In the 20th century the scientific method and worldview was forced onto every aspect of life with disastrous results. The belief that one can control something by gaining information about it is at the heart of much of this. The scientific method of observing controlled repeatable experiments and predicting future behavior from the results, while appropriate when dealing with consistent physical phenomena, can produce misleading and invalid results when applied to other things. (And of course, even with physical phenomena one's powers of observation are limited and are likely not revealing the full reality.)
The most blatant examples are in pseudo-sciences such as psychology and economics. Of course, plenty of good work does get done in these disciplines, but by labeling them sciences rather than arts, we give them an aura of being tapped into some fundamental natural truth, which protects them from appropriate scrutiny. (In fact, Freud pursued this deception quite deliberately. He knew that if his new school of philosophy was instead labeled a science it would be treated much more generously by society and would likely have far greater influence, and lobbied directly for this result.) It also confers on them the ideas that behavior can be predicted accurately and that anything unmeasurable or unobservable isn't real or relevant. It infuses them with an authority they don't deserve. They should be seen simply as philosophies, to be stacked up against other theories about why things are the way they are.
But the influence of scientific reasoning goes far beyond the false sciences. Every aspect of modern life is suffused with its ideas. Nerd thinking—that one can predict life and control its messiness by treating all of it with cool scientific reason—is a pathology rampant today, rooted in a generation of children indoctrinated in a scientific worldview, confronting a rudderless world full of danger and uncertainty.
One aspect of this is the idea that if you collect enough observations about something—either your own or, through research, those of others—then you will be able to control it, contain it, not be threatened by it. It's tricky to criticize this, because more information is often a good thing. Challenging people's desire to understand things better seems unhelpful. But the point is this: healthy curiosity and a productive desire to learn from observations and mistakes becomes a pathology of intellectualism when one believes it affects anything outside oneself. If you act on knowledge, those actions can make a difference; but the simple fact that you have, for example, read a New York Times article about an event in Senegal has no effect on the situation in Senegal. And it likely has no relevant effect on your life or your community. Keeping up to speed in something unrelated to your work or personal life can be fun and educational; there's nothing wrong with that. But whether a sports fan or armchair general, the danger is when the line of fantastical thinking is crossed. The acute version of this dysfunction is the intellectual who, afraid of the uncertainty of life, feels compelled to know everything, understand everything, whether local or international, science or art. Since this is impossible, especially with the complexity of society today, they're in a constant state of dis-ease over the insufficient state of their knowledge. In a world that is simultaneously dangerous and chaotic, the anxiety created by this approach can be debilitating. Less dramatically, it simply leads to a lot of unnecessary stress.
The whole is greater
The biggest problem with the misapplication of science, though, is reductionism. This idea, that you can understand something by breaking it down into its component parts and studying the parts, has had far-reaching and terrible consequences in the last century. It's coincidence with or perhaps complicity in the Industrial Revolution formed a nexus of understanding around the model of the machine. Creating simplified mechanical versions of natural phenomena led to the steam locomotive, factory equipment, the automobile and a million other things. But while some of this was clearly beneficial, serious thinkers also treated complex and mysterious natural phenomena such as the human body and weather like predictable mechanical systems. Despite ongoing failures in their work, they maintained that the problem was only in lack of adequate information; that they had to be more reductionist, not less, to finally grasp the whole. This view has thankfully been coming under more challenge lately. In areas where systems are clearly very complex, such as the human body, reductionism has diminished in power even within the scientific community, but it is still a strong force.
Human health, in fact, is a good example of the value of both approaches and the limits of both. Traditional Eastern medicine and medieval Western medicine both treat the body as an unknowable system, a whole which can only be understood by observing behavior of the whole, and so, they often are deficient in dealing with clear-cut problems that can be addressed by simple remedies based on an understanding of a simple natural phenomenon. On the other hand, modern Western medicine based on anatomy and the reduction of the human body into a variety of discrete organs and conditions falls terribly short when dealing with systemic problems. And even with problems that are not per se systemic, its failure to recognize the crossing of boundaries between systems or the influence of systems on each other leads it to miss many solutions, sometimes the only solutions, to health problems. This goes far beyond popular issues like mind over matter; even a simple and relatively obvious issue such as that trauma to one system can weaken an adjacent system and make that system more vulnerable is poorly understood in reductionist Western medicine.
So, as is clear from the example of human health, the answer to many of the issues of reductionism vs. holism is that they can both be useful but neither exclusively answers all questions. Philosophies and Sciences that exclude one or the other will be flawed. To put it another way, you can learn a lot from studying something's parts, but must never forget that the whole is greater than their sum.
© 2004 Philip F. Rose