Tom Facchine – al-Raghib al-Isfahani #72 – The Monocrop of Western Academy

			then are also Hani draws our attention to the importance of not over specializing we it's important
to be well rounded and we can really take a cautionary tale from Western scholarship and this
because Western scholarship before the whole move to interdisciplinary work and things like that had
fractured so much that the historians don't talk to the political theorists and the political
theorists don't talk to the economists and the economists don't talk to the psychologists and all
these sorts of things. So you end up with absurdities. Honestly, you do, you end up with complete
absurdities. Most historians and the Western Academy are very weak, theoretically, they don't have a
		

			sufficient where a requisite understanding of political theory or of human psychology. And so the
historian inevitably ends up making sort of assumptions or claims about how human psychology works
in their accounting for well, this event happened because of this, or because of that, or what were
the causes that took place. Right? And the same thing with economists, economists are probably even
worse, where they're talking about consuming and you know, consumption and production and supply and
demand and and how do consumers behave? And yet, most of them are woefully ignorant of psychology,
right? And how, how humans are actually motivated. And so you have some absurdities, like in
		

			microeconomics, and they say, Well, we're starting out from the premise that all individuals are
rational or make rational choices. It's like you must live under a rock, because that's not true.
People don't make decisions rationally. They make decisions emotionally. And so this is partly a
product, you get these absurdities from the fracturing and the over specialization, right? So
Robert, also, he wants us to avoid the same thing. And it's a testament to the soundness and the
holistic nature of Islamic scholarship that you really didn't find a whole lot of that if you go to
the Islamic scholars like the use of Imam Akhmed, and these folks who are specialists, and Hadith
		

			and specialists and FIP, and you have many people who are specialists in Koran and specialists in
the UK or something like that, you you find polymaths you find people who are extremely well rounded
in multiple different spheres, a Shafi writing poetry, right? You have got countless examples of the
sorts of things so dogmas for honey wants us to understand that being well rounded is extremely
important, why there are several reasons one is that you need to be able to relate to other people,
if all you know is one thing, then you're going to have an extremely, extremely limited ability to
relate to other people and to explain things to them. Right? If the only thing that I know is
		

			medicine, I get up and give a clip every Friday, and the only analogies or illustrations that I can
use come from medicine, well, how am I going to relate to the carpenter? How am I going to relate to
the Uber driver? How am I going to relate to the student? How am I going to relate to these
different people and communicate my message I'm not going to be able to write I'm also not going to
be able not just about communicate, but I'm not going to be able to analyze things from different
angles, right, I'm only going to be able to see things from one perspective, we saw this actually
with the with the pandemic, you know, we had a lot of doctors that approach things from the the
		

			science or the medicinal science sort of point of view, and for them, and they follow the studies
and they're like, I don't understand what's the big deal. It's like this is very clear, we should be
doing X, Y and Z, we should be doing this, that and the third, but they didn't understand politics,
or they didn't understand how the pandemic was politicized, or they didn't understand the social
aspect and how things got loaded in with different symbolic meanings. And so it became a whole
virtue signaling thing. Well, are you left? Or are you right? And which tribe Do you belong to, and
these sorts of things. And so people were making decisions based off of those political or social
		

			concerns, and they were making decisions based off of medical concerns or scientific concerns, you
know, we say in English, if you only have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail, right? If you
only have one tool or one lens to look through things, then you're only going to be able to see
things from a very, very limited perspective, and you're not going to be able to even
hermeneutically Understand how other people are making sense of things. We can bring an example or
an analogy from the from the natural world, right? Allah subhanaw taala created things in a system
of biodiversity, right? And so our knowledge should be like that biodiversity, right, you can
		

			compare two sorts of fields, you have one field, which is sort of we go back to indigenous sort of
planting and agricultural techniques, you have the three sisters, you have co cropping, right, you
have different things that are growing together, you've got cover crops, and you've got food crops,
and you've got different sorts of things that are doing all different types of things for the soil,
for the insects, for the birds, everything has something within that piece of land, right? Humans
can go and benefit from that land. You've got something for the birds and something for the
squirrels and something for the bugs and something for the earthworms. And some Everybody's got
		

			something there. Okay, well, what if we go the whole modern agricultural route and we make it just a
mono crop, just corn, as far as the eye can see, okay, what we're doing is we're really putting all
of our eggs in one basket. Now, the things that survive off of the corn, they come to that one
square acre, or that one square mile, and everything else that needs something else, it's useless to
them, right? They don't there's certain bugs that won't go there. There's certain birds that won't
go there. There's certain animals that won't go there. It's dead to them. Right. And so this can't
be how our knowledge is right? Those actual by the way those mono crops are extremely weak when it
		

			comes to being able to be
		

			drought resistant or being able to be flood resistant. Or when it comes to, you know, what you
actually find is you find extremes, right, the bugs will be, you know, extreme in one year, like too
many. And then too many of this type of bug and too few of this type of type of bug, everything's
out of balance, right. So this is a metaphor for our or an analogy for our knowledge, right, you
can't just have one type of knowledge, you need to be balanced, you need to have a diversity of
things that you are aware of, and perspectives that you can take on because it will not only enrich
your knowledge, it will make your knowledge more beneficial to others. So now I'm gonna come off to
		

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