The Danger of Scientism? (response to Benjamin Cain)

Go read Benjamin Cain’s fascinating and tightly argued essay posted at Three Pound Brain (the blog of author R. Scott Bakker). Below is my comment to him:

That was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

 

I agree with what may be your most important conclusion: that the real danger “we” face as auto-poetic “minds” is that techno-science is systematically disassembling the “cultural”/”folk psychological” conditions necessary for human ensoulment. The built-environments and electronic media we have surrounded ourselves with are not simply made in “our image”; the machines have also been making us, from the very beginning, into something other than human. The techno-evangelists call this the “transhuman,” but I’m not so sure we in the “developed” world are taking a step “beyond” our “natural” state as pre-scientific social animals.

 

Whether or not scientific knowledge can really transcend its biocultural conditions in order to speak transparently on behalf of the Facts of Nature, simply believing such a thing were possible has lead in a few short centuries to a total re-visioning of the purpose of human life (=consumerism) and civilization (=techno-capitalism).

 

Even if our pre-scientific ancestors really partook of something called “life” and had individual “souls” which found themselves in relation to “gods,” this became impossible the moment the techno-scientific utopia finally arrived. Once science dispelled every supposedly meaningful quality in the observable universe, “we” didn’t need “souls” anymore, or at least, we forgot how it was that our ancestors managed to ritually invoke them.

 

Mythic culture traditionally allowed for collective ceremony and celebration of the sacred marriage of earth and sky. It oriented primal humans to the rhythms of the cosmos upon which they depended (agriculturally for food and spiritually for existential orientation). We are wrong to assume that the imaginations of early humans “projected” meaning onto the patterned movements of earth and sky. Just like modern day machines shape us as we interact with them, impressing their digi-logic into our neuro-logic, the seasonal rhythms of earth and the cosmic revolutions of heaven projected their astro-logic into the imaginations of early humans. True myth was not “made up” by humans; the first human stories were learned by paying very close attention to the language of nature itself. Nowadays, with the stars drowned out by the light of our cities and the animals driven nearly to extinction by other industrial activity, human language has become far more arbitrary, far less archetypal. If nominalism was still entirely false in Plato’s day, it has since become truer in ours.

 

Related articles

• The Universe as a Work of Art: Images of the Cosmos in Plato, Descartes, and Kepler (footnotes2plato.com)
• Eric Voegelin’s 1948 Definition of Scientism (maverickphilosopher.typepad.com)
• Responding to Levi Bryant on the Question of Religion (footnotes2plato.com)