Psyche, Science, and Society

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• 1. Dave "knowbuddhau" Parker  |  October 12th, 2009 at 3:37 pm

  (An earlier version didn’t close blockquotes. Your hosts need to give us a preview.)

  How did we come to this? I’m trying to answer that as a psycho-poet (that is, one with a BA and all-but-thesis in research psychology). E.g., what mythos intends the cosmos that grows psychos like Addington, Cheney, and Yoo?

  Here are some things I do know, some of the crucial events that, IMO, have led directly to our present day use of torture and inhuman cruelty as matters of policy. Any thoughts?

  A) The wholesale adoption of the so-called “Newtonian revolution” at the start of the Cold War.

  CHOMSKY (2007): As Henry Kissinger later explained in his academic essays, only the West has undergone the Newtonian revolution and is therefore “deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer,” while the rest still believe “that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer,” the “basic division” that is “the deepest problem of the contemporary international order.” But Russia, unlike third word peasants who think that rain and sun are inside their heads, was perhaps coming to the realization that the world is not just a dream, Kissinger felt.

  That right there is a Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the making. As I’ve said elsewhere, reclaiming our inalienable organic humanity is the first step in acting humanely.

  B) The 1956 decision, at the APA convention, to reject Robert Oppenheimer’s advice, not to base psychology on an outdated physics, and to instead model our science of the mind of organic beings on the laws derived from Newton’s old balls in empty space. In effect, after WWII, we killed the cosmos, mechanized it, and have been attempting to machine the earth into submission ever since.

  KINGET (1979): Psychology’s attempt at independence thus amounts to breaking away from one field, philosophy, only to subject itself blindly to the methodological and epistemological dictates of another, physics, with equally sterile effects upon the refugee-discipline. Almost a quarter-century after Robert Oppenheimer’s warning at the 1956 APA convention that the worst thing psychology might do would be “to model itself after a physics which is not there anymore, which has been outdated” (p. 134)*, almost all of psychology continues to fashion itself basically upon variations of this moribund model.

  *Oppenheimer, R. (1956). Analogy in science. American Psychologist, 11, 127-135. In Kinget, G. W. (1979). Objective psychology: a case of epistemological sleight-of-hand. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 11, 83-96.)

  How’s that working out for us? .

  C) In 1957, Joseph Campbell began lecturing at the State Dept’s Foreign Service Institute. That should send a chill up the spine of anyone familiar with the power of myth. We’ve been weaponizing myths into weapons of mass deception, and deploying them domestically, ever since.

  D) Skinner’s inhuman behaviorism was described as mythology by Chomsky 42 years ago:

  CHOMSKY (1967): The conclusion that I hoped to establish in the review, by discussing these speculations in their most explicit and detailed form, was that the general point of view was largely mythology, and that its widespread acceptance is not the result of empirical support, persuasive reasoning, or the absence of a plausible alternative.

  E) Stephen Jay Gould’s 2001 announcement of the failure of reductionism for us complex, biological systems. Reductionism is dead already, people, we can’t keep reducing organic beings to mechanisms and then pretend we ARE mechanisms.

  GOULD (2001): The implications of this finding cascade across several realms. …

  But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. (“Analysis” literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems — predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? — we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

  The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology — and for two major reasons.

  First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code — and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

  Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems.

  .

  F) The Matrix (the movie). Esp. the scene in which Neo wakes up, to find himself an organic being having the life sucked out of him in an hyper-mechanized world. That’s what I’m saying has been done with the science of psychology, in particular, and the social sciences, in general.

  Any thoughts on any of those?