Download ON CONSCIOUSNESS-CENTERED SOCIAL CONFLICT THEORY

ON CONSCIOUSNESS-CENTERED SOCIAL CONFLICT THEORY:
THE CASE OF THE MAHARISHI TECHNOLOGY OF THE UNIFIED FIELD
David V. Edwards
Professor of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin TX 78712
A discussion paper prepared for
the symposium "Alleviating International Conflicts
through the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidha Program"
at the 1990 annual meetings of
the American Psychological Association,
Humanistic Psychology Division,
Boston, August 1990
It has long been widely considered legitimate to study social action in terms of the images
of reality and the thought processes in the minds and/or brains of social actors, difficult though it is
to get intersubjectively reliable access to either. Surely no scholars in the academic fields of social
conflict and international relations would dispute that we have learned much of value from
theoretical approaches and empirical research projects with these foci.
Most such efforts thus far have been built on the assumption--or at least the hope--that the
mind and/or brain can ultimately be "black-boxed" in such a way that the explanation for the
specific mental content or actual brain processes operating to shape decision and/or action in a
given situation can refer to preceeding mental states and/or environing conditions. The consequent
assumption has been that ultimately we would find behavior to be fully explainable, or determined,
by such preceeding conditions. Put another way, it has been assumed that consciousness as such is
not causal in human action.
In recent years, this common assumption has been increasingly challenged by at least two
distinguishable perspectives. One is the view that an individual's consciousness--conceived as
awareness or a reflective understanding of the interplay of one's beliefs about reality and that
reality's effects upon one--is constitutive of the individual's action, behavior, or physical
functioning, and that one's consciousness can be changed by reflection undertaken by the individual
himself or herself. Thus, according to this perspective, a change in one's thinking or understanding
can itself produce a change in one's physical reality. This approach underlies the growing
"bodymind" approach to medicine and health still commonly termed "psychosomatic."1 It also
underlies ongoing research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory on the
interaction of human consciousness with physical devices, information-gathering processes, and
technological systems.2 It is also characteristic of certain other still-marginal approaches,
sometimes called "postmodern", to the social sciences.3
The second type of challenge to conventional views of social science derives from the
argument that collective consciousness is itself causal in the social world. One of the leading
research programs in this area is the ongoing research undertaken over the past decade by affiliates
of Maharishi International University and others and reported in a series of scholarly papers.4 One
component of this approach is fundamentally theoretical, seeking to develop the theory that the
ultimate stuff of the universe, of reality, is consciousness rather than material reality. This assertion
is based on application of principles derived from quantum physics.5
Another component, conventionally empirical in approach, seeks to show that action carried
on in collective consciousness--by various forms of Transcendental Meditation--influences what we
perceive to be material reality at a distance.
Phenomena of "action at a distance"--a distance, that is, greater than the senses can
consciously experience and react to--have always been problematic to most social scientists.6 They
are, of course, hardly problematic in the realm of the physical sciences, where gravitational
attraction, the paradigmatic case of "action at a distance", is accepted by everyone as a "physical
fact."
The research conducted by the predominantly-MIU-based teams on the effect of various
forms of Transcendental Meditation on the incidence of violence in particular parts of the world has
produced startling findings. In study after study they have found that particular types of meditation
by small groups of trained meditators has resulted in very substantial decreases in acts of violence,
1
See, for one example among many, Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing (New York: Bantam, 1989).
Robert G. Jahn & Brenda J. Dunne, Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).
3
David V. Edwards, “Beyond Postmodernism: Image, Discourse, and Ethics in International Relations,” a paper
prepared for the annual meetings of the International Studies Association, Washington DC, April 1990.
4
Among these are David W. Orme-Johnson, et al., "International Peace Project in the Middle East: The Effects of the
Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field," 32 Journal of Conflict Resolution 4 (December 1988) 776-812; and three
papers presented to the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, Boston, August 1990: John L.
Davies and Charles N. Alexander, "Alleviating Violence in Lebanon Through Enhancing Coherence in Collective
Consciousness;" Orme-Johnson et al., "Reducing International Conflict and Terrorism through the Transcendental
Meditation and TM-Sidhi Program;" and Paul Gelderloos et al., "Improved East-West Relations through Maharishi's
Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi Program."
5
See, for example, Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum: the Compound 'I' (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989);
Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985); and David Bohm, "Postmodern Science and a
Postmodern World" and Willis Harman, "The Postmodern Heresy: Consciousness as Causal", both in David Ray
Griffin, ed., The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1988).
6
For this reason, critics have usually classed them as "paranormal" or even "abnormal", in order to locate them beyond
the realm of serious study. See Jeffrey Mishlove, Psi Development Systems (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1983), a study
of subjective and objective approaches to the analysis of such phenomena.
2
terrorism, and other societally negative phenomena in such places as Lebanon and Israel, and in
U.S.-Soviet relations.7
This research has three important implications for the theory and practice of social science.
First, it clearly poses a direct challenge to the underlying theoretical and research presuppositions
of dominant social science. Second, it opens up new avenues of research which are now being
pursued by a small group of researchers in particular locations at specific times, but could clearly
be the focus of projects attempting replication, expansion, and differentiation in various virtually
limitless promising ways should evaluation of the research record thus far prove to merit this.
Third, however, its potential societal significance is much greater, precisely because it incorporates
what the researchers characterize as "a new technology" which assertedly offers new opportunities
for effective action in social reality by alleviating violent conflict through reducing societal stress
noninvasively.
The claim can be made plausibly that the promised practical societal impact of this research
significantly exceeds that of any other ongoing social-psychological research program. For this
reason alone, the research along with the theory that informs it deserves the most serious evaluative
consideration by the social science community. However, it has thus far been unable to achieve
this consideration because the major social science presentation and publication avenues have been
largely closed to it by their designated "gatekeepers" or "disciplinary mental hygienists"--the
organizers of professional conferences and the editors of major journals.
There is, therefore, a second, meta-level, question raised by this research, beyond that of its
validity. That is the question of how highly unconventional research can receive the exposure
required for it to be evaluated seriously on terms that would allow for the possibility that its novel
assertions and/or assumptions may be correct, however implausible or threatening they are to most
established, "certified", scholars.
(In view of the controversial nature of this research and my position in opposition to that of
these authorities, I should perhaps declare at this point that I have no involvement in this research.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a meditator--Transcendental or otherwise. My knowledge of
and interest in this research stems from my thirty years of academic study, teaching, and writing in
the field of international relations and my attendance at several presentations of this research at the
1989 annual American Political Science Association meetings plus my subsequent conversations
with several of the project leaders and my reading of various of their research reports.)
What, then, should be the response of the social science community to the MIU research
thus far? When the first account was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, it was
accompanied by an unprecedented prefatory "Editor's Comment" that concluded that the hypothesis
and its empirical testing met "the standards to which manuscripts submitted for publication in this
journal are normally subjected." Editor Bruce Russett, a political scientist at Yale, then revealed
that he had also subjected the article to abnormal tests, sending it to twice the usual number of
reviewers. He also appended to it on publication an extended comment by one of the (equally
skeptical) reviewers, who reported that "both the level of exposition and the application of
7
These studies and their findings are reported in the MIU papers cited above.
statistical methods for hypothesis testing are commensurate with this reviewer's standards for
scientific research." In other words, the research had met the evaluative standards of experts in
generally-believed-relevant statistical tests.
This fact shifted attention to the substance--the underlying theory--of the article. Editor
Russett characterized that as "to say the least, unorthodox" and "highly implausible" and the
commenting reviewer asserted that most social scientists would find it "suspect". Nonetheless, the
editor decided to publish the research report with an admonition that others in the field should
attempt to replicate the findings because replication is the ultimate criterion of scientific
acceptability. Thus far, editors have not seen fit to publish subsequent reports concerning a series
of replications by the MIU team, all reporting strong confirmation of the original findings in
different times and places.
Thus, at least until now, there is no methodological reason to dismiss the results. Indeed,
there is virtually no theoretical reason not to take them seriously as matters for further pursuit, for
the most commonly held view in the social sciences today is that the real-world implausibility or
even inaccuracy of theoretical presuppositions and the hypotheses derived from them for testing is
not a criterion for rejection of a theory that produces research results conforming to those derived
hypotheses.8
Thus, this ongoing research project is seen as methodologically sound in the assessment of
those specializing in that realm of evaluation, and theoretically unorthodox or perhaps preposterous
by most of those thus far expressing themselves on it. Does that mean that the scholarly
community in international relations and conflict studies will hereupon attempt to replicate the
research? Clearly, that is unlikely--at least at this time--given what we know about the
unquestioned presuppositions of most others in those fields and their commitments to their own
research programs. What then is to be done?
By its nature, this is research most likely to be undertaken by partisans of the underlying
theory. Indeed, carrying out the research, whether originally or replicatorily, requires large terms
of participants trained in its particular meditation modes and willing to spend many hours over
sustained periods of time meditating. It is, then, of its nature, partisan research. But then, in
generally less obvious but no less powerful ways, so is most other research.9 For this reason, the
burden of replication and further extended testing will inevitably fall to its partisans. This in turn
means that the burden of interesting, let alone impressing, colleagues will also fall to them.
What then can they do to increase the likelihood that their work will be taken more
seriously by skeptical colleagues? Mere replication seems unlikely to convince, especially given
the career investments of the potential audiences in other theoretical perspectives much closer to
8
The basic statement of this position, since endorsed by many social theorists, is that of Milton Friedman in his Essays
in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
9
After all, to mention but one example, most psychological research is so tedious and time-and-effort-intensive that its
subjects can only be dragooned into participating by threats of not passing their introductory psychology classes.
"conventional wisdom" about international and other forms of conflict, let alone the unease with
which many social scientists approach questions of consciousness and meditation.10
A more promising strategy--and one ultimately more defensible in philosophy-of-socialscience terms, would be to adapt the mode of "reflective practice" in their ongoing research.
Nearly everyone grants that social actors must act before knowing and also learn while doing-especially given the relatively primitive state of consensual knowledge about the determinants of
social action and interaction. Donald Schoen, a professor of urban studies and education at MIT,
studying the conduct of professionals such as architects and psychotherapists, terms these people
"reflective practitioners" because "they exhibit a kind of knowing-in-practice, most of which is
tacit," and they engage in "reflection-in-action", modifying their practical theories as experience
suggests.11
We have generally assumed, however, that social scientists, while they study such people
among others, are not--or at least should not be--thmeselves like that. Instead, they should employ
"the scientific method", knowing how to act before acting because they were properly socialized to
derive hypotheses from theory and design research projects to test these hypotheses, and divorcing
their learning from the conduct of everyday life which they study, by means of controlled
experimentation situated as close to a laboratory, or at least laboratory-like conditions, as possible.
This widely held concept of the appropriate practice of social science is, I believe,
fundamentally misguided. It is grounded in an assumption that the social scientist is independent of
the phenomena he or she is studying, having therefore no effect upon them, because, most assume,
social reality is fundamentally determinate--shaped by environing circumstances rather than atleast-somewhat-indeterminate choice by social actors. For reasons of space, I cannot develop the
case against such social science presuppositions here, as I and others have elsewhere.12
Suffice it for present purposes to suggest that the social scientist operates from certain
consciously chosen or unconsciously accepted commitments to a social role in a reality that is
influenced over time in part by the ways his or her theories and those of other social scientists
influence the actors being studied. This therefore requires that social science theorizing have two
essential characteristics--one essential for accuracy, the other for ethical responsibility.
Because social scientists do not yet know the correct theories about social action, their
theorizing must be reflective in the sense that it regularly seeks feedback and modifies its assertions
10
See Julia Day Howell, "The Social Sciences and Mystical Experience," chapter 5 in G. K. Zollschan et al., eds.,
Exploring the Paranormal (Dorset: Prism Press, 1989).
11
Donald A. Schoen, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983),
pp. vii-ix. This approach has its roots in what Schoen and his colleague Chris Argyris call "the theory of action." See
Argyris, "Research as Action: Usable Knowledge for Understanding and Changing the Status Quo", in Nigel Nicholson
et al., eds., The Theory and Practice of Organizational Psychology (New York: Academic Press, 1982). It is also
closely related to the tradition called "action research" in education and management. See, for example, Richard
Winter, Action-Research and the Nature of Social Inquiry: Professional Innovation and Educational Work (Aldershot:
Gower, 1987).
12
David V. Edwards, "Theorizing as Practice: Raising Our Theoretical Consciousness", a paper presented at the 1989
annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, September 1989. See also, among many
others, G.L.S. Shackle, Imagination and the Nature of Choice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979).
in accordance with these "reports from the field". This makes the social scientist a "reflective
practitioner" in Schoen's sense.
But the challenge is even more severe for the social theorist. Because the subject of social
science study is, at least from time to time, subject to influence by the study of it and the discussion
that eventuates from that study, to be accurate over time social science theorizing must be
"reflexive" as well. That is, it must take into account the effects on its subject of the study itself
and the societal absorption of the results, both in research reports and in theorizing, of that study.
Suggestive illustrations of this phenomenon include the self-fulfilling prophecy in sociology,
expectation effects in psychology, and reflexive prediction in economics.13
Because the social scientist's theorizing and research reporting may contribute to the
shaping of subsequent social behavior, the social science theory becomes a factor and the theorist
becomes an actor in social reality. And this effect carries with it an ethical responsibility not yet
generally recognized by most practicing social scientists.
It is by now widely recognized that one's values influence--appropriately enough--one's
selection of the projects one undertakes, but many still believe that the social scientist's ethical
responsibility ends there. They are able to hold to this belief because they still assume social reality
to be "out there" independent of those who study it, just as most of us believe that physical reality is
"out there" independent of us and our perceptual activities.14
The latter view, that of physical reality as independent of the percipient, is no longer
defensible in the face of quantum mechanical theory. Nor, it now seems, is the former view, that of
social reality as similarly independent.15 It is notable that the MIU research under examination is at
least partly grounded in quantum theory.16
If social reality is influenced, at least potentially, by social theory, then the social theorist is
responsible, to some degree, for the consequences of purveying the theory. It will, admittedly, be
difficult to forecast these likely consequences and thus to decide the extent of that responsibility,
especially while our social theory is so underdeveloped. Nonetheless, the ascription of some
degree of responsibility at least invites the social theorist to think more carefully about the kind of
social reality he or she would like to foster, and to adopt theories and where possible design
experiments intended, insofar as one can plausibly forecast, to foster those changes.
This approach to theorizing and theory-testing should be particularly appropriate for the
MIU project participants. Their view is that meditation practiced by small groups of people can
have beneficial effects on social peacefulness. They also believe that underlying universal laws of
human nature prevent the exploitation of these effects to the detriment of society and social groups.
Thus experimental application of these principles and the practice they recommend, even if it is
13
14
See, for example, Russell A. Jones, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977).
For a provocative alternative, see Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1988).
15
See, for example, the books cited above.
16
The other major ground is Vedic philosophy, as they report in Orme-Johnson et al., op. cit., pp.778-779.
intended primarily to test and validate the underlying theory, will tend to improve the quality of
social life in the region.
This beneficial effect is something most social theories cannot hope for, since they tend to
be theories of conflict and violence rather than of their reduction. This characteristic holds even
when social theories are developed by theorists who consider their work "peace research" and are
explicitly committed to creating a more peaceful world, if the theories they develop are theories of
war, arms racing, conflict escalation, intergroup hostility, or other such socially deleterious
phenomena.
The underlying counterproductive dynamic in such cases may have various components.
One is the tendency to legitimate the behavior to which causal efficacy is being attributed by the
very fact of terming it widespread, for example. Another is the tendency to disempower the
audience of theory which fully "explains" socially deleterious behavior by "showing" that there
were causal factors operating to "make" the people behave as they did--something that tends to
deemphasize the role (and thereby the ethical necessity and the practical promise) of individual
responsibility.
Suppose, then, that social theorists were to adopt this mode of "reflexive reflective practice"
as the appropriate way of testing social theory--and also, of course, of redeveloping it. How could
such social theory ever be "confirmed" or "validated"? The very fact that theory articulated--and
tested--in the present influences behavior in the future to some extent suggests that such theory is
unlikely ever to be fully confirmed, even if it is as reflexive (that is, takes into account the likely
future effects on society of its pronouncement and perhaps its testing) as it can be made.
If we conceive of validation or confirmation in absolute terms, then this is correct. But
thoughtful social scientists have long since come to terms with the apparent impossibility of
developing apodictic or certain social theory--some because they believe that social reality is
simply too complex, others because they accept the argument for ineluctable indeterminacy, and
still others because they are impressed by the profound philosophical "problem of induction". Once
we grant that our theories will never be perfectly predictive, the relevant test becomes one best
characterized as pragmatic.
Most have favored correspondence as the vital "truth test" of theory--correspondence with
the social reality being theorized about or predicted. There are two fundamental problems with this
test, beyond the question of determinacy. These problems derive from the fact that the raw
materials for theorizing are always historical--past developments--while the derived hypotheses
generally take the form of predictions about virtually present or future developments. The first
problem is that few now expect the future to be just like the past, so that even fully reliable
historical materials are unlikely to permit development of social theory satisfactorily applicable to
the future. The second problem is that we now realize that all historical accounts are stories-partisan images of a never fully or accurately recapitulatable past--and thus not very reliable for
purposes of social theorizing, even though they are all we have to go on.17
17
For several of the more interesting recent analyses of what might be called "the politics of historiography" see Hans
Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
So what, then, should the correspondence be among? If the theorizing affects the outcome
in ways that require tentativity of formulation, then the correspondence should be sought between
the reflexive prediction and the future development. The appropriate way of conceiving of this is
to think of the test as a pragmatic one. Does the theory work in predicting the coming of a
specified social state given a particular action?
In the case of the research in question, the theory predicts a particular decline in incidents of
violence as a direct consequence of a particular pattern of meditation activity. The prediction is
conditional upon the choice to meditate in the specified ways. The test is the correspondence of the
outcome given the occurrence of the specified action with the previous reflexive prediction.
At this level, which is in fact the mode employed thus far by the MIU researchers, this
seems to be a normal instance of one type of social scientific research. The underlying problem is,
however, twofold. First, there is no control, and second there is no convincing account of the
ascribed causal connection. Critics of the MIU research might suggest randomizing the
meditational events in advance to make the findings more compelling. Some of the participants,
however, find that requirement ethically questionable, because it requires people who believe that
they have an effective way to lessen violence to relent from practicing it from time to time, at the
putative loss of life, merely to convince the skeptics that their theory is correct. These partisan
theory-testers wish, in other words, a mode of confirmation that is ethically responsible. That
mode, I submit, is the "reflexive reflective practice" that I am sketching here. It circumvents the
requirement of control groups given the believed negative real-world consequences of such
research design, while over time and across varying cases giving increasing reason for confidence
in the general theory that informs the practice.
As that confidence grows, it will become possible to write "stories" about the underlying,
assumedly causal, developments that can account for the predicted and observed effects with
increasing plausibility. It should be noted, however, that such plausibility always resides, not in the
world being studied, but in the observers. Plausibility and the stories that are thought to undergird
it are functions of the unquestioned assumptions made by observers, and perhaps the practitioners.
And the strongest conducer to unquestioningness, beyond simple authority, is unsurprisingness.
The informing theory employed in this mode of reflexive reflective practice may be revised
in conjunction with the hypotheses being tested over time in whatever ways seem promising and
then prove productive as the research progresses. Furthermore, this very over-time productivity
will provide the empirical basis for increasing confidence in the ascription of causal power to the
mechanisms employed.
Thus this type of very unorthodox theory and research provides the occasion--as its
potential significance for society provides the strong motivation--for a new approach to social
scientific theory development and testing: reflexive reflective practice.
1989) and Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley:University of
California Press, 1986).