we tell it we like.