The prevalent Western worldview is hampered by intellectual structures and practices that limit capacity, conceptual imagination, and our ability to adapt to reality.
Here's the first and perhaps most central problem: the West thinks that more data clarifies, that more data narrows explanatory and narrative possibilities. This strikes me as patently absurd.
That sense of narrowing is an illusion, and is often no more than shutting down perception and settling-in to bias. It is not, as advertised, the refinement of objective description; it is not refinement of description in any sense except the narrative sense. Sometimes, one accepts it for safety or for power over others (especially when settled narratives reward collective bias or greed), or because of some pressing expediency. The desire for safety comes from a species of panic (in one later Greek sense) as a profound fear of being overwhelmed by the All.
Postmodern cultural experience and the practical realities of the “information economy” illustrate conclusively that more data does not mitigate narrative or explanatory possibilities. Data proliferates and quickly escapes the capacity of the human mind to hold or understand, bringing a host of contradictions and counterindications, some of which we cannot see and many of which we actively choose not to see. At the neurological level, we--these "I's" who witness and "know"--are connected to the “external” cosmos principally through analogy. Only analogic thinking can reflect its woven nature, in which terms like metonymy and synechdoche are as functionally relevant as the vocabulary of physics (and in practical terms, more so). The magical principle of correspondence asserts that poetic analogy is not merely conceptual, but actual: that resonance, association and similarity are as relevant physically as they are poetically and that they may be more accurate descriptions of cosmology than traditional notions of causation.
Settling in to a specific working narrative is pragmatic, but it’s also deceptive. A narrative that works now is not the only possible narrative, not the only narrative that will work (even to produce material results or explain phenomena), and a narrative that works now may not work tomorrow, even if all that changes is the cultural context or the felt need for the results a given narrative yields.
An inability to see that 100 data yield more narrative and explanatory possibilities than 3 data is a failure of imagination, one that reveals a suppressed or lacking aptitude or an anxious retreat from immensity. Anomalies expand narrative possibility exponentially. Concurrence means only that a tool works well for locating similarities and recurrent synchronicities, but links between data points are always narrative links. Each one of them is conceptually limited by human aptitude, organically and culturally, but in reality is infinitely unlimited and equally connected to all other things. The concept of "degree" reflects narrative and conceptual reality only, and is true only of the developmental inner world.
In its frequently short-sighted technological pragmatism and domination by industry and concepts of “progress” and “mastery,” the West mistakes expediency for knowledge. (As well as the old saws about knowledge for wisdom and wisdom for Truth).
This kind of thinking colors the world mechanistically, and with the help of pharmaceuticals creates “better” workers and better soldiers and more efficient extraction of resources, oblivious in most instances to the reality of interconnection. From this vantage, "The West" is a harnessed horse on a closed track, one small region in the Mind, and something everyone agrees is not a place. Not even in the sense that "North" is a particular point. For East and West, there has never been a ground zero.
Technologically driven knowing pushes itself only until it achieves its objective and maximizes return, usually financial profit or military power. Then it settles. It almost never tracks complex interconnections, nor asks what could be given form if the 200,000 data points assume a different narrative relationship. It is not concerned individual human experience or individualized epistemological inflection. It does not conceptualize “becoming human.” It takes being human for granted, and hence never develops beyond the starting point as a receptive slate for whatever the first narrative is that works. Stuck, and for a lifetime.
Such knowing isn't self-aware when it comes to the actual nature of awareness as narrative. Epistemology is essentially narratology. When we fail to see the reality of complex and paradoxical interconnection--at material and ideational levels—we are extremely culture-bound and miss something central to being fully human: We are very much within a story.
In its rush to “objectivize,” mechanistic knowing usually fails to anticipate, resist or transcend neuro-linguistic programming, which operates in all human symbol systems including sensory perception (which is brain phenomena produced by presumed external stimuli and broken into cognitive units like "sky" and "tree" and "beauty" and narrativized by the internal witness; it is not reality itself), language, symbol and mathematics. The West too frequently confounds the tools of knowing with the knower. We represent Lady Justice with a blindfold, but the attribute would be more accurately offered to Lady Science, at least when she’s looking in the mirror. When the empirical apparatus is interrogated, pure empiricism falls. Our own personal “taints” (or tints) all our observations and all our observations of our observations. Acknowledged or not, the soul will have its say.
Such things as Occam's Razor and the contrivances of formal logic are results-oriented expediencies, culturally validated only by technology (see above) or by collective bias (see above). Ignoring anomalies, hard core Westerners generally go beyond these kinds of cognitive limits only when the thought-structure fails to work or does not work as expected.
Archeology and ancient history also often fall prey to this trap. Anthropology less so, since contemporary methodologies encourage self-awareness and interaction with living subjects and tend to interrogate witnessing biases. I have doctoral-level specializations in the US between 1492 and 1865. The humanities more concerned with remote time periods often amazingly settle on one narrative, even when scholars of much more recent data-filled periods--like twenty years ago, or 250, or 500--acknowledge multiple narrative possibilities. This is pronounced in privileged narratives of Greece and Israel and Egypt, and also in marginal narratives like those of Marija Gimbutas or Martin Bernal or David Frawley. The truth about human epistemology makes such things as "strict reconstruction" (or even "tradition" or racial and national identity) laughable. As a scholar of more recent cultural history, the definitive claims of scholars of the ancient world look about as sophisticated as blackface.
All narratives are houses of cards in constant flux. Imagine that: standing in a dynamic house of cards. In the West, science and scholarship have strong and trustworthy dynamics of generational reconception. People get tenure by finding and selling a new narrative... and by ignoring or pretending that the range of narrative possibility isn't actually infinite. It's the West... we have revolutions, not tradition; we look for experts to manufacture and demonstrate knowledge, rather than self-consciously creating it together, with mutual and egalitarian evaluations of effectiveness.
If something seems like an exclusive and self-evident truth without potential for variation, it means only that I have found the present limit of my imaginative or cognitive or biological powers. Settling for those means settling for limitation and limited tools. It may produce much technology and much change, but it isn't growth.
Others' limitations will vary from my own.
Hermetics, Shamans, a few physicists and a certain category of very influential linguists who are more appropriately called philosophers report that grammar and poetry are better metaphors for how reality works than "law," and that the whole concept of law itself might be reflective of a certain kind of stultifying superstition that ultimately keeps us, individually and collectively, from living richly.
A second major problem with the Western worldview is that in recent generations, it has attacked the principles of similtude and correspondence and attempted to eradicate the traditional languages of magic, religion, poetry and symbol.
The West has said that resemblance is superficial or accidental and by itself is meaningless. (That it has done this even while discovering evolution is a bizarre contradiction that I can't account for). It has done this in spite of the fact that our brains are wired associatively, and we are in essence associative and symbolic beings, literally constituted in self-awareness by a very rich corpus of symbolic associations growing only through resonance. It has done this in defiance of all that is organically human, and has precipitated more alienation from nature and the body than the 1500 years of Christianity that preceded "the West".
I am experientially confident that Western causality is a misperception of reality, and that similitude and correspondence (resonance) are generally more logically valid than causal perception. Cause and effect seem to work within “woven” structures, to be contextualized by an associational reality. Causality is therefore secondary (but not contradictory or irrelevant) to correspondence.
I am analytically confident that linear causality is a limiting and unsustainable misperception. I strongly suspect that the epochal crash of such thoughtforms is the force behind conscious and bodily evolution, and is the psycho-spiritual reality behind the nearly universal mytheme of apocalypse.
We're in a magical world where there is no boundary between mind and matter. I'm going to live more and more richly.
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