The Social Roots of the Newtonian-Cartesian Paradigm
“Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)” Wittgenstein, ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ 4.111
One of the unquestioned presumptions of our age is that the framework of reality that science is locked into is grounded in empirical data and is the product of adherence to the pure principles of the scientific method.
I shall challenge this presumption and show that while science has been enormously successful in describing the phenomenal world and in modelling, predicting and manipulating the behaviour of physical systems, the metaphysical framework of reality into which it seeks to make sense of it all is primarily a social construct.
This may strike one as absurd. The ideology of a society may well be rooted in its economic base, as Marx and others have held, but science is an entirely different proposition: science is the pure and noble pursuit of truth uninfluenced by social and economic forces. I shall show that it is not and that the ideology and mythology of a society extends even to its scientific paradigms.
The framework of reality that science and indeed the whole of our society is locked into can described briefly as follows: The universe consists of material objects separate in space and time and unconnected at any deeper or implicate level; matter is fundamental and consciousness is an emergent property of it; the material universe exists independently of consciousness; everything is governed by strict deterministic-mechanistic laws; psi phenomena are impossible; nature is blind and purposeless; the universe is a great machine and we are biological robots that are part of that machine. This framework of reality is called the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm and it is upheld and defended by the scientific establishment.
Yet this paradigm cannot correspond to anything real. Philosophically, it is internally incoherent – which is why no first-rate philosopher has held to it. Empirically it cannot accommodate either the behaviour of nature at the quantum level or anomalous phenomena like psi for which there is now definitive scientific evidence. So why has the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm not been abandoned by science and replaced by some other framework of reality?
As the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed, paradigms are very resistant to change. The question though is why – and specifically why this particular paradigm is resistant to change.
It is a source of perplexity to many physicists that a hundred years after the quantum revolution, all scientific disciplines except physics are still steeped in the old classical science. Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has suggested that “...the greatest scientific revolution of all time has gone largely unnoticed by the general public, not because its implications are uninteresting but because they are so shattering as to be almost beyond belief.” That is true. But they are so only when viewed from within the old paradigm – since everything that won’t fit into a paradigm or framework of reality is by definition beyond belief. So the question is: why is the old framework of reality still being sustained, against all reason and available empirical data, a hundred years after the quantum revolution?
There is a schizophrenic split in science today. In physics, the old classical laws have long been overthrown and the framework of reality that accommodated them lies as detritus in the sand. Matter itself, from which the old universe was constructed, is dead. It has been replaced by 'tendencies to exist', as Schrodinger described material particles, existence only as innumerable possibilities before the consciousness of the observer brings one of those possibilities into actuality – or, as we say, collapses the quantum indeterminacy. ‘Yes, but where can the electron be said to be?’ asked Bohr’s old mentor. ‘To be, to be,’ said Bohr, ‘What does it mean to be?’ It is consciousness not matter that has turned out to be fundamental. Yet in all the other disciplines of science except physics – nay, physics at the highest level – scientists go about their business as if nothing had happened, thinking and moving and breathing within the old materialist, mechanistic paradigm. Scientists in other fields of science may use quantum equations – if they did not they would not get very far – but frameworks of reality in biology, psychology, the neuro-sciences et al. are untouched by quantum theory. What powerful force, we can only wonder, is capable of holding up a scientific paradigm when it would otherwise collapse like a house of cards?
What powerful force is capable of leading science to deny the existence of phenomena for which there is scientific evidence? There exists a whole range of anomalous phenomena for which there is not only evidence but - particularly for psi - evidence as good as, and often better than, that found in most other fields of science. The scientific evidence for psi is actually so good that it really ought to put the debate about the existence of psi phenomena to rest. Sceptics will naturally object and say there is no scientific evidence but that is because they do not bother to look – or look properly – but reject it out of hand. They simply presume that such evidence cannot exist – and therefore does not exist. It cannot exist because it is incompatible with science. Sceptics are always coming out with this 'incompatible with science' mantra. What they mean is that it is incompatible with the old classical physics, that is to say, the old Newtonian-Cartesian mechanistic paradigm. They can only mean this since it is certainly not incompatible with quantum physics which surpassed it almost a century ago. On the contrary, its existence is in perfect accord with the new physics. As Nobel physicists Brian Josephson has said: ‘If we didn’t know about psi, we would have to predict its existence on the basis of these quantum results.’
To reject whole bodies of data because they don’t fit into the current scientific framework of reality is to abandon the pure, ideal principles of science and resort to dogma. If the empirical data do not support the paradigm, then it is the paradigm that ought to be rejected and not the other way round. I'm not suggesting that the paradigm ought to be rejected every time you get an anomalous experimental result, of course, but here you have a whole field (psi) that it is simply impossible to accommodate into this framework of reality.
Look at the various areas of inquiry to which science is denied access. What do they have in common? Is it not immediately obvious? What they all share is that they all challenge the framework of reality that our society, our culture, our age is locked into, the framework of reality in which we all live and move and breathe and into which all facts about the world must fit if they are to make sense to us. This is the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, the mechanistic, deterministic interpretation of the world which describes a clockwork universe in which matter is fundamental and consciousness reduced to an epiphenomenon or shadow of matter.
I have been alluding to the rejection of anomalous phenomena by the scientific establishment since it would be misleading to say ‘science’ rejects it. We are always hearing that science says this or science says that, as in ‘science says paranormal phenomena do not exist’. Science does not say anything, only scientists do, and scientists do not speak with a single voice. Even among what might be termed ‘mainstream scientists’ we can only talk sensibly of an average, which can be represented by the sliced off top of a Bell-curve (the full range of scientific opinion being represented by the whole of the Bell curve). Even among mainstream scientists, there is a range of opinion. So it is misleading to talk of 'science' saying this or that. It would be, in fact, a more accurate portrayal of the situation to say that the scientific establishment presents a united front to the world that declares such phenomena to be illusory and scientists feel compelled to go along with it for very concrete reasons but it does not reflect what individual scientists – even ‘mainstream’ scientists – think in private. Look at the results of surveys where scientists are asked about such things and you’ll see that this is so. While some remain hostile to such areas of inquiry even in private, many do not. In quiet discussions among themselves away from the institutions of science, views are markedly more diverse. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake has observed: 'I have been struck over and over again by the contrast between public and private discussion. In public scientists are very aware of the powerful taboos that restrict the range of permissible topics; in private they are often more adventurous.' Many good, creative, independent thinkers in the scientific community have testified to and railed against this – invariably when they’re retired. Such is the hostility of the scientific establishment to anything that threatens the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that scientists no longer feel free to give expression to their own thoughts. Even so much as expressing interest in phenomena like psi, never mind doing private research into it – in your own time and without funding – carries a stigma that can jeopardise your career and wreck your chances of funding for other projects.
This taboo against psi and certain other anomalous phenomena isn’t something that exists only at the scientific level. It has filtered down to ordinary, everyday life, where it manifests itself in myriad ways, from the media’s tongue-in-cheek coverage of taboo topics in the media to the reflexive dismissal by the ‘scientifically educated’ of all experimental findings relating to anomalous phenomena - presumably a consequence either of the media taking their lead from establishment science or of both the scientific institutions and the media taking their lead from a common source.
This taboo against anything which challenges the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm can be viewed as just one aspect of a social conditioning that none of us is immune to, as evidenced by the fact that we have all internalised it. We all carry our own personal censor around inside of us. A personal note here: I will confess that whenever I have come face to face with something that doesn’t fit into the ordinary everyday framework of reality, something that shouldn’t happen, that science says doesn’t happen, yet something that I have seen with my own eyes and that I know happened and must have happened to others too, there is a kind of ‘voice’ inside me telling me it didn’t happen – didn’t happen because things like that can’t happen, because they’re impossible. This voice declares itself the ‘voice of reason’, though it is totally irrational. I have come to recognise it for what it is: a deep-rooted social conditioning, though recognising it doesn’t silence it.
What makes this kind of social conditioning such a powerful force is that it harnesses the power of language. We see this at work when we find ourselves talking about seeking a ‘rational’ explanation for these various phenomena, as if by merely acknowledging the existence of something strange we abandon reason. We do not really wish to say this but are manipulated into saying it – and thinking it – by the words and common phrases to hand. Ordinary language is full of such ready-made phrases that we all use without stopping to think of their implied meaning. Words shift spontaneously away from their intended meanings to take on board value-laden connotations that reflect this social conditioning. A word like ‘supernatural’, once a perfectly respectable word, came to mean almost the opposite of what was originally meant and acquired connotations that ensure that the whole field of inquiry is derided and dismissed. So it was abandoned and the term ‘paranormal’ substituted for it. This worked for a while until it too acquired unwanted connotations. Then it had to be changed again to ‘anomalous phenomena’ or various unwieldy scientific terms. The neutral term ‘UFO’ comes to mean extraterrestrial spacecraft and so has to be changed to ‘anomalous aerial phenomenon’ (AAP) to rid itself of all interpretative baggage and this works for while but only until language catches up with it. You know when that time has come when people start saying: ‘You don’t believe in AAPs, do you?’ The role of language in inculcating us with a society’s myths and ideologies goes even deeper than this, as we shall see.
So why are the scientific institutions and indeed Western society itself locked into a paradigm that is not rooted in reality? Why have we clung on to it after all the evidence that has piled up against it? What is so special about the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that it has to be defended against all reason? Let us look at how any society or culture acquires its belief systems.
In order for a society to cohere, members of that society must share an ideology or mythology, along with a set of beliefs, values and patterns of behaviour. In modern societies it is through the institutions of the state that this ideology is ‘enshrined’, as Marx put it and it is through these institutions that the ideology is imbibed. Exposure to the mass media is an even more effective means of inculcating the populace than it was in Marx’s time but all the other institutions, particularly those of education and the family, continue to play powerful roles. The socio-linguistic theorist Jurgen Habermas has shown that it is imbibed at an even more fundamental level directly through the acquisition of language. (The insights into language that post-Structural linguistics offered was not available to Marx.) The mythology of a society is embedded in its language though a vast semantic web of word meanings. A coffee bean is only what it is because coffee grinders, spoons, cups, coffee are what they are. A box takes part of its meaning from ‘ballot’ which in turn takes part of its meaning from ‘democracy’ and so on. No word exists in isolation, as Saussure has shown. Habermas called this ideology embedded in language the Lebenswelt (usually translated ‘Life World’) and pictured it as a vast sea in which we all begin to bathe from the moment that as a child we learn to speak. Althusser has shown how we begin to be inculcated with mythology at an even earlier age at a physiological level through mimicry, for which young children have a natural instinct, and physiological reflex. It is because of this behavioural conditioning that we instinctively submit to authority, that our body reacts to certain clues even before our mind does. The whole process is essentially a natural one and is grounded in our biology. We are social beings and are socially conditioned by the mythology and ideology of whatever culture and society we are born into.
In an open society, individuals are free to challenge the prevailing ideology and give expression to ideas opposing it. Sometimes those ideas may take root, spread throughout that society and are incorporated into the existing ideology. Then new words will enter the web of language, the meaning of other words will change subtly as they are used to express the new ideas and ultimately the whole web will change. This gives the individual power. He is socially conditioned but he can break the chains of that conditioning with his own original thoughts and input them into the Lebenswelt. However, even in an open society ideas do not take root because they are true or because they are born out of reason and accepted by others as true. Whether new ideas take root depends upon whether they offer solutions to social problems. If they do then they survive and are incorporated into the old ideology. If they represent a threat to the established order then they are quickly weeded out by something akin to neo-Darwinian natural selection.
What kind of social problems are we talking about? What determines the kind of ideology that a particular society creates and seeks to perpetuate? Hegel thought it had to do with freedom and the unfolding and expression in the physical world of the transcendent will of Spirit. Marx disagreed. Marx thought that the ideology of a society – its values and attitudes as well as its thoughts - is rooted in its economic base. Marx thus turned Hegel on his head. Freedom, truth and things of the spirit have nothing to do with it, said Marx. It is the material means of our survival that give rise to a society’s ideology and determines whether new ideas are accepted by that society or not. It is the material mean of our survival that first establishes itself and the ideology arises out of it – not, as Hegel had thought, the other way round. The consumer-capitalist system and life-style on which Western society is founded, says Marx, has given rise to a particular ideology that sustains it, just as the feudal system before it gave rise to the kind of ideology that sustained that.
The process is, in a truly open society, a natural and spontaneous one. However, in most societies and particularly in our modern Western society, there is something parasitic on this natural order of things, something darker. Habermas called it the System. It is the deliberate and conscious manipulation of the thoughts, ideals, values, attitudes and habits of the masses by our rulers – which is to say, the power elite or corporate power rather than our simply our elected representatives. In contrast to the Lebenswelt, where there is a flowing in and a flowing out, input and output, to and from the individual, the System’s channels allows flow only in one direction: from the System to the individual.
It is not clear whether Marx thought of the whole process of social conditioning as a purely natural force or whether he was also aware of this attempt by the power elites to consciously control the minds of the masses. My understanding is that he did not differentiate between the two because he saw any attempt by the elites to control the minds of the masses as having its roots in a natural process. The conscious and deliberate manipulation of the minds of the masses has, after all, been going on since the dawn of civilisation. William the Bastard (aka William I, the ‘Conqueror’) had to enlist the help of the Pope so his soldiers could be told that God was on their side. The Greek warriors had to be told that they were fighting for Helen and not a strategic trading route in order to persuade them to go to war with Troy. Helen, by the way, was not just a queen but a goddess too. Religion, as Seneca observed, has always been ‘useful’ to our rulers. In fact the pulpit was until the invention of the printing press the main channel of propaganda.
It was not until modern times, however, that techniques for influencing the minds of whole populations, predicated on Freud’s understanding of the unconscious, burgeoned into a science. It began during World War One – some thirty years after Marx’s death – with the British war-propaganda ministry. Hitler learned a lot from it and the US took its lead from it when the US administration were faced with the problem of persuading essentially peace-loving Americans to go to war. The problem was compounded with its president Woodrow Wilson having been elected on a ‘peace’ ticket. The solution was to construct a propaganda machine on the lines of the British model. It was called the Creel Commission and it turned an essentially pacifist population into rabid, flag-waving, German-hating warmongers.
One member of the Creel Commission was Edward Bernays, a cousin of Freud. After the war, Bernays realised that Freud’s insights into the unconscious could be used to make people buy stuff they didn’t need and didn’t really want, which ushered in the age of advertising. Among Bernays’ successes was persuading women to smoke cigarettes by associating them in the female unconscious with freedom and the feminist movement. Bernays realised that the same linguistic techniques of manipulation used for advertising and persuading people to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their children in killing fellow human beings could be used to control them politically in peace time. Thus the art of Public Relations was born (even the name was a PR exercise). It proved extremely effective at whipping up fear of communism, hatred of the labour unions and destroying freedom of the press and free expression. Manufacturing consent for nefarious ventures in foreign lands was easy, as was inculcating them at home with ideology that persuaded them that being poor and downtrodden was their own fault or an act of God. Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate... constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
The ideology that we in Western democratic states imbibe – the bedrock of mythology into which all the minor myths fit – might include something like the following: Our own country is a noble and altruistic nation which only goes to war for humanitarian reasons and self-defence. We, its subjects, are not indoctrinated with propaganda like other countries but are freely informed so we can make up our own mind about things and the information we are given is not filtered or selected. The government we have is the government we, the people, have chosen and if we don’t like it, it is our own fault; we can always form another party. Capitalism is the only realistic socio-economic system and while the main concern of the big companies has to be with making profit, welfare of the people at least comes second. Material goods are the chief source of happiness and affluence is a virtue. Some people have more money than others but they deserve it because they have earned it. History is as true an account of the past as current knowledge permits and science is impartial and above corruption...and so on and on about freedom, democracy, capitalism, consumerism, meritocracy, history, and so on.
According to Marx, all this mythology has its roots in the economic base. Would Marx have wanted to include scientific paradigms as part and parcel of the ideology and mythology enshrined in the institutions of the state? Marxist scholars have always presumed not but we don’t really know. Either way, it seems unthinkable that the framework of reality into which science fits all its empirical discoveries could be a social construct. That is not to disregard the dodgy science done by vested corporate interests but that’s corruption but on a relatively minor scale. Fudged data may persuade people to swallow useless medications but planes cannot fly by such means. Surely science has to be locked into a framework of reality that connects with the physical world. So how could it function if its framework of reality were a social construct?
Not very well, a curt answer might be. As Sheldrake has said, science which is mired in 'dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia' stifles creativity. The question is though: how does it function at all?
The answer, startling as it may seem, is that none of our thoughts connect directly with the world. For we do not have cognitive access to raw sense experience anyway. Sense experience comes to us through a filter of perception and language: a socially constructed cognitive-linguistic filter which separates us from the ‘blur of the world’. When we make observation statements we are never describing pure sense data: we are describing what we perceive through the lens of theory. Even a simple observation of a coffee bean is full of theory. No one ‘sees’ a black oval shape when they then proceed to interpret as a coffee bean. They see right from the start a coffee bean that belongs with others of its kind, which is inextricably linked – nay, whose very meaning is inseparable from - the smell and taste and effect of coffee. Spoons, grinders, cups of coffee, and at an even more subliminal level Brazil, coffee history, comparison with tea etc. are all part of the meaning and therefore the perception of the black oval shape in front of us. What we perceive is determined by a vast semantic web of words with socially determined meanings. If it is true of coffee beans it is surely no less true of the tracks of elementary particles, clicks on Geiger counters and a fortiori the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. Everything is theory-laden. It is impossible to extricate ourselves from theory. Raw experience cannot, as Wittgenstein showed, get properly into either language or cognition. We do not have access to the real coffee bean.
The cognitive-linguistic framework of reality which overlays direct and immediate experience is an artificial entity that changes with time. This can be illustrated with the notion of determinism which has replace the notion of free will, not because it explains the empirical data of science better but for reason of some socio-linguistic force. Science has constructed deterministic theory out of perceptions of deterministic events. Scientists perceive determinism everywhere in nature – nowhere in nature do they see free will, even in themselves. What happens when the determinist is confronted with phenomena that were formerly called free will: that is to say, by actions caused by the self, by its own nature? He still calls it determinism. That is because the term has been expanded to cover all that was formerly meant by free will. That this is so is apparent from the fact that he is quite unable to say what it is he understands by the term ‘free will’, as when you want to know what it is he rejecting, what it is whose existence he is denying. It is no longer even thinkable to him since the semantic space formerly occupied by ‘free will’ has been subsumed under ‘determinism’. Free will has become meaningless. No wonder he sees determinism everywhere.
At a deeper level, we perceive the world as consisting of material objects composed of consciousness-independent substance. However this is a purely metaphysical notion in that it trespasses beyond sense data. It may be a notion that is grounded in our biology and not merely in our social conditioning (thought some have disputed this) but it is still a construct. Nowhere do we actually directly apprehend this material substance. We could get rid of it entirely and nowhere would brush up against any ‘reality’ in terms of sense data that would require that we change the new framework of reality back into one which incorporated the notion of material objects existing independent of consciousness.
So even what we perceive of the world through the five senses already comes to us laden with theory. We cannot make so much as the most rudimentary observation statement that is not theory-laden. It is a condition of our perceiving the world that we perceive it through cognitive-linguistic lenses that are culture-specific. So the framework of reality that we are locked into isn’t constructed out of our perceptions of the world but our perceptions constructed out of our framework of reality.
This is not to say that any world view would do or that any conceivable framework of reality could accommodate our empirical discoveries about the world as well as any other, only that a whole range of possible world views could, with a bit of tweaking, fudging, ignoring, rejecting and selecting of awkward data, serve equally well as a framework of reality and many would serve a lot better than the current one. This begs the question: why this particular paradigm rather than any other? What is so special about the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm?
If the Marxist or neo-Marxist interpretation is correct, then the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm must have arisen out of our socio-economic base and what is special about it is that it continues to support and sustain it. That socio-economic base is the consumer-capitalism system; it is this system and the materialist way of life that forms the basis of Western society. What is more threatening to a materialist way of life than what could be termed ‘things of the spirit’ and a paradigm which can accommodate them? Such a paradigm would give rise to a way of looking at the world which would lead to a way of life that is anathema to the notion that happiness lies in more material possessions – in fact, a way of life in which material possessions matter hardly at all, in which they might even seem threatening to human happiness. Any paradigm based upon a spiritual interpretation of the universe would open the floodgates to a way of life that would undermine or even destroy the socio-economic system of our Western society. That is why the floodgates must be kept closed and access to certain areas of inquiry denied – or at least taboos and prohibitions put in place to discourage such inquiry. I am not suggesting this is an entirely – or even primarily – a contrived procedure. Social forces are quite capable, on their own, of ensuring, in a completely natural and spontaneous way, that the ideology of a society supports its economic base without any interference from individuals or groups of individuals endeavouring to control the minds and behaviour of the masses. Un-natural and contrived social forces undoubtedly do exist but they are not needed as an explanation for scientific paradigms.
If the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm is a social construct that has arisen out of the consumer-capitalist system, we cannot expect any new discoveries in science to alter or overthrow that paradigm. There have been many new discoveries since the dawn of the scientific age – many radical, unexpected, amazing, shocking, mind-blowing, counter-intuitive, astonishing discoveries. Yet the paradigm or framework of reality in which they have all been made to fit has not changed. It has not changed at all since the dawn of the age of science. Isn’t that strange! Well, no – not if that framework of reality is a social construct that has arisen out of, and supports and maintains, the capitalist socio-economic system. You wouldn’t expect a change of paradigm until the system changes. So we cannot expect any new discoveries in science to overturn the paradigm. Neither reason nor logic nor contrary empirical evidence will collapse the house of cards which is the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm until the socio-economic system changes. The only thing that will collapse it and usher in new scientific paradigm will be the end of capitalism.
“Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)” Wittgenstein, ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ 4.111
One of the unquestioned presumptions of our age is that the framework of reality that science is locked into is grounded in empirical data and is the product of adherence to the pure principles of the scientific method.
I shall challenge this presumption and show that while science has been enormously successful in describing the phenomenal world and in modelling, predicting and manipulating the behaviour of physical systems, the metaphysical framework of reality into which it seeks to make sense of it all is primarily a social construct.
This may strike one as absurd. The ideology of a society may well be rooted in its economic base, as Marx and others have held, but science is an entirely different proposition: science is the pure and noble pursuit of truth uninfluenced by social and economic forces. I shall show that it is not and that the ideology and mythology of a society extends even to its scientific paradigms.
The framework of reality that science and indeed the whole of our society is locked into can described briefly as follows: The universe consists of material objects separate in space and time and unconnected at any deeper or implicate level; matter is fundamental and consciousness is an emergent property of it; the material universe exists independently of consciousness; everything is governed by strict deterministic-mechanistic laws; psi phenomena are impossible; nature is blind and purposeless; the universe is a great machine and we are biological robots that are part of that machine. This framework of reality is called the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm and it is upheld and defended by the scientific establishment.
Yet this paradigm cannot correspond to anything real. Philosophically, it is internally incoherent – which is why no first-rate philosopher has held to it. Empirically it cannot accommodate either the behaviour of nature at the quantum level or anomalous phenomena like psi for which there is now definitive scientific evidence. So why has the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm not been abandoned by science and replaced by some other framework of reality?
As the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed, paradigms are very resistant to change. The question though is why – and specifically why this particular paradigm is resistant to change.
It is a source of perplexity to many physicists that a hundred years after the quantum revolution, all scientific disciplines except physics are still steeped in the old classical science. Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has suggested that “...the greatest scientific revolution of all time has gone largely unnoticed by the general public, not because its implications are uninteresting but because they are so shattering as to be almost beyond belief.” That is true. But they are so only when viewed from within the old paradigm – since everything that won’t fit into a paradigm or framework of reality is by definition beyond belief. So the question is: why is the old framework of reality still being sustained, against all reason and available empirical data, a hundred years after the quantum revolution?
There is a schizophrenic split in science today. In physics, the old classical laws have long been overthrown and the framework of reality that accommodated them lies as detritus in the sand. Matter itself, from which the old universe was constructed, is dead. It has been replaced by 'tendencies to exist', as Schrodinger described material particles, existence only as innumerable possibilities before the consciousness of the observer brings one of those possibilities into actuality – or, as we say, collapses the quantum indeterminacy. ‘Yes, but where can the electron be said to be?’ asked Bohr’s old mentor. ‘To be, to be,’ said Bohr, ‘What does it mean to be?’ It is consciousness not matter that has turned out to be fundamental. Yet in all the other disciplines of science except physics – nay, physics at the highest level – scientists go about their business as if nothing had happened, thinking and moving and breathing within the old materialist, mechanistic paradigm. Scientists in other fields of science may use quantum equations – if they did not they would not get very far – but frameworks of reality in biology, psychology, the neuro-sciences et al. are untouched by quantum theory. What powerful force, we can only wonder, is capable of holding up a scientific paradigm when it would otherwise collapse like a house of cards?
What powerful force is capable of leading science to deny the existence of phenomena for which there is scientific evidence? There exists a whole range of anomalous phenomena for which there is not only evidence but - particularly for psi - evidence as good as, and often better than, that found in most other fields of science. The scientific evidence for psi is actually so good that it really ought to put the debate about the existence of psi phenomena to rest. Sceptics will naturally object and say there is no scientific evidence but that is because they do not bother to look – or look properly – but reject it out of hand. They simply presume that such evidence cannot exist – and therefore does not exist. It cannot exist because it is incompatible with science. Sceptics are always coming out with this 'incompatible with science' mantra. What they mean is that it is incompatible with the old classical physics, that is to say, the old Newtonian-Cartesian mechanistic paradigm. They can only mean this since it is certainly not incompatible with quantum physics which surpassed it almost a century ago. On the contrary, its existence is in perfect accord with the new physics. As Nobel physicists Brian Josephson has said: ‘If we didn’t know about psi, we would have to predict its existence on the basis of these quantum results.’
To reject whole bodies of data because they don’t fit into the current scientific framework of reality is to abandon the pure, ideal principles of science and resort to dogma. If the empirical data do not support the paradigm, then it is the paradigm that ought to be rejected and not the other way round. I'm not suggesting that the paradigm ought to be rejected every time you get an anomalous experimental result, of course, but here you have a whole field (psi) that it is simply impossible to accommodate into this framework of reality.
Look at the various areas of inquiry to which science is denied access. What do they have in common? Is it not immediately obvious? What they all share is that they all challenge the framework of reality that our society, our culture, our age is locked into, the framework of reality in which we all live and move and breathe and into which all facts about the world must fit if they are to make sense to us. This is the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, the mechanistic, deterministic interpretation of the world which describes a clockwork universe in which matter is fundamental and consciousness reduced to an epiphenomenon or shadow of matter.
I have been alluding to the rejection of anomalous phenomena by the scientific establishment since it would be misleading to say ‘science’ rejects it. We are always hearing that science says this or science says that, as in ‘science says paranormal phenomena do not exist’. Science does not say anything, only scientists do, and scientists do not speak with a single voice. Even among what might be termed ‘mainstream scientists’ we can only talk sensibly of an average, which can be represented by the sliced off top of a Bell-curve (the full range of scientific opinion being represented by the whole of the Bell curve). Even among mainstream scientists, there is a range of opinion. So it is misleading to talk of 'science' saying this or that. It would be, in fact, a more accurate portrayal of the situation to say that the scientific establishment presents a united front to the world that declares such phenomena to be illusory and scientists feel compelled to go along with it for very concrete reasons but it does not reflect what individual scientists – even ‘mainstream’ scientists – think in private. Look at the results of surveys where scientists are asked about such things and you’ll see that this is so. While some remain hostile to such areas of inquiry even in private, many do not. In quiet discussions among themselves away from the institutions of science, views are markedly more diverse. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake has observed: 'I have been struck over and over again by the contrast between public and private discussion. In public scientists are very aware of the powerful taboos that restrict the range of permissible topics; in private they are often more adventurous.' Many good, creative, independent thinkers in the scientific community have testified to and railed against this – invariably when they’re retired. Such is the hostility of the scientific establishment to anything that threatens the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that scientists no longer feel free to give expression to their own thoughts. Even so much as expressing interest in phenomena like psi, never mind doing private research into it – in your own time and without funding – carries a stigma that can jeopardise your career and wreck your chances of funding for other projects.
This taboo against psi and certain other anomalous phenomena isn’t something that exists only at the scientific level. It has filtered down to ordinary, everyday life, where it manifests itself in myriad ways, from the media’s tongue-in-cheek coverage of taboo topics in the media to the reflexive dismissal by the ‘scientifically educated’ of all experimental findings relating to anomalous phenomena - presumably a consequence either of the media taking their lead from establishment science or of both the scientific institutions and the media taking their lead from a common source.
This taboo against anything which challenges the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm can be viewed as just one aspect of a social conditioning that none of us is immune to, as evidenced by the fact that we have all internalised it. We all carry our own personal censor around inside of us. A personal note here: I will confess that whenever I have come face to face with something that doesn’t fit into the ordinary everyday framework of reality, something that shouldn’t happen, that science says doesn’t happen, yet something that I have seen with my own eyes and that I know happened and must have happened to others too, there is a kind of ‘voice’ inside me telling me it didn’t happen – didn’t happen because things like that can’t happen, because they’re impossible. This voice declares itself the ‘voice of reason’, though it is totally irrational. I have come to recognise it for what it is: a deep-rooted social conditioning, though recognising it doesn’t silence it.
What makes this kind of social conditioning such a powerful force is that it harnesses the power of language. We see this at work when we find ourselves talking about seeking a ‘rational’ explanation for these various phenomena, as if by merely acknowledging the existence of something strange we abandon reason. We do not really wish to say this but are manipulated into saying it – and thinking it – by the words and common phrases to hand. Ordinary language is full of such ready-made phrases that we all use without stopping to think of their implied meaning. Words shift spontaneously away from their intended meanings to take on board value-laden connotations that reflect this social conditioning. A word like ‘supernatural’, once a perfectly respectable word, came to mean almost the opposite of what was originally meant and acquired connotations that ensure that the whole field of inquiry is derided and dismissed. So it was abandoned and the term ‘paranormal’ substituted for it. This worked for a while until it too acquired unwanted connotations. Then it had to be changed again to ‘anomalous phenomena’ or various unwieldy scientific terms. The neutral term ‘UFO’ comes to mean extraterrestrial spacecraft and so has to be changed to ‘anomalous aerial phenomenon’ (AAP) to rid itself of all interpretative baggage and this works for while but only until language catches up with it. You know when that time has come when people start saying: ‘You don’t believe in AAPs, do you?’ The role of language in inculcating us with a society’s myths and ideologies goes even deeper than this, as we shall see.
So why are the scientific institutions and indeed Western society itself locked into a paradigm that is not rooted in reality? Why have we clung on to it after all the evidence that has piled up against it? What is so special about the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that it has to be defended against all reason? Let us look at how any society or culture acquires its belief systems.
In order for a society to cohere, members of that society must share an ideology or mythology, along with a set of beliefs, values and patterns of behaviour. In modern societies it is through the institutions of the state that this ideology is ‘enshrined’, as Marx put it and it is through these institutions that the ideology is imbibed. Exposure to the mass media is an even more effective means of inculcating the populace than it was in Marx’s time but all the other institutions, particularly those of education and the family, continue to play powerful roles. The socio-linguistic theorist Jurgen Habermas has shown that it is imbibed at an even more fundamental level directly through the acquisition of language. (The insights into language that post-Structural linguistics offered was not available to Marx.) The mythology of a society is embedded in its language though a vast semantic web of word meanings. A coffee bean is only what it is because coffee grinders, spoons, cups, coffee are what they are. A box takes part of its meaning from ‘ballot’ which in turn takes part of its meaning from ‘democracy’ and so on. No word exists in isolation, as Saussure has shown. Habermas called this ideology embedded in language the Lebenswelt (usually translated ‘Life World’) and pictured it as a vast sea in which we all begin to bathe from the moment that as a child we learn to speak. Althusser has shown how we begin to be inculcated with mythology at an even earlier age at a physiological level through mimicry, for which young children have a natural instinct, and physiological reflex. It is because of this behavioural conditioning that we instinctively submit to authority, that our body reacts to certain clues even before our mind does. The whole process is essentially a natural one and is grounded in our biology. We are social beings and are socially conditioned by the mythology and ideology of whatever culture and society we are born into.
In an open society, individuals are free to challenge the prevailing ideology and give expression to ideas opposing it. Sometimes those ideas may take root, spread throughout that society and are incorporated into the existing ideology. Then new words will enter the web of language, the meaning of other words will change subtly as they are used to express the new ideas and ultimately the whole web will change. This gives the individual power. He is socially conditioned but he can break the chains of that conditioning with his own original thoughts and input them into the Lebenswelt. However, even in an open society ideas do not take root because they are true or because they are born out of reason and accepted by others as true. Whether new ideas take root depends upon whether they offer solutions to social problems. If they do then they survive and are incorporated into the old ideology. If they represent a threat to the established order then they are quickly weeded out by something akin to neo-Darwinian natural selection.
What kind of social problems are we talking about? What determines the kind of ideology that a particular society creates and seeks to perpetuate? Hegel thought it had to do with freedom and the unfolding and expression in the physical world of the transcendent will of Spirit. Marx disagreed. Marx thought that the ideology of a society – its values and attitudes as well as its thoughts - is rooted in its economic base. Marx thus turned Hegel on his head. Freedom, truth and things of the spirit have nothing to do with it, said Marx. It is the material means of our survival that give rise to a society’s ideology and determines whether new ideas are accepted by that society or not. It is the material mean of our survival that first establishes itself and the ideology arises out of it – not, as Hegel had thought, the other way round. The consumer-capitalist system and life-style on which Western society is founded, says Marx, has given rise to a particular ideology that sustains it, just as the feudal system before it gave rise to the kind of ideology that sustained that.
The process is, in a truly open society, a natural and spontaneous one. However, in most societies and particularly in our modern Western society, there is something parasitic on this natural order of things, something darker. Habermas called it the System. It is the deliberate and conscious manipulation of the thoughts, ideals, values, attitudes and habits of the masses by our rulers – which is to say, the power elite or corporate power rather than our simply our elected representatives. In contrast to the Lebenswelt, where there is a flowing in and a flowing out, input and output, to and from the individual, the System’s channels allows flow only in one direction: from the System to the individual.
It is not clear whether Marx thought of the whole process of social conditioning as a purely natural force or whether he was also aware of this attempt by the power elites to consciously control the minds of the masses. My understanding is that he did not differentiate between the two because he saw any attempt by the elites to control the minds of the masses as having its roots in a natural process. The conscious and deliberate manipulation of the minds of the masses has, after all, been going on since the dawn of civilisation. William the Bastard (aka William I, the ‘Conqueror’) had to enlist the help of the Pope so his soldiers could be told that God was on their side. The Greek warriors had to be told that they were fighting for Helen and not a strategic trading route in order to persuade them to go to war with Troy. Helen, by the way, was not just a queen but a goddess too. Religion, as Seneca observed, has always been ‘useful’ to our rulers. In fact the pulpit was until the invention of the printing press the main channel of propaganda.
It was not until modern times, however, that techniques for influencing the minds of whole populations, predicated on Freud’s understanding of the unconscious, burgeoned into a science. It began during World War One – some thirty years after Marx’s death – with the British war-propaganda ministry. Hitler learned a lot from it and the US took its lead from it when the US administration were faced with the problem of persuading essentially peace-loving Americans to go to war. The problem was compounded with its president Woodrow Wilson having been elected on a ‘peace’ ticket. The solution was to construct a propaganda machine on the lines of the British model. It was called the Creel Commission and it turned an essentially pacifist population into rabid, flag-waving, German-hating warmongers.
One member of the Creel Commission was Edward Bernays, a cousin of Freud. After the war, Bernays realised that Freud’s insights into the unconscious could be used to make people buy stuff they didn’t need and didn’t really want, which ushered in the age of advertising. Among Bernays’ successes was persuading women to smoke cigarettes by associating them in the female unconscious with freedom and the feminist movement. Bernays realised that the same linguistic techniques of manipulation used for advertising and persuading people to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their children in killing fellow human beings could be used to control them politically in peace time. Thus the art of Public Relations was born (even the name was a PR exercise). It proved extremely effective at whipping up fear of communism, hatred of the labour unions and destroying freedom of the press and free expression. Manufacturing consent for nefarious ventures in foreign lands was easy, as was inculcating them at home with ideology that persuaded them that being poor and downtrodden was their own fault or an act of God. Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate... constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
The ideology that we in Western democratic states imbibe – the bedrock of mythology into which all the minor myths fit – might include something like the following: Our own country is a noble and altruistic nation which only goes to war for humanitarian reasons and self-defence. We, its subjects, are not indoctrinated with propaganda like other countries but are freely informed so we can make up our own mind about things and the information we are given is not filtered or selected. The government we have is the government we, the people, have chosen and if we don’t like it, it is our own fault; we can always form another party. Capitalism is the only realistic socio-economic system and while the main concern of the big companies has to be with making profit, welfare of the people at least comes second. Material goods are the chief source of happiness and affluence is a virtue. Some people have more money than others but they deserve it because they have earned it. History is as true an account of the past as current knowledge permits and science is impartial and above corruption...and so on and on about freedom, democracy, capitalism, consumerism, meritocracy, history, and so on.
According to Marx, all this mythology has its roots in the economic base. Would Marx have wanted to include scientific paradigms as part and parcel of the ideology and mythology enshrined in the institutions of the state? Marxist scholars have always presumed not but we don’t really know. Either way, it seems unthinkable that the framework of reality into which science fits all its empirical discoveries could be a social construct. That is not to disregard the dodgy science done by vested corporate interests but that’s corruption but on a relatively minor scale. Fudged data may persuade people to swallow useless medications but planes cannot fly by such means. Surely science has to be locked into a framework of reality that connects with the physical world. So how could it function if its framework of reality were a social construct?
Not very well, a curt answer might be. As Sheldrake has said, science which is mired in 'dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia' stifles creativity. The question is though: how does it function at all?
The answer, startling as it may seem, is that none of our thoughts connect directly with the world. For we do not have cognitive access to raw sense experience anyway. Sense experience comes to us through a filter of perception and language: a socially constructed cognitive-linguistic filter which separates us from the ‘blur of the world’. When we make observation statements we are never describing pure sense data: we are describing what we perceive through the lens of theory. Even a simple observation of a coffee bean is full of theory. No one ‘sees’ a black oval shape when they then proceed to interpret as a coffee bean. They see right from the start a coffee bean that belongs with others of its kind, which is inextricably linked – nay, whose very meaning is inseparable from - the smell and taste and effect of coffee. Spoons, grinders, cups of coffee, and at an even more subliminal level Brazil, coffee history, comparison with tea etc. are all part of the meaning and therefore the perception of the black oval shape in front of us. What we perceive is determined by a vast semantic web of words with socially determined meanings. If it is true of coffee beans it is surely no less true of the tracks of elementary particles, clicks on Geiger counters and a fortiori the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. Everything is theory-laden. It is impossible to extricate ourselves from theory. Raw experience cannot, as Wittgenstein showed, get properly into either language or cognition. We do not have access to the real coffee bean.
The cognitive-linguistic framework of reality which overlays direct and immediate experience is an artificial entity that changes with time. This can be illustrated with the notion of determinism which has replace the notion of free will, not because it explains the empirical data of science better but for reason of some socio-linguistic force. Science has constructed deterministic theory out of perceptions of deterministic events. Scientists perceive determinism everywhere in nature – nowhere in nature do they see free will, even in themselves. What happens when the determinist is confronted with phenomena that were formerly called free will: that is to say, by actions caused by the self, by its own nature? He still calls it determinism. That is because the term has been expanded to cover all that was formerly meant by free will. That this is so is apparent from the fact that he is quite unable to say what it is he understands by the term ‘free will’, as when you want to know what it is he rejecting, what it is whose existence he is denying. It is no longer even thinkable to him since the semantic space formerly occupied by ‘free will’ has been subsumed under ‘determinism’. Free will has become meaningless. No wonder he sees determinism everywhere.
At a deeper level, we perceive the world as consisting of material objects composed of consciousness-independent substance. However this is a purely metaphysical notion in that it trespasses beyond sense data. It may be a notion that is grounded in our biology and not merely in our social conditioning (thought some have disputed this) but it is still a construct. Nowhere do we actually directly apprehend this material substance. We could get rid of it entirely and nowhere would brush up against any ‘reality’ in terms of sense data that would require that we change the new framework of reality back into one which incorporated the notion of material objects existing independent of consciousness.
So even what we perceive of the world through the five senses already comes to us laden with theory. We cannot make so much as the most rudimentary observation statement that is not theory-laden. It is a condition of our perceiving the world that we perceive it through cognitive-linguistic lenses that are culture-specific. So the framework of reality that we are locked into isn’t constructed out of our perceptions of the world but our perceptions constructed out of our framework of reality.
This is not to say that any world view would do or that any conceivable framework of reality could accommodate our empirical discoveries about the world as well as any other, only that a whole range of possible world views could, with a bit of tweaking, fudging, ignoring, rejecting and selecting of awkward data, serve equally well as a framework of reality and many would serve a lot better than the current one. This begs the question: why this particular paradigm rather than any other? What is so special about the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm?
If the Marxist or neo-Marxist interpretation is correct, then the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm must have arisen out of our socio-economic base and what is special about it is that it continues to support and sustain it. That socio-economic base is the consumer-capitalism system; it is this system and the materialist way of life that forms the basis of Western society. What is more threatening to a materialist way of life than what could be termed ‘things of the spirit’ and a paradigm which can accommodate them? Such a paradigm would give rise to a way of looking at the world which would lead to a way of life that is anathema to the notion that happiness lies in more material possessions – in fact, a way of life in which material possessions matter hardly at all, in which they might even seem threatening to human happiness. Any paradigm based upon a spiritual interpretation of the universe would open the floodgates to a way of life that would undermine or even destroy the socio-economic system of our Western society. That is why the floodgates must be kept closed and access to certain areas of inquiry denied – or at least taboos and prohibitions put in place to discourage such inquiry. I am not suggesting this is an entirely – or even primarily – a contrived procedure. Social forces are quite capable, on their own, of ensuring, in a completely natural and spontaneous way, that the ideology of a society supports its economic base without any interference from individuals or groups of individuals endeavouring to control the minds and behaviour of the masses. Un-natural and contrived social forces undoubtedly do exist but they are not needed as an explanation for scientific paradigms.
If the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm is a social construct that has arisen out of the consumer-capitalist system, we cannot expect any new discoveries in science to alter or overthrow that paradigm. There have been many new discoveries since the dawn of the scientific age – many radical, unexpected, amazing, shocking, mind-blowing, counter-intuitive, astonishing discoveries. Yet the paradigm or framework of reality in which they have all been made to fit has not changed. It has not changed at all since the dawn of the age of science. Isn’t that strange! Well, no – not if that framework of reality is a social construct that has arisen out of, and supports and maintains, the capitalist socio-economic system. You wouldn’t expect a change of paradigm until the system changes. So we cannot expect any new discoveries in science to overturn the paradigm. Neither reason nor logic nor contrary empirical evidence will collapse the house of cards which is the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm until the socio-economic system changes. The only thing that will collapse it and usher in new scientific paradigm will be the end of capitalism.