3.1.4 Reductionism

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?