CHAPTER 6: THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF THE BETRAYAL

Richard Norgaard

 

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.

(Richard Rorty 1989:9)

 

Many have ventured thoughtful explanations as to why development during the past century has been so environmentally destructive. Some natural scientists argue that massive environmental destruction is inevitable when human populations are expanding exponentially. Others emphasize that far too many new substances have been introduced into the environment before determining their impacts on other species let alone ourselves. Economists argue that producers and consumers behave in a manner that cannot be sustained because market prices do not include environmental costs. Moralists argue that people generally are too greedy and shortsighted, while marxists argue that capitalists are too avaricious and myopic. Every discipline has a preferred explanation of our environmental crises consistent with its patterns of thinking. There is no reason to take issue with any of these explanations rooted in particular disciplines of thought for each provides insights.

 

Beyond these disciplinary explanations, however, there are broader philosophical interpretations of why modernism has led to the degradation of environmental systems. These arguments also link to the destruction of cultural systems. Most people believe humans think in a more sophisticated manner than other species. It seems likely that our way of thinking is related to other uniquely human characteristics such as how we organize into social systems and how we transform environmental systems. Thus I argue that key premises of Western patterns of thinking help explain the cultural and biological destruction associated with modernism.

 

I want to make it very clear that I am not addressing the diverse and contradictory ways in which each of us thinks as individuals. Nor am I addressing how scientists actually think or how science really progresses. I am only addressing the metaphysical and epistemological premises, sup­positions, or beliefs underlying the modern world view. These premises, however, are critically important for they determine the bounds of accept­able political discourse as well as the processes of public fact gathering, decision-making, and implementation.

 

Table 6.1 Dominant and alternate premises

 

Dominant Premises	Alternate Premises
Atomism: Systems consist of unchanging parts and are simply the sum of their parts.	Holism: Parts cannot be understood apart from their wholes and wholes are different from the sum of their parts.
Mechanism: Relationships between parts are fixed, systems move smoothly from one equilibrium to another, and changes are reversible,	Systems might be mechanical, but they might also be deterministic yet not predictable or smooth because they are chaotic or simply very discontinuous. Systems can also be evolutionary.
Universalism: Diverse, complex phenomena are the result of underlying universal principles which are few in number and unchanging over time and space.	Contextualism: Phenomena are contingent upon a large number of factors particular to the time and place. Similar phenomena might well occur in different times and places due to widely different factors.
Objectivism: We can stand apart from what we are trying to understand.	Subjectivism: Systems cannot be understood apart from us and our activities, our values, and how we have known and hence acted upon systems in the past.
Monism: Our separate individual ways of understanding complex systems are merging into a coherent whole.	Pluralism: Complex systems can only be known through alternate patterns of thinking which are necessarily simplifications of reality. Different patterns are inherently incongruent.

 

Modernism destroys cultural and biological systems because of five closely interlinked metaphysical and epistemological premises that characterize Western thought. Labeling them with parallel “isms”, they are atomism, mechanism, objectivism, universalism, and monism. These five philosophical suppositions address the nature of reality, how people fit into reality, how we can know, and the nature of knowledge. Today these beliefs are implicit to many arguments, but they are quite explicitly expressed in the works of nineteenth-century scientists and social philosophers. Most people now, including the vast majority of scientists, lose little sleep contemplating the ultimate nature of reality or how they think they know. Nevertheless, these key philosophical premises are unconsciously, implicitly, and eclectically invoked in arguments presented in both public and scientific occasions.

 

Furthermore these premises are implied in the arguments of academics, capitalists, environmentalists, and politicians with diverse and frequently opposing interests. A few people build arguments around these beliefs for strategic purposes, fully cognizant that they are inappropriate to the particular case for which they are utilizing them. This is because the suppositions are so widely embedded in Western institutions that they cannot be questioned. To question publicly these premises is to disempower oneself from effectively working in large organizations, serving as a scientific or technical expert, or publicly engaging in political discourse.

 

Atomism, mechanism, universalism, objectivism, and monism are not poor philosophical suppositions from which to reason. They have proven to be extremely productive for both Western science and other institutions. The problem is that these beliefs are embedded in our public discourse to the exclusion of other metaphysical and epistemological premises which are more appropriate for understanding the complexities of environmental systems and which are more supportive of cultural pluralism.

 

 

THE DOMINANT METAPHYSICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL SUPPOSITIONS

 

Atomism is the premise that systems consist of parts that do not change and that systems can be thought of as the sum of their parts. This belief is usually traced to the Greek philosophers, especially Democritus who wrote in the fifth century B.C. Chemistry made rapid progress, after centuries of confusion as alchemy, by adhering strictly to the idea of atomism. Atoms in chemical reactions are thought merely to combine, and the compound is thought to be merely the sum of the parts even though entirely new properties emerge when the compound is formed. When reactions are reversed, we think of the atoms as unchanged. Since at least subdisciplines of all of the other natural sciences build upon the principles of chemistry, atomism has proven to be a very powerful metaphysical construct for understanding the natural world.

 

Atomism as a metaphysical premise has also been very influential in how we understand our social world. Western political philosophy, most notably that which is strongly rooted in the thinking of John Locke (1632-1704), has stressed the individual and characterized societies as the sum of their individuals. Democracy and atomism have been closely associated. Similarly, Western economic thought has stressed individual producers and consumers with supply and demand being the sum of their respective activities.

 

Atomism also serves us well at an operational level. It facilitates thinking about solving problems as a process of solving separate tasks which, when each is completed, results in the whole being solved. Postal services, for example, treat each letter as a separate problem, bag problems into postal zones, ship bags to separate locations, and so on until the job is done. Similarly, we think of economies as consisting of millions of people working on separate tasks which are connected within businesses and corporations and then through markets. Undertaking each separate task accomplishes the whole, the provision of goods and services. The problem, of course, is that some operations cannot be divided into separate tasks but must be under­taken simultaneously in close coordination. The heart surgeon, anesthesiol­ogist, and staff maintaining and monitoring life supporting equipment must operate around an organic, not atomistic, paradigm.

 

Mechanism is the premise that the relations between the parts of a system do not change. Oxygen and hydrogen always combine in the same propor­tions under particular conditions to form water. The planets revolve around the sun, always in accordance with the principles of mechanics. Obviously for these two cases and many more in the natural world, our belief in mechanism is quite reasonable. Mechanical systems behave in a regular manner. Mechanical systems also have the special characteristic of revers­ibility. Changes can be unchanged; the system can always return to its original state with sufficient additional energy input. Once the regularities of a particular system are known, how the system responds is predictable. And once we can predict the effect of different changes, we can choose to impose the change that will have a desired effect.

 

The ability to predict and control is so closely tied to our beliefs about science that explanations which have few predictive qualities and hence do not empower people, theories of evolution being the most obvious example, are not thought of as being scientific even by a few, albeit older, philosophers of science.

 

Universalism is the belief that the parts of systems and the relations between the parts have an underlying nature which is the same everywhere and at all times. Equally importantly, the underlying nature of things and relations are thought to be interpretable by a relatively small number of universal principles. There are many examples where universalism holds. The laws of thermodynamics are few in number, universally true, and underlie and explain many processes. A few prrnciples of chemistry are especially important and widely applicable. Through these principles we know that coal-fired electric generation plants operate the same around the world, with even their minor divergences due to ambient temperature differences explicable by the laws of thermodynamics and the principles of chemistry. Most processes designed by people, industrial processes especially, operate the same across time and space. Agriculture, of course, is an extremely important exception. Each crop variety is sensitive to the local characteristics of soils, climate, and pests — factors whose effects on agriculture cannot be explained by a few basic principles. Western agricultural scientists and industry experts, however, have strived to reduce this local sensitivity as much as possible by developing industrially produced inputs to override the natural factors and by developing crop varieties which respond to produced inputs. Thus universalism seems to be a common property at the level of basic physical processes but not for complex systems. Our belief in universalism, moreover, makes it a management goal in our interactions with more complex systems.

 

Objectivism is the belief that natural and social systems can be understood and acted upon objectively, as if people can understand and act and not be a part of the system they are understanding and changing. Science is about unchanging, real objects and the relations between them which can be known “objectively”. Science addresses, for example, the qualities of insects and the relations between them. The knowledge acquired through science is not supposed to be tainted by our subjective feelings about creepy crawly things. Holding to objectivism, moreover, means the behavior of the insects is not thought to be affected by the presence or activities of the scientist studying them. Objectivism is a reasonable supposition for physics, though there are some notable difficulties even here, and becomes increasingly unrealistic as it becomes more difficult for the scientists to isolate themselves from the systems they are studying.

 

Objectivism includes the premise that it is possible to comprehend reality as if it did not include ourselves and that reality can be known independently of our values. Western science is widely believed to be objective in the sense that it is commonly thought to be only concerned with the facts about reality apart from how people value different things. When this supposed quality is extended to beliefs about the use of science in public decision­making, objectivism is frequently referred to as positivism. Of the five philosophical beliefs, objectivism or positivism is the only one which is explicitly invoked in public discourse today. It is typically invoked when a speaker wants to convince an audience that her or his arguments only deal with the facts and hence are immutable reality.

 

The belief that science is value-free and that reality can be understood as if people are apart from reality is very important to our Western conception of science. The belief makes some sense for the knowledge we have acquired of parts of systems under controlled laboratory conditions, but the belief loses its context when this knowledge is then put into practice under uncontrolled conditions beyond the laboratory. When people cannot be isolated from the system under study, this belief lacks even this initial footing as well as a basis in practice. And lastly, there is good reason to believe that our values affect our choice of patterns of thinking for interpreting systems. While this is especially so for the social sciences, there is good evidence for this in the natural sciences as well.

 

Monism is the belief that there is one best way of understanding systems. Alternatively, monism is the belief that there is only one best way for knowing any particular system and that the multiple ways of compre­hending different systems fit, or will fit as science progresses, into a coherent whole of understanding. Monism denies the possibility of multiple right and contradictory answers stemming from alternative ways of thinking about the same problem. If there are alternative ways of thinking about something, at least the answers must be congruent. And if two paths of thinking result in different or incongruent answers, one path must be wrong or science has not progressed sufficiently for us to understand how they fit together. Monism as a premise is supported by the consistencies between much of physics, chemistry, and microbiology. But scientific debates over the complexities of social and environmental systems are frequently fueled by excessive belief in monism in areas where there is little evidence to support the premise.

 

Let me emphasize again that these metaphysical and epistemological premises proved extremely effective well into the twentieth century. Physics and chemistry were enormously successful in establishing the characteristics of basic units of nature and in determining universal relations between units. The biological sciences, including their application in agriculture, and the environmental sciences, including their application in engineering, have drawn heavily upon physics and chemistry. The use of this knowledge in the design of industrial processes and manufacture of products, in the manufacture of chemicals and machines to enhance agricultural productivity, and to produce ever more novel consumer goods has transformed the lives of almost everyone. Most of the technologies we use were developed through the aid of these philosophical premises.

 

These metaphysical and epistemological suppositions, however, are not well suited for thinking about complex systems, especially systems which include people. Yet they have become so embedded in the rules of Western political discourse and organizational behavior that alternative philosophical premises which would help us understand complex systems as well as support cultural pluralism have not been tolerated. How Western social rationality became so constrained and the implications of these constraints deserves further elaboration.

 

WESTERN SOCIAL RATIONALITY

 

Early Western scientists set out to understand a static world as God had created it. They envisioned the acquisition of knowledge as a process whereby individual minds investigated nature’s parts, or atoms, and processes, or mechanics. The mind was thought of as an independent entity that perceives and interprets. Asking questions, thinking, and acting were thought neither to influence the underlying principles which govern nature nor to affect the mind itself. Like the mind, nature also just was. Thus people and the natural world were juxtaposed in the Western world view. The idea of objectivity stems from this static juxtaposition.

 

Scientific knowledge of atomistic parts and mechanistic relations could be used to develop technologies to adjust the relative numbers of the parts and the relative strengths of the relations. Through these adjustments, people could transform nature to have the properties and behave in a manner more consistent with desired objectives. Objectivism meant that human action did not change the underlying nature of parts or relations. With unchanging parts and relations, knowledge could be presumed to be universal over time. Furthermore, differences in natural and social systems across regions could also be thought of as differences in the proportions of parts and strengths of relations. Thus the idea of underlying universal truths could be maintained across diverse environments and cultures.

 

This atomistic-mechanistic view of knowledge and its use is illustrated in Figure 6.1. Note that this diagram is a simplification of Figure 4.1. The major difference is that the line of causation, the process of development in the earlier diagram, is looped back on itself. The barrier drawn between the changing proportions of the parts and strengths of the relations and the nature of the parts and relations is a key aspect of the epistemological stance. No such barrier, of course, exists between the reality from which we draw theories and design technologies and the reality we affect through our social organization and technologies.

 

Figure 6.1 A Newtonian world view of science and action

 

The adoption of this metaphysical and epistemological stance in the public sphere traces up through many political philosophers and social movements. Certainly one of the stronger tracings stems from the positivist philosophy espoused by Auguste Comte between 1825 and 1850. Comte extended Newton’s mechanical framework to social systems, stressed the importance of values but took them as given and apart from his framework. As a product of his times, his thinking complemented that of many others pursuing similar lines. Comte, however, was the most prolific and outspoken. He coined the terms positivism and sociology. He and his many followers truly believed that social systems could be understood by the methods of Western science, that the consequences of alternative courses of action could be predicted, and that people could then rationally choose between courses according to that which they valued most. He clearly envisioned that science, by serving the process of social decision-making, would free society from the irrationalities of established religions and the tyranny of arbitrary power. His philosophy of positivism integrated science and social processes and replaced existing religious authority and raw political power. Comte literally thought of positivism as a superior religion, one that could be more benevolent by effectively linking science, individual values, and social action.

 

The foregoing attributes of positivism shaped the modern world view. The process of adopting these views, however, was somewhat erratic. Natural scientists, technocrats, and market-oriented economists found positivist beliefs very compatible. It is interesting to note that while Comte and other Western intellectuals then and now have always espoused universal enlightenment, positivism gives the currently enlightened a special social authority. As the role of government in the industrializing nations expanded, drew upon scientific information and expertise, and patterned itself on the scientific approach, rational positivism reigned as implicit official state religion during the twentieth century much as Comte had envisioned.

 

Though positivism was eagerly accepted as a social philosophy by natural scientists, technocrats, and market-oriented economists, it has had a very stormy history within the social sciences themselves. Patterns of thinking that emphasized the importance of history and local context are rooted in beliefs which clash with rational positivism. Only a minority of social scientists today believe that facts and values can be separated and hence that rational positivism is an adequate basis for public philosophy. Since rational positivism is well institutionalized and widely believed publicly, social science patterns of thought, and hence social scientists working in their professional capacity, have little influence in governments. Natural scientists, technocrats, and neoclassical economists participate as professionals in public decision-making because they have more readily accepted these publicly dominant epistemological and metaphysical beliefs and reinforced them through their mode of participation. Change seems unlikely until other combinations of philosophical beliefs acquire sufficient public acceptance to compete with positivism.

 

Neoclassical economics as used in capitalist countries and the analogous optimization techniques used in socialist countries, both to guide and to rationalize public decision-making, epitomize the modern world view. Early economists explicitly acknowledged their philosophical debt to Isaac Newton while the mathematizers of economics — Cournot, Jevons, Pareto, and Walras — formalized economics along the mechanistic models of Newton. The neoclassical model is atomistic in the assumption that land, labor, and capital are separate components, like individual atoms. They are combined during the production of goods and services and are only related to each other through their relative values determined in exchange. Neo­classical economics is mechanistic in its assumption that economic systems can operate in equilibrium at any position along a continuum and move back and forth between positions. If more labor becomes available, the economic system adjusts so that more labor intensive goods are produced and are sold at lower prices relative to capital intensive goods, the returns to labor fall, and the returns to capital increase. If the quantity of labor returns to its previous level, the economy produces the previous mix of goods at the same prices and the earnings of labor and capital return to their previous levels. Economists, with few exceptions, construct atomistic-mechanistic models of economies characterized by a range of stable equilibria and the reversibility of system changes.

 

Thus economics incorporated atomism and mechanism, the two most productive assumptions of Western natural science. The parts of the economy as well as the relations between the parts do not change their characteristics. The only thing that changes in the basic economic world view is the relative numbers of different parts and the relative strengths of different relations. The imaginary barrier of Figure 6.1 is clearly in place. The economists’ knowledge of the economic system can be used to change the relative numbers and strengths in order to make it behave in a manner better suited to our objective values without changing the characteristics of the parts and relations themselves. Under this construct, the theories of economics about the parts and relations still hold even after using the theories to intervene in the economy.

Partly because these metaphysical and epistemological beliefs were especially productive for science during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public became thoroughly enamored of science and the ways in which science seemed to insure progress. This public support led governments to promote science actively. And along with this came the adoption of scientific procedures and criteria in administrative decision­making. It was quite natural that the metaphysical and epistemological beliefs widely held at the time by scientists and the public became tightly embedded in our public institutions. These beliefs, however, now underlie many of the crises of modernism.

 

 

WESTERN PUBLIC RATIONALITY AND THE CRISES OF MODERNISM

 

The five metaphysical and epistemological beliefs underlying modern rationality are rarely the basis for thought and action by individuals, families, and small groups. Today, the most innovative scientists and most successful entrepreneurs do not rely solely on these premises. Yet these suppositions are the only ones which are publicly held acceptable for use in public discourse and decision-making. The challenges of sustained human interaction with the biosphere require a public response. But arguments for environmental action that are rooted in other philosophical premises are weeded out of the public dialogue. Recreating an understanding of society that is greater than the sum of its individuals and re-imaging the future so that we do not all end up as identical, inhuman consumers choking in a polluted world requires a new public response. Let me argue that we have failed to respond adequately to date because the five publicly held philosophical postulates underlying modernism are inappropriate to the task.

 

By publicly agreeing to atomism, we accept that problems can be divided into parts. We have become so effective at dividing and conquering that problems that can be treated in this manner are no longer problems. For this reason, the critical problems that dominate the agenda of modernism today do not have the property of separability. Affluence, environmental degradation, and the health problems of the industrial countries must be understood as one problem. Global climate change, acid rain, and the accumulation of toxics cannot be treated apart from the high rates of use of energy and materials for industrial production and transport associated with Western opulence. Similarly poverty and environmental degradation in the poor countries must be seen as one problem. Poverty cannot be solved with­out better environmental management and better environmental manage­ment cannot be attained without the managers of the land receiving a fair return. Whole systems must be addressed. But our public belief in atomism legitimates the position of those who argue that fixing the parts is sufficient as well as the position of those who argue that fixing the parts has not been effective in the past and that thus nothing can be done.

 

By publicly agreeing to mechanism, we accept as a basic premise that it is possible to predict how systems will respond to different stimuli and hence to make them behave as we see fit. But we repeatedly delude ourselves when we act on the premise that ecosystems and societies are analogous to mechanical systems. Our remedies do not lead to new equilibrium solutions we prefer. On the contrary, new problems with new relationships between them evolve with every step we take. Automobiles solved the problems of horse transportation, but brand new, unforeseen problems — rapid urban growth, freeways, the loss of community, air pollution, spills from oil tankers, and global climate change — with complicated relationships between them evolved to take the place of the old problems and relationships.

 

The consequences of mechanistic premises when dealing with systems which are better understood as coevolving deserves elaboration. In the case of pest control, for example, the mechanical world view simply has insecticides reducing the population of insects to a preferred new equilibrium level. The coevolutionary perspective, however, also alerts us to the fact that the pesticide exerts selective pressure on the insect population. Those individual insects which are more resistant to the insecticide are more likely to survive and have offspring. Since insects have offspring frequently, resistance to the insecticide develops within the population remarkably quickly. The evolution of resistance, in turn, results in selective pressure against the original insecticide in favor of new insecticides for which this population of insects has not yet acquired resistance. The coevolutionary process can go back and forth without reaching an equilibrium. The mechanical view gives the impression that the insecticide provides an easy solution. The coevolutionary view indicates that the use of insecticides will change the path of coevolution in a manner which may be better, but may be worse.

 

The destruction of cultural systems is also facilitated through overdepen­dence on a mechanical world view. When new technologies, values, types of knowledge, and ways of organizing are accepted by or imposed on cultures, the mechanical view of cultures assumes simply that a new cultural equilibrium will be reached. The original traits and relationships that define the culture are presumed to remain intact after a new introduction, only the relative frequency of the traits and strengths of the relationships are presumed to change. From a coevolutionary perspective, however, one expects that some aspects of the culture will be selected out and driven to extinction and that underlying cultural relationships will be forever changed. Cultural systems are always evolving, of course, but if changes are introduced with the expectations generated by a mechanical understanding of systems, the rate of cultural change will be faster and the types of changes will in fact be quite unexpected.

 

The process of cultural transformation is also illustrative. Consider the introduction of a fertilizer-responsive rice into a traditional cultures From the mechanical perspective, this is seen simply as an additional technical option among those available to farmers. Old varieties are presumed always to exist. A socially enlightened mechanical view accepts that the adoption of the responsive rice will depend on social organization and cultural values. The mechanical world view, however, does not foresee that if the new rice is adopted that it will select in favor of the form of social organization that is most favorable to it. For example, a fertilizer-responsive rice requires the purchase of fertilizer. This fact favors those who plant for the market over those who plant for subsistence. Thus the introduction of the new rice creates the situation where a coevolution process favors market social organization and the supporting individualist values.

 

To be sure, good things as well as bad have not been foreseen in the past from the mechanistic perspective. Yet the bad at the end of the twentieth century look bad indeed. I contend that the process of delusion illustrated above is occurring repeatedly across the spectrum of public decisions, to the extent that this, among other philosophical explanations, is a significant “cause” of the crises of modernism. Given the consequences of global climate change and the loss of biodiversity as well as our renewed interest in the importance of maintaining cultural systems and diversity, it seems unduly risky to speed ahead with only the mechanical world view to guide us in public decisions.

 

The errors generated by assuming mechanism are compounded by assuming obectivism. People and how they think, organize, and value things are clearly a part of the coevolutionary process in both of the foregoing examples. People’s mechanical perception of insect control and of the introduction of a new rice variety is obviously critical to the coevolutionary path that is initiated in each case. Changes in technical options on the farm select for social organization and values as the coevolutionary process unfolds. To premise that people are apart from the natural processes they seek to modify is to put on a blindfold voluntarily.

 

To assume atomism and mechanism is to assume the existence of the barrier in Figure 6.1, which somehow isolates the reality on which we derive our knowledge from the reality on which we act. The existence of this imaginary barrier in our public understanding of science and its absence in reality provides an epistemological explanation of why development has been unsustainable. Action changes the nature of parts and relations, typically in an irreversible manner. The introduction of totally new parts — agrichemicals and industrial wastes into ecosystems and televisions and fax machines into social systems — create brand new relations. Basing action on science girded by false beliefs in universals, in unchanging parts and relations, continually results in “unforeseen” changes in social and environ­mental systems. Thus the unsustainability of past development has an epistemological explanation.

 

By publicly agreeing to universaljsm, we also accept that phenomena in widely different places and times can be understood through the application of a few simple principles. To the extent that universal principles do apply, then problems, once these principles are known, are not complex or difficult to solve. Furthermore, since the principles are universally true, explanations can be determined and solutions devised from afar. Being close to a system, such as an agroecosystem or a group of traditional peoples, and knowing intimate details has no special advantage for if scientific principles are universal and few in number only a few critical facts must be known. Thus universalism, or at least belief in universalism, promotes management from afar, centralization, and large-scale, factory-like operations with many laborers and few who monitor, think, and manage. Of course, to the extent universalism is inappropriate but we erroneously think it is appropriate, mistakes are made.

 

By publicly agreeing to monism, we end up arbitrarily throwing out answers which conflict with established knowledge but which may be just as good and reliable. Different ways of understanding complex systems yield different insights. But if we publicly believe that there is only one best way of understanding any given system, then the understanding that can be gained from multiple insights is forgone. Alternative lines of reasoning utilizing different types of information are eliminated from the rational calculus of technocratic agencies when they prove incongruent with dominant patterns and premises. At the level of political discourse, a greater diversity of arguments is entertained. But the work of politicians has been reduced, due to our limited vision of the role of politics, by passing problems on to agencies delegated to resolve problems scientifically. The paucity of ways of understanding at this level leads us to make mistakes which could have been foreseen and prevented.

 

By publicly agreeing to monism we have no public basis for utilizing the knowledge of other cultures. Acupuncture, for example, has been used effectively in Asia for centuries. Because this knowledge is inconsistent with Western medical understanding, its practice has been severely restricted in the West until relatively recently. Acupuncture is still largely unavailable in hospitals because the management of hospitals is dominated by Western doctors. Last but not least, by publicly agreeing to monism we are unable to look upon cultures with different knowledge systems as equals. This disrespect for other cultures hastens cultural narrowing.

 

 

CONCLUSIONS

The characteristics of our environmental difficulties have been identified differently by biologists, climatologists, demographers, economists, geologists, and on through the alphabet. While each of their explanations provides insight, each fails to identify how progress driven by science has gone astray. The metaphysical and epistemological suppositions of the modern world view explain the environmental side of the betrayal quite simply. They are common to most disciplines. Furthermore, these same beliefs underlie the cultural destruction associated with modernism.

 

In Chapter 5 on the idea of progress, I argued that people developed excessive expectations for Western science with respect to the possi­bilities for designing rational social systems. Our inability to meet these expectations is also rooted in our excessive reliance on particular metaphysical and epistemological premises which are inappropriate for understanding complex systems, especially complex systems with the “understander” inside of them. A more appropriate cosmology is elaborated in Chapter 9. But first we have a chapter on the problems of deterministic thinking and then a chapter further elaborating the coevolutionary process.