In
all the known universe of uncountable stars and planets so far only one
jewell like planet stands out from the rest in it's amazing beauty and
complexity of life forms.
But on this planet earth, of its
many thousands or millions of species one single species is making such
a mess of it that all life is being put in danger of extinction.
WHY?
The short answer is ignorance and greed. However there is a larger story worth considering.
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published his Model of the Solar System that positioned the Sun remains motionless at the center of the Universe, with Earth and the other planets orbiting around it.
On February 13, 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei
arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating Copernican
theory. Orthodox inquisitors demand punishment for blasphemy of
questioning the origins of the cosmos and pondering our place within
it. At the time of his death in 1643, Galileo had been under house
arrest for 8 years as a result of having held to his opinions.
René Descartes
(1596-1650) was mostly remembered as the "father of modern philosophy".
He lived in a time preceding the Age of Enlightenment that flourished
in Europe. While the philosophical distinction between mind and body in
western thought can be traced to the Greeks, Descartes reinforced this
concept and gave it a name, dualism and committed to the mechanistic
conception of physical world.
Mechanism
is the belief that living things are like complicated machines composed
of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other. This
mechanistic conception of life evolved into Scientism,
the belief that only science can provide knowledge worth having and
that only scientific claims are meaningful. Scientism holds that
science is the only way to know truth while all other claims to
knowledge are simply irrelevant.
Scientism
can be seen as a kind of faith that science has no boundaries, and that
in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will
be dealt and solved by science alone. Scientism is an attempt to shut
down political debates. It shifts the discussion from questions of
value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in
the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate.
Scientism
is the adherence to a materialist version of reality that confines
investigation to those sorts of things that are permitted by
materialism. The belief, however, that scientism is science, and that
its authority should be similarly accepted, has been disastrous.
Scientism is the handmaiden of the administrative state, which is the
ruling authority of bureaucratic totalitarianism.
Is science
our only guide to what exists? Scientism is increasingly influential in
popular scientific literature and intellectual life in general, but
philosophers have hitherto largely ignored it.
The problem with
scientism, or one of its many problems, is that it tends to be
prejudiced and therefore not very scientific. True science is open
minded, scientism is not. The idea that what cannot be weighed or
measured does not exist is puerile, arrogant, and blind to most of the
chief qualities that make human life profound. Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that the decline of religion would result in a turning to rigid idiological systems as a replacement
One
way to find out what you want is to learn what you don't want. It seems
we have come to understand very well what it is we do not want. Dystopia is a world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.
A
computer search for "system is broken" will yield a slew of large
categories that need to be changed: ecology, healthcare, education,
government, food, racism, justice, police and military, taxes, etc.
Many if not most of our systems are broken. They are literally falling
apart as we watch.
What happened? How did so much go so wrong?
How could we be so indifferent to the destruction of our own
environment, to each other, and to ourselves? We have come to see each
other as inanimate objects to be possessed, manipulated. and often
tossed aside or destroyed. Such indifference reveals that emotion is not the
problem, it is the lack of emotion.
We have become possessed by
seemingly unshakable ideas of the way things should be and who we think we
are. Science is the pursuit of knowledge covering general truths
or the operations of fundamental laws by using unbiased observations
and systematic experimentation. Contrasted to this is scientism, which
is the belief that only science can provide knowledge worth having.
By
seeking to explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry,
scientism reduces human beings to something a lot less than
what we are. As long as we depend only on physical measurements to
understand reality, we are stuck with the limits of matter. Scientism holds that about 95% of all reality is "dark energy" and dark matter but no one knows what it is.
Science
has utterly failed to solve the "hard problem" of the question of "how
experience arises out of non-sentient matter." Despite centuries of
analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and
scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being "at
once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives".
In fact, there seems to be growing evidence that consciousness actually exists independently and outside of
the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark
matter and dark energy or gravity. Panpsychism is the view that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality.
Spirituality means different things to different people.
For some, it's primarily about a belief in God and active participation
in organized religion. For others, it's about non-religious experiences
that help them get in touch with their spiritual selves through quiet
reflection, time in nature, private prayer, yoga, or meditation.
For more than a thousand years the church sought to prevent people from making conjectures about spirituality. Many people identify as spiritual but not religious:
With a few exceptions, the percentage of adults who identify as
religious in many industrialized countries is declining, while remaining
generally high in less developed nations. Even as religious affiliation
decreases, though, a sense of spiritual identification could remain
steady or even increase. The human psyche has been split into a good and a worthless portion. This divorcing ourselves from the numinous and liminal
world has brought us to the brink of self-destructive annihilation.
Limiting ourselves only to proven facts ignores the facts that are yet
to be proven. Some would say that subjectivity is the better part of our
human nature.
Science has also delivered wealth and power into the hands of the greedy. Moral and social issues have taken a back seat to profits. Capitalism
is individualistic, competitive, consumerist, and fantastically
materially productive but simultaneously spiritually desolate.
Capitalism promotes "short-term thinking based on this religion of
profit at all costs." Our
greed and indifference have brought us to the limits of sustainability.
If we can just WAKE UP and stop supporting foolish and act with compassion and common sense we might still avert a
mass extinction event.
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