Passionate science and the trap of “objectivity”
I once had a colleague who worked for a major engineering company. We would get together every so often to discuss business. He led a unit of the engineering business, leading contracts and also supplying services internally to other units. There were a set of internal accounting rules to set cross-charging rates, and his bonus and ultimately his salary depended on them. Of course, they didn’t work.
My colleague was a lovely generous man, technically astute and keen to do good work. The accounting rules prevented people in the business from helping each other do the best for the clients. This will be news to no-one. However, my interest here is that it seemed every time we met there would be discussions going on to come up with a set of rules that would free people to do good work. From my arms-length view, all these schemes were trying to do the same thing and would produce the same result, but he could not see or accept that.
I watched an old, old video of a discussion between Humberto Maturana and Heinz von Foerster (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc6YFUoPWSI) . Two more wonderfully kind and wise gentlemen you could not meet. In the clip, they discuss what people do when they say they are doing science. Neither of them think that science is systemically wrong-headed, but both bemoan the fact that scientists, in general, cannot describe clearly what it is they are doing and not doing. They reach a lovely conclusion, that the findings of science in general are coloured by the procedures that science adopts: the structures and natural laws that are found are cast in the form of the nature of the exploration.
Projection
I try to avoid psychobabble, but let’s try and nail this term practically and in the everyday. Projection is simply when something we are doing seems (to us) to be being done (to us) by someone else. I invite regular readers of these blogs to see how much of what I write about is my own projection onto the world. I know I am not free of the tendency.
Of course, we are following on the previous section: can we actually discern what it is we are doing, when we do what we do. One way into this is to look at people where the gap between what they are saying and what they are doing is very large. We can make a guess that this is because their perception of their world is highly distorted. The main Brexiteer politicians (Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Nigel Paul Farage, Arron Fraser Andrew Banks, Michael Andrew Gove) claim that they can see how the UK can prosper outside the EU, but they can’t. And some of those politicians aren’t even politicians in the strict sense of being professionals.
That particular projection, that the EU is doing things to us and that it would be much better for everyone if they stopped doing those things, has been carefully nurtured in the British public by a totally corrupt press. People like Robert Mercer understand how to exploit situations like that. They can both make money and destroy the political systems that would otherwise check their ability to operate. And the rubric for being used and abused in that way is “taking back control”! If we see Brexit politicians as principal actors rather than pawns, we are part of the problem system.
What we can just about make out here is that powerful political operators can work by using other people’s projections to manipulate them so strongly that they have no idea they are being manipulated at all. This is the ultimate in not knowing what your own process is: to believe it is one thing when it actually something diametrically opposite.
Here is another universal that we don’t normally think of as projection. David Graeber would like to write a book about archaeology and ancient history entitled “We were never stupid”. He knows that no publisher would run with that title, because everyone needs to believe that we are smarter than our forebears, especially our ancient forebears. The fact that there is no evidence anywhere for people not being smart at some point in the past doesn’t come into it. We project our need to be smarter than someone else onto the safe target of historical people who clearly were a bit dim because they didn’t do what we do.
Which takes us to the driver for projection. We project when we cannot handle the truth of our own situation. We tell ourselves a story about how the terrible things we fear are not down to us but to someone else. According to Melanie Klein, a suckling infant experiences being attacked and deprived of the breast they consume, despite the positive nurturing attention they receive. And to go back to Brexit, we experience the EU politicians as destroying our prospects precisely because we cannot take proper responsibility for our actions, emotionally.
We can see that Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson are behaving in an infantile way. We recognise clearly the primitive rage and the misallocation of reality in their behaviour. In a way, these are the key diagnoses that we need, because when projection is the motor of action then everything gets complicated really fast. If I attack you for something I can’t handle about myself, your trying to explain to me what I am doing is just going to be experienced as another attack. This is precisely how wars are fought. Here we simply want to note that a person who cannot bear the truth of their situation will not be helped by more truth or more forceful truth.[1]
Just about the only thing I have ever thought that capitalism has going for it, is the ability to use the money system to visit this sort of truth on people without it becoming personal.[2] But of course that is an idealised capitalism that has never been allowed to work as it should for all the reasons we are rehearsing. This need for methods of resolution points to where we need to go next.
Projection is fundamental in many situations because of its energy. If it wasn’t an energetic situation that we couldn’t handle, we wouldn’t project. Not only can we not normally tell if we are projecting but the circumstances are the most pressing in our lives: precisely the ones that are the most important and which we can’t handle.
Mutual projection
We can touch lightly again on Bob Marshall’s Organisational Psychotherapy. He talks a lot in his method about withdrawing his own projections: that is, seeming not to have a view.
Projection is simply a universal psychological mechanism. Although it is much involved, centrally involved in many pathologies, it is closely related to some healthier effects. We have rehearsed before and at some length that we are not, as we appear, separate individuals: our minds are linked. What we call, for instance, having high expectations for a child would actually be better described as allowing that child to borrow some of our mental capacities. Remember the case of the boy in Cambridge who could see through his mother’s eyes.
So when we look at a situation, we need to allow those multiple constellations of meaning. Lets use the soil ecosystem metaphor again. Healthy plants and healthy soil support each other in being healthy. If we see a plant attacked by, say, greenfly, we can experience the ill-health of the plant as being due to the insects taking its sap and leaving it weak. Or we can experience it as weak and therefore being consumed by “pests” of various sorts as part of returning its materials to a healthy ecosystem.[3] The way to disambiguate the situation is to improve the soil health and see if the resulting plant health means that the pests go elsewhere. Although we speak of fighting infections, the metaphor misleads us into mis-steps.
Plants provide soil microbiota with sugars as nourishment. Is that a tax of the plants, that weakens them when compared with plants in a sterile medium? No not at all: that giving of sugars is an exchange in which they get a bargain in terms of minerals and nutrients that at its best gives a flush of incredible health and growth: one we are not used to seeing because of our faulty projections into the plant world.
So when we establish a mutual projection with a child for instance, it is possible to experience a sharing of minds. We get to see through the child’s fresh and wondering eyes and they get to cope with some fears that adults can cope with more easily. Such an interpenetration of experience is fraught with a different sort of risk of course: the relationship is so easy to abuse. But that does not mean that this is how human offspring develop at their very, very best.
Arms-length science anyone?
When Maturana and von Foerster say that scientists need to be aware of their own process, of what it is they are actually doing, they are in this territory. If we design scientific experiments that follow our projections onto the world, the results will contain the projective mechanisms. If we experience greenfly sucking the life out of our roses, the scientific, repeatable, validated results will show that they are. If we do further experiments to find treatments that protect the roses from the greenfly, those too can be scientifically correct. And we will have misled ourselves and any readers by not understanding our own processes.
Goethe published his Metamorphosis of Plants in 1788 after a study tour across the Alps to Italy. He is famous for entering a sort of meditative communion with the plants he was studying, essentially to allow the plants to tell him about their own processes in their own terms. It has to be said that his conclusions have largely stood the test of time over what is now nearly a quarter of a millennium. By contrast whole fields of modern science have gone astray and will need to be entirely overthrown.
We can bring some of these threads together. A wrong-headed model of child development means that much education is anti-educational. There is a burgeoning home-schooling and unschool movement because enough people who care deeply about their children have understood that.[4] A projection by medical professionals that their patients need to be told what to do has led to grossly unethical and misleading anti-science, especially in dietary advice and in mental health. And similarly, there are even faster growing movements that reclaim the space and avoid dealing with the so-called professionals. Social media itself, of course, is partly a response to the impossibility of finding good journalism in the mainstream media when it matters most.
How do we avoid getting caught up in projections that will wreck the usefulness of our science? Understanding Goethe would be a start. Talking OP with Bob Marshall would be another start. But the general answer is that it is precisely pressure to deliver that makes us unable to take stock of our own complicity in a situation. The requirement to make things objective and scientifically testable is self-defeating when the pressure comes on. An institution such as NICE with a requirement to be objective in its assessment of treatments for fraught situations is probably not possible, when a more advisory role could be really useful. It would have to be accepted, however, that a good measure of the quality of its advice was that the advice changed quite frequently.
What price science?
The price of science is a passionate involvement with the area of study. A passion that acknowledges complete subjective involvement and commitment as the only route to being able to reclaim our projections. We must stop looking for cool distance and dispassionate rationality as they open the door to the failures of our modern world. This requirement for objectivity in others is our complicity in failure. Asking for the facts and only the facts is fatal.
[1] It’s a truism of consulting that you can only help the client as far as they’re willing and able to be helped. Beyond that point, being more right and more insightful isn’t helpful, except insofar as it might help you find a better-fitting engagement.
[2] On a small scale, this is of course what Beeminder does for goals and commitments, turning emotional avoidance into a cold-hearted rational economic decision and some information about whether your goal is something you want to do at all. The founders run their entire lives this way: http://messymatters.com/autonomy/
[3] This also reminds me of wolves, where the hunters often cull the weakest members of a prey herd, thereby strengthening the whole.
[4] A colleague has recently pulled her child from the school system, over-zealous administrators were determined to punish a group of children for a single incident of non-violent misdemeanor and transfer them to what sounds like prep-school for prison: metal detectors, uniforms, close scrutiny at all times. The other parents all acquiesced.
