3.1 Cause, Effect and Nurture

Welcome to Section Three which is all about Theories.  I hope that you found Section Two interesting.  I realise that it’s rather long and perhaps, reading it, you may have sometimes thought – now there’s an angry man!

And you’d be absolutely right – there are a lot of things that make me angry.

For instance, when I see thousands or even millions of € of public money being wasted on things that don’t work while children go hungry or homeless I get angry.

But, in another way, I’m not that angry really. We are all imperfect humans in an imperfect world trying to do the best that we can at any particular point in time and circumstance.

And if I am angry, my fervent hope is that I am using my anger in a constructive way to give me energy first of all to motivate myself and then to effect some small change in the bit of the world that I come into contact with.

Getting back to theories, when something is proposed that is unlikely to work out, we often hear people saying: that’s all right in theory, but will it work in practice?

I will define a theory as a belief about something that we usually know a bit about. If we then act on our belief, whatever we predicted would happen, happens.

Of course, if they are to be of use to humanity, theories have to be tested in practice – in the real world as it were.

For example, I have a theory that if a child experiences positive affirmation and praise in the context of a consistent, warm and trusting relationship it will optimise his ability to learn.  I can then test this theory by praising and affirming a child over many years in formal (or informal) educational settings and see does it actually happen – i.e. is the child learning?

We can define a successful theory as one that makes predictions, and then those predictions happen.  If a theory is successful its prediction is generally consistent at different times, and in different places.  This, of course, is relatively straightforward when we are dealing with technology, but in areas of human endeavour such as culture, (or, in our case, emotional healing), predicting how theories apply at different times and in different places can be more challenging – and might not always hold true.

My theory about praising and affirming a child will, I believe, hold true everywhere in the world, would have held true at any time in human history, and will hold true into the future.  (The reasons for the predictability of this theory are explained in Chapter Three, Universal Theories of Change).

But let us say that I have a theory that sending men who are addicted to drugs and who are in prison for violent crimes on a six-week anger-management course will effect permanent positive change in respect of their addiction and expression of anger. This might work really well with some men but might not with others and from my experience I don’t believe that it is as successful a theory as the one that I described above in respect of praising and affirming children over many years.

I will explore these anomalies (or inconsistencies) in the application of theories of human behaviour in this and other Chapters in this Section.

Another thing of note about a theory is that what is being predicted may be new, i.e. previously unknown, or may have been known in a different context at some time in the past.

Testing a theory to see if it is successful leads to either it being verified or disproven. 

For example, the people who first proposed Systems Theory believed (very simply put) that beings living in proximity, or connected, affect each other’s behaviour a lot.  This will be considerably expanded in that Chapter.

The title of this website – The Natural World of Child Protection – determined the particular theories that I chose to include in this Section.  That is, the ones that (in my opinion) relate to the natural world as I described in the link and that we need to be familiar with if we wish to enhance the protection of vulnerable adults and children.

To kick-start, our first Chapter is concerned with Cause and Effect, and Nurture.

We probably don’t think about cause and effect that much, but it is deeply embedded in our experience of the world, every day, from conception to death, which is why I include it early on in the Section.  Some of the content of the other Chapters will be based on theories posited in this Chapter, within which I will explain some terms that I will be returning to again.

The Chapter is divided into six Sub-Chapters:

3.1.1    CAUSE, EFFECT AND NURTURE – INTRODUCTION

3.1.2    CAUSE AND EFFECT

3.1.3    CRIME AND IMPRISONMENT

3.1.4    REDUCTIONISM

3.1.5    NURTURE

3.1.6 CAUSE, EFFECT AND NURTURE – CONCLUSION AND ENDNOTES

If we observe a child learning to walk, or talk, or indeed mastering any task that needs to be mastered so that he will grow, we will notice that the path from unable to do it to complete familiarity involves, mostly, mimicking, trial and error, and practice, practice, practice.

We might not remember learning very basic childhood tasks as adults but we will experience the process when we try and master a new skill at any stage of our lives.  Each action, as we learn, causes a particular effect which, as we experience success, motivates us to repeat the action so that our level of competence in the effect is bettered.

Whether it is driving, changing a baby’s nappy, playing a musical instrument, knitting, or the tricky business of ensuring an egg is soft-boiled, the process is always the same. Eventually, we reach a point where we are satisfied with our level of competence at whatever skill we wish to master.

Of course, if the skill is of particular importance to us, the nature of the human seems to be to continue to try and improve beyond the plateau of satisfaction that is the norm for most of the population.  For example, a Formula One racing driver will want to drive a bit better than I do!

So, causation can be defined as a relationship between two events when the first event (the cause) gives rise to the second event (the effect).

For example, there is causation between a child getting up on the saddle of his bike, rolling forward with the assistance of a trusted adult, gaining enough belief in himself to balance, realising that the cause of the not-falling-sideways-effect is moving forward (i.e. internalising the principle of the gyroscope -think spinning top falling over when it stops) and eventually becoming competent in the art of cycling.  There is a causation chain (some people call this a causation mechanism) between firstly getting up on the saddle and being able to cycle alone!

(Cause and effect will be further described in the following posts 3.1.2.1 and 3.1.2.2),

Just as an aside – I find it interesting that in the French language there is a verb causer which means talking using symbols which ultimately leads to an event happening.  The reason that this is of interest to me is that I will be mentioning the importance of symbols in human communication in following Chapters.

The subject matter of the next Chapter is Systems Theory and I will mention it briefly here.

When I develop a skill, in addition to a cause having a particular effect, I will notice that my increased skill level will change me, and will change the relationship that I have with others in my environment.

For example the child who masters the skill of cycling will have far more independence which will cause parents to both enjoy the experiences that the child’s new found independence brings and worry about her safety on the road.

The child who masters art or drawing will bring pride to his parents and perhaps awaken an interest in art in a grandparent that had been long dormant.  (The interest in art, that is, not the grandparent).

So thinking systemically, it would be virtually impossible to regard children learning to cycle, or knit, or to develop skills in languages or art, as stand-alone events that affect nothing else around them.

Similarly a teenager may master a skill that might be very undesirable in the eyes of parents (such as rolling a joint or telling lies very convincingly) and this will, in turn, cause parents to learn new skills to limit the potential harm of such actions on both the teenager and the family at large, e.g. younger brothers and sisters.

As parents try and adapt to what they perceive as danger, the new skills that they learn will probably involve negotiating, compromising, bargaining, and developing extra vigilance that they did not need when the child was younger.  The result of the application of the new skills, (i.e. the cause) has the effect of steering the teenager through the rocky road of adolescence to being a mature adult.

Of course the exact same thing happens if we, as parents, observe a trait that we consider to be desirable.  The skills we might learn may be an appreciation of something with which we were previously unfamiliar and had no knowledge of (e.g. sport, music, art etc.) and perhaps it may spark an interest in such matters.

Once again the cause of us being interested in new things has the effect of encouraging our child as well as perhaps opening up new areas of interest for ourselves that we didn’t know were out there, or in which we might have some potential.

So throughout my life I constantly learn new skills, put them into practice, achieve a certain degree of mastery and influence those around me as they adapt their lives to my new skill, and I am in turn influenced by the skills that others around me learn and put into practice.

As I mentioned above, these processes will be described in the following posts and more particularly in the next Chapter on Systems Theory.

To illustrate how different effects can be generated by the same cause, and are influenced by what perspective we view them from, consider how we might describe the Sun.  (I will give it a capital letter since it is so important in our lives)!

In addition to illustrating cause and effect, this post will describe the difference between objective and subjective views. (If you want a more general description you’ll find it here).

The Sun’s warmth and light begat life on Earth so in terms of cause and effect, if we say that the Sun is a cause, an effect is life on Earth since its origins 4.5 billion years ago.  Our distant ancestors probably knew this intuitively, which is why the Sun had God-like status in almost all ancient cultures.

A paradoxical aspect of the Sun worth noting (and known to the ancients) is that, even though almost all life on our planet is dependent on it, it can never be visited by us. In Greek mythology this is posited in the legend of Icarus, who fell into the sea and drowned after wax holding his wings together melted when he was flying to the Sun.

And I say almost above, because I am informed by people who know about these things that all life on Earth would not cease if the Sun disappeared.  However, in respect of our human experience, the life that would survive would be of a very primitive nature.

It is no wonder that the prevailing image of God in almost all cultures is someone that humans depend on completely and has a substantial influence on our lives, that resides in a place we call heaven which is up in the sky, (somewhere the Sun is too), and, like the Sun, cannot be physically approached and met.

This cannot-be-approached-and-met bit has been analogised in most religions (certainly in Christianity which is the only one that I am really familiar with) in the sense that we have to die before we can physically meet our God.  (I stress physically here – because many people believe that we meet our God every day; spiritually).

Getting back to how we describe the Sun, if you Google The Sun, (which I did) you will find out that it is a star that comprises about 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System and is estimated to be brighter than 85% of all the other stars in the Milky Way.  It is the brightest object in our sky and is about 13 billion times brighter than the next brightest star.  Its distance from Earth is about 150,000,000 km and light travels from the Sun to us in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds.  Its surface temperature is over 5,500⁰C, and the energy of this sunlight, which consists of electromagnetic radiation, supports almost all life on Earth by a process called photosynthesis.   The Sun rotates on its own axis and the rotational period is about 28 of our days.

Wow!

So that is one way to describe the Sun.  I will call it an objective description.  No matter who measures all of the above, if they use the same instruments for measuring, their answers will be the same.  

In rainy Ireland when the Sun shines we usually feel a little better in ourselves.  The Sun rising at dawn precipitates waking up, bird-song (dawn chorus), cock-crowing, new ideas (it dawned on me), and, ultimately, starting a new day.  Increasing sunlight in the spring brings new life, hope and optimism, warmth, longer evenings, greenery, growth of necessary plants to feed and nurture us, and animals coming out of hibernation. 

Even the word spring suggests energy and indeed the Irish word for spring (earrach) has a root in work, (suggesting that we Irish took the entire winter off and only began working again when the Sun came out for a bit longer).  And the appearance of the Sun means we can get out and enjoy ourselves outdoors.  So in our rainy climate the Sun will almost always be welcomed.

In a desert climate where farmers are desperate for rain people will almost certainly have a different attitude to the Sun than we have in Ireland.  While it will still rise, bringing the dawn, birdsong, new day etc. it might also be very unwelcome at different times during the year.  There may be a shortage of drinkable water and great efforts might have to be made to keep perishable foods fresh.  The Sun’s heat may bring out unwanted insects or dangerous animals and far from getting outdoors and having picnics like we do in Ireland at the first sight of the Sun, its heat may be overbearing and unpleasant, and people will probably want to go indoors, block their windows to shield them from the sun, and sleep through its highest heat, (that is, have a siesta), in the hours after midday.

Now when we compare the three descriptions it is easy to see that while the first description will always be the same, (constant) the second and third will change (vary) depending on from what perspective we humans view the Sun.

The first description is objective i.e. it’s the same no matter who, when, where etc.  The second and third are subjective.  They depend on who describes, or where the person is, or what experiences she has had or is having in respect of the Sun, or maybe even when she describes it.  Indeed, every person who describes may have a different description.

In terms of Cause and Effect, if we assume the Sun to be always the cause, then the effect might be totally different depending on our circumstances. 

It might be helpful to look at the objective and subjective views in tabular form:

Objective and Subjective Views – The Sun

Objective and Subjective Views – The Rain

We can see that objectivity is concerned with practicality, what we observe and can measure etc. and subjectivity is concerned with our emotions, how we feel about something.

It is of interest to note that our ability to think symbolically and appreciate the abstract is strongly linked to our ability to be objective. Animals cannot really think objectively. They may have instinctive awareness of cause and effect but – apart from, perhaps, non-human primates who have some limited awareness – they cannot really imagine what will happen if the effect is two or more steps distant from the cause.

In order to figure out how to solve a problem and then – instead of doing something that will offer short-term relief – build a solution that will last we need to be able to think objectively.

Important Note:

The terms objective and subjective will be used a good bit in the website – many discussions, explorations etc. will make more sense if they are understood.

While I am on about the Sun (see previous post) and our attitude to it, I think that it might be interesting to consider how we view darkness and light.  We have a general belief since time immemorial manifest in our legends, stories, songs, religions etc. right up to the modern day that darkness is to be avoided and light is what is desired.

Darkness Into Light as we say!

Darkness is associated with depression, misery, gloominess, unhappiness, fear, sometimes even suicide and everything that humans do not want for themselves.  We generally don’t like walking alone in the dark.  Little children are often afraid of the dark going to bed at night.

In the world of therapy there is a general belief that our shadow side is a negative trait of our personality that we need to bring into awareness. But as my colleague Peter Nevin alerted to me one day, our shadow can, equally, contain positive aspects that we are unaware of.

Our fear of the dark and the general negativity surrounding blackness and darkness manifests in our language i.e. a black day in our history, the black economy, the black death, we wear black when we are mourning, (in Ireland anyway), the black sheep of the family is the one that doesn’t fit in, or causes trouble, if we want to disparage someone we might blacken his name, and then there is the notorious black Mass which is supposed to call up the devil!

The Dark Ages were a period in history where (supposedly) there wasn’t much scientific discovery, and they were followed by The Enlightenment.  And I remember in the halcyon days of the All Ireland Rugby League five Limerick teams lost on the same day and people that I knew called it Black Saturday!

Light, on the other hand, is associated with vision, forward-thinking, imagination, creativity, inspiration, goodness, hope, relief and similar traits.  We have loads of sayings promoting the benefits of light to humanity.  For example, we have the light-bulb moment, light will always conquer darkness, throw some light on the subject, the light at the end of the tunnel, see the light, that’s how the light gets in, and the one that really shows it, better to light a candle than curse the darkness, and hundreds more I’m sure if we looked hard enough! And light is also the word we use if something is easy to carry. (The only negative association that I could think of in respect of the word light is that if a play, film, book, event, programme, course of study etc. is not that substantial or deep it is said to be light).

And one that I was always confused about; the darkest hour is just before the dawn – is it – really?   (Now that might be a very subjective one)!

But is darkness intrinsically bad?  Maybe the principal reason that we find the dark frightening is that we can’t see properly in it – so we are not forewarned if we are in danger.  And maybe the reason that we associate it with depression is that it lacks colour.

Even at dusk, the world becomes lacking in colour.  The light of a bright moon is rarely strong enough to reflect colour either.  As I sit here writing this at 11 p.m. it is dark outside but very bright inside because of electric light.  But this has only been possible for a tiny, tiny fraction of human history.  Humans have always tried to light up the darkness with artificial light from fires, candles, etc. but their light was never bright enough to match daylight until electric light was invented a mere 120 years ago.

It can be worthwhile pausing to explore what is good about something that we all feel is bad, or are afraid of, or associate with negativity – and vice versa, because there is beauty in darkness too.

In fact, far from being the absence of light, darkness has its own transcendent quality of rest, silence, and recuperation.  Also, it is easier to have privacy and solitude.  I often think that the air seems fresher at night.  Unless we are at a night club or in a pub late at night, it is generally quieter at night than during the day, so we have less distraction. We may also have opportunities to think. (And perhaps the beauty of darkness inspired Paul Simon to write his lovely song, ‘The Sound Of Silence’ which begins with the line ‘hello darkness my old friend’).

And intimacy and romantic activity, including lovemaking (and therefore procreation of our very species) seems – for some reason – to favour the nighttime over bright light – though whether this is due to some learned puritanical inhibition about our bodies which seeped into us over many thousands of years due to some kind of civilising process (or not) I don’t know.

And, of course, vital to our health, darkness helps us to sleep and allows us the opportunity to recover from the busy-ness of the day.   And it will also allow us to hide – perhaps contributing to our feelings of safety rather than making us feel unsafe – for example if we are on the run from the law.

But probably the greatest beauty of complete darkness, with no artificial light from towns or cities, (and it is very hard to find places like that nowadays – at least in the developed World), is observation of our night sky – the stars, moon and planets.  It’s like the darkness highlights the light!

So in terms of cause and effect, the effects of both fear and safety can be caused by darkness.

Like the Sun, our attitude to it is dependent on our circumstances.

Before I finish, consider the oft-used expression Darkest Africa – so-called because it had to be enlightened by European civilisation. This places darkness firmly in the Continent where the vast majority of black people in the world come from.

I read some radical black literature once that proposed that black people are disadvantaged because blackness and darkness are associated with undesirable things. (Though this doesn’t, obviously, pertain to Ireland where our national drink is black – or the world of banking, where being in the black means having money).

At first reading this seemed to me to be an extreme version of the linking of the word left with sinister and gauche – which, being a citeog [1] I can obviously relate to, and if I wanted to make much of could feel a teeny little bit offended by – but maybe there’s something in it. (Here is Muhammad Ali being interviewed by Michael Parkinson on BBC in the 1970’s where Ali wittily – and very perceptively – explores this theme, as only he could).

And to finish this discussion on darkness, I said earlier that this website was a bit of a shot in the dark.  I’m not sure where whatever I put out there will land, or what I’ll hit with it.  In other words, it’s a bit of a risk – but exciting too – thanks to darkness!

[1]. Sinister (which means kind of evil or threatening) is the Latin word for left. Gauche (which means vulgar, clumsy or awkward), is the French word for left.  Citeog is the Gaelic word for a left-handed person.   

Surely one of the big design challenges (and remember – for the purposes of this discussion – design means how well something works) when addressing seemingly unsolvable issues like crime and imprisonment, is that the rule of cause and effect which is so familiar to us all, and which largely determines the way we live our lives, seems to be turned on its head.

After all, imprisonment is a very punishing experience for anyone – and one would think that every fibre in our being would try to avoid it.  In a nutshell, if the effect is imprisonment (severe punishment) and the cause of that effect is my behaviour, why do I keep behaving in that way?

People who have some knowledge of the why of self-destructive choices will be aware of unconscious forces that drive people to do things that cause them to end up in prison – and we will be exploring them in later Chapters – in particular the Chapter on Trauma and Related Topics.

However, regardless of the fact that our knowledge of the influence of the unconscious is widespread in academia and the helping professions it is my observation that, generally, when planners look at causes of crime and imprisonment in society (with a view to putting something in place to stop it happening) they appear to focus on what I will call proximate causes.

I will define a proximate cause as the nearest cause to the effect. (It might be helpful to expand on this a little to say that a proximate cause of ground getting wet may be rain falling.  However the reasons why rain falls here, and falls now, are rooted in many interconnected different causes such as amount of sunshine, the strength of the wind, our altitude, the current air pressure, nearness to the sea, and even gravity – i.e. rain falls down not up)!

Getting back to the causes of crime, a proximate cause as to why a young man might join a gang involved in criminality might be, the young man drops out of school.

Following on from this, a proximate cause of the young man dropping out of school might be suspension due to bad behaviour.

What is put in place by the Pillars dominated system might then be a home-school liaison officer or a school attendance officer who uses what we often refer to as a carrot and stick approach to the problem, which will usually include a mixture of encouraging the boy, appraising him of the rewards of school attendance and warning him and his parents of the legal consequences of school absence for children.

But when we begin to try and determine the cause for the bad behaviour it gets more complicated.

In my experience the response of decision makers within the Pillars is usually not at all in tune, or empathic with the intertwined causes (sometimes called complex causation) involved.  What I mean by this is that there are usually so many different factors in a young man’s life that cause him to behave in a way that his parents, family and society considers to be bad that the decision makers seem to get stuck.

Like our varying attitudes to the Sun, it is very common that everyone concerned for the boy will have a different opinion on 1): why he is getting into trouble, and 2): what needs to be done to steer him clear of trouble in the future. The reason for this is that no two perspectives are the same.

This is even true within the same family, where Dad might have a particular opinion as to what to do, and Mam will have a different one.  The teacher’s opinion will differ yet again, as might a neighbour’s, and a Garda who is involved might see the situation from yet a different perspective.

Most of the reasons for the differences are down to how the different people who are involved experience the boy, what stake they have in the boy’s future, their history and knowledge of the boy, their relationship with him, their life experience, their knowledge and/or training, their own prejudices, etc. etc.

(This is like, as I said, how our differences in our description of the Sun depend on how we experience it).

I expand on how people get stuck in different posts but it is enough to say here that in my experience it is common that strategies that are put in place to protect such young people usually use what I will call reductionist methods, breaking everything down into identifiable causes, and setting up something to deal with each individual cause in isolation, instead of dealing with the whole.

I’m almost certain that this happens because we (rightfully) believe that all effects have causes.

So accustomed as we are to the reductionist model of thinking it seems to make sense that if we deal with the causes one by one the effects will also disappear one by one. 

An example of this might be referring a 14 year old boy who is seriously misusing drugs to a treatment centre for an 8 week programme, but ignoring the myriad of stresses that impact on him as a result of his unstable family life, and then having the expectation that all will be well when he comes home.  Here, the well-meaning planners’ goal is that by sending him for 8 weeks to a very expensive treatment centre the skills learned over the duration (cause) will result in his long-term sobriety (effect). 

Sometimes, ordinary, non-professional people (including, perhaps, his parents, or members of his extended family) know intuitively that this has a very small chance of working, but they are ignored because firstly the planners are desperate for a solution, and also the family members are not educated professionals.

And, his parents may be afraid to voice their sceptism because they are desperate for a solution too – and know that this is the only option on offer!

Such a referral to a treatment centre is perfectly logical, when you think of it.  But very often doesn’t work, as I will explain in far more depth in later Chapters. 

We discussed how such decisions are arrived at in the Chapter on the Pillars, and we will be mentioning such processes again.

Reductionism, which I briefly mentioned in a previous post, involves breaking down big problems into smaller problems so that they can be understood better and then solved.

I will expand on the term a little here. 

Cause and effect is particularly important in the world of science, a realm that helping people is not generally considered to be part of!  While a social science degree is an important principal route to becoming a professional helper of families in distress I don’t think that the public generally regard people who help others as scientists.

This might be because people perceive science to involve mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geology etc. analytical thinking, and then the application of, or the marrying of that thinking to practical tasks, e.g. engineering, medicine, pharmacology etc.

And perhaps most people intuitively believe that it is far more challenging to calculate precise measurements (what most people consider to be an integral element of science) in the area of human distress than it is in physics, chemistry, geology etc.

It is worth reflecting on the principal method that we humans, (having come up with a theory about something), use to precisely measure, glean knowledge, and then make informed decisions, particularly in predicting what might happen in the future, in countless different areas over thousands of years.

The tried and trusted method is to set up an artificial experiment to examine, explore, and find out more about a process whose effect is not known, or is in doubt, or that someone is curious about.  It is usually necessary to set up this experiment in a place where it can be examined separate to the environment where the process normally happens.  This separate place is known as a laboratory.  In a laboratory, external processes that can have an effect on the process to be examined are eliminated, or else held constant, so we can get a true result.

By replicating the process many times over, while at the same time rigorously proving the truthfulness (or veracity) of the results mathematically, we can then minimise, if not eradicate the doubt in respect of our predictions for the same process in other environments.

This is the reductionist method, and is often referred to as Newtonian or classical science [1].

[1]. The term Newtonian refers to the famous scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton, who I already mentioned.  He is the man on whose head, legend has it, an apple fell – which got him thinking about gravity.  While quantum mechanics, relativity, and latterly chaos theory and fractal geometry have challenged the reductionist, Newtonian, objective methods of scientific enquiry, the breaking down of problems into separate parts to solve them in a logical way is still very sedimented in our thinking.

(Reductionism will be further explored in the Chapter on Systems Theory).

In doing a scientific experiment, when a scientist observes, and then measures the process, it is very important that he will not influence it in any way, i.e. that he remains totally objective and accepts the results that are found – not altering results to get the result that he thinks or hopes he might find.

I believe that how badly we need something (or a particular result – to be more precise) in any particular field determines how close our version of the truth will be to the objective reality.  The best scientists are able to remain objective and not allow prejudice to influence results.  But even in the very objective worlds of physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine etc. prejudice can influence results. 

And furthermore, the truth is sometimes not the same as objective reality – rather it’s often what everyone knows and believes at a particular time in history.  Once upon a time it was true that the earth was flat, it was also true that if a woman (who people suspected was a witch) didn’t drown when immersed in water she was a witch.

Altering results to fit a particular policy, or ingratiate a person in authority, or make money, or even boost one’s own ego, is a lot more common than the layman might think.

I have memories, for example, of being convinced by an influential body of scientists in the 1970’s and 1980’s that nuclear power was safe. What they neglected to say, of course, was that if everything works perfectly, and no-one makes a mistake (which, as we know, is an impossible scenario) then nuclear power is safe. Their claims were, of course, blown apart, (pun intended) by the tragedy of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1985 when it was proven that ordinary people’s fears were more reliable than the conclusions of the scientific establishment.

In a previous post I discussed how scientists who are deemed to be highly intelligent believe that putting their considerable energies and talents in developing more sophisticated weapons will make our world a safer place. And this truth has been blown apart (pun intended again) so many times in history that there is no need to give any examples.

(If you are interested further, Rupert Sheldrake, a scientist in Cambridge University, England, has written papers, books etc. about how results of experiments can be distorted to suit a desired outcome).

Following on from the previous post, in science, particularly from the 1600’s onwards, because of improvements in methods of doing experiments, as well as the accuracy of instruments and laboratory equipment, what we can observe and measure began to carry more weight than the belief that what we wish for or how we feel about something influences whatever we are studying or exploring.

However in the early 20^th Century developments in quantum mechanics and chaos theory as well as the theory of relativity got scientists thinking again about how the person undertaking an experiment influences the experiment – and in particular how science, far from being fixed and certain, (Newtonian) is actually full of uncertainty.

While these developments might not have changed the world view of the average human that much, they did have some significance in our felt understanding of complexity, as scientific discovery eventually filters through to society at large and affects social and political development.

So, over the past 130 years or so, in parallel to science becoming uncertain – and this is the important bit when it comes to this website – the view that we have of our world has changed (and is still changing) from being a world with firm boundaries where almost everything is provable and undeniable, to a much more complex mish-mash of uncertainty, ambiguity, and even insecurity, where the old certainties of class, religion, status, employment, right and wrong, and even family structure are, all the time, in doubt.

In short – our world has got a lot more complex!

Now some scientists in the 1600’s proposed that reductionism was not the only way of measuring, in particular when it came to living systems, but they were not really taken that seriously as scientific discoveries enabled by reductionist thought raced ahead and the new technology that promised (and delivered) so much became universally available.

Also, the non-mechanistic world view was associated with ancient sciences that depended on intuition, faith, and what we would now call pseudo-sciences such as alchemy, astrology and other semi-religious beliefs.  After the Renaissance and the (astounding at that time) discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Newton and others, precision, technology and certainty were in, intuition, shamanism and uncertainty were out.

For example, we increasingly began to believe that whether or not rain fell from the sky and assisted our crops to grow depended on temperature, air pressure, altitude, wind-speed etc. and not on our ability to dance or pray for rain. Or, more importantly, that the deadly cholera disease was spread by water-borne bacteria instead of visited upon us by a disapproving God.

This change, of course brought many benefits in technology as we moved away from faith and superstition – this is why we should not discount reductionism and all its benefits – but it also meant that the world of science (naturally enough) became removed from uncertainty. The old methods were gradually discredited by scientific fact and humans came to value certainty more and more as they felt the benefits directly.

These benefits were felt as much in medicine and healing (which I will expand on in the next post, and is why I am including these posts at all) as they were in transport, communications, business, and technology.

(There are two Endnotes in a later post that will expand further on this post for those who are interested).

A very simple example of a reductionist-type experiment (that anyone who did science will have learned early in secondary school) is Boyle’s Law (which was taught to us with great enthusiasm because firstly it is a very important experiment and also because Robert Boyle was Irish).

He did his experiment by pouring mercury into a glass tube enclosed at the one end and then measured the reduction in volume of air as the pressure from the extra weight of mercury increased. He showed the relationship between pressure and volume when the amount of gas (air – in Boyle’s case) and its temperature didn’t change.  (That is, were held constant).  This relatively simple law is applied in thousands of different environments, and the results of its application, to all intents and purposes, are the same.

In terms of cause and effect, it is very obvious.  The effect (the reduction in volume) can be clearly linked to the cause (the pressure exerted on the air by the weight of mercury).  The design of thousands of applications depends on the proven-ness of the validity of the original hypothesis.

Now, thinking about the calculation of precise measurements in the area of human distress, it is far more difficult to predict how, for example:

Psychological pressure from a traumatic event affects the behaviour of a human being in society.

Than it is to predict how:

Physical pressure from weight of mercury affects the behaviour of air in a glass tube.

The difficulty that we helpers of very hurt people face in design, (i.e. planning strategies to alleviate distress) is that in the application of our science, cause and effect are not at all as clear.

We are fooled into thinking, however, that the opposite is the case, because cause and effect works reasonably well for the vast majority of the population.  (This will be expanded considerably in Chapter Three of this Section, Universal Theory of Change).

But just to get us thinking I will give an example of reductionism in the area of helping people, where the people being helped are children aged between approx. 4 and 18.

Mainstream education is an area in which both cause and effect and reductionism in respect of human beings are both manifest.  The desired effect (a human reaching mature adulthood gaining sufficient knowledge in diverse areas to allow him to compete for employment so he can make a living) is caused by many years of social, mental and physical, and indeed spiritual development starting from 1+1 = 2, and finishing with advanced mathematics, or, starting from spelling simple words and writing the cat sat on the mat and ending with knowledge of a wide array of poetry, philosophy, grammar, languages etc.

The way that this is done is that, over the lifetime of the education, (like Boyle’s famous experiment described above) the number of variables (things that can and will change) is reduced to a minimum.

Examples of what are held as constant as possible are 1): the curriculum, 2): the class size, 3): the exams given, 4): the marking of those exams, 5): the classroom, 6): the methods of teaching, 7): the training teachers receive, and 8): the length of the school year.

With all these factors relatively constant, mainstream education actually strives to scientifically predict the quality of the result of years of education as a measurable quantity.  (The marks attained by different students in the same unknown exam that is given to everyone at the same time).

This is an example of using the reductionist method to determine future behaviour.

Of course a school is not a laboratory as such, but to illustrate the relevance of the reductionist method to the arguments that I put forward in this website I will propose that mainstream education is analogous to a controlled experiment in a laboratory, (school) with a human as the subject, replicated many times so that the human’s future behaviour can be (somewhat) predicted.

The reason that we keep doing it is that over many generations and in many cultures, with minor alterations, it has worked reasonably well!

So is it any surprise that very intelligent, well educated, and experienced planners in education, health and justice adopt a similar paradigm to supporting people in the Focus Group who are in deep distress?