What's Your Alternative to Fundamentalism?

I don’t mean religious fundamentalism, which is easy for non-believers to knock. I mean fundamentalism in the broad sense.

A fundamentalist embraces and builds from first principles, be they moral (this is what we ought to do) or scientific (this is how things are).

With a book like Principles, Ray Dalio is certainly a fundamentalist. But so was Marx. So was Freud. So was Darwin.

Viewed formally, it makes no difference what your principles are, only that you have them.

Fundamentalists include: Physicists who believe in unified theory, historians who think the present is best explained by past events, psychologists who think Hitler just needed some time on the couch, nutritionists who think wellbeing is basically a function of diet, and philosophers.

The problem with any given fundamentalism is that it sees itself (perhaps correctly) as mutually exclusive of other fundamentalisms.

Interdisciplinary debates can sound as confrontational as those between sales and marketing teams.

The analogy to business teams is good for three reasons.

1) How can we treat our own unique knowledge set and methodology through a paradigm of cooperation rather than winner-take-all competition?

2) Most organizations have an executive team and are not totally flat. But if this is so, then are not fundamentalisms inevitably locked in competition to fill the chief executive role? How can their conflict be resolved?

3) What if we evaluated the relative merit of disciplines on the basis of how well their leading proponents could lead an interdisciplinary organization in creating a product of value? Without further information, would you join the company led by the poet, the city planner, the biochemist, the engineer, or the historian?