Science and Technology as an Ideology
Looking at the state of the world today, and the agendas that world authorities want to implement on Earth, we may tend to seek conspiracy theories to help us to understand the reason why our civilization had become so fragile, and why our capacity to intelligently grasp the meaning of things and directions proposed for the human being, appears so dim. But, it seems, this problem is deeply rooted in the way modern science was established.
Science was, at its early stage of development, emprisoned by the necessities of war, by the necessity of a rationale proof of efficacity (and, therefore, turning necessary the creation of technology, teleological reasoning controlled by success). Modern science, instead of attempting to learn how to communicate with nature, has chosen to submit nature as an object of study, as something without conscience and to be manipulated. Nature is just there, we don’t care if plants feel, or water is affected by our states of mind (see, for example, Prof. Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, researches on these topics), or if stones have a conscience. Xintoism and other older cultures do care, but these are considered obsolete views.
The actual lack of respect by nature exhibited by multi-industrial poles, is the reflection of modern science. This is the Gordian knot of our present conflicts and source of civilizational problems at all levels. Modern science and technology (its organic outcome) have become an ideology with a rational of domination that erases the citizen’s conscience (since an increasing of productivity and an increased dominion over nature offer to the citizens an increased level of comfort) [1]. Modern science and technology had become, naturally, the arsenal of war for all sorts of Totalitarianism, from Right to Left.
The need for a re-valorization of our values (Herbert Marcuse, in the One-Dimensional Man [1]) or the need for the development of new science (Goethe [2], Edmund Husserl [3], and Jürgen Habermas [4]) are two possible escape routes that would release humans from a more than expected servitude and lack of conscience (although living “comfortably”). The way Newtonian mechanics is taught has intrinsic values that may contribute to a misleading doctrine of political economy, as assuming that only “external” forces may change the state of motion, or rest, of a given “body”, that once a body is “submitted” to an external force, it can’t escape its fate.
Opposing to this prevalent deleterious doctrine, we attempted to build a consistent description of mechanics and electrodynamics [5] that surpasses these limitations, showing that physical (or social, as in social physics, by generalizing the concepts) may have three types of interactions that offer to the system diverse ways to escape to their “fate”: 1) external forces, indeed; 2) internal processes of an organization (due to the entropy, or information, the system may have); and 3) free energy, or/and, using a concept from econophysics, technological leverage. The consistency obtained in the new formulation of dynamics may help to view nature or the political, social, and economic arena on new grounds. At least, it was our motivation.
The historical conflict between Western (modern) science and religion has its source on this unfinished architecture: modern science sees nature as a passive object of transformation, while religion sees man and woman as transformable by nature or a deity (see, for example, Ref.[6]). No wonder why, according to some [7], Galileo Galilei fought (dirty?) to imposes his doctrine, and some say that probably at the very beginning of Western science, sectarianism and authoritarianism become part of it [7]. As Yuval Harari has fiercely defended, we must acquire conscience of the hidden doctrines that make the body of science and technology and, silently, are eroding the values of equality and freedom, and so destroying the principles of democracy [8].
References:
[1] Herbert Marcuse, “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society”, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1964) [Listen to interview to Marcuse, here]
[2] “Zarte Empirie”: Goethean Science as a Way of Knowing’, Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium Feb 12, 2017, link here.
[3] Edmund Husserl, “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy”, Northwestern University Press, 1970, here
[4] Jürgen Habermas, Science and Technology as an Ideology
[5] Mario J. Pinheiro, “A reformulation of mechanics and electrodynamics”, Heliyon, Volume 3, Issue 7, July 2017, e00365, link here.
[6] BBC News, “Heil Satan?: The Satanists battling for religious freedom, 23 August 2019
[8] Yuval Noah Harari, “Why Technology Favors Tyranny”, in The Atlantic, October 2019 Issue. Link here.
