Nature, Science and the Death of Pan

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 3: Nature, Science and the Death of Pan

One of Szeryszynski’s missions is to argue against a functionalist understanding of history; that, for example, “the course of history from the birth of Christianity to modern technology and widespread environmental problems proceeds with an inexorable logic” (31). On the contrary, our world is a confluence of forces which when combined produce results that no one could predict in advance. “I argued,” he writes, “that scientific ideas of nature are a product of the contingent, branching trajectory of the Western sacred, rather than a timeless set of truths which were simply waiting in the wings of history for cultural conditions conducive to their discovery” (51). And this is crucial for debunking the myth of disenchantment, because it’s not as if we have ‘arrived’ at some great climax; we are continuing to evolve… so let’s not be so arrogant to think that we’ve finally got it ‘right.’

Let’s also not celebrate particularly if we have succeeded in murdering Pan, the God of nature! Not that we necessarily have, as the author argues that if Pan is dead at all, he died a very slow death; he was not killed in some epiphanic bolt of lightning. In a weird way, in fact, “the ‘disenchantment of nature’ is also the emergence of nature in the modern sense (see Scott, 2003: 8-16)…. Nature as understood by science thus has its own hidden theology. And the ‘disenchantment’ of nature is thus itself a form of enchantment” (47). So the result, in the end, of the schism between modern science and religion, “constituted an intensification of theological reflection in relation to the natural world” (48). But is this ‘nature’ Pan? Not really: “Modernity is thus constituted by a ‘religion of nature’ that changes both religion and nature” (49).

We may be able to see the death of Pan in the move to a monotheistic sacred, but Szerszynski argues that this is simply “a shift within a larger frame, within what might be called the social or personal understanding of nature” (32). To understand this, we have to grasp that “pre-modern nature is best conceived not as divine but as social (Kelsen, 1946; Descola, 1994; Descola and Pálsson, 1996)” (33).

The author’s central argument is that “the transformation of ideas of nature from pre-modern to modern societies is best understood not as dedivinization, disenchantment or secularization but desocializing or depersonalization” (42). The key is in recognizing that pre-modern societies did not see nature as a “separate category of technological relations distinct form the social and the cultural; they were understood using categories and concepts that today we would largely reserve for social relationships, such as reciprocity, intention, action and meaning” (42). What does this imply for my PhD, then? Can we ever reunite these worlds in our heads? Can we put Humpty Dumpty together again after he has broken to bits? Is this, effectively, the scale of what I’m proposing to do?

I think another important takeaway from this chapter has to do with the evolution of ‘meaning’ in our world. Consider that, “Rather than simply being experienced as a wild realm of blind forces indifferent to humans and their concerns, pre-modern cultures experience the world as an already meaningful dwelling place (Ingold, 2000, part 2)” (34). And, as Wertheim also pointed out, there was a shift somewhere along the line where people found meaning in projecting God’s intent or purpose onto nature: “the language of God as “lawgiver” gave way to the idea that the world was ordered, that there were “laws” to be discovered, which motivated scientists “from Descartes to Newton” to pursue the discovery of those laws as evidence of the mind of God” (44).

How different both must have been compared to now, where we seem to require the manufacturing of meaning, most clearly evidenced by our obsessive consumerism and the ‘progress’ of step-wise technological development.