Localised generality
A localised generality is what happens when a pattern or 'whole' only really exists in a specific, crooked instance, rather than as a clean law floating above the world. In Mind the Gaps Phil Smith uses the cosmic example of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): a faint radiation “rippling through our bodies” all the time, an “imprecise but meaningful map of the universe” passing through every atom, rock and person. Every body is, in that sense, “a localised generality of the entire cosmos.” But there is a gap: the CMB tells us something about the state of the universe moments after it began and “NOTHING about before or at the point of initiation,” leaving the origin occult. In the companion essay Mind the Fields, he also explores William Clifford’s term ‘mind-stuff’ (used by him to describe the simple elements of which consciousness is composed), quantum theory and the thorny question: ‘how can the subjective experiences of consciousness (qualia) arise from the otherwise non-conscious physical components that make up our brains?’. Here and around here it is that the familiar modern conundrum sits. Many people want, quite properly, to honour the rigour of science – controlled trials, falsifiability, statistical caution – and yet are pulled by experience towards phenomena that do not fit comfortably inside that frame: forms of energy‑based healing such as shiatsu, uncanny premonitions, astrological patterns that seem to line up, homoeopathy that works, guidance from the I Ching, moments of synchronicity that feel more than random, Hellinger's constellations work. These are quickly labelled ‘pseudoscience’ from one side and treated as unquestionable truth from the other. Localised generality offers a third stance: to treat such experiences as real, situated events in a broken universe, without inflating them into universal laws or dismissing them as delusion. Smith’s argument, both here and in Mind the Fields, is that our cosmos and cultures are “uneven and holey”, full of gaps “small, discrete and scattered unevenly throughout the entire cosmos” that “drive everything”. Generalities – the system, history, human nature, even 'science' in the abstract – are always stitched together after the fact, out of partial measurements and selective attention. The "goblin work" is done in the gaps: what is noticed or not, which anomalies are thrown away, which coincidences are allowed to matter. In this sense, an accurate experiment, a disturbing dream, a tarot spread, a river in spate and a political uprising are all localised generalities: each is a small, contingent configuration in which wider patterns briefly show themselves without becoming tidy rules. Mind the Gaps insists that even our hardest science cannot escape this structure. Cosmology depends on human interpretation of instruments; quantum cuts make hyper‑empiricism impossible; “attempting to fill the gap of the occult with some big generality like a cosmic God, or Nihilism or Rationalism, or Gaia… is to traduce the cosmos’s essential quality of Occult Mystery”. At the same time, he refuses the supernatural escape hatch: if a ghost, a vision, a 'field' of healing or a premonition is real at all, then it belongs to nature, not outside it. The category 'supernatural' is surplus. The question becomes not “is it scientific or not?” but “what kind of localised generality is this, and how far can we responsibly let it generalise?” Horatio Morpurgo’s A Guide to the Unconformity offers a variation on the same theme. Lyme Bay is not treated as a generic marine ecosystem but as one coastal “somewhere” in which navigation instruments, imperial ventures, Victorian sea‑shore collecting, industrial scallop dredging, marine conservation and personal activism tangle together. The geological unconformity – the missing strata – and the astrolabe pulled from the seabed function as localised generalities too: specific objects that carry a vast pattern of global history, climate, technology and imagination without collapsing into a simple story. They also expose how much of that pattern has been held in place by what is not recorded, not remembered, not mapped. Taken together, the essays offer a way to stand with one foot in empirical rigour and the other in the unruly world of embodied, symbolic and 'energetic' experience. Localised generality allows that a shiatsu session, an accurate astrological reading or a run of meaningful coincidences can be taken seriously as events in a real, gappy cosmos, without claiming that they reveal timeless laws or that “anything goes”. It also insists that laboratory results and satellite maps are themselves local constructions, dependent on gaps, instruments and interpretative habits. Both science and noetics appear as different ways of working with a universe that “does not join up everywhere”, where “generalities are only ever localised” and “gaps… are essential parts of what is”. Rather than asking which side is right – the sceptic or the intuitive, the Newtonian or the New Age – localised generality asks what sort of responsibility is owed to each kind of pattern as it appears: how far it may legitimately be extended, when it must be held as local, and how to stay alert to the gaps and unconformities that prevent any worldview, scientific or esoteric, from becoming a final, gap‑free system. References: Phil Smith: Mind the Gaps Phil Smith: Mind the Fields Horatio Morpurgo: A Guide to the Unconformity For a non-dualist view, see Julian Carlyon: One Earth: Three Worlds |
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