OutBoxing Series: The question that science can not or will not answer - the language inside us
Outboxing: this series of posts makes you think about life, it wants to show things from a different perspective or it just wants to express what you already know subconsciously.
In a series that I saw on people and technology, there was an item about a company that, as an experiment, had all employees equipped with wearables, wristbands that measure vital functions. Your boss can follow your blood pressure, your stress level, and of course your productivity. Another item in that series was how the DNA of children aged 3 or 4 in China is tested at school. So they can show the parents: “look, he is now 3 years old, but he is not very social, so he better choose a profession that gives him a little responsibility. That way he does not have to work too much with people." Or the other way around.
Society is becoming increasingly practical with the help of new technology, aimed at improving our well-being, optimizing our production, our presence, and keeping an eye on everything. I was wondering, what if everything is measurable? About how technology penetrates more and more into our lives, and also changes our image of people.
We are seeing more and more that the technical knowledge of man, of how man work and how our brains work, and how we react is used to send us in a certain direction. Think about 'nudging', something many governments are doing nowadays.
To quote Wikipedia:
Nudge is a concept in behavioral science, political theory and economics which proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as ways to influence the behavior and decision making of groups or individuals. Nudging contrasts with other ways to achieve compliance, such as education, legislation or enforcement.
If it comes from the government, it is often done with the best intentions, for example, that citizens fill in their tax forms on time, or that they do not smoke in certain places.
Also think of neuromarketing. Advertising is about as old as the world, but the techniques used by advertising today have become very sophisticated because of that new neurological knowledge to influence people. Man becomes less and less independent a subject, but increasingly an object. That is one of the big developments that probably cannot be reversed. As a result, you get a view of people that consists of figures and graphs.
If you are interested in scientific developments, it becomes increasingly difficult to see a human as an independent individual who takes his own decisions, thinks about important issues and then takes action.
What should you put against that? Not a lot can beat three queens. It’s a delicate issue. Because we live in a society where both commerce and politics increasingly consider man as a non-rational being. As a creature that can be manipulated. Or a creature that you can lead in the right direction, to put it nicely.
I do not think that politics will easily give up such new techniques. The independent, autonomous person who deliberately thinks about things is increasingly becoming a kind of fiction. We all know that we are irrational beings, but we are not used to living in a culture that sees us as irrational beings that can be manipulated. And that is, I think, a big difference with the past. The idea of man as an autonomous being that is enlightened is becoming more and more a fiction that we only practise with our mouths.
Also the people who have something to sell say: YOU make the choice. YOU may decide. YOU have a moment to make up your mind. In the meantime they think of all sorts of ways to steer us in a certain direction.
In this way our human image is fundamentally affected. If you ask children to draw a house, many of them will draw a pointed roof. Maybe you too. But which house actually still has a pointed roof? That is how it is with our human image. Our image of man is still a sane, rational figure, but in the meantime our culture has actually already given up that view of human life. Mainly because all those shortcuts in the psyche to steer people are known.
That creates a big problem. Especially because the language in which we speak about ourselves is increasingly the language of the figures, even though this always happens with the best intentions. We are no longer the people who tell each other great stories. We do not longer live in myths.
You can say that science shows us how we are. If you measure our brain activity when we are scared, then a part of our brain lights up. But what good is that to you? What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of a spider? Afraid of the bailiff? Or are you afraid of death? These are three different fears. Ultimately, it is all about what we ourselves think of fear, and how we learn to deal with fear ourselves.
My concern is that the language of science, the language of the figures, increasingly deprives us of our fantasy about ourselves. Our ability to tell stories to form culture or religion. These meaningful stories are becoming rarer due to the language of science. And that has an effect.
Iconically, the idea is that we are our brain. Neuroscience is becoming increasingly important in our understanding of ourselves. You hear more and more: “Yes, this is what you do, but that's where it comes from.”
My take would be that that doesn’t say so much, because we are responsible for how we deal with this new knowledge. This new knowledge about us and also the new developments in science raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human. And that is very practical. In about 40 or 50 years, everyone can have children with everyone, regardless of age or gender. Soon it will only be a matter of taking someone's skin cell, which is then processed into a stem cell, of which you eventually make fertility cells.
This means that our entire biological idea of man and also of sexual intercourse will change. What does that mean for us? What difference will that make for us? Science cannot answer that. We have to do that ourselves, with our imagination. With our philosophical, contemplative attitude. With our cultural, religious and moral strength. These are all areas that are part of the humanities, not the science of the numbers and the hard facts.
It is worrying that we currently lack what we need most. Who we are, that teaches science. But who we want to be is culture. That is imagination. Those are the humanities. These will become increasingly important when dealing with the ethical issues of major technological change.
I want to argue here that the language that is more difficult to grasp cannot be captured in figures, namely the language inside us. In our heads all kinds of feelings, all kinds of subtleties, all kinds of nuances take place. All kinds of opposites. Contradictions. We have to preserve that inner world against the ever-advancing language of statistics.