Can Science Help Bring Peace to Our World and to Our Lives?
To better address the greatest challenges of in our world, we need to better understand the frontier where the mind meets the social landscape
As life is so often confusing and filled with conflicts, most of us are looking for a way to make things more peaceful. Probably most of us would want to understand more about the world and about ourselves, if doing so would allow us to find inner peace. The biggest obstacle in this is the realization that it is nearly impossible for us to have peace in our lives when we live in a world in which there is so much animosity and distrust and where there is so much suffering and violence.
This leads us to the realization that inner peace (that we seek within our own consciousness) and outer peace (that we seek with the outside world) are deeply interdependent. We not only want to find inner peace, but we also need to promote peace among the people that we encounter and that our lives depend upon.
An important step toward this end is to better understand other people, including what they value, what motivates them, and how we can best get along with them. In order to do this, we need to be self-aware, because anyone who wishes to gain insights into the thoughts and feelings of another person needs to first develop clarity and awareness into their own drives and desires. Sometimes, we might find that our inner drives and desires are unhealthy, and in such cases, we can seek assistance from other people who we can describe our feelings to and who can offer help and support.
If we put all of this into practice, we might find a measure of peace within our own consciousness and we might be surrounded by people who are also similarly finding inner peace. If we can also be socially at peace with those around us, then we should be able to find more overall peace in our lives.
To achieve such a level of peace would be quite an accomplishment, but there would inevitably still be nagging concerns that could cause conflicts to flare up in one’s own life. Since we live in a world with so much unnecessary conflict and suffering, it is difficult to have lasting peace in our lives unless we are working to promote peace within society at large. Ideally, we want to see other people, even those who we will never meet and whose lives are largely disconnected from our own, understanding each other at a deeper level so that there could be less conflict and more peace in the world overall. The truth is that in an interconnected and globalized world, our lives and our long-term peace depend on a lot of other people also coming to find peace in their lives and getting along with each other.
In light of all of this, we can recognize that we are seeking to promote higher levels of multiple things that are all dependent on each other and are all necessary for sustainable peace. We need to be aware of our own inner desires, prejudices, and biases. We need to be aware of the thoughts and feelings of other people. We need to be able to communicate our thoughts and feelings to other people. And we need people to be able to understand each other at a deeper level. In summary, we need both societal understanding and inner awareness in order to alleviate conflict and suffering in the world and in our lives and to work toward lasting peace. It is necessary for us to promote these not just for ourselves, but also for as many people in the world as possible.
This leads to the question: how is any of this possible? How can we promote the awareness and understanding that is necessary for peace? Here is what I think: we can lean on the power of modern science. Among the many systems of knowledge formation that have been used to answer some of the most important questions about life and the universe, modern science has proven to be quite reliable. Scientific research has given us incredible knowledge of the natural world, including how to build vehicles to transport us anywhere in the world, how to grow more food with less land, and how to treat infectious diseases, among countless other examples of how science has improved human well-being.
Modern science has made much progress in allowing us to understand the world and ourselves, and progress continues to be made every day toward these ends. Science helps us do a lot, but there are nonetheless important areas of life that must be partially outside the domain of the physical, biological, and social sciences because they can only truly be known from first-person conscious experience and thus cannot be known objectively. The nature of conscious experience itself and the experiences that are dependent upon it, such as core values and a sense of morality, can only be fully understood from direct first-person experience, but they are nonetheless quite real examples of knowledge.
This is important because people can only understand each other and work toward peace if they realize that they have common values and a shared moral framework. Sure, the world is very large and diverse, wherein people from different walks of life have differing worldviews and social mores. But since we are all human, we have quite a lot in common, despite our cultural differences.
If modern science is not up to the task of promoting greater societal understanding and inner awareness, then we need to develop an innovation that can get us there. If there are important areas of life that are outside the realm of our best physical, biological, and social sciences, then we need a new paradigm through which these sciences can be integrated with a new science that would be focused on first-person conscious experience. Such a science would have to apply to our own subjective experiences, and it would have to allow us to better understand other people’s subjective experiences as well, because this is the only way that a core human commonality could be identified.
For example, if there are two ethnic groups that are historically at odds with each other and have built up bad blood and deep mistrust for generations, then we could still find commonalities among these people and get them to focus on their similarities rather than their differences. If mothers of one ethnic group see mothers from the other ethnic group caring for their young children and mourning their dead, then they might be able to relate these feelings to their own lives and their own families. It is this sort of deep empathy that can lay the foundation for the community leaders of both ethnic groups to recognize their shared humanity and to work toward fostering peace. This is ultimately made possible through the communication and mutual understanding of thoughts, feelings, and life experiences.
Phenomenology is a disciplined approach to examining personal experience, and could be key to making this possible. Phenomenology is a diverse field and even the experts in this field sometimes struggle to find a concise and all-encompassing definition of it. Dermot Moran provided the following:
Phenomenology may be characterized initially in a broad sense as the unprejudiced, descriptive study of whatever appears to consciousness, precisely in the manner in which is so appears…This approach involves the practice of taking a fresh unprejudiced look — i.e. untainted by scientific, metaphysical, religious or cultural presuppositions or attitudes — at the fundamental and essential features of human experience in and of the world.[1]
This ties into our greater purpose of finding peace because if people can find a way of accurately describing to each other what appears in their conscious experience, then mutual understanding of this can be possible, and the subjective realm does not need to be so mysterious and impenetrable. This mutual understanding can then be used to build bridges between peoples and communities with different worldviews and different backgrounds in life.
For example, a phenomenological approach to understanding people’s thoughts and feelings would be concerned with how people experience these things within their own lives. We can use this approach to study any sentiments that serve to unite people all the same as those that cause divisions, even if doing so might be uncomfortable for us. It is easy to dismiss irrational and prejudiced beliefs that some people have and to simply explain this in terms of psychology, sociology, politics, or religion, but we would be missing an opportunity to empathize with people’s firsthand struggles unless we make an effort to put ourselves in their place and to imagine what they are going through and imagine their thoughts and feelings in their situation. We need to work to understand people’s direct experiences in life, and only then should we merge this information with our prior objective scientific knowledge.
Phenomenology has been around since the early Twentieth Century, but it has never been seen as all that scientific. The goal, therefore, would have to be to formulate a way of doing phenomenology whose results are reproducible and testable, similar to the way modern science works. Phenomenology also is not effective on its own and needs to work in conjunction with other sciences, such as psychology, sociology, biology, and physics. Therefore, we need researchers to develop a new integral scientific paradigm that would incorporate modern phenomenology along with these other, better established, sciences.
Phenomenology needs to be central to the quest to avoid conflict and to work toward peace because it already has a proven track record in small-scale conflict resolution, wherein the participants are encouraged to frame the problem at hand in a way that is primarily based around the perceptions and feelings of each individual in the relationship. In other words, the phenomenal field focuses on how each party feels at the moment and has felt in the past and these facts are given special significance. This approach shows promise, but a methodology needs to be formulated that integrates phenomenology with other sciences so that it can be applied to a larger society-wide scale.
We need an innovative scientific paradigm along these lines that would serve as an important tool in our quest to promote greater societal understanding and inner awareness. We live in a world with immense and seemingly intractable problems, most notably warfare, poverty, corruption, oppression, disease, and environmental degradation. Each of these problems is either caused or made worse by people misunderstanding, fearing, and hating other people. It is increasingly difficult for any of us to find peace in our own lives when there is so much of this going on in the world, since people’s lives are so dependent on each other. We need to recognize that one of the most significant root causes of conflict and suffering is the lack of communication and understanding, and we need to work to address these disconnects.
We need to develop a new way of doing science that provides a connection between the mind and the social landscape, and we need to put this into practice so that we can better address our world’s greatest challenges. Those of us who have the ability to do so need to devote our efforts to develop this important innovation so that it could eventually be used to avoid conflict, to promote peace, and to encourage higher levels of enlightenment for as many people as possible.
This is one of the things that we are trying to develop with this new initiative called The Enlightened Worldview Project. I am working on a book to propose a new way of doing science along these lines and I am planning a series of forthcoming posts to summarize the methodology behind this. If you have any comments or questions about this project, please email me brandon@EnlightenedWorldview.com
[1] Moran, Dermot. The Phenomenology Reader, p. 1.
