Modernity
The dominant thought-forms of modern life derive from technological language. Technological language is based on the findings of science, and is used to predict and control reality. The curious thing is that it does not always take a great deal of scientific knowledge to facilitate a great deal of control of reality. Those who ran concentration camps, like those who now run prisons, knew almost nothing about the inmates, but they could predict and control their behavior, and manipulate it totally, on the basis of observations that any child might make: people like to eat, and they fear pain. Little more than that. Guards in a modern prison need not know the people they imprison. Technology is like that. It can predict and control on the basis of carefully measured regularities, and a little planning, but it does not need to understand what it measures. Physicists who tell us about quantum reality are quite clear about this.
Modern western science and technology are based on a materialist metaphysics. Up until recently, the fact that science was grounded in materialism has not been a problem, at least when it dealt with reality on the level of physics and astronomy. The commitment of science to observation and reason, in conjunction with its use of mathematics, was a winning combination that allowed it to define with precision the regularities of reality on that level. Its accomplishments were impressive -- at times even astonishing. But when it was applied to living entities, the modern understanding alienated us from reality. In psychology and sociology, and to a lesser extent in biology, serious debates arose as to the possibility, or even the desirability, of imitating the practices of the physical sciences. Could we do justice to living entities if we excluded mental reality from our data, and reduced our concept of knowledge to mathematical formulas based on solely the external observations of organisms? If consciousness, goal seeking, and agency were fundamental facts of reality, such an approach would be profoundly alienating.
Science is concerned with trying to understand reality. In this endeavour it commits itself to relying exclusively on experience and reason. This seems to me to be the right path, but only insofar as we include the full range of experience. Western science does not do that. It has committed itself to materialism, which limits itself to knowledge based on observations from the outside of entities. Knowledge from inside entities is labelled "only subjective" and is discarded as a reliable source of knowledge. In this way our science started out on the wrong foot by beginning with only half the data.
If we exclude the subjectivity of the entities we study -- whether they be biological organisms, or societies, or the whole of reality -- we fail to perceive the consciousness, purposes and agency of the entities. We see them only as complex objects driven solely by mechanical forces. From this perspective the entities that we encounter have no inner nature that should be respected. Viewing ourselves as the only entities that have purposes that need to be taken into account, we do not see the arrogance and violence of treating the rest of the entities in the world with no regard for who and what they are. The world of "nature", after all, is only a random assortment of accidents. Nature, in effect, has no nature. Therefore we see no problem with the primary project that defines modernity: to replace the natural world with one engineered by our technology.
It appears likely at this point that the modern project will destroy us. Indeed, the evidence is that it is destroying us already. Every day we are assured that more of our technology will save us, and every day we see our technology continuing to destroy every aspect of our world. To be ultimately successful, a technology must negotiate with a world that it respects. Only if it does that can it enhance our relationship with the natural order.
For some scientists, doing science may intensify their lives. Undoubtedly, if a scientist is studying dolphins by swimming around with them out in the ocean, or an anthropologist spends time living in an unfamiliar culture, they will experience those aspects of reality they are studying with greater intensity than the rest of us do. But biological science is much more often pursued injecting rats with pathogens, or reading hundreds of papers on some detail of nature. In any case, the overall impact of the current practice of science based as it is on a reductionist and materialist world view is to disenchant the world. It takes the magic out of life. It teaches us to encounter the natural world not as a living entity, but at a complex thing. An "it."
Here, for example, is an experiment I read about in the essay Evolution of Paternal Investment by the evolutionary psychologist, David C. Geary. The researchers wanted to study whether a two-parent family among birds provided the babies with a greater probability for survival. So they "removed" the male (I presume they must have killed it) from a selection of nests and compared the survival rates in those nests that retained the male parent:
"The former benefit of paternal investment has been demonstrated by removing fathers from nests, which results in lower offspring survival rates. In an analysis across 31 bird species, M????ller (2000) determined that 34% of the variability in offspring survival was due to paternal investment. In some species, removal of the male results the death of all nestlings (obligate investment) and in other species male removal has lesser effects, as females compensate for lost provisions (facultative investment)."
I don't mean to pick on evolutionary psychology. Its approach to things seems pretty typical of what modern biological science looks like. Generally speaking something has to die, and we end up with numbers -- not with an improved understanding of what the entity that is being studied is. The march of civilization is the march of science, technology and industrialization. It is a march that has left a terrible swath of suffering and exploitation in its wake, always promising a better life, but never quite providing it for any but a few.
The Impact of Modernity on the Natural World
Modern technological civilization has never been more accurately described than in Melville's Moby Dick. I have in mind a chapter called "Stubb Kills a Whale," and I quote from this chapter at some length:
The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
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