[People] are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Sam Harris wrote, “Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the cosmos, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach.”112
Because this paragraph contains so many premises that are so central to so much of this culture’s discourse, and so central to this culture’s destructiveness, I’d like to spend some time taking it apart, not only to expose these particular harmful premises, but to model a process of deconstruction we all need to learn in order to disengage ourselves from this culture’s sticky web of harmful thinking patterns.
In this case his first such assertion is this: “Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith.”
Well, first, there’s a good chance that this “well-educated Christian” wouldn’t even be a man. Margery Kempe (who wrote the first English-language autobiography), Catherine of Siena (whose letters are considered some of the great works of early Tuscan literature), and Margareta Ebner (and her extremely thorough classical education) all say hello.
Not only is it by no means certain that a well-educated Christian from the fourteenth century would be a man, it is absurd to suggest that this person “would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith.” Meet Thomas Bradwardine, confessor to Edward III and briefly Archbishop of Canterbury. This particular “total ignoramus” was Chancellor of Merton College, in Oxford, and part of a group who developed and demonstrated the mean speed theorem long before Galileo, who has normally been given credit for it. In his book Tractatus de proportionibus, published in 1328, Thomas Bradwardine anticipated exponential growth (using compound interest as a special case), laying the foundation for the works of Bernoulli and Euler. He also did crucial work on trigonometry, and in the field of logic called insolubles, most particularly on a problem that should be near to Harris’s heart (presuming Harris has one), called the liar’s paradox.113
Meet William of Ockham, a Franciscan Friar most famous for formulating Ockham’s razor, which states that an explanation should make as few assumptions as possible.114
Meet Nicole Oresme, merely an economist, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, philosopher, psychologist, musicologist, and translator, as well as a counselor to King Charles V of France. Oh, yes, and he was the Bishop of Lisieux, in France. He also prepared the way for calculus, even providing a proof still taught in calculus classes. In music he mathematically described partial tones, or overtones. He wrote on acoustics, musical aesthetics, the physiology of voice and hearing, and the psychology of hearing. And did I mention that he formulated the wave theory of both music and light? He also wrote on the importance of the unconscious to both perception and behavior.115
Meet Jean Buridan, a French priest who developed the concept of impetus, which we would recognize as inertia. His intellectual attacks on William of Ockham have been interpreted by some as the genesis of the scientific revolution.116
The point is obvious: people are rarely unidimensional. I am no fan of Christianity, but I’ve known Christians—even fundamentalists—who can run circles around me in the areas of physics (despite my degree), chemistry (no great shakes there), geology, international affairs, herbalism, painting, acupuncture, oceanography, wildcrafting, climatology, needlework, hunting, gardening, pottery, history, law, psychology, mycology, astronomy, astrology, basketball, poker, car repair, and so on. I’ve known Christians with extensive knowledge of classical music. I’ve known Christians with extensive knowledge of literature. I’ve known Christians with extensive (firsthand) knowledge of psychoactive substances. All the same can be said for scientists I’ve known (many of whom have also had extensive theological knowledge). All the same can be said for farmers I’ve known. All the same can be said for prisoners I’ve known at a maximum security prison (some of the prisoners were deeply informed opera fans). Where we see the cliché of unidimensionality most often, and perhaps most harmfully, is when it comes to indigenous peoples who are to this day too often derided as ignorant, not having useful knowledge.
It would be absurd—and terrible writing—for me to make a serious blanket statement that philosophers only know philosophy (even when, if you define philosophy by its etymology—a love of wisdom—most philosophers I’ve known or read don’t know shit about philosophy, because they possess very little wisdom, and even less do they allow wisdom to possess them117). I mean, pretend I were to write, “Imagine that we could revive a well-educated philosopher of the twentieth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of philosophy. He would surely know nothing, to take an extreme example, about homosexual sadomasochism.” If I were to write something so completely ignorant, the ghost of Michel Foucault would surely rise up to bite me in the ass. And the thing is, he’d probably like it.
This sort of thinking reveals precisely the kind of hypersimplification of complexity that allows scientific philosophers such as Harris and Dawkins (and more broadly, that allows this culture in general) to pretend the world consists of resources and not real beings. What Harris did to make his point—and if he were caricaturing in order to make a comic point we’d obviously be having a different discussion—was to ignore real-life people and replace them with cardboard cutouts, and then to treat these cardboard cutouts as though they were in some way real. This is, as I explored in my book The Culture of Make Believe, the very essence of bigotry, the very essence of objectification. I wrote, “I can hate another person because of who he is without denying his individuality. In fact it’s possible to hate him because of who he is. But if I hate a person because she’s black, or an Indian, or a Jew, or a woman, or a homosexual, I’m not even giving her the honor of hating her in particular. I’m hating a stereotype that I’m projecting onto her.” It would be one thing for Harris to attack the atrocities caused, facilitated, or catalyzed by Christian, Muslim, or indigenous belief systems (which he does with gusto), or those caused, facilitated, or catalyzed by capitalist or scientific belief systems (about which he is, shall we say, discrete), but it is quite another to issue blanket statements that these other individuals would “prove” to be anything. Heck, let’s go straight to perhaps the easiest group to demonize: Nazis. They’re all a bunch of monsters, right? Well, it’s not quite that easy. Plenty of Nazis weren’t particularly anti-Semitic, nor even necessarily nationalistic. Some of them were simply ambitious, and knew that in a society that rewarded membership in the Nazi Party, one’s chances of social success were increased by said membership.118 Some people joined the party because they were unwilling or incapable of thinking for themselves, much as many people today follow along with capitalism or Christianity or science for the same reason. There were even those who joined because they opposed the Nazis, and believed they could more effectively resist “from the inside” (see, for example, the psychologically and morally complex case of Kurt Gerstein). It would be sloppy to confidently ascribe motives to all of them. Likewise today, within a society that rewards the accumulation of wealth and power (and more broadly, rewards perceiving the natural world as consisting of resources to be exploited) one’s chances of social or financial success are greater if one reinforces that mind-set.
One of the problems with the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective is that it is based on hypersimplifying complexity. This hypersimplification inheres in its reduction of infinitely complex beings into objects. This culture—and this is true whether we’re talking about Christianity or science—perceives itself as separate from and better than all others, and one of the ways it maintains this conceit is by labeling itself as having unique access to truth, and all others (whether it’s Christians, as in Harris’s case, or more usually indigenous people, or nearly universally in this culture, nonhumans) as ignorant and/or static.
As I’ve been writing the last few paragraphs, I’ve been thinking about an indigenous language I read about that doesn’t have a way for speakers to declare what another being is. Members of this culture have no way of saying, “That is a tree,” but rather they say, “I call that a tree.” Their language implicitly reinforces (and causes speakers to recognize) their understanding of the roles of humility and faith in how they perceive the world, and discourages, even disallows, statements implying certain knowledge about the nature of reality, which they cannot know (and which Dawkins, Harris, et al., pretend they know).
As much as I love bashing CEOs, political leaders, vivisectors, rapists, pornographers, corporate journalists, scientific philosophers, and so on, and as much as I understand that in each case they must be stopped (from committing atrocities in the first four cases, and in providing the philosophical [sic] support for atrocities in the last three), none of this alters my understanding that CEOs, political leaders, vivisectors, rapists, pornographers, corporate journalists, and scientific philosophers are not cardboard cutouts, but rather are complex beings with complex motivations.
Tonight I watched several bears who live in the forest they and I share. They were outside my mother’s house. One bear is a mother my own mother has known for years, who through those years has consistently brought her babies to meet and get to know my mother. This year the mother bear had twins. These days when my mother goes outside, one of those twins routinely approaches to lick her hand. The other twin is skittish, and tonight decided to race up a tree, then stay there. Later in the evening the bear I mentioned earlier, who two years ago was shot in the leg, came up. The skittish twin stayed in her tree, and the mother and other twin retired to a tree nearby. The other bear seemed sick. She moved slowly, uncomfortably, even when she had no weight on her long-injured leg. Her eyes were dull. I do not know what is wrong with her. My mother did not walk outside when this bear was there. She never does. Why? As my mother says, “This bear is angry, and she has good reason to be.”
My point? These are not generic bears. These are not equation bears. They are simply bears, with all of the complexity that implies. These are individuals, who make choices, who have different forms of knowledge, who have different personalities. Unless we wish to show ourselves both arrogant and ignorant, we should not project a truncated hypersimplicity onto them.
What happens when complexity is hypersimplified? Well, what do you think is happening to the oceans? This culture is hypersimplifying oceans’ complexity. What happens when members of this culture cut down forests? They hypersimplify complexity. Compare the complexity of a prairie to that of a tilled monocrop. Compare the complexity of a living river to that of a series of reservoirs. Compare the complexity of a world with tens of thousands of cultures to one where I can watch a news program from across the world delivered by someone wearing a tie.
This culture destroys complexity. It does this not only because perception must simplify complexity (because our ability to perceive and to think is limited by our ability to perceive and to think, as opposed to reality, which is not limited by our ability to perceive and to think, but rather only by reality itself), but more importantly in great measure to facilitate exploitation; it is more difficult—morally, existentially, and physically—to exploit another when you respect that other’s complexity, that other’s beingness.
Harris (and remember, Harris is not the point; he is merely wonderfully articulating many of the thought errors made by too many members of this culture; indeed, thought errors that guide this culture in its destructive behaviors) also says that this hypothetical revived Christian from the fourteenth century would “know more or less everything there is to know about God.” It would be easy to dismiss this as simply another example of lazy scholarship, in that he clearly didn’t even bother to understand that which he is attacking (Christianity): part of the point of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God is that He will always know more than you do; according to Judeo-Christian theology, no human can ever know more or less everything there is to know about God.
However, something else is going on here, having to do with science, limits, blasphemy, and knowing “more or less everything there is to know.” This simple little phrase reveals far more about the fundamental arrogance of the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective than it does about the ignorance of Christians. For all its innumerable and inexcusable faults, for all the arrogance of its claims of being the One True Way, for all its arrogance in declaring “man’s” dominion over the earth, Judeo-Christianity at least inculcates the humility to understand that there is something—as in God—about which humans cannot know everything, and that there is someone—as in God—who stands superior to “man.” Science places no such strictures on “man’s” arrogance. What Christians and others would see as a necessary humility—a barrier to hubris, if you will—it seems many scientists (and science in general) would see as ignorant or superstitious, a barrier to knowledge, and thus a barrier to power, a barrier to making matter and energy jump ever more precisely through hoops. Or, from a more sane perspective, a barrier to attempting to make matter and energy jump ever more precisely through hoops, with these attempts leading to any number of unplanned-for negative consequences.
A few years ago I spoke with the writer and philosopher Stanley Aronowitz.119 I said, “You’ve written, ‘The power of science consists, in the first place, in its conflation of knowledge and truth.’ What does this mean?”
He responded, “Science is founded on the idea that the results of its methods—which are very specific mathematical and experimental methods—are equivalent to what we mean by truth. The mythology holds that science describes physical reality, that science is truth. And if science is truth, instead of merely one form of truth, then all other forms of truth—all philosophical truth, all ethical truth, all emotional, spiritual, relational, experiential truths—are devalued. They are regarded as something else besides truth.
“A lot of this stems from Kant. He wrote three critiques. The first is The Critique of Pure Reason, which was his attempt to develop an understanding of science. His second is about politics, and the third is about art and ethics. And what Kant helped science do—in fact he brought this out from science—was to separate all possible discussions of truth from anything having to do with speculation, anything having to do with ethical understanding, anything having to do with art. Scientists may agree that there is something called artistic truth, but they—and I’m talking not so much about specific scientists (although this is often true) as I am about what the scientific worldview does to all of us—don’t think artistic truth has anything to do with the material reality that the scientist investigates.
“Science is based on exclusion. And not just the exclusion of all these other forms of knowledge. It’s full of exclusions. Logic, for example. In order to establish its authority it excludes what might be described as a critical logical analysis that derives not strictly from experiment, but from the more or less informal observation of any, say, philosopher or political or social theorist.”
“Or indigenous person,” I added.
“Yes, and in each case, scientists will say, ‘That’s all very interesting, but it’s really got nothing to do with truth. It’s just your opinion.’
“One reason this is important is that if you can convince people that science has a monopoly on truth, you may be able to get them to believe also that the knowledge generated through science is independent of politics, history, social influences, cultural bias, and so on.
“The truth, of course, is that science isn’t independent of these things, that what we perceive as a scientific truth today may very well be considered nonsense in a few years. This means it’s absolutely absurd to believe that any paradigm of scientific knowledge is equivalent to the way the world really is. Of course you can’t say this to scientists, or they go crazy.
“But it’s true. Think of some of the changes science has gone through. What was taken by scientists as truth in the era of Aristotle—a period of well over a thousand years—was considered incontrovertible, and grounded not only in experiment and observation, which Aristotle did in fact have, but also grounded in a methodological set of assumptions that everybody accepted. Then along comes the Copernican Revolution, and now scientists have got a new set of assumptions. Now this is the truth according to science, and what we so firmly believed before is so much superstition.”
I reminded him that my first degree was in physics, and said, “I can just hear how my teachers would have responded. They would have said, ‘Well, one of the great things about science is how open it is to these revolutions of thought. That is precisely why scientific knowledge is truth, because it allows for evolution, it mutates as we make methodological or experimental discoveries that invalidate our old hypotheses and generate new ones.…’ ”
He responded, “I agree with your teachers insofar as a strength of science is its ability to endure and grow from evolutions in thought and methodology. But where I run into problems is with their belief that every day and in every way things are becoming closer to the truth. A fundamental precept of science is that at some point we’re finally going to get to the bottom of things. We’re going to understand the fundamental building blocks of matter, we’re going to unify electromagnetism with gravity, and like Einstein believed, we’re going to have a general theory. This conceit may be scientists’ version of utopian hope. It is, probably, natural science’s version of the ‘vision thing’ which motivates many to undertake day-to-day drudgery connected to scientific work. Now, I’m skeptical about that possibility. I know physicists who even dispute each other. There are scientists who take the same position I do, that there will always be uncertainty, there will always be tentativeness, there will always be this kind of upheaval. And then there are those who believe—and they are the majority—that we are moving toward some ultimate theory. And you really have to say that this latter group subscribes to science as a religion.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
His eyes flashed. He said, “First, their religion masquerades as something that it is not; in fact they consider themselves skeptics, and are often highly scornful of people who rely on ‘mere faith.’ More broadly, science is coercive in the same way that dogmatic belief in a deity can be coercive. Just as God is then taken as an axiom by true believers, so the four elements of scientific discourse cannot be questioned.”
I asked what those four elements are.
He said, “The first is the exclusion of the qualitative in favor of the quantitative. If you cannot assign a number to something, it doesn’t exist. The second is that except at the outset, speculation is excluded in favor of observation and experimentation. The third is that knowledge is claimed to be free of value: there’s nothing inherently wrong in knowing how to make a neutron bomb, for example. It’s simply information, so the mythology goes. And the fourth is that method is given primacy in the confirmation of knowledge.”
“Meaning that since science has defined its methods as the only way to discover truth, the only acceptable criticisms of science are those conducted within the methodological framework that science has set up for itself. Further, science insists that only those who have been inducted into its community, through means of training and credentials, are qualified to make these criticisms.”
“A priesthood,” I said.
“But there is something else at stake here. Theirs is a belief in the end of history. It’s a version of a belief … at the level of human affairs, that we’ve finally ended history. [Francis] Fukayama thinks we’ve ended history because the world has been unified under the common denominator of capitalism, so-called liberal democracy, the market.”
I said, “Obviously there are a lot of problems with Fukayama’s boosterism of capitalism, not the least of which is that it doesn’t match reality …”
Aronowitz responded, “Oh, absolutely. He makes no sense at all. And the same is true scientifically. The scientific hope is for an end of natural history. We will someday understand everything.”
“And essentially be as God …”
“But let me ask you this: Does the world change? Is the material world itself moving constantly? Well, if that is true, then we can’t ever know the ultimate anything. If there exists anything even remotely resembling free-willed actors anywhere in the universe, then there can be no ultimate knowledge of the sort science purports.”
“Which of course is one of the reasons members of this culture must insist humans aren’t free-willed. Not only does this belief make their exploitation a tad more palatable, but it allows people to believe they can predict, and therefore control, and therefore manage these others.”
“Yes, and look, here’s the real point. Everybody knows that social and political philosophers generate ideologies. But not many people take this to be the case for physicists, chemists, or biologists. These people aren’t supposed to be dealing in ideology, they’re supposed to be dealing with Truth. But they create the myths by which, for better or worse, their work continues. It’s all very ideological, but in fact science has a tremendous investment in not being considered ideology. It has rigorously delineated itself from ideology, and said, ‘Science is the separation of knowledge from ideology.’ You see how they work it? It’s really clever.
“The ‘rigorous’ methods of science have become the arbiter of what is real, rather than speculation, rather than religious belief, rather than all the beliefs that existed in the Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, and feudal periods, rather than direct personal experience. For example, given a choice between what you yourself experience, and results you are told emerge from a laboratory, which do you believe? Probably the laboratory, because we’ve been convinced that laboratory experiments show us the world through lenses not ‘tainted’ by emotion, speculation, logic, or ideology.
“But you know what? The scientists won’t be able to get away with this forever. It doesn’t work, because from the start—while they were developing the scientific method—they already had a priori aims. They had, and continue to have, goals which inform their research. They have subsets of perspectives which include and exclude certain sort of phenomena.”
Like dreams, for one.
He said, “Let’s ground this in biology. We’ve all heard of the famous monk Gregor Mendel, and we know the Mendel-Morgan hypothesis, which is that the environment exerts almost no long-term influence on human or nonhuman organisms—plants and animals. We know that. I use the word know, by the way, ironically. We know that our makeup is determined genetically. We also know that Lamarck was another nineteenth-century scientist who, even before the founding of modern genetics, repudiated Mendel’s underlying premise that organisms respond solely to their inherent genetic makeup. He said that characteristics are not inherited genetically, but rather acquired through interactions with one’s environment. And then these characteristics can be passed on to one’s progeny. Now, Lamarck was crude, but does that mean the monk Mendel was correct in building his eternal God into the notion of genetics?”
I mentioned, “Mendel fudged his data, by the way.”
Stanley waved his hand dismissively, “Yes, he fudged, and he lied. But that doesn’t alter the fact that genetics is now taken as gospel. But what has happened is that as biology—evolutionary biology in particular—has become more sophisticated—some of it coming out of agronomy, some of it coming out of people like Luther Burbank, and then people like Stephen Jay Gould whose theory of contingency challenged the doctrine of adaptation, and people like Francisco Ayala, and the marine biologist Richard Levins—biologists have begun to understand that all organisms exist in context. You cannot understand them out of that context. You cannot take an organism out of its context and have the same organism.”
“Of course,” I said.
“It is no longer satisfactory to regard mutations as accidental, but now many biologists are beginning to understand that mutations manifest a relationship with the environment. They’re not so much saying this is the case on a one-to-one basis within one generation, but that organisms evolve as adaptations to their environment, and that the environment co-adapts to organisms. It’s a dialectical or interactive process of mutual determination.
“So now there is a big battle going on in biology between the evolutionists and the geneticists, who have radically different theories of organic development. The evolutionists say we have three levels of relationships going on at the same time. One is the relation of the organism with its own genes, or species with their genetic pool. The second is the organism with its immediate environment. And the third is the organism with the whole world. In other words it’s cosmic. This is an ecological perspective, and a brilliant one. And then you have the geneticists, who say, ‘Oh, no. That’s not the case. We have DNA which we can explore and chop up and recombine, then put into other organisms. We can put wax moth DNA into cucumbers. We can put sea cucumber DNA into mice. And there won’t be any larger repercussions. Everything is just contained in the DNA. The environment has almost no influence.
“Do you want to tell me science isn’t ideological, and that scientific research doesn’t have a priori aims? I have one word for you: Monsanto. Or make it two words: genetic engineering.
“But here’s the real point: even though it’s acceptable to fight this battle in biology, the battle is still fought very strictly within the confines of the methodology set up by science itself. It’s necessarily self-referential.”
“No heresy allowed …”
“Exactly, because from this perspective science is a reflection of the objective world. The propositions of physics, chemistry, biology, and so on are by the consensus of the scientific community incontrovertible reflections of reality, or truth. And they are incontrovertible, especially by a lay person.”
I told him that I had once been talking to a scientist friend of mine about interspecies communication. She was scornful of it. I asked what it would take to convince her, and she said, “If after you asked it to, the animal did something that was against its nature.” Leaving aside the question of what is an animal’s nature (determined, of course, by the methodology of science!) I gave her a bunch of examples, both personal and from friends and books. Her face grew more and more set, until at last she said, “There is nothing that you can say that would convince me.” I said, “That’s the power of a dogmatic belief in science.”
He thought a moment, then said, “For some scientists everything outside the box—defined by the rules of scientific discourse—must be ignored. And I hope you didn’t push your friend any further, because sometimes scientists get very agitated when you call them on the game they’re playing.”
“And the game is …”
“Religion. Teleology. Control. The desire for prediction, and ultimately the desire to control the natural world, has become the foundation of their methodology of knowing truth.
“Think about it. I mean, what is a laboratory experiment? At the beginning one must select from the multiplicity of objects and relations that constitute the world a slice to study. How do you conduct a laboratory experiment? The first thing you do is factor out the world. You factor out emotion. You factor out ethics. You factor out nature, if you want to put it that way. You factor out the cosmos. You create a situation of strict abstraction. From that, we think we can extrapolate propositions which correspond to the world and its phenomena. Or rather, scientists think that. And these propositions do correspond to the world, so long as we ignore the actual physical world and its context.”
I asked, “What are the social implications of this?”
He said, “The point of science—and this may or may not be true of individual scientists—is to make the world subject to human domination. If they can abstract, and then they can predict on the basis of that abstraction, then they can try, at both the human and natural levels, to use that prediction in order to exert control.”
Of course scientists and scientific philosophers from Francis Bacon to Richard Dawkins have said this same thing, but they have said it with a terrifying eagerness, rather than with horror.
I asked, “What is the relationship between science and capitalism?”
He said, “Capitalism as we know it couldn’t exist without science. And science as we know it has been formed and deformed by capitalism at every step of the way.
“There’s an apocryphal story that nonetheless has some truth to it that the first full-time scientist, by which I mean the first person who was able to make his living with science, was Michael Faraday. He was employed by the Royal Institution [of Great Britain] in the 1840s to work on electromagnetism. They paid him room and board and a small stipend, and allowed him to entertain people in the upper reaches of society with lectures for which he was paid. Now, one of Faraday’s great supporters was Charles Babbage, a very urbane businessman—and the inventor of one of the earliest computers—who was extremely interested in figuring out how science could become fully integrated into industry. Babbage understood that mass production could only become really powerful as a means of making profit and accumulating capital when it became scientifically based. I’m talking about something far more fundamental than the scientific management movement in which the labor process gets chopped up by Taylorism or by Henry Ford using an assembly line. That of course is part of it. But I’m talking about the use of electricity and machinery so that instead of drawing a pulley and cutting materials in a factory by hand, you now could install a little electric motor. Then from chemistry you’ve got the bessemer and the blast furnace.
“The upshot of all this is that throughout the nineteenth century science became increasingly vital to capitalism, and then got translated into engineering. Engineering is a practically based scientific application. Prior to the 1870s, most engineers were independent contractors, but with the increasing integration of science into industry engineers began to be taken on board as staff. Now of course engineers are central to most industries; you could almost tell the history of the world since 1850 by the progressive integration of science and engineering into capitalism.
“Physics in particular has been crucial to capitalism because of the important advances in communications technologies, many of which were developed not by the government but directly by industry, for example by the telephone company or General Electric.”
I asked where universities fit into that picture.
He said, “That’s a really interesting question: how did the university get radically transformed from sort of a sleepy trainer for doctors and preachers to its current function as a high-powered, scientific-knowledge-based adjunct of capitalism? It was really in the rearmament of 1938, when the United States decided to go to war. That year President Roosevelt appointed Vannevar Bush, a famous scientist, as the first science adviser in the history of the United States. Roosevelt said to him, ‘Look, we’ve got to figure out a way to build all these munitions,’ and Bush did a survey trying to figure out how they were going to do all the research and design for everything from radar to atomic bombs. He decided it would be more efficient and faster to use the preexisting infrastructure of the university system than it would be to build it all from scratch. This transformation of the university system has had immense implications, because it generated an incredibly solid base for the new capitalism: the triumvirate of the university/corporate/government complex. And science is the core of that complex.
“The funny part of it all is that none of them look back …”
I said that reminded me of something he’d written that I didn’t understand, that “the loss of memory is the transcendental condition for science. A sense of history is inimical to the project of domination because it would generate questions that cannot be answered instrumentally.”
He said, “Let’s discuss this on two levels. The first level is, What does it mean that Derrick was a physicist? What was your education like? Let me ask you a few questions. What school did you go to?”
“The Colorado School of Mines.”
“Did you ever read Ptolemy?”
“Of course not.”
“You didn’t read Aristotle, therefore.”
“Correct.”
“Did you read Galileo Galilei?”
“Nope.”
“Newton?”
“Nope.”
“Anything in the history of science?”
“No Descartes, Bacon. Nobody. We didn’t read Faraday. We didn’t read Einstein. It was purely instrumental.”
“And if you don’t read in the history of science, you—and I don’t mean you personally, but as a cohort, as a generation—will never learn that there were fundamental certainties that were completely disrupted. Moreover, what you won’t learn is that there were things that were excluded in the next generation that could have been useful and interesting. That every generation of change excludes and includes, incorporates and marginalizes, certain kinds of knowledges that it doesn’t find helpful, useful, or whatever. You would never understand that at one point there were scientific debates, and that the scientific community might or might not have chosen the right side.”
I said, “Maybe I’ve just been dense so far, but I finally get it. If you’re going to present yourself as absolute truth, you cannot leave behind evidence of those conflicts. This would explain also why mainstream Christianity always had to mercilessly eradicate all heretical branches—the Albigensians, Anabaptists, and so on.”
He smiled and said, “There’s a book called Leviathan and Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life about the struggle between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. The struggle was over what is the nature of scientific knowledge. Hobbes made what would for any red-blooded scientist be an absurd, absolutely bonkers statement, that speculation can be genuine scientific knowledge, that one could draw conclusions about the nature of the universe that were valid through deductive reason without the benefit or detriment of observation. Boyle, on the other hand, was a Baconian, who said, ‘I’m from Missouri, show me. Seeing is believing.’ And who won out in that battle? Boyle, obviously, leading to every last article of scientific faith: that reason cannot yield genuine knowledge, that reason is always derivative of observation, and so on.”
I didn’t understand, said, “But Hobbes’s position is absurd, too …”
“Hold your hesitation for a second. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t agree with either of these guys.
“Let me approach this from another angle. The famous French psychologist and philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, ‘The body is a subject.’ He, and this also comes from Henri Bergson, argued that the body as a feeling subject is a source of knowledge, perhaps the source of knowledge.
“The real point about the Hobbes/Boyle debate is that both sides missed the boat. The same is true for most commentary on their debate. On the one hand you’ve got these extremely narrow observations in science, as we’ve discussed. And on the other hand you’ve got something that is exclusively an intellectual process. Once again we’re running up against the edges of the box which scientific discourse can never allow to be breached! If you introduce feelings, intuition, what have you, you’re suddenly talking about poetry, faith, religion, mysticism, something other people do. Something that Native Americans, East Indians, Asians do. But not us! We are Western man, and Western man has only rationality. The place where Hobbes and Boyle agreed—and I’m not sure either one would have been fully aware of this—was that everything has to be controlled, everything has to be through the ‘mind.’ The body must be excluded. Ever since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we have gone from Cartesianism to Cartesianism.
“But there’s more. It’s not only that the absolute knowledge that is claimed by science would be disrupted by a knowledge of history, and particularly the history of science, and by the context within which science functions, that is, that science is umbilically tied to capitalism. The other issue is what I would call an implicit philosophy of the present. That is to say, all that counts is the here and now. Not so much in terms of knowledge, but in terms of politics.”
I told him I didn’t understand.
He said, “You must be able to continually forget the past, and you must be able to continually reinvent yourself to be infinitely fungible—science as such, not on the individual level—in order to be able to adapt yourself to these increasingly powerful forces that say that the essential condition for scientific activity is that you subordinate yourself to them. The adaptive individual is the one who doesn’t have the burden of a past, and who doesn’t allow the wider world to impinge upon one’s self-evaluation. Oppenheimer and Einstein were people of broad culture. They were people who were tortured by their choices. Einstein was politicized by his choices, to a great degree. Many people don’t know that Einstein was a militant socialist of a certain variety—i.e., a communist. And he was. Part of the reason for this is that he allowed himself to be aware of history, and he forced himself to deal with the social and moral implications of his scientific—which means political and moral—choices. This led him to an understanding of what he would and would not do.
“Science cannot function in the world when it allows itself to fully confront the implications of choices made on a daily basis by scientists. This means that any sort of intensive self-examination simply won’t be allowed. Because if it is allowed the field of science would have to become active. Science as a whole and scientists in particular would have to say, ‘I refuse to do this. I won’t do that. I’m going to become involved not only in the policy of who gets the money and on what basis but the policy of what we should be doing.’
“Self-examination about the horrors created by science in WWII led to a scientists’ movement against the bomb. This movement carried through to the sixties, to the antinuclear movement, Scientists for Social Responsibility, Engineers for Social Responsibility, and all that. But with the exception of climatologists, for example, and a few biologists, particularly conservation biologists, where are the scientists with a conscience now? Sure, there are some individuals and organizations, but since the Vietnam War the scientific communities of biology, physics, and chemistry have basically surrendered to capital. They are the direct adjuncts of capital, and their rationalizations for this—’If we don’t do this service for capitalism or for the military (which is essentially in service to capitalism) we’re not going to get any money for research’—are absurd.”
I said, “If there is no past, there is no accountability.”
“The question obviously then becomes, are scientists citizens? Or putting it another way, does a citizen have any claims on science? Scientists helped create Three Mile Island. Love Canal. Hanford. Global warming. You can go down the list. What can a citizen say about this? Where should we put our words in? How do we hold these scientists accountable for their subordination to capital? Or more specifically, how do we hold them accountable for their subordination to the power of the private corporation?”
I would say, more broadly, that the question is how to bring accountability to an entire culture based on a scientific progress defined by its ability to dominate (and ultimately, destroy).
I said, “As we talk I keep thinking about the connections between science, capitalism, and Christianity. The central thread that ties them all together is that each one must be the only belief of its type. None of the three will brook any competition.”
He responded, “One God. Monotheism. The Judeo-Christian tradition. The Muslim tradition. Monotheism is the scourge of the earth, you know. There can only be one God, one truth, one word, and the word of God is the truth.”
I asked, “What’s so scary about pluralism?”
He said, “For many people the complexity and confusion of everyday life has to have a resolution in something that they can actually believe in and have faith in. And in a way science is the new faith. And it connects up with religion as a faith. It says the buck stops someplace, and there is a mechanism of two things. The first is salvation: better living through chemistry, as Ronald Reagan said. Technology will save us from this horrible, insufficient, transient world. And also redemption. We can redeem ourselves through the technological fix.”
“Redeem ourselves from what?”
“Well, partly from mortality, if you will. In other words, we postpone death. We deal with the fear of death through the technological and scientific fix. And partly through science we promise to redeem ourselves from our responsibility to our children and to the future. We tell our children that the future will be taken care of because of the spread of scientific and technological knowledge, and its applications. And the horrible irony of this is that in great measure because of science, the world we are leaving for the children is increasingly impoverished and toxic.”120
That conversation with Aronowitz has stayed with me for years, but the truth is that we don’t need Aronowitz to point out to us that science is imbued with arrogance, especially the supreme arrogance of believing that everything can be known; or that science is about control—about, as Dawkins said, “making matter and energy jump through hoops on command”; or, to put all this another way, that having done away with the distant monotheistic sky God, humans are now trying, through science, to take God’s place, to know as much as God, to become as powerful as God, to become God.
What evidence is there for this? Well, we can talk about the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” who after the first Trinity test, famously said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”121 Or we can talk about the billions of dollars spent to create artificial life or artificial intelligence while this culture destroys real natural life and denies the existence of real natural nonhuman intelligence. We can talk about the widespread belief among many of those who belong to the cult of the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective that someday science and technology will “solve” not only such existential “problems” as pain, aging, physical limitations, and death; but also the very real problems caused by science and technology, such as toxic or radioactive waste, global warming, biodiversity crash, human overpopulation and overconsumption, and so on. We can talk about the fact that this widespread belief is an article of faith that fails to stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny, and we can talk about the fact that all the evidence in the (dying) world fails to shake the faith of the True-Believing members of the cult of the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective. We can talk about this culture’s frenzied insistence that there be no limits on growth, “knowledge,” exploitation, power, wealth. We can talk about the fact that this culture is killing the planet. We can talk about the fact that although methane burps have started, and although it is widely understood that anthropogenic global warming is caused in great measure by the burning of coal, oil, and gas, none of the mainstream proposals to curb global warming seriously propose stopping the burning of coal, oil, and gas. These proposals take industrial capitalism as a given and the real world as that which must conform to industrial capitalism (just as an omnipotent God could make all others conform to His wishes). If we define insanity as being out of touch with reality, this is by definition insane. The real world is the real world. This culture is not the real world. The stock market is not the real world. The US government is not the real world. Laboratories are not the real world. The real world is sockeye salmon, black terns, Ethiopian wolves, Mekong giant catfish, Sicilian fir, the Columbia River, the Amazon Basin, polar ice caps, the Pacific Ocean. And one of the many things these cult members do not allow themselves to understand is that without a real world you do not have a social structure, even a social structure in which you can make believe that you can force matter and energy to jump through hoops on command. No planet, no you, no matter how megalomaniacal you may be. Fantasies aside, you ain’t God. Believers in the Cult of the Industrial God, believers in the Cult of the Scientific God, believers in the Cult of the Mechanistic God, are staking the life of the planet on their entirely unsupported and unsupportable faith that, through science, humans, or rather Humans—Homo sapiens sapiens: the wisest of the wise—will be omniscient enough to be able to find solutions to the crises caused by the burning of coal, oil, and gas without stopping the burning of coal, oil, and gas, and will be powerful enough, omnipotent enough, to be able to make these plans work, in violation of the straightforward “scientific laws” of cause and effect which they say govern the universe. Doesn’t that sound like God, or rather a cult who pretends they’re God? How is the continued belief in these plans, in the face of the violation of those “scientific laws,” any less ridiculous than fundamentalist Christians believing that Jehovah stopped the earth from spinning so that Joshua could win the battle of Gibeon?
You’ve heard of the governmental agency called the God Squad, right? The official title is the Endangered Species Committee, and the purpose of the committee is to explicitly determine whether or not to condemn a specific species to extinction because it is in the way of economic activities. Of course most of the time the God Squad doesn’t need to become involved; hundreds of species are driven extinct every day by this God culture.
Still not convinced? Let’s try this. We can talk about the faith—supported by no evidence whatsoever, and contradicted by a (dying) world of evidence—that members of this culture can through science and technology know enough, can become omniscient enough, to manage forests without killing them, to manage rivers without killing them, to manage oceans without killing them. Can play God. It is an utterly fanatical religious belief that through science, humans can know “more or less everything there is to know” about these others, or at least enough to make them “jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.” Well, I’ve got a prediction for you, you arrogant, murderous motherfuckers: if you try to control forests, rivers, oceans, and so on, you’ll kill them. And truth be told, I’ve got another prediction for you, and listen to this one well: I and people like me, allied with nonhuman people, and allied with those on the other sides, are going to stop you before you can fully manifest your desire to become Death, destroyer of worlds.