Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

EIGHT FALLACIES OF THE MODERN WORLD AND FIVE AXIOMS FOR A POSTMODERN WORLDVIEW CHARLES BIRCH* The modern worldview has come to mean the view that has become increasingly dominant since the seventeenth century with the rise of science. It is a worldview built on a scientific understanding especially in terms of a mechanistic philosophy. It has made the difference between a prescientific world of superstition and the modern world with all the products of its technology. The benefits of the scientific-technological world have been immense. But it has had its costs. It has tended to see progress in terms of straight lines beaming out into the future, with its ultimate faith in the capacity of science and technology to solve our problems. Second, it is deficient as a total worldview and has left us in a dilemma about ethics and values and purposes. We are now seeing the exhaustion of that sort of modernity. A postmodern worldview does not see the world primarily as a factory existing for the purpose of making goods. Nor does it view the world in terms of mechanistic or materialistic terms. It is not a "substance" view of reality. Progress is seen as fulfillment ofspiritual possibilities. What matters is not growth in power and possessions but in the richness of experience of all that lives. The modern worldview brings with it much that is positive from the Enlightenment. While affirming what is positive, we can gain critical distance from the Enlightenment and attempt to free ourselves from its negative consequences. I am aware ofeight such negative consequences, which I refer to as fallacies. Others may recognize more. Eight Fallacies of the Modern World 1. THE FALLACY OF MISPLACED CONCRETENESS This is the fallacy, enunciated by A. N. Whitehead, of identifying an abstraction as concrete or real [I]. To say that the human has some ?Address: 5a/73 Yarranabbe Road, Darling Point, N.S.W. 2027, Australia.© 1988 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/89/3201-0608$01.00 1 2 Charles Birch ¦ Postmodern Worldview machine-like qualities is correct. To say the human is a machine is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Besides having bones that operate like levers and a heart that operates on the principle of a force pump, a human being experiences and feels and wonders. Machines do not. The concrete in this instance is the human being with all subjective qualities included. The abstraction is the machine that excludes the subjective . This fallacy has terrible consequences when we treat human beings and animals as ifthey were machines, manipulating them as such. This has sometimes been called the fallacy of reification. To reify is to "thingify." It is the idea that a particular sort ofbehaviour (being aggressive ) or an institution is subject to the laws ofmechanics. It is the cardinal fallacy of that form of sociobiology that would "reduce" behaviour to genes. Sociobiology is an attempt to bring social behaviour into the realm of predictive and quantitative science. It does that by reification. Levins and Lewontin argue that the great success of viewing nature as a clock or similar contrivance, together with the method derived from it, is in part a result of a historical path ofleast resistance. "Those problems that yield to the attack are pursued most vigorously, precisely because the method works there. Other problems and other phenomena are left behind, walled off from understanding by the commitment to Cartesianism . The harder problems are not tackled, if for no other reason than that brilliant scientific careers are not built on persistent failure. So the problems of understanding embryonic and psychic development and the structure and function of the central nervous system remain in much the same unsatisfactory state they were in fifty years ago, while molecular biologists go from triumph to triumph in describing and manipulating genes" [2]. Another variant of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the socalled naturalistic fallacy. It is classically the fallacy of trying to derive human "ought" from what "is" in the nonhuman world. It is a fact that in nature there is a "struggle for existence." As Darwin showed, of all the individual plants and animals that...