One of the interesting features of blogging about the
twilight of science and technology these days is that there’s rarely any need
to wait long for a cogent example. One that came my way not long ago via a reader
of this blog—tip of the archdruidical hat to Eric S.—shows that not even a
science icon can get away with asking questions about the rising tide of
financial corruption and dogmatic ideology that’s drowning the scientific
enterprise in our time.
Many of my readers will recall Bill Nye the Science Guy, the
star of a television program on science in the 1990s and still a vocal and
entertaining proponent of science education. In a recent interview, Nye was
asked why he doesn’t support the happy-go-lucky attitude toward dumping
genetically modified organisms into the environment that’s standard in the
United States and a few other countries these days. His answer is that their impact on ecosystems is a
significant issue that hasn’t been adequately addressed. Those who know their
way around today’s pseudoskeptic scene won’t be surprised by the reaction from
one of Discover Magazine’s bloggers: a tar and feathers party, more or less, full
of the standard GMO industry talking points and little else.
Nye’s point, as it happens, is as sensible as it is
scientific: ecosystems are complex wholes that can be thrown out of balance by
relatively subtle shifts, and since human beings depend for their survival and
prosperity on the products of natural ecosystems, avoiding unnecessary
disruption to those systems is arguably a good idea. This eminently rational
sort of thinking, though, is not welcomed in corporate boardrooms just
now. In the case under discussion, it’s
particularly unwelcome in the boardrooms of
corporations heavily invested in genetic modification, which have a
straightforward if shortsighted financial interest in flooding the biosphere
with as many GMOs as they can sell.
Thus it’s reasonable that Monsanto et al. would scream
bloody murder in response to Nye’s comment. What interests me is that so many
believers in science should do the same, and not only in this one case. Last I
checked, “what makes the biggest profit for industry must be true” isn’t
considered a rule of scientific reasoning, but that sort of thinking is
remarkably common in what passes for skepticism these days. To cite an
additional example, it’s surely not accidental that there’s a 1.00 correlation
between the health care modalities that make money for the medical and
pharmaceutical industries and the health care modalities that the current crop
of soi-disant skeptics consider rational and science-based, and an equal 1.00
correlation between those modalities that don’t make money for the medical and
pharmaceutical industries and those that today’s skeptics dismiss as
superstitious quackery.
To some extent, this is likely a product of what’s called
“astroturfing,” the manufacture of artificial grassroots movements to support
the agendas of an industrial sector or a political faction. The internet, with
its cult of anonymity and its less than endearing habit of letting every
discussion plunge to the lowest common denominator of bullying and abuse, was
tailor-made for that sort of activity; it’s pretty much an open secret at this
point, or so I’m told by the net-savvy, that most significant industries these
days maintain staffs of paid flacks who spend their working hours searching the
internet for venues to push messages favorable to their employers and challenge
opposing views. Given the widespread lack of enthusiasm for GMOs, Monsanto and
its competitors would have to be idiots to neglect such an obvious and commonly
used marketing tactic.
Still, there’s more going on here than ordinary media
manipulation in the hot pursuit of profits. There are plenty of people who have
no financial stake in the GMO industry who defend it fiercely from even the
least whisper of criticism, just as there are plenty of people who denounce
alternative medicine in ferocious terms even though they don’t happen to make
money from the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex. I’ve discussed in
previous posts here, and in a forthcoming book, the way that faith in progress was pressed into service as a
substitute for religious belief during the nineteenth century, and continues to
fill that role for many people today. It’s not a transformation that did
science any good, but its implications as industrial civilization tips over
into decline and fall are considerably worse than the ones I’ve explored in
previous essays. I want to talk about those implications here, because they
have a great deal to say about the future of science and technology in the
deindustrializing world of the near future.
It’s important, in order to make sense of those
implications, to grasp that science and technology function as social
phenomena, and fill social roles, in ways that have more than a little in
common with the intellectual activities of civilizations of the past. That
doesn’t mean, as some postmodern theorists have argued, that science and
technology are purely social phenomena; both of them have to
take the natural world into account, and so have an important dimension that
transcends the social. That said, the social dimension also exists, and since
human beings are social mammals, that dimension has an immense impact on the
way that science and technology function in this or any other human society.
From a social standpoint, it’s thus not actually all that
relevant that that the scientists and engineers of contemporary industrial
society can accomplish things with matter and energy that weren’t within the
capacities of Babylonian astrologer-priests, Hindu gurus, Chinese literati, or
village elders in precontact New Guinea. Each of these groups have been
assigned a particular social role, the role of interpreter of Nature, by their
respective societies, and each of them are accorded substantial privileges for
fulfilling the requirements of their role. It’s therefore possible to draw
precise and pointed comparisons between the different bodies of people filling
that very common social role in different societies.
The exercise is worth doing, not least because it helps sort
out the far from meaningless distinction between the aspects of modern science
and technology that unfold from their considerable capacities for doing things
with matter and energy, and the aspects of modern science and technology that
unfold from the normal dynamics of social privilege. What’s more, since modern science and
technology wasn’t around in previous eras of decline and fall but privileged
intellectual castes certainly were, recognizing the common features that unite
today’s scientists, engineers, and promoters of scientific and technological
progress with equivalent groups in past civilizations makes it a good deal
easier to anticipate the fate of science and technology in the decades and
centuries to come.
A specific example will be more useful here than any number
of generalizations, so let’s consider the fate of philosophy in the waning
years of the Roman world. The extraordinary intellectual adventure we call
classical philosophy began in the Greek colonial cities of Ionia around 585
BCE, when Thales of Miletus first proposed a logical rather than a mythical
explanation for the universe, and proceeded through three broad stages from
there. The first stage, that of the so-called Presocratics, focused on the
natural world, and the questions it asked and tried to answer can more or less
be summed up as “What exists?” Its
failures and equivocal successes led the second stage, which extended from
Socrates through Plato and Aristotle to the Old Academy and its rivals, to focus
their attention on different questions, which can be summed up just as neatly
as “How can we know what exists?”
That was an immensely fruitful shift in focus. It led to the
creation of classical logic—one of the great achievements of the human mind—and
it also drove the transformations that turned mathematics from an assortment of
rules of thumb to an architecture of logical proofs, and thus laid the
foundations on which Newtonian physics and other quantitative sciences
eventually built. Like every other great
intellectual adventure of our species, though, it never managed to fulfill all
the hopes that had been loaded onto it; the philosopher’s dream of human
society made wholly subject to reason turned out to be just as unreachable as
the scientist’s of the universe made wholly subject to the human will. As that
failure became impossible to ignore, classical philosophy shifted focus again,
to a series of questions and attempted answers that amounted to “given what we
know about what exists, how should we live?”
That’s the question that drove the last great age of
classical philosophy, the age of the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the
Neoplatonists, the three philosophical schools I discussed a few months back as
constructive
personal responses to the fall of our civilization. At first, these
and other schools carried on lively and far-reaching debates, but as the Roman
world stumbled toward its end under the burden of its own unsolved problems,
the philosophers closed ranks; debates continued, but they focused more and
more tightly on narrow technical issues within individual schools. What’s more,
the schools themselves closed ranks; pure Stoic, Aristotelian, and Epicurean
philosophy gradually dropped out of fashion, and by the fourth century CE, a
Neoplatonism enriched with bits and pieces of all the other schools stood
effectively alone, the last school standing in the long struggle Thales kicked
off ten centuries before.
Now I have to confess to a strong personal partiality for
the Neoplatonists. It was from Plotinus and Proclus, respectively the first and
last great figures in the classical tradition, that I first grasped why
philosophy matters and what it can accomplish, and for all its problems—like
every philosophical account of the world, it has some—Neoplatonism still makes
intuitive sense to me in a way that few other philosophies do. What’s more, the
men and women who defended classical Neoplatonism in its final years were
people of great intellectual and personal dignity, committed to proclaming the
truth as they knew it in the face of intolerance and persecution that ended up
costing no few of them their lives.
The awkward fact remains that classical philosophy, like
modern science, functioned as a social phenomenon and filled certain social
roles. The intellectual power of the final Neoplatonist synthesis and the
personal virtues of its last proponents have to be balanced against its blind
support of a deeply troubled social order; in all the long history of classical
philosophy, it never seems to have occurred to anyone that debates about the
nature of justice might reasonably address, say, the ethics of slavery. While a
stonecutter like Socrates could take an active role in philosophical debate in
Athens in the fourth century BCE, furthermore, the institutionalization of
philosophy meant that by the last years of classical Neoplatonism, its practice
was restricted to those with ample income and leisure, and its values
inevitably became more and more closely tied to the social class of its
practitioners.
That’s the thing that drove the ferocious rejection of
philosophy by the underclass of the age, the slaves and urban poor who made up
the vast majority of the population throughout the Roman empire, and who
received little if any benefit from the intellectual achievements of their
society. To them, the subtleties of Neoplatonist thought were irrelevant to the
increasingly difficult realities of life on the lower end of the social pyramid
in a brutally hierarchical and increasingly dysfunctional world. That’s an
important reason why so many of them turned for solace to a new religious
movement from the eastern fringes of the empire, a despised sect that claimed
that God had been born on earth as a mere carpenter’s son and communicated
through his life and death a way of salvation that privileged the poor and
downtrodden above the rich and well-educated.
It was as a social phenomenon, filling certain social roles,
that Christianity attracted persecution from the imperial government, and it
was in response to Christianity’s significance as a social phenomenon that the
imperial government executed an about-face under Constantine and took the new
religion under its protection. Like plenty of autocrats before and since,
Constantine clearly grasped that the real threat to his position and power came
from other members of his own class—in his case, the patrician elite of the
Roman world—and saw that he could undercut those threats and counter potential
rivals through an alliance of convenience with the leaders of the underclass.
That’s the political subtext of the Edict of Milan, which legalized
Christianity throughout the empire and brought it imperial patronage.
The patrician class of late Roman times, like its equivalent
today, exercised power through a system of interlocking institutions from which
outsiders were carefully excluded, and it maintained a prickly independence
from the central government. By the fourth
century, tensions between the bureaucratic imperial state and the patrician
class, with its local power bases and local loyalties, were rising toward a
flashpoint. The rise of Christianity
thus gave Constantine and his successors an extraordinary opportunity. Most of the institutions that undergirded
patrician power linked to Pagan religion; local senates, temple priesthoods,
philosophical schools, and other elements of elite culture normally involved
duties drawn from the traditional faith. A religious pretext to strike at those
institutions must have seemed as good as any other, and the Christian
underclass offered one other useful feature: mobs capable of horrific acts of
violence against prominent defenders of the patrician order.
That was why, for example, a Christian mob in 415 CE dragged
the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia from her chariot as she rode home from her
teaching gig at the Academy in Alexandria, cudgeled her to death, cut the flesh
from her bones with sharpened oyster shells—the cheap pocket knives of the
day—and burned the bloody gobbets to ashes. What doomed Hypatia was not only
her defense of the old philosophical traditions, but also her connection to
Alexandria’s patrician class; her ghastly fate was as much the vengeance of the
underclass against the elite as it was an act of religious persecution. She was
far from the only victim of violence driven by those paired motives, either. It
was as a result of such pressures that, by the time the emperor Justinian
ordered the last academies closed in 529 CE, the classical philosophical
tradition was essentially dead.
That’s the sort of thing that happens when an intellectual
tradition becomes too closely affiliated with the institutions, ideologies, and
interests of a social elite. If the elite falls, so does the tradition—and if
it becomes advantageous for anyone else to target the elite, the tradition can
be a convenient target, especially if it’s succeeded in alienating most of the
population outside the elite in question.
Modern science is extremely vulnerable to such a turn of
events. There was a time when the benefits of scientific research and
technological development routinely reached the poor as well as the privileged,
but that time has long since passed; these days, the benefits of research and
development move up the social ladder, while the costs and negative
consequences move down. Nearly all the jobs eliminated by automation,
globalization, and the computer revolution, for example, used to hire from the
bottom end of the job market. In the
same way, changes in US health care in recent decades have benefited the
privileged while subjecting most others to substandard care at prices so high
that medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US today.
It’s all very well for the promoters of progress to gabble
on about science as the key to humanity’s destiny; the poor know that the
destiny thus marketed isn’t for them. To
the poor, progress means fewer jobs with lower pay and worse conditions, more
surveillance and impersonal violence carried out by governments that show less
and less interest in paying even lip service to the concept of civil rights, a
rising tide of illnesses caused by environmental degradation and industrial
effluents, and glimpses from afar of an endless stream of lavishly advertised
tech-derived trinkets, perks and privileges that they will never have. Between
the poor and any appreciation for modern science stands a wall made of failed
schools, defunded libraries, denied opportunities, and the systematic use of
science and technology to benefit other people at their expense. Such a wall,
it probably bears noting, makes a good surface against which to sharpen oyster
shells.
It seems improbable that anything significant will be done
to change this picture until it’s far too late for such changes to have any
meaningful effect. Barring dramatic transformations in the distribution of
wealth, the conduct of public education, the funding for such basic social amenities
as public libraries, and a great deal more, the underclass of the modern
industrial world can be expected to grow more and more disenchanted with
science as a social phenomenon in our culture, and to turn instead—as their
equivalents in the Roman world and so many other civilizations did—to some
tradition from the fringes that places itself in stark opposition to everything
modern scientific culture stands for. Once that process gets under way, it’s
simply a matter of waiting until the corporate elite that funds science,
defines its values, and manipulates it for PR purposes, becomes sufficiently
vulnerable that some other power center decides to take it out, using
institutional science as a convenient point of attack.
Saving anything from the resulting wreck will be a tall
order. Still, the same historical parallel discussed above offers some degree
of hope. The narrowing focus of classical philosophy in its last years meant,
among other things, that a substantial body of knowledge that had once been
part of the philosophical movement was no longer identified with it by the time
the cudgels and shells came out, and much of it was promptly adopted by
Christian clerics and monastics as useful for the Church. That’s how classical
astronomy, music theory, and agronomy, among other things, found their way into
the educational repertoire of Christian monasteries and nunneries in the dark
ages. What’s more, once the power of the patrician class was broken, a
carefully sanitized version of Neoplatonist philosophy found its way into
Christianity; in some denominations, it’s still a living presence today.
That may well happen again. Certainly today’s defenders of
science are doing their best to shove a range of scientific viewpoints out the
door; the denunciation meted out to Bill Nye for bringing basic concepts from
ecology into a discussion where they were highly relevant is par for the course
these days. There’s an interesting distinction between the sciences that get
this treatment and those that don’t: on the one hand, those that are being
flung aside are those that focus on observation of natural systems rather than
control of artificial ones; on the other, any science that raises doubts about
the possibility or desirability of infinite technological expansion can expect
to find itself shivering in the dark outside in very short order. (This latter
point applies to other fields of intellectual endeavor as well; half the angry
denunciations of philosophy you’ll hear these days from figures such as Neil DeGrasse
Tyson, I’m convinced, come out of the simple fact that the claims of modern
science to know objective truths about nature won’t stand up to fifteen minutes
of competent philosophical analysis.)
