“I have observed that the closer one comes to the study of humans the shoddier the quality of the scientific evidence.”

Biologist Lynn Margulis at Pharyngula

Wittgenstein said much the same thing….

In the study of humans, the arts (poetry, stories, drama,  journalism, biography, cultural criticism, history, and philosophy) have much more to say, say it better and say it more memorably than most of the relevant academic disciplines. Margulis is  a proponent and co-developer of the modern version of the Gaia hypothesis (now regarded by some as a thesis) which can be said to view the Earth as a single organism. Arthur Conan Doyle, better known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, wrote a short story with that premise, When the World Screamed.

Obviously, its a thesis that environmentalists and communitarians will regard benevolently, and classical individualists at least somewhat suspiciously. But need it be so? After all, one man’s environmentalism is another man’s conservation; one man’s sustainability is another man’s thrift; one man’s cooperative is another man’s citizen republic…

I don’t mean to propose some kind of dishonest compromise between ideologies but just to rethink the confidence with which we assume that our actions cannot find a peaceable “way of going on” even when our ideologies cannot.