LOCALISED GENERALITY

Entry 104 in the Triarchy Press Idioticon

104. Localised Generality

If you, like me, ever struggle to hold the line between science and so-called ‘pseudoscience’ — or even to know where to draw the line…

If you do service to the laws of physics but find that something else just works (what’s your tipple: dowsing, homoeopathy, synchronicity, shiatsu, reflexology, past lives, NLP…?)

If you’re untouched by all this New-Age mumbo-jumbo but are staggered by the extent to which these ideas have taken root in contemporary society (or never submitted to the Enlightenment in the first place)…

This may be the Idioticon entry for you.

LOCALISED GENERALITY

A localised generality is what happens when a pattern or ‘whole’ only really exists in a specific, crooked instance, rather than as a clean ‘law of nature’ floating above the world. In Mind the Gaps Phil Smith uses the example of the Cosmic Microwave Background: a faint radiation “rippling through our bodies” all the time, an “imprecise but meaningful map of the universe” passing through every atom, rock and person. Every body is, in that sense, “a localised generality of the entire cosmos”.

In the companion essay Mind the Fields, he also explores the term ‘mind-stuff’ (coined by William Clifford to describe the simple elements of which consciousness is composed), quantum theory and the thorny question: ‘how can the subjective experiences of consciousness (qualia) arise from the otherwise non-conscious physical components that make up our brains?’.

Here and around here it is that the familiar modern conundrum sits. Many people want to honour the rigour of science – controlled trials, falsifiability, statistical caution – and yet are pulled by experience towards phenomena that do not fit comfortably inside that frame:

• forms of energy‑based healing

• the uncanny in its many forms

• spiral dynamics

• premonitions

• constellations work

• astrological patterns that seem to line up

• homoeopathy

• the power of prayer

• guidance from the I Ching

• moments of synchronicity that feel more than random.

These are quickly labelled ‘pseudoscience’ from one side and treated as unquestionable lived experience by the other. Localised generality offers a third stance: to treat such experiences as real, situated events in a broken universe, without inflating them into universal laws or dismissing them as delusion.

Smith’s argument is that our cosmos and cultures are “uneven and holey”, full of gaps “small, discrete and scattered unevenly throughout the entire cosmos” that drive everything. Generalities – the system, history, human nature, even science in the abstract – are always stitched together after the fact, out of partial measurements and selective attention. The “goblin work” is done in the gaps: what is noticed or not, which anomalies are thrown away, which coincidences are allowed to matter. In this sense, an accurate experiment, a disturbing dream, a tarot spread, a river in spate and a political uprising are all localised generalities: each is a small, contingent configuration in which wider patterns briefly show themselves without becoming tidy rules.​

Mind the Gaps insists that even our hardest science cannot escape this structure and explains why. Mind the Fields helps with some of the familiar tussles about Quantum Physics. I’ve read them both half a dozen times and, in a way I can still only dimly understand, they are loosening a knot that I’ve been worrying at since my mother first baffled her seven-year-old son with ideas that seemed to be both true and nonsense at the same time.

Taken together, the essays offer a way to stand with one foot in empirical rigour and the other in the unruly world of embodied, symbolic, esoteric and ‘energetic’ experience.

If you’re interested, you can read the full Idioticon entry and find the books referenced here: Localised Generality

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