The
ecological complexities of existence overwhelm the human mind, even
though some of that richness is an integral part of man’s own
nature. It is only by isolating some part of that existence for a
short time that it can be momentarily grasped: we learn only from
samples. By separating primary from secondary qualities, by making
mathematical description the test of truth, by utilizing only a part
of the human self to explore only a part of its environment, the new
science successfully turned the most significant attributes of life
into purely secondary phenomena, ticketed for replacement by the
machine. Thus living organisms, in their most typical functions and
purposes, became superfluous.
Lewis
Mumford, 1970, p.68.
“The
interesting thing for us”, continues Pumphrey [talking about the
Vocorder], “is the effect of this process on the character of
speech, for in discarding or blurring the detailed structure, it has
effected a completely mechanical separation of the emotive and
informative functions of speech. The output of this infernal machine
is perfectly intelligible and perfectly impersonal.
No trace of anger or love, pity or terror, irony or sincerity, can
get through it. The age or sex of the speaker cannot be guessed. No
dog would recognise his master’s voice. In fact, it does not sound
as if a human agent was responsible for the message. But the
intelligence is unimpaired.”
Ibid,
p69 (emphasis added).
Initially
people didn’t trust what they were hearing on the telephone because
they couldn’t put a face to it. The word “phony” emerged at the
time to describe the experience of not believing the voice at the
other end of the phone line.
Jeremy
Rifkin, 2009, p.376.
Science
is a many splendid thing.
Q:
What is the role of Scientism (science as religion) if objective
truth is an impossibility?
A: To
ensure predictability of outcome, to ‘control’ nature, to tame
the wild.
Q:
What is its power?
A: To
manufacture machines, enable mass production, design and build giant
cities, create an increasingly machine-like society, etc. (the value
of this product spectrum is of course in the eye of the beholder),
but also, rooted deep in the humble origins of Scientism, i.e. as
part of what we might call science proper, to encourage humility in
the pursuit of increasing or deepening wisdom regarding how universe
and its infinitely interdependent systems work.
The
bright appeal of the mechanical utopia Scientism promises arises from
the immature ego’s ‘congenital’ need for control,
reflexively fearful as it is of disorder, the unknown, the
unpredictable. It is this fear that has turned science proper into a
new iteration of ancient sun worship: centralisation, mega-projects,
power obsession, institutionalised hierarchy, the mighty state,
mechanised armies of human automatons as one with their machinery,
etc. This almost lifeless technotopia is an inhumane expression of
the ego’s power- and control-urge newly equipped with ‘objective’
science, a paradigm that concerns itself solely with the measurable.
But Scientism’s prudish expulsion of subjectivity from its
crystal-clear domain, the domain of what it thinks of as real, blinds
it to the fact that emotional and wholly subjective human beings must
remain firmly ensconced in the picture to first conceive and then
wield science (or be wielded by it). This subtle but significant
blind spot has made a religion of science, broadly speaking.
This
doesn’t mean the 'dispassionate' recording of observable phenomena
and the consequent humble positing of falsifiable theories – a
process that improves wisdom and understanding, piece by cumulative
piece (however fitfully) – somehow dooms us to destruction or is
without merit. The humility the scientific method requires of us is, in my eyes, a beautiful thing, a wonderful cultural achievement. However, it is
very, very far from specific to Western Civilisation, or to
civilisation generally. The challenge is in not falling prey to our
fear-based need for control, and also recognising that all
methods of apprehending and explaining reality are limited. The
challenge is to not erect totalitarian absolutes we must orbit as
vassals, i.e. Sun King, divine king, president, market, money, nation
state, The Truth, etc. As Lewis Mumford puts it, “Man cannot be
trusted with absolutes.”
How do
we stay humble and aware of this creeping tendency while allowing
space for invention and curious inquiry? I believe the answer lies in
Scientism’s opposite, or twin: faith. Obviously, there is a deep
paradox here, and this is what I try to resolve, or make fruitful,
in this article.
Mumford’s
The Pentagon of Power, which inspires this article, laments
the decimation of the rich “polytechnics” of the high middle ages
– a period responsible for a host of wonderful inventions and
ingenious inventiveness. This almost anarchic richness did not
survive the filtering or distillation of that richness by the likes
of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and even Bacon, unwitting fathers of
what Mumford calls the “Monotechnics” that characterises our age.
They created the lexis and syntax for the objectivism in which only
the measurable matters, in which only the measurable is real. But
it is not the case that the oddity of this position, its patriarchal
obsession with control and regimentation, its fascination with the
fully manipulable domain of machines, was lost on other thinkers of
that time. For example:
Descartes’
contemporary Gassendi saw the weakness of his position. “You will
say”, he wrote Descartes, “I am mind alone … But let us talk in
earnest, and tell me frankly, do you not derive from the very sound
you utter in so saying from the society in which you have lived? And,
since the sounds you utter are derived from intercourse with other
men, are not the meanings of the sounds derived from the same
source?”
Mumford,
1970, p.82
It is self-evident that we are inextricably embedded in and products
of our environment. See if you can extract yourself from universe to
get a better view of it. Or, try and grow up from scratch again
without learning anything until such time that you can make
‘intelligent’ choices about what you choose to learn. We cannot
have thoughts in a mother-tongue language without first acquiring
that language while unaware we are acquiring it and all the ideas
that flow in with it. What possible objective appraisal of the
process of socialisation that occurs in our early years can we carry
out on ourselves? How can we check it, police it, sort the wheat from
the chaff as we drink it all in? Descartes’ separation of mind from
matter – where mind is spirit/intelligence capable of manipulating
and perfecting a machine universe to fulfil humanity’s destiny to
become nature’s “lords and masters” – either ignores or
cannot accommodate this obvious truth.
And yet
despite this, despite Goethe pointing out over two centuries ago that
we cannot take one step deeper into nature nor one step out of it,
despite relentless philosophical challenge, Scientism was born and
rose to create and dominate Western Civilisation. As if destined. As
if it has a lesson to teach us.
So, to
repeat: how do we stay humble and avoid absolutism in the face of
this grand destiny, in opposition to the weight of history? We yield.
We let go. We give in. We act on faith, fearlessly, not knowing the
outcome of our daring. But only we, as ‘individuals’, can decide
which path to tread to bring this about, to open us up to our richer
unfolding. To use the old cliché, we must be courageous enough to
follow our hearts. (Believe me, if it doesn’t hurt like hell,
you’ve either been following your heart fearlessly for years, or
haven’t leapt courageously enough.)
Parallel
with our descent into Scientism, we have become too cerebral. We live
in our heads, are stuck in our minds, in Descartes’ prison, steered
from within by unexamined fears that rule despotically from our
cultural and psychological shadows. Rationality, objectivity, truth
as distinct facts to be learned by rote, The News, entertainment,
schools, consumerism, in fact the whole spectacle of modern life
distracts us into mind, shepherds us into isolated pens of mental
separation. This dynamic drives, sustains and is driven by the same
fear that spawns it.
And yet
we know, do we not, that mind is not everything. Surely we know by
now that no one thing can be everything. Perhaps we can even say that
there can be no distinct thing at all…
As one
of many direct consequences of having had the courage to follow my
heart and quit my old job towards the end of 2011, I recently fell
deeply in love. It went badly wrong, and caused much suffering. The
experience shocked me, broke me, cracked me open like an egg. I lost
control and was forced to yield, to collapse into apparently endless
pain. The turbulence this set in motion tossed me around like a rag
doll. No logic, no rationality, no mind-based intelligence was of any
use. I was lost at sea. In some ways, I lost my mind.
But the
whole experience was (and remains) deeply spiritual. The love I felt,
the depth of connection, was unlike anything I have ever known. I now
liken it to a Near Death Experience (NDE). People who have gone
through an NDE report being immersed in and experiencing that they
are ‘made of’ unconditional love, and being fully aware in an
infinity rich with creative force. They experience this as their true
home, their true self. This is the description that is closest to
what I felt. But there is no science that can confirm the 'reality'
of such experiences, and unless you are touched by and touch that
realm, that state, that soulscape, you cannot know it. If you
hear it described, you cannot know what it is like so your mind
recoils, throws up suspicions and objections. If you do happen upon
it for whatever reason, you cannot measure it. You cannot record it
on film or tape. You cannot reproduce it for others. You cannot
‘prove’ it.
You
talk in riddles, and hope…
Yet I
know it was real. I know I did not ‘dream’ it. The
soulscape I became is more real than the ‘physical’ world we call
real. I was wide awake, wholly alive.
I
suspect what happened to me, and has happened to millions of others
for different reasons, is a microcosm of what is happening to
modernity, to the civilisational project as a whole, to its latest
vanguard Scientism. We are broken by an extreme event, and are
changed. Then comes the challenge of what to do with the new knowing.
In this
case, it is an extreme of subjectivity. Extremes upset our apple
carts. They take us out of mind. If we come back, we know something
new. We are renewed. But the message we might want to share cannot be
appreciated by mind. Only something like faith can accept it,
whereupon we are free to use that faith as impetus for our own,
unique development, our leap into the dark. Sadly, Scientism scorns
faith, its blind spot, its shadow, despite faith being, I believe,
fundamental to human experience. Scientism cannot handle this, cannot
process it, cannot apprehend it , does not know where to begin. These
rich, experiential phenomena must stay outside its remit.
Taking
measurements of brain and other biological activity proves little in
this area, as the assertion that the data recorded can be definitive
about consciousness rests on an assumption: first matter, then
consciousness. This assumption, or faith, cannot be proven, even if
we manage to fabricate ‘artificial’ intelligence or other new
life forms. That would be akin to building a radio capable of giving
consciousness a new vehicle of expression, a new type of experience
to learn from. It would not prove machinery can itself give rise to
separated conscious experience, for it might also be that machinery
can be an avatar for consciousness.
Scientism,
like money and all other rigidly hierarchical institutions, must be
demoted before our culture can become wiser and richer, more humane.
My ego was demoted by my immersion in an experience and a place that
were fully beyond all hope of control. I am richer and wiser for it,
and more humble. The frustration for the rational among us is that
this process is unprovable and unreproducible. But so what! So is
something as mundane as a holiday, or rather the particular quality
of a holiday. Indeed, what single thing that we have experienced can
we reproduce, exactly, for ourselves or others? Which can we measure
with numbers to understand better? Being unreproducible and
unmeasurable, must we call all experiences unreal? Is there no such
thing as experience? Is reality unreal? And if we cannot guarantee
an identically wonderful
holiday/romance/marriage/friendship/childhood/song/film by being
rigorously objective and scientific in its planning, are we therefore
doomed to misery?
Life is
a complex and endless unfolding of unique and interdependent nows,
not one of which will ever happen again, nor can any experience be
replicated. That’s why life is so terribly wonderful, so achingly
beautiful. Precisely because we cannot control it.
Universe
(or All That Is, or God) is not an external machine to control,
improve, perfect, domesticate, render unthreatening. It is alive with
us, wild with us. We are alive because of it, in it, through it.
Yielding to this fearful truth is the advent of lasting joy.
