Reductionism is the tendency to explain complex phenomena as masked examples of simpler phenomena, as is the tendency to reduce something that is higher to something that is lower.
The attempt to interpret the inquiry for truth not as something else but as a thirst for power is also seen as an example of reductionism.
Reductionism is a typical technique of ideologues that strive to convince others that they know a significant truth about the world. Most often, ideologues use reductionism in order to pinpoint a single agent, guilty of one’s misfortunes in life. As human nature is to protect one’s self from one’s own mistakes, the ideologues could easily reduce our inner tension by pointing to an outside perpetrator for our unhappiness.
It is not that Germany lost the war, the Nazis claimed, it is that the Jews are stealing “our jobs, our money, our power”. It is not you were lazy (or had bad luck in life, because this is as well a significant factor for success), it is that the Kulaks exploited you to become rich, the communists argued.
Reductionism, as hard as it is, we ought to avoid.
Michel Foucault argued that everything people do, they do it for power. And even engaging with someone ambitious, is either giving them power (thus, taking it away from you) or giving power to you (thus, taking it away from them). Karl Marx believed that all the world history was the history of class wars, where the rich actively tried not to stay rich but to stop the poor become rich. The feminists claim that all of world history is the power struggle of the sexes, where men try to diminish and overpower women. Post-modernists, on the other hand, reduce the world to taxonomic “boxes”, where everyone is first and foremost an agent of their group. The latter means that if you are white(in the USA), no matter what struggles you might have overcome, you are, by definition – an oppressor, and if you are black(in the USA), no matter what successes you might have reached, you are, by definition, oppressed.
Naturally, all of these claims do have some merit. Some of the people’s interactions do have to do with power, some men do punish women for being women (and vice-versa), some business owners do exploit their employees.
But:
- This is not all that happens.
- Everything has a reason.
- People are not simply their group identity.
On the contrary, each and every person that you know or don’t know has a life as vivid and as filled with emotions as you. They have their reasons to do the thing that they do and to make the choices that they make. Whether someone is black or white, woman or man, Christian or Muslim is not at all what they are. It is but a part of their identity. What is more, the most significant elements of people’s identity come from the way they were raised and their schooling.
Related:
