The Cartesian Jones And The Chia Pet Moloch (Yours For Only $2.99 Plus Shipping!)

[hatrack]

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Perhaps it is fighting reductionism with more reductionism to ascribe the ennui and rapine of the age to the scientific method of Rene Descartes. His role as one of the principle architects of the Enlightenment looms large but he alone cannot be tried and convicted for the abuses of the era any more than anyone else might be. After all, the post-Enlightenment scientific revolution has produced incredible benefits in everything from medicine to energy, food productivity and mobility. To a peasant caught in the crossfire between the warring medieval factions of their day, we are as gods of a sort in our magnificently rich mobility. However, in our relentless peering, the scientific compulsion finds us missing the matter for the void and we have developed an addiction of sorts, something I might refer to as a Cartesian Jones.

While we dismiss spirituality as something we cannot measure , we focus our considerable attentions upon things rational, and funny enough, we become more irrational by the year. Our vaunted technology increases in an accelerating manner, largely freed from the pesky confines of Faith and Morality so the fate of the planet and our place within it becomes increasingly questionable and open to a kind of double whammy of nihilism. We cannot escape the nihilism of our technological juggernaut to a state of safety within Nature because Nature appears set to bite back in response to technological excess. So, we opt for a little more of the hair of the dog that bit us and the Cartesian Jones continues apace. The culture steadfastly thinks a continuing application of science will accrue the more beneficent solutions we think we need. Technology, once a means to an end, becomes the End itself and spawns a priesthood of technocrats who worship a technological idol, a kind of Chia Pet Moloch, an all seeing eye and giver of life….yours for $2.99 plus shipping. Concurrently, the technocrat’s drinking partner, the nation-state bureaucracy sets itself the task of creating ever-expanding spheres of influence and operation for the technocrat to exploit in both conflict and peace. Government becomes both our newest spectator sport and our keeper. The machinery of life divides, divides again and re-divides to rapt attention all around. Needless to say, everyone seems too busy to check the bank account to insure we can actually pay for all the things we seem to want to stroke in our hot little hands. But this of course, is where Fiat Money in service to complex mathematics comes in handy. The fact that our rational concoctions of currency require increasing levels of blind faith is but one of the many hilarious aspects of this defiantly rational age.

You can see this Cartesian compulsion anywhere you care to look. The relentless grid of our cities and highways, the circuit board of a computer, the grid of data points in a video screen, the tables, spread sheets and data of statistical analysis, the schedules of our work day…they all conspire to immerse our waking hours in a kind of swamp of structured analytical detention relieved only by the cheap thrills of our role as a consumer within a gigantic apparatus of entertainment. Government, the chief ordering agent of our social construct, accumulates ever-expanding layers of meaning, category and responsibility while we ascribe an almost technological power to it all, thinking more government , like more technology, will solve all the problems of a “hostile” world. All the while, we continue to treat the natural wold as the “other”, our antagonist… the thing we must overcome and control. It has gotten to a point where a significant cross section of humanity self-loathe enough to characterize our species as a cancer, something that is lethal above all else and we assuage this sense of sin against life by creating nature preserves where man can be kept at arms length or better yet, kept out entirely while the rest of the planet is worked over at will. The categorical compulsions of modern artifice insure that we “stay on track” to structure our cognizance in order that we might maintain ourselves as something distinct by virtue of our thought and so nature stubbornly remains “the other”…a thing which must be either overcome or merely tolerated, or perhaps preserved as a romantic museum piece under glass. Nature, like everything else is reduced to a product category that is either trash or treasure and so treated accordingly.

The cheerful modernist abjures any skepticism about this cult of Methodological Skepticism by flinging the old charge of the hair-shirt Luddite at anyone who displays the temerity to question the existing categorical orders. In other words, the skeptic, to be honest in their sentiment must choose an abnegation of technology and retreat backwards to a time more primitive and be happy with it or be known as a fruitless hypocrite. This is but another example of the reductionism inherent to the cult of hyper-technological modernity. As humans, there is simply no escaping the fact that we are remarkable for our technological urges. Beavers may dam rivers, Birds craft elaborate nests, Wasps may make paper apartments and Termites build mud towers but it is humanity that is most able to radically transform the larger environment for our own purposes. Denying this technological urge would be tantamount to denying human life itself. Instead, the proper ordering would be to abandon our fundamental and historical antagonism between man and his environment in order to find a proper outlet for Technology In Nature rather than Technology Against Nature. This is not an altogether new or unique outlook. Fibonacci, the 13th century Italian brought 6th century Asian mathematics to the west with his Fibonacci Sequence, a series of numbers which can express the geometry of an unfurling fern frond or nautilus shell and has an uncanny relationship with the ideal proportions of the Golden Ratio. In the 18th century American West, John Muir spoke of the hustlers and profiteers who besiege any preserve as soon as it is put off limits. He spoke of the critical spiritual need for wilderness and arcadian scenery. After a few days camping with the romantic Scotsman in the crisp air of Yosemite, President Teddy Roosevelt unleashed a torrent of natural preserves across the continent and in so doing, virtually jump-started the modern American environmental movement. This nation is richly ornamented with a public treasure representing the finest aspects of our unsullied continent because of the quiet reverence for all life that Muir represents. Before Muir, Thoreau spoke of the riches attendant to the blending of quiet economy and the everyday natural landscape. In the modern era, an environmental ethos steadily gains steam and in the 1980’s , Benoit Mandelbrot brought the Mandelbrot Set and its fractals to popular recognition. This complex and breathtakingly beautiful mathematics is heir to the work of Fibonacci with seemingly organic and self-similarly repeating forms expressed both mathematically and in almost hallucinogenic computer graphics that are as much a fantastic art as they are mathematics.

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http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=6331

[Teaser]

1. eh, this skeptic is unconvinced

that the Mandelbrot set has any spiritual significance at all.

It's just recursion.

[GliderGuider]

2. I buy it.

But I wouldn't drop it all on Decartes' head (Rene no longer thinks nor is, so he can't defend himself).

The pervasive sense of subject/object separation that provides the underpinnings for both Cartesian dualism and the casual human rape of our surroundings has its origin deep in our species' history. On this topic, I always recommend Charles Eisenstein's shockingly perceptive book, The Ascent of Humanity, in which he explores the root of our current state of affairs in Man's sense of separation from ... well, pretty much everything.

I ascribe this sense of separateness to our capacity for abstract self-awareness, a Faustian ability that was conferred on us by the development of our neocortex over many tens of thousands of years.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. I don't see self-awareness as a Faustian bargaining chip

It seems to me that self-awareness is the first step towards awareness of the other (i.e. empathy and/or sympathy.)

Early photosynthetic organisms (to the best of our knowledge) had no self-awareness, yet they were able to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe">change the makeup of Earth's atmosphere much more dramatically than even we have done (although, not quite as fast.)

It's not our ability to think which caused our predicament. However, our ability to think makes us able to recognize our predicament, and it will be our ability to think which will save us (assuming we can save ourselves.)