"Every new economic and social revolution in history has been accompanied by a new explanation of the creation of life and the workings of nature. The new concept of nature is always the most important strand of the matrix that makes up any new social order. In each instance, the new cosmology serves to justify the rightness and inevitability of the new way human beings are organizing their world by suggesting that nature itself is organized along similar lines. [...] Our concepts of nature are utterly, unabashedly, almost embarassingly anthropocentric. The laws of nature are being re-written to conform with our latest manipulation of the natural world."
- Jeremy Rifkin, "The Biotech Century"
A few examples are in order.
The clockwork metaphor invented during the Enlightenment - that the world is a big mechanism that keeps ticking like a clock - coincided with the spree of mechanical inventions, automatons of various kinds. To this day we make use of mechanistic, or engineering vocabulary, even when they're clearly not apt.
Atomism - the idea that the only 'real' truth lies at the bottom of things, at the level of constituent elements - came to be during the advent of particle physics.
The idea that human brains are actually hardware running software, that human beings are in fact just computers, and the world is in fact just information - take a wild guess as to what technological advancement lies at the bottom of this myth.
Then there's the myth of evolution - that everything necessarily and inevitably 'evolves', which is often understood as "gets better", and that the survival of the fittest is an universal and inevitable part of everything everywhere.
And finally, the fancy contemporary myth - genetics. Everything is just genes and we are just vehicles for our genes, and everything is determined by genes, yet somehow, and rather surprisingly, we are able to control the genetic makeup of everything thorugh genetic engineering. In common parlance, "in the genes" has essentially replaced the old "in the blood".
I whole-heartedly agree with Rifkin. We as humans should really have a reality check, and get rid of the self-serving anthropocentrism that permeates our every living moment.
Objection: Perhaps humans are only adopting their worldviews to better fit with their increasing knowledge of that world.
Reply: If they did that, they would not turn every new fad into a metaphysical explanation of Life, Universe and Everything. They would realize that new evidence in a particular field has extended their understanding of that particular field, and perhaps additionally in some related fields. They would not make up things like social darwinism and behaviorism and sociobiology. The problem is that new methods or findings in a particular field are extended to where they are not apt.
No comments:
Post a Comment