Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Foresaw the death of civilization
part 1 was on April 21, 2014
The problem is that among the forces gathered under the
rubric “scientism” is a movement that seeks the abolition of humanity, that
movement is “transhumanism.” In his article Lawler writes of how Wieseltier
exposed Scientism as the major force seeking to destroy the arts and humanities
and the crucial reasons why we must not allow this to happen. He speaks of
transhumanism:
No one can deny, for example, that the
movement known as transhumanism aims at “the abolition of man,” at the
overcoming of the distinction between man and machine on pretty much the
machine’s terms. Every competent scientist and humanist knows it will never
achieve its goal, as Marxism never achieved anything like the “communism as the
end of history” Marx fancifully described. But humanists are right to fear what
can be lost on an ideological mission impossible.
[1]
In fairness to transhumanists they see themselves as seeking
to enhance human intellectual abilities. They point to the age old desire to
mirror human life in after life as a wish for continuance; they also point to
renaissance humanist classics such as Pico della Mirandola’s
Oration on the
Dignity of Man where he says “it will be in your power to descend to the
lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to
rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”
[2]
So they are not totally insensitive to humanist standards. Yet we know Picco
was not a transhumanist. Bostrom begins reckoning their history from the 1920s
(after trances his kindred spirits form caveman days to the Nietzsche) British
biochemist J.B.S. Haldane published the essay
Daedalous; or, Science and the
future. That essay argued for the benefit of controlling our own genetics.
[3]
The term “transhuman” may have first been used by James Hughes in this 2004
work
Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned
Human of the Future.[4]
Among the topics engaged by transhumanism we
find
“radical extension of human
health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and
augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities.
”[5] The
list goes on with
“space colonization and
the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other
potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition.
”[6] But what is the price for these
“improvements?”
Transhumanists view human nature as a
work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in
desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution.
Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other
rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with
vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.
[7]
Essentially they are the “Borg,” from
Star Trek the Next
Generation. The Borg were the race of biological being augmented by
machines that sought total domination of the universe.
[8]
They do actually advocate all assortments of augmentation for intellectual
capability and bodily limitations. Their greatest value is what Bostrom calls
“the post human relam.”
[9]
Looking to end humanity and move beyond it. To soften the blow they talk about
how they share the values of humanism, but humaists want to prolong humanity so
that the value will be consistent, the transhumanists want to end humanity and
somehow believe the values will remain consistent. Leslie Fain, writing for
Catholic World Report, finds that they are going to enhance everything from
genetic life span to physical speed, they will become a new species.
“Transhumanists, in general, aren’t too worried about this,” she quotes
Michael Cook, editor of
MercatorNet,
“Their future will divide homo sapiens into two
sub-species, the gen-poor (genetically poor) and the gen-rich. To me, it’s a
bit like the ghastly scenario envisaged by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine—a
world divided into the Eloi and the Morlochs.”
The transhumanism narrative is becoming more mainstream.
Pop culture references and commercials (such as
this one from Verizon)
hyping men and women becoming “one” with their latest technological toys
abound; last year an Italian transhumanist
was
elected to parliament.
[10]
With this hyper technology augmenting a new species and
moving beyond the old humanity, what’s going to lead them beyond the old sin
nature? What’s going to assure that we wont wind up with a have-augmentation
and Have-not augmentation culture?
Transhumanism
has not only bonded with atheism but produced a sort of fundamentalist segment.
Zoltan Istavon, in huff post, who proclaims that “I am an atheist therefore I
am a transhumanist.”
Sometime in the next decade, the number
of worldwide godless people -- atheists, agnostics, and those unaffiliated with
religion -- is likely to break through the billion-person mark. Many in this
massive group already champion reason, defend science, welcome radical
technologies, and implicitly trust and embrace modern medicine. They are,
indeed, already transhumanists. Yet many of them don't know it because they
haven't thought much about it. However, that is about to change. A
transformative cultural storm comprised of radical life improving technologies
is set to blow in soon.
[11]
He is assuming that all non-affiliated are atheists, which
is a mistaken assumption. These guys believe in reason that means none us old
fashioned humans who believe in God believe in reason. We stupid old Christians
don’t trust medicine. If this radical cultural storm waves the flag of
destruction of humanity in this way as a badge of commitment to atheist
ideology humanity is truly in trouble. The transhmanists are part of the
scientistic ideology because they have come to accept the notion that science
is the only form of knowledge and all value and truth must be shaped around
that.
The dangers
of scientism and the loss of humanity have been lurking over modernity for a
long time. These things go way back to the nineteenth century. What we see
emerging today as the perils brought on by scientism is just the modern outcome
of trends that were engaged by Albert Schweitzer as early as 1900. Schweitzer
is all but forgotten today. He’s mainly remembered as a great humanitarian who went
to Africa to nurse the poor. In the early part of the
twentieth century and up to the 1960s he was given huge respect one of the most
profoundly brilliant and great men of human history. Schweitzer had four
brilliant careers going at the same time. He was a theologian, philosopher,
Bible Scholar and concert musician. In addition to all that he built organs.
After having achieved greatness with his book
Quest of the Historical Jesus[12] he went to
medical school and became a doctor. Then he went to Africa
and spent his life nursing the poorest of the poor. One thing he did not do
even in leaving civilization was to give up on civilization. He wrote one of
the first philosophies of civilization and was one of the first philosophers to
seriously argue for animal rights. As early as 1900 Schweitzer already argued
that civilization was dead and we lived in barbarism. The reason, because
civilization is more than just indoor plumbing and modern inventions it is an
ideal about the quality of life in affording the individual purist of his/her
cherished goals. Yet modern life negates the individual and reduces ideals and
personal concepts of freedom to matters of taste and eccentricity. Schweitzer
identified that process by which this reduction takes place.
[13]
The forces that Schweitzer traces as the collapse of civilization may well have
culminated in World War I.
Schweitzer
anticipated the work of Karl Jaspers, C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse,
thinkers who flourished five decades after he began his thinking on
civilization. Karl Jaspers reflected upon the end of Western civilization in
Man
In The Modern Age, likening it to the end of Hellenism before the dark
ages.
[14]
For Jaspers, the current phase in modernity (the 1920s) marked the turning
point from human pursuits such as discursive reasoning, thought, understanding,
and artistic production, to the dominance of a highly organized super-structure
based upon reducing content to "technique." Art becomes "mere
amusement and pleasure (instead of an emblem of transcendence), science becomes
mere concern for technical utility (instead of the satisfaction of a primary
will to know).
[15] He warned that the
growing tendency to "wrap the world in apparatus," the building of a
giant inter-connected infrastructure based entirely on calculation, would have
a deleterious effect upon humanity. According to Jaspers, society faces the
extinction of those qualities and aspirations which have always defined
humanity, such as rational discourse and ethical norms. These warnings seem
quaint when one considers that they were made before regular air travel in the
days of radio. It may be that at each stage in technical development, society
becomes more habituated to technique, closed in a technological womb that grows
ever more content with closed possibilities for qualitative change. The
contemporary litany of dangers, ecological destruction of the planet, the
failure of the educational system, growing violence, and governmental control,
should bare out the realization that society is complacent in the face of
growing peril. Jasper's notion that discursive reasoning was being replaced by
technique anticipates the work of C. Wright Mills in the 1950s.
Mills was a
sociologist at Columbia University
in New York. He is best known for
his work
The Power Elite.[16] It is from that
work that we take the popular phrase of the 1960s, “military industrial
complex.” In
The Sociological Imagination[17] he explodes the
illusions by which the power elite cover their own lack of understanding. His
message there is that not only does the system run over the individual but even
those who are in charge of it are dragged along by its momentum and don’t
really know where they are going. Mills was one of the first thinkers to use
the term "post-modern" (which he hyphenated). For Mills, writing in
the '50s, modernity had already passed away, post-modernity had dawned.
"The ideological mark...[of the post-modern epoch] --that which sets it
apart from the modern age-- is that the ideas of freedom and of reason have
become moot; that increased rationality may not be assumed to make for
increased freedom."
[18]
As with Schweitzer, Mills reflects that the technological structure separates
people from control over or reflection upon the ends of their lives.
"Caught in the everyday milieux of their limited lives, ordinary people
cannot reason about the greater structures both rational and irrational of
which their milieu are subordinate parts."
[19]
(168).
The individual learns not to reason,
but to rationalize the goals and ends of life, and his or her position in the
overall scheme of things. Given...the ascendant trend of rationalization, the
individual 'does what he can.' He gears his aspirations and his work to the
situation he is in and from which he can find no way out. In due course he does
not seek a way out: he adapts. That part of his life which is left over from
work he uses to play, to consume, to have fun. Yet this sphere of consumption
is also being rationalized. Alienated from production, from work, he is also
alienated from consumption, from genuine leisure. This adaptation of the
individual and its effects upon his milieux and self results not only in the
loss of his chance, but in due course of his capacity and will to reason; it
also affects his chances and his capacity to act as a free [person]. Indeed,
neither the value of freedom nor of reason, it would seem, are known to him.
[20]
The end
result, according to Mills, is that
society becomes filled with
"cheerful robots,"
those who obey the programming of
technique and cannot seek alternatives.
[21] Mills charged that the social
sciences
help to further the aims and
methods of technique, hiding behind
the "
scientific objectivity,"
unwilling to mount any
critique. Mills anticipates Herbert
Marcuse's work,
written in 1964,
One-Dimensional Man.
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
warned of rise of one-dimensional
man
Herbert
Marcuse (July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German academic who fled to America
to avoid the Nazis in the 30s. He worked for the OAS during the war and latter
become the major intellectual powerhouse behind the New Left of the 1960s. He
was based in San Diego where the
taught, Ronald Reagan tried to have his Doctorate revoked to silence his
criticisms of the war and the establishment. He was a Marxist, some say
Neo-Marxist he was critical of Stalin and called a revisionist by Stalinists.
Marcuse was best known for his seminal work One-Dimensional Man (1964),
one of the greatest books of the era and one of primary importance for the
century. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that affluent capitalist
society has been good at providing primary needs to a mass population (despite
continuing poverty for some) and it has created a bourgeois society that
perpetuates false needs. The American worker has bought into his place in the
capitalist order as a cog in the machine, or a bit of overhead for the owners
of the means of production, because in exchange will continue to supply the false
needs upon which he has become admitted; that is the material trammels of an
affluent society.
...The irresistible output of the
entertainment and information
industry carry with
them prescribed attitudes and
habits...The
products indoctrinate and
manipulate; they promote
a false consciousness which is
immune
against falsehood. And as these
beneficial
products have become available to
more
individuals, in more social classes,
the
indoctrination they carry ceases to
be
publicity; it becomes a way of
life. It is a good way
of life' much better than before
and as a good way of
life, it militates against
qualitative change.
Thus emerges a pattern of
one-dimensional
thought and behavior, in which
ideas,
aspirations, and objectives that, by
their
content, transcend the established
universe of
discourse and action are either
repelled
or reduced to terms of this
[social-political] universe. They
are re-defined by
the rationality of the given system
and of its quantitative
extension.
[22]
(12).
The prognosis for one-dimensional man doesn’t end with just
supporting capitalism as the basis of false needs. The whole concept of being a
thinking person who lives in a society in which thinking people can determine
their own lives is called into question and in fact done away with because the
concept of freedom is illusory and not scientific. The scientistic crowd is
telling us that freedom is a trick. The issues of one-dimensional man don’t
stop Marxism because there is more to power than just capital vs labor, or
capitalism vs. Marxism. Lurking behind the accumulation of false
needs (technological version of
bread and
circuses) is operational thinking.
This is
what Marcuse means by
"quantitative extension
of the given system" (quotation
above). "
The trend [one-dimensional consumer
society] may
be related to a development in
scientific method: operationalism in
the physical,
behaviorism in the social sciences.
The
common feature is a total empiricism
in the treatment of concepts; their
meaning is restricted to the
representation
of particular operations and
behavior...In
general, we mean by a concept
nothing more than a set of
operations...a positivism which, in
its
denial of the transcending elements
of
reason, forms the academic counterpart
to
the socially required
behavior."
[23] The
positivist and reductionist
tendencies of contemporary
scientific thought, which props up
the
technostructure and furnishes it
with "empirical
proof," works to eliminate all
concepts
that cannot be quantified, and
therefore,
eventually
”commodified.”
Stanly
Aronowitz wrote
Science as Power, in which he argues two things: power
is possessed by a process of legitimating, and science has lent itself to that
legitimating at the expense of all other forms of truth.
[24]
In other words power is not merely taken by a group or an institution but it is
built through a process of self legitimating moves. That process is part of the
means by which modern science procures funding and perpetuates itself in modern
society; by being of use to power through lending itself to the development of
the means of power. We see this explicitly through the military but more subtly
through industry and the development of technology, the status of scientific
funding in the university and so on. In lending itself to power as an
enforcement mechanism science subsumes other views and other concepts of truth.
This process is inherent since science has always provided a certain aspect of
truth in revealing the mechanism through which the natural world functions.
Apart form the cultural currying of power, Aronowitz finds, science has an
intrinsic power in its conflation of truth and knowledge. “Devising a method of
proving the validity of propositions about objects taken as external to the knower
has become identical with what we mean by ‘truth.’”
[25]
In other words science purports to tell us how the physical world stacks up and
wont allow any other method to introduce other kinds of truth that it would
consider authoritative, that becomes all there is in the world, the physical
set up that science can study and quantify. The process by which modern though
came to understand itself as its own object, from Plato’s observation of truth
as self representing, to Hegel’s notion that consciousness takes itself as its
own object, is done away by modern science.
[26]
Perhaps that’s why atheists have such abhorrence for the subjective. We can’t
trust our own perceptions we can only trust that which is produced by the
scientific method. The problem is so much of modern science is not procured
through the process of empirical verification that is the hallmark of modern
science, but must be reached though calculation, in terms of modern quantum
theory for example. Then truth comes to be a rubber stamp placed upon “truth”
by science. As Aronowitz points out, “Science is truth, and can for this reason
represent itself by means of its procedures…self criticism of science is
conducted within the boundaries of its own normative structures.”
[27]
The
thinkers from Schweitzer to Marcuse and Aronowitz they are all building on the
indicators of civilization in decay that Schweitzer originally saw. By the time
we get to the end of the twentieth century they are so far gone one dimensional
man is established. We are now working on moving from one-dimensional to
cheerful robot. There’s a snowball relationship in that the scientistic
mentality creates the situation then feeds off of it. Knowledge is reduced to
one thing, science, then that one thing is transmogrified from knowledge to
technique, or illusion of technique. Finally humanity itself is displaced as
freedom is reduced to just anther false need. That is to say freedom becomes
confused with the products one buys and with the process of choosing products.
The concept of freedom itself is ratcheted down from a personal philosophical
understanding of the goals and ends of one’s life to purchasing power to
obedience. The real discourse becomes closed around the one possibility left to
us, which is how best to obey. When the only form of knowledge is science
knowledge of freedom must disappear, there is no freedom in science. The
concept of freedom requires a substantial conceptual background to cover all
the bases. We have to understand the parameters of freedom, the possibilities,
the impediments to freedom, balancing freedom against responsibility and so on.
When the only form of knowledge is about the facts of nature and how they work
there’s no room for an abstraction like ‘possible freedom.’
Separation from God.
For those
of us who feel we know the reality of God in our lives, this is a great harm.
It would rob those who don’t know that reality of the ability to ever learn.
Reduction of knowledge to only scientific knowledge, ala the ideological
administration of scientism, robs us of knowing God because it reduces
religious experience to the level of the “subjective” the emotional, these are
greatly things to be avoided in the ideology of scientism. Scienstism portrays
itself as rational and objective it places all that does not bow before it in
the category of the irrational and the subjective. We have already seen the way
new atheism rationalizes scientific protocols to manipulate “God does not
exist” into a scientific fact, via Austin Cline (see above FN 7). To reprise that statement:
"this alleged entity has no place in any scientific equations, plays
no role in any scientific explanations, cannot be used to predict any events,
does not describe any thing or force that has yet been detected, and there are
no models of the universe in which its presence is either required, productive,
or useful."
[28]
But that’s just circular reasoning because it assumes at the
outset that since there is no argument that is deemed acceptable scientifically,
there can be no warrant for belief in God. As long as the only form of
knowledge is science then the only valid argument is scientific. While there
are valid scientifically based arguments for God (see chapters nine and ten)
there is no “fact” accepted in science such that “God exists.” Therefore, any
argument for the existence of God is met with “that’s disproved before we start
because it’s not science.” Cutting off other forms of knowledge the gate
keepers of scientific acuity merely denounce warrant for belief based upon
their own prejudices. Based upon that assumption it is deemed “unscientific” to
argue for such a warrant. In fact what I’m saying is that scientists are human
and they embody the same prejudices as anyone. That has to be ignored when the
only from of knowledge is science because the human factor is not part of the
scientific process. Thus belief in God is removed from reality by a series of
protocols that amount to nothing more than jumped up ideology.
God belief and the realm of discourse
Belief in
God is more than just belief in an entity. It’s also the basis for rejecting
the closed realm of discourse. This is true for two reasons, (1) because as the
Transcendental signified God sets in motion the basic first principles that
serve as premises of logic. God determines the basis upon which truth is held,
since God alone is the ultimate creator then God alone is the final assigner of
meaning. Thus the realm of discourse can never be truly closed by temporal
power or human concerns. (2) Because in a practical sense the open nature of
discourse depends to a great deal upon the understanding of technique. When we
come to vest the illusion of technique with all power and all logic then we
vest it with all right. That’s when we start thinking its right to pursue
actions merely because we have the physical prowess to do so. As long as God is
understood as the orbiter of truth no human technique affords one the efficacy
to close the realm of discourse around any one social project. An example of
what I’m talking about is the case of a worker in stem cell research who was
injured by the technology but was denied direct medical care. “I was denied
directed medical care for exposures from dangerous embryonic stem technologies
incurred while at work. Unbelievably, I was denied under the premise that ‘trade
secrets’ supersede a worker’s right to specific exposure information. Welcome
to the embryonic stem cell world, a world of legal quagmire where human rights
and public rights are slated toward the chopping block.”
[29]
In fact, the public has been fooled.
The embryonic stem cell research industry is far from the altruistic persona it
has painted itself to be. Rather, embryonic stem cell research is about big
money, first and foremost. It is about securing a position of power within the economic
and legal mainstream of the American public. That is why biotech worker’s
rights regarding safety and healthcare have been denied. That is why,
unfortunately, the public’s right will be denied too.
And the media has not helped. The media has purposely turned the human
embryonic stem cell debate into a polarized “religion versus science” contest.
But issues lying in-between those two polarities contain much of the tainted
meat that can negatively impact the public toward human rights. These concerns
get no media attention. The public remains ignorant. In fact, the public lacks
an understanding of the legal, social and cultural effects that could
negatively impact them as advanced technologies move forward.
[30]
What’s the link from science as the only form of knowledge
and this case? The realm of discourse is closed around the illusion of
technique. Ethical consideration disappear because we have the technology we
know how to do it, it’s sanctioned by the thinking experts who make decisions
for us. These are the guys that know stuff, there’s no knowledge outside of
science, these are scientists so they must know all about ethics and if they do
can do it, must be good to do.
tune in Monday for 3d and final part in
"Atheist Reduction of Knowledge to Science."
sources
[2] Picco della Mirandola,
Oration
on the Dignity of man, quoted in Nick Bostrom,
A History of
Transhumanist Though. Pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/history.pdf
accessed 1/1/14
. originally published in The Journal of
Evolution and Technology, vol 14, issue 1, April 2005., 2.
Bostrom is a philosopher who teaches at Oxford
and the edition of Mirandola used is:Chicago, Gateway Editions 1956.
[4] James Hughes,
Citizen
Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the
Future. Cambridge Mass: West
View Press, 2004, 155
Huges is a sociologist and bioethicist. He’s been
involved in the transhumaist movement since before 2004, he was ordained a
Buddhist monk in the 80s.
[5] Nick Bostrom, “Ethical
Issues for the 21
st Century,”
Philosophical Documentation
Center Press, Ed.
Frederick Adams,
2003, 3-14.
[9] Bostrom, Ethical
Issues..Op Cit., 8.
[11] Zoltan Istvan, “I am an
Atheist Therefore I am a Transhumaist.”
Huff Post The Blog, 12/5/13. on line
Istvan Is a self proclaimed “visionary.”
[12] Albert Schweitzer, The
Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus
to Wrede. New York: MacMillan,
originally 1906, MacMillan paperbacks 1961, eighth printing, 1973.
[13] J.L. Hinman, “Albert
Schweitzer On The Death of Civilization.” Negations: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Social Criticism. No 3. (Winter 1998). On line copy,
http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/ accessed
1/4/14.
See also: Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of
Civilization. Translated C.T. Campion, Buffalo,
New York: Prometheus Books. 1980 (original
German pulbication 1923). The work is divided into two sections, the
"Decay and Restoration of Civilization," and "Ethics and
Civilization." Unwin has published the first section as an independent
volume entitled The Decay and Restoration of Civilization.
[14] Jaspers, Karl.
Man In
The Modern Age. New
York: Doubleday, 1957, 20.
[16] C Wright Mills,
the
Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1956. No page given.
[17] C. Wright Mills,
The
Sociological Imagination. New York,
London: Oxford University Press,
1967 (originally 1959)
[22] Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional
Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Soceity. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1964, 12.
[24] Stanley
Aronowitz,
Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology In Modern Society. Minneapolis
Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 1988, ix.
Stanley Aronotwitz is professor of Sociology and
cultural studies at CUNY Graduate Center, New
York. He is a long time cultural critic and political
activist.
[27] Ibid., viii the idea
about quantum physics he states on page ix
