Science as Myth and the Myth of Science. (05/09/2002)
Science is the epitome of Enlightenment ideology. It gave birth to the Enlightenment and was born from it. It is both the mother and the child of itself. It has achieved mythic status in the culture its has created. Everything we are, everything we have, can be said to have come into existence because people learned how to apply mathematical principles to the process of exploiting nature. We learned how to do it better, more efficiently, than anyone had ever been able to do before number became synonymous with God. That material comfort has risen exponentially in direct proportion to how well or how badly any particular people have managed to apply scientific principles to their pursuit of their material well-being is obvious to anyone who bothers to look. Those who have done so successfully have prospered. Those who have failed have suffered. This relatively simple observation has also generated a popular myth among those who have benefited from scientific methodology that science itself is a wholly desirable and beneficial ideology that carries with it no negative downside for anyone who employs it. If any unfortunate circumstance happens to arise because of an overly zealous pursuit of scientific principles, and it might be possible to cite a few examples, people who defend science simply claim that the principles are not to blame, are not at fault, but that the people who use them to exploit natural reality have failed to be vigilant enough in safeguarding against their misuse.
At the same time, and on the other hand, there are several kinds of people in the world who argue against science, and against the various ways it has been used to exploit nature, on the ground that the excessive pursuit of material wealth damages the human spirit from a religious point-of-view, on one side, and may be responsible ultimately for degrading the natural environment, through an excessive consumption of resources, from a more practical perspective, on the other. For reasons made obvious elsewhere in this document, I have little to say about objections to science on religious grounds. Reducing, or inhibiting, the pursuit of our knowledge of natural reality through scientific principles because it offends God, or offends those people who think it does, or might, offend God, constitutes no credible reason to restrict our comprehension of the world in which we live.
From the other direction, however, a very credible argument can be raised to suggest that, as science has accelerated our ability to exploit, if not destroy, nature, it has also augmented the possibility that significant human populations will be brought to the edge of catastrophe, especially in under-developed regions of the world, if its application is not more carefully employed. While there is nothing like consensus to support this assertion, and where opinion over the issue may be evenly divided and powerfully emotional, even to the point where incivility and occasional violence seem to rule the debate, the connection between the rise of scientific method and the decline of environmental quality can at least be seen as parallel phenomena that hang on opposite horns of a cause and effect relationship. If true, a considerable challenge is raised to anyone hoping to explain how the mere perception of natural reality as a function of number, without recourse to dependence on notions grounded in the abstract and otherworldly arguments of a spiritual religiosity, can cause a deterioration in the quality of the environment. One might be tempted here to assert that a difference between pure and applied science might be the culprit.
People who apply science at one end of a process do not necessarily anticipate the consequences at the other end of its use. An obvious example over the last forty years has been the development of nuclear energy as an important source for the production of electricity. When the process began scientists argued that such production was relatively cheap, efficient, and "clean." Nuclear power plants do not have smokestacks that produce huge clouds of visible toxic fumes. At the same time, scientists were aware of the fact that such plants did produce a dangerous by-product in the form of radioactive rods of "spent" fuel that would require centuries of storage isolation from all living things because their long life of lethal radioactivity would kill anything with which they came in contact. This problem was addressed with the same optimism that science directs toward everything else it confronts: eventually a solution to the long-term storage problem would be discovered and the spent fuel rods would be rendered harmless. Unfortunately, at least to date, the solution has not been forthcoming and the nuclear energy industry has reached a standstill in its utility expansion as a cheap and reliable source of electricity. Recently (05/08/2002), the US House of Representatives has passed a bill authorizing the NEC to begin storing 154 million pounds of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a solution to this problem. Other difficulties have also surfaced. Design flaws have caused several accidents that have threatened the lives of thousands of people living near the plants. One today near Manhattan ("Indian Point," reactor #2) is so riddled with problems that many people have advocated it be shut down immediately. That has not happened yet because no one can devise a plan that will render the plant any safer off-line than it is on-line.
Looking critically at the problem: the pure science of nuclear energy, E = MC2, does not threaten anyone in any conceivable way. The application of that mathematical formula, however, first as a weapon against Japan, and then in nuclear power plants, has caused the deaths of thousands of people and threatens the lives of many thousands more. Since radioactive fuel rods have an active lethal life span of at least 20,000 years, where it is probably inconceivable that a containment structure can be built that will last even half that long a time, not even at Yucca Mountain, the fuel rods being produced and discarded now will eventually, and inevitably, kill or injure thousands of people in the future. For the short-term advantage of cheap and efficient energy, then, science seems to have bequeathed us a problem that may well outlive the memory of the human knowledge that created it in the first place. I say this only because we know hardly anything about the intellectual processes and content of the knowledge held by people who lived as recently as 10,000 years ago.
Science then has generated a series of claims about itself that suggests it is completely benign and essentially beneficial when the people who use it to exploit natural resources take seriously the need to moderate their application of its discoveries in ways that do not threaten the environment. Unfortunately, and for the most part, scientists have left the regulation of such applications to non-scientific communities too often concerned only with how much profit can be gained from this or that use of scientific principle and too little awareness of the consequences that may follow along in the wake of employing new technologies for the sake of exploiting nature.
A problem perhaps on the other side of this one arises when a longer view of human history is inserted into the discussion. For instance, while it is certainly clear to us now that the Ptolemaic perception of the solar system was essentially flawed, even if it had been worked out using mathematical principles and was at least a primitive formulation of scientific methodology, the people who embraced the geocentric view of the solar system were no less certain of its validity than we are now that the sun holds that central position in our planetary system. True, at the same time, is the fact that no one was harmed or damaged in any substantial way simply because he/she adhered to an invalid conception of material and spatial reality. In fact, it might even be possible to make a sensible argument that the shift from earth-centered to sun-centered cosmology is in part responsible for the spread of environmental destructiveness that has followed along in the wake of the scientific revolution. When the earth stopped being the center of human orientation, it became increasingly difficult to defend against people and activities that might threaten its structural integrity. People ordinarily resist the temptation to launch damaging attacks against their own material center but, with the spread of the notion that the sun, not the earth, was the true center of human reality, even in a broad physical sense, whatever caution or hesitation might have prevented attacks against nature were radically dissipated as the Copernican revolution progressed.
Also true here is the additional fact that Copernicanism only built on the previous ground of the Christian view that the world was essentially evil and would be completely destroyed anyway in the final arrival of God's insatiable wrath against the face of human sinfulness. There were no real safe-guards against environmental destruction in Christian ideology in the first place, which probably accounts now for the fact that most fundamental Christians, George W. Bush included, either attack or ignore anyone who voices concerns about the environment. A typical, and recent, example of anti-environmental behavior occurred in South America when Enron decided to build a natural gas pipeline through the center of a pristine tropical forest that had previously been set aside as off-limits to any kind of development or exploitation by virtually every agency in every world government anyone can name. Enron falsified survey information, claiming the forest was not "pristine" at all, bribed and coerced enough officials here and there to get what it wanted and built the pipeline against all remaining objections. The purpose of the pipeline was to move natural gas from fields in Bolivia, across the center of the tropical forest, to a power plant Enron owned in Brazil. Enron then sold itself huge amounts of natural gas, well before the pipeline was completed, "cooked the books" through an offshore shell corporation so that it could claim the gas sale as profit, and used it to prop up its balance sheet in its effort to avoid bankruptcy. Hence, Enron claimed gas sales from itself to itself as profit before any could be delivered to a power plant it also owned but did not report because it had sold "controlling" interest in the plant to a second off-shore shell corporation which it also owned while claiming it did not. Enron tweaked about $200 million out of this financial scam, while compromising a tropical forest, so that it could "cook" it solvency for another quarter before it finally collapsed. George W. Bush's Secretary of the Army was head over heels in this business because the division of Enron that orchestrated the natural gas deals in Bolivia and Brazil (Enron Energy Services) was under his control when it happened. I noticed the other day that the Pentagon is currently working day-and-night in its latest lobbying efforts to get environmental regulations relaxed even more than they already have been. Bush's is a friendly ear, of course, since Enron has had him in its back pocket since the day he became governor of Texas. General Thomas E. White (Secretary of Army) holds that position now precisely because he was a 12-year veteran of Enron's chicanery before joining the Administration.
A final point is that pre-Copernican thinkers were so certain of the validity of their point-of-view that a number of people who expressed adherence to solar-centric cosmology were persecuted by those in power who remained firmly committed to Ptolemaic astronomy. That certainty had a number of sources, of course, and even a few that were anything but rational, however, it is important to note that a pre-scientific certitude, while it cannot make any false statement or perception true, nevertheless ought to warn us against being too secure in our own certainty that a "scientific" perception of natural reality is necessarily a true and valid one. In light of the fact that most right-wing conservatives believe nature is essentially evil, that God gave them the absolute right of dominion over it, and that most are driven by what appears to be an insatiable greed for material wealth, while opposing scientific research and intellectual development across the widest expanse of human achievement possible, it is anything but difficult to understand why they are so willing, even driven, to use whatever means are necessary and at hand to extract as much wealth as possible from the natural world before it too reaches the final stages of its own bankruptcy. Science, and its application, is the means at hand to satisfy that greed and George W. Bush's conceptualization of it, in the American corporate culture, after the Enron model, is reason enough to question the validity of scientific methodology, if only because it has never displayed a cautionary formula against its own complicity in the destruction of the natural world it investigates and defines.
Pure scientists have always claimed that they are not responsible for the way that non-scientists apply their discoveries and insights in the real world. Few, if any, critics of science have ever ventured out on the ground that science should be eliminated as a teachable methodology because there is a glaring disconnect between its application to the exploitation of natural resources and determining who should be held responsible for the consequences of that "post-scientific" activity. Can, or should, Einstein be held to account because his discovery of E = MC2 resulted in the development of nuclear weapons that now, according to the Bush administration, threaten us from every side of his "axis-of-evil," or because nuclear power plants generate dangerous by-products that cannot be safely disposed?
While it would be absurd to punish scientists for the way their science is applied, even though that possibility may not be completely beyond happenstance given the way Attorney General Ashcroft tends to perceive issues of Justice, the total disconnect of responsibility between pure and applied science, especially when the application is being driven solely by corporate greed, at the very least should fuel an examination, if not an active debate, about the actual nature of scientific methodology and whether or not its connection to reality is based on more than just the convenience of asserting that number really is the best way to comprehend material phenomena. I reach this point out of a profound distrust for Eurocentric ideology which tends to posit two sides to every question in a dialectical pursuit of good and evil. Language-based thinking, characterized by the term Logos, asserts that only good can come from the word and that its opposite, number, can produce only evil. This is true because Logos is the word of God in Judeo-Christian tradition while numbers are essentially Arabic and hence products of Islam. Somewhere, even deep in the "soul" of every right-wing fundamentalist Christian, is the notion that number, and its incorporation into science, is inherently evil because it stands at an opposite pole to the Divine Word of God. This juxtaposition then tends to elevate the idea of number, making it co-equal, if still somewhat subservient, to the opposite notion of the inherent goodness one expects to find attributed to the Word. Hence, if the Word is Good, then Number must be Evil, which, and not without reason, is precisely the way George W. Bush currently characterizes his war against terrorism, demanding that all nations declare they are for or against us, and our political, military, and economic goals, even as he splits them into camps of Good (Judeo-Christian America) and Evil (Terror-Prone Islamic cultures).
Granting mythic status in this way to the notion of number may well be little more than a rhetorical trick, as it were, but it points to the existence of a significant fault-line hidden under the granite surface of scientific ideology. Science confronts us with a claim that number is superior to word in its ability to explain and describe the material world. Proof is given in the form of citing an endless and familiar list of human accomplishments centered on the destruction of natural environments through scientific means, all of which have benefited people in various ways. Some benefits over time, however, have carried along with them a hidden menace, a few of which are so dire that we may not survive their coming to fruition. From nuclear winter to global warming, the myth of science as only a beneficial force of human intellect may end up as conflicted with contradiction as the one that tells us belief in God (mine not yours as it were) is a necessary component of universal human felicity as well.
The idea of "science as myth" means only to suggest that perceiving the world as number-intensive formulas may actually be a case of substituting one metaphor for another, where the initial choice was in seeing the world as a function of God as Creator, while the new one reads more like seeing number as the ultimate hope of salvation for a dying world. One may not serve us any better than the other, however, since both seem to have an unmistakably human capacity to foreshadow, anticipate, and even pre-determine, an apocalyptic annihilation of human life. Given the parallel and interactive rise of Enlightenment philosophy and scientific methodology, where many of its inherently human philosophical flaws have become apparent, from Descartes to Kant, perhaps Science itself needs more critical evaluation and considerably less blind acceptance than it now enjoys. My point here is not that we should, or even can, return to pre-scientific ideologies, to positions mostly favored by right-wing religious conservatives who want to deny science altogether because they believe it offends God, but to suggest instead that we find ways to look well beyond the limitations set in rules of number and forward to a cosmological landscape, numerically formulated or not, that carries with it a preservation of nature rather than a willful destruction of it.