What is consilience?

Consilience is how separate subjects grow together over time. For example, 150 years ago, physics, chemistry, and biology were separate subjects. Now they overlap. When biochemists and biophysicists research living systems, it is often necessary to do so at the level of atoms, where physics, chemistry, and biology are indivisible.

The term “consilience” was invented in 1840 by the polymath William Whewell, who also invented the word “scientist.” He described consilience as the “jumping together of facts altogether different.” It is how an idea can connect observations that were previously unrelated. For instance, prior to Newton, lots of people had observed the motion of the planets and had seen apples falling from trees, but the events would have been viewed as entirely unrelated. The idea of “gravity,” as conceived by Newton, linked these observations such that both could be explained as being caused by the same force.

Edward O. Wilson used the term in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Arguably one of the finest living scientist-writers, Wilson described how we are on the verge of a revolution where art and science are growing together. “The grand synthesis could come together quickly,” he wrote, “or it could come together with painful slowness over a period of decades.”

When he wrote the book, Wilson assumed that the revolution would take place because science would force us, as a species, to confront the realities of the genetic origins of our behavior. Consilience is taking place quickly, but not for the reason Wilson conceived. Advances in science are contributing to consilience, but more significant are the developments in other subjects such as mathematics and linguistics, which are connecting together and forcing us to acknowledge that science is just one aspect of our culture and not true in any absolute sense.

Now we can see why science has been incapable of answering basic questions about the human mind, and yet for its practitioners its approaches have proven so compelling.

Why is persuasion significant?

The subject of persuasion is significant because it relates to every aspect of communication and what we believe to be true – or not. When something is explained what makes the explanation believable? Why do we consider that some things are “common sense” even though they cannot be proven? Persuasion also relates to scientific ideas that are well accepted but not absolutely correct. And it links with the feelings we experience when we read a well-crafted novel and become immersed in a world that feels quite real – but is invented.

Our ability to persuade contributes to the joys and frustrations of life, affecting our relationships and our jobs. Persuasion is central to business because managers need to get results: they have to be able to persuade people to do the things that are needed to raise money, build teams, and sell stuff.

The subject has far-reaching significance because it helps explain everything that people believe – or do not believe – and how their views can be changed. It therefore touches on perennially controversial subjects such as religion, politics, nationalism, and propaganda.

Why is the book called Consilience and the Business
of Persuasion?

The title Consilience and the Business of Persuasion describes two domains that have traditionally been regarded as unrelated. Consilience relates to the nature of knowledge and how it interconnects. The business of persuasion relates to the commercial aspects of selling and leadership.

I am interested in the latter because it is the field I work in. At the start of my career I joined the marketing department of a multinational food company. Since that time, I have often been perplexed by the shakiness of much of the theory that the practice of marketing is based on. What marketing professionals do can make the difference between a company succeeding or failing, and yet there is little agreement on some of the most basic questions about marketing practice. For instance, what is the relationship between selling and marketing? Is it fair to categorize marketing as “persuasion”? How does advertising work? Basic questions maybe, but no two marketing professionals will answer these questions in the same way.

Marketing is, by its nature, integrative, or should be, and yet throughout my career I have been mystified by the gap between the skills used by artists and writers and the skills used by professional managers. Business schools tend to gravitate to logical ways of thinking and then attempt to apply them to the management of people. For the most part they overlook the role of the arts and the significance of belief.

In trying to understand the function of marketing, I found it necessary to go beyond the explanations found in business literature. To uncover the connection between logic, art, and belief, it is necessary to see them from a historical perspective. While art, science, and religion are now viewed as being different and irreconcilable, you only need go back some 300 years to find they were once considered to be interrelated. Using the long lens of history, as well as the microscopic lens of science, it becomes possible to understand human nature in ways that are vastly more sophisticated than before.

Consilience and the Business of Persuasion explains how the steadily filling reservoirs of knowledge have reached the point where they can no longer be contained by the labels we have grown accustomed to. The dam has reached bursting point. Now we can explain how human knowledge and the nature of persuasion are interrelated.

How are persuasion and consilience related?

Traditional views about persuasion and propaganda have been based on scientific approaches. Consequently, they have tended to be myopic and biased towards the culture of science.

The culture of science is problematic because it is founded on a belief that objectivity is possible. This belief provides a solid enough foundation when it is used to investigate non-living systems, but in the study of the human brain the belief in objectivity prevents us from seeing that the brain is not a device designed to think using reason. There is a lot more to human culture than reason and rationality.

To comprehend how the brain works, no matter how cursorily, it is necessary to grasp the nature of understanding, which can only be achieved by viewing human culture in its broadest, most inclusive context and stepping back from the concrete concepts that the technically-minded find reassuring.

The brain cannot be understood by solely scientific perspectives and the same is the case with marketing. It is impossible to comprehend marketing by adopting a purely technical orientation. The evidence is that if you try, the results are likly to be mediocre. In order to get good results, it is nessesary to deal with aspects human existance that include vision, trust and value. Contrary to the managment mantra of, "If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it," the concepts of vision, value and trust are critical aspects of business and yet they are impossible to define and quantify with absolute certainty.

For communications to work, they need to be believed, but facts, even if they are absolutely correct, are singularly ineffective at persuading people to change their behavior. So while science is grounded in a belief in the supremacy of intellectual reason, the realities of markets show something different. They show that when it comes to getting people to change their behavior, a well-expressed idea is more effective than a list of facts.

Science is grounded on the idea of facts, but facts do not carry the authority of facts unless they are believed. What we need to understand is that a belief in scientific facts is an aspect of the culture of science. Ironically, however, the genealogy of science can be traced back to the humanities and religion – where metaphors and stories are the currency – just as they need to be in effective marketing.

Who should read Consilience and the Business
of Persuasion?

You should read this book if you want a deeper understanding of human behavior and motivation. It is written for communications professionals, business leaders, consultants, and experts who deal with people and aspire to be at the leading edge of their field.

This book is written for those without specialized knowledge; however, the subject is unusually challenging for two reasons. First the subjects covered are diverse relating to science, as well as the arts and culture. Most difficult is that it is necessary to penetrate beneath the veneer of popular science and appreciate the significance of some of the details of the brain’s anatomy and chemistry. Second, in order to understand the connections between the brain and common ideas about human nature, we are forced to challenge notions that everyone believes are true – ideas that are “common sense.”

The book will appeal to those who have wide-ranging interests and wish to understand how diverse fields connect together – and how the results enable us to see ourselves in a new and more realistic light.

Does the book really have to be challenging to
make the point?

Consilience is written for practitioners who have come to realize that human culture is complex. One-size-fits-all solutions do not exist. It is impossible to understand people’s behavior by adopting the perspective of any one specialized discipline.

Traditional explanations tend to be religious or scientific or artistic. While it is simpler to adopt a singular approach, it misses the point that the ideas in which we believe are the result of biological and cultural processes that do not conform to these categories, familiar as they are.

As a marketer, I am acutely aware that the easiest way to write a business bestseller is to pick a focused issue and then “solve” it using compelling anecdotes. The best way to write a science bestseller is to pick a subject that readers are already partly familiar with and then report snippets of scientific findings that confirm what they already believe.

Neither of these approaches helps us answer the deeper questions involved in understanding human behavior. We have to adopt new perspectives and see how traditional approaches are based on ideas that have come to us through history and are so deeply embedded in our culture that they are rarely, if ever, questioned.

It turns out that much of what scientists have been finding is in conflict with our long held beliefs about our culture. Therefore, the entire subject is unavoidably challenging.

Sure, we all love anecdotes and snappy stories, especially if they are self-affirming. But after a while they can get tedious and we feel the need to ask deeper questions about the principles that underlie the anecdotes and stories.

The deepest questions are those that are often answered by religion, questions such as: Why are we here? And: What happens to us when we die? Scientists also try to answer these same questions, but in different ways. So if we are interested in why people believe in ideas that are religious or scientific, we need to delve beneath the surface and find the underlying principles.

What is Primal Marketing?

Primal Marketing: The Science of People and Persuasion was the working title I used in early drafts of the book. The word “primal” was probably not appropriate in the first place because it conjures up images of gorillas and hoary old discussions about nature versus nurture.

Then, in 2002, Daniel Goleman published a book called Primal Leadership. Given that I argue against the simplistic binary characterizations that underlie Goleman’s theories, it became evident I was going to have to pick a word other than “primal.”

He argues that human nature can be divided into emotion and reason, or EQ and IQ. This idea is generally believed for a couple of reasons. First, it fits with our common sense, in that we can think “rationally” or we can become “emotional.” Second, the idea has been part of popular scientific accounts of the human brain since the 1960s when it was conjectured that we have an emotional “reptilian brain” that is held in check by a “higher brain.”

Like so many other commonly-believed theories about human nature, this one has never been corroborated by the findings of modern researchers. The division between emotion and reason is simply not mirrored in any kind of broad polarity in the mechanisms found in the brain. Two leading neuroanatomists, Butler and Hodos, in an atlas of brain anatomy state, “The extensive body of work in comparative neurobiology over the past three decades unequivocally contradicts this theory.”

The categorization of “emotional” is based on the extrapolation of certain physiological responses, especially those that relate to fear, aggression, and sex. These types of responses are not much different to others like thirst and hunger, and yet few people would consider hunger as “emotional.”

And so Primal Marketing bit the dust and I borrowed the more unusual and appropriate word “consilience” from William Whewell and Edward O. Wilson.

How can I get a copy of the book?

You’ll have to wait until it is published.

The book has taken longer to write than I had planned. Years longer. There are lots of reasons for this. One is that I want to explain a diversity of concepts with a singular focus, and I want to do it clearly. Another is that I keep finding new perspectives for approaching the matter. And each time I set off through the forest, I get lost, take detours, and discover new ideas. Only afterwards do I realize that there is a far more direct path.

If all goes well, the book will be published before the end of 2006.