Reductionistic
thinking, which is the philosophy of contracting complex systems in science and
society to smaller or single causalities, is dangerous. With this contraction
comes an indifference towards uncovering and appreciating complex explanations
and the variability contributed by the context. In the sciences, reductionism
leads to the unfortunate skewing of effort and funding towards what are
promoted as “basic” questions, and the neglect of disciplines that are most
likely to help humanity by acting on practical scales. The effects of
reductionism in society are even more alarming. Reductionistic thinking leaves
little room for variety, cultural traditions, living urban environments, or
religion, thus reducing our worldview to a sterile minimalism bereft of several
of the most glorious achievements of evolved human civilization. There is also
the additional and more practical consequence: reductionism is responsible for
leading us towards societal collapse.
Notwithstanding
the continued imagery of the wild-haired scientist untouched by surrounding
happenings and upheavals, science has intensely contributed to, and at times
rewritten, social and political histories. Among the more contentious of its
contributions is the philosophy of reductionism. Thus physicists in the earlier
part of the last century were prone to investigating the dynamics of atoms and
everything smaller than them, as if matter and all its wonderful properties
could be explained only through protons and neutrons, later moving on to quarks
and other such elusive elementary constituents. Similarly, much of biology in
the latter half of the twentieth century was devoted to understanding and
developing the tools for understanding the workings of genes, to the extent that
Richard Dawkins advocated a worldview wherein it is the genes that live and
evolve, using individuals and their anatomies as vehicles for perpetuation
(Dawkins, 1990).
Advances in both
material physics and biology have exploded these myths and shown that
explanations of how inanimate and animate things work, and are made, cannot
simply be broken down into their components. The very idea of any component
being elementary has lost its nineteenth-century meaning, where the whole could
be put together straightforwardly from elementary mechanical parts. Mechanisms
are in fact intricate and layered, and interactions between components
contribute as much, if not more, as the components themselves. Moreover, the
environmental context also matters and is an intrinsic part of structure and
function. Nevertheless, the reductive mindset refuses to go away. What’s more,
like all the different ways by which science and technology have come to
dominate our lives, the reductionist worldview now influences how we think about
anything and everything.
The pathologies of urban dystopia
One area where
reductionism’s devastating consequences are most acutely felt is urban
planning. A city is a complex multilayered system, teeming with components,
very much like a biological organism. Following the Second World War,
architects and planners instituted a top-down approach to planning and
constructing the city that reduced it to simplistic components (Salingaros,
2000). Complex urban systems were contracted and dismembered by separating
distinct multiscale functions: residential, commercial, workplace, pedestrian
transport, vehicular transport, green areas and parks, and manufacturing, as a
result of the industrial mobilization for World-War II. All of these had
earlier evolved together like the distinct and complementary functions inside
an organism. Pre-war cities combined all their essential urban functions
spatially in an “urban web” (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 1). After the war,
residences were separated from commercial areas and workplaces, pedestrian
regions were separated from streets, and so on. This is called “monofunctional
zoning”, an approach to planning widely held responsible for extinguishing
vibrant urban life in our post-war cities.
The reductionist
approach to urbanism decomposed all the complex components of a living city and
discarded many vital ones as “inessential.” All of this was done with the
approval and encouragement of “experts” who studied city functions
scientifically but reached totally erroneous conclusions, while the most
enlightened criticism comes from the doctor/writer Theodore Dalrymple (2009)
and the philosopher Roger Scruton (2008). The pathologies of functional
separation, and the concomitant emphasis on the largest scale (where highways
take preference over medium-capacity and narrow streets, sidewalks, and
footpaths; skyscrapers take preference over walkable four-storey compact
buildings; giant centrally-planned parks take preference over older networks of
small neighborhood parks) are endemic in our industrial society’s preoccupation
with some imagined “efficiency of scale.” This is nothing other than a
pernicious manifestation of the reductionistic fallacy.
The architect and
software pioneer Christopher Alexander pointed out this fallacy in understanding
urban form in his classic paper “A City is Not a Tree” (Alexander, 1965). More
recently, Alexander has presented an analysis of structural complexity that
emphasizes cooperating hierarchical levels, and which gives proper importance
to a system’s emergent properties. His latest work is not specific to
architecture and city planning, and is eminently applicable to all complex
systems (Alexander, 2001-2005). This work is not well known among researchers
in science, economics, or the humanities. We believe that it is extremely
useful because it offers an antidote to the reductionistic approach being
forced onto biology and many other disciplines.
It is unfortunate
that urbanists working in government planning departments re-wrote city
planning regulations following the Second World War into a highly
reductionistic set of rules. Governments were motivated by a misplaced belief
that crude industrialization together with reductionism and collectivization
had the power to solve all of humankind’s problems. Those zoning rules apply
today; so that it is illegal to plan a human-scale city with mixed uses and the
dynamic cross-fertilization we find in traditional cities the world over.
Instead, we see applied gigantism coupled to an abject neglect of human scale,
losing in effect those myriads of small-scale activities and physical spaces
and structures that create and enrich human life in urban settings.
People interact
with buildings, other people, built and natural forms, spaces, surfaces, urban
vegetation, and ornamentation, and those interactions occur on a multitude of
spatial and temporal scales. In great urban spots, persons feel more alive
because they are nourished by the geometry of the environment. This sensory
feeling of “life” is shared by other people experiencing the same space, hence
a “living” environment leads to common bonding among those individuals who
happen to share that space for a few seconds, an hour, a day, or a lifetime.
But post-war urbanism denies this visceral experience, and instead imposes
someone’s dead vision of an abstract impersonal world that is supposed to work
mechanically (Salingaros, 2012). The New Urbanism movement in the United States
aims to reverse this catastrophic trend, but it is fighting against a
mechanical/industrial vision of the built environment that appeals to
governments and powerful commercial interests.
So far we have
criticized the effects of reductionism in urban spatial dimensions. Equally
catastrophic was the postwar neglect of a city’s temporal complexity. The
traditional network city defines a multiscale web of urban events and flows,
but its vital complexity in the time dimension ceased to be visible to those
responsible for maintaining its workings. Planners instead became obsessed with
building gigantic static grids as a setting for buildings as urban sculptures.
None of this had anything to do with people’s movements, interactions, or the
accommodation of life’s dynamic processes. Concepts such as fractal loading
(Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 7) that drove human urbanization in the first place
were ignored and their importance denied, because they conflicted with a
reductionistic image of a city as created from a gigantic version of children’s
building blocks.
As humanity faces
an ecological disaster because of uncontrolled reliance on a finite source of
fossil fuels, our decision makers still ignore the obvious solutions that
evolved over millennia: an organic city fabric that mixes distributed uses,
scales, and flows. A dynamic “scale-free” city that works better over all
spatial and temporal scales, and that emphasizes none above others, is much
more resilient to the inevitable energy crash. Our traditional cities, rejected
by twentieth-century planners because they are “messy” in the same ways that biological
organisms are internally “messy,” provide the non-reductionistic solution to
maintaining the quality of human life on earth. The solution to housing the
world’s population is to channel the organic forces behind the generation of
self-built settlements, and not to insist upon imposing the reductionistic
solution of the same high-rises everywhere (Salingaros, 2005).
Tradition, religious belief, and sustainability are casualties of reductionism
Urban structure is
not the only practice that has been compromised by reductionistic thinking.
Going outside concrete and obviously practical matters altogether, we run into
the old gap between science and religion. Many people influenced by
reductionism are unwilling to accept a worldview where, along with science,
concepts such as religion are quintessential contributors to culture and its
evolution. Not surprisingly, this attitude creates resentment from the world’s
population that happens to be religious. The present essay is not the place to
resolve this issue; nevertheless, it is interesting that the problem we are
addressing also has implications for human society and culture in a very deep
sense. Reductionism runs antagonistic to historicism, the philosophy that
advocates analysis of any object or construct by emphasizing its historical,
geographical, and cultural setting. Reductionistic thinking biases policies
determining the interrelationships of nations and peoples, towards industrially
successful archetypes that remain indifferent to the observation that different
communities, ethnicities, and civilizations have evolved their own tenets of
justice, social interaction, and aesthetics.
Within this
observed range of plurality there exists a basic commonality that respects
evolved complexity, the existence and communication with different states of
meaning and consciousness, and the individual creative potential of human
beings. More than just leveling distinctions among cultures, therefore,
reductionistic thinking erases their underling complexity and reduces people to
a one-dimensional definition. And this contracted dimension is strictly a
crudely mechanical one. Any additional states such as those responsible for the
existence of mind and meaning, of connectivity to the multiscale phenomena in
the universe and to religious dimensions, are denied.
We wish to draw
attention to the fact that much of traditional art (visual art, architecture,
music, dance, and literature) has been, and in non-western societies, continues
to be inspired and motivated by religion. The authors as scientists (and not
speaking as defenders of any particular religious point of view) acknowledge
that this creativity exemplifies one of the zeniths of human achievement,
through a process that has evolved for millennia since the beginnings of the
human race. Furthermore, the complexity of social interactions combined with
traditional heritage gives meaning and hope to the life of billions of the
world’s population. All of that supposedly has no place in a reductionistic
worldview that denies meaning inside a social context, and any form of higher
meaning in general. Dawkins once again applied his reductionistic thinking to
argue against religion (Dawkins, 2006), proposing a human existence with a
vastly restricted scope. But reductionism in society severs us from a complex
and nourishing tradition, the better to re-attach us to a one-dimensional
framework manipulated by others.
Towards a synthetic worldview
An increasingly
adopted viewpoint in science looks at matter and its influencing properties as
affecting each other’s structure and function in a dynamic and reciprocal
fashion; i.e., causality flows both ways. At least one of the founders of
sociology, Émile Durkheim, came close to proposing a bidirectional relationship
between social dynamics and religion (which was overlooked when others used his
ideas for reductionistic political ends) (Durkheim, 1915). Thinking through
analogy, does society create art, or does art generated by inspired individuals
shape and thus create society? Here too we would argue for a bi-directional
causality. Moreover, the absurdly one-dimensional art prevalent in the West
over the past few decades has had devastating consequences on the complexity of
a healthy society that is reduced thereby. “Health” in any system, as measured
by the continued balanced working of all of its parts, cannot be maintained
without a requisite complexity, as was already pointed out by Ross Ashby (Ashby,
2011).
A resilient
approach to the environment, and in figuring out how to prevent human beings
from destroying it, requires abandoning polarizing twentieth-century political
divisions. As Roger Scruton convincingly argues (Scruton, 2012), the solution lies
in local (i.e. small-scale, topical) responsibility, and away from the
top-centered collectivist state, monolithic bureaucracies, or global
multinational control. At the same time, society needs to stop its willful and
ideologically-driven desecration of evolved traditions, because those are in
many cases still the best sustainable alternatives to non-resilient
twentieth-century practices. Using science to promote progress is wonderful,
but it must be in an enlightened rather than reductionistic framework,
otherwise the consequences could be devastating in the long term.
There is much more
here that is eminently practical, for the complexity of cultural practices
evolved side-by-side with our understanding of nature. Locked within cultural
histories we discover sustainable practices that helped to preserve the natural
environment during millennia of human habitation and use. One such example is
small-scale agriculture contingent upon maintaining seed variety (Altieri,
2009; Shiva, 1988). Reductionistic thinking under the slogan “economy of scale”
rejects contextual and geographical diversity and eliminates such ancient but
proven practices, replacing them with an industrial agriculture dependent upon
imported, non-reproducing seeds. This drastic change benefits the largest scale
in a command hierarchy (i.e. the multinational corporation that produces such
seeds through genetic modification, together with politicians who uncritically
support the eradication of their country’s local agricultural practices) and
destroys the smaller scales of the agricultural system. Its devastating
consequences on society in developing countries are too well known to elaborate
here (but see Bello and Baviera, 2009).
The above example
is a case where a complex system: in this instance, traditional sustainable
small-scale agriculture intertwining hundreds of millions of people and their
culture, way of life, social meaning, and religion is contracted to a tiny
elite social group (directors of a global multinational; a few politicians
temporarily in power). It represents a command move hierarchically upwards, in
which social complexity and environmental resilience is sacrificed to benefit
one single level in the political/economic system. The hoped-for “economy of
scale” is an exclusive goal of this one scale of a vast socio-cultural system,
and the very process neglects all the other scales, their interdependence, and
the principle that the wellbeing of the population depends upon maintaining the
web of scales making up the complex system.
For those not
educated in the sciences, it is very easy to be misled into believing that all
of science is reductionistic. Since that would contradict what people
intuitively perceive as true about the nature of the universe, the value of
science itself is thereby diminished. When moreover reductionistic scientific arguments
are misused to erase and negate millennial traditions, folk art, innate human
creativity, human-scale architecture, material culture, informal urbanism, and
sustainable ways of life, people react by being driven away from science
towards irrational beliefs and superstition. At least those promise hope in
contrast to the onslaught of “rational” reductionistic methods that erase
crucial and timeless aspects of humanity. Which opens up societies to the
opposite danger of reductionistic belief systems.
Reductionistic
politico-religious movements promote the loss of healthy spiritual variety
while feeding and exploiting our basest instincts. Invariably, they represent
some group’s struggle for power couched in an absolutist philosophical or
religious cocoon that makes the movement attractive to new followers.
Reductionistic thinking has achieved the remarkable goal of repeatedly
de-humanizing human beings by suppressing their complex potentials and inborn
ability to distinguish ugliness from beauty, moral right from wrong, and
creation from destruction. Even established religions go through an occasional
period of contraction into reductionism, during which embarrassing and terrible
things happen: such as the willful destruction of their own artistic and cultural
heritage in an iconoclastic rage; the persecution of people holding different
beliefs; or the mistreatment of fellow believers for imagined apostasies.
Starting in the
early twentieth-century, sustainable practices and cultural traditions were
replaced with a sleek and flashy mechanical utopia. The mass media convinced
people that industrial products were preferable to living structures. And that
economic and social progress demanded that the former replace the latter. This
monumental deception expressed a reductionistic worldview. When the bubble of
“progress through industrial production/consumption” bursts, the only solution
will be to laboriously re-build the resilient multiscale complexity of our
artistic, cultural, belief, and ecological systems. But, whereas reductionistic
collapse is very easy to accomplish, it is extremely difficult to reconstruct
complexity so that it works. That is a task akin to generating a living
organism, which is a secret we are not privy to. The world has ignored and even
intentionally destroyed the complexity of the natural systems upon which life
depends. And the vast loss of biodiversity that this reductionistic consumer
madness achieved is irreversible.
We do not entirely
agree with Joseph Tainter, who attributes societal collapse to increasing
complexity and the associated rising energy use due to that complexity
(Alexander, 2012; Tainter, 1988). We instead prefer to interpret the historical
data as a change in systemic structure that re-arranges the complexity to make
the system less resilient. Societal complexity turns out to be stable and
healthy for as long as it is distributed in a multiscale interactive manner. It
is only when a complex system is skewed towards one dominant scale or purpose
(e.g. a unidirectional power level; an energy-wasteful and usually large-scale
abstract goal; mobilization for war) that it suppresses the other levels and
could become pathological. Without getting into the debate over voluntary
simplification of today’s society in order to prevent ecological collapse, we
encourage researchers to study the system structure, and in particular the
blatant instances of reductionistic practices that are indeed wasting available
resources.
Conclusions
This essay touched
upon many seemingly disparate topics, from the sciences, to cities, and from
culture and aesthetics to religion. We suggested a unifying thread for
understanding all of those phenomena as emergent manifestations of their
multilayered causalities. Emergence is not a “neovitalist” notion but simply
stands for properties that are products of hitherto undiscovered scales or
hidden interactions between established ones. Emergent properties are what
differentiate the ‘real’ from what Scruton calls the ‘fake’ or kitsch (Scruton,
2012), which are mere facades and fabrications of what is obvious and visible
in real constructs. For this reason, one has to respect the overall complexity
of something that has evolved over time, be it a work of art, a city, or a
traditional society, and accept certain of its features that we cannot
comprehend at the moment, given the limitation of the tools and methods
available to us. The arrogance of some reductionistic thinkers that leads them
to dismiss everything they cannot explain using a mechanistic approach is not
only wrong, but also dangerous. Hopefully, a more enlightened mindset, one that
takes a positive historicist and interdisciplinary approach, can now help to
validate complexity wherever it is found. We can study complex systems for the
lessons they provide us, and not damage them as a previous generation of
“experts” did by applying reductionistic thinking.
In conclusion, our
discussion is not just about aesthetics, but touches upon the very survival of
humanity and the ecosystems that support life on earth. We feel sufficiently
alarmed by the present approach, which rests upon exclusively reductionistic
advice given by experts to both governments and the private sector. We are not
optimistic that modern societies can avoid catastrophic systemic collapse by
continuing to trust those same experts, all of whom are firmly rooted in a
reductionistic, mechanical view of the universe. Major decisions that affect
the future of humanity and civilization: what types of science to fund, the
shape of our buildings and cities, providing a fertile educational and media
environment that nourishes a symbiosis between tradition and the culture of
life, require a new kind of input. Realizing the near-impossibility of
diverting a comfortable way of doing things that has so far produced great
material wealth, it is nevertheless imperative to turn to anti-reductionistic
thinking so as to recover sustainable aspects of humanity lost in the past
century.
Acknowledgment: We are indebted
to Alexandros A. Lavdas for criticism and useful suggestions.
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