The monological perspective believes that adequate understanding is obtainable from objective measurement and observation, without the need to engage the object of study in dialogue.

Since the enlightenment, like most of our society, our medical system has been intensely monological. A sufferer is given a tightly circumscribed role in the diagnosis of his own malady. And despite its emphasis on holism and relativism, the new age movement is equally monological. A thousand therapeutic flowers may be encouraged to bloom, but each is monological — a standard technique of diagnosis or therapy, applied in essential independence of the sufferer’s subjective experience.

The optometrist is trained in a technique to combat myopia mainly by measuring spherical and cylindrical focal deviation, and prescribing lenses to correct it. As his patient, you are essentially a passive object of study. You may be strained, tired, or under the weather, and much of your visual deficiency may derive from this temporary cause. But that’s not a problem for your optometrist. With grand assurance, he will lock you permanently into your temporary level of defectiveness. This is tantamount to a physical assault resulting in permanent damage.

How can he live with himself? Professional groupthink, wilful blindness, and above all the monological viewpoint, conspire to mollify his conscience.

This Mr Magoo professionalism is equally evident in our absurdly monological system of criminal law, the so-called adverserial system, which is essentially a moderated contest between two objective theories, of guilt and of innocence, neither of which are meant to be based on an understanding of the mindset of the accused.

But surely the New Age movement save us from the dispassionate stare of the monological eye? Suppose you’re an ex-athlete, like many of them, as strong as you are inflexible. You understandably think that yoga will fix you. You join a class and are asked to perform a forward bend. This is an efficient bend for most people because in a single pose, it stretches the entire underside of your leg. However, not for you. You’re sure to feel only an intense stretching pain immediately behind your knees. knees. That’s because the hamstring muscles spanning the underside of your thighs are so taut that they don’t stretch at all. Instead all the tension is felt in the ligaments around and behind the knee. The yoga instructor will advise you to keep stretching this way day after day. You will not improve your flexibhility and you will likely damage your ligaments.

What you need are hamstring-specific techniques. But determining this requires dialogue. It requires the yoga instructor to ask you what you feel, and listen to your response. But they aren’t trained to do that. They’re trained in grand monological fashion to tell you what you feel. The New Age ideology may encourage you to feel the posture and listen to your body. But, critically, the instructor won’t ask you what you then hear.