In other papers across this website we have argued the need for a fifth wave of public health, one which is informed by our modernist past but not hidebound by it. The key, we think, will be to transcend but include the modernist mindset or worldview. This is not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater – we still need modernist insights, derived from reductionist thinking, because they are valuable in many situations. Reductionism has helped us to understand a great deal about the natural world. There are numerous ways in which reductionism (breaking down a phenomenon into its constituent parts) has proved to be an effective tool for creating understanding which, in turn, has led to interventions that improve lives. But reductionism cannot describe complex phenomena. Nor can it describe the compexity of subjective experience. This is because a complex system is always more than the sum of its parts and thus cannot be explained by reducing it to individual constituents.
In this paper we rehearse just a few of the new forms of knowledge and thinking which have profoundly challenged existing understandings. First, though, it may be worth describing the ways in which our views of the world are formed and the powerful influence this can exert.
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