What if we were in a dark age but didn’t even know it? We thought we were making rapid scientific and technological progress but science and technology were our problems. Science kept us moving backwards, in fundamental ignorance. We were missing some essential piece of knowledge that skewed all of our outcomes and discoveries. All the equations in all of our mathematics and algorithms lacked an essential variable, a necessary bit of data which distorted all our answers and meanings. What if all of our Grand Unified Theories turned out to be Towers of Babel without that essential missing piece?

We cling to science the way our ancestors hung on to superstition, the way medievalists clung to religion. In so doing, we failed to develop an entirely new branch of knowledge that would have radically altered and improved our understanding and our way of life, a branch called science. For centuries, we lived in a dark age, but did not know it.

What if we live in a new dark age, but, for want of vision, for want of imagination, we cannot see how backward we are? We can only see how much progress we’ve made compared to those who once believed in magic. And yet, not knowing the extent of the heavens or the possibility of progress we can yet make, we shroud ourselves in darkness and bind ourselves to old ways of knowing. We chain ourselves to one method, the scientific one. Any kind of knowledge, if relied upon exclusively at the expense of other ways of knowing, leads to stagnation. Its symptom is closed-mindedness. We have, perhaps, reached this apogee in human understanding, when it is time to allow in other, nonscientific modes of understanding.

When a trend culminates, it leads to its opposite. Daoism and its yin and yang implicitly recognize this, as did C. G. Jung in developing the idea of enantiodromia  Although it took a few hundred years, the trend of the medieval religious worldview and its geocentrism pendulated to its opposite: the intellectual rigors of the Enlightenment and the Copernican Principle that we’re not particularly privileged observers. 

Science has produced ‘progress,’ and progress is sinking us. If you think about it, over-reliance on technology has been the direct or indirect cause of many of our woes: overpopulation, Malthusian poverty and hunger, ecological degradation. But we’re so myopically focused on scientism and the benefits of tech that we can’t see them as the problem, and cannot see what we’re missing. We’re unable to see how distorted and one-sided our knowledge had become, just like medieval religious dogma kept us in irons for hundreds of years. Because we may be blinded by our own knowledge and our own hubris, we can’t see how much more we could know through other ways of knowing, which may include new, as-yet-undiscovered disciplines.

It’s as if we have only one tool, and because it’s the only instrument we think we have at our disposal, we use it on everything, whether it works or not. Religious dogma was the hammer of its day. Before that, magic was the instrument deployed to affect change to the environment.

I don’t suggest tossing out science. I encourage a combination of disciplines to yield a new ways of knowing that includes, yet transcends science.

This new knowledge could be a synthesis of science, psychology, metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality. Yet these can be combined and weighted in ways we would consider unique or unusual. They’re not exclusionary, like science is, since it excludes any kind of knowledge that can’t be falsified through its experimental method. They’re inclusionary, like evolution itself, which includes prior knowledge and awareness and yet transcends it. I call this the inclusionary principle. Or perhaps this new consilience is something totally undreamt of. It will make our current theories, understandings and laws seem backward because the assumptions with which we will begin will also be radically different.   

Our world civilization is perched on a precipice. We lack sufficient resources – food, clean water, fuel. We have too many people warring over these resources, and we have the means to destroy ourselves and the whole planet, either through an intentional but miscalculated war, or through an ecological apocalypse. What do we have to lose? What have we to lose by trying something new, especially when the old ways are leading to the very extinction we fear?

© 2025 by Michael C. Just