A very important discrimination when attempting to engage questions from a culturally mature perspective is the distinction between good science and scientism. Scientism describes formulations that treat right-hand, material explanations as sufficient. Traditional science in contrast only claims that the right hand works for right hand stuff. (Among good scientists we see a wide diversity of beliefs about reality’s fundamental workings. For example, many scientists hold strong religious beliefs.)
It is useful to think of scientism as having “hard” and “soft” forms. Hard scientism argues that left-hand concerns have no real significance. Left-hand concerns are best simply ignored. Hard scientism is scientific fundamentalism.
Soft scientism attempts to extend science’s reach into traditionally left-hand territory. At its best, it humanizes science, brings it to the world of the every day events. I think of Carl Sagan’s moving descriptions of cosmological genesis, Steven Jay Gould’s invitation to step into Darwin’s vision, and E.O. Wilson’s almost spiritual plea for the protection of species diversity (in spite of an explicitly materialist cosmology).
Cultural Maturity, and CST more specifically, proposes that while both hard and soft forms have contributed and will continue to, neither fully succeeds with the big picture.
From Hope and the Future:
“Cultural Maturity’s challenge to scientism begins at a social level, with that key recognition that knowledge and know how to use it are not at all the same thing. Few questions of significance today are just material. In some sense they are also questions of meaning and value. Today, as we inquire with increasingly dramatic depth into the fundational mechanisms of life and the cosmos, the notion that science and invention have moral dimensions becomes increasingly undeniable. In The Life Era, astrophysicist Eric Chaiison said it pointedly: “If our species is to survive to enjoy a future, then we must make synonymous the words ‘future’ and ‘ethical.'”
That something is missing becomes most inescapable when it comes to understanding ourselves. If ascribing rigidly to right-hand methodology doesn’t simply dismiss important variables (for, example, extreme behaviorism denies any significance to the internal contents of awareness), it strongly biases what we consider important. Researchers working in the field of psychology have only very recently began to regard phenomena such as love and spirituality as worthy topics of study (even though the average person would list them near the top of psychological concerns). I’m reminded of Einstein’s comment “Not everything that can be counted counts. And not everything that counts can be counted.” (Ignoring what cannot be readily counted leaves us necessarily short of the kind of understanding the future requires. More, because such thinking disregards important date, it is simply bad science.)
At a more cultural level, a particularly pertinent observation pertains to the tasks of future social decision-making. Cultural Maturity claims that today’s critical questions universally require integrative sorts of “analysis”—both hands are needed and not just one added to the next. We cans see this in how none of the notions I’ve used to get at the heart of culturally mature truth—integral intelligence, creative complexity, mature relativism, deep responsibility, or any at all complete interpretation of purpose or wisdom—makes real sense unless each hand is brought into play. The social sciences have attempted to objectively study intelligence, creativity, maturity, responsibility, and purpose, but however informative such studies, the best of them also teach us that what we can rationally scrutinize, behaviorally observe, and objectively measure represents but a part of what these notions are about.
At the least, more than right-hand truth is needed for understanding the human experience. And in a more limited sense right-hand truth stops short for understanding as a whole. We might consider this a loss, but ultimately it does not at all dull the sharp edge of scientific. Quite the opposite. It does remove mechanistic analysis and objective observation as final answers. But by making scientific understanding part of a larger systemic picture, it offers ultimately that scientific truth might be both more far-reaching in its implications and more precise.”
Later:
“This is not to wholly dismiss efforts to explain the whole ball of wax in right-hand terms—and certainly not the usefulness of mechanistic formulations in some contexts. And example of a fascinating area of examination: I find in what gets called the “sciences of complexity”—chaos theory, fractal geometry, the study of self-organizing systems and the like—some of the most interesting contemporary lines of scientific inquiry. But they too get decidedly problematical when extrapolated beyond their immediate observations and particularly so when applied in anything but the most metaphoric sense to human experience.
The sciences of complexity have found a wide popular audience of late. This is in part a function of real contribution. They offer fascinating insight into the evolution of physical structures, and at least provocative conjecture with regard to the origins of life. I suspect, however, that the larger part of popular attention directive less from their applicability (which is fairly limited) than from how well they function as metaphors for the more dynamic kind of thinking the future requires (the dramatic images produced by the Mandelbrot equation, for example, propel us into an infinitely layered, almost psychedelically collidescopic landscape). The fact that they do so without violating the mechanistic assumptions of classical science unquestionably adds to the attraction fro people of certain temperaments.
Another example of a line of thought where scientism asks some good questions but ultimately falls short is evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ concept of the “meme”—an attempt to extend a classical Darwinian model into the human realm. Dawkins is probably the most ardent of contemporary hard scientism advocates—certainly the most visibly so. Dawkins argument of atheism is simply narrow minded (he may be right, but his argument is no more sound than those of religious fundamentalists). His framing of thought and tradition in Darwinian terms is more interesting, but ultimately leaves us wanting for related reasons.
Dawkins proposes that particular cultural beliefs and practices, like genes at a biologic level, exist because they have won in a battle of the fittest. The idea has merit—and particular appeal to more right hand sorts (it offers a right-hand replacement for the humanities). But in the end it reduces human belief to little but fashion and habit. Like pragmatism, it begs questions of value and significance. It fails to answer why certain sets of beliefs and practices, at particular times and places, are more enduring, more “fit,” than others (the question that CST attempts to address with its patterning concepts). Ignore that question and we have left out what makes us human.”