Morin notes that our current trend of hyper-specialization keeps us from seeing the global (which it fragments) and the essential (which it obscures). According to Morin, essential problems are never fragmented; yet, tackling global problems has never been more essential.
Our general culture strongly leans toward abstracting all ideas and information and seeing them in the absence of context. Morin states that disciplinary scientific and technological culture fragments, disjoins and compartmentalizes knowledge , "making it increasingly difficult to place it in context. Cutting thought up into disciplines makes us unable to grasp 'that which is woven together' or, in the original meaning of the term, the complex."
Reduction and disjunction
Morin writes:
Up to the mid-twentieth century, most scientific disciplines obeyed the principle of reduction of the knowledge of a whole to knowledge of its parts, as if the organization of an entity did not produce new [emergent] qualities or properties with respect to the parts taken in isolation.
The principle of reduction inevitably results in reduction of the complex to the simple. It applies to living human complexities the mechanical determinist logic of artificial machines. And it may obscure the truth and eliminate all elements that cannot be measured and quantified, taking the human out of what is human, the passions, emotions, sorrows and joys. Further, when the principle of reduction is applied in strict obedience to the determinist postulate it obscures what is fortuitous, new, inventive.
Because we were taught to separate, compartmentalize and isolate learning instead of making connections, the whole of our knowledge forms an unintelligible puzzle. Interactions, retroactions, and complexities, lost in the no-man's land between different disciplines, become invisible. The major human problems disappear, obscured by specific technical problems. The inability to organize scattered compartmentalized learning leads to atrophy of the natural mental disposition [to see things in context].
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Morin writes: "Fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanized, disjunctive, reductionist intelligence breaks the 'world-complex' into disjointed fragments, fractures problems, separates what is connected, makes the multidimensional unidimensional. This intelligence is nearsighted and often goes blind."
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