I'm a serious fellow. I've been told more than once in my life that I think too much, and probably have merited that assessment on a number of occasions. Being a person who can't help it, though, I do have the added benefit of knowing the limits of ivory tower logic, limits learned through hard-won experience.
There are benefits to being serious, to trying to reduce things in life to singular causes. If that weren't the case, our society wouldn't be what it is today, with our highly refined, well developed technology. With that in mind, even scientists are finding that some systems cannot be well understood from their component's characteristics alone. We call those kinds of systems, which are quite common in the real world emergent.
Trouble is, much of our philosophy and our attitudes are shaped by those centuries of time in which our culture alternated between romantic irreducibility, and pragmatic reductionism- people either believe that the world was a big mystery which the logic mavens did not understand half as much as they liked to believe, and those who believed the Romantics overlooked much of the undergirding order of the world. The cliche of both being right and both being wrong applies here.
It's not a very meaningful way of approaching things, on either end or in the middle. Additionally, neither side really has an approach that takes advantage of the way things really work. Of course, you could say each side must necessarily be an abstraction of the way people really work, and I guess you could say that is true. Unfortunately, in times of stress, people can sometimes run home to their philosophical momma, and start applying their perspective on the world with a vengeance.
America prospers, I think, in large part because it doesn't allow one way of thinking to exclusively rule the roost. From individual freedom emerges a robust discourse, with redundant backups, if you will, ready to take over when the former majority opinion loses favor. Some, though, react to that prospect with fear, and so try and push their ideas relentlessly.
We see such a situation in politics today, but not just there. We see it in the arts, particularly in the movie business. We see it in business culture, and even in religion. We see people who believe that they can reduce the good conduct of all these things to a list of rules, or at the very least a philosophical system.
Folks try to apply scientific methods (scientific in that they draw a conclusion by scholarly and/or systematic methods) to enterprises that are quite human in character. It can work to a certain extent, but only to the extent that people are willing to be skeptical about their own conclusions and how they came to them.
In trying to unravel the character of the world we live in and the things in it, we must recognize that we human beings can imagine the counterfactual quite easily. We must also recognize that in dealing with our fellow human beings, there are some facts which cannot be freed from subjective perspective, but which nonetheless have as great if not greater influence on the way things work than the cold, hard facts themselves.
We're flawed creatures, who can misjudge the world around us. This is why we have to keep both our eyes and our minds open as we try to establish the character of the world around us. This is also why we must do this on a permanent basis.
Only when we allow ourselves an awareness of how fragile our hold on reality truly is do we appreciate what an intellectual sin it is to have no room for error or different opinion in our plans. We need our discourse to be more fluid. Critics of what I say here may point out that not all new or different ideas have equal quality. This is, in many ways, all too true- in fact, that sensibility informs my argument here. What must be understood, though, is that the approach I suggest is all-inclusive in its skepticism. Both new ideas and old can be and often are wrong, in part or in the majority.
In fact, if you take a long enough view, all our ideas are wrong, illusions that cause us to stray from appropriate action. You could in fact call this original sin, if you are religiously inclined, though you could also call it human fallibility if such a morally drenched term seems over the top. Either way, like a ship on the sea, there is the course we intend to take, and the direction our vehicle of thought takes on the seas of reality. It is important, every now and then, as a sailor might do on a long voyage, for us to gauge where we really are, where we're really going, and what conditions our journey is taking us into.
Which brings me to this point, and the reason I portray the necessary course of action as neverending: As with sailing, a course correction cannot erase the path the vessel has taken to that point, nor make the current position a different one in the blink of an eye. It can only serve to reorient ourselves towards the right course for the destination we seek.
The relief from the consequences of the errors we make, to the extent that we can have it, is dependent on the quality of our next assessment of the situation. We can get that wrong, and remain off course. Or, more worryingly, a change in the weather or in the certain conditions along the leg of a journey could invalidate the course we are on, forcing us to reconsider what if any path could bring us to our goal- that or dare the approach anyways, our pride justly or unjustly refusing to buckle against the obstacle.
Regardless of all that, finding the right course to take, maintaining it, and deciding whether to keep to it or abandon it, is a dynamic process, especially if we put a premium on getting things done right. The corrupt, the lazy, and the unmotivated find no reason to make a friend of change. To those who wish to get things accomplished, to fulfill the noble impulses, and to keep a system pure, change (or at least it's potential) is their best ally.
Change, though, is not achieved all at once, nor are our current means of bringing it about always the best. If this sounds like it complicates things, it does, but these are complexities that were there to start, like a car engine is under the hood. The exterior may allow us the illusion that the car is a simple, unified entity, but that doesn't change what we find beyond the chrome. What we are rendering more complex is our appreciation.
But the complexity does carry with it costs of mental overhead. We get into what Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart call Ant Country, where a reductionist approach leads us to bewildering uncertainty as to how to manage things. The fearful approach to Ant Country is part of what motivates people to react and move towards romanticism and it's philosophical relatives.
This brings us back to a quality that we've long neglected: judgment. Critical thinking, rather than just procedural. It's easy once we've fallen into our mental arrogance to head in this direction- after all, if you've figured it out, why bother wasting the effort to refigure things? But since our notion of things is often imperfect, it's necessary and advantageous for us to peer past the veil of ignorance that surrounds us and reassess things. What brings many to fear this is the requirement that one exercise personal, subjective judgment. It becomes a practical moral act, rather than the inevitable result of a process that can't be wrong as long as you follow it.
The trouble is, conditions can and often do change in the world, and many of the systems that we attempt to address with these approaches are both dynamic and emergent in their character. Even if such process works once, it doesn't necessarily follow that such processes will remain a way to do the right thing. The process can become not unlike the food pellet system in a lab rat's cage, rewarding folks for doing things a certain way arbitrary of true utility of their actions. This is the hidden trap of the market, of any political party, of any means of managing people that does not reward open eyes open minds, and a sustained involvement with the going-ons of the world.
We have to be willing to risk being wrong to do things right, and having taken that risk, we must face up to the consequences of our actions with integrity, courage, and humility. To wall ourselves off in process and argument will not preserve us from error, it will only serve to sustain us in it.
