Aldous Huxley issued this statement as a warning; the technocrats amongst us take it as a programme to be enacted. This is what one wrote in response:
"Technical engineers will be called upon in great measure in the next 50 years simply because the necessity for adaptive strategy and projects will require deep technical expertise if we are to survive in any measure the change brought about by the current climate crisis."
That response in a nutshell sums up the disdain and contempt for the work people like me have produced - no true knowledge generated, nothing practicable, nothing programmable.
Some cite James Lovelock - who died this week - as offering the spirituality I seek beyond the techocratic mentality. I would point here that Lovelock's Gaia is not a genuinely organic view at all but a cybernetic conception. I would also point out that Lovelock openly called for the "suspension of democracy." My objections cut no ice. When technocrats talk so blandly about "we," they don't actually mean all flesh and blood humans, only those deemed worthy of survival. As one of those who would likely be deemed unworthy, I take a personal interest in these measures of survival. Biologically, humanity is one; politically and sociologically, however, it isn't: there is no unified “we.” Technocrats are presenting us with ideal visions of climate-controlled cities, economies, and polities for the survival of “humanity,” but the survival they refer to concerns not actual flesh and blood humans but the human species above and beyond its particular members. Austerian environmental policies in the context of asymmetrical relations of power and resources entails the survival of the socially as well as ecologically fit, with the weakest going to the wall. In The Vanishing Face of Gaia A Final Warning (2009), James Lovelock openly states that not all of us will make it. In fact, he claims that the human population will be reduced by billions. Few of us will make it. And to the technocratic mind, that prospect is of no concern – it the survival of the species that matters. To the technocratic mind, nothing other than that crude survival matters – civilisation, ethics, democracy, political ideals, art, the reasons for living, nothing. Such people don’t understand that mere survival can never be an end in itself. Without the reasons for living, the human spirit withers and dies. It is possible for human beings to survive in such an external world, but it will die within. So when technocrats set their sights on the field of practical reason, I take an interest.
This statement is an indication of what we are up against. The attack on the humanities is a plain inhumanism. Philistine technocrats have politics as well as culture in their sights. A suspended democracy is an ended democracy, period. We are going to have to rally the people and build a public and move these characters on and out if 'we' are to 'survive' in any humanly meaningful sense. Technocrats are a menace to people and public life. And their 'solutions' are crude and simplistic.
James Lovelock, the pioneer of Gaia theory, died last week. I have read books by him and on him (He Knew He was Right), I know his work well. Those books cost me a lot of time and money, so I am hardly dismissive of him. But I didn’t join in the general praise on social media. I don’t think people read deeply enough. They either have this romantic image of the Earth as a living Goddess or hold the Earth to be a self-subsistent organism which is entirely indifferent to any of the species' that live upon and within it. Whilst the former is plainly not Lovelock’s view (thankfully), the latter merely leaves us paralysed at the sheer pointlessness of it all.
“Well, what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the preacher sayeth. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe, the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be – and the non-necessity of it.” (Thomas Hardy).
Except that the adherents of a disenchanting science assert the pointless, meaningless, indifferent necessity over all our hopes, dreams, and visions. It's not enough - 'the world is objectively valueless and indifferent to human concerns, now save it!' It doesn't work, it doesn't appeal, it doesn't motivate, hence the constant recourse to psycholgical manipulation and abstract coercion. Nudge, as in pushing people against their will.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ― Edward Bernays, Propaganda
Again, what was once a warning is now a strategy and programme of political control. It is the end of democracy, and ‘progressives’ openly advocate for it in the name of ‘necessity.’ We are ruled by technocrats and neurocrats. Intellectually and psychologically, the origins of this ecology of fear lie in the bad metaphysics of ‘scientism,’ the view that the only true knowledge arises in the field of a disenchanting science that reveals life to be pointless anyway. I call the bluff of the people who argue in this manner: if life is indeed meaningless, then nothing is more meaningless than the science and philosophy that says it is so. It is no wonder that the people who hold such a view are unable to inspire action, motivate people within, and obligate them voluntarily but must instead resort to manipulation and force.
There are many who consider Lovelock to be one of the enchanters, but I’m not so sure. In chapters two and three of Of Gods and Gaia I address the problematic aspects of Lovelock’s Gaia as a cybernetic model of the Earth - mechanistic - as well as its highly questionable political and ethical implications. I much prefer Lynn Margulis’ work on symbiosis. But I do like that, although he proclaimed himself a man of science, Lovelock steered clear of the bigoted and ignorant denunciations of religion like those he saw being launched by more militant atheists. He made it clear that he was not one of those people:
I am too committed to the scientific way of thinking to feel comfortable when enunciating the Creed or the Lord's Prayer in a Christian Church. The insistence of the definition "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth" seems to anaesthetize the sense of wonder, as if one were committed to a single line of thought by a cosmic legal contract. It seems wrong also to take it merely as a metaphor. But I respect the intuition of those who do believe, and I am moved by the ceremony, the music, and most of all by the glory of the words of the prayer book that to me are the nearest to perfect expression of our language. When atheistic science can inspire anything as moving as Bach's St Matthew passion or as seemly as Salisbury Cathedral I will respect it but not be part of it.
James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia 2000: 195
James Lovelock RIP.
Works of mine on this theme:
Affirming Freedom and Democracy and Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation: The Allure of Eco-Authoritarianism under the Sign of Climate Necessity (2022)