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Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that the most difficult thing to do was to diverge from common opinions just a little. My various efforts in that direction have been so fundamentally misread as to make this 750-word summary almost doomed to incomprehension, but when I explicate the same topics at great length, citing historical and methodological precedents, they seem equally doomed to be reshaped to fit readers' expectations of what I surely must be saying. I am not saying that, most of the time. That is why I engage in the deliberate hyperbole of something like the following absurd title: Of course it is not true that "everything we know is wrong," or there would be no technical or social progress. We simply tend to absolutize whatever level of understanding we have reached, to the point of deifying our own opinions, even our opinions that we are not deifying our own opinions but rather are subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny. So I tend to imitate Flannery O'Connor's dictum that it is necessary to wake people up with grotesquerie before you can expect them to pay attention. Even then they will get it wrong, but so will I, the author; we never know our own motives, not fully anyway, and all we can hope to do is reduce our level of error to tolerable proportions. Some assertions are more deeply and indisputably wrong than others.
Everything You Know Is Wrong, But Then Everyone Has Always Been Wrong About Everything Anyway
Knowing that we view everything through cultural filters—mathematics being as cultural as anything else that is human—leads at least some of us to the strangely vertiginous feeling that all of human history (our own included, of course) is largely a matter of seeing differently sized pictures considerably out of focus. We think we have a clear vision of things at last until something forces us to realize that we don’t. We think we have the big picture at last until some event forces us to realize that there is either a bigger one or a potentially valid different one. This is not exactly a new insight, but it seems to surprise people every time it heaves into view.
Reductionist neuroscience is coming to resemble the reductionist biologies of a century and more ago, and is creating a structurally similar backlash that is even more wrong in its anti-reductionist assumptions, except when it isn’t even wrong. The genuine advance in knowledge allows for a synthesis of social, psychological, and physiological approaches that could go far beyond the insupportable, largely emotional responses to reductionism that have given “holistic” such a bad name, but scarcely anyone has mastered the relevant disciplines sufficiently.
At the same time, as I have noted much too repeatedly, the ability to perceive the need for a working synthesis of nature and nurture isn’t rocket science (i.e., it doesn’t require knowledge of an immense percentage of the general principles, just a perception of the main effects that stem from the underlying causes); some kind of behavioral modification rooted in physiological substrates probably dates back to the Paleolithic, and has advanced or regressed according to the historical circumstances in which such knowledge found itself embedded. Every so often some horrific upheaval of history wipes out all the advanced practitioners, and few enough of the advanced practitioners ever acquire enough distance on their practice to contemplate the possibility that theirs is only a specific instance of a larger theoretical body of knowledge. The whole thing slides back to grade school levels with monotonous regularity, and in many if not most cases never gets out of nursery school. It is not necessarily—actually, it probably isn’t—a single body of knowledge, just the same practices and principles being rediscovered independently again and again in different parts of the world, and sometimes being expressed in the same fairly obvious analogies and symbols. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t, and always it gets things at least slightly wrong, pretty much like the practice of medicine and psychology and such in our own century.
Now that practitioners of the traditional techniques are showing up in Europe and the Americas and getting doctoral degrees in psychology and anthropology and physiology, we are bemusedly coming to realize that some of the stupid assertions of the occultists a century and a half ago really were based not on their own delusional inventions but on their misunderstanding of some now-forgotten Victorian explorer’s badly summarized but accurate version of some other traveler’s tale based on some rural farmer’s explanation of what he remembered having heard from the traveling merchant who came through the village—recollections that were true, as far as they went and as far as the farmer was capable of making sense of the original beliefs and events in his own terminology, which the intervening narrators then understood in terms of their own presuppositions.
Some of the more preposterous theses really did reflect actual belief structures that persist to this day—the actuality of which does not automatically mean that the belief structures themselves were or are valid. That’s a separate question, being investigated for the most part in such muddled conditions that nobody is likely to learn very much of any use—not until everyone involved buckles down to contemplating how to create multidisciplinary parameters within which empirically valid methods might be devised that would fit the problem at hand, rather than denying that the problem at hand even exists. We are always blind to our own shortcomings, even when we take them into account and try to correct for them.
I write this because I have just encountered another case in which ideas that were general cultural currency a century ago have so metastasized into infantile nonsense in the intervening decades that they have rendered us insensible to the possibility that there ever were grown-up versions of the ideas—grown-up versions that are probably as wrong as everything else that human beings assert, but that at least are not childish nonsense. Like our own best beliefs, they are grown-up nonsense.
Everything You Know Is Wrong, But Then Everyone Has Always Been Wrong About Everything Anyway
Knowing that we view everything through cultural filters—mathematics being as cultural as anything else that is human—leads at least some of us to the strangely vertiginous feeling that all of human history (our own included, of course) is largely a matter of seeing differently sized pictures considerably out of focus. We think we have a clear vision of things at last until something forces us to realize that we don’t. We think we have the big picture at last until some event forces us to realize that there is either a bigger one or a potentially valid different one. This is not exactly a new insight, but it seems to surprise people every time it heaves into view.
Reductionist neuroscience is coming to resemble the reductionist biologies of a century and more ago, and is creating a structurally similar backlash that is even more wrong in its anti-reductionist assumptions, except when it isn’t even wrong. The genuine advance in knowledge allows for a synthesis of social, psychological, and physiological approaches that could go far beyond the insupportable, largely emotional responses to reductionism that have given “holistic” such a bad name, but scarcely anyone has mastered the relevant disciplines sufficiently.
At the same time, as I have noted much too repeatedly, the ability to perceive the need for a working synthesis of nature and nurture isn’t rocket science (i.e., it doesn’t require knowledge of an immense percentage of the general principles, just a perception of the main effects that stem from the underlying causes); some kind of behavioral modification rooted in physiological substrates probably dates back to the Paleolithic, and has advanced or regressed according to the historical circumstances in which such knowledge found itself embedded. Every so often some horrific upheaval of history wipes out all the advanced practitioners, and few enough of the advanced practitioners ever acquire enough distance on their practice to contemplate the possibility that theirs is only a specific instance of a larger theoretical body of knowledge. The whole thing slides back to grade school levels with monotonous regularity, and in many if not most cases never gets out of nursery school. It is not necessarily—actually, it probably isn’t—a single body of knowledge, just the same practices and principles being rediscovered independently again and again in different parts of the world, and sometimes being expressed in the same fairly obvious analogies and symbols. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t, and always it gets things at least slightly wrong, pretty much like the practice of medicine and psychology and such in our own century.
Now that practitioners of the traditional techniques are showing up in Europe and the Americas and getting doctoral degrees in psychology and anthropology and physiology, we are bemusedly coming to realize that some of the stupid assertions of the occultists a century and a half ago really were based not on their own delusional inventions but on their misunderstanding of some now-forgotten Victorian explorer’s badly summarized but accurate version of some other traveler’s tale based on some rural farmer’s explanation of what he remembered having heard from the traveling merchant who came through the village—recollections that were true, as far as they went and as far as the farmer was capable of making sense of the original beliefs and events in his own terminology, which the intervening narrators then understood in terms of their own presuppositions.
Some of the more preposterous theses really did reflect actual belief structures that persist to this day—the actuality of which does not automatically mean that the belief structures themselves were or are valid. That’s a separate question, being investigated for the most part in such muddled conditions that nobody is likely to learn very much of any use—not until everyone involved buckles down to contemplating how to create multidisciplinary parameters within which empirically valid methods might be devised that would fit the problem at hand, rather than denying that the problem at hand even exists. We are always blind to our own shortcomings, even when we take them into account and try to correct for them.
I write this because I have just encountered another case in which ideas that were general cultural currency a century ago have so metastasized into infantile nonsense in the intervening decades that they have rendered us insensible to the possibility that there ever were grown-up versions of the ideas—grown-up versions that are probably as wrong as everything else that human beings assert, but that at least are not childish nonsense. Like our own best beliefs, they are grown-up nonsense.
