Objectivity and the Patriarchy – the inadequacy of scientific materialism

The language of Science

As a youngster in the days before computer games and the internet, for something interesting to do and to fend off boredom on rainy days, we used to have hobbies. My older brother passed on to me his interest in amateur chemistry, astronomy and electronics. He had a full lab down in the cellar of our house, where we used to make laughing gas, stink bombs and various explosives. We also made our own crystal radio sets with wire strung along the length of the washing line as an outdoor aerial, and wartime Bakelite headphones, with which I remember listening to pirate radio (Caroline) and John Peel under the bed-covers late into the night. I was fascinated by all of this – learning by exploration and experimentation was interesting and fun.

At eleven, when I went to a boys’ grammar school, I found that science lessons (Chemistry, Physics and Biology), which I had eagerly anticipated, were much less enjoyable than I’d hoped. We painstakingly re-trod the footsteps of the historical scientific figures from previous centuries and were taught to rigidly follow set procedures – there was no real ‘experimentation’, and the nearest thing to fun was sniffing solvents and making flame throwers out of our Bunsen burners when the teacher was not looking!

We were being trained in a dispassionate scientific method which was supposed to be rigorous, repeatable and objective. 

The way we were taught to document our ‘experiments’ is enlightening – human activity and all reference to the surrounding environment had to be completely expunged. The process had to be described’ (there, old habits die hard – I mean ‘we had to describe the process’!) as if it happened by itself in a metaphorical vacuum: ‘…The substance was added to the flask, and the mixture was stirred while raising the temperature to 50 degrees C.  This resulted in the liquid changing from red to green…’. Despite the fact that I was performing these actions in a dingy classroom lab in East London in the 1970s, there was to be no trace of me or my environment in my report of it. We weren’t allowed to say ‘I’ anywhere – it was as though the procedure was performed by some disembodied ghost out of time… 

Old-School Science Rules (OK!)

The idea was to remove all subjective (human or external) influences – any process should be capable of being reproduced anywhere by anyone, as long as they followed the exact same steps with the same attention to detail. This controlled and restricted approach developed as an inherent and fundamental foundation to the empirical, scientific method and spread beyond it during the nineteenth century. Repeatability, and thus reductionism – the control of as many aspects of a procedure, was a bastion of scientific practice.

The Enlightenment, which disseminated the new scientific method throughout society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a reaction against what was seen as the mysticism that had gone before, that random, chaotic world where humans lacked agency and were merely victims of the whims of spirits and deities. The increasing understanding of how the universe ticked empowered those who understood it and could therefore predict it – Humans (some of them at least) were now in charge!

Sex, Class, Race and ‘Objectivity’

This language of dispassionate, scientific objectivity evolved and spread through the dominant Patriarchal, White, Imperialist, Northern European (and especially British) culture, and fit neatly into place with the prevailing Protestantism, with its emphasis on unemotionality, distance, asceticism and denial of the bodily. The cult of ‘Rationalism’ and its dispassionate mentality and language became a keystone of Western civilisation and a way of distinguishing the ‘civilised’ from those ‘simpler’ and more ‘primitive’ or ‘less sophisticated’ cultures and people who had been assigned lower status and lesser value – women, the working class, people of colour. Despite its supposed adherence to objectivity, various ‘scientific’ theories were developed over the centuries to support the existing hierarchy and ‘prove’ its ‘natural order’ – from phrenology (the measurement of skulls to determine criminality and other traits) to the Eugenics that underpinned the Nazis’ extermination of Jews and Gypsies who they considered sub-human.

A key feature of this world-view is its dispassionate nature – an attempt to repress any emotions and certainly not to display any… lacking in passion. This feature is a characteristic of male conditioning but also similar to the characterisation of the owning/ruling class and indeed of the English as a group – all are said to display the ‘stiff upper lip’ that never wobbles. Noticing this set me to wondering why this aspect of behaviour has come to be shared by these groups? What is it that we have in common?

Men, the owning class and the English have traditionally been the ones to exercise power – men over women and children; the owning class over those lower down in the class structure; and the English over the third of the world they conquered as Empire. I have been told by Black people that they find that white people in general can also seem dispassionate, lifeless and unemotional (perhaps lacking in ‘Soul’). I can’t help thinking that in order to be trained to be part of a controlling class of humans that act as the agents for the oppression (sexism, classism and racism/imperialism) of another group, there is a need for us to be conditioned to be cut off from our feelings and therefore those of others – that the only way we can take on the role of exploiters of others is if we are somewhat numb ourselves, so that we don’t empathise and feel their pain at being subjugated. To carry out these dominant roles in society, to de-humanise others, we first need to be de-humanised ourselves…

I don’t have any empirical scientific proof that this is the case, but it certainly seems to make sense to me.

Pseudo-science – one size fits all

The world proposed by Newton and his descendants was a purely mechanistic one. They believed that if you had enough information and understood the rules, then you could predict everything – and they spent their lives dedicated to the expansion of this new world-order, where there was a place for everything, and everything worked like clockwork, which came to saturate European culture. During the twentieth century however, this view of the world started to unravel, as the leading edge of science began to discover the limits of the mechanistic and uncover the seemingly irrational and non-deterministic all over the place – for instance from the 1920s in the infinitesimally small world of quantum mechanics, and, during the latter half of the century, in the macroscopic world of Chaos theory.

Despite these changes (which are still only very slowly filtering down to a society that has been locked into the mechanistic mindset for 300 years), growing up in the late twentieth century, we were taught only the traditional style of thought and process that still presided.

Even Einstein himself struggled with the reappraisal of this old-fashioned world-view. When confronted with aspects of the newly developing field of Quantum Mechanics, such as energy packets (quanta) affecting each other instantly across vast distances, he famously said ‘God doesn’t throw dice’ (to which Niels Bohr’s reply was, “Albert, you’ve got to stop telling God what to do” – or words to that effect!).

This mechanistic scientific monoculture has had major side effects. Having prioritised my study of the sciences both in and out of school, I remember deciding to take economics as a subject for O-Level. I lasted only a few classes, as I became increasingly bemused by terms like ‘the Law of Supply and Demand’, so-called fundamental ‘laws’ which were presented as a given and then used as a basis for further assumptions. I remember standing up in class one day when my frustration became too much and asking for the proof of this so-called ‘Law’, as in the scientific method to which I had been trained, this is what you did before building on any basic principles. Needless to say, no such proof was forthcoming, and after one more class, I quit the subject. I had come to the conclusion that this was a ‘pseudo-science’ (though at the time I think I would have called it ‘Bullshit’!)

It is still increasingly the case in this society, where only the objective, scientifically proven is apportioned any value, that if a field is to survive (to be taken seriously, be funded, recognised and ‘respectable’ academically), it has had to dress itself up in scientific sounding language, no matter how innapropriate that is to the subject – it effectively becomes a pseudo-science. This trend, unfortunately continues, despite the fact that the sciences themselves in the meantime have become far less black and white.

After experiencing this first cultural conflict during my early education, I have continued to notice throughout my life, many instances of where this attempt to cram all human knowledge into a one-size-fits-all doctrine has been a problem…

For example, during my time as a lecturer in an Art college, I became more and more frustrated that an increasing emphasis was being placed on students’ written work, and that they were expected to be increasingly academic. After all, how else could they be empirically measured and their value be assessed and graded in order to award them a degree? Apart from through references to Art history, a display of technical ability, or any surrounding conceptual theories, a work of pure creativity and its value as an artwork cannot be objectively assessed. Art exists almost entirely outside the dispassionate, objective world – it is completely subjective. And so it should be. This unfortunately, leaves the Art Establishment, and especially its Educational department, in a quandary – How can work be measured objectively? How can value be assessed? How can funding be obtained without a measurable, objective, scientific appraisal method?

I eventually left this profession, but later in my life, when I became a counsellor and subsequently started teaching counselling, I came across the same drive to de-humanise this practice too, in the interests of ‘Science’. Dozens of different psychological theories and models, from Freudianism to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and its spin-offs, have been formulated over the last 200 years, mostly without very much in the way of empirical evidence, and many of these are contradictory. The majority of these models continue to co-exist in the present, and increasingly therapists select aspects of several into the way they work – a psychological “pick ‘n mix”. At the same time, assessment of ‘results’ has become more pervasive – everything has to be ‘evidence-based’ with ‘measurable outcomes’, requiring endless questionnaires and assessments – attempts to quantify and measure happiness and pain. In my opinion, to try to quantify this is like dissecting a bird’s wing to understand the beauty of its flight.

In the attempt to quantify mental ‘disease’, the manual of the psychiatric profession (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or ‘DSM’, which was developed for the American medical insurance industry but has become a global standard), has grown larger and larger, encompassing more and more natural human responses to the pain of living in a world that becomes less and less human. Take for example ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’, which is defined as a young person exhibiting ‘symptoms’ like: ‘Often loses temper’, ‘Is often touchy or easily annoyed’, ‘Is often angry and resentful’, ‘Often argues with authority figures’ and ‘Often deliberately annoys others’ – does that sound to you like a mental illness for which drugs should be prescribed? Or does it just sound like a typical teenager, who is struggling with hormonal changes, who’s feeling isolated and could probably use a bit of support?

Psychiatry, in my opinion, is a prime example of a pseudoscience. As already mentioned, there are a plethora of models that contradict each other, and time and time again, the only thing that has been scientifically measured and proven, is that it doesn’t matter which model the practitioner believes in or practices, it’s the quality of attention, empathy and compassion that s/he displays towards their client that elicits improvement in their emotional state. But these qualities are subtle, sophisticated and subjective and above all human, things that are likely impossible to ever measure objectively.

It is, in my view, impossible (and absurd to attempt) to be objective – to try and turn the mechanistic gaze of traditional old-school science inward to examine the workings of consciousness – that which is the very subjective itself. Sure, you can measure electric currents and map areas of activity in the brain, but does this describe joy or pain? Or empathy and love? The traditional scientific world-view just can’t cope.

I once did jury service at the Old Bailey and found myself allocated to a murder trial. The most disturbing example of the dichotomy I am describing came at the crux of the case, when two ‘expert’ witnesses, both eminent psychiatrists, presented their definition of what ‘temporary insanity’ consisted of – why on the one hand (from the defence), the defendant was temporarily insane when they committed the killing, and on the other (prosecution), why they were not. The longer this debate went on, the more ludicrous the whole idea seemed to me. For sure, if they – ‘the experts’ could not agree on a definition of insanity, then how could we, the jurors? I ended up coming to the conclusion that the idea of ‘temporary insanity’ must have been invented by someone who was themselves ‘temporarily insane’!

This is just a further demonstration to me that the rationalistic objectivity of Scientific Materialism is way out on a limb when it comes to dealing with human pain and emotion – arguably, its only real contribution has been the growth of the Pharmaceutical industry and the development of feeling-numbing drugs.

At that boys-only Grammar school for children of upwardly mobile middle-class parents that I attended, the primary aim was to train us in that mode of thought and the language that went with this dominant culture. But it had no room for descriptions of feelings, for our perceptions, for personal impressions – no room indeed for us – only for cold, hard, observable, measurable ‘facts’. We learned that informal, subjective, emotional language was invalid and of lower value – if you wanted to get ahead, be respected and valued, the quicker and more thoroughly you learnt to act, talk and write without subjectivity or emotion, like an automaton, the better.  As such, although many of us achieved academically and were destined for positions of reasonable influence in the world, we left that school without any skills in how to be a human in the real world or communicate with others on a human level. In fact, it was worse than that – whatever of those human qualities and skills we might have had when we started had been mostly squeezed out of us by the age of 18.

Time to rethink…

On the one hand, the scientific and technical revolution enabled by the development of science and rationalism led to the present age of unprecedented technological development, food production and advances in medicine, no doubt saving millions upon millions of lives and extending life-spans beyond prior imagination along the way.  It has served us – in particular the people of the Global North, Men, Whites, the Owning Class – those it was designed by and for – relatively well.

On the other hand, as technology advances relentlessly in an increasingly materialist culture grounded in this empirical scientific ‘objectivity’, it rapidly becomes more and more apparent that its fundamental disconnection from the subjective, emotional values that underpin our humanness has built it into the greatest threat to the future of life on earth.

Runaway, machine-enhanced, capitalist over-production, pursuing ever-increasing profit, dispassionate over-exploitation of fundamentally limited planetary resources and increasing creation of harmful materials without reference to their impact on the wider environment, have led to this latest great extinction event that we are now living in. And while some sections of the world’s population are, on the face of it, still objectively, materially more expansively endowed, what has been the cost? All of this has been achieved without any reference to the bigger picture of the consequences in terms of human suffering and devastation to the environment – the planet Earth – the only one we have.

The overall quality of the majority of human lives and that of all life on earth is being subjectively damaged, perhaps beyond the possibility of repair…

Towards a new rationality – thought and feelings too

A Warning – Feelings are essential but may not be the best guide…

Feelings can be great, or horrible! But either way, they are essential to life – we should definitely learn to feel them, experience them, and communicate about them, otherwise we are no more than robots (or more accurately, if you are a SF fan, cyborgs). The good ones we get to revel in, and the difficult ones we can experience and heal from – they are indicators of where there is unresolved old hurt (or new hurt) that needs working through. 

I’ve known plenty of men who, after years of therapy, are desperate to reclaim their feelings. They express outpourings of grief, loss and anger because they have felt distanced, numb and dehumanised for so long, and they elevate the experience of feeling to the most important position in their life – their ‘Higher Power’ if you like. They can then become remorseless in their pursuit of experiences that induce powerful feelings, sometimes to the exclusion of good sense!

And that’s understandable – when we’ve fought so hard for so long to get something so important as a sense of humanity back from where it’s been buried for so long, it’s no surprise that we can get a bit desperate about it.

Some guys are so desperate to feel something (anything) again, that they are at risk of rejecting reasoned and measured decision making and just act without thought – following their feelings (like at the extremes IMO, the fellas who bungy-jump off buildings or wingsuit off mountains).

‘Reason’ – the process of thinking things through logically and rationally, having been dominated for so long by its unawareness and numbness to emotion and absence of care, has got a bit of a bad rep these days, it’s seen by an increasing number of people in the world as a bit pointy-headed and ‘out of touch’… 

We can see the effects of this all around us today, with the rejection of scientific ‘truth’ and the opinion of ‘experts’ in the plethora of ‘alternative truths’ – conspiracy theories and misinformation – that abound on social media and even at the heart of governments. Populism thrives on chaos, and many people have become disillusioned with rationalism and are primed and willing to embrace just whatever ‘feels right’…

But a gut feeling is just a gut feeling – we should certainly listen to it and explore what it’s trying to tell us (and this is the bit that we’re haven’t been consciously doing for centuries and which we can re-learn) but at the end of the day, the decision making process that humanity has evolved to be so good at, relies on building an accurate, informed model of the world in our amazing minds and working out with thought what makes the most sense.

Our urgent goal must be to find a form of reason that is not completely objective and without feeling – that way lies Nazi medical research (‘the test subject was injected with the solution and the temperature was noted at regular intervals’). But it is critical that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – choosing climate catastrophe denial because it is less challenging and makes us feel better, may in the short-term get an advocate elected, but will unfortunately lead us to certain self-destruction.

We need to come up with a new type of holistic reasoning that involves us as fully feeling human beings and also involves our best understanding of the environment and the world and our position in it, joined with our best thinking. 

After all, despite the fact that we generally think that we are being sensible and clear-headed most of the time, the reality is that we are human. Even when we thought we were doing our best, clearest, most rational thinking, we have always to some degree been acting on our gut: our decisions and actions are always deeply affected by our feelings – of pain (avoiding it where possible), or fear, anger, numbness, isolation and distance – we have just not been consciously aware of it at the time. And this has caused us to make mistakes, often great big ones – if you want to hear about them, just ask a girlfriend, wife or woman-friend!

We can do better. Our decisions and actions can only be improved by having a better awareness of how we are feeling, so we can take that into account – even if it is just to decide that it is not in anyone’s best interest to be guided by a feeling if it doesn’t make sense – it might be better to just park that one for now and not act in the throes of it – and make sure to talk about it with someone later 😉