Towards a planetary culture.

Here's a few interesting blogs which explore a planetary perspective:

1) Emergent Culture's "Towards a Universal Cosmology of a Planetary Culture."

A Holistic Cosmology would not be a set of untested beliefs or cultural instructions, but a body of knowledge offering the greatest amount of social coherence to those who have out grown the regionalism of cultural specific beliefs. A Holistic Cosmology would be for those ready to embrace a unified understanding of what it means to be a singular humanity

2. Emergent Culture, "Demystifying myth, and the power of myth to bind and free part 1."

Myths may therefore be seen as mind maps with built-in sets of directions to best help the collective-individual navigate the terrain of life. We may now understand why Campbell said that a society who has either forgotten or misinterpreted its myths is for all intended purposes lost—disoriented and in the dark. The overarching function of myth is then to orient, to guide and to relate the individual-collective with the phenomenal world.

3. Heidikolb's blog, "On AVATAR and the return of the feminine, a Jungian Perspective." I liked this in particular because it offered an alternative to the more cynical/dismissive reviews in mainstream media.

Much has been written about the film Avatar since its release. Critical voices abound. Some see it as a “white person’s fantasy on racial identity”. This thought would have never occurred to me. Others see it as a “mythic expose” of Western militarism & colonialism. That reasoning I can appreciate. It is what one might see when the eye is focused on the history of Western civilization. To that I will add some thoughts from psyche’s perspective.

4. The Gaia Community College. Anyone see this before? I just found it, looks promising!

Richard Feynman on social science.

Richard Feynman is famous for his ground-breaking work in quantum physics. I found an interview on youtube where he discusses social science very critically, calling it a pseudo-science. His basic argument is that social science has no tangible laws, no theorems like "hard science" does. There is no social science, not yet at least. Studying societies is far more complex and it's not as easy to be scientific with so many variables. He has a point. Here's the video, what do you think?




Technically, Feynman is right, but I wouldn't be completely dismissive about the field (that would be bad, having a sociology BA and all...). To me, social science is still in a very embryonic state, just as the hard sciences once were.

One good way to look at social science is that it is still developing into a science, just as the hard sciences had their alchemy which eventually evolved into chemistry, social science is evolving too. Feynman mentioned in the video that they have the scientific method down, but any discernible scientific laws are far from being realized. I would agree. We have a lot of data, a lot of information about social phenomena, but no tangible theorems (yet), at least not mainstream.

It's also really important to note that there is a necessary acknowledgment of hierarchy or holarchy in science. Biology is dependent on chemistry, which is dependent on physics for its principles. But a physicist can't say that biology isn't scientific, even though it is far less predictable. It's just more complex. A social science would be another big leap in complexity. That's what makes it so difficult. It also doesn't mean that social science can be reducible to physics, any more than biology can. The variables are far more complicated. We don't have instruments for observing social interaction the same way we can create microscopes and telescopes.

In my opinion, we might begin to have more tangible and observable, and thus scientific theories that apply to all human societies once we begin to converge our data. This would imply that sociologists, anthropologists, economics, psychologists, biologists, neurologists, archeologists, etc. work together.

This is getting easier to do, particularly in the internet age. Once we get our data together we can begin to discern patterns, and maybe work up some nice models that explain human societies scientifically. The 21st century is an exciting time to be a social scientist, because the fruit of decades of research may eventually start to reveal underlying principles in all human societies.

This also may call for us to acknowledge the idea that a society is a process, a flux. Or in other words, just as our awareness of biological evolution opened up new gateways of knowledge, our awareness of sociological evolution might reveal new principles about our very nature.

It's popular to place social science on the side lines, while hard-science attempts to describe human behavior exhaustively in biological and genetic terms. While it is revealing a lot about us, I think this approach will have limitations, because it doesn't take into account that we aren't reducible to 1) behavior 2) genetics and biology. There is a layer, a socio-cultural layer, that has its own properties and hopefully, we'll approach it more scientifically as time goes on.