How many of you all have heard the
saying “I think, therefore I am”? Most of you, I’ll bet . . . it was written in
1636—at the dawn of the Enlightenment—by French philosopher René Descarte, and
it sums up one of his major contributions to Western Philosophy. Despite—or
perhaps because of—fragile health, his philosophy went on to revolutionize
thinking, helping (along with Isaac Newton) usher in modernism and the
scientific revolution. In fact, it can be said that science as we know it is
based squarely on his notion of the separation of mind from matter. That is,
objects are independent of and separate from our mind (or consciousness).
Philosophers refer to this as strong
objectivity.
This notion is essential to the
development of science, that and Newton’s principle of causal determinism , and for
the first time, in a Cartesian-Newtonian universe God, for the first time, was
not needed to make it all work, although at the time, the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, it was still
customary that God be cited a few times in a work of any consequence. This led
Napoleon to question Pierre Laplace’s latest work: “Monsieur Laplace,” he said,
“you have not mentioned God in your book even once. Why is that?” To which
Laplace replied “Your majesty, I have not needed that particular hypothesis.”
Although this marked the beginning of
increasingly open scientific criticism of religion, what I want to point out is
that in modern thought, objectivism requires a separation between the human self and
everything—and everybody—else. There is self—that
which thinks, and therefore is—and
all that is not self.
Which of course is all the rest of creation, including other people, people
that aren’t that
particular self. For example, I am a self—I think, therefore I am—and you all are
not; from my
Cartesian point of view, you are objects. Of course, it’s the same for every
one of you, you are a self—you think
therefore you
are—and everything and everybody else
is separate. Subject-object thinking separates everything into me and not-me,
you and not-you. And given
all that, the most natural thing in the world
is self-regard, the idea that the highest good is looking out for old number
one, often extended, of course, to number one’s immediate family. It’s no
accident that another thing that came out of the enlightenment is the notion
that rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity,
enshrined in the writings of Adam Smith, the father of free-market capitalism.
Anyway. According to the
Cartesian-Newtonian world view, the separation of mind and matter or subject
and object allows us to stand outside creation and observe it objectively, i.e.,without bias. Further,
it allows us to manipulate
creation and observe it using the scientific method, which is wholly dependent
upon the notion that we are separate—or at least separable—from that which we observe.
Finally—and this is the point I want to make on this Earth Day—separation of
mind and matter or self and the-rest-of-creation encourages us to view the rest of creation as
something separate from us, and thus exploitable. This is the crux of the
ecological matter: if humanity is considered separate from its
“environment”—that is, the rest of creation—it enables us to much more easily
rationalize its use and, almost inevitably, overuse.
After all, it’s not us we’re doing it to, it’s other. It’s almost as if God put it there
solely for our use.
And while the world was young, in the
pre-industrial ages, this worked . . . human populations were small enough that
the renewal rate of natural resources we—and every other living thing—rely upon
was sustainable. The small amount of carbon we released was easily absorbed in
the global carbon cycle. Fisheries were utilized at a rate that was easily
replenished by fish populations, and human waste was produced at a rate that
assimilable by natural means. But as human populations exploded during the
Industrial Age—made possible by technology made possible by science made
possible by the insights of Newton and Descartes—it wasn’t long (200 years?)
before the “earth’s bounty,” which contrary to belief at the time was always a limited “resource,”
began to reach its limit. The carbon cycle began to be saturated, due to
overpopulation and fossil-fuel-burning transportation technology. The fisheries
began to die out, due to overpopulation and rapacious harvesting technology.
And the Earth began to fill up with garbage due to overpopulation and
non-reusable manufacturing technology.
Note the way we speak of all this—we
refer to the earth as a resource,
and if you look ”resource” up in a dictionary, you’ll find something like this:
“a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be
drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively.” So what
happens when you call water and trees and fish and rocks and micro-organisms
“natural resources?” Their identity as God’s good creation is diminished and
they become things to use for human advancement. When you speak of something as
a “resource” you automatically consign it to that Cartesian class of “other,”
of “not-me.” And it becomes fodder for human growth and well-being.
All this can be seen as a consequence of
our separation from the rest of creation; after all, it’s not like we are
exploiting ourselves,
is it? It’s not as if we’re driving ourselves
to extinction, destroying our own
habitat at a non-renewable rate, is it? Well . . . not so fast . . . the major
world religions have always maintained, at their core, that we are one with one
another and inseparable from creation. In the 5th or 6th centuries before
Christ, Siddhārtha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, began a worldwide
movement that teaches, among other things, the concepts of interbeing and
no-self, the ideas that we inseparable—literally—from one another and from
everything else. In the Christian canon, Jesus himself teaches (especially in
the Gospel of John) that he is in us and we are in him, which implies unity of
being, and Christian mystics, from St John of the Cross to Teresa of Avila to Thomas
Merton, have taught that the end of Christian spirituality is to realize the unity which
underlies all reality.
And now, science is catching up with
religion on that front. For the last century or so, the foundational ideas of
classical physics have been crumbling. In particular, the proposition that we
can separate ourselves from the rest of creation took a fatal hit. Turns out,
as observers we have an unavoidable influence on what we observe. Not only
that, if we know some things about an object, we can’t know others, and vice versa. This adds up to
what quantum physicist Amit Goswami calls “subject-object mixing,” where the
supposed separation of material creation into “I” and “thou” has broken down.
Finally, non-locality—which Einstein derided as “spooky action at a
distance”—has shown that there is a transcendent realm outside of space-time.
For a sometime-biologist like me, one
who has always been a believer as well, this is an exciting time. New
information and paradigms, such as Goswami’s science within consciousness and
the re-enchantment of universe, promise a new integration of science and
spirituality. It also gives a new paradigm within which to view the environment
and our place in it, when what we do to the least of these—to the blue jay or
the oak tree or the single-celled, pond-dwelling microbe—we do not only to
Jesus, but literally—not
metaphorically or indirectly but literally—to
ourselves as well.
As a Christian, there’s one more thing I
can say: The more I learn, the more I marvel at the works of the divine. Truly,
the heavens reveal the glory of God! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment