Empiricism and Rationalism-
The Two Scourges of Modern Times
( Why our Educational System fails us)
Preface. This subject is close to my heart! One of the most powerful triggers for my own spiritual journey was a confrontation about this very subject. Here is the backstory! Prior to my conversion to Islam, like all able-bodied Canadian males lol, I had girlfriends. One of my first girlfriends, while I was still at University, was an attractive, artistic, literary-minded young lady who had a problem with depression. While we were together she was seeing a psychiatrist who invited me in for a session. I am not sure why?! Maybe he thought I was part of the problem or maybe he thought I was part of the solution! God only knows.
Being a pure scientific type at the time ( how embarrassing lol?!) I refused -saying psychiatry was” pure bunk” ( meaning no empirical basis) and there was no point. Boy, can life be ironic! Who would have thought at that point that I would spend 45 years as a psychiatrist later on?!
My girlfriend was legitimately pissed-off with me and went to see a good friend of hers-another artistic, literary type.to discuss the situation. When she returned, she looked me in the eye and said “Me and M. decided that you are a positivist”. I had no idea of what “a positivist” was but it felt like an attack at the core of my being. It turns out that “positivism” is one of the forms of Empiricism. Websters Dictionary defines “positivism” as “a system of philosophy basing knowledge solely on data of sense experience” Sound familiar?! Every “scientific expert” on the television or radio is a positivist and proud of it to boot!
Not my case fortunately! I took it on as a challenge and thought: ”O.K. I’m too stuck in the scientific mind-set. I’m going to investigate the arts(Spirituality was still very far from my mind at that point) And so I decided to take a sabbatical to explore the arts. I was in medical school at the time and everyone told me that McGill Medical school would never accept taking off a year for such exploration. But they did! And so my spiritual search had just begun. Boy can destiny bring us to places we never imagined! Alhumdulillah.
Let me continue with another relevant anecdote before continuing the exposition . Those who know me know that I love anecdotes lol. I even believe that there is more reality in anecdotes then in randomized, controlled studies. What a heretic?!
Once upon a time, we lived in a large single-family dwelling with an annex that had been used as an in-law suite and earlier on as a dentists office, I believe. I did my psychiatric practice from that annex and my children were not allowed to come there while I was working. Well…one fine day the cat escaped from the family side of the dwelling to the professional side. My youngest daughter ran over to bring the cat back and ran into one of my patients in the waiting room.
When I returned back to the family side after work, she asked me; ”Daddy, who was that patient? ”I answered; “you know I am not allowed to tell you that but why do you ask”. She responded: ”She looks so sick”. She meant physically not psychologically in that instance. ”Interesting that you noticed” I said. In fact that patient had what I call a “cadaveric”(green-gray) complexion. ”You know, ,Sara, that lady just went to her general doctor two days ago. He looked at her tests and her imaging studies and said: ”You’re in perfect health madam .It’s all in your head” As if that would help lol.
That is precisely what I am talking about in this article. That doctor was trained in Empiricism. ”Objective” testing(that’s what they call it!) showed that she was in perfect health. But she wasn’t! She was very sick. It just didn’t show up in the tests.
So where does this mind-set come from? You’ve probably guessed! From our schooling! As early as they can (Piaget says you can understand these kind of concepts at around 7 years of age i.e. grade two of elementary school. It starts soon after that although I am sure that if they could somehow integrate this thinking via a vaccine, they would start even earlier!
Let’s start with a definition here. Webster’s Dictionary says: ”A search for knowledge by observation and experiment”. Please note that the experiment itself is based on observation and measurement. Basically what we are talking about is what is observable to the five outer senses. Everything else is discounted.
Nowadays we have a whole litany of terms that are more or less identical to Empiricism or derive from its philosophical perspective. They include “objective”, ”measurable”, ”scientific”, “evidence-based, ”data” ’facts”….The list goes on and on. Ultimately what is being underlined is that what counts, what is reliable is the “Outer”. Everything else is “subjective’ the biggest curse word in the Empiricist lexicon-the “s” word lol. Your feelings, your insights , your intuitions, your beliefs- forget it. They are all subject to distortion and error. Only the facts count! How many times have you heard that one recently lol?
( Btw for those who need philosophical references for these ideas , the Father of Empiricism was the English Philosopher named John Locke and the Father of Rationalism was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, probably more influential than any other philosopher in history as all the major religions of the West including Judaism, Christianity and Islam have adopted and integrated his ideas into their traditions. Matter for another essay!)
One of my favourite quotes on this subject comes from the famous Swiss psychoanalyst ,C.J. Jung: ”many scientific-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings( I would add their hearts and their souls!) for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism (The ‘s’ word lol in the Empiricist lexicon).By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath( how unobjective lol)we have developed an enthusiasm for facts-mountains of facts far beyond any single individual’s power to survey( he hadn’t met the flood of modern-day barbarian hordes of statisticians lol)We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole”.
Jung is also implying a reality which modern Empiricists and Statisticians have not yet understood! The latter believe that the more facts, the more data the merrier. After all it makes the statistical analysis” more powerful” they say. Yes, more powerful to detect insignificant differences. Actually there is a “law of diminishing returns” with respect to data. Too much data ends up confusing the picture rather than clarifying it. Ask the jurors in the O.J. trial about that one!
We witnessed a stark example of this phenomenon in a study published early on in the pandemic in the prestigious journal The Lancet about hydroxychloroquine use in Covid. The numbers of patients were astounding1 Tens of thousands. The editors got all excited! Wow, such big numbers. Statisticians paradise! It was like a red flag to a bull or big breasts to a horny adolescent boy-irresistible. Only one problem. The data was fraudulent and the journal had to retract the article -something relatively rare in these “prestigious “ journals. But how could you blame them . The data wee enormous lol
The other side of this twin-horned demon of modernism is Rationalism-the ghost of Aristotle. Websters says: ”the principle or practice of accepting reason as the only authority in determining one’s opinions or course of action”. I think Websters is being kind here to the Rationalists. It should read: ”as the only authority from which to determine all of reality” That, at least, is what the Rationalists believe.
There are numerous terms we hear on a daily basis associated with Rationalism. Terms such as “The Age of Rationalism”;The Age of Enlightenment” (as if!); ”coherent”, ”consistent” (ever hear any politicians being accused of inconsistency? So what?!) ;”systematic”( another accusation to people of insight-your argument is not systematic”) “contradictory” (And so what again).Reality does not correspond to the laws of logic ! Only mental models do!
Time for another anecdote here. Oops anecdotes are haram(forbidden) in the scientific model as being too unreliable Too bad! I personally get more from anecdotes than from scientific studies and that is true of you, as well, probably. But you may not have seen through this element of Empiricist propaganda.
I was a student in a second-year philosophy course. Thank God our medical school program allowed us to study other subjects besides medicine! We were reading The Socratic dialogues. I was irritated by how compliant and obsequious the other interlocutors of Socrates were in these dialogues. I thought to myself: ”He would never get away with this in contemporary world.” So the paper I wrote was entitled “An Alternative Socratic Dialogue: A discussion between Socrates and American Joe” ( no connection to my original nickname Joey lol!).In this dialogue the simple American argued back in a persistent way so that the dialogue ended in a stalemate! American Joe was not going to be a pushover like the other Socratic participants!
I was proud of my work. “How creative!” I thought. And I was shocked when the teacher gave me a grade of 65 (yes we used proper centiles in those days lol).When I looked for his comments it said the following: ”Your argument is not well-developed enough(i.e. not logical, rational enough).But that was the whole point, no? Old Aristotelians never die. They just lose their neuronal connections”!
Before exploring the implications of this philosophical premise and all its extensions in the modern world let me underline the “fatal flaw” here. Reason exists in one’s mind. It forms mental models and plans based on this methodology. Then it tries to apply these models and plans to Reality. This poses the age-old “map vs. territory” problem. The map (or in this case the model) is never the same as the territory. It is always a pale imitation. And so is the model. Ever noticed how the models of both climate change and of the Covid pandemic never panned out?! But Reality never changes the mind of these believers. And they have a lot of support-both moral and financial. The studies, the committees, the commissions, let alone the ideologues- they are all ready to hire an applaud these modellers and planners! After all who needs Reality when you have convictions to replace it with lol?!
Now, we find examples of the applications of these two approaches all over the modern world-in medicine as in the example at the beginning of the text, in Law where for example the Supreme( read supremely logical!) Court of the U.S. argues that billionaires have the right to give as much money to election campaigns as they wish because this is “consistent”(another one of those ugly Rationalist words ) with the First Amendment of free speech. So in this case money is associated with speech! Only in America! But not really The Canadian Supreme(I like to say Supremely foolish court) concluded that the “danse a dix” where the client was allowed to touch the stripper for an extra five dollars was “consistent” with Cana dian values. Really?! Have we sunk that low in Canada?!
All that being said, I think that the Rationalists have had their most troublesome effects in the domain of religion. Once the theologians get to work with their logical extensions of scriptures one gets to all kinds of distortions , misunderstandings and conflicts. So the Jews become convinced that they alone are Chosen Ones, the Christians begin confusing God with His Creation( “the only begotten son of God” Really?!) and the Muslims conclude that a woman should only go outdoors in a tent lol. None of this is in the original revelations. All of this is a result of mind-productons i.e. a result of Rationalism! A lengthly article could certainly be written about how mental elaborations(read logic) have distorted the religious impulse but that will have to wait for a later time.
Now all the practical people( May Allah have mercy on them lol) are going to ask: ”So what do we do about it?” So as not to disappoint them, I will try to answer the question. But before I do I would like to share an insight I gained from the philosopher and mystic, Krishnamurti, whose works I read extensively and met in Ojai in 1973..He said that consciousness, awareness was enough. If you are fully conscious of something, it begins to change immediately. But that is too deep for most of us caught in the cause and effect paradigm. If you want to further explore that illusion ,you will have to shift from John Locke to his fellow countryman David Hume -one of the first non-mystical people to understand that cause and effect are not necessarily related to each other. Matter for a later discussion. We don’t want to ruffle your ”scientific” mind-set too much at this point.
The simple answer to the inevitable question: ”So what do we do about it?’ is “ We develop an awareness of our inner world- the world of inner sight, of hearing the ring of truth, the world of insight and intuition and feeling”. This is no small matter. The schools have not figured it out yet. Some theorists would say they don’t want to because it would go against their agenda of producing submissive workers and citizens. I will leave these speculations for others, but it is clear that despite 50 years of research into other forms of intelligence beyond the scientific and the outward, they have not even begun to succeed at this most important project!
And yet, there are methods. Anna Freud proposed to set up group therapy for all the children in elementary school in London. To its credit, the British government actually considered it! (highly unlikely anywhere in North America especially now). But eventually it was refused because of the expense of paying so many competent professionals for the service. ”Mindfulness” would be another tool. Someone must have thought about integrating it into the academic curriculum but I still haven’t heard of any concrete examples(if you know of any please inform me) .Then there is art and music therapy. No, not art and music! That is still outward. Art therapy connects the art to your inner feeling states(your internal psychodynamics if you will) as does music therapy. And so our schooling systems are still putting out “inner world illiterates”. Instead of exploring ourselves we hear talk of A.I. (automated intelligence) and social media controls (as if?) and transhumanism(as if the answer lies in transcending our humanity rather than embracing it).
So we are far from the solution. Our best chance, in fact, is setting up our own homeschooling and experimenting with different forms of education. If we wait for our-large scale educational institutions to do anything different we are likely to end up in “Extinction Revolution” with Greta Thunberg and her woke transhuman acolytes lol.
A shout-out here for all attempts at home-schooling. It appears to be our only hope although it may already be too late. God help us!
Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim