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A Balanced Account of the World: A Critical Look at the Scientific WorldviewKipawa, Vendredi, Avril 22, 2011 - 13:22 (Analyses)
Wolfi Landstreicher
The origin of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries corresponds with the origins of modern capitalism and the industrial system. From the beginning, the worldview and methods of science have fit in perfectly with the need of the capitalist social system to dominate nature and the vast majority of human beings. Francis Bacon made it clear that science was not an attempt to understand nature as it is, but to dominate it in order to twist it to the ends of humanity—in this case meaning the current rulers of the social order. In this light, science must necessarily be subjected to social analysis by anyone claiming to call the present social reality into question. A BALANCED ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD: The origin of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries corresponds with the origins of modern capitalism and the industrial system. From the beginning, the worldview and methods of science have fit in perfectly with the need of the capitalist social system to dominate nature and the vast majority of human beings. Francis Bacon made it clear that science was not an attempt to understand nature as it is, but to dominate it in order to twist it to the ends of humanity—in this case meaning the current rulers of the social order. In this light, science must necessarily be subjected to social analysis by anyone claiming to call the present social reality into question. Science is not simply a matter of observing the world, experimenting with its elements and drawing reasonable conclusions. Otherwise, we would have to recognize children, so-called primitives and a good many animals as excellent scientists. But the practical experiments carried out by all of us every day lack a few necessary factors, the first and most important of which is the concept of the universe as a single entity operating under universal, rational, knowable laws. Without this foundation, science cannot operate as such. Of course, the idea of universal natural laws had already come into existence in ancient Greece, arising at about the same time as written law for governing the city-states and money-based commerce. But the ancient Greek perspective differed Between the time of the ancient Greek philosophers and the origin of modern science, two significant historical events affected the western view of the world. The first of these was the rise of the Christian religion as the central dominating factor in So religion and a technological development laid the basis for the development of a mechanistic view of the universe and with it of modern science. Recognizing the importance of religion in providing this ideological framework, it should come as no But the scandals of science, like those of the church, the state or capital, are not the substance of the problem. The substance lies in the ideological foundations of science. Basically relational views of the universe—whether the legalistic one of the ancient Greek or the more fluid views of people who lived outside civilization—imply that an understanding of the universe would come from attempting to view it as holistically as possible in order to observe the relationships between things, the If the universe is a machine and not an interrelationship between a myriad of beings, then one does not achieve an understanding of it through simple observation and direct experimentation, but through a specialized form of experimentation. One cannot come to an understanding of how a machine works simply by observing it as it functions in its environment. One needs to break it down into its parts—the gears, the wheels, the wires, the levers, etc.—in order to figure out what each part does. Thus, a foundational aspect of the method of modern science is the necessity of breaking everything down into its parts, with the aim of achieving the most basic unit. It is in this light that one can understand why scientists think that it is possible to learn more about life by cutting a frog open in a laboratory than by sitting by a pond observing frogs and fish and mosquitoes and lily pads actually living together. The knowledge science pursues is quantitative knowledge, mathematical knowledge, utilitarian knowledge—a type of knowledge that transforms the world into the machine it claims the world is. This sort of knowledge cannot be drawn from free observation in the world. It requires the sphere of the laboratory where parts can be experimented with outside of the context of the whole and within the framework of the ideological foundations of mathematics and a mechanistic worldview. Only parts that have been separated in this way can be reconstructed to meet the needs of those who rule. Of course, the first parts that must be separated from this mechanistic whole are the scientists themselves. The factor that makes the experiments of animals, children, non-civilized people and untrained people within the modern world unscientific is our So modern science developed with a specific purpose. That purpose was not the pursuit of truth or even knowledge except in the most utilitarian sense, but rather the atomization and rationalization of the natural world so that it could be broken With the mathematization of all things, what is singular in each thing disappears, because what is singular is beyond abstraction and therefore beyond mathematics. When that which is singular in beings and things disappears, the basis for passionate relations, relations of desire, disappears as well. After all, how does one measure passion? How does one calculate desire? The domination of instrumental reason has little room for any passion other than that deformed sort of greed that seeks to The various classification systems of science—which parallel systems used by state bureaucracies—certainly played a significant role in excluding the singular from the realm of science. But science uses another more insidious and irreparable method for destroying the singular. It attempts to break every thing down into its smallest possible components—first those units that are shared by every entity of a particular type, and then those that are shared by every entity that exists—because mathematics can only be applied to homogeneous units, units that can be equivalent. If early scientists had a tendency to experiment frequently with dead animals, including humans, it was because in death one dog or one monkey or one human is very much like any other. When pinned on a board in a laboratory with their bodies cut open, have not all frogs become equivalent? But this does not yet break things down adequately. Certainly such experimentation, whether with dead organisms or with non-organic matter allowed science to break the world down into components it could mold to fit into its well-measured, calculated, mechanistic perspective, a necessary step in the development of industrial technology. But mathematics and the corresponding mechanistic worldview were still quite clearly ideas that were being imposed on an unwilling and resistant world—particularly (or maybe just most noticeably) the human world, the world of the exploited who did not want their lives measured out in hours of work timed by the industrially accurate clocks of the boss, the exploited who didn’t want to spend every day in the same repetitive task that is also being carried out by hundreds—or maybe thousands—of others in the same building, or one that is identical to it in order to earn the general equivalent for buying survival. Physics has always been the science in the forefront of the effort to make mathematics the inherent basis of reality. If one is to believe the myth, when the apple hit Newton on the head, it supposedly led him to come up with equations to mathematically explain the attraction and repulsion of objects. For some reason, this is supposed to make us think of him as a genius rather than a petty-minded, calculating businessman/scientist. (He was a stockholder in the famous East India Company which provided the financial basis for so many of Britain’s imperialistic endeavors and head of the Bank of England for a time.) But Newton’s law of gravity, Galileo’s law of inertia, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. come across as mathematical constructs of the human mind that are imposed on the universe, just as their technological results—the industrial system of capitalism—was an imposition of this rationalized worldview into the daily lives of the exploited classes. It should be clear from this that the scientific method was never the empirical method. The latter was based only on experience, observation and experiment within the world with no preconceptions, mathematical or otherwise. The scientific method, on the other hand starts from the necessity of imposing mathematical, instrumental rationality on the universe. In order to carry out this task, as I have said, it had to separate specific components from their environment, remove them to the sterility Modern science has been able to continue developing not because it opens the way to increasing knowledge, but because it has been successful at carrying out the task for which the state and the ruling class funded it. Modern science was never intended to provide real knowledge of the world—that would have required immersion in the world, not separation from it— but rather to impose a particular perspective on the universe that would turn it in to a machine useful to the ruling class. The industrial system is proof of the success of science at carrying out this task, but not of the truth of its worldview. It is in this light that we can examine the "advances" that constitute the "new physics"—relativity physics, atomic physics and quantum physics—because it is this post-Newtonian physics that succeeds in imposing the mathematical conception onto the universe to such a degree that the two come to be seen as one. In Newtonian physics, the universe is a material reality, a machine made up of parts the interactions of which can be "explained" (though, in fact, nothing is really explained) mathematically. In the "new" physics, the universe is a mathematical construct—matter simply being part of the equation—made up of bits of information. In Relativity physics mathematizes the universe on the macrocosmic level. According to its theories, the universe is a "space-time continuum". But what does this mean? The "spacetime continuum" is, in fact, purely a mathematical construct, the multi-dimensional graph of a complex equation. Thus, it is completely beyond empirical observation—strangely like cyberspace. Or not so strangely, if one considers the former as a model for the latter. Once again, it matters little if this picture of the The "ultimate reality" that is the "space-time continuum"— this "reality" beyond our senses that the experts tell is more real than our daily experience (and who still doubts them in this alienated world?)—is constructed of bits of information called quanta. This is the microcosm of the total mathematization of the universe, the realm of quantum physics. Quantum physics is particularly interesting for the way in which it exposes the project of modern science. Quantum physics is supposed to be the science of sub-atomic particles. At first, there were just three: the proton, the electron and the neutron. These explained atomic weight, electricity, etc. and allowed for the development of nuclear technology and modern electronics. But too many Relativity physics and quantum physics are often passed off as "pure science" (as if such a thing has ever existed), theoretical exploration without any instrumental considerations. Without even considering the role these branches of science have played Relativity and quantum physics have succeeded in doing what every branch of science would like to do; they have completely separated their sphere of knowledge from the realm of the senses. If reality is only a complex mathematical equation made up of While some have tried to portray the concepts of relativity and quantum physics as a break with the mechanistic worldview held by science up to that time, in fact, this "new" view of the world as pure mathematical construct made up of bits of information It is worth noting that the "discovery" of DNA occurred just a few years before the beginning of what some have called the "information age". Of course, cybernetic and information technologies had existed for some time already, but it was in the early 1970’s that these technologies began to penetrate into the general social sphere to a great enough extent to be able to affect how people viewed the world. Since we have already been torn from any sort of deep, direct relationship with the natural world As we have seen, science has never been simply an attempt to describe what exists. Rather it seeks to dominate reality and make it conform to the ends of those who hold power. Thus, the digitalization of life and of the universe has the express purpose Nanotechnology applies the same digitalization to inorganic matter. Chemistry and atomic physics provided the conception of matter as constructed of molecules which are constructed of atoms which are constructed of subatomic particles. The goal of Both biotechnology and nanotechnology can evoke horrific visions: large and small scale monsters, strange diseases, totalitarian gene manipulation, microscopic air-borne spying devices, intelligent machines with no more need of their human The earliest modern scientists were mostly devout christians. Their mechanical universe was a machine manufactured by god with a purpose beyond itself, determined by god. This conception of a higher purpose disappeared from scientific thought long ago. The cybernetic universe serves no other purpose than that of maintaining itself in order to maintain the flow of bits of information. On the social level where it affects our lives, this means that every individual is simply a tool for maintaining the present social order and can be adjusted as necessary to maintain the flow of information that allows this order to reproduce itself, information more precisely called commodity exchange. And here the real function of science is revealed. Science is the attempt to create a system that can present a balanced account of all the resources in the universe, making them available to capital. This is why it must break the universe down into its smallest bits, bits that have a sufficient degree of identity and interchangeability to act as a general equivalent. This is why it must force the universe to conform to a mathematical construct. This is why ultimately a cybernetic model is best for the Thus, the struggle against capitalism is the struggle against modern science, the struggle against a system that strives to know the world merely as measurable resources with a price, as interchangeable bits of economic value. For those of us who seek to know the world passionately, who want to encounter it joyfully with a sense of wonder, different ways of knowledge are essential, ways that aim not at domination, but at pleasure and adventure. That it is possible to study and explore the universe in |
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