by Agnes a Paris
Wed Mar 29th, 2006 at 03:18:34 PM EST
For millenniums, humankind has demonstrated a persistent need to believe in something.
Where this necessity crystallizes in religion, it is easy to debunk, and the opportunities have not been scarce.
In the 19th century, the buzz created by another wave of industrial and scientific progress created a new belief, positivism, which unlike scientism is a neutral label.
Epistemology is one of the most fascinating sub-divisions of philosophy.
As Kant superbly made out, nature is not something that exists irrespectively of our perception of it; on the contrary, our own internal filters and mental schemes condition the perception we have of reality. That was his Copernican revolution. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was an early version of this understanding of the impact of cultural artifacts on our perceptions of the world.
My belief is that without that major step forward, the Einstein relativity theory would never have existed. Einstein never claimed that Galileo's relativity theory was false; he just provided a different perspective on the universe and a different framework for our perception of it.
Accordingly, facts and reality are conventional wisdom concepts.
Time for an anecdote before the audience falls asleep. I used to have harsh disagreements with a colleague back when I worked in the Risk Management division of a bank. His job was to have projects endorsed by the credit committee; mine was to make sure that those projects were not potential liabilities for the bank. Therefore, my duty was to question the assumptions underlying the viability of the project, which caused me to ask the ritual question: "how is this risk mitigated?' he sometimes would be crossed and just retort: "no risk there" And me: "how do you substantiate that assertion?" "that's a fact".
I have always been very suspicious of facts. Sometimes, belief in facts leads to prejudices and constrains our ability to question our own beliefs. Reliance on allegedly bullet-proof facts hinders progress. Ironically enough, the scientific community sticking to facts was a major hurdle for Galileo, Copernicus, and Einstein and so many other conventional wisdom debunkers and reality-inquirers people whose hubris was dangerous to the establishment.
True, a predictable world is less unsettling, the future is less of a menace. Besides, financial markets hate uncertainty.
In an ideal world, there would be only one truth, spoken out by facts, and we could all rest in the comfy armchair of mother science, fed with figures, equations, and, as post-modern people, watching the world through the prism of the post powerful conventional wisdom tool, the mass media.
Images cannot lie. There is one single framework to bring reality into our homes, the TV set. Do not be afraid, totalitarianism is looming. However, this time, it is a diluted, soft, post-modern avatar. Totalitarianism of the entertainment age.
