(or, How I Learned to Unlearn as a Means for Relearning What I Already Knew … I Think)

It’s interesting to consider how the connections we make in our minds interact with the world as we actually find it. Many years ago I was given the insight that methods of knowing (under the banner of epistemology) are deeply connected to how we perform ourselves and societies into the world (ontology). This synergy seems self-evident to an extent, but the nuances begin to ask more of us than merely linking thought with action: they call upon us to interrogate the foundations of our connection to the fabric of reality itself, and what we make from that.

This is no small undertaking, to pull at the threads of knowledge and querying whether anything is “real” in the sense of being immutable, constant, and transcendent beyond mere perceptions and beliefs. Indeed, this longing for a realm that exists objectively beyond our limitations and ministrations helped drive the advent of both science in a modern sense and, interestingly, aspects of religiosity at scale. Any tensions between these realms were more about the origins of such transcendent force and the methods that could be drawn upon to access it; in essence, both longed for universal truth, and it came down to Faith vs. Experimentation (which obviously is a big subject, and best left for another day).

While many of these inquiries had antecedents in the historical record, especially as they built upon Greek and Roman constructs, the period of roughly the last 500 years has kicked these pursuits into hyperdrive and has set the template for the breakneck pace of change evident in our world today. Back then, the rise of mass culture was beginning to stir as new technologies of communication and conveyance began to appear, allowing more unitary ideologies to proliferate. This was the era of the rise of nation states, market economies at scale, global trade, pervasive technological progress, mass production, resource capture, and especially grand narratives.

At the root of these pursuits was an emerging worldview that rendered reality (or “nature”) as discoverable, capable of being discerned in its workings, subject to quantification and cause-effect analysis, and ultimately susceptible to being controlled (or more kindly, managed) by humans. This paradigm was typified by what we often take as the “scientific method” that posits knowledge acquisition as the logical pursuit of human sensory perception, augmented by the tools we use for collecting, measuring, and analyzing “data” from the world around us. It presumes that reality is in fact knowable, that it follows certain patterns and rules, that it exists independent of our perceptions, and that we can channel all of this into stable structures that conform to our observations.

And that method has gotten us quite far in many respects, prospering because it actually explained a lot of the world around us and, increasingly, came to validate many of our intuitive understandings of the world. With this method, medicines could be extrapolated from plants at a large scale and tested for specific conditions, trade could be coordinated via stable channels for shipping and communication, laws of motion and thermodynamics could be deployed for energy production and transportation, and even human behaviors could be quantified and assessed in ways that made it possible to predict/influence them. In short, it gave us great power to act in the world at scale.

All of this coheres with how most of us live our lives, as we enjoy many of the benefits (or experience the multitude of burdens, as the case may be) from the world that was built upon these sorts of pillars. Still, there is a fair question to be raised about whether that foundation is actually immutable or whether we built a world that reinforces it without critically examining its efficacy. To be sure, it hurts if you drop a bowling ball on your foot, but that doesn’t mean the bowling ball is actually doing the hurting or that the pain is “real” as opposed to being a s(t)imulated response. It’s entirely possible that neither the foot nor the bowling ball were really there in the first place (which, as it turns out, if we take a quantum view of things is actually “true” on a much deeper level).

Humans have always sought knowledge and conducted experiments; the issue is whether that is a basis to alter the world in ways that may be irreparable.

But we needn’t even go that far to grasp the limits of our inquiries. To the extent that the world around us is measurable, we might ask whether the tendency to fit our understanding into those measures conditions the conclusions we draw (also known as confirmation bias). And we know from even basic physics that acts of observation influence what is being observed. Even more to the point, it is entirely fair to consider whether the socioeconomic systems we have built upon foundations of predictability are simply wrongly conceived. Humans have always sought knowledge and conducted experiments; the issue is whether that is a basis to alter the world in ways that may be irreparable. As the powerful text Hospicing Modernity urges, we should “consider how we are related and accountable to what is unknowable, things that are not visible or imaginable within and around us … if we are to open different possibilities for seeing, sensing, relating, and imagining, we will need to figure out how to interrupt our usual ways of doing things and the satisfaction we have with what has been normalized as natural, true, and desirable.” There is a world — maybe the world — beyond our conceptions and calculations.

Decades ago I was introduced to a plausible conflation between the empirical method and the construction of empire that turned out to be wrong, at least linguistically speaking in terms of deriving from a common source (one is Latin, the other Greek). But the premise itself still holds, perhaps even more so than it did back then: how we come to know the world sets forth the parameters for what we build upon it; to the extent that we can open up what constitutes actionable knowledge, we can also begin to forge much-needed interventions that don’t merely replicate the logic of what got us into our present precarious predicament. I’m not suggesting that we abandon the empirical project altogether, but rather that we consider whether there are more interesting ways to exercise power from myriad forms of knowing. Ultimately, approaching knowledge through a lens of humility and diversity could lead us to even more stable ways of being and living.

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NOTE: we take the things that drop in front of us as they appear, even if it’s three decades later, and we don’t usually control the timing. And when instances arise that show us something more complex about things we’ve taken as a given, it is incumbent upon us to take the invitation to inquire further. Is it window dressing or is it structural? Does it undermine or (even ironically) serve to reaffirm our commitment? I don’t know, but then again I don’t not know…. {image: Pixabay}