There are no equations for world peace

Copernicus, Galileo and Newton opened the eyes of the West.

We forget how revolutionary their ideas were. For a thousand years, the West believed – in ways we cannot comprehend – that the Christian God ruled the universe. The path to understanding the way the world worked was the path that led to God, and the Bible was the map.

But centuries of painstaking, stumbling attempts at science began to reveal, in irrefutable ways, that the physical world was a law-abiding one. Observation, measurement, experiment and logic – the tools of reason – described the world much more accurately than the Bible’s parables.

By the time of the Enlightenment, the mysteries of physics and chemistry and engineering were being unraveled by the steady progress of what we call hard science. The light of reason erased the shadows of doubt in those fields, and it was only natural to believe that the rules that governed human behavior would soon be revealed as well

Soon, it was thought, the wise would guide us to societies that worked as smoothly as the steam engines that powered ships, and the insights that solved the problems of celestial motion would do the same to human politics.

First came the attempts by Descartes and Leibniz to preserve the status of God and the dictates of Christian morality with theories as elaborate as the Scholastic minutiae of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.

Then the chilling impersonality of Hobbes and Spinoza sought to bring order by removing the spiritual, to great extent, and abandoning humanity to brutalizing nature or grinding inevitability

But the messy lives we live are not governed by logic. Our “sciences” that investigate human behavior are notoriously incomplete and inaccurate. Economists have yet to satisfactorily explain the Great Depression of a century ago, much less the volatility of the modern stock market. Political scientists have no idea how best to govern a complex society.

In short, whatever rules govern human behavior remain opaque, and certainly cannot be manipulated to create a just society. Reason may lead to certain conclusions about human nature, but observation has shown that the behaviors reason and logic suggest are too often replaced by emotional, illogical and eventually self-defeating decisions.

In the end, the doubts about the possibilities of scientific laws applying to human behavior coalesced in the corrosive writing of David Hume, who used reason to show that reason had its limitations, and that to expect a perfect system -- rivaling that of Newton's physics -- to emerge from human confusion was a fool's game.

Even today, in the rush to teach everyone about science, technology, engineering and math, we tend to believe there are mechanical and logical explanations and solutions to the problems of our global society. If only we pursue policy X, poverty will disappear. And surely policy Y will put an end to war.

But even the most casual glance at human history shows otherwise, even after the dawn of the scientific worldview some centuries ago. One would have hoped that the modern world would be a kinder, gentler place than the thousands of years that preceded it, as we know so much more, and can manipulate nature so much more effectively.

We have not, however, learned how to manipulate human nature. We are still the willful, impulsive, emotional and all too irrational beings we have always been – and believing that logic and reason will solve our problems is simply magical thinking.

Copernicus, Galileo and Newton changed the way we look at the world, and gave us hope we could change ourselves – but the reality is that we are still human, and still flawed. There is no perfect system that will solve our problems, no logical wand that will, say, eliminate racism.

Logic and reason work when applied to engineering; they do not work when applied to humanity. The wisdom we need to move the world forward cannot come from science. We must find the empathy and forgiveness for others we so desperately need within ourselves – and it seems we must do so sooner rather than later.

Photo byThomas T for Unsplash