Abstraction and the Economy — Small Is Beautiful

That our present way of thinking is taking us straight towards a global catastrophe is becoming more evident every day. The notion of unlimited growth on a finite planet is an obvious contradiction. But that contradiction, that hubris, is deeply rooted in our culture, and in order to change it we need to go deep into some of the basic assumptions that have constituted our world view in the last three or four centuries.

The religion of our times, the dominant myth, the new cosmological story is the scientific world view. It is therefore crucially important to understand the basic premises of that view, its essential nature, which is simultaneously the source of its power and of its limitations.

The root of both the power and the blindness of science is the process of abstraction which lies at the base of the scientific enterprise. This is worth clarifying a bit.

The infinite complexity, the infinite qualitative nuances of lived experience are not amenable to scientific study. An essential requirement for something to be the object of scientific study is that the phenomenon at hand be repeatable: that what I observe here today, e.g., may be reproduced tomorrow by somebody else in Tokyo, and that our observations may be compared and analyzed in unequivocal common language.