by Harvey Harrison
I was a volunteer lawyer in a county juvenile criminal justice system as an advocate for the children. One of my clients who we all cherished in the system was "R", a soft-spoken, intelligent, mentally ill sixteen-year-old who was incarcerated when I met him. He was in jail because he had been using drugs and so tested dirty when he visited his probation officer. He had also tried to kill himself a few times, which is how he received a psychiatric diagnosis. R had this gentle charisma and nobility that I will remember forever. He had, as they say, "potential".
More revealing of why we loved him was his natural kindness. I remember he attended a court date with his family which was his younger sister (about 7 or 8 years old) and his mom. I left the courtroom and entered the "on deck" waiting room to find sister sitting in R's lap, and the two of them were focused on making a pretty picture in the coloring book on her lap. R, whose future was to be decided in moments, was completely absorbed with his sister in making the picture pretty. I was moved by his attention to her at that unpredictable time and, above all, by the sense of safety, contentment and joy his sister radiated. Mom sat nearby appropriately nervously.
My assignment was to be a bridge between juvenile and school hall; that is, I was to help R make the transition from jail back to school, a transition R very much wanted to make though, in the past, he had been truant a great deal.
R and I and the system were successful, and R was doing well. Once he asked me when the "family therapy" ordered by the court would begin. I truthfully and painfully said I did not know. R loved his Mom, and yet he had fits of anger toward her that nobody including R understood. This troubled R so he put his hope on the "family therapy".
So did I. You see: as a member of the juvenile criminal justice team, I had access to R's file. It was thick and in it was at least one psychologist's report that recited this: until R's father abandoned the family when his sister was a toddler, the father regularly and frequently physically beat R very severely. So, said the psychologist, these beatings were the trauma that contributed to R's dysfunction.
The team really wanted R to succeed, and I recall raising whether anybody had focused on these beatings. The answer was "no". I thought that R's anger toward Mom might be misdirected anger at his father and at his mother's failure to protect him from the beatings. Please know that R's mother was diminutive. I feel extremely confident that father was beating her more than R. R's intuitions that family therapy might help were, as usual, right on target: it could uncover the source of and help heal R's anger.
Here is the important point for our purposes. The crime which brought R into the system was petty theft. He and some buddies had trespassed on to the premises of an abandoned store to take some candy bars left behind. They were caught by the police, and R was convicted of petty theft.
"Reductionism" is the very human impulse to understand somebody or something by narrowing, excluding, overlooking (like the content of the psych report), decreasing the factors in mind to focus only on a few. In R's case, "reductionism" would be shown by describing R as "a drug-abusing petty thief". While that reduction of R was completely accurate in fact, it assured that R would not receive the family therapy which might have saved him.
The sad end of R's story is that, for reasons beyond the scope here, R and his mom did not receive therapy in time, and R went "awol", committed a number of major non-violent felonies like drug "mule"-ing, and, I feel confident, is currently in State Prison.
So, briefly, "reductionism" is to understand somebody or something by selectively narrowing focus only to certain factors of a situation. I am not an enemy of "reductionism" generally. Not at all: if you want directions to the local convenience store, you do not want a map that includes Greenland.
Indeed, most human knowledge and all science advance by a selective narrowing of focus on certain topics, studies, experiments, and the like. What standards and values are applied in the selectivity make the difference between wonderful and terrible reductionism.
So, I am speaking here only about reductionism in a spiritual, religious, or philosophical context, and that is what I mean primarily mean by the word "ultimate".
"Non-reductionism", then, would be to strive to understand experience and to experience life directly while consciously suspending or setting aside for a while the habitual human practice of selective focus.
Another meaning of the word "ultimate" here is to do something so that it becomes the most universal or habitual way of doing it. As reductionism is the default or habitual setting of human thought, I am urging here that "non-reductionism" be sought as the default or habitual setting.
In short, I urge that "ultimate nonreductionism" be pursued as humanity's chosen "home page" setting because it will help make the widest and broadest frames of reference most important.