Nature, Technology and the Sacred: a Postscript

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 11 – Nature, Technology and the Sacred: a Postscript

I find myself pasting huge chunks of Szerszynski, but it is mostly because the author articulates his nuanced argument incredibly well, so it would be a shame to dilute it. I like this summary he provides of his mission: “As Weber himself put it in a different context, under conditions of modernity ‘[t]he many gods of old, without their magic and therefore in the form of impersonal forces, rise up from their graves, strive for power over our lives and begin once more their eternal struggle amongst themselves’ (Weber, 1989: 22-3). I have been similarly suggesting in this book that in contemporary society we can see not a decline but a profusion of the sacred; dispersed across the social, natural and technological landscape, the sacred becomes feral. / But the contemporary sacred is not thereby without order and pattern” (171).

The important nuance with Szerszynski is to understand that technology does not disgod nature, or indeed strip an meaning from it; but rather it “serves ceremonial functions in maintaining a particular sacral ordering of nature” (172). So, if we are going to try to answer the question of “which enchantment of nature might offer a genuine alternative to the domination of nature and humanity by modern technology” (124), we have to start by understanding these “sacral meanings” (172). And here is yet another excellent question to consider: “But what should be our guide in such a process [of achieving the right relation to nature and to technology]? (172). Here is the problem: “I have suggested that the characteristic form of the sacred in contemporary culture is a postmodern sacred where the ultimate ground of value and meaning has been drawn into human subjectivity itself. This ordering of the sacred is not without its distinctive modes of truth. Yet it seems unable to provide either a place outside the social and technological world, or an inherent rationality within it, on which could be grounded a critique of modern society. It thus seems only able to generate either celebrations of the contemporary extension of consumer choice that simply sacralize the modern technological condition, or at best offer purely symbolic escapes from that condition that ultimately leave it unchallenged (Roberts, 2004)” (172).

I think the lesson to take away from this book is that a critique of technology cannot be done well without taking into account the “historical conditionedness” (174) of the unique, Gestalt ordering of the world; i.e. the worldview or mindset of the users and producers of that technology. Technology offers the misleading promise of “overcom[ing] finitude”; and therefore, the author suggests that, “the very embracing of our historical conditionedness, and ultimately of our embeddedness in the ongoing transformation of the sacred, can itself be seen as an anti-technological move, a negation of the negation of finitude” (174). In other words, the truly radical thing to do is to, as a first step in technological innovation, is to recognize the historical conditioning of that innovation. So it is silly, really, to “refuse what is handed us by the past; such is the impossible dream of Enlightenment. Instead, the task must be to receive that past more consciously and responsibly” (174). We must be humble, but we must also humble science: “Thus the embracing of finitude is likely to involve a humbling of science as only one way of knowing nature, and of technology as only one way of dealing with it” (177-8).

The author concludes with this: “…technologies need to be engaged with more fully, to be ‘read’ in a far richer way: in terms of what relationships they bear to our past trajectory, how they might be harnessed to non-technological goals in the present, and upon what future trajectory they might set us. Understanding the embeddedness of our ideas of nature and technology in the ongoing transformation of the Western sacred is an essential component of that task” (178).

Now my PhD is seeming incredibly daunting! – if I have to, as part of the process, contextualize the modern epistemology and the modern relationship between technology and nature… and humanity. But what’s somewhat heartening is the suggestion (between the lines) that if we change what technology means to us, it may change our relationship to nature, possibly ushering in an epoch of greater environmental stewardship.

Nature, Virtue and Everyday Life

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 8 – Nature, Virtue and Everyday Life

(I have skipped over chapters 5-7 because, while interesting, they do not help me much with my thinking about my PhD.)

This chapter is about how people are seeking to “reorder their relationship with non-human nature” (138). One example he uses is Vegetarians, who have strong feelings about how they should live their lives in relation to nature; they serve as an example of “living according to one’s principles… and ordering one’s own life in a morally excellent way in relation to them” (133). To explain this behavior, Szerszynksi uses virtue theory, which “focuses neither on acts nor consequences but on character as the primary locus for moral judgement (see Kruschwitz and Roberts, 1987; French et al., 1988)” (131). Virtue theory helps us understand the ways in which nature has become politicized (135).

And it might, therefore, be a useful thing to explore in terms of understanding why we behave the way we do, and why sustainability has become such an important issue of late. Equally, Bordieu’s concept of habitus might come in handy here, because it explained “how ways of thinking are absorbed as habits into the body, but are also socially located (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984)”; and how different manifestations of this habitus represent “different social groups” that then “try to reorder the moral hierarchies of society in order to ensure they are higher than other groups” (135). Szerszynski writes: “What has all this got to do with green consumerism? Firstly, like the popular religion of the early modern period, both in the sense of investing everyday actions – shopping, cooking, discarding – with sacral significance, and in terms of involving a certain habituation of bodily action, the going through of formulaic movements in given contexts…. Secondly, like popular religion, this kind of ecological piety helps to stabilize self and society in a world understood as permeated with risk and hazard…. Thirdly, like those of early modern popular religion, the rituals and taboos of green consumerism can be seen as expressive as much as instrumental, as serving to affirm the identity of the individual and their social bonds with others, as much as to navigate around a risky world” (138).

The point is that we have a choice – indeed, we are “obliged” to choose – in modernity “by what codes and through what patterns we live our life” (127). (Traditionalists, too, are of course making this choice.) What is ‘right’ is no longer ordained in the way it once was (when life was “dominated by a justice-based emancipatory politics concerned with the liberation of groups and individuals from tradition, inequality and oppression” (127?)); and now we have to ask ourselves questions about “how one should live” (127?). People are responsible now for their own self-realization (this seems to agree with Maslow’s hierarchy literature); and they must make a sense of the world for themselves by making choices that embody their moralities.

Modern Technology and the Sacred

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 4: Modern Technology and the Sacred

It is facile to say, “technology is our new religion.” This is not precisely accurate. But modern society has attached very important meanings to the development of technology, which are important to understand. We get some clues to the evolution of this meaning in the etymology of the word itself.

Technologousi, used up to the 12th Century, connoted “reasoning subordinated to craft and artfulness” (55). This changed with the Reformation (and Puritanism in particular), which brought with it a “new emphasis on reducing the arts to universal, univocal methodological principles – on finding the logos of techne itself, the science that defines all the arts, and thus overcoming the recalcitrance of matter and making it subservient to logos”… and then… “Technologia, and its synonym technometria, emerged as Latin terms in the work of the sixteenth-century French Protestant rhetorician Peter Ramus, who used them in the more modern sense of ‘the logos of the relations among all technai. But it was the eighteenth century, for example in the work of Johann Beckamann, that the concept of technology as ‘a functional description of the process of production’ emerges in its recognizably modern sense (Mitcham, 1994; 128-31)” (55-6).

The important point for understanding the meaning of technology in the modern world is this:
“It was only with the collapse of the sacred into the empirical world, the shift from an ordering of society according to the transcendent axis to a biopolitical, immanent ordering of the social, and began to constitute things in the world as Heidegger’s ‘standing-reserve’. The ultimate purpose of society was no longer to praise of the creator but the reproduction of itself; numerous sciences and technologies emerged to provide the knowledges necessary to ensure the continuation and optimization of the life process. The last vestiges of classical and Christian meanings in the technological sublime were all but swept away. Technology became measured against neither quotidian nor supernal human needs and interests, but against its own, technical criteria. Technology became the measure of man – became autonomous, became sublime” (64).

For the rest of this post, I’m going to inartfully paste some good passages that relate to other works in my literature review.

1. I always try to relate my research back to Foucault – not just because it’s a fun game, but because I understand Foucault’s interpretation of how power operates: “In the modern period, by contrast, the biological becomes seen as a self-sufficient mode of existence; what modern power administers is no longer ‘legal subjects’ but ‘living beings’ (Foucault, 1979: 142-3). And in such societies technology alters radically from the forms it took in pre-modern times. Technology becomes systematized, with an explosion in the scope and purchase of technique, and its harnessing to the goal of shaping and optimizing life itself” (59).

2. This passage relates well to what Vowell was talking about in The Wordy Shipmates: “The sublime thus became a key figure for the self-understanding of American, able not only to underscore the ‘lofty materialism’ of the Jeffersonian vision of government…, but also to combine a sense of the unique grandeur of the vast natural landscape of the new country with a celebration of the human capacity to transform the same landscape. A very specific ‘technological sublime’, exalting the power to dominate nature, provided a new, non-denominational civil religion to unite a pluralistic nation through awestruck moments of Durkheimian collective effervescence in front of public technological projects such as bridges and skyscrapers, and later atom bombs and rocket launches” (61).

3. And this theme keeps coming back, the idea that we have stopped asking “why” questions: “Technologies grated this form of sublimity advance without any awareness of questions of purpose which lie outside their own way of framing the world; questions like ‘why?’ hand in the air, with no expectation of an answer (Szerszynski, 2003a)” (63).

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.

Nature, Secularization and the Transformation of the Sacred

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 2: Nature, Secularization and the Transformation of the Sacred

For Szerszynksi, one of the first steps to realizing the continuing role of the sacred in modern Western society is to broaden its definition. As he says, “I will be arguing that the sacred has its correlate of what astrophysicists call dark matter – that there is much more of it about than we might think” (11).

One of the preeminent voices on the ‘sacred’ is of course Durkheim, whose definition is defined by Szerszynski as follows: “to regard something sacred is to set is apart from the routine and the everyday; to attribute to it some kind of divine or transcendent characteristic, power or significance; to treat it as an end in itself rather than something that can legitimately be used solely as a means to an end” (10). This understanding has come under attack as being majorly flawed because it ignores how things “come to be seen as sacred in the first place” (Milton, in Szeryszynski: 10). An alternative definition posited by Kay Milton is that the sacred is “‘what matters most to people’” (10), taking into account emotions.

But there are potential useful demarcations of stages in the development of the meaning of the sacred in our world. For the purposes of comparison (perhaps not to serve as a comprehensive list), Szerszynski identifies primal religion, archaic religion, the Axial Age, the Protestant sacred, the modern sacred, and the postmodern sacred:

Primal: “The aim of primal religion is to secure the sustainable reproduction of life within this world, rather than to escape it or to live according to laws originating from outside (Bellah, 1970: 25-9)” (16).

Archaic: “Like primal religion, archaic religion is similarly monistic in its experience of the world as a unified ‘natural-divine cosmos’, but here the deities are more definite gods with whom humans must interact in an ordered way” (17).

Axial Age: “In a radical shift in the understanding of the sacred which occurs across the globe between 800 and 200 BCE, in what Karl Jaspers calls the axial age (Jaspers, 1953), the cosmological monism of earlier religion is progressively reordered around a dualistic distinction between ‘this’ world and a transcendent reality understood to exist ‘above’ it” (17).

Protestant Sacred: “We arrive at the Protestant sacred when the Reformation strips away the institutional and supernatural hierarchies that both constituted and spanned the gulf between the transcendent divine and the world, making that gulf at once infinite and infinitesimal, absolute and vanishingly small. With the divine’s even more absolute removal from this world, it became apprehended under the figure of the sublime – as infinite, unconditioned and unknowable (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 106-7). But at the same time as the Reformation radicalizes the gulf between the empirical and transcendent worlds, the latter is also brought close to each individual, and to nature” (19).

Modern Sacred: “With the modern sacred, embracing the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the vertical transcendent axis is increasingly drawn into the empirical world. Instead of Being and order being seen as deriving from a supernatural source external to empirical reality, they are increasingly seen as properties of that reality itself. The world thereby comes to be seen as profane in a newly radical sense” (20)

Postmodern Sacred: “Finally, we arrive at what I want to call the postmodern sacred, which exhibits a more thoroughgoing collapse of the organizing dualism of the monotheistic and Protestant sacred. But this signals not a return to the monistic, single reality of the primal and archaic sacred, but the emergence of a multiplex reality, one filled with and constituted by different cosmologies and world-views grounded in subjective experience. Rather than religion and cosmology – including ideas of nature – determining who people thought they were and how they experienced the world, instead people feel obliged to fashion or choose religious and cosmological ideas on the basis of their own subjective experience – what ‘feels right’ to them (see Heelas, 1996; Roof, 1999)” (22-3).

What’s fascinating to me is that at some point, “Divine attributes are thus stripped of metaphor and allegory and allotted specific functions in the new scientific understanding of the world – a move which helps lay the grounds for the later erasure of God from Western science” (20), and this sort of abandonment by God (which I talked about in my earlier posts) in a way helps us define our new purpose, and it is technology: “And in America in particular the sublimity of the monotheistic God – his supra-human grandeur, his indifference to the interests and projects of individual humans – is transferred not only to nature but also to technology, as the human capacity to transform the world starts to be seen not just as the ability to meet empirical needs but as a quasi-salvational collective project (Nye, 1994)” (22).

This of course becomes part of the mythology of disenchantment described earlier. The function of the myth, he argues, is to basically make us feel special, important (and secondarily, to perpetuate our current ways of knowing, which include our mythologizing of secularization): “Secularization was thus one of the key ideas used to capture the idea of the uniqueness of modern Western society…. It was assumed widely – and argued explicitly by secularization theorists – that this shift was a natural and inevitable outcome of societal development…. As societies moved up this [evolutionary] ladder, it was thought, religion would lose its hold and disappear” (12). Thus, made meaningful by the myth, the waning participation in organized religion serves to reinforce notions of superiority. And the notion that technology has replaced God is a key interpretation of this disenchantment myth. (I also really like this statement: “as the goal of technology comes to be rendered in technical terms, technology starts to order the ends of life in its own terms” (172). It’s an excellent way of saying that technology has not only become a source of meaning in modernity but that it is self-reinforcing.)

So understanding how religious ways of knowing have changed throughout history is crucial for understanding the modern epistemologies; as Habermas argued, “the history of religion is actually the history of reason” (25).

The Disenchantment of the World

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Preface & Chapter 1: The Disenchantment of the World

I read Berman quite some time ago, but felt I should post a summary of his argument before doing one for Szerszynski, because the two have very different ways of understanding the same epistemological shift. Specifically, Szerszynski criticizes the notion of the “disenchantment of nature” that Berman bemoans; and indeed that Weber describes in his work on bureaucracy (“The disenchantment of nature is central to Weber’s account: in a disenchanted society ‘there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work’ – everything is capable of being explained (Weber, 1989: 13))” (5).

Szerszyski does not deny that it would seem from appearances that there is indeed a disenchantment of sorts occurring in the modern age: “Nature is mathematical – something to be counted, measured and mapped. Nature is immanent – it operates according to its own internal processes, rather than being shaped or guided by a supernatural hand. It is mechanical, behaving according to cause and effect, not seeking teleological goals. It is a resource, to be owned or held in common, to be used or preserved. It gives up its meanings to careful observation and scientific theory, not to mythology or divination. This is the nature of scientific, industrial modernity, the nature whose being is mastered by science, whose value is measured by economics, and whose potentiality is determined by technology” (5).

This sounds rather like Berman. But then Szerszynki pauses and decides to look deeper. He asks, “to paraphrase Mark Twain, what if reports of the death of nature have been greatly exaggerated? What if the narrative of the disenchantment of nature is little more than a creation myth of modern society – a half-truth told in order to secure a sense of modernity’s exceptionality, its discontinuity with earlier cultures (Crook, 1991; Latour, 1993)” (7)?

The key difference in his interpretation of the trend is that it’s not that God is dead; but rather, a shuffle has occurred, which has produced a different ordering of the sacred in our lived reality: “I do not want just to identify exceptions to a general, assumed disenchantment of nature; instead, I want to propose a shift in the whole way we think of that disenchantment, in terms of an overarching set of transformations in the sacral ordering of the world” (xi-xii). So, bizarrely, it seems that even the clear trends toward secularization – the thinning out of congregations, for example – is merely a manifestation of this restructuring: “…rather than particular orderings of the sacred being a response to a particular experience or understanding of God, I would rather see any particular understanding of God (including the idea that there is no God) as a feature of a particular ordering of the sacred, as only intelligible when that order is grasped as a Gestalt” (ix-x). Similarly, we should not hail the “revival of ‘nature religion’” in contemporary societies as a “‘return of the repressed’, as an eruption of a long-suppressed pagan cosmology and sensibility” (9): “Instead, we should understand contemporary ideas of and practices around nature as evidence of a postmodern sacred, a mode of being-in-the-world and a cosmology that is the product of a long and distinctive historical process, and shaped by distinctively contemporary conditions” (9).

So like Berman, Szerszynski concedes that epistemologies are ‘situation-bound’ (“…what Heidegger calls our ‘throwness’ in history means that our being-in-the-world is mediated through – no, stronger, is incarnated in – the cultural currents into which we are thrown…. (x)), and that they are self-reinforcing (“And it is only when we approach nature in a technological way – in a way that is concerned above all with prediction and control – that the kinds of knowledge offered by science and economics become intelligible and useful (Habermas, 1971a)” (5)); but he makes the claim that there is a thread that connects these ways of knowing: “whatever character the local eddies might have, [I hope to show that] the broad swell is always that of the sacred” (x).

In other words, his book aims to show that the sacred is not dead; it is not lost; it is incognito, disguised as secularization, atheism, disenchantment, etc.. All the while, the sacred still guides our understanding of the world on a fundamental level.

Reenchantment of the World

A summary of:
Berman, M. (1981). The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press: London.

Berman is – to say the least – not thrilled with the state of things as he sees them. And he writes this in 1981. I can only imagine the mood he’s in today.

In his book, he traces the arc of scientific thought to its sad zenith:
“Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and thus not really a part of the world around me. The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated “thing” in a world of othere, equally meaningless things. This world is not of my own making; the cosmos cares nothing for me, and I do not really like a sense of belonging to it. What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul” (17). To Berman, “We have, as Dante wrote in the Divine Comedy, awoken to find ourselves in a dark woods” (23). It is dark precisely because there is no light, i.e. no God: “The phrase is Weber’s: die Entzauberung der Welt. Schiller, a century earlier, had an equally telling expression for it: die Entgotterung der Natur, the ‘disgodding’ of nature’” (69).

His point is really that scientific thinking is becoming our human nature (much as Carr and others would argue): “What I am arguing is that the scientific world view is integral to modernity, mass society, and the situation described above. It is our consciousness, in the Western industrial nations…” (22). Just as Carr might argue, and Marx, and apparently Marcuse concluded: “they have become what they own” (17).

Berman argues that we must not think of scientific as being ‘better’ than other ways of knowing. Scientific thinking, the scientific method – these are “situation-bound” (150), i.e. a product of their time; and therefore, it cannot have “epistemological superiority” over other ways of knowing. As an alternative, for example, there are more enchanted ways of understanding the world. Berman may be criticized for romanticizing the past, arguing that, “For more than 99 percent of human history, the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it” (23). He blames this disenchantment for our recent toxic relationship with the earth, not to mention the devastating psychological effects this has on humans. Consider these:

• “The history of the West… is the progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from phenomenal appearances” (69).

• “Modern science and technology are based not only on a hostile attitude toward the environment, but on the repression of the body and the unconscious; and unless these can be recovered, unless participating consciousness can be restored in a way that is scientifically (or at least rationally) credible and not merely a relapse into naïve animism, then what it means to be a human being will forever be lost” (132).

He suggests that the only hope for us is to re-enchant the world; and more specifically, “Some type of holistic, or participating, consciousness and a corresponding sociopolitical formation have to emerge if we are to survive as a species” (23).

The trouble is, you can’t just forget the things that have become part of your worldview. “Here, then, is the crux of the modern dilemma. We cannot go back to alchemy or animism – at least that does not seem likely” (23). On the other hand, Berman cannot stomach the idea of living in the world that scientific progress promises to lead us toward. And it’s true, I would rather live in a world like the one Heraclitus knew (“ ‘What is divine escapes men’s notice because of their incredulity’” (95)) than the world of Simon Stevin (“What appears a wonder is not a wonder” (67)) or Isaac Newton (“The mystery of nearly two millennia was over: one could be reassured that the heavens that confront us on a starry night held no more secrets than a few grains of sand running through our fingers” (42)).

One of the troubling features of the scientific worldview for Berman is that it changes the questions we ask: “So long as men were content to ask why objects fell, why phenomena occurred, the question of how they fell or occurred was irrelevant. These two questions are not mutually exclusive, at least not in theory; but in historical terms they have proven to be so. ‘How’ became increasingly important, ‘why’ increasingly irrelevant. In the twentieth century, as we shall see, ‘how’ has become our ‘why’” (28). This, in fact, is not so different from what Wertheim argues.

This obsession with the how has caused us to view the world as being a big, complex, machine. For example, “Man’s activity as a thinking being – and that is his essence, according to Descartes – is purely mechanical” (34). From this perspective, we have developed the scientific method (which further reinforces this worldview, it should be noted): “Subdivide, measure, combine; subdivide, measure, combine…. This method may properly be called ‘atomistic,’ in the sense that knowing consists of subdividing a thing into its smallest components” (34). Max Weber recognized how this kind of thinking stripped hitherto natural processes of purpose, making them meaningful or valuable only insomuch as they are instrumentally valuable, profitable, expedient: “Max Weber called this attitude of mind zweckrational, that is, purposively rational, or instrumentally rational” (40).

The other goal of science is control; obsessive, pathological control: “Finally, atomism, quantifiability, and the deliberate act of viewing nature as an abstraction from which one can distance oneself – all open the possibility that Bacon proclaimed as the true goal of science: control” (46). Calculation was of course necessary for the development of modern capitalism; and “The German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the money economy ‘created the ideal of exact numerical calculation,’ and that the ‘mathematically exact interpretation of the cosmos’ was the ‘theoretical counterpart of a money economy’” (55).

And, as I have been harping on about forever, the result is that, “modern science is grounded in a sharp distinction between fact and value; it can only tell us how to do something, not what to do or whether we should do it” (51).