Abstract
This essay examines science’s enlightenment ideals of transparency and democratic knowledge against modern challenges. It traces humanity through three phases—pre-civilization, pre-modern civilization, and technology-driven modernity—highlighting how constant change creates instability. The author critiques both science denial and academic obscurantism, arguing that politicizing science (as with COVID-19 and climate change) breeds mistrust. While advocating for technological progress as inevitable and necessary, the essay acknowledges something sacred is missing from purely scientific worldviews. It calls for making science more accessible and democratic, bridging the gap between rigorous inquiry and humanistic meaning to restore public trust.
Table of Contents ↴
1. Science and the Enlightenment
The Ideal
One of the hallmarks of science, of the scientific revolution, of the enlightenment (the period most often associated with the triumph of science) is the fight against obscurantism, against the deliberate or even unintended clouding of message and method, the hiding of knowledge, the belief in a secret knowledge only available to initiates. This is part of what science is fighting against: Its purpose is to communicate, to create community, to make thinking transparent and transparently repeatable. Scientific knowledge is – or should be – the ultimate democratic knowledge: everyone with access to the same knowledge and the same tools and methods should be able to recapitulate every step in thinking, and to repeat every experiment with the same outcome.
This is what science is. It does not matter who you are, where you come from, what your standing in society is: The only thing that matters is your willingness to learn and to participate in a community of learners, to subject yourself to rigorous critique and skepticism, to ultimate honesty, in the aim of ultimate clarity and insight and advancement not for yourself but for everyone. It is science itself, to use the words of the great Daniel Dennett in describing the Theory of Evolution, is “universal acid”: “it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 63).
Complications of Science
This is, of course, an ideal, and there are several objections to it. Of course it matters who you are and what your standing in society is, because your ability to learn and practice science is contingent on whether the resources and freedom to do so are available to you. Too many people have historically and presently been excluded from participating in science as much as they would have liked to. Obstacles still exist, and they can be imposed by poverty, discrimination, stigma, ideology, religion, and arrogance of the elites, amongst many other factors.
Science itself, not in theory but in practice, can be obscurantist by not allowing every idea to rise up when it should, by not helping to foster pathways of thinking that may come from unorthodox or untrained contributors. The scientific establishment can be rigorous to the point of close-mindedness, even if for good reason. Bad ideas may proliferate out of the desire to shut out what are perceived as even worse ideas. Siloed thinking, a strict adherence to disciplines, and an unwillingness to be truly inter- or even transdisciplinary can have deleterious effects; however, so can a deliberate violation of standards and guidelines. Not every new idea ends up being a good idea. Time is limited, and scientists and academics cannot pay attention to every challenge to established knowledge.
Some facts are settled. Some theories are solid beyond doubt. Scientific theories are complex structures of facts and explanations, supported by evidence, oftentimes multi-disciplinary, confirmed after years, decades, even centuries of challenges. A scientific theory is more than the colloquial understanding of theory implies; it is more than just an idea, it is a confirmed and confirmable building of thought that may fray a bit on the edges, and can still be open to modifications or contextualizations, but that nevertheless has stood the test of time.
Example: Evolution
The aforementioned Theory of Evolution is such an example. Initially formulated by Charles Darwin, it has been confirmed by evidence and further theories in biology, geology, genetics, and many more. Some detailed questions (like epigenetics, a surprise return of a variant of Lamarckism) still come up and lead to revision, but the general principle is sound: chance variations within a system are undergoing selection pressure by processes and conditions in its environment which lead to the evolution of new characteristics in future generations which will need to stand the test of time. (You may notice that I did not define “system” as necessarily a living being — the same principle may be much more general than typically assumed).
One of the most frequent objections to evolutionary theory is the old question of intelligent design. Who created the world? Was it a version of the Demiurge, a creator god? Does it need an (intelligent) designer for evolution to work? No. However, nobody can rule out that amongst the processes and conditions in the environment, a conscious intervention could have happened. Here, I side with Stephen J. Gould (as much as I typically agree with Richard Dawkins on most issues): Science and Religion are best understood as non-overlapping magisteria.
If science pretends to disprove religion, it tends to look arrogant and heavy-handed, downright ignorant of theology and religious commentary, and especially of a more transcendental understanding of religion. If religion intercedes in science, it also looks foolish, given that the criticism, again, tends to not come from the transcendental and philosophical sides but from the dogmatic, literalist gatekeepers of the most narrow interpretations of religion: Religion takes many forms and has many aspects. Religious thinking goes beyond simplistic notions of some god in the clouds; in many ways, it is about a complex of ideas and structures such as ritual, structuring politics and society, human development, and questions touching the sublime, the numinous, the divine and eternal. Religion can range from allegedly simple day-to-day ritualistic folk religion with strong beliefs in the supernatural to what has been called Einsteinian religion, the belief that nature itself can be seen as that which is larger than us and transcends us, which sounds like a form of pantheism or spirituality.
Example: Theories of Everything
A second example. It is typically said that Einstein obviated Newton when it comes to gravity, but that is not quite correct. Everything Newtonian physics has stated about gravity still holds, especially when it concerns the effects of gravity on Earth. Beyond that though (and that can even mean Earth orbit!), relativity comes into play. Similarly, we do not yet know how the force of gravity is transmitted. The so-called “Theory of Everything” — a grandiose name if there ever was one! — which physicists are searching for aims to find an explanation for the basic forces we have been able to observe in the universe, and see how they are related: strong interaction (holding quarks together e.g. in hadrons such as protons and neutrons), weak interaction (whatever happens in an atomic nucleus, for instance), electromagnetism (whatever happens between the atomic nucleus and the electrons, for instance) are shown already to be related. To connect these three interactions or forces with gravity is the current challenge (please bear in mind that even though I did take one semester in physics and have read quite a bit of lay physics books, I am not a physicist, and my understanding here is certainly limited).
The point is, a theory can be part of a larger theoretical building with parts unknown, without invalidating aspects of the larger theory. Gravity still does its thing whether we know how it does it or not. Similarly, Evolution works, whether we completely understand the beginnings of life yet or not.
The Enlightenment aspect of science shows in both examples: A clear-cut and sometimes still provocative divider has been erected between traditional and religious ideas, and what can actually be proven and substantiated without appeal to a divine power. The enlightenment mission – to bring light into the presumed darkness of pre-scientific thought – has been a key tool for the so-called scientific revolution, for the technological revolution, for modernity, and against tradition.
2. The Current Division of the Sciences
One Science Divided
Now, both examples chosen so far come from a background of what is now called natural sciences; in the case of evolution, even life sciences. We are all familiar with these seemingly clear-cut dividers: Natural Science is considered “hard science”, dealing with matters of fact, hard evidence, positivist measurability etc. The Humanities are “soft”, dealing with ideas, observations, reflections, perspectives on being human. A middle approach between “hard” and “soft” are the Social Sciences, bringing “hard” methodologies to “soft” fields. Sometimes it helps to use the term “Academia” to unite all these fields, to avoid unnecessary dividers.
Disciplinary Edges
Then there are the strange cases of Mathematics and Theology. Does Theology even belong with a science framework? After all, it is about belief systems, about religion, and that is mostly subjective, certainly not objective stuff. But what about mathematics then? Frank Tipler’s Physics of Immortality explores the very edges of sciences, which look oddly spiritual. Roger Penrose has written about human consciousness in Shadows of the Mind. Paul Davies has written about the connection between physics and theology in God and the New Physics. Fritjof Capra has written about the connections between physics and Eastern mysticism in The Tao of Physics. These are all theoretical physicists and/or mathematicians.
Where do numbers come from? Why is the universe calibrated for life? Mathematics is oftentimes considered to be the language of science, the language of the universe. Is this just another way of calling it the language of God? Is our understanding of God simply hampered by our insistence on seeing God as a person rather than as transcendence, divinity, or the universe itself? A more transcendental understanding of divinity may very well be compatible with the edges of scientific inquiry and theory.
Divisions in Flux?
Ironically, this is where science originally came from. The current division of the sciences is relatively new, and there are good reasons for it; yet historically, there was much more of a flux between the worldly and the otherworldly approaches towards the theories and methods to think about knowledge, about its acquisition, about its explanation, about its application, and about systematizing such a process. What we might call theology nowadays would have had its place in a variety of disciplines such as logic, physics and ethics, but even mathematics or geometry, for both worse and maybe better.
But how could that be better at all? How could a more transcendental or meaning-focused approach be compatible with or even desirable within a modern scientific paradigm?
Before we continue here, let us remind ourselves what we have lost, and how much different our world currently is from any other period in world history. We need to remind ourselves, I would argue, of the cost, not just the benefit, wrought by the enlightenment, as it has helped bring us onto a path of modernity.
3. Effects of Modernity
Marx’ Description of Modernity
The societal effects of the enlightenment have been described strikingly by none other than Karl Marx in, of all pieces, his Communist Manifesto. Do not read the following as an endorsement of communism — I would be one of the last persons to support such an idea — but as an acknowledgement of the power of transformation made possible by science, technology, the accumulation of wealth, and the rise of the middle class (or bourgeoisie). It is the most striking definition of modernity, as Marshall Berman also has laid out. Here goes:
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” (Marx, 1848).
No matter what you may think about his further thinking in Capital (which he never was able to finish) and “Capitalism” itself, his thoughts on modernity are still crucial. There is something that happened in this period of time when enlightenment ideas, science, discovery and changes in modes of production and ownership and political rule all came together.
Phase I: Human Pre-Civilization
In many ways, there have only been three phases of human history. The first is the time before cities and before wide-spread systemic agriculture and large populations. We are increasingly unsure when that time actually ended — modern discoveries in Central Europe and the Amazon basin, for instance, have questioned our assumptions. But there certainly was a time humans lived in arrangements much closer to nature, for better or worse (I prefer to avoid the term “state of nature” because it is one of the probably most destructive and false statements in human intellectual history. I must write about that at another time, but not here).
Phase II: Pre-Modern Human Civilization
The second phase encompasses what we would call Antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the Renaissance in European terminology: Civilization before the systematic victory of science, and before inventions like the steam engine and electricity changed our lives forever. Labor was largely human or animal, not technological. Slavery was normal. States were less extensive than now, and even the Roman Empire was more of a collection of city states than a territorial construct. Humans could reasonably expect life to continue on very similar to before.
Phase III: Modern Human Civilization / Pre-Artificial Civilization
We are living in a completely different time than those first phases. This third phase is determined by an awareness of permanent technological revolution, followed by continuous social changes. No stability. Volatility within not just lifetimes but human life phases.
Personal Example: Experiencing Technological Change in a Lifetime
A personal example, if I may. I remember the impact of these kinds of changes. I grew up without the internet or mobile phones or artificial intelligence. Each of those was a major change within my lifetime. The first major change technology-wise happened at around age 20 when the early internet became available. I remember when AltaVista was a leading search engine, Yahoo a catalog (“Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”), and Google not yet in existence. I started my web site on GeoCities in 1998. Not much later I had my first the cell phone (first without internet), but during my military service in Germany I still had to frequent phone booths to call home. My first internet-able phone was a Nokia 8800 with an Opera Mini browser. I was never able to afford that much desired Nokia Communicator. Furthermore, initially, you had to be an expert buying computers. All the details mattered — and you needed to know how to manage them. My first PC had a hard drive of 21 MB on a 286 processor, barely able to run Windows 3.1, file names had 8 characters followed by a dot and three characters indicating file type. You better had a filing system for your 5.2 inch and 3.5 inch floppy disks. Now, one terabyte is nothing, the computer runs video processing in no time, and I have artificial intelligence helping me create graphics and clean up transcripts. Word hardly ever crashes. I can hold video calls with family and teach via video conference with people all around the world. All of this happened in the span of 30 years. 30 years! Those who have lived through these times remember how revolutionary all these changes were. Internet. Phones you could take with you. Internet on phones. Artificial Intelligence. Inconceivable, literally!
Even more inconceivable, what will happen in the next years? What does this mean for one’s sense of stability, of predictability? Can you even think of planning your life at all? What changes in mindset does this require? And, more frighteningly, how natural this all feels by now (at least to those who have not been too shy about technology)…
Whatever we call this, modernity, or postmodernity, or whatever term we can still use to distinguish ever new phases of this technology-driven world — it is a description of a state of the world in constant flux.
Film Example: Qatsi
As a further illustration, Geoffrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind — life out of balance, set to the music of Philip Glass. For those who have not seen it, here is an excerpt from a key sequence called “The Grid”:
Koyaanisqatsi hails from 1982, and while the world it depicts is seen as out of balance — through the speeding up of quotidian activities and thus alienating ourselves from them —, a mere 20 years later, Naqoyqatsi can only see the world as even more abstract, even more alienated in itself, for instance in its sequence “Primacy of Number”:
Just the mere notion of this ever changing speed of development is creating stress — but also opportunities unknown before. The key, I would argue, is to keep both in a balance that is still livable. We seem to be missing the mark though in many ways, because there seems to be a growing need for nostalgia, simpler times, and at least the illusion of control.
Phase Model as Simplification and Guidance
These phases should not be seen with too much certainty. After all, modernity is the outcome of developments in pre-modernity, just as civilization is the outcome of pre-civilization. We do not yet know how old actual civilization really is. We have assumed for a long time that Mesopotamia was the beginning. Now we know that it wasn’t. Certainly though, there could not have been anything much older for long? We may never know. Maybe Graham Hancock has been right after all; however, that is easier to say than prove — and science needs proof, not just hypothesizing. After all, Hancock doesn’t know either, and his thesis keeps evolving with the science it is based on, as it should be. But whatever the truth may be, precivilization eventually led to civilization, just as civilization led to modernity. Rome and the Middle Ages — yes, even those falsely labeled dreaded Dark Ages — pushed technological development. Modernity does not spring out of premodernity without preparation; it is the cumulation of what came before. These markers of the three different phases I mentioned illustrate nothing else but the idea that changes accumulate and bring something new at a certain tipping point, or, with Hegel and later Engels, that a difference in quantity can become a difference in quality.
Furthermore, as I have indicated in the naming already, Modernity is still Human Civilization, but it is also Pre-Artificial Life Civilization. Whether or to which degree Phase 4 will still be a phase of Human Civilization or not rather Phase 1 of Artificial Civilization remains to be seen.
4. Seeking for an Alternative
Alternatives to Modernity?
Is there an alternative to modernity? One answer could be: Yes, because it has already existed: Premodernity. And yet, this could be mistaken, after all, premodernity eventually led to modernity with as much certainty as precivilization led to civilization. All of this happened globally, sometimes independently from each other. Progress — in its most neutral sense of the progression of time and developments over time — cannot really be stopped; it may be slowed down, but not stopped altogether.
Had Hero of Alexandria been able to develop his Aeolipile — an early steam engine — further to the point of adoption, the world would have looked different today.
Had the Western Roman Empire been able to create a more stable succession of power, and to cultivate its leadership talent rather than waste it away in pointless acts of violence, it would not have had to fail.
Conversely, if Nazi scientists had been a bit faster, they would have been able to develop thermonuclear bombs before the Americans, and who knows what horrors that would have unleashed. Or if young Adolf has been accepted in art school after all with hist postcard painting, the name Hitler would have been obscure due to his pedestrian tastes.
The Inevitability of Technological Progress?
But I digress. Modernity has been inevitable, and it will be inevitable to proceed what may. Could we all — as in the Dune universe — do a pre-Butlerian Jihad and outlaw all AI aggressively before it challenges us? We could. But someone else will try to go along with progress, and there we’ll be, or maybe not. Also, of those who talk about a return to simpler times without all this technology and all this medicine and science and feminism and all, I have yet to hear about a person who actually did it successfully.
We can escape only in our minds, and it seems that while we are living in the most modern period yet, this has also become the age also of a search for an alternative that is questioning the inevitability of technological progress.
Misrepresenting Science, Example: Covid
It is perplexing. Science rules our world, or rather, its results. None of our technology would be thinkable without science. And yet, we are also seeing an increase in resistance against science, even demonization of it. Some of this has to do with how science has been politicized since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, on both extreme ends of politics.
As we have seen since the Covid-19 entered our world, either science is seen as some almost soulless process with implied objective and obviously correct political agency (“follow the science”), or it is described as something that stands in the way of human beings experiencing some mystical connection to the universe (“nature knows best”). Ironically, I am having difficulty assigning either of those positions to a specific ideological camp, simply because these are two poles between which most humans situate themselves differently during different times in their lives. (With regards to Covid, denial is what unites both factions currently in unhappy and dangerous harmony).
As we have seen, the commingling of science and politics has created a perfect storm. The handling of the pandemic has been a mixed affair, and every country has made its own mistakes — the biggest, however, as usual, that we tend not to want to learn from other countries’ mistakes.
First, any responsibility of Communist China was played down for reasons I am still trying to figure out. Clearly, China disappeared whistleblowers, misinformed the world, and keeps lying about the cause of the pandemic and the initial phase. A lot of suffering could have been prevented if the Chinese government had just acted transparently. As to the origin of the pandemic, we were told not to speculate beyond the official reason given. Lesson I: If you tell the people not to think for themselves, there will be hell to pay. They know you are lying to you.
Then, we did not have enough masks because, for some crazy reason, even though we all knew that such pandemics would come more frequently due to climate change and globalization, we were not prepared, and because we were not prepared, we were told: Masks don’t work. Later, this was revised — because it was clearly a false narrative given out because we did not have enough of them, and hospitals and essential workers needed them more urgently — which led to lasting skepticism about masks. Lesson II: If you lie to your people, no matter how well intentioned, they won’t believe you if you reveal the truth later. Also, if you obviously treat your people like children, they will hate you.
Now, we were told to listen to “the” science. Alternative voices were not heard, and thus no serious rebuttals were possible. The “Great Barrington” crowd — a cynical ploy to achieve “natural immunity” towards an unknown virus and thus to let “vulnerable” (read: unwanted) people just die — nowadays rules the “Make America Healthy Again” coalition under RFJ jr. because, well, because no one seems to trust the establishment anymore. Combine that with a dose of Spencerism (falsely called “Social Darwinism”), and blame those weakened by or dying from Covid on their own failings.
Science and politics were by then so much intertwined that the key achievement of President Trump, the fast-tracking of the development of the Covid vaccines, were denied by the political Left, and even the announcement of the success delayed in a way that, intentionally or not, was not able to secure re-election. Nota bene: I am not necessarily a fan of Trump. But I am always an advocate for fairness. Now, the MAGA supporters are the ones not liking the vaccine, which certainly must confuse President Trump, and President Biden lied that the pandemic was over (it’s not). Any scientific caveat by experts that we still need to pay attention to covid is brushed aside: We have moved on (to idiocracy?). Lesson III: If you mix science and politics, and let politics dictate scientific debate and progress, that may sometimes work, but science may suffer from cheap political victories.
And here we are. Covid still circulates, it may damage people’s cardiovascular and neurological systems, and even if you survive it (with the help of the vaccine, and eventually also Paxlovid), 1 in 3 currently can still contract Long Covid. Take it from me: You don’t want that.
Eventually, covid denialism won the day — primarily, I believe, because people were sick and tired of taking precautions, and the political pressure became too high to still maintain Covid measures, as sensible as that might well have been from a public health perspective.
Oh well. But wait, our science denialism is even worse when it comes to the next example: Climate Change.
Misrepresenting Science, Example: Climate Change
Climate change, our most urgent problem, faces fiercest denialism. In my view, this is due not merely to the fact that people do not understand what is happening. It is due mainly to the political consequences drawn from climate data.
But first, climate data is a complicated matter. Much of what we know about the climate comes from highly technical source material, much of the data is incomplete and relies on modelling, and the sources of global warming are both natural and human-made. Furthermore, “global warming” does not mean that there will be a uniform warming everywhere, but there can be local cooling, or overall a complex change in long-term weather and climate patterns. Alas the word climate change to illustrate this complexity. The modelling is not really a problem either, but occasionally, it will have to be adapted depending on new knowledge. In many ways, we have to take it on the scientific version of faith (or, educate ourselves very well for many decades in a variety of fields) and believe what thousands of scientists from a variety of countries have compiled.
What should be clear though, from everything we know, that there are at least three ways to react to climate change. First, do nothing. Catastrophe will ensue. Second, undo technological progress and reduce living standards (“carbon footprints”); basically, a return to nature. Catastrophe will ensue, but maybe tampered climate-wise, but definitely economically. Third, do what we can to make sensible adjustments, otherwise run with it and innovate technologically to adapt and eventually even undo. Catastrophe will ensue, but may be ameliorated eventually.
Over the years, my reaction to this has varied. Before I even knew about climate change, I wrote some rather angry poems in German about environmental destruction — and am writing an update to that as well. By now, I have come to believe that the only way out is this third path, to work on technological innovation. Why is that?
People in the so-called West or Global North have worked for generations to ensure a comfortable standard of living. They will not give this up willingly, no matter the reason. In case of doubt, they will vote people in that will leave them alone. This has been a recurring pattern over many years. Also, younger populations are increasingly used to a level of technology that will be impossible to turn back without revolt. Just as Covid measures died due to popular political pressure, climate change measures die because they are simply unpopular.
There may well be some who are genuine deniers of climate change. I suspect though that the majority of so-called deniers just want to live their lives and be done with sacrificing their lifestyle for changes they believe are still years away.
But the “return to nature” alternative also holds sway, especially in combination with some form of nature mysticism.
Now, let’s go a bit deeper into this as well as into Spencerism from the Covid example.
Nature Mysticism and Spencerism
Nature mysticism is alive and well, and has always crossed political lines — be it talk of “mother” nature, the idealization of a less scientized past (with less so-called “Western” medicine, and arguably more predators dangerous to humans), or an almost eugenicist or Spencerian view of life and misreading of evolutionary theory. This is fostered by a dangerous misreading of the “survival of the fittest” phrase as “survival of the strongest” (this is what the German translation has done to it — “Überleben der Stärkeren”, with well-known consequences). “Fitness” does not mean what most people seem to believe it means, and whoever is “strongest” is not quite obvious.
As Leon Megginson has observed in summarizing Darwin’s key insight (a quote that has been falsely attributed to Darwin himself):
“it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
(Megginson, ‘Lessons from Europe for American Business’, Southwestern Social Science Quarterly (1963) 44(1): 3-13, at p. 4.).
Key to evolution is that fitness means adaptability, specifically to environmental conditions such as geography, climate, predators, competitors, conspecifics. It is not clear who is stronger, who outlasts in the end. The lion? Probably not. A top predator, dependent on the supply of prey, is a rather weak link in the chain of life. Strong and impressive physically, but not strong in the terms of ubiquity. Its existence depends on many factors, among them the availability of prey individuals. Any change in these populations threatens the top of the food chain — now the question of who is stronger looks rather different. Similarly in business, big players regularly have shown to be more fragile than small ones. PAN AM, TWA, gone. Blockbuster, gone — while Netflix has survived for now by shifting from snail-mailing DVDs to become a streaming service. Toys ‘R’ Us, Sears (of Sears Tower fame!), Woolworth (again, with its own building), Borders, dead. HP is hanging by a thread. Big is fragile. Ants and beetles are legion. Tiny copepods rule the earth, and as a group, insects are the most numerous. Tardigrades can survive almost anything. Big mammals like humans may be impressive, but our needs are many, and our future is fragile.
Not only is it more complex who is fit and strong, but also, the mechanism of natural selection does require indeed a form of selection. The phrase “nature red in tooth and claw” is true whether you like it or not. It does not mean that nature is evil, but that its system does not care about the survival of individuals or even individual species. The system exists because the system exists.
When we as human beings nowadays move around in natural environments, we move around both as a temporary visitors and as the architects of a pseudo-natural environment thoroughly shaped by us. Most areas in Europe and North America have removed all our big predators, except in a few areas which you should not enter without caution. What we see as nature is oftentimes an illusion providing us harmonious uplift, a romantic fantasy if anything.
The New Man
And yet, we seem to have entered a new romantic age in some ways. The radical transformation which science has achieved has come to its limits: all the utopian ideas believing in a “new man”, a new kind of human being, achievable through education based on science, have always believed human nature to be infinitely malleable.
The truth is, we are just at the point to achieve this, but not through the means of education, but through much more invasive means, some of them already attempted in the past, albeit with much less knowledge and much more primitive technology.
The eugenics of the past will look like child’s play to what could, or will be possible; to what could, or will be coming. Not just that: the revolution ushered in by our still rather primitive artificial intelligence will not be stopped if current developments continue.
Thus for those seeing clearly, our future will be determined by new utopian dreams including a combination of the following: eugenic improvements available through preimplantation diagnostics, genetic modification, increased selection, CRISPR, etc.; human-technological hybridization probably with A.I.; down to artificial life proper.
The humanity we used to know is at its end.
5. Retrotopia, the Humanities, and That Which is Sacred
In the face of all of this, many of us, maybe all of us, want to believe that we could just go on, or even go back to simpler times, ignoring the complexity of these times. For some, this means that the age of retrotopia, to borrow Zygmunt Bauman’s term, is just beginning.
But there is more to this.
I believe in science, I believe in technological solutions to today’s problems, and I believe that technological progress is inevitable. I do not want to return to a past that is needlessly mystified and idealized. I like my technology. I like the water closet, drinking water in the home, electricity, lighting, heating, air condition, the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the dryer, the car, the computer, the television, the stereo, the phone, the internet, etc., all of it. I would not want to live without any of these. We will need to use technology to remediate what climate change is about to bring. We will need to travel to the solar system, colonize other planets, moons and asteroids, travel to the stars, etc. All of this is what makes being human worthwhile.
Something is Missing
And yet, there is, to speak with Habermas, the awareness of what is missing (“Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt”). We cannot always articulate what exactly it means, but I would locate it in the sphere of what used to be called the sacred, the numinous, the mysterious, the divine: Something that is larger than us. This has been the domain not just of religion but also of the humanities.
Humanities and Humanity are interconnected not just linguistically. It is the domain of culture where we can reflect on our consciousness, our soul, our very being. This is where we can talk about history, about how our past still holds meaning for us, and where we need to still learn.
Maybe this is why people are so interested in what people like Graham Hancock have to say, why so-called alternative medicine and astrology and what is called pseudoscience still exist. I am not arguing that science is wrong, but that science can sometime come across as too cold, for lack of a less stereotypical word.
Without combining the search for scientific truth with the search for human and humanistic meaning, science cannot continue to succeed. Whatever future science is projecting for us, needs to be connected to something deeper within us, and something larger beyond us.
One of the strongest denials facing science is when it comes to Evolution. As I have argued somewhere else (Kneis, Evolution, 2014), this seems to be a reaction to modernity itself (see also: Kneis, The Emancipation of the Soul, 2010).
Science, Theory and Obscurantism
As science has becoming more complex, it has become more hidden, more elitist in appearance if not substance, and more obscurantist. Maybe our education has gotten worse (it certainly seems so), or scientific knowledge has simply grown too fast.
This, sadly, does not just pertain to the natural sciences, but also to the humanities and social sciences. Scientific obscurantism is hidden in formulas, but humanistic obscurantism is hidden in modernist and postmodern language games. Academic texts have become inaccessible even to experts. There is little effort to work against that either: Those who write with a modestly educated lay audience in mind will not succeed in the highest circles of obscurantism.
The most ironic example is that of Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In it, she discusses Marxist-infused social science writing, which ostentatiously claims to be written for those “from below”, but in a gesture both generous and condescending can only be read and understood by those with a PhD in gobbledygook (which I have). Spivak first brilliantly shows how inaccessible such academic language is, before then rather lucidly talking about an example from modern Indian history, to finally conclude that if the subaltern could finally speak, nobody would listen. But as important as her writing may be, it has always pained me to assign it even to doctoral students. It is simply too complicated, without reason. And yet, it ironically proves its own point. What is called “theory” (the shared body of theoretical understanding in the social sciences and humanities) has lost its human touch.
Theory and science have to become understandable again. They have to become more accessible. They have to become more democratic. They have lost their place in the public sphere. Lucid science-based writing of the style of a Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Yuval Noah Harrari is rare, and frequently even looked down upon by the “real” scientists as mere “popularism.”
What Now
Science denial is a reaction to what is seen an as an inaccessibility or as obscurantism. Many people do not trust science any more because they don’t understand it — because it is not communicated well, and because it has been and is being abused by politics.
We also need to pay more attention to what can be called the borderlands of science — where human imagination meets strange phenomena of consciousness, of dreams, of ancient wisdom cultures, and of pseudoscience. This is where the curiosity of many lies, and where there may be a lot of work still to do.
For those of us within the sciences, social sciences and humanities, this means to vigorously explain what we are doing, and also, to listen to the people for what they are interested in. Democracy and science can only work together, which is why we need to push for a better public understanding not just of the hard sciences but also of the social sciences and humanities.
Is it that simple? Probably not. But I believe a lot can be achieved if we pretend it to be. Nothing is lost by not communicating better.
Erratic Attempts 