Multidisciplinarity has always been my passion. During my long years of scientific training, I could never settle for the tools offered by each specific social discipline I encountered. I perceived that the mindset developed within university departments somehow did not open me up to understanding the world in its complexity (and, at the same time, simplicity), but rather confined my thinking to tracks that promised to produce controllable and actionable knowledge outputs, but also very narrow in their epistemological and ethical value. Philosophers speak of “reductionism,” psychologists of “tunnel vision”: instead of keeping our eyes wide open to the rainbow of the world, we conform to believing that the world is only one color. Instead of embarking on the exploration of the sea, we prefer to continue refining swimming techniques in the pool, ending up confusing one for the other.
If it were up to me, I would retain the empirical method of science (it is greatly needed!), but I would emancipate myself from disciplines. After all, disciplines erect boundaries that simply do not exist in the real world; they are artificial, invented, convenient boundaries, akin to political borders between countries. The word itself says it: disciplines serve to “discipline” the world, that is, to give the world an order starting from certain assumptions, not to understand it. When the goal is to discipline rather than understand, the risk is to stop producing (universal) ideas and start producing (partisan) ideologies. This is exactly what happens every day and at all levels, in scientific journals, as well as in the media, or at the bar with friends. Listen to what The Economist states, a publication that wholeheartedly embraces a specific disciplinary ideology, that of economics: “Cities are the economic engine of the world, and the bigger they are, the better” [from the article “Jam Today” of February 27]. This is a categorical statement that, instead of creating understanding of what cities really are, imposes the economist’s point of view, who, confined within his discipline, can no longer see… the obvious. The unchecked growth of cities could also generate environmental and social problems, and who knows how many other consequences at other levels. The disciplinary perspective should therefore be proposed as a viewpoint that has its time and place, rather than an assumption to confirm at all costs, if not the ultimate truth to which we should all conform. Otherwise, we cause harm: we literally distort the reality of facts, inevitably creating divisions, conflicts, factions, theories, and schools of thought.
It is no coincidence that I offer an example from The Economist, because the mono-thought of economics is the one that most dominates, or rather, disciplines, today’s world. It certainly made sense at one time, but at this stage of humanity’s development, many of us think it is essential to remove the blinders to generate evolutionary ideas. The cover of the same Economist from February 20 is titled “The World Economy. Are We Out of Ammunition?”, referring to the problem that global economic production is not growing despite central banks having played all their available cards to make this happen. What do we do if reality no longer allows itself to be disciplined? The same economic discipline is destined to collapse like a house of cards, under the weight of unforeseen consequences that the same mono-thought had generated. The economics we know has had its time: it has served us for many things, but now it no longer serves us. It was an achievement of human ingenuity, but the glory of the past now hinders us from facing the present.
Last week at the Golinelli Foundation in Bologna, we inaugurated the “Icarus” project, a path through which students from different university faculties are called to collaborate on real problems posed to them by companies. To introduce the theme of multidisciplinarity, I propose to the students a reflection on listening: it will not be about imposing our disciplinary viewpoints on companies, but rather about listening to their needs. In the most scientific way possible, that is, without filters or prejudices, but rather empirically and attentively, each helped by their own cultural, specialist, and human sensitivity. Listening will open the doors of understanding for us, and in turn, understanding will lead us to intuit the optimal thing to do.
The future of scientific disciplines and the contribution they can make to our society, in my opinion, passes through experiments like the one promoted by the Golinelli Foundation. It is important that the production of knowledge is not based solely within and for the disciplines, lest it lose its scientific and truthful nature. To be such, research must be completely free and disinterested, with the sole aim of understanding, and thus loving even more the world around us. To date, however, disciplines seem oriented towards another goal: to make the world more intelligible in a reductionist way, so as to generate ideologies and technologies capable, precisely, of disciplining it. All this may have been indispensable in the past, but at this stage of our evolution, we are increasingly realizing the limits of confining the world into “boxes” that force us to take positions, and of which we end up becoming slaves. True understanding, on the other hand, is unique and equal for all, because unique are the laws of our nature that unite us and make us free. True understanding is not afraid to reach the essence of love.