Science, Civilization's Ally
by Ran Prieur

What we call "science" is not neutral. It's loaded with motives and assumptions that came out of, and reinforce, the catastrophe of dissociation, disempowerment, and consuming deadness that we call "civilization."

Science assumes detachment. This is built into the very word "observation." To "observe" something is to perceive it while distancing oneself emotionally and physically, to have a one-way channel of "information" moving from the observed thing to the "self," which is defined as not being part of that thing. This kind of relationship is supposedly not only possible, but good. In fact it's not even possible science refutes itself at its most advanced stages, with theoretical physicists discovering that it does not make sense to talk about "what is" independent of perspective. Detached observation is not itself an observation or a fact, but a mental habit that we have learned and can unlearn. As Stan Gooch has noticed, "experience" is a healthier word than "observation" because it does not imply detachment.

Science assumes that matter is more fundamental than mind. This bizarre idea exists only in Western civilization. Not only is it un-provable, it's obviously false. Your own awareness is more fundamental than "matter," which exists only as an idea shaped out of your awareness. Science gets around this by also shaping the idea of "mind" out of your mind, and sticking this idea in a spot dependent on the idea of matter, and simply telling the giant lie that the mindfulness that sees the whole thing is a function of the idea of mind, and not the other way around. What I'm trying to get at here is a deep paradigm shift. I've just explained it intellectually, but it cannot be practiced intellectually, only by directly experiencing your awareness, your perspective, your being, as fundamental.

And what is this "matter"? By definition, it is both objectifiable and dead, just bouncing particles and waves that can be viewed from an absolute detached perspective, but that do not require for their existence any perspective or mindfulness. Matter is mindlessness, and mindlessness is deeper than mind. Again, this is not something we can see, but a basic assumption that tells us how to look.

The view of reality as not dependent on mind became easier to believe with the invention of more sophisticated machines, because these machines could be used as models. Philosophers could point to a clock and say that an atom, or a dog, or the whole universe, is like that clock, just mindlessly going through motions. But machines are not mindless or dead. They are manifestations of the mindfulness and aliveness of their human creators. And if machines are our model for matter, it follows that matter is not dead, but the manifestation of some deeper aliveness. A few contemporary scientists have noticed this, and have had to say that the universe is not like a machine at all, since a machine is based on mind. Now they say that the basis of reality is something special that we cannot prove or even really imagine some kind of myth of bottomless deadness.

The death-based or "mechanistic" view is a religion, the dominant religion of our time. It is far stronger than Christianity, which has totally adopted the machine model, but just tacked souls on top and personified the objectively true, detached perspective as an omnipotent sky-father deity named "God," manipulating the world from a safe distance just like the scientists.

Both mechanistic science and mechanistic Christianity were popularized by the philosopher Renee Descartes, who really believed that the scream of a tortured dog is no different from a bell ringing on a machine. "Putting Descartes before the horse" is deservedly the most common pun in philosophy, because that's exactly what Descartes did. "I think therefore I am" puts existence deeper than awareness, plus it narrows existence and awareness to the detached forms of "I am" and "I think." It is both a reversal of and a flight from the perspective of healthy cultures.

Of course a man doesn't get the urge to intellectually deny the pain of a tortured creature out of nowhere. We were massacring villages and cutting down forests to build insane social monoliths of disempowerment for thousands of years before Descartes. His thinking was not a cause of civilization, but an intensification, an intellectual sanctioning of what was already happening, just as the Nazis made extermination of Jews an official policy after the practice had already begun. It makes it a lot easier to turn everything alive into something dead, to turn forests and people into resources and capital, if you believe everything is dead in the first place.

Science makes everything dead not only by declaration, but by method. Science deals only with the quantitative. It does not admit values or emotions or the way the air smells when it's starting to rain or if it deals with these things, it does so by transforming them into numbers, by turning your oneness with the smell of the rain into your abstract preoccupation with the chemical formula for ozone, by turning the way it makes you feel into the intellectual idea that emotions are only an illusion of firing neurons.

Number itself is not truth but a chosen style of thinking. If you see three apples, you are temporarily avoiding the perspective that sees this apple and this apple and this apple. Saying "three" suppresses uniqueness and diversity.

Defenders of science will say that of course science deals with the quantifiable. If it didn't, it wouldn't be science. And that's precisely my point: We have chosen a habit of mind that focuses our attention down into a world removed from reality, where nothing has quality or awareness or life of its own. We have chosen to transform the living into the dead.

Careful-thinking scientists will admit that what they study is a narrow simulation of the complex real world, but few of them notice that this narrow focus is self-feeding, that it has built contractive technological, economic, and political systems that are all working together sucking our reality in on itself. Science denies emotion, but it is not itself unemotional. Emotional detachment is an emotion.

As narrow as the world of numbers is, scientific method does not even permit all numbers only those numbers that are reproducible, predictable, and the same for all observers. Of course reality itself is not reproducible or predictable or the same for all observers. But neither are fantasy worlds derived from reality. So science doesn't stop at pulling us into a dream world it goes one step further and makes this dream world a nightmare, whose contents are selected for predictability and controllability and uniformity.

Because of science, we can have a factory that predictably makes one million alarm clocks that will all look the same and all predictably go off at the time they're set for, so that one million people will predictably get to their jobs just when their employers expect them where they're likely to work with machines that, like the alarm clocks, are standardized, so that any laborer can use any machine, and one person is the same as another. Because of science, states of consciousness that cannot be reliably dispensed are classified as insane, or at best "non-ordinary," and excluded. Anomalous experience, anomalous ideas, and anomalous people are cast off or destroyed like imperfectly-shaped machine components.

Does all this necessarily follow from science? Could we have a system of knowledge based on predictability that produced a culture of chaos and surprise? If we did, it would be through resistance to that predictability and not through obedience to it. But our culture has never wanted surprise anyway, and if it had, it wouldn't have chosen science.

Science is only a manifestation and locking in of an urge for control that we've had at least since we started farming fields and fencing animals instead of surfing the less predictable (but more abundant) world of reality, or "nature." And from that time to now, this urge has driven every decision about what counts as "progress." In a little known fork in the road of science, Goethe experimented with optics independent of Newton, but where Newton shined lights through prisms, producing projected spectra for detached observation, Goethe had people look through prisms, and developed these experiments into a theory that was deeply different from Newton's but equally verifiable and self-consistent. No one knows what strange technological path this theory would have led us to, because of course it was ignored in favor of Newton's theory, which was more compatible with objectification.

If you find it hard to believe that science could have gone onto a radically different path, that the universe has room for divergent experimentally confirmable "truths," then it's because you have been raised inside what William Blake called "single vision and Newton's sleep." In an even less known fork in the road of pre-science, Medieval alchemical literature reports that alchemists actually succeeded in creating gold. Of course we can tell ourselves that they were lying, but maybe in 500 years our descendants will say we were lying about splitting the atom or building flying machines, or they will say it was all metaphor. Maybe it is.

My point is, we can look through any filter we want. Instead of focusing toward what's most predictable, repeatable, quantifiable, detachedly observable, we can focus toward what's most fun, most beautiful, most magical, most alive. And we can turn this focus as we did with science into a self-reinforcing system of thought and action, a culture, a society, a sustained, wonderful reality. The real question is, why did we ever do anything else?