The sin of reductionist thinking

Hi Looby and thanks for any thought you lend to this if it catches your eye ... or others' eyes, too!

I have come to the realization that too much of our world is stuck in reductionist thinking. I get the whole idea that one way of understanding something is to break it down into more manageable components. But, I have observed with careful contemplation that those who rely on reductionist thinking to understand the world around them never seem to reconstruct the thing they’re trying to understand, and then move forward in action with only the reductionist view and not the holistic view.

Though I see reductionist thinking all around me, one place I observe it taking place to the detriment of the planet is in agriculture. The industrialization of agriculture was followed hotly by the reductionist approach. As the chemists, botanists, geneticists, bureaucrats, et. al., broke agriculture into parts they thought they could deal with and control, they never seemed to put agriculture back together as a whole in its natural context in the biosphere -- to observe its vast interconnections. Proponents of industrial reductionist agriculture never used what they learned through reductionist thinking to help inform a holistic perspective, but instead, used their limited views to drive policy and practice. Thus they introduce practices that are motivated by production goals rather than building life.

Coming at this from the other direction is agriculture that is based on local observation and context-sensitive solutions. This is what I see in permaculture and its cousins. Though we might want to scientifically examine the physical and chemical processes of plant guilds; we don’t have to in order to apply them effectively and beneficially.

To me, observation and repetition is a far, far better means of practicing agriculture than reductionism. Thoughts?

hi Dan,
I certainly agree that reductionist thinking has led us to denying the effects of our actions and to feelings of seperation and isolation. This is evident on many levels including agriculture. The opposite way of thinking is systems thinking which is one of the seven ways. Seeing ourselves as part of a connected whole enables us to see our actions as meaningful.
One of the first steps to systems thinking is observation of the systems around us and those we are part of.
thanks Looby

This is going to be a bit vague and rambly, and I haven't read your new book yet Looby so I hope nothing I write is going to clash, but I'm reminded of a few things.

One is the symbology used in this card, which is used as the 'alchemy' card in a set of druid inspired tarot cards.



From what I remember, the alchemist (or in these cards the fferyllt, which is based on the welsh word) is atempting to mix fire and water to discover the holy-grail, or 'ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything' according to how you look at things. The symbol on the skin thing hanging above her head is what we normally think of as a star of David, but in celtic mythology it represents two ways of thinking. The 'downward pointing' triangle represents male, reductionist thinking, breaking everything down to its component parts. The complementary 'upward pointing' triangle, which makes the star complete and functional, represents female (um, what is the opposite of reductionist? any suggestions?) thinking, putting ideas back together to create new ways of understanding the world.



I'm also reminded of Fritjof Capra's book The Turning Point, but it's so long ago that I read it that I don't really feel able to say very much about it. I'll have to dig it out and have a look...

Are you familiar with this book Looby? Are any of your ideas similar?

Dan Grubbs wrote:I have come to the realization that too much of our world is stuck in reductionist thinking. I get the whole idea that one way of understanding something is to break it down into more manageable components. But, I have observed with careful contemplation that those who rely on reductionist thinking to understand the world around them never seem to reconstruct the thing they’re trying to understand, and then move forward in action with only the reductionist view and not the holistic view.

I do not share exactly the same realization, I would rather suggest that the people are stuck with the fantasy that reality and their reduced view are equal.
You could call me a reductionist, as I have spend a few years at university reducing the world to principles that I can understand and write down (aka. physics).
Yet I knew this was a model and would only describe one part of the reality under very narrow circumstances.
And every time one would look more at the details new phenomena appeared and some of the previously important laws lost their importance.
When one would look at the greater scale these details transformed into new phenomena and previously minor correlations would began to dominate the whole behavior.
Then with the understanding of the different phenomena, relations at the different scales one could understand how some strange relations arose.

Dan Grubbs wrote:To me, observation and repetition is a far, far better means of practicing agriculture than reductionism.

I guess we need both. The "female" holistic view that is based on observing and repeating nature and the "male" reduction and "local optimization".
And both of them have to be aware that they are very limited when used alone, and that they are equally important.

(Due to reading through Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, and having an insatiable desire to discuss related ideas, I seem to be bringing forth several old threads today. Glad to have found them!)

"Reductionist" thinking--also known as analysis, right?--is useful in its way, for certain purposes.  And of course we have all seen how it can lead to great understanding of some things in some ways. I see that the original post agrees with this idea. And I agree with what I read in the original post that certain ways of thinking/knowing are overtaught, overused, and over-relied upon today.

We are used to cause-and-effect, scientific thinking in our times. Studying traditional methods of education a few years ago, I learned some names for different modes of knowledge, of which scientific knowledge is just one. My favorite is called "poetic knowledge" (which doesn't have a necessary connection to verse poetry, by the way):

Poetic knowledge is…a spontaneous act of the external and internal senses with the intellect, integrated and whole rather than an act associated with the powers of analytic reasoning…
--Poetic Knowledge by James S. Taylor

 

It's a way we apprehend a person, place, thing or idea, in its wholeness, which wholeness is not only "greater than the sum of its parts" as the saying goes, but also is something more "personal," in a way, than merely a functioning collection of parts.

Learning and using new ways of thinking/understanding is easier said than done, of course, and teaching these things to others is even harder, but "teacher of better" thinking is an ancillary role that I believe each Permaculturist has by virtue of knowing there are better ways to do things than they are often done. I'm starting with teaching broader thinking in my own home to my daughter! Thank goodness I can raise her now with an introduction to systems thinking, having discovered that great book as well.

Hi Rachel, lovely to find another Donella Meadows fan here on Permies... actually, I would think perhaps there are quite a few.

It's funny within the context of the OP about reductionist vs. holistic thinking, to think about Thinking in Systems (both the book, and the subject in general). I'll come back to that at the end.

I share the concern over the often disastrous dominance of reductionist thinking in our decadent late-capitalist world, and certainly do agree that reductionist thinking can become dangerous when it chronically fails to finish its own analysis by seeking out its place again in the conext it came from, in the whole.

Spending too much time analyzing a small, analyzable thing can make you forget everything else. You forget that the small thing you're analyzing actually is related to everything. In fact, the scientific method, which has given us so much progress, just begs at every turn for us to isolate variables and such, and leads us to find a key factor or two to manipulate situations in some particular way. And we believe its conclusions and act on them as the "truth." As if those one or two little factors we found existed in isolation in the real world. So acting with this mistaken belief that you can manipulate your variables in the real world having only the effects observed in your carefully isolated, sterilized little lab often has us running off the rails in the modern world.

This is made worse by what economists call "externalities," a huge problem in conventional economic theory that everyone acknowledges and then essentially brushes off and looks the other way because its implications are too big. Externalities mean, if I dump toxic gick in your river, neener neener neener, too bad, not my problem, no one owns the river, do they? Same with the air, soil loss, plastic in the oceans, none of it is my (little individual reductionist) problem. But all of us get that sinking feeling when we look at the whole again and see it going to H-E-double-toothpicks due to all of us acting like isolated little reductionists. And there's "nothing to be done" because no one actually has the brain power to think about The Whole. At least not in this analytical way.

That makes your "poetic knowledge" idea all the more interesting. A way to look at wholes as wholes and deal with them that way without dissecting them. I'm really interested in this subject if you want to share more. It seems this is hard core epistemology, meaning the philosophy of how do we know, that we know what we know? Not an irrelevant subject because every few hundred years, our whole way of looking at the world changes, and suddenly society "knows" or "sees" or is interested in radically different things than it was before.

Anyway, it seems to me at the moment that poetic knowledge does not have any big system, or organization, or ideology, or cultural trend, pulling for it at the moment. Science, education, capitalism, the organization of work, our way of looking at problems, all of them seem to be pulling for reductionism. I wonder what forces could/do pull for holism?

Aside: For the moment, this poetic knowledge concept reminds me of all forms of art, first of all, and then also of language learning, a subject I've always loved. A lot of language students study in that reductionist way -- analyzing the grammar, looking for the logic of the other language's system, learning lists of clearly defined vocabulary. All stuff that feeds into the very weak, slow and limited frontal cortex of our brains, but hey, it's all we've got to analyze with. Other students, though, just mess around, pick up catchy phrases and tones of voice they've heard here and there, and repeat and innovate with them, not very accurately at first, but they keep going and gradually get better at them. Without every actually "knowing" (in that reductionist way we're used to calling 'knowing') what they're doing. Actually everyone learns their own native language this way. And some days you can just see a foreign language student lost in analysis, and other days the same student's neurons line up in a particular way, and they just go with the flow, stop thinking, dive in, and do really well. Speech is more about training the instincts to deliver your thoughts as words -- speech happens way too fast for the analytical frontal cortex to keep up with it. And art, who can analyze that? Though goodness knows we all try. I suppose it's because both rely so heavily on this poetic aspect... dissecting them may turn up some interesting stuff, but it's nowhere near as interesting as the phenomenon (like listening to music) itself.

So circling back to systems thinking... Maybe that is the bridge we need between discrete analysis and holistic mushiness. It seems to have a foot in both worlds. Kind of like Burra's tarot card above. Maybe that's what I always found attractive about it. Anyway, thanks for the post! It sounds like your daughter is lucky with the education you're giving her!

Dave de Basque wrote:
Aside: For the moment, this poetic knowledge concept reminds me of all forms of art, first of all, and then also of language learning, a subject I've always loved. A lot of language students study in that reductionist way -- analyzing the grammar, looking for the logic of the other language's system, learning lists of clearly defined vocabulary. All stuff that feeds into the very weak, slow and limited frontal cortex of our brains, but hey, it's all we've got to analyze with. Other students, though, just mess around, pick up catchy phrases and tones of voice they've heard here and there, and repeat and innovate with them, not very accurately at first, but they keep going and gradually get better at them. Without every actually "knowing" (in that reductionist way we're used to calling 'knowing') what they're doing. Actually everyone learns their own native language this way. And some days you can just see a foreign language student lost in analysis, and other days the same student's neurons line up in a particular way, and they just go with the flow, stop thinking, dive in, and do really well. Speech is more about training the instincts to deliver your thoughts as words -- speech happens way too fast for the analytical frontal cortex to keep up with it. And art, who can analyze that? Though goodness knows we all try. I suppose it's because both rely so heavily on this poetic aspect... dissecting them may turn up some interesting stuff, but it's nowhere near as interesting as the phenomenon (like listening to music) itself.

YES! I teach a language myself (via the internet!), and Latin is usually taught two ways: the Grammar/Translation Method OR the Natural (Contextual Induction) Method. I learned and fell in love with Latin via the analytical G/T Method, and I continue to have a love for parsing and all of that kind of thing to this day. However, I teach Latin now via the holistic Natural Method because...that's how you really learn to communicate in a language, any language. A language is a vast  whole, with branching connections that include grammar topics, but are not based exclusively on them. It's based on meaning, really, and that's what we need to get at, from the beginning, to understand and use a language.  I love the processes and skills of analysis, but I appreciate their limitations as a mode of thought, particularly as my areas of interest and mental training are in the Humanities rather than the sciences.

Ahhh, there's so much to learn about learning, and to think about thinking...it's exciting!