Subject: INCOMPLETE SCIENCE, THE BODY AND INDWELLING SPIRITScience can be considered as a particular extension of pervasive
human activities of thinking and problem solving. Systematic and
rigorous testing of observations, carried out by science, is not
unique but simply in some respects more careful. But scientific
knowledge is inherently incomplete. Rigor is not achieved equally
for all components of a system. Components of a subsystem are
characterized with the remainder staying in background.
Characterizations of larger systems tend to be statistical rather
than precise.
A careful scientist may make sweeping inferences and articulate hopes
and desires inspired by scientific findings, but scientific claims
themselves should be more strictly constrained by the limits of the
evidence itself. The inferences scientists and other people make
from science, however, are often confused with the science itself.
These inferences reflect much more than the science or the material
world studied. They reflect belief systems that are strongly
culturally conditioned. These belief systems shape and are shaped by
every aspect of experience of body, self, other human beings, and
nature. These belief systems feed back upon the science and shape how
science proceeds. They shape what questions are asked and what are
not, what is noticed and what is not, what can be spoken and what
cannot, what is thinkable and what is not.
In what follows I will schematize some opposing worldviews that can
shape science, and sketch their divergent implications. The first
worldview I will call a _control-oriented disconnected_ belief
system. The second I will call a _stewardship oriented connected_
belief system.
Underlying much of the scientific enterprise has been a set of
beliefs: that we can control nature through science, that this is
desirable and good, and that this control will end human suffering.
This belief system also tends to include negative assumptions about
nature. Nature is limited, dumb. Human engineering is superior to
nature's. In order to progress it is necessary to transcend nature.
Negative assumptions about nature include negative assumptions about
our own nature, both our psychological nature, and the nature of our
bodies. "Human nature" is nasty, selfish, greedy and lustful.
Natural impulses are anti-social, and civilization requires that they
be reined in and controlled. The body is distasteful, a source of
pain, appetite, sex, sickness, suffering and death. The body's
pleasures are sinful and dangerous, and must be reined in and
controlled; the body's pains should be fixed and escaped.
A schematic of a spiritual belief system consistent with this
control-oriented approach to nature is of a remote diety, not rooted
in body or place, with transcendence or escape as a spiritual goal,
and with discipline of body and mind imposed by external authority
An opposing belief system holds that we can play a role of nurturance
and stewardship toward nature, but that control is an impossible,
misguided goal. The goal of minimizing (not eliminating) suffering
is approached in these terms through a balanced integration of
technical, cultural, economic, community and spiritual approaches.
From this point of view nature is fascinating in its intricacy, and
complexity. Eager curiosity is balanced with humility about the
limits of what we know compared to what exists and may yet surprise
us. Nature is respectfully queried for lessons arising from the
complexity of matter, of planetary structure, and of the long
evolution of organisms and ecosystems. Characterizing how
interventions will ramify throughout a system is an intrinsic part of
scientific inquiry and technical planning.
Human beings are seen as having inherent drives toward love,
cooperation, curiosity, creativity and conviviality. Rage,
impatience, self-centeredness and greed are seen as borne of fear,
isolation, danger, humiliation and deprivation whose opposites, love,
genuine connection, safety, respect and heartfelt generosity, can in
principle minimize these defensive reactions.
The human body and mind are understood to have great potential for
physical, mental and spiritual development. Every individual has the
intrinsic capacity to cultivate these potentials to the extent that
effort is applied, with high refinement and subtlety rewarding
sustained commitment. Curiosity about the body, how it moves, how it
senses, how it feels in the many senses of that word, is encouraged
and incorporated into cumulative cultural practices. Sexuality, one
of the body's many capacities, is sacred but not taboo.
A schematic of a spiritual practice consistent with the stewardship
approach would ground spiritual practice in human relationship,
bodily experience and connectedness with nature and would create
cooperative modes of interacting.
While these two opposing belief systems are ends of a spectrum, and
while fascinating and even perverse combinations of elements of both
perspectives can be found, the stark opposition of vantage points can
help pose questions.
As an adherent, to the best of my capacity, of the second belief
system, I ask of adherents of the first set of beliefs, why do you
have such a fierce need for control? In real life attempts to engage
this discussion I have encountered difficulties, as the question does
not resonate with people who appear to be, to use current parlance,
"control freaks." In my experience such people do not characterize
themselves in this manner, no matter how strongly they may come
across in this way to others. At best they might take the value of
control for granted and wonder why there should be any question about
it. An alternative seems inconceivable to them. I have thus been
left with my own inferences about the answer to my question, which I
will share.
I suspect that the need, indeed the drive, for control comes from
deep-seated disconnectedness. From infancy connection to other human
beings, to the body's own sensorium and movement and expressive
repertoire, and to nature have been thwarted. Infants may not be
touched, may spend long periods of time alone in a crib in a room by
themselves. Toddlers and children may be seen and not heard, and
treated as annoyances and as defective adults. Achievement may be a
child's only route to recognition; open-ended wonderment may be
disdained as unproductive and therefore threatening. Nature may be
seen (if it is seen at all by city dwellers) as dirty or dangerous,
as undifferentiated and uninteresting. Only technical experts may
seem to know about nature, and the interesting parts of nature become
not those that can be seen with the eyes, heard with the ears, and
smelled and tasted and felt, but rather only those aspects that can
be discerned with the assistance of complex technologies. There is
often no tangible personal experience of body-based transformation of
perception or emotion, and the body thus comes to be experienced as
static, and even as remote. Only technical experts seem endowed with
the power to change the body, and only from the outside; the body is
submitted to these interventions as a passive disconnected object.
For people who grew up like this, power and potency are achieved
through devices, and escape from the boring, aggravating immanence of
the body. Powers beyond the body are cultivated but powers within
the body are not. If athletics becomes a preoccupation, achievement
of quantifiable milestones is sought, how many miles run, how fast,
how many peaks climbed, how many weights lifted, but not quality of
experience of the activity, not the movement of the limbs and torso
while running and the many possible orientations of the pelvis and
hips, not the view from the trails one races to complete, not the
subtle and varied potentialities of human biomechanics while
weight-training. Endorphins released by effort are noted and sought
as a drug but not wondered at, explored. The body becomes another
productive mechanism.
The inherent capability of the human body/mind/spirit for more
integrated meaningful experience may on occasion break through this
driven mindset. People however may not be prepared to enlarge upon
these epiphanies, because every aspect of their life and belief
systems may co-conspire against such spiritual opening; they thus
easily revert back to a more defended existence.
Disconnectedness enables domination. It enables one to dominate, and
it sets one up to be dominated. Disconnected from feeling and from
compassion, one dominates others. Disconnected from one's power to
imagine alternatives, to reject humiliation, and to resist, one
submits to domination.
Disconnection also enables domination of nature. The drive to
subjugate nature seems basic and urgent. Anyone or anything that
slows this drive, even asks it to pause and reflect, is experienced
as a threat. The struggle to defeat that threat may parade as the
pinnacle of rationality against primitive nature, of science against
emotion. But the underlying emotional force behind the urgent and
intolerant tone of this struggle is a primordial preverbal inchoate
fear.
Insofar as science and technology are driven by this
disconnectedness, they are likely to ride roughshod over human,
cultural, ecological and spiritual considerations. And we indeed
have unprecedented power to override all of these concerns. Nuclear
and chemical technologies, biotechnology and nanotechnology all have
sweeping global ramifications. The power that now exists to
manipulate the smallest genetic, molecular and atomic levels of
living and inanimate matter is not something that adherents of the
second "connected, stewardship" belief system feel comfortable
leaving in the hands of the first "disconnected, control-oriented"
belief system.
Advocates of germline engineering for the sake of "human
improvement," notably extremists like the Extropy Society, are a
frightening example of disconnected control oriented people who think
they can do better than "Mother Nature" and do not appreciate their
deep ignorance of the potentialities of the bodies we have, the
breathtaking limitations of our current and foreseeable knowledge of
genetics, or the magnitude of their intolerance and hubris. These
people confuse constraint with deficiency. They do not comprehend
that instead of escaping the "limits" of our body and the "limits" of
nature, we need to reinhabit our bodies and our earth, and fall in
love with the constrained but still infinite potentialities of both.
Constraint is the basis of art. You do not criticize a violin
because it is not a piano. Instead you admire the artful elicitation
of the full potentialities of the instrument you have.
There are restricted settings where sheer technological "control" is
appropriate. A pilot should be able to control an airplane to within
tolerances allowing survival. A comatose patient or a patient in
surgery can have physiological parameters closely regulated from the
outside. Yet even within the bounds of these situations control is
not complete. Control becomes altogether inappropriate when thinking
of raising a child, encouraging artistic creativity or regenerating
an ecosystem.
I think that the fundamental millennial task is to regenerate
connectedness and to reorient every aspect of human enterprise from
being driven by fear to being guided by love. This regeneration will
require spiritual, cultural and somatic work as well as technical
expertise. Indeed, technology needs to be reevaluated from
spiritual, cultural, somatic and ecological perspectives.
This cannot mean an abandonment of the cognitive advances we have
made. In particular, scientific advance has allowed us unprecedented
access to levels of material reality not immediately accessible to
the human sensorium. Our newly gained access to mediated perception
of levels from the subatomic to the galactic is a gift of great
aesthetic merit.
More judgement and forebearance is required when the question arises
of transforming science into technology. This transformation needs
to be done with more restraint, and from a connected rather than a
disconnected ground. How do we use our technical power elegantly and
appropriately, rather than on trivial impulse and for greed and
profit?
We need to learn how to have meaningful interaction among sciences
dealing with multiple levels and scales of the material world.
Learning some of the mechanisms of operation of smaller units of
matter, like genes or molecules, has become an end in itself, as if
it could replace rather than augment other kinds of knowledge. It
has been confused with gaining knowledge that is more fundamental.
This is a deep mistake. Let me explain through examples.
A person who has a spiritual epiphany has been touched in some
profound way. If we had instruments sensitive enough, we could
detect accompanying alterations in neural circuitry, neurotransmitter
concentrations, and gene expression, as well as in other larger
levels such as breathing, heart rate and skin conductance. Mind
affects matter. Yet even if we could thoroughly characterize a
spiritual experience at these levels, we would not then recommend
that we engineer spiritual experiences. We witness the hazards of
decontextualized, engineered psychological/spiritual questing in the
drug crisis. The best way to achieve a spiritual transformation is
through spiritual discipline and lived experience, and will probably
remain so into eternity.
Intervention at multiple levels can change a system's functioning.
Elegance in technology should not be equated with intervention at the
tiniest molecular or genetic level. It may be that the system has
the capacity to transform itself more elegantly than we ever might
with our genetic meddling if we only aimed to find another level at
which to tweak it. The role of molecular and genetic inquiry in this
kind of elegant technology model would be to learn more about the
system's physiology and regulatory mechanisms, so that more complex
pathways would be better understood, and points where regulation
could be modulated might be found. Monitoring molecular, genetic and
other technology-mediated markers might help fine-tune such
modulatory interventions, but might not be the routes of intervention
themselves.
The drive to control the tiniest parts of nature seems most
parsimoniously comprehensible not in terms of scientific progress but
rather in terms of economic pressure. Such tiny components of nature
can be patented and privatized. Regulatory system-based
interventions, on the other hand, are less easily turned into
commodities for market. This suggests a rather profound
contradiction or incompatibility between market forces and the
integrity of complex biological systems. I pose this as a conundrum
to ponder.
Regulatory system-based elegant interventions have more in common
than do molecular and genetic engineering with practices encompassed
in indigenous knowledge systems. For instance, traditional
agricultural practices tend to involve not monoculture but
multi-cropping, and integration of cultural and symbolic with
agricultural considerations. Integrity of family and community as
well as soil and agroecology are maintained in an integrated fashion.
A large-scale study in China reported recently in the journal NATURE
found that by planting two rice varieties together instead of just
one, the devastating "blast" fungus was reduced not only in the
fields themselves by 94% but also strikingly in the entire region.
This is a relatively simple application of a much more complex
repertoire of traditional agricultural techniques, yet even this
pared down intervention had dramatic effects. Traditional rice
farmers in Asia report that it is the hybrid and not the traditional
rice varieties that are subject to fungus, and they see the
imposition of hybrid and now genetically engineered rice (imposition
of these innovations always being accompanied by heavy-handed
economic pressure) as devastating bioecocultural integrity and
diversity.
Indigenous knowledge systems develop over long periods of time by
thoughtful participant-observers who take account of phenomena in
context. This is a different variant of human problem solving
capabilities than the _scientific or experimental method,_ but the
knowledge it yields has some distinct advantages. Chinese
acupuncture is another indigenous knowledge system that was generated
by cumulative complex observation of self as well as other, internal
monitoring as well as external manipulation. Its system of meridians
and points can now be detected with modern electrical equipment. Yet
it is doubtful that these meridians and points would have been
discovered de novo by scientists who work with instrumentation but
without the guidance of their own cultivated somatic sensibilities.
Certain classes of somatic and psychological knowledge, at least,
require the inclusion of careful, skilled self-observation. And
validation of these knowledge systems with modern instruments does
not replicate the more comprehensive framework in which the knowledge
was traditionally embodied. Electronic instruments cannot train the
fingers to be sensitive to acupuncture points, nor do they cultivate
the complex system of practices incorporated in Chinese medicine,
such as Chi Kung and T'ai Chi, which have cultural meaning as well as
health benefits. Who is to say whether acupuncture uprooted from its
full context is more purified and true, rather than more weakened and
lost?
Spiritual, moral and cultural frameworks can help us to live together
in peace and goodwill within a world we will never fully know or
control, however much we may learn. If we are to survive, we need to
let go of the drive for control and private gain, and regenerate
sustainable and meaningful ways of life. We have already lost ever
so much of the biological and cultural richness that could help us
achieve this. Our millennial challenge is to preserve and regenerate
human capabilities and bodies of knowledge that are subtle, complex,
somatically and environmentally grounded, and culturally and
spiritually meaningful. And our millennial challenge is also to
reevaluate science and technology, transforming them as necessary
(possibly in major ways), so that they help regenerate rather than
destroy cultural and biological diversity and biogeochemical
integrity. Sensitive thoughtful grounding in our own bodily being is
an important foundation for these regenerative efforts.
Martha R. Herbert, M.D., Ph.D.
herbert@helix.mgh.harvard.edu
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