Chapter 3
Ways of Not Knowing:
Distortions of Science and Intelligence
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INTELLIGENCE (Late Middle English [origin: Old French and Modern French from Latin “intelligentia,” formed as “intelligent”]): The faculty of understanding; intellect. —Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. “intelligence”
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I’ve focused on essential science as a formal system for gaining and refining knowledge, and scientism as a degeneration of essential science that harms many people by irrationally dismissing and pathologizing all aspects of the spiritual perspective. (Scientism hinders progress in all areas of science, of course, inhibiting new ways of thinking, but in this book we focus on its effects on our possible spiritual nature.) Real people, with all of their good and bad qualities, and individual differences, use systems, philosophies, and knowledge tools. I have no doubt that there are some materialistic practitioners of scientism, for example, who are kind, generous people who wish the best for others, just as there are practitioners of essential science or of various spiritual systems who are, for whatever reasons, mean spirited and derive some kind of pleasure from belittling and dismissing other people. So while we focus on these formal philosophies and systems of materialism and spiritual views, we have to remember that there are always important differences in the way real people use them. Your motivations, personality, and other psychological factors interact with the formal characteristics of the knowledge system.
In terms of establishing how we would discover and refine knowledge about the spiritual, as well as progress in general, we’ll take a brief look at some of the ways people use knowledge tools to actually avoid learning new things or getting better understandings of old things. If you sometimes recognize yourself in these descriptions, as I too often recognize myself—well, better to be embarrassed and learn than to remain ignorant!
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“…it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” (Maslow 1966, 15–16).
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Abraham Maslow, a pioneering psychologist who was the primary founder of both humanistic and transpersonal psychology, published a brilliant little book back in 1966, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. He focused on science since it was and remains prestigious and a highly influential way of knowing, but his insights into the psychology of knowing and not knowing—what real people may actually do when they try to expand their knowledge, as opposed to what they say they do—are vitally applicable to ordinary, religious, and spiritual life. His insights are a psychology of scientism, or just about any “ism.”
I often sum up his insights in this way: Used correctly, science can be an open-ended, error-correcting, personal-growth system of great power. Used incorrectly and inappropriately, science can be one of the best and most prestigious neurotic defense mechanisms available. As Maslow (1966, 33) beautifully put it: “Science, then, can be a defense. It can be primarily a safety philosophy, a security system, a complicated way of avoiding anxiety and upsetting problems. In the extreme instance it can be a way of avoiding life, a kind of self-cloistering. It can become in the hands of some people, at least, a social institution with primarily defensive, conserving functions, ordering and stabilizing rather than discovering and renewing.”
The same is true, in my experience, for spiritual systems. They can be open-ended, error-correcting growth systems, opening to new, vital knowledge and compassion for self and others, or they can be used as neurotic defense mechanisms, protecting users from real spiritual growth while allowing them to feel superior to ordinary people, and “spiritual” at the same time.
So what are these pathologies of cognition, both intellectual and emotional, that Maslow identified in The Psychology of Science? There are twenty-one of them, and I’ll summarize them in a table later, but let’s look at them more thoroughly now.
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The American revolutionary Patrick Henry became famous for his saying, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” Without taking this to paranoid levels, I think this is just as true psychologically and spiritually as politically. Without our cultivating mindfulness and desiring to better learn the truth, our intentions too often go astray.
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A compulsive need for certainty is the first pathology. Many psychological studies have found that a tolerance for ambiguity—an ability to admit “I don’t know” or “I’m confused by this”—is a sign of psychological maturity.
Premature generalization is one of the consequences of an excessive need for certainty. Your mind forces actual instances of life into general categories that eliminate much of life’s richness and subtler differences, while giving you the impression that you know so much.
Hanging onto a generalization in spite of new information that contradicts it is something people may desperately and stubbornly do for the kinds of reasons just stated. You attach too much to what makes sense, what makes you feel good, what has worked before. Remember our discussion of essential science: theory is always subject to change if new data doesn’t fit. When human experience doesn’t fit into scientistic materialism, for instance, there’s often a specious generalization invoked to make such potentially disturbing information go away. A common method is to invoke human fallibility: people are misled, superstitious, crazy, liars, or deluded, so you can stop paying attention to anything that doesn’t fit your idea of the way the world works.
Denial of ignorance is another major obstacle to knowledge. Because we all want to look good, of course, to ourselves and others, we’re unable to say, “I don’t know” or “I was wrong about that.” Personally I’ve found that the sooner I can admit, at least to myself if not to others, that I don’t understand something, the sooner I stop digging myself deeper into a messy mixture of ignorance and deluded pride about what I do know.
The need to appear decisive, certain, confident is often what covers such denial of doubt, confusion, or puzzlement. We’re talking about an inability to be humble.
It’s funny, here, I don’t think of myself as a particularly spiritual person, and yet I sometimes think that I have, in my role as a “scientist,” a great advantage over people recognized as “spiritual teachers.” I can say I don’t know something, whereas our social and personal expectations put those designated as spiritual teachers under enormous pressure to (pretend to) know everything. Various spiritual systems all make claims of knowing everything that’s really important. (When was the last time you came in contact with a religion that said, “We have a few aspects of the truth but a lot to learn, so we may be wrong about some things”?) Add to this the need for teachers, as representatives of their spiritual traditions, to uphold their systems, and these folks are under enormous pressure to feel as if and act as if they always know whatever’s required.
An inflexible, neurotic need to be tough is another expression of this. The person needs to be powerful, fearless, strong, and severe. That’s the kind of person, the kind of scientist or spiritual teacher, we respect, isn’t it? But these image investments, personas, are what are called counterphobic mechanisms by psychotherapists; they’re defenses against fear and ignorance. As Maslow (1966, 27) put it, “Among scientists the legitimate wish to be ‘hard nosed’ or tough minded or rigorous may be pathologized into being ‘merely hard nosed’ or exclusively tough minded, or of finding it impossible not to be rigorous. There may develop an inability to be gentle, surrendering, noncontrolling, patient, receptive even when the circumstances clearly call for it as prerequisite to better knowing, e.g., as in psychotherapy.”
A lack of balance between our masculine and feminine sides is another major obstacle to growing in knowledge. Science, religion, and most spirituality have been socially and historically shaped mainly by men, often with active suppression of women and the characteristics we usually consider feminine. Balance, full openness to knowledge, calls for the ability to be not only active, dominant, masterful, controlling, “in charge,” and “masculine,” but also noncontrolling, noninterfering, tolerant, receptive, and “feminine.” Knowing which stance is appropriate for a given task is important, or, if you don’t know what’s best, being willing to experiment with different stances to see what each yields.
Rationalization is another major obstacle to knowing. The brain’s emotional circuits often react and form a judgment before the more intellectual parts have even gotten the message that something’s happening, something’s being perceived. It’s as if a controlling part of our minds said, “I don’t like that fellow, and I’m going to find a good, logical-seeming reason why.” Our enormous skill at rationalization, our ability to create an apparently logical connection between almost anything, regardless of whether that connection exists in reality, is why I stressed that in essential science we can’t stop at the theory stage, feeling good because our explanations make so much sense; we’ve got to go on and make predictions, and see how our theories account for new input.
Intolerance of ambiguity, an inability to be comfortable with the vague and mysterious, is a strong personality trait of some people, despite that learning new things can often take a long time. So, to get more comfortable, their minds generalize or rationalize too soon or too broadly, or oversimplify by ignoring parts of reality.
Social factors biasing the search for knowledge should never be underestimated, of course. This pathology can manifest as the need to conform, to win approval, to be a member of the in-group. At an ordinary level, it feels a lot better to be an accepted member of a high-prestige group known as “scientists” or, in a much smaller subset of the population, “spiritual seekers” than to be a “crackpot” or a “weirdo.”
I’ve struggled with such social factors throughout my career. On the one hand, I’ve taken pride in the model of Gautama Buddha, expressed in me in an attitude of “I, Charles T. Tart, on my own, am going to sit down under this tree and meditate or think until I have figured out everything important about the world! No mindless conformity for me!” ( I’m not grandiosely claiming that the Buddha was like me, but instead I’m talking about the way we tend to perceive him as a solitary hero conquering the world of illusion.)
On the other hand, I’ve learned, often after considerable struggle, that I’m not only actually a very social creature and strongly influenced by the beliefs and attitudes of those around me, I need other people; social life is woven into the fabric of my being. Trying to accurately see where I am on the seesaw between these forces and ideals is important work for me, as I do want to get at the truth insofar as I can.
Grandiosity, megalomania, arrogance, egotism, and paranoid tendencies are among the faults that serve as additional human obstacles to refining knowledge. Obstacles that these factors are, the situation is often even more complicated by the deeper psychological factors that they might be covering up, like feelings of worthlessness.
Pathological humility, what Maslow calls a “fear of paranoia,” is another extreme that people exhibit. For various reasons, conscious or unconscious, we can undervalue ourselves and thus try to evade our own growth as a defense; for example, “How can I, a mere everyday person, be seriously interested in spirituality and the paranormal when the real authorities, the scientists, have dismissed it all as nonsense?”
Overrespect for authority, for the prestigious institution, for the great man, and the need to mirror his opinion to (in your mind) keep his love is another pathology. These authorities can be troublesome! Maslow (1966, 28) sees this as “Becoming only a disciple, a loyal follower, ultimately a stooge, unable to be independent, unable to affirm himself.”
Underrespect for authority is, of course, another extreme, and it often manifests as a compulsive need to fight authority. Then you’re unable to learn from your elders or teachers. The way of authority, as discussed earlier, can be quite misleading if practiced in isolation from the other ways or by being influenced by authorities who happen to be wrong about some things, but it’s very useful as part of the balanced process of essential science.
Overrespect for the intellectual powers of the mind also is another pathology, one where you have a need to be always and only rational, sensible, and logical. Bucke, in his description of his Cosmic Consciousness experience, showed a sensible respect for the intellectual in, for example, describing his experience in the third person because he felt it helped him be more accurate, but he certainly didn’t make us feel as if intellectuality and rationality were the main points of Cosmic Consciousness or even the most important aspects.
Intellectualization is very tricky in general. Our ability to step back from the immediacy of experience, emotion, and bodily agitation to take a broader, more logical view of a situation is one of the greatest powers of the human mind. But considering it as always being the “highest” ability, using it (or, too often, being used by it) compulsively in all situations for all knowledge seeking, or both is maladaptive.
A particular style of psychopathology that psychotherapists often see used, for example, is an automatic or compulsive (or both) transforming of the emotional or the bodily into the (apparently) rational, “…perceiving only the intellectual aspect of complex situations, being satisfied with naming rather than experiencing, etc. This is a common shortcoming of professional intellectuals, who tend to be blinder to the emotional and impulsive side of life than to its cognitive aspects” (Maslow 1966, 28). I personally understand this all too well, and one of the major growth themes in my own life has been developing my emotional and bodily intelligence, and at least taking it into account, if not letting it lead when appropriate for situations, instead of having my life compulsively and automatically intellectualized.
Dominating, one-upping, or impressing people is a pathology for which your intellect may be a tool. Then, rationality frequently gets subtly shifted into rationalization in the service of power, often at the cost of part of the truth.
Fearing the truth and knowledge to the extent of avoiding or distorting it is hard to appreciate unless you’ve done a lot of self-discovery work. It’s a scary, unknown world out there in many ways, and we all die in the end, so it’s understandable that we create our own little “knowledge clearing” in the forest of reality, and are very reluctant to venture into the woods beyond the clearing. Like all these obstacles to increasing knowledge, if you consciously know you’re doing it, you have a chance to alter things. When any of these obstacles become completely automatic and you don’t even know you’re using them and being used by them, you have little chance of changing, unless perhaps reality “hits you over the head” very hard, and even then you may just curse your fate instead of seeing difficulties as potential growth opportunities and calls for deeper insight into who you are and what your attitudes are.
Rubricizing, or forcing reality into categories that have an authoritative quality about them so that so we’re hesitant to think about them any other way, is what a lot of intellectual and emotional activity amounts to. As with other obstacles to knowledge we’ve discussed so far, lack of flexibility in dealing with experience and reality always has costs.
Compulsively dichotomizing is one very common and general kind of forced categorization. With this, there are only two opposing values to everything: good or bad, yes or no, black or white. A spiritual tradition like Buddhism, for example, sees this automatic compulsive duality as a primary cause of our suffering. At times, reality may be good or bad, good and bad, neither good nor bad, or something in between, something else altogether.
A compulsive seeking of and need for novelty and the devaluation of the familiar is the opposite obstacle to knowledge of attachment to the familiar, to the known, mentioned above. Sometimes important truths are indeed commonplace, humdrum, just repeated over and over again knowledge.
Table 3.1 lists these obstacles to knowing in a shorthand way for convenience.