Dangers and Wrong Paths
“What a variety of dangers surrounds us! What a number of wrong paths present themselves in the investigation of the sciences!”
- Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
‘Unlike religion, no one has ever killed anyone in the name of atheism.’ I have heard variants of this argument advanced a few times by atheists who, instead of contenting themselves with the life-affirming philosophy implied in the atheist argument, have to denigrate and abuse other positions, and particularly religion. Whilst the conflict here may be unfortunate, it is unavoidable. The problem lies in atheism’s negation. That may seem to apply to religion alone, but it does not and it can not. I was told that God, like all gods, is a human creation. Whatever created god serves to motivate human beings into taking action for the better in the world is fine, I was also told. The argument doesn’t work because, once we recognize any deity as a human creation, it loses the awe and reverence and becomes just another moral theory, of no greater motivating and obligating power than any other moral theory. If God is 'merely' made up, then so to is every other ethic, a projection and reification of a false necessity and certitude. All is meaningless flux, and of no consequence.
The argument is a cul-de-sac, but does have the merit of highlighting the fact that human beings are creators of culture and of society. Human beings create institutions, associations, rules and regulations, and they do so for reasons, ideas, and beliefs. A rigorous philosophy of negation, challenging each and every human institution, norm and value, idea, and practice, and rejecting them on account of being 'made up,' would be unliveable. The second passage in the US Declaration of Independence declares:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’
What kind of truths are being asserted here? These are certainly not biological truths. If we are to take our stand on science and what science reveals about the hard facts of life, then we have to face the truth that there is no good and human beings are not created equal and are not endowed with unalienable Rights. Those of a humanist and atheist persuasion would be quite happy with the view that rights of life, liberty, and happiness are human creations, by way of political convention. What is not appreciated, however, is that once we are in a situation of conventionalism, as against the affirmation of transcendent standards, then life, liberty, and happiness, and whether they even exist at all, all become a matter of a power struggle. Once this is so, the question arises as to why anyone should or would be motivated to contest their absence and how they could expect to be able to motivate and mobilize other people for their attainment. There has to be an extra-political standard inducing will and motivation. It is always possible to raise the banner of such rights within the political terrain, of course. But the opposite argument made from an assertion of sheer power is at least as plausible, even more so, actually, given the evidence in favour of politics as no more than a circulation of elites, given the reproduction of hierarchy and inequality throughout society in history, given the facts of unequal biological endowment. Once you make these rights conventional, then it is not right that matters but might. I wish you well in your struggle for democracy on these terms. Nietzsche loathed democracy but he loathed the Judaeo-Christian tradition even more, because he well knew that it was the religious tradition that gave birth to the notion of rights, equality, and democracy. You discard those religious foundations for conventionalism at your peril. The opening lines of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address in 1961 return to this theme:
‘We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom--symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.’
Rights that are merely conferred by the state can just as easily be withdrawn by the state. To be more secure than that, they must rest on some extra-political standard of justice.
Kennedy here touches on something I wish to explore, the god-like power that human beings hold in their hands as a result of the expansion of science, technology, and industry. That has given human beings the power to create either a Heaven on Earth or a Hell. The optimistic view, which I see best represented in the praxis philosophy of Karl Marx, is that human beings will come finally to realize their social and rational natures and create a peaceable and just commonwealth on Earth. This, I would argue, is not a wild and utopian ambition but is well within the human scope. The existence of this social and rational nature on the part of human beings is affirmed in the best of both ancient philosophy and Judaeo-Christian religion. In realizing this nature, as these traditions enjoin us so to do, as either Reason or God’s calling to us, human beings come to exercise a common conscious mastery of their technical, institutional, and economic powers and use them for the common good (a good that embraces other beings and bodies on the more-than-human world).
Of course, the bit that Marx, in common with all modern humanists, excised from this optimistic scheme was God and religion. The argument is premised on an anthropological optimism which sees God as a projection of ideal human qualities, which human beings are to recognize as their own powers and hence reappropriate. It is also based on a view of religion as either a plain delusion or, as in Marx, as the expression of a social deficiency to be corrected by social transformation. That’s a view for which I argued forcefully for decades, and still in large part retain. I now argue that to remove God and religion from the picture introduces a dangerous delusion that turns an optimistic philosophy into fantasy. Instead of an invitation to aspire to a power and knowledge that we accept is ultimately beyond us, human beings are invited to see themselves as all-knowing, all-powerful forces on the planet, in pursuit of a self-realization that can neither know nor respect any limit.
Human beings are creative beings culturally and socially. The things that human beings create cannot simply be negated, unless one is proposing an entirely unmediated existence. This is a Romantic delusion.
At its heart, atheism is a laisser-faire philosophy, refusing positive positions in order to just let the life principle flow, without the need for naming and framing. Of course, human beings create culture quite naturally, as part of life’s natural flow. Human beings are immersed in culture. And, as spiritual beings, create religion, quite naturally. There are plenty of atheists whose loathing of religion far exceeds their loving of life and respect for the creative powers of human beings with whom they disagree. Religion is an affront to their reason, and stands in the way of the life-affirmative principle, they claim. The objection savours a great deal of the ‘natural order’ argument of free-market economists, for whom markets would work perfectly if artificial impediments and encroachments were removed. Like health and safety laws, environmental protections, trade unions, government policies, all those things that those meddlesome human beings do. In being natural, human beings cannot help being imperfect and making mistakes.
The argument is invalid. Strictly speaking, no one could ever do anything in the name of atheism. Atheism is not a positive philosophy but merely a negation of a positive, specifically, the existence of God. The problem is that you could re-write the statement ‘no-one has ever killed anyone in the name of religion’ by placing any human activity in place of religion, from politics to music to football to marriage and sexual relations, everything. Where there is a positive human belief or institution, there will be aggression, violence, and murder. The statement is a mere call to ‘imagine’ all the things human beings do in the world not existing any more, nothing to kill and die for, a brotherhood of man. That kind of nonsense is the dangerous kind that resolves problems merely by wishing them away, leaving us entrenched in an unchanged world. That kind of wishful thinking never ends well in the hard yards of human affairs.
There is, however, another way of meeting the challenge issued in this remark. This involves an examination of the consequences of the decline of religion, with its hold on society first being loosened and then removed. The Reformation struck the first blow, and the Enlightenment the decisive blow. In the aftermath of the context of the scientific, industrial, and democratic revolutions, human beings took the world into their own hands. And here we are today.
Many would consider this a liberation. Against the liberals who argued for freedom of religion, Marx argued for a society which was free of religion. Marx’s argument was based on the view that religion was the soul of a soulless world, a demand for happiness that real society frustrated, causing human beings to project their yearning upwards. The end of religion, for Marx, was the end of an inverted, alienated society that required illusion to sustain its greatest ideals in fantasy. Marx’s ambition was the humanist one of Heaven on Earth. He considered that the technical, organisational, and economic resources for such an existence existed and that, beyond the class relations that divided human beings amongst themselves, communism was the beginning of real history. It’s a heady view. It’s a declaration of human independence, an independence from God, and maybe much else besides. Marx never made the mistake of declaring human independence from 'the eternal conditions' of the 'universal metabolism of nature' (quotes from Marx); that was capital's error. Religion was never truly extirpated by rationalization as a secularisation; instead, capital became the new god, the idol demanding human sacrifices on a daily basis. The atheist critique stands, and demands a thoroughgoing secularisation. The trouble that human beings have in doing without religion in some form, even bogus form, suggests a reality to religion that cannot be extirpated, only perverted.
The new idol has paid handsomely. Weber's 'iron cage' of capitalist modernity is a gilded cage, one that few are too concerned to fight to leave. The production of material quantities by the global capitalist economy in the past century must have far exceeded the wildest dreams of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In material terms, we are in Heaven. But we are not. There is a lack of peace and contentment, a pervasive and profound dis-ease and dissatisfaction. This is not a psychological condition, expressing the ingratitude of a spoiled generation that takes material abundance for granted; it is a moral condition, a very human spiritual protest against meaninglessness and purposelessness. Modern man and woman in search of a soul in soulless conditions.
Lewis Mumford, a man of no faith and no religion, explained the malaise of the world as lying in a ‘purposeless materialism.’ Can we put this down to atheism? Only if we are interested in responding to the provocation of an atheistic statement aimed against religion. We could put it down to a false or inverted religion, human beings taking it upon themselves to become as God. You could follow Chesterton’s line that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing they believe in anything. Not I, say many atheists. That would have been Nietzsche’s response. Nietzsche repudiated humanism as just another form of idolatry. But what about most people? Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. To state that the objective facts of nature deny such a meaning does nothing to end the cosmic longing for meaning. Indeed, it only makes it clear that the thirst for meaning is only quenched in a realm beyond the natural facts. Fail to offer appropriate means to satisfying that spiritual yearning and it every easily comes to be attached to all manner of other means. The loss of an authentic religious experience thus issues easily in a bogus religion. The deification of human technical power over nature, for instance.
You don’t have to look hard in the writings of the men of science since the seventeenth century to find one statement after another making the claim that scientific advance, technological power, and industrial expansion would suffice to realize Heaven on Earth. Robert Boyle summed it up when he wrote about establishing ‘the Empire of Man’ through the technical conquest of Nature. For the most part, the motives of the planetary technocrats were benign, as with Francis Bacon and those whom he inspired. Bacon declared the goal of science to be "the restitution and reinvesting of man to the sovereignty and power . . . which he had in his first state of creation." Bacon's motives are pure, but there is actually a dangerous misreading of Genesis in this declaration, indicating precisely how and why the dream of creating Heaven on Earth could, and indeed would, backfire. Sovereignty and power belonged to God, human beings were God’s partners sharing in the Creation, bringing to fruition God’s plan. Bacon’s view placed the emphasis on human knowledge and skill in the attempt to restore humanity to a prelapsarian state of grace. This view was premised on the belief science would generate a range of powerful technologies that could be used to improve the material conditions of people's lives. Salvation would thus come through science and the technical power it yielded to ensure that all lived happy, healthy, and materially secure lives. In fine, science gave us the power to re-create Eden on Earth. And wasn’t that, after all, the point of the Bible story? Science promised a new Earth and a new man. ‘Man’ was the subject of this technical power yielded by science, and nature was the object. As nature came to be modeled as machine during the period of the Scientific Revolution, a new spirit of began to arise in which nature was not seen as having intrinsic value, but only value as an object of human use — and as an object of technological control.
Bacon argues that the mechanical arts do not “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” Given that “the dominion of man over nature rests only on knowledge,” the key to this technical mastery of nature lies in organized scientific research. By such organisation on the part of scientists concentrating and coordinating their efforts, research findings will coalesce and be focused to great practical effect. With scientists conjoining their effort in common enterprise, knowledge will accumulate and expand to the good of society. Bacon conceives this united effort as something proceeding in alignment with God’s divine plan for humanity and the world. He thus called upon human beings to make peace among themselves so as to turn “with united forces against the Nature of Things, to storm and occupy her castles and strongholds, and extend the boundaries of human empire, as far as God Almighty in his goodness may permit.” That recognition of the limits established by God’s goodness in qualification seems feeble in comparison with the forceful expression of the conquest of nature in the rest of the passage. Whilst Bacon thought his views consistent with God’s plan as laid out in The Bible, the emphasis on power and knowledge and its combination in transforming the world by force has little by way of respect and humility. ‘Storm and occupy’ is the language of industrial enclosure and commercialisation, not of harmony. The new philosophy asserted by Bacon is motivated by the concern that humanity “recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest” and establish the “Dominion of Man over the Universe.” In fine, Bacon offers his new method as the means to advance progress in every field, rendering nature the “slave of mankind” to usher in the “truly masculine birth of time.” (Quotes from The Soul of the World). Bacon couched this technical conquest and subjugation of Nature in terms of a divine injunction and fulfilment of promise. In the unpublished guide he composed for his imaginary successor, ‘my son,’ Bacon explained how progress through science would be achieved:
“I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave … so may I succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds.”
Very many have seen in Bacon a messianic and very masculine obsession with taking (feminine) Nature by force and subduing and controlling it under the human will. Feminist scholars have noted the sexual imagery and metaphors pervading Bacon’s discussions. Bacon drew a revealing parallel between the procedures of extracting truth from Nature and from women. Addressing the King, he declared: “For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings … Neither ought a man make a scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.”
I would always caution against drawing large conclusions from selected texts taken out of context. A passage such as this can easily be interpreted in terms of the male violation of female nature, and that, indeed, is how it has been interpreted. We can just as easily accept it as merely a hunting metaphor to elaborate a point in terms that can be comprehended. As Alan Soble writes: 'I suppose that a man who made no scruple of penetrating holes (and corners?) might be a rapist, but he also might be a foxhunter, a proctologist, or a billiard player.' It depends. The issue with Bacon with respect to the later project of science goes much deeper than this. Not the violation but the subversion of God and exaltation of human power is the real issue. Bacon’s language, meaning, and intention can only be properly understood in terms of an appreciation of his entire work. (I would recommend this book, The View Beyond Bacon (D Patrick ed 2011). In a remarkable vision of the unpublished guide for ‘my son,’ Bacon imagined a future in which his dreams would be realized through the union of celibate scientists and Nature herself:
‘My dear, dear boy, what I purpose is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy, and legal wedlock; and from this association you will secure an increase beyond all the hopes and prayers of ordinary marriages, to wit, a blessed race of Heroes or Supermen who will overcome the immeasurable helplessness and poverty of the human race.’
Geeks partnered with Mother Nature, then. It all sounds detached, impersonal, and decadent to me. There is no true mediation here. Such notions are very different from religious notions of human beings as God’s partners in Creation, as part of a creative unfolding from within in accordance with God’s divine plan. Bacon’s view is a bastardization of the religious calling, with human beings, conceived in distinctly masculine image, subverting the position of God. Bacon saw himself as working within a divine plan:
'Let us establish a chaste and lawful marriage between mind and nature, with the divine mercy as bridewoman.'
With these words, however, Bacon, opened the way to a subversion of the great partnership between humanity and God, a path on which human beings would increasingly become intoxicated by their technical power. Bacon’s notion of celibate scientists being wedded to nature is suggestive in this respect. Solomon's House, the location of the research activity envisaged by Bacon, resembles the scientific establishment conceived as a monastic order. At the heart of the investigative operation is a self-appointed elite group of thirty-six "fathers" whose mission is to find "the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things" and to use this knowledge for "the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." The “fathers” are concerned to apply the knowledge of nature yielded as a result of scientific investigation to the betterment of the citizens of the New Atlantis. It is important to note that these ‘fathers’ are not just scientists but also priests. Bacon intended scientific investigation and technological application to be bounded by an ethical conscience so that their industry would lead to the human betterment in the moral and not just the material sense. The moral aspect went missing in development, with technical capacities coming to far outstrip moral capacities.
The image of Bacon as a sexist has been overdone as a result of a selective focus on certain passages. This is not the issue for me. Bacon did not always nor even mainly portray Nature as a female body being overpowered by male scientists. Bacon actually expresses the need to respect Nature in order to come to know Nature. He says this openly: ‘we cannot command nature except by obeying her.’ He states that ‘man’ is nature's 'servant and interpreter,’ declaring that nature’s subtlety 'is far greater than that of the sense of the understanding.’ Bacon also declares that it is useless to use force since in consequence it 'maketh nature more violent.’ Bacon does write of 'pursuing' nature, winning 'victories' over it and even 'dissecting' it, his writings make no reference to 'rape' and 'torture' in these respects.
So why do grave doubts remain? Because we are reading backwards from where we are now and what we know of where these developments led, seeing in them the origins of the catastrophe that stands on our horizon. Feminist critics see in Bacon the origin of masculine science’s violation of nature. To such critics, climate change and global heating are the result of an arrogant male contempt for 'Mother Nature', treating nature as a 'female' to be subjugated and exploited. Bacon has been excoriated by feminist critics for ‘putting nature on the wrack’ to yield her secrets by force. But those words were not Bacon’s, they were the words of Leibniz writing about Bacon. Likewise, Bacon was of the view that Nature was animate and infused with a vital force or spirit; it was Descartes who believed that Nature was a machine and should be studied as a mechanism. These may be faulty views of Bacon, but the misinterpretation was encouraged by the heady emphasis on science and knowledge as technical human power over Nature.
I find Bacon a fascinating case in that, whilst he is not an atheist, his reasoning seems designed to bring humanity to atheism. In On Atheism, he argues: ‘A little philosophy inclines man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy brings men's minds about to religion.’ Whilst a little knowledge may be dangerous, unfortunately it can also be immensely powerful, especially in its practical effects in changing the world. This has encouraged humanity to remain in the shallows and avoid the depths for so long that they take the former to be the only reality and no longer believe the latter to exist at all. Philosophy concerns the realm of Reason, but those whose intuition tells them that there is a realm beyond reason require:
'the more discordant, therefore, and incredible, the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith'.
That was Bacon’s view, a view that many of that age and before would not have found incredible. The simple truth is that the age lost its faith through the advance of science and the tangible proof of its power in the practical application of technology. There was no ‘ultimate reality,’ reality was the sensuous surface that we could see and touch and apply tools to and transform according to will. However inadvertently, Bacon undoubtedly contributed to an increasingly powerful and confident, not to say arrogant, humanity sending God into first intellectual, then moral, and then actual exile. In such a way, ‘depth in [natural] philosophy' has brought men's minds to atheism. Which is to say, with Blake, that ‘Newton’s sleep’ has brought us to ‘single vision,’ a life lived on the surface and far from the depths of the fourfold. Blake may have been wrong about Newton the man here, since Newton was deeply religious, albeit in a very unorthodox way, but he was right about the way that Newtonian science came to reduce nature to mere inanimate mechanism.
Bacon himself could have suspected that this would happen. As he wrote:
"The fact is, my son, that the human mind in studying nature becomes big under the impact of things and brings forth a teeming brood of errors."
We are now living with the civilization-threatening, even life-threatening, consequences of those errors. In succeeding at a scale far beyond the wildest of dreams, the scientistic project for the conquest of nature has called upon human beings to rise to the god-like scale of their power and knowledge. It is a dangerous and destructive delusion and a fantasy, but that hasn’t prevented many from proposing that we organize and act to meet the challenge. Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the words ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ And, Heaven help us and God forgive us, Brand sets out an argument that insists that society adopt all manner of planetary geo-engineering so as to put right all that human technological imposition upon Nature has got wrong. I have no time for any of it, it is a plain misreading and misuse of The Bible in order to subvert God, violate Nature, and mislead humanity by its own intoxication and vanity.
In fine, whilst Bacon cannot rightly be charged with setting female nature up for crude male violation, the way was opened for some such thing. The sexually charged imagery and language of the conquest and mastery of nature did come to be woven into scientific apologetics. As a student, Newton learned that the aim of natural philosophy (or science) was to ‘search Nature out of her Concealments, and unfold her dark Mysteries.’ Astronomer Edmond Halley later sought Newton out to congratulate him on ‘penetrating so far into the abstrusest secrets of Nature.’ It may all be metaphor but, as Patricia Fara writes in Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment the record of the Enlightenment is as much one of regression and repression as it is of emancipation, particularly where women and nature are concerned:
‘Imagery of penetration, and domination permeated advertisements for the early Royal Society. Experimenters portrayed themselves as nature’s philosophical suitors, who achieved success when “you woo your mistress with boldness and importunity … the surest and most powerful way to win her … many others proceed with too much hesitation and caution.’ Contemplation alone, they warned, would never persuade ‘Dame Nature’ to ‘unlock her Cabinet.’ Instead, those who wanted to ‘penetrate into Nature’s antechamber to her inner closet’ should use manipulative instruments like Boyle’s air-pump, which distorted nature into an artificial vacuum. This Baconian invention would, its advocates promised, allow an experimental ‘inquisition’ of nature to wrench out ‘a confession of all that lay in her most intimate recesses.’”
Many may be inclined to dismiss this as all metaphor. That would be complacent. Truth is a slippery notion in the world of metaphors, with language and meaning becoming so fluid as to invite new, alternate, readings and developments. As Fara writes, metaphors evoke unsuspected connections; they add a richness that is suggestive, in both a good and a bad sense, making language fluid so that new generations of readers bring new interpretations. I could read Bacon easily as an attempt to fulfil the Biblical injunction that humanity use its God-given powers to re-create Eden on Earth. He can be read also in terms of the call that human beings can, through their science and technology, become as gods and that, this being so, have through their morality become good as being as gods. (That’s the only way to make sense of Stewart Brand’s mad and dangerous delusion of planetary engineering in Whole Earth Discipline).
It is astonishing to consider how many of Bacon's scientific visions have come to be realized in the modern world. His list of the fathers' achievements is comprehensive and almost exhaustive: the only thing missing is the computer. Are we, then, living in Bacon’s world? I would say ‘not quite.’ The religious dimension and ethical intention have been supplanted or, more accurately, distorted and perverted. The means have become so enlarged as to become ends in themselves, displacing true ends and the way that these are ordered by ethics. Ethics has been humbled, privatised, and relegated to the domain of non-reason and non-knowledge: mere subjective opinion, and of no more significance than that.
‘Scientific Man’ therefore established the foundation for the process of mechanization that prepared the way intellectually and psychologically as well as technically for the Industrial Revolution. Many know William Blake’s reference to the ‘dark satanic mills,’ and believe that these refer to the factories of industrialising England. This is a misreading. Blake is referring to the mechanization of the mind which in turn would come to be expressed in the industrialization of the world. The development of more powerful and efficient engines translated directly into vastly improved automated equipment and steam-powered machinery, with the result that industry came to be conducted on a scale that previous generations could not have comprehended. Steam engines, electric power, and radio communication were exemplary realizations of Francis Bacon's imaginings of the practical possibilities of science. By unveiling the secrets of nature, scientific investigators were developing the power to command its hidden forces in the shape of life-transforming technologies, turning these over to ‘society’ in the form of government, politics, industry, business, and the military.
The end was benign, but the political implications of the social and institutional context in which that activity would proceed were elided, with destructive consequences that would become more and more clear as time passed. Two world wars which came close to destroying civilization were not accidents. Neither is the ecological catastrophe looming on the horizon.
As time passed, there was a growing belief that science, as Bacon had argued, contained the keys for unlocking a "better" future for all. That optimism was summed up by the title and argument of Alfred Wallace's 1898 book, The Wonderful Century. The wonders of that century, Wallace emphasized, were a direct result of science. In his account, Wallace acknowledged that science had had the odd disaster along the way, but argued that these were nothing like significant enough to dent the view that the way to the better world lay through science and scientific advance. Wallace was in no doubt that the technological achievements of the age made the contemporary world infinitely superior to all past stages of civilization:
"A comparative estimate of the number and importance of these achievements leads to the conclusion that not only is our century superior to any that have gone before it, but that it may be best compared with the whole preceding historical period. It must therefore be held to constitute the beginning of a new era of human progress."
Wallace’s view is typical, with countless scientists and advocates of science and scientific advance affirming confidently that science was the key to a "better" world in the future. As the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1928:
"civilization as we know it is a poor thing. And if it is to be improved there is no hope save in science. . . . Physics and chemistry have made us rich, biology healthy, and the application of scientific thought to ethics by men such as Bentham has done more than a dozen saints to make us good. The process can only continue if science continues."
Bacon had argued for the ‘fathers’ as scientist-priests in order that material and technological improvement be accompanied by a moral improvement. In later ages there was a tendency to focus on the former and discard the latter, on the assumption that material and moral improvement proceed hand in hand. There was and there remains a prejudice that morality is a mere epiphenomena on material advances. That view runs all through Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline. Brand quotes Brecht, to the effect: ‘grub first, then ethics.’ To that I say, ethics first, and then there will be food for all. In the current world of material advance, people starve in the midst of abundance. This is true globally, but also within nations. Every week at Church there is a collection for the local food banks upon which people rely. There is no shortage of food, only ethics.
Haldane presumed that science alone was sufficient to produce both a better material world and a better moral world:
"We are far from perfect, we do not hang starving children for stealing food, raid the coast of Africa for slaves, or imprison debtors for life. These advances are the direct and indirect consequences of science."
The naivety is breathtaking, not least for a self-professed marxist. It is a product of scientistic prejudice and is bereft of a critique of the social relations of science and technology. There are other direct and indirect consequences of science that Haldane has missed. Haldane missed imperialism, militarism, world war, mass unemployment, civil war, genocide, and couldn’t envisage future threats of nuclear annihilation and ecocide. And that serves to make my point: in being so quick to claim credit for the undoubted material achievements of the modern world, the advocates and apologists of science have to recognise the failures of this world, of which there are many. You cannot blame the failures on politics and social relations, not least in respect of the evident willingness of so many scientists to work within the military-industrial complex. And not least given the pronounced tendency of so many with a scientific and technological persuasion to shy away from social and political questions. This is a point I addressed at length in Politics, Planetary Engineering, and Environmentalism: The Politics of Gaia
As we stand on the brink of climate catastrophe and civilizational collapse, consider these words of Robert Ingersoll:
"The few took advantage of the ignorant many. They pretended to have received messages from the Unknown. They stood between the helpless multitude and the gods. They were the carriers of flags of truce. At the court of heaven they presented the cause of man, and upon the labor of the deceived they lived."
"We find now that the prosperity of nations has depended, not upon their religion, not upon the goodness or providence of some god, but on soil and climate and commerce, upon the ingenuity, industry, and courage of the people, upon the development of the mind, on the spread of education, on the liberty of thought and action; and that in this mighty panorama of national life, reason has built and superstition has destroyed."
"I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world."
-- Robert Ingersoll
Science won and delivered the promised booty on the back of exploited labour and nature. It also delivered the world into the hands of a global heat machine. If and when collapse and catastrophe comes, it won't be religion and a long abandoned God that will be responsible, it will be 'men as gods,' embodied in capitalist relations. Those who are so quick to claim the achievements should also own the disasters.
For those who have shared this view in the modern world, humanity stands under a moral obligation to embrace science, on the understanding that scientific advance in itself was a moral advance. We can evaluate the truth of that view by its own test, the practical impact upon society. Rousseau made his name by taking a deliberately contrarian view with respect to the common view that the sciences had improved the moral condition of civilization. That Rousseau made his name with such a thesis shows precisely the extent to which scientism has been the dominant culture of the modern world for a long time now. If the champions of science seek to claim credit for the evident material abundance, comfort, and technological paradise we now enjoy, it is only fair to ask them to own the crises that are the price to be paid for living in a world further and further removed from our ecological, biological, social, and moral matrix.
There is a significant and critical difference between the "better" future that Bacon had envisioned at the beginning of this whole advance and the one that existed in the visions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century advocates and apologists of science. Bacon had envisaged science as not only consistent with Christianity, but as responding to its call to make the Earth a new Eden through material and moral improvement. Bacon saw science as the means to the end of creating a new age of Christianity. For Bacon, science was the servant of religion, not the good life in itself but its custodian. However, as time passed, science and religion parted company as means became so enlarged as to displace ends. Blake had condemned the science emerging in his day, the science of the flatlands of ‘single vision,’ as ‘the tree of death.’ He had dire forebodings of the time when the champions of science would come not merely to discard religion, but denounce it, not merely as separate from science and irrelevant to all important questions, but the enemy of enlightenment. This was the enlightenment that would blind, leading people to seek salvation in science and science alone, not merely doing without a religious framework but in conscious opposition to it. Wittgenstein felt the effects, denouncing ‘scientism’ as the primary fallacy of the modern age. Science is not religion, and insofar as it becomes religion it ceases to be science. But science has come to encroach in domains of value, meaning, and significance, as well as decision-making and authority, where it does not belong.
The seeds of enmity and final divorce between science and religion were planted during the Enlightenment, when thinkers such as David Hume, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and the marquis de Condorcet expressed an open contempt for Christianity. To his lasting credit, the champion of philosophy’s awkward squad, Jean Jacques Rousseau had the nerve to stand apart from the enlightened crowd, denouncing atheistic materialism as ‘the philosophy of the comfortable.’ Rousseau saw clearly that the modern world was exchanging one elite for another elite, and declared against both. In affirming possibilities beyond liberal rationalism and conservative reaction, Rousseau found himself alone. He described himself as an ancient among the moderns. In truth, he was an ancient looking well past the moderns to a future reconciliation to come.
Rousseau’s career as a philosopher began in response to an advertisement he saw in a 1749 issue of Mercure de France, in which the Academy of Dijon offered a prize for an essay on the question: "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?"
The overwhelming inclination of the enlightened folk of the age would have been to have answered the question in the affirmative. Rousseau, however, was a curious kind of person. He argued from a position that was both in and against the Enlightenment, discomforting both the enlightened and the reactionary alike. In this question, Rousseau discovered the incredibly disquieting suggestion that the modernity that was in the process of emerging rested on a fault-line: reason was complicit in the fall of Being. In this first essay, Rousseau focused relentlessly on the destructive influence of civilization on human beings. Winning first prize in the contest, Rousseau embarked on a career as a philosopher, and the modern world has yet to come close to coming to terms with his philosophy. From the very first, Rousseau identified the potential corruption at the heart of a thoroughly rationalized modernity:
'What a variety of dangers surrounds us! What a number of wrong paths present themselves in the investigation of the sciences! Through how many errors, more perilous than truth itself is useful, must we not pass to arrive at it? The disadvantages we lie under are evident; for falsehood is capable of an infinite variety of combinations; but the truth has only one manner of being. Besides, where is the man who sincerely desires to find it? Or even admitting his good will, by what characteristic marks is he sure of knowing it? Amid the infinite diversity of opinions where is the criterion by which we may certainly judge of it? Again, what is still more difficult, should we even be fortunate enough to discover it, who among us will know how to make right use of it? If our sciences are futile in the objects they propose, they are no less dangerous in the effects they produce. Being the effect of idleness, they generate idleness in their turn; and an irreparable loss of time is the first prejudice which they must necessarily cause to society.
Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
Rousseau's discovery of the advertisement for the essay prize came whilst he walked to prison to visit Denis Diderot, who had been imprisoned at Vincennes for writing a work which questioned the idea of a providential God…
This loss of religion in relation to the supposed improvement or decline in morals is indeed a complicated question. There were reasons why people turned away from religion and thought that human betterment came as a result of society learning to do without religion. The simple lesson for me is that all concentrations of power are baneful, and concentrations of power in the hands of the righteous even more so.
In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, Rousseau explains his intent in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences as being to "to destroy that magical illusion which gives us a stupid admiration for the instruments of our misfortunes and [an attempt] to correct that deceptive assessment that makes us honor pernicious talents and scorn useful virtues. Throughout he makes us see the human race as better, wiser, and happier in its primitive constitution; blind, miserable, and wicked to the degree that it moves away from it. His goal is to rectify the error of our judgements in order to delay the progress of our vices, and to show us that where we seek glory and renown, we in fact find only error and miseries.” (Jeff J.S. Black (January 16, 2009). Rousseau's Critique of Science: A Commentary on the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts).
Rousseau understood from the first that his answer contradicted the dominant view of the age and that there would be "a universal outcry against me." He nevertheless entertained the hope that there would be "a few sensible men" capable of appreciating the view he set out. In a strange position for a democratic thinker, Rousseau perceives most of humanity in opposition to him. The position is not, however, contradictory once one understands Rousseau in terms of seeking a Platonism for the age of democracy. As David Lay Williams argues in Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, Rousseau is concerned to affirm transcendent norms and truths as against the mere conventional creations of political society. The title of Williams’ book could be re-written as Rousseau’s Democratic Platonism. In his concept of the General Will, Rousseau sought to reconcile the two dominant wings of western philosophy, the notions of objective truth and subjective will. The truth, Rousseau understood, could not just be passively given but had to be actively willed. Rousseau thus combined the cognitive and the affective to present a view of the democratisation of power and politics. Society would be governed by democracy once individuals had learned to lead themselves by their nous instead of allowing themselves to be led by the nose.
Rousseau’s emphasis was therefore on inciting the common moral and intellectual reason and embodying it in a genuine public community. Williams emphasizes Rousseau’s commitment to transcendent standards, indicating a truth which human beings need to discern and conform themselves to in order to be free. It is in the context of this commitment that we need to set Jeff J. S. Black’s comment that Rousseau was concerned that his work should outlive him. As Williams’ book makes clear, this concern on Rousseau’s part was more than personal vanity. Rousseau did set his face against ideas and arguments that were fashionable and popular in the day, but this was not a mere contrarianism or intellectual snobbery on his part. Rousseau held a principled commitment to standards that transcended time and place: "To live beyond one's century, then, one must appeal to principles that are more lasting and to readers who are less thoughtless." (Jeff J.S. Black (January 16, 2009). Rousseau's Critique of Science: A Commentary on the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts).
Those principles allowed Rousseau to avoid complicity with the dominant rationalism of the age and the way that it ensnared many of its liveliest minds. Rousseau was confident that his thoughts would survive precisely because he distanced himself from the concerns of "men born to be in bondage to the opinions of the society in which they live in." In this criticism he includes "wits" and "those who follow fashion.” He considered that those who reflexively support the dominant and fashionable thinking of the age merely "play the free-thinker and the philosopher."
From a deep commitment to furthering the democratic revolution, Rousseau noted the elitist tendencies of an Enlightenment rationalism that accented the scientistic conception of knowledge but neglected the moral. In the Discourse on Inequality, he firmly rooted his critique in a socio-economic analysis of the emerging bourgeois society. Rousseau subjected the commitment to progress through an expansion of science, technology, trade, and industry to a sustained critique. His view was a radical continuation and deepening of the left republicanism begun by Spinoza, offering a profound and still vital alternative to the failures of the liberal Enlightenment. In the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau "authored a scathing attack on scientific progress...an attack whose principles he never disavowed, and whose particulars he repeated, to some extent, in each of his subsequent writings." (Jeff J.S. Black (January 16, 2009). Rousseau's Critique of Science: A Commentary on the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts).
I would cite Rousseau in cautioning against 'necessity' as a political argument and science as an authority to be followed. What seems liberatory isn’t necessarily so; there is no direct uni-linear development from reason to freedom: “Necessity raised up thrones; the arts and sciences have made them strong.” (Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences).
The answer to the question depends on whether reason comes with its moral component firmly in place. Always, the cognitive needs to be accompanied by the social and the affective dimensions. Rousseau emphasized a common intellectual and moral reason and sought the social and institutional conditions which served to incite, inspire, and canalize both. In the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences he warned against a one-sided scientistic rationalism that would corrupt society from within and send civilisation on the wrong path:
“Let men learn for once that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child. Let them know that all the secrets she hides are so many evils from which she protects them, and that the very difficulty they find in acquiring knowledge is not the least of her bounty towards them. Men are perverse; but they would have been far worse, if they had had the misfortune to be born learned.”
Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
I doubt that that would be a popular view today, particularly when the mantra of the age is ‘unite behind the science.’ The modern world has been fully united behind the view that science would set us free. To those who still argue for progress, all we can say is: it is here, you have arrived. Will the future belong to Rousseau? Only if we are very lucky, and a lot wiser than we have been.
Human beings have had the power to take responsibility for putting their affairs on a rational basis, satisfying the material needs of all. And who can say that they failed? We live in a technologically rich world with a standard of living that is far in excess of any other civilisation. Religion was an age of superstition and ignorance that retarded development and kept people poor and stupid, prone to plague and famine. So says the self-serving Enlightenment myth. I studied the history of science as an undergraduate and learned that the Middle Ages were an age of innovation that paved the way for the revolutionary developments that followed.
But there is another side to this success story, the side in which the expansion of human power has transgressed both moral and material limits. Let’s first take the moral limits:
"If people lose their religion, nothing remains to keep them living in a society. They have no shield for their defence, no basis for their decisions, no foundation for their stability, and no form by which they exist in the world."
Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh, London, Penguin Classics, 1999, p. 490.
Once human beings have taken morality into their own hands, they have the responsibility to establish the limits to their power and reach. But how could human beings have the capacity to discern within themselves and determine a self-limiting principle? The idea that human morality rests on its own moral reason is self-contradictory. Human moral reason cannot be its own foundation. The only limitation here can only come in practice, in the check of wider society. But that is not a moral check, only the physical check of power. The problem with human self-realisation is that, in the absence of a self-limiting principle, it runs to infinity, eating up resources in an endless process until exhaustion is reached. That nihilism describes perfectly the economic system that has been established in the wake of scientific and technological advance. The capital system is based on the central driver of accumulation. This accumulation is an endless process that recognizes no limits. So the world and its resources, human and natural, are devoured in an endless expansion based on accumulation for the sake of accumulation, the endless production of means for the sake of further means, displacing the true ends set by moral determination. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets,’ wrote Marx in Capital 1, pointing out the new moral law of the modern capitalist world.
Writing in the aftermath of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ Max Weber wrote some hard words that men and women of faith would find unpalatable, but irrefutable:
‘The inward interest of a truly religiously "musical" man can never be served by veiling to him and to others the fundamental fact that he is destined to live in a godless and prophetless time.’
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, p. 153
More than a century on from Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber, these hard words concerning the godless age ushered in by the scientistic-techno-industrial conquest of nature now apply to the non- and the anti-religious. If you take credit for the material largesse produced by the modern economic system, then you have also to take ownership of its more destructive consequences with respect to production and consumption, as well as to its ill-distribution causing inequality, rivalry, conflict, ill-health, crime and so on. There has already been an awful lot of deaths as a result of climate change, but these are a drop in the ocean compared to what is likely to come. These deaths are as a direct result of the global heat machine that human skill and ingenuity has unleashed without recognition of limits on the environment. In discarding God, human beings discarded the idea that they needed to conform themselves to a purpose that is greater than any that they supply themselves. Committed to an ethos of self-realization, human beings are incapable of supplying themselves with a self-limiting principle. This comes out in both the theory and practice of the self-made moderns. The capital system is based upon an endless accumulation that transgresses all limits. The liberal philosophy that individuals are autonomous agents free to choose their own good is also limitless, the only check being that of external law and the resistance of others. The result has been that nature and its resources have been and are being eaten up, with death and destruction certain to come. But that’s not what was intended and not what is entailed by a life of reason lived in affirmation of life, apologists will argue. That apology doesn’t work. No true religion advances war and murder. The truth is that human beings are flawed creatures who require guidance from an ethic and an end that is greater than their self-will and projection. Remove that, and human beings will curve in on themselves.
We can chart the result. According to the State of the Climate in 2018 report from NOAA and the American Meteorological Society, global atmospheric carbon dioxide is at 407 parts per million, up from about 280 parts per million in 1750. These figures are entirely the product of the scientific, technological, and industrial advance since the capitalist annexation and commercialisation of the commons. The world has long since passed the danger point of 350ppm. The warnings were issued, but not heeded. Human beings could not heed the warning precisely because their socio-institutional system is not geared to respond to rational and moral appeal. The capital system is deaf to reason and morality; it is, as Marx argued, an alienated system of production which reduces the human creators to the status of passive, dependent, and determined objects incapable of exercising control and responsibility. There is precious little point in continuing to sound the alarm and issue the appeal.
‘Men as gods’ deifying their technological means in service to their economic gods - now that’s what I call the diversion and perversion of the religious sensibility of humanity. See your handiwork and own it. People have been trying, of course, but in the only way they know how: throwing the only weapons and skills they possess, the very technics that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe.
When I was first taught philosophy, I was introduced to Giambattista Vico, Hegel, and Marx. There was a clear theme to this module, that of human self-creation as the basis of power and freedom. There was a heavy emphasis on Vico’s verum ipsum factum principle. This holds that the condition of knowing something is to have made it. The class was clearly being taken in the direction of a free society constituted on the basis of human beings coming to know the world as their own creation and control it consciously to the end of the social good. As political ends go, it is a noble one imagined in fulfilment of the Enlightenment project: the human creation of the world and the demand that human beings come to exercise a self-conscious collective mastery of their existence. We were introduced to Vico's distinction between Nature and Society. Nature, Vico argued, was God's realm and therefore unknowable, but Society, being a human self-creation, was knowable and therefore – in anticipation of Marx - controllable. We were told that Vico only denied the knowability of Nature on account of possible repression by the religious authorities. We accepted that view rather than challenged it. It didn’t seem important at the time, given the emphasis on the growth of human self-knowledge in history, which culminated in Marx. But this idea that Vico was in denial of God and religion is not right. I would also challenge the view that Nature, as God’s domain, is unknowable. It doesn’t ring true in a Judeao-Christian tradition that teaches that God made the world intelligible to intelligent beings; human beings are endowed with reason and enjoined to use it to know God through Nature. Reason and its use is built into the design. Vico is a remarkably neglected philosopher and a great one. He isn't remotely the atheist I was taught he was. These classes were really teaching the humanist philosophy that human beings could go it alone in a world of their own self-creation. It’s a noble Enlightenment philosophy, but reveals a blindspot to religion that is disabling. The religious aspects of Vico’s thought were never addressed. In later modules there was some brief and dismissive speculation as to whether Hegel’s Weltgeist was God, but it was a mere aside in passing, before we got back to the main business of the progress of reason to the consciousness of freedom.
I would challenge this notion of Nature being unknowable. God made the world intelligible to intelligible beings. Hence I argue that the idea that human beings are truth-seekers is a theological notion. Without God as the Ultimate Reality to which we must conform ourselves and our actions, human beings become rationalising beings, projectors of truth and meaning in an objectively valueless world, turning the world, and others, to their own private ends, defending those ends with reasons of their own. Left to their own devices, human beings set out to deceive each other, and themselves, defending and advancing a self-interest that is cut off from relations to a reality outside of the ego. Instead of learning to conform themselves to ultimate reality, human beings come to seek to bend that reality to their will and desire. Assertions of an enlightened self-interest here return us to eighteenth century notions of natural reasonableness, sympathy, and sociability which suffice to produce harmony if allowed to go free in their interplay. Such a view led to the idea that a competitive market society is the end of history. It is, as Marx argued in the Grundrisse, a self-cancellation.
"One truly understands only what one can create.”
I would relate this quote from Vico to Tolkien's distinction between Creation and human sub-creation. The one is given, containing a truth which it is the responsibility of human beings to disclose and conform themselves to; the latter is the realm of human creative praxis. Insofar as sub-creation proceeds within the Creation it constitutes a healthy and necessary flourishing which is reverential and respectful of limits and boundaries; when it overreaches these parameters and displaces the Creation, sub-creation degenerates into a prideful self-worship and self-destructs.
In finishing, I would also draw attention to another flaw in this vision of humanity coming to take control into its own hands. Socially and politically there is no ‘humanity.’ Human beings are always differentiated in society. Any assertion of ‘humanity’ or ‘we’ here has to demonstrate a much greater sociological precision, lest morality merely become a cover for the predation of the strong upon the weak. That’s the flaw in a humanist ethic which, cut off from the God which unites all and makes all equal, reduces morality to prevailing asymmetries in social relations. The problem in the contemporary world is that the human 'we' is fractured and hence incapable of comprehending and controlling the collective forces generated by human practice. Marx showed us a way out of that predicament, hence I remain grateful to the lecturers in my philosophy classes. But I remain adamant in my conclusion that the failure of the modern age to take religion seriously will prove its undoing. At the heart of every transgression of boundaries is the age old delusion of human beings aspiring to the power and knowledge of God. Human beings are made in the image of God, meaning that they aspire to realize their better qualities; it does not mean they are identical with God, rivals for the possession, control, and use of divine power and knowledge. At the heart of the ‘existential crisis’ that is climate change lies the human estrangement from God and the mad and self-destructive delusion that human beings could acquire the power and knowledge of God to create Heaven on Earth. The economic system that has delivered the material largesse and technological power we enjoy is also a global heat machine that is transgressing planetary boundaries. That machine is made in the image of Man bereft of God. The most fundamental transgression of that machine is the transgression of moral boundaries. Bacon sought to put the material and the moral in tandem with each other; those who followed in his footsteps made the moral a secondary consequence and function of the material. And now we have 'men as gods' deifying capital and technology, thinking the very things that plunged the world into crisis will be sufficient to avert catastrophe. In losing the moral, we stand in danger of losing the material.
Capitalists: we’ve wrecked the planet, how can we keep it going long enough to make a little more money out of what is left?;
Scientists: we’ll say the problem is climate change and blame it on ‘humanity’ and adverse weather, to which "we" "must" adapt;
Politicians: we’ll tax and regulate it (and people), we can make it happen institutionally;
Engineers: we’ll supply the tools, we can make it happen technologically;
Media: we'll publicize and broadcast it, we have the reach and the communications;
Public: (waving placards and cheering) we want system-change! (we'll bail the system out and keep it exploiting the planet to oblivion!).
Pragmatists: this can all be done.