A modern prayer

Scientific practices might be a prayer in modern society.

Obviously, such an interpretation is impertinent.

Even excellent scientists, engineers and other intellectuals are not completely sure about the future. So, there is no evidence that they never pray as they keep on producing authentic knowledge.

Praying in present high modernity may take a variety of forms.

Everyday politics may be one such form.

What are scientists likely to pray for?

Probably, happiness?

I’d like to relate scientific practices to such desires as might be rooted in scientists’ deeper sentiments.

Sounds absurd?

I should admit.

However, I also believe that there is no reason to abandon my seemingly absurd ideas. People appear to me too naive to believe that their primitive but more direct sensations should be worthless insofar as they wish to materialize lives that deserve to live by means of productive and constructive methods. It seems as if many believe to manage everything by reference to what is visible in an accountable manner.

As humanity develops, forms of prayer might have to be diversified while images of the world become increasingly convergent.

The convergent images do not necessarily mean convergence of moral concerns between different actors. Even into a certain rigorous method in conventional scientific terms, we can ascribe our respectively unique sentiments that are supposed to be orientated towards happiness.

Insofar as scientists engage habitually in rational scientific modes of knowing the world, other actors and selfhood, such rituals can be interpreted as forms of prayer in high modernity.

Traditional forms of prayer have become somewhat unpopular because many people find them to be less relevant to their everyday projects with which to materialize happiness. Habits, customs and routines are being established and maintained through each one’s sense of appropriateness. Although repetitive actions tend to be seen as sources of boredom, a lack of innovativeness, or worse, a lack of moral engagements for unceasing efforts at progresses, our ways of life continue to demonstrate different patterns even if in a more or less fluctuating manner.

Concerns with interdisciplinary research and knowledge creation are important. But, I’d like to approach the problems concerning compartmentalization of academic disciplines from a different direction, or more specifically, in ways that directly address our mundane sentiments about positive moral values and evaluative appropriateness.

By seeing the current scientific practices as a form of prayer, I’d like to facilitate more relational understandings and ways of interpreting them.

Relational interpretation aims to redefine roles of practices of scientific knowledge creation in ways that render others opportunities to identify patterns, causalities or other significant relationships between events and phenomena by neutralizing a variety of concepts that denotes potentials for intentional interventions, such as, agencies, subjectivity, the mind, materiality and affordance.

According to a relational ontology and an epistemology that suits it, these concepts are all emerging out of interactions between different actors, material objects and environments. More critically, interactions that human actors take part in proceed asymmetrically, meaning that actions are to be interpreted by others regardless of the actors’ intentions and assumptions. Because of this asymmetry, alternate successions between the acts of presenting and observing actions continuously renew our worldviews. Typically, each one is supposed to be experiencing opening-ups of one’s world that is liable to be constricted by one’s principles and assumptions. The opening-up of one’s world might be called happiness.

Scientific practices might have to offer as many people as possible opportunities to open up their horizons, rather than prescribing authentic knowledge. The key to produce relevant knowledge for the entire humanity might reside in how to exploit everyone’s desire for happiness in terms that continually open up ways to new (possibly positive and bright) futures.

To do so, the relational interpretation serves scientific practices to explore possible connections between now meticulously divided knowledge fields in terms of synchronic (systemic and network-like) and diachronic (historical, genealogical) linkages. The key is to know potentials of our imagination and how it is operating. We, semiotic animals who conceive of or even perceive the world by means of signs, are each playing a critical role of interpreter.

Our interpretations are distinct from other animals in that they relationally enable us to transcend the boundaries drawn between visible and invisible. In the asymmetrical relationality, linkages on which one’s interpretations need to be built are inevitably cut apart by the act of presenting the interpretations. Hence, we tend to mistake others’ interpretations for their pursuit of self-interests. We act and conceal a vast amount of non-obvious linkages mostly intermittently. It is, thus, important to devise us with means to identify and reconnect such broken linkages, including each other’s primitive but direct senses, that must have enabled interpretations presented to us.

The relational interpretation is expected to be practiced habitually. It also replace conventional conception about self-reflection in ways that orientate it towards the future rather than the past. We need to be accustomed to seeing through others’ (denotations of ) actions each other’s true and unique sentiments that are supposed to be innately orientated towards the better than the worse.