Dangers of the reductionist approach

Dangers of the reductionist approach

 

In British history, one of the things that I've found surprising is its contrasting features of the minds of the intellectuals between the nineteenth century and the present. Over the period of less than two centuries, British intellectual society has significantly lost its interest and passion in the concept of self-responsibility. The passion and interest of the intellectuals seem to have collectively moved towards the efforts of criticising social injustice or a lack of governmental support.  

 

Self-responsibility is the concept that needs introspection of minds and behaviours. It is extremely difficult to decide the true intention or righteousness of other people' minds and behaviours even if that is put to a trial in the court of law. In religious and literary narratives, it may seem easy to decide who is good and who is bad, who is wise and who is stupid. However, the real world is much different. And actually the judgments in the religious texts or fiction novels are also in most cases biased, from the strict philosophical perspective. This is why at least the rule of law should be consistently kept in society in any case. To put simply, we are too often caught up by our own prejudice. For the same reason, I am sceptical of the collective zeal in the current political situation of South Korea. Lula, the former Brazilian president, enjoyed the extremely high approval rate of 87 percent near the end of his presidential term in 2010, but this year the Federal prosecutors in Brazil filed corruption charges against him, describing him even as the mastermind of the scheme.  

 

From the perspective of medical history, in the nineteenth century health was largely in the domain of individual responsibility. Moral and physical responsibilities held by individual persons for health were thought most important while public measures were limited to the area of cleanliness such as sanitary system and food hygiene. Traditionally hygiene had been regarded as ways of maintaining health of individual persons, and in this sense hygiene was still closely related to medicine at least until the late nineteenth century. However, under the name of public hygiene or modern hygiene, hygiene was gradually losing its philosophical and moral aspects, and was more inclined towards physical and material aspects. Meanwhile, medicine in the nineteenth century was becoming increasingly scientific through the fierce theoretical debates within the medical profession over a number of issues, such as over the true nature of contagious diseases and fever diseases, or over the legitimacy of medical practices such as blood-letting and drug medication. On the other hand, orthodox medicine increasingly tried to monopolise the medical market, expelling other heterodox healers and controlling unorthodox medical thoughts within its profession. By the early twentieth century, the relation between personal hygiene (in the traditional concept) and medicine had largely been lost. Scientific medicine became tied with public hygiene (or now public health) through various projects of state intervention into individual health. The moral or mental aspects of health became largely disassociated from physical aspects of health, mainly on the basis of the reductionist approach of the modern biomedicine. 

 

Particularly the medical intervention into personal health reminds me of the similar rhetoric of the modern mainstream economics that rationalises the necessity of governmental intervention into the market. The logic that applies to both areas is the reductionist approach that investigates the mechanisms of the body and the market into separate elements and functions, failing to respond to emergent properties of the body and the market. For instance, human intelligence is still at such a law level that economics has not yet fully succeeded in the explanation about any of the emergent properties of markets called the 'Invisible Hand' (Humans had empirically been aware of the fact that the market brings wealth to society since the beginning of human civilisation, but it was only 300 years ago in Western history when, in the market of intelligence, the intellectuals began to attempt to academicise the function of the market). Likewise, the dental implant of the latest model may not be able to properly mimic even a few of the millions of unknown functions that the natural tooth has. 

Intervention is, however, often chosen as an easier way to respond to problems. This is why intervention strategies are adopted in reality in spite of their risks in the long term. Many economists today are suggesting that their governments should do more to correct the faults of the market. They have already distorted the market by urging governments to employ sweet policies such as zero interest rate and quantity easing instead of allowing the market participants to go through painful restructuring. Similarly, many dentists today are kind to their patients and extract their teeth while assuring that the dental implant can restore their mastication, rather than trying to enlighten them how false their perception of oral hygiene is and encourage them to train a meticulous way of maintaining the hygiene. I am sceptical how many professionals can feel confidence in their ways of tackling the present problems, although they may claim the inevitability of such compromise.

In solving physical and social problems, in the short term the reductionist logic could promise certain benefits. However, it is often neglected that such a logic also causes cost that accompanies those benefits, which later most likely produces more harms that surpass the short term benefits. For instance, overuse of antibiotics make the human body becomes excessively dependent on antibiotics. Killing specific or a broad spectrum of micro-organims is one feature of those drugs but we do not know the full effects of the germicidal on our body and ecosystem, which cannot be known in near future considering the present level (or direction) of our science, let alone by the limited pharmaceutical control tests. The main reason why I try not to use any soap, shampoo, moisturiser, lotion or toothpaste is not because of fear of chemicals but because of the fact that, even if you use all or the best products, you can never expect them to even mimic the function which the natural skin or the saliva have. Likewise, extreme labour friendly policies and extreme feminism policies might look closer to the ideals of humanitarianism and righteousness, but indeed they might result in the situation where employers become reluctant to hire young people as regular workers and capable young guys become reluctant to marry women. I do not doubt the good intentions of those labour economists and feminists, but it is extremely risky to 'believe' that good intentions would necessarily lead to good results. Above all, such reductionist approaches like aiming at specific target groups or benefits naturally lead to the ignorance of the fact that human society is not a linear function. I am as suspicious of the efficacy of such intervention policies as I am of medications and chemicals. In fact, it has been just less than two centuries that people have fallen to those reductionist approaches to our physical and social problems. Humans do not know even a dust of the mechanism of the human body and human nature. 

© 2016 Min Bae