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Title: Science Author: Alex Gorrion Date: May 29, 2015 Language: en Topics: science, religion, spirituality, christianity, rationalism, the Enlightenment, patriarchy, The Anvil Review, review Source: The Anvil Review
Elaborating an idea that was left mentioned but unexplored in the
previous essay, we wish to outline some central arguments of our belief
that Western science or Enlightenment rationalism constitutes a mythical
worldview, a state religion, and a productive modality, which is to say,
a worldshaper. While it is true that all religions are worldshapers,
since understanding is one of the first forms of shaping, by being
integrally connected to capitalism Western science is the most powerful
worldshaper to date; far from neutral, it is a most potent machine. Not
only do we argue the religious nature of Science, we also assert that it
is a direct ideological descendant of Christianity, and while the
ascendancy of Enlightenment rationalism constituted a rupture with
Church power and doctrine, we would qualify this as an evolutionary
rupture, incurring no more breakage or damage to Church structures and
thinking than was strictly necessary for Science to gain its
independence and make a qualitative leap as the hegemonic worldshaper,
as the butterfly must break the chrysalis.
From the outset we find it necessary to make a crucial distinction
between Enlightenment rationalism, a category that contains nearly all
the attributes people wish to communicate when they refer to “science,”
and the empirical method, which rationalism's coreligionists would have
us believe is the pure essence and extent of real science, a method
unencumbered by worldview.
In rejecting Science we do not reject the empirical method, which we
consider a useful but severely limited way of gaining knowledge; rather
we reject all of Western science's dark matter, all the elements it
claims not to possess. We can use the empirical method without believing
in Science just like we can appreciate a cathedral without being
Catholic or use fire or wheels without being animists (as were the
probable inventors of those tools). In fact, the comparison is faulty,
given that Enlightenment thinkers were not the sole nor the first
inventors of empiricism, just as Johannes Gutenberg was not the sole nor
the first inventor of the printing press. Experimentation is widespread
in human history, and in many cultures it has taken on methodical forms.
Because scientists from the “hard” branches have studied neither
discourse, nor symbols, nor logic, they tend to be unaware when they are
speaking metaphorically, and often confuse fact with fiction (to be fair
I should point out that this problem, which I had grasped but could not
articulate, was first elucidated to me by a PhD candidate of the
humanities). Believers in Science will generally assert that Science
itself is nothing more than empiricism. This is balderdash. We enumerate
below a whole host of religious elements of the rationalist worldview
and characteristics that the Enlightenment uncritically inherited from
Christianity. But first, it would be good to point out a chief
limitation of empiricism itself. This element can be summed up as the
following non-falsifiable article of faith: “believe only what you can
see.” Such a belief is wholly ignorant of the fact, now empirically
proven, that observation changes what is being observed, and it also
predisposes us to a knowledge of aliens rather than a knowledge of self,
relationships, or fields.
Leaving behind positivism and the faith in one kind of knowledge alone,
we would state that “only what can be observed and tested counts as
empirical knowledge.” The implication is that there are many other kinds
of knowledge, a recognition unknown to men of “Science,” who have chosen
to name their doctrine, simply and presumptuously, “Knowledge”—in Latin
of course, suggesting an entire other train of baggage coming along on
tracks clearly laid down by the Catholic church.
While we can appreciate a limited but significant validity in
empiricism, we must attack objectivity wholeheartedly as a
philosophically and empirically preposterous idea, as well as a morally
disturbed way of looking at the world. Nevermind the insistence that
contradiction or paradox constitutes a logical fallacy (which in some
cultures would be viewed as a sign of a simplistic immaturity), the
belief that there exists a complete, internally aligned, finite set of
facts to describe every situation implies a worldview screaming for an
absent god. All facts are processed knowledge resulting from personal
involvement in a situation, guided by a specific cultural and historical
framing as well as individual motivations. Regardless of whether a
falling tree makes noise in an empty forest, how someone understands a
forest and what features of it they decide to, or are even able to,
measure, are all subjectively determined factors. There are no facts
without personhood, and the tendency to try to alienate the facts from
the producers of those facts not only trains people in a non-ecstatic
disembodied view of their own lives, it also suggests dishonesty as well
as an extreme discomfort with one's place in the world. In a world not
ruled by Science, psychologists would be speaking about “objectivity
neurosis” rather than “oppositional defiance disorder.”
Empirically and philosophically speaking, objectivity is a concept that
has been thoroughly problematized, if not to say discredited;
nonetheless it continues to make the rounds and play a central role in
shaping people's worldview (a dynamic that we will see pop up a number
of times throughout this essay). It is now a well produced and difficult
to deny fact that observation always changes that which is observed.
This holds true across the disciplines, from the thermometer slightly
changing the temperature of the matter it is inserted into, to the
velocity of one object being relative to the velocity of the object from
which it is being observed, to people changing their behavior, even
pandering to the scientist's expectations, when being observed by an
anthropologist or sociologist. This boils down to a truism that should,
at least philosophically, hold great weight: it is impossible to know
the world without us.
In terms of physics, it is hard to talk about objective velocity and
position because space is not a neutral, static field of fixed
coordinates against which objects can be measured; in fact on a number
of levels even the firm distinction between object and space is
illusory, stemming from a human (or at least Western) preference for
seeing things and not seeing the field that contains them.
And in terms of knowledge production focusing on other humans, we can
take a moment to mock medical studies (the medical industry, ahem,
profession, will be a favorite whipping boy of this article). The
supposedly passive subjects in medical studies are engaged in the study
for specific reasons opaque to the researchers who are ostensibly in
control; they know how to give the researchers what they want, and even
to play them. In many cases, they are more able professionals than the
researchers themselves. And if we are to believe that an uncontrolled
“placebo effect,” purely psychological in terms of Science's mind-body
dualism, can corrupt the results of a study, what about the
psychological effects of living for several days inside a research
facility, under artificial lights, an altered diet and daily routine,
and constant observation, not to mention the tapping of bodily fluids?
The objectivity and “control” in a medical study is a convenient lie, an
industry convention designed to produce credibility, which is nothing
other than an appearance.
As for statistics, the ultimate in objective information, anyone who
cares to knows how easily statistics can be cooked and manipulated, at
the moment of presentation, of analysis, or even at the moment of data
intake. Which is not to say, relativistically, that all statistics are
meaningless or equally valid; only that they can never be honestly used
as anything more than one of many forms of knowledge, nor do they convey
that chimera, objective truth.
And though scientists are not always directly involved in the production
of the following discourse, the pedantic idea of objectivity that is a
cornerstone of the news media only functions in a society that holds
Science as sacred. The journalistic hoax that allows an infinity of
perspectives to be silenced so as to present “both sides” of a story,
and their refusal to educate viewers about the invisibilized questions
of framing, can only fly for a public that still believes that objective
information exists. It would probably not be exaggerated to view this
hoax as a cover-up. If people realized that the best that can be hoped
for (and not even in a pessimistic sense) is multi-subjective knowledge,
they would not constantly have to devalue and suppress their own
subjective knowledge, which is to say their life experiences, in the
search for a superior yet unattainable objective knowledge. And someone
who suppresses their own viewpoint is easier to control.
Additionally, before we enumerate rationalism's myths and religious
features, it would also do to touch on a middle area: knowledge that is
validated by the empirical method, but marginalized or obscured by the
acting priests of Science. We can refer to this field as heresy, an
exploration conducted within the terminology and cosmology of the faith,
rather than external to it, but one that contradicts the interests of
those who hold power over the faith.
To validate our terminological comparison to heresy within the Christian
paradigm, we can consider the Anabaptists. As with all heretics of their
era, they were also true Christians. They used the objective material
and tools of the Church, namely the reading of Scripture, to subvert the
unspoken goal of the Church institution, which was Power, the
accumulation of which its heir Science has realized to a far greater
extent and in a more dissimulated, innocent fashion. And just as the
Anabaptists were marginalized once their ability to contest the Church
exercise of power was violently eliminated, so too are heretical forms
of Science marginalized, though the mechanisms of marginalization are
quite different, owing in part to modern media technologies and the
universalization of literacy, and in part to the functioning of research
grants.
Gaia theory, the Kropotkinian view of evolution, and Reclusian
theorizations in geography are three examples of heresy in the
rationalist paradigm. Articulated by trained scientists with a
scientific terminology, compatible with systems theory and other
contemporary theories that are given more credence, modifiable in the
face of empirical testing so as to separate them from pseudo-science;
nonetheless they all have been effectively marginalized. The latter two,
theorized by anarchists who won great praise in their day, have been
largely erased from the history books, only starting to make a
reappearance today, whereas the former has been marginalized primarily
through derision. Rather than being subjected to scrutiny, it is affixed
with an aura of mysticism (granted, the name helps) enough to keep away
research funders and scientists concerned about their careers.
Simultaneously, the police on multiple continents wage a fierce and
bloody war, under the rubric of antiterrorism, against anyone who would
attach the Gaia theory worldview to a social force (in other words,
radical environmentalists who see life as a planetary quality, and the
earth as a living system that can only be protected holistically). As
much as the skeptics would insist that these two maneuvers in the
current war on heresy are separate—the derision and the repression—we
must not forget that the police today, like most other professions,
conduct themselves scientifically, and that they generally do not attack
social groups granted legitimacy by other powerful institutions.
A fact published by Silvia Federici illustrates the link between the
enthusiastic explorations of science and of the police; Francis Bacon,
the father of empiricism, was also the Attorney General for the British
Crown. He conducted political repression for the State, becoming
involved in the interrogation and torture of subjects, an activity that
perhaps expanded his understanding of the methodical acquisition of
knowledge. And even though today, given centuries of complexification,
the ecologist and the police investigator, both scientifically trained,
are not the same person, it is hard to ignore the community of interests
they work for. One is employed by Exxon to carry out investigations that
will either raise doubts about global warming or open up new product
lines for “clean energy,” and the other has a “domestic terrorism”
assignment that was created after political lobbying by Exxon in the
face of a direct action campaign against a pipeline. Or perhaps his job
post was indirectly created by Weyerhauser, or Monsanto, or Huntingdon
Life Sciences, but in that case one only need go a level higher, to find
that both companies use the same bank.
One of the prime hand-me-downs that is pervasive in Enlightenment
rationalism is the tension between the material and the ideal, which is
perhaps the definitional tension of Western civilization, apparent in
Plato, apparent in Christianity, and apparent in Science. Although each
of these paradigms has seized on somewhat different resolutions to the
tension, the dichotomy itself is peculiar, arbitrary in the way that all
cultural values are arbitrary.
Science pretends to resolve the tension by producing a dead universe (a
philosophical projection that Science as a worldshaper may be close to
achieving). The ideal or the spirit has been abolished, assumed to be a
fiction of the material world, which in rationalist terms is the only
world (almost an inversion of Manichaeism, which is curious given the
fury with which the medieval Church attacked the followers of Mani).
Scientists still are not any closer to furnishing ultimate explanations
of consciousness, life, or creation—though their “I don't know” has
gotten fascinatingly more detailed—and they continuously have to return
to their relationship with religion, their explanations of the power of
the mind, the placebo effect, reports of altered consciousness among
people who experienced temporary death, and so on. This wouldn't be a
problem if Science did not pretend to be an absolute system of
knowledge. As far as answers are concerned, Science is much better at
cobbling them together than most other systems of knowledge, but the
weight of its pretension to absoluteness causes it to stumble painfully
over these few details, again and again, that it still cannot smooth
down.
It is worth noting that, even though today, pre-Enlightenment
Christianity is portrayed (in anachronistic terms) as fanciful and
mystical, in fact Christianity took many important steps towards the
dead universe of Enlightenment rationalism. Notably, Christianity
succeeded in enclosing the sacred, which had once been a commons. The
heresies that the Church attacked most violently were precisely those
heresies that claimed that everyone could talk to God without priests as
intermediaries. The Church was founded on the erection of barriers
between common people and the sacred. What's more, Christianity was a
notably skeptical religion for its day, discussing doctrine and evidence
with a high premium on logic, method, and objectivity. The chief
difference is that the primary materials they operated on in their
theoretical laboratories were not observations of the world around them,
but Scripture; nonetheless Church scholars regularly debated with vigor
what stories, traditions, and documents were fraudulent rather than
accepting any tall tale placed before them.
True, the Catholic Church certified a great many miracles in order to
canonize their saints, but their actions must be compared with what came
before them, not what came after. Catholicism constituted a much less
miraculous universe than the pagan one that had preceded it. Theirs was
a universe in which miracles could not be commonly experienced and
proclaimed, but had to be granted institutional recognition. Moreover,
the honoring of sainthood was a necessary Catholic concession to the
paganism it worked hard to supplant. Much of the opprobrium reserved by
Protestantism and then rationalism for the Catholic Church was directed
at its worldly compromises with a decentralized spiritual practice that,
by the 17th century, had already been stamped out. It is no coincidence
that the countries where the witch burnings were most thorough and the
bloodiest forms of Protestantism most active would also be the cradles
of scientific rationalism.
Nor is it a coincidence that many of the early men of science were monks
or trained ecclesiasts, such as Copernicus, Mendel, Albertus Magnus,
Roger Bacon, Georges Lemaitre, Nicolas Steno, and many more, while
others like Linnaeus were educated for the priesthood before branching
off into other fields of study.
Science has gone one further, abolishing the sacred sphere that the
Church had enclosed and placed beyond easy access. Nonetheless, it not
only suffers this absence, it continues to produce a world ruled by
abstraction, often to a neurotic degree. Far from solved, the tension
between matter and spirit it inherited from Christianity remains alive
in Science.
We can also fault Science for its proliferation of simplified myths.
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, articulates perfectly how our scientific
society is based on anthropocentric myths about evolution. Ask anyone to
explain the evolution of life, and they will tell you a story that
starts with single-celled organisms and ends with humankind, the
pinnacle of progress. Scientists have an easy out, for they can always
claim that this is not really a factually rigorous or “objective”
explanation of evolution, and they can't be blamed for other people's
ignorance. What they can't explain is why that myth has always been
reproduced at a far greater frequency than any empirically accurate
rendition of the evolution tale, and often issues from the mouths of
trained scientists themselves.
In fact, practitioners of Science are far more guilty of this
simplification process than their predecessors. With the Christians, the
simplified myths tend to involve simply glossing over contradictions. It
is my impression that most Christians don't know that the Bible is
actually full of contradictions, or that, for example, Genesis actually
contains multiple creation stories that differ on important details.
With Science, however, the mythical simplifications tend to be far more
crass, often flying in the face of empirical evidence in order to
articulate a myth that is calming or convenient to the social order.
Examples abound, from the already cited evolution myth that depicts a
hierarchical progression culminating in homo sapiens, to apologia for
nuclear energy, to essentialist justifications for traditional gender
relations. Frustratingly, such myths are hard to challenge, because
scientists are not usually instructed in the nuances of symbolic
communication, and thus do not recognize a myth if it slaps them in the
face (on the contrary, they tend to operate in the Christian realm of
truth, taking their own narratives as objective, and those of other
religions as preposterous absurdities). If effectively confronted, any
of these myths can be conveniently jettisoned as pseudo-science, but an
explanation is never offered as to why such myths are so often produced
by scientists themselves, and why opportunities are systematically
generated for their distribution.
Because Science is operating in a much more complicated textual terrain
than Scripture, and because of the attendant professionalism, no
scientist has a global picture, the way an erudite Biblical scholar
might have a global picture of his respective textual terrain. In other
words, scientists inevitably have to address aspects of empirical
knowledge that are outside their field of expertise. Their vision of
other fields is often fed to them by the same mass media that take the
fall for being the propagators of pseudo-science. But what we are
dealing with is something systematic. In a knowledge system that is far
too complex for any one mind to appreciate all of it, or even a tenth of
it, the mechanisms by which knowledge is simplified for the
non-specialists, and by which a global portrayal of the knowledge is
produced, must be analyzed as a structural part of that knowledge
system. Western science, however, dodges the bullet on this one by
avoiding holistic analysis of its methodology. Against such a laughably
broad claim as “Science produces a mythical view of evolution,” the
institutional body need only trot out an expert on, say, the evolution
of color-perception among insects, to give a suitably detailed
description of evolutionary processes and thus deny responsibility for
the inaccuracies of pop science. But the pop science and the mechanisms
that produce it are an integral part of Science itself.
In the most charitable analysis, individual scientists or scientific
institutions would do well to analyze this enduring failure to
communicate. Why are so many inaccurate narratives and so much
misinformation distributed and reproduced, long after the advent of the
Age of Reason? No doubt, politicians or television can be blamed, but
any sincere skeptic cannot help but to see the way these mythical
narratives are structurally reinforced, and the way they are beneficial
to power-holders in a hierarchical society.
The structural component is important, and reveals other forms of
Christian heritage. Similar to the medieval church, the advancement of
Western science is accomplished by professionals who are patronized by
financial and territorial powers, free to research and debate within the
informal but very real boundaries established by patronage, while
bringing no empowerment or enlightenment to the masses, only
instructions. After all, the average citizen of a modern, scientific
country gains no real tools for understanding or influencing the world
around them. On the contrary, they are consigned to believing their
doctor or the scientists who quality control the products they consume
(a frequently foolish and sometimes even fatal mistake), and gleaning
simplified versions of larger truths from copies of National Geographic
or a productive half-hour spent watching the Discovery Channel.
Like the Church hierarchy, the hierarchy of scientific tenures is not a
meritocracy as they would like to believe. One encounters an endless
number of nincompoops with PhDs. And while we may find academic,
peer-reviewed journals to be an invaluable resource for research, as
well as a useful vehicle for the production and evaluation of empirical
knowledge (this is of course a meek understatement), it is not
infrequently that one comes across authors in such journals who are
total hacks incapable of marshaling facts or analyzing their own data;
and the only reason they were published is because they boasted a fancy
piece of paper and a prestigious post.
And while that nebulous network we can ironically refer to as Science is
not as nepotist as the one that, with more precision, we can refer to
metonymically as the Church—although tell that to the Harvard Admissions
Board—entry into the club and ascendance in its ranks is determined at
least as much by class considerations, dexterousness at university
politics, alignment with other power structures, and success in
publishing and receiving funding (which means selling to a market) as it
is by merit or ability. We personally know of an intelligent scientist
and excellent professor who was prevented from getting tenure in her
department simply because her politics differed from those of the
department chair.
Such personal anecdotes are hardly scientific and can't be taken as
solid proof of anything, of course, but the day the professionals
publish an empirical study revealing once and for all how many of their
colleagues are total idiots, perhaps we can give up on our rude, country
mouse ways and stick to The Facts rather than bewildering readers with
romantic little jaunts through Storyland. In fact, this absence of data
reveals an important point: scientific institutions will not produce
knowledge that is not useful to the exercise of power. They would only
conduct and publish a study revealing how many accredited scientists
were airheads if there were some institutional pressure to reform
admissions processes; in the meantime, such studies are useless because
they would serve to discredit the institutions.
Science, like Christianity in the Middle Ages, is the custodian of
collective memory. Whereas before it was only clerics who recorded the
history of society, now nearly all primary research is conducted by
trained scientists (social and other). Subsequently, the masses may do
with this data what we will, but the questions of what forgotten epochs
or aspects of history will be opened up to us and from what angle they
will be mined are decided entirely by professional researchers.
Another artifact of Christian inheritance is the progressive, unilinear
view of time that rationalism has strongly favored. This was the
dominant Christian temporality once the Gnostics were defeated around
the 5th century and while since Einstein it no longer holds water in
physics and has been challenged in recent decades in many of the social
sciences, the myth of progress is still firmly entrenched. Examples
include the evolution myth already discussed, in which humans follow
chimpanzees, or the long dominant and still taught anthropological
framework that has states following chiefdoms following tribes following
bands, another story with no basis in fact. In his excellent research,
Stephen Jay Gould documents a number of scientific blunders among
linguists and others who assumed that the simple must be followed by the
complex, as well as an abundance of examples from the natural and social
sciences demonstrating the non-progressive multilineality of evolution.
Another prejudice Enlightenment rationalism inherited from Christianity
is the belief in a unitary cause. Just as Thomas Aquinas based his proof
for the existence of God on the non-falsifiable assumption that
existence needed a unitary, original cause, physicists and
mathematicians continue to perfect Grand Unified Theories in order to
come closer to a “theory of everything.” And in other fields, scientists
cleave to Ockham's Razor, a prejudice towards the simplest explanation
(developed by a Franciscan friar no less). And while Ockham's Razor is
clearly useful, and a necessary complement to falsifiability, it can
also accustom thinkers to blind themselves to complexity, or to see
causation and change occurring in unilinear chains rather than as
dynamic equilibria shifting across a field.
Enlightenment rationalism directly inherited Christianity's zeal for
speaking in the name of nature; in fact as it reached maturation Science
directly contested the ability of the Church to speak for the natural
world, usurping that throne for itself. Just as Christianity in certain
moments declared homosexuality, sex out of wedlock, working on Sunday,
or going naked unnatural, Enlightenment rationalism began to justify its
own social values through a particular characterization of the natural
world. This new world they produced, both discursively and to an
increasing extent socio-economically, is a mechanical and hierarchical
world. Natural patterns were described as “laws,” originally assumed to
have been drafted by a clockmaker God. This latter figure, embarrassing
for later scientists, quietly disappeared, but His clocklike universe
and laws remain. Living bodies continue to be characterized as machines,
and with their typical obtuseness the proponents of this view generally
do not know if they are speaking literally or metaphorically.
Perhaps the most important element shared by Christianity and Science is
their pathologically immature fear of death. A large part of scientific
production is designed to seek everlasting life for individuals (those
who can afford the treatments, of course) and for the species. Nevermind
that scientists claim to speak for the natural world and in nature
species die out; humanity must survive. Does Science, therefore, think
to change the productive processes it has given rise to, since they are
the greatest current threat to human survival? Of course not. These
processes must be accelerated so that humankind can colonize Mars before
we destroy the biosphere, colonize other solar systems before our sun
dies, and in the meantime set up a planetary defense system should any
asteroids come too close. Scientists evidently cannot get over
themselves and accept that everybody dies.
Why is our species more important than all the others, and more
important than the inorganic processes of the universe? The only
possible justification for getting ourselves, at the cost of all others,
off the planet is, “because we can.” If that is the ultimate ethic of
our civilization, it is only fair that it be applied not only to
scientists but also to their opponents. We can hope the luddites and
primitivists take note. Anything that can be done, must be done. Any
scientist that can be killed, should be. Why not? It's not like there's
anything, in the grand scheme of things, to lose.
Therefore, any supporter of Western science and in particular the
project to send human life out into the stars should recognize that Ted
Kaczynski and more recently ITS in Mexico were absolutely right in
assassinating scientists. They had the power to do it, therefore it was
right. But if, perhaps, they feel reluctant to place their lives in the
hands of such a mercenary ethos, maybe, just maybe, it's because their
only real morality is the belief that everything they do is right. Not
so different from the Christians in the end, are they?
As we have stated earlier, Western science constitutes a knowledge
system. The knowledge it produces is frequently valid, up until the
point it claims to be absolute. Since it is very difficult to think
outside of a paradigm, it might be useful to review the kinds of
knowledge that Science is predisposed to produce. This will further
reveal the mythical, religious nature of rationalism. And in case our
position is unclear, we must insist that there is absolutely nothing
wrong with myths—on the contrary humans cannot live without myths—unless
they are myths that claim to be objective truths. Rationalism, like any
other cosmovision, is spiritual at its core, but on this point we will
take sides to argue that the spirituality of Enlightenment rationalism
is fundamentally sick, corrupted, alienated, authoritarian, ecocidal,
patriarchal, and sociopathic.
Given its background in Christianity and platonic philosophy, Science is
predisposed to produce the following types of knowledge:
--The charting of ahistorical genealogies (as in the classification of
species not according to their role or relation with other species, to
name one of many possible organizational schema, but according to their
presumed genetic descendance; perhaps it is not unreasonable to see in
this a marked Old Testament influence);
--An awareness of alienated units (swallowing—until recently
uncritically—the Enlightenment concept of the individual, along with
other sovereigns like the nation, scientists have overwhelmingly favored
an analysis of discrete bodies rather than of fields, fluxes, or
interconnections, which is akin to analyzing the ocean as a large
collection of waves);
--The development of mathematics as the language of nature (revealing
something approaching a kabbalist mysticism, rather than simply
understanding numerical relations as one of multiple ways to describe
the world, examples abound of scientists and mathematicians talking
about numerical relations comprising a secret language behind the façade
of the physical world, even as a sort of key to decoding existence;
fractals enthusiasts promote this thinking with particular frequency);
--The articulation of mechanical relationships (as opposed to reciprocal
or dynamic relationships: what is overwhelmingly interesting for Science
is not to discover how to maintain or effect states of balance that
foster well-being, but how to achieve reproducibility and control,
isolating operative factors so that a certain input will always produce
the desired output);
--Discoveries resulting from divisionism, or the search for pure
elements that cannot be divided or cut (in the popular parlance, the
search for the “building blocks” of life, matter, the universe, etc.,
which belies a rather simplistic view of how things are constructed, as
well as a zeal to identify component elements so that reality can be
reconfigured).
What other kinds of knowledge are there, and what is wrong with the
types of knowledge enumerated above? After all, as of the 20th century
Science can also boast a knowledge of field dynamics, dynamic
equilibrium, and chaotic systems. Give them enough time, and our boys in
labcoats will discover it all, right?
Naturally it is hard to talk about what we don't know or haven't been
able to discover, and perhaps even harder to reveal the presence of a
lens when our whole lives we have been trained to look only at the
object, and from the same perspective no less. Objectivity is an
extremely pervasive, subtle philosophy specifically because it trains
its adepts to believe that the only meaningful differences are, well,
objective. If they are aware of the existence of, for example,
ecosystems, they are unlikely to recognize that another culture
understands ecosystems better or possesses knowledge that the
rationalists do not, especially if that other culture has no
quantitative studies to demonstrate their knowledge. It will be hard for
them to grasp how much perspective, emphasis, and mythical framing can
affect knowledge. If both knowledge systems perceive the same objective
facts, that wolves eat deer and deer eat plants and plants feed off the
soil and the sun, then in objective terms a food chain as a theoretical
heuristic lacks nothing that another knowledge system might contain,
even though it puts all the attention on discrete agents rather than the
living field constituted by the dynamic relationships between them, and
therefore leads to a number of disastrous misunderstandings about
ecosystems (remember the Cane Toad!).
Nonetheless, we will try our best to reveal what is lacking, similar to
how astronomers must discover black holes by looking at the things
around them.
Quantum physics and Cartesian geometry may be a good place to start.
Just as Cartesian dualism remains embedded in Enlightenment rationalism,
the Cartesian geometry of flat planes and right angles remains integral
to the scientific worldview, even though it has been invalidated by the
principle of relativity (whereas the determinism of classical science up
to and including general relativity has been contradicted by the
uncertainty of quantum mechanics). If space itself is not a neutral,
static phenomenon, something as stable and happy as a square or a
triangle can be nothing but an illusion or a convenient lie. (This is a
part of Science's mythical simplification, elements of the worldview
that it cannot actually defend, but that it nonetheless perpetuates,
through mechanisms that will be dishonestly chalked up to “pop science”
if ever called to account.)
Nonetheless, it is useful to train people to think in terms of Cartesian
geometry, because the discipline has been extremely active in enclosing
and dividing land or rationally governing construction through
blueprints (as Deleuze and Guattari have written, blueprints are not
required even for the construction of complex buildings, unless the
construction process needs to be subordinated to an external and
rational authority).
It would be easy to say that this whole line of argument is flawed,
since it was scientists themselves (Einstein and the like) who
discovered relativity and revealed the shortcomings of Cartesian
geometry. However, well over a thousand years earlier, Daoists and
Buddhists were already promoting a worldview that clashed with Cartesian
geometry but was largely compatible with the discoveries of quantum
physics. We reference Einstein because it is the only way to get the
faithful to listen; believers in Science refuse to recognize outside
sources. Quoting the Dao De Jing to back up a certain worldview would be
about as effective as quoting the Quran to convince a Christian that a
part of their doctrine is flawed.
But the empirical method, one might argue, should not be abandoned.
Scientists cannot go chasing down every last traditional spirituality as
the basis for its worldview. Scientists had to pass through the
fallacies of Cartesian geometry in order to arrive at relativity,
because they could not have discovered quantum physics or field dynamics
without prior discoveries, adequate microscopes, and so forth. Is this
credible? Maybe not. The concept of atoms comes from the ancient Greeks,
who lacked microscopes. Yet the concept fit with their worldview. Were
they really intuitive, or is it just a coincidence? Or is it possible
that atoms do not objectively exist, that they are just one of multiple
ways of understanding the composition of things? But I have seen atoms,
some readers will no doubt react, referring to the drawings and diagrams
in any high school physics textbook, just as students a century earlier
were treated to pictorial renditions of the Garden of Eden (and how
perfect, in the end, that objectivity comes to us in a series of
representations that we forget, from one moment to the next, are
representations). What is objectively true is that what we call atoms
are not atoms, or otherwise the category of “sub-atomic” would be
meaningless (see: a-tom, etymology). And it turns out that at the
subatomic level, the division between particles and waves, matter and
energy, breaks down.
On the one hand, it is only reasonable that the schematics placed on a
subject become more nuanced as the study of that subject progresses—in
other words it would be unfair to fault scientists if earlier models
proved insufficient, when we should be congratulating them for their
honesty. On the other hand, we should also consider that these
schema—particles, matter, even circles and squares—that are sold to us
as objective representations (this phrase is a hilarious oxymoron,
though we doubt anyone who has only studied hard sciences is capable of
getting it) are not the fruit of testing and experimentation, as the
mythology of empiricism would have us believe, but are rather cultural,
spiritual constructs born of a specific worldview that are imposed by
the scientist on the object of study (revealing at a deeper level what
in superficial, quantitative terms has already been accepted as
scientific fact, that all observation changes what is observed, another
of these new discoveries that other cultures have known for a long
time). In other words, atoms, squares, and the dualism between matter
and energy were not discovered; they already existed in the Western
imaginary and were used as symbolic tools, imposed on the inchoate
knowledge that was gradually being produced in order to simplify and
organize it.
Consider another example. Referring to a case of heresy in Milan in
1028, a Church chronicler writes about the heterodoxy as a disease that
needs to be eradicated before it can “contaminate” the rest of Italy. Is
it a mere coincidence that the scientific understanding of disease that
would arise centuries later (now with the aid of microscopes) would
promote this exact same vision of a neutral field invaded by impure
agents that spread through contact? They did not know about germs and
bacteria, but they already spoke of unclean agents that caused
contamination. Could it be that scientists utilized a pre-existing logic
to simplify and describe the complex reality of sickness? Yet we all
know that germs are an objective reality. There is no other valid theory
of disease, right? On the contrary, a worldview based on fields and
relationships would have us overlook the germs and focus on the diet,
the body, the weather, the community—all the things that Western
medicine ignores or at least minimizes. And without a doubt, this latter
theory would have a much better track record at dealing with disease,
because rather than doing essentially nothing until antibiotics could be
invented, it would have encouraged people to question food monocultures,
urban crowding, air quality, poverty, and more.
To speak more concretely, we could state that saying germs cause
sickness is like saying air causes fire. At least with many common
sicknesses, the germs are always, or often, present in any human
community, but people don't get sick as long as their immune systems are
working well. Likewise, air is always present (on the planet's surface,
anyway), but fuel and a spark are needed before you get fire.
To draw another example related to health, since in this field (along
with ecology), the ignorance and blundering of Science has been most
apparent (and, come to think of it, the health of our bodies and the
health of the environment are basically the two most important things
one might study), we can consider acupuncture. In our own lifetimes,
acupuncture has gone from a treatment that was ignored or ridiculed in
the West, to one that has been confirmed as effective by scientific
studies. This reaction belies the hypocrisy and also the implicit racism
of empiricist mythology, as acupuncture is based on thousands of years
of observation and testing, only it wasn't bearded white men who were in
charge, so it clearly doesn't count. And despite its proven
effectiveness, acupuncture is still belittled or dismissed, providing
more evidence of the cultural supremacy (an important component of any
religion) implicit in Science.
Part of the reason that scientists cannot easily promote acupuncture is
that they have no idea how it works. People trained in Chinese medicine
know how acupuncture works, but their explanations are completely
useless for believers in Science, since they rely on concepts like
energy meridians, yin and yang, that are meaningless within the
worldview of Enlightenment rationalism. To fully accept acupuncture or
any other component of Chinese medicine would be to acknowledge that
Science is partial rather than absolute, that it is only one knowledge
system of many, and that would be unacceptable.
Let's compare their treatment of Chinese medicine with their adventures
in psychiatry. True to their preference for mechanistic and divisionist
forms of knowledge, as mentioned above, they have “isolated” (a truly
spiritual term that accurately reflects their depraved philosophy) the
components of the brain that produce the chemicals connected to certain
emotions. Once you know what chemicals need to be blocked and what
chemicals need to be produced in greater quantity, you've got the
emotions all figured out. Simple, right? (Hopefully, readers read those
last two lines in a Mickey Mouse voice, or at least with the voice of
Joey from Friends).
The result of this kind of brilliant thinking are antidepressants that
cause higher rates of suicide, as well as other forms of intimately
disturbing unpleasantness. Some highly civilized people might not
believe that extreme stupidity is just cause for execution. Nonetheless,
we are confident that many who have been at the mercy of psychiatrists
(for they, along with other scientists, do nothing if not exercise power
over people) would agree with us that certain of these experts should be
dragged out into the streets and shot. But, since the shoe is on the
other foot, we can at least start with a bit of well earned mockery.
Science has perfected a knowledge of aliens. An alien is an Other, but
not an autonomous Other necessary for the understanding of the self; the
alien helps the scientific self promote its alibi of non-selfhood or
objectivity, that it is not a being intervening in the world and
producing specific kinds of knowledge but a simple, non-interfering gaze
that could belong to any subject, simply observing already existing
facts that lie scattered across the terrain. An alien, of necessity, is
violently uprooted from its surroundings, and it is the very process of
observation, categorization, and analysis, as part of greater
socio-economic processes, that achieves its alienation. Science, upon
knowing an alien, has already fucked it thoroughly and irrevocably, yet
it pretends that the alien already existed as an alien before the
intervention of the scientific gaze.
Rationalism has perfected a number of apparatuses ostensibly intended to
display knowledge. In practice, these apparatuses are factories of
alienation that train us to understand things as dismembered bodies
whose relationships and histories are as invisible as they are
extraneous. These apparatuses are the encyclopedia, the museum, the zoo.
In order to appear in a zoo or a museum, a body must already have
undergone a process of colonization, uprooting, kidnapping, trauma,
muting, and domination. For Science to claim (and to do so without
speaking, to naturalize the idea) that a zebra in a zoo is the same
thing as a zebra in its herd in the Serengeti, or that a ceremonial mask
stored with reverence and used to bring the rains in Borneo is the same
as a mask sitting in a display case in London, it must engage in a very
powerful and evil kind of magic. It is a transformation of the most
pernicious kind. In one kind of transformative magic, a person can be
made a fish or a bird, and discover the interconnectedness of all
things, and the mobility of the spirit. In rationalism's transformation,
two beings that are completely unlike—one free and the other
imprisoned—are made into the same being, teaching us the sameness of all
things and the transferability of objects.
Picking up after their idols, the Greeks (though there is no direct
intellectual continuity from the Greeks of antiquity to Enlightenment
rationalism, contrary to scientific mythology; in fact it was primarily
the medieval Arabs who built upon and improved the previous intellectual
traditions, whereas the early Christians who would create the
socio-political and intellectual structures that would eventually give
rise to the Enlightenment were great burners of libraries, a tradition
the European colonizers would carry on in modified form across the
globe), scientists have continued in their search for the atom, that
which cannot be cut, and which is therefore, supposedly, pure or more
real. But what is cut in every atom, a priori, is its relationship with
its surroundings.
The principles of the alien and the atom indicate that Science is not
merely a method, nor even a producer of knowledge, but a worldshaper, a
Weltanschauung that, through its connection to a complex of productive
forces, codifies a modality with which to approach the world, inscribes
a specific understanding of what the world actually is so that all its
operations may unfold on a complementary terrain, and ends up
reproducing the type of world that it believed in from the beginning, at
increasing intensities and extremes of scale.
Cartesian geometry was flawed, but no matter; in the hands of surveyors,
architects, and landlords it made for a more Cartesian world. Early
physiologists had nothing other than muddled metaphor to support their
claims that living bodies were organic machines. Nowadays, biochemists
can use genetic manipulation to turn living cells into chemical
factories and nanotechnicians can create robots out of artificial
chemical compounds. Trigonometry can be taught as a pure math, but
historically it changed the world as a mathematics of projectile
warfare. Rocket science, the 20th century's symbol of pure genius (as
in, “He's no rocket scientist”), likewise put the eggheads of the day at
the service of a military restructuring of reality.
Leaving all the alibis aside, Science as it exists is inconceivable
without its unbroken institutional, philosophical, and economic
connections with policing, warfare, and industrialization. Its medical
knowledge of bodies corresponds to the State's need to discipline,
exploit, and torture those bodies; its funding and the areas of its
advancement, its ��discoveries,” correspond to the need of states to wage
warfare against their neighbors and the need of capitalists to get an
edge on their competitors and their laborers. It is not merely a complex
of academic institutions that has advanced alongside, and been corrupted
by, the institutions of the modern nation-state and of capital
investment. On the contrary, at no point is Science autonomous within
and endogenous to those academic institutions. It has always been a
primary motor for the expansion—material and spiritual, to borrow the
tired dichotomy—of the present world system that has colonized the
entire globe, put all forms of life to work, reengineered the landscape
to favor production and social control, and that is now busy rewriting
the very matrix in which life and existence unfold; therefore its
development has not been an exclusively academic affair but a chief
concern of all the institutions of power with which it is coterminous.
Capitalism and therefore present-day ecocide do not exist without
Science, neither technologically nor philosophically, and no amount of
excuses about the individuality of scientists or the mutual independence
of investors and inventors can change that fact. Just as feudal society
is inconceivable without the clergy, even though the feudal relationship
is typically simplified as one between serf and secular lord or vassal
and liege lord, the scientific class are the linchpin of capitalist
society, despite not properly belonging to the bourgeoisie or
proletariat. Scientific investigation is a major sector of production in
its own right; scientists constitute a privileged caste indispensable to
the self-evaluation, reproduction, expansion, and social legitimation of
state and private entities; and the scientific worldview, with its
popular and professional forms, is crucial to uniting ruler and ruled in
the present day and explaining existence in a way that is compatible
with the interests of domination.
An unwritten rule of the scientific philosophy that is, nonetheless,
abundantly evident, is the non-limitation of invention and discovery.
Anything that can be invented, should be. Knowledge should never be
forsworn; it must always be used for the accumulation of more knowledge.
A professional class that could invent nuclear weapons plainly follows
such an imperative. Curiously, power within the scientific regime
operates in a way that is remarkably similar to capital—there is no bad
money, and all money must be invested or lost.
As we have tried to indicate in the first essay of this series, Science,
not only as a producer of technologies but also as a worldview and
spirituality, is indispensable in the production of golem, who are the
citizens of the world system, composed of the dust of obliterated
worlds, alienated from their histories and their surroundings, held
together only by the false commons of the apparatuses produced to
sustain them.
We predict that many believers in Science, especially the academically
initiated, will reject this critique as uselessly broad, if they do not
dismiss it outright. This is worth analyzing. First of all, someone in a
position of power, someone with an accredited brain, a priest with a
position in the hierarchy, need not respond to a non-professional
writer, a layperson, unless the critique begins to be so widely
distributed it constitutes a threat. The overwhelming silence this
article will be met with, except from other laypersons, suggests that
indeed there is a hierarchy at stake, rather than a free and equal
community of ideas. After all, the Catholic Church did not begin to
execute heretics among the laity until subversive heresies that
challenged church hierarchies were widespread and began connecting with
other social fault lines between upper and lower classes (principally
cleaving to the new mobile urban class of weavers or rural peasants who
increasingly asserted their autonomy) a situation that attained in the
12th century.
Secondly, and more substantially, we have noticed a certain pattern. The
academically trained will always insist that the scientific community is
highly self-critical, yet at the same time they always (as far as we
have seen) reject criticisms that come from outside of academia as
“overgeneralized” or unfounded. We would argue that this is a
structurally systematic response.
An institution with hegemonic aspirations, or one that has already
achieved dominance, must never allow itself to be fit into a globalizing
theory (for what we are offering here, to be honest, is not a critique,
it is a theoretical explanation of where Science fits within an
anarchist view of the world). Anticolonial movements have already
criticized postmodernism for how theorizing other people's identities
and histories constitutes an exercise of power over those peoples. More
broadly, Science cannot accept any external theorization of its role,
because it is busy trying to place everything and everyone else within a
theoretical system of its own making. At this juncture, we are not
trying to offer criticism or feedback that might be useful to specific
scientists, and which accordingly, must be particular, balanced, and
fair. We are trying to theorize about a system of knowledge that
pretends to be objective and all-encompassing, and a cabal (in the
Biblical rather than paranoid conspiratorial sense) that claims not to
exist, not to have agency, and not to have systematic patterns of
behavior and ways of shaping the world.
In other words, what we are dealing with is precisely the lack of a
theoretical generalization about Science as a complex of institutions
with dynamic agency and an extremely important role within capitalism.
Lacking this, it does not escape our attention that the only serious
critiques of scientists that will be permitted are those that originate
from other scientists and are published and disseminated by the
structures that Science has sanctioned for its internal communications;
and secondarily critiques originating from the laity that follow the
rules of good form, addressing only particular scientists and particular
errors, and thus never capable of contributing towards a theoretical
framework that addresses Science globally. To avoid unfair
generalization, we are meant to wait until the official producers of
knowledge themselves conceive of and find funding for a study that could
objectively demonstrate in what percentage of the cases these criticisms
are founded. Pie in the sky.
Remaining cautious of the potential for demagoguery or logical
manipulation that comparisons present, let us again take the example of
the Catholic Church in the centuries before the Enlightenment. In
serious conversation today, it is perfectly viable to speak of the
Church as an institution designed to accumulate power, effect social
control, mobilize myths and superstitions, and repress heresy. Are
particularities lost in this widely accepted theoretical view of the
Church? Of course (and ironically, when it comes to outright
misrepresentation, and not just the smoothing that accompanies
generalization, the scientific proponents of the Enlightenment are
largely to blame, in their zealousness to differentiate themselves from
their supposedly irrational predecessors). Debate was in fact encouraged
in the Church in the Middle Ages. Heresy could only be punished after
formal processes in which the accused usually had the opportunity to
defend themselves. As for superstitions, the Church also dealt in a
wealth of historical fact, they often displayed intellectual vigor in
their studies, and there were many efforts to challenge and discredit
fraudulent documents and data (then as now, any “fact” that wasn't
politically necessary could be comfortably disputed). And regarding the
accumulation of power, there are even examples of clergy who fought for
the Church to give up its temporal power.
Do all these details mean that the summarized theorization of the
Church's social role, articulated above, is invalid? Of course not. Now
what if we imagine a priest in the 12th century responding to the wave
of popular dissent, deflecting a generalized critique of the Church by
enumerating the following points, all of which are factually correct:
the Church isn't a unified institution, there are many internal
differences and no one person or body controls everything that happens
in the Church; what priests are you referring to? because there are good
ones and bad ones; laypeople might be ignorant of this, but the Church
is very self-critical—aside from constant debates that occur via letters
that bounce back and forth across Western Europe, the popes also
organize ecclesiastical conferences every few years to discuss and
update dogma; are you talking about deacons, priests, bishops, abbots,
archbishops, or cardinals? because the clergy function really
differently depending on the level you look at.
Particularization at such a juncture is nothing but filibustering.
We don't doubt that Science has its own mechanisms for self-criticism
and accountability. In this day and age, what institutional complex
doesn't? The point is, these mechanisms are not adequate for the rest of
us. It can be claimed that Science is not a cohesive body nor a
religion, but we can see that sufficient coordination exists for
scientists to be trained with enough homogeneity that they can be
compatible and communicative internationally, and that these scientists
are consistently useful in the maintenance and expansion of capitalism.
True, capitalism can harness anything, even the games of children, but
there really is no comparison, as scientific methodologies, the products
of scientific knowledge, and trained scientists themselves play an
irreplaceable role at the highest levels of global capitalism and on all
the frontiers of capitalist expansion.