Forum

In my Foundations of Sustainable Ag course, we’ve read some pretty far out things – at least, they were far out to me. One of these is “Integrating Sustainability into Agricultural Education” by Arjen Wals et. al. You can find the whole paper here: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B09-LNh9FdMEMGI5MGVmYmYtZDU3My00MzMyLWIzNTUtYjg0M2MxNGMyNmJm&hl=en (pdf, I hope this is fair use of the document since it’s educational, please let me know if not). You don’t have to read it, I just wanted to post it in case anyone was interested.

Long story short, Wals talks about the many different ways to see the world, including: holism v reductionism and relativism v objectivism. It’s likely that I’m just not destined to be a philosopher, but I see all of these worldviews as being artificial divisions – people invented these ideas to help describe things, but that doesn’t mean that any of them is “right”, they’re just different. A lot of people in my class had a hard time with this paper.

I bring this up, because Liz (hyperlocavore on twitter) brings up a point we’ve discussed before in class. Genetic engineering can be seen one reductionist solution in the body of reductionist solutions that is “conventional ag” while the body of methods making up “sustainable ag” can be considered holistic (I only put these in quotes to indicate that the lines between the types are not solid – in reality it’s more of a gradient between really reductionist/conventional methods and really holistic/sustainable methods with lots inbetween).

I agree with Liz – the definitions of holistic and reductionist fit well here.

But, I wonder how much weight we should put to these distinctions. If a farmer wants to be truly holistic, they shouldn’t make any individual responses to specific problems, instead they should tweak the system as a whole. We all know that doesn’t happen. All good farmers, organic or otherwise, carefully observe their fields and react as needed, whether their reactions are conventional like synthetic fertilizer and organophosphates, or organic like blood meal or guano and a Bt spray.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as truly holistic farming, except in very few cases where growing conditions are amazing. A more holistic farming system can be achieved, but not a truly holistic farming system.

To bring this to orgenics, Liz argues that genetic engineering can’t fit here. If we choose the holistic/reductionist paradigm, then she’s right. But that is a choice we impose on farming, not something inherent in farming itself.

Raoul Adamchak (of my fav book, Tomorrow’s Table – sorry to keep harping on it, but it really is splendid) argues that genetic engineering is inherently compatibility with organic or sustainable farming. He says that organic farming is finding biological ways to solve biological problems. We messed that up when we started finding chemical solutions for biological problems. Genetic engineering is a biological solution – at least for some traits. Bt, drought tolerance, improved nutrition count, but herbicide resistance and anything else that encourages chemical use doesn’t count. This distinction makes perfect sense to me, a lot more sense than the holistic/reductionist divide. It’s like we’re letting reality (nature, etc) make the dividing lines instead of imposing ones we thought of.

Yes, I know, I have some pretty strange views on things – but that’s why I’d love to hear what you have to say in response! Here’s looking at you, Liz

“Which leads me to believe that holists are, in actuality, operating from a basis of reductionism. After all, how can one begin to understand a system without first discerning something of its parts. They might be good at guessing about the interactions among the parts, but they must admit some knowledge of the parts themselves to do so.”

In my experience, I totally agree with this statement. Whenever I read a critique of reductionism by someone who promotes ‘holism,’ their critique is always based on reductionist logic. For example, Michael Pollan, in his recent book In Defense of Food, argues against reductionism in food and nutrition science. His criticisms are each based on reductionism, and he even states that he will formulate his food philsophy using… reductionism. (And nutritional reductionism too). Rather than reducing healthy diets to the level of nutrients and their interactions, he prefers to reduce diets to the level of individual foods. Still reductionism.

I sat in on a humanities lecture given by Evelyn Fox Keller recently, where she declared that reductionism was no good ‘because we’re all interactions!’ But in that lecture, she argued from a reductionist standpoint with regard to the words we use to describe phenomena. In other words, she reduced some of the problems in science to what words were used to describe things. This I wholeheartedly agree with, but it contradicts the general thesis that she put forward.

In medicine, we hear about holism (i.e. Eastern?) versus reductionism (Western?), and holists often argue over reductionism with a common caricature. Let’s say the engine light come on in your car – which indicates a problem. The holist says that the reductionist solution it to cut the wire to the engine light, thus turning it off. Obviously, this is a stupid thing to do as it does not address the problem that the engine light symptom indicated. But we never hear what the ‘holistic’ solution is to the car conundrum. Anything like replacing a spark plug or changing the oil is a reductionist solution, so the joke often goes: ‘The holist washes the windows and gives the car a new coat of wax!’ You have to treat your Whole Body.

The main problem I find with holism is not with the philosophical concept or its valid uses, but with the fact that most people who tout holism as the fix to any problem is that they seldom know what holism means. It is often used as a cover for preventing investigation – you can’t study the individual parts, you have to take the Whole Thing as an indivisible Holon that you must accept in-full. How do you know that one of the components in that system needs to be in there, or is not hurting the system? You can only know through reductionism.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism wikipedia page has some good information on reductionism, including two things that people often miss about it.
First, as you mentioned that holists tend to define reducitonism as ‘focusing on only one part’ they are using a caricature of reductionism. Daniel Dennett defines extreme reductionism as like this as ‘greedy reductionism’ which should naturally be avoided.

Second, Dawkins’ solution to the reductionism-holism debate is ‘Hierarchical Reductionism’, where you explain things in terms of different levels of parts or levels that make sense. For example, you can explain a healthy diet in terms of the foods it contains, and the nutrients of those foods. But explaining a healthy diet in terms of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces of nature would make no sense.