Parallel Ontologies

Lightbulb moments have reshaped the way that I see the world time and time again and Harvard has proven to be fruitful terrain for such incandescences. Several have been direct consequences of interactions with and assignments from Professor Swayam Bagaria, who might be the smartest man you’ll ever meet, and I’m not just saying that because he is one of my examiners. But by far the most significant of these step-function mental schema remappings was triggered while reading an article in a book titled Morality and Health discussing “The Causal Ontologies of Suffering.”²⁵

A causal ontology in the context of this reading is a system of cause and effect that one might use to explain suffering, especially a medical or psychological ailment. One causal ontology, the norm in Western science and medicine, is the “biomedical” by which we explain diseases, mental or physical, through “genetic defects, hormone imbalances, organ pathologies, and physical impairments.”²⁶ Another one is “interpersonal causal ontology,” which would include sorcery and witchcraft, common folk beliefs throughout the world, and especially relevant in the context of India, the main focus of this paper.²⁷ There are many more: “sociopolitical,” products of systems of oppression, a common discussion theme at Harvard these days; “psychological,” think Freud along the lines of “unfulfilled desires and frustrated intentions;” and “astrophysical,” as above, so below; a resurgent ontology in the West.²⁸ The big insight for me was not that these exist, but that they exist in parallel.

Per Professor Bagaria, a notable feature of Hindu action and belief as it pertains to medicine is the ability to hold multiple ontologies as valid in parallel.²⁹ Someone might go to an allopathic medical doctor, but also go to an ayurvedic doctor, an astrologer, and a guru to heal their ailment. One ontology does not need to contradict the other. Our Western tendency seems to be to choose or privilege one ontology over others, myopically focusing on one reality, when really there are so many. The Hindu stance, to me, is liberating, and I think more reflective of our whole reality. It may be that we can reduce everything to systems of oppression. But we might be able to reduce everything to matters of faith, or gender, or sex, or virtue. There is perhaps no limit to how many ontologies can exist in parallel while all being valid and explanatory. One way to think of our coming struggles as humanity is a clash of ontologies.

Everybody has their own beliefs. Some value democracy, others value a certain religious tradition. Some are conservative, others progressive, others indigenous. A liberal might be an economic conservative to some. Some believe in the transcendent, others are firmly grounded in the immanent. We have atheists who believe theists are fools and theists who believe atheists are lost. For as long as we continue to believe that our reality is the only one, we will fight, and humanity’s future will be relegated to an ugly power struggle. We must start accepting that there are other truths besides our own and that parallel ontologies can each be fully explanatory without any inherent contradiction in that.