Emptiness and Joyful Freedom by Greg Goode & Tomas Sander

Author:Greg Goode & Tomas Sander [Goode, Greg & Sander, Tomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: spirituality
ISBN: 9781908664365
Publisher: Non-Duality Press
Published: 2013-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12 – LIGHTENING UP YOUR SOCIAL WORLD

The targets in this chapter are:

Essentialism about gender, race, emotions, self and mental states

The objectivity of scientific knowledge, truth, the real and the good

Grand narratives.

This approach is inspired by the work of Kenneth Gergen, Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Thomas Kuhn and Jean-François Lyotard.

Social constructionism studies the ways in which many phenomena in our life are the result of social activities rather than being given by God or nature. When we see things with an eye towards their social and historical factors, they seem less inevitable and more open.

For example, by seeing how different cultures in our world have very different views, values, practices and self-understanding, we become more sensitive to how these things depend on culture. Then, these things seem less like they were dictated by nature or divine will.

For social constructionism, truth is seen as what “passes for truth” rather than as being something objective. As truth evolves and develops from human social practices, it is shaped by the interests of people. Those interests and the resulting truths can privilege one social group at the expense of another. Unmasking how truths develop and serve interest groups, and how they maintain societal power structures, is a form of ideological critique which often results in a call for social change. Quite often, there is a strong personal or social emancipatory element in social constructionism.

Even seemingly innocent truths, such as the natural sciences, can be shown to be created by social processes among scientists. What gets the stamp of “truth” can depend on rivalries among research groups, interests of funding agencies and so on. As Thomas Kuhn has shown, scientific progress is driven by paradigm shifts that are often incommensurable with what prevailed before, for instance the shift from Newtonian physics to relativity theory to quantum theory. Thus there is no basis upon which to claim that science is converging towards an objectively truer description of reality.

For example, we might believe that current science gets the world more or less right, whereas Ptolemy, 2000 years ago, who claimed that the earth was the center of the universe, got it mostly wrong. We may smile at those ancient guys and all the stuff that they didn’t know. But given the rapid developments in science and the future major paradigm shifts to be expected, how do we think people in 500, 1000, or 2000 years will look back at us? Will they smile at us for all the backwards, disproven scientific theories that we staunchly believe today?

I (Tomas) have liked science since I created a few little explosions with a chemistry set, as a boy. I was fascinated by astronomy, evolution, and what psychologists have to say about human life. Eventually I became a scientist myself. Science focuses on what can be empirically proven, and society grants it the authority to speak about all sorts of things ranging from the perfect marriage to solving economic problems of the third world. It’s very easy to believe in science too much and check your own intelligence at the door.

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