How The Enlightenment Separated Humanity From Nature
We need a new way to understand our relationship to the physical world
Every intellectual movement casts its shadow — the Enlightenment is no exception. Beginning with early scientific thinkers like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, the study of observable nature was divorced from the study of human beings, and ever since, our relationship to the natural world has been fraught with utopian error.
We live with rapidly accelerating climate change — an unforeseen consequence of the industrial revolution — and a common denial of elementary biological facts, such as the differences on average between the brains of men and women. Blank slate utopians who deny sex differences and industrial utopians who deny climate change are both products of errors built into Enlightenment thinking. In creating the foundations for the technological society, the brilliant philosophers at the core of the Enlightenment accidentally created a society of hapless utopians, incapable of placing human activity squarely within the range of biological nature.
The “empire of reason” can be traced back to the 17th century and the dualism of Rene Descartes. In order to progress scientifically, a distinction had to be made between the intractable problems of self-consciousness and the objective, measurable world. Descartes proposed a solution: The entire world was to be reduced entirely to “measure and number,” the founding reductionist principles of science, save for human minds, God, and angels. Of course, the study of measure and number gradually eroded the claims of religion, challenging faith through ruthless empiricism. The consequences of this initial decision, that every aspect of nature except for the human being could be determined entirely through the methods of science, would define the relationship between human beings and the objective world for centuries. Through his Cartesian dualism, which enabled the flourishing of modern science by removing psyche from the world, Descartes inadvertently structured modern science to conceive of the human being as outside of nature.
Francis Bacon, a legendary classical liberal and scientific thinker, gave this separation a deeper element of sinister power-fantasy. If humankind was distinct from the natural world, then we could in fact treat it as our servant, our slave. The sciences would be aimed toward the development of new technology, the contortions and enslavement of nature made to suit our alien human whims. Bacon wrote that the scientist must steal the secrets of nature in Promethean fashion, “as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.” One could scarcely imagine a worse relationship between human being and nature than that of torturer and victim sprawled across the rack.
The progressive liberalism of John Dewey continued this deeply perverse relationship into nearly transhumanist territory. In his recent book Why Liberalism Failed, the Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen quotes Dewey’s commentary about “savages” and civilized people:
The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment.
The desire to master and transform nature is the core tenet of the liberal Enlightenment. The industrial revolution and the invention of the atomic bomb are both results of our ability to not only pry open the secrets of nature, but then to wield them in new and unprecedented ways. This “instrumentality,” from the sharpening of the first stick in the Savannah, is perhaps the core of our humanity, our essential difference from the rest of the animal kingdom. Not only do we discover our own genetics, but with technology like CRISPR, we seek to edit them to our standards of perfection. As Dewey and Bacon envisioned, humanity would become the masters of nature and would manipulate the world to suit their ambitions.
Perceiving ourselves as transhumanist Gods, shaping the Earth and ourselves into whatever forms we choose, we realize Nietzsche’s hope that human beings would one day create their own nature. The invention of mass urban environments reshapes human nature — the structure of a morning commute as opposed to the vicissitudes of hunting and gathering changes the way we behave, think, and even live. The internet, as we experience it daily, is also reshaping our human nature through the plasticity of our brains. There is a perpetual feedback between human manipulation of the environment and changes within ourselves. But what if this manipulation ends in disaster? What if it ultimately destroys either nature or the human beings who have shaped it?
Apocalyptic threats emerging from technological development are not hard to find. Elon Musk and countless others are obsessed with the potential threat of A.I. For example, if a machine intelligence begins to process information at exceedingly faster speeds, there is a real possibility that it will outstrip both the intelligence of the scientists who created it and the ethics of the human species. There is no way to determine how such an A.I. would perceive the world, or how it would propose solutions to the challenges that face us. The modification of our own DNA also returns the moral swamp of eugenics to the forefront of our public discussion. An A.I. could recommend changes to our very brain circuitry, or suggest that large amounts of human beings be sacrificed for a perceived “greater good.” There is simply no way to predict what an A.I. more intelligent than any human being would tell us about ourselves, or what we should do to manage the increasing complexity of the world.
Understanding our biological nature with complete objectivity must be a prerequisite for tampering with it in substantial ways, or allowing any machine to guide its development. But a new wave of science denial has gripped the West, most obviously in the aftermath of the James Damore Google memo, in which citing personality differences on average between the sexes is perceived as a reactionary claim among large swathes of the media class. Discussions on IQ, and the heritable intelligence of individuals, are also deeply taboo in many highly public media circles, because admitting to such fundamental inequality feels immoral and cruel. But denial of biological reality is no longer tenable in an age where both non-human intelligence and the editing of the human genome are strong possibilities in our lifetime. If we don’t understand ourselves, then the forces that stand to change us will take us by storm. We do not want to be unprepared for drastic changes because we refused to understand empirical knowledge about our own nature.
Climate scientists are also concerned about massive flooding as a consequence of a century of unchecked industrialism, pumping out unnatural levels of CO2 that are reshaping the environment in negative ways. Ocean acidification, rising sea levels, mass droughts, and freak storms are all part of the bundled manifestation of humankind’s industrial-technological inheritance. Believing ourselves to be separate from the fate of nature, the inner logic of capitalism has resisted any recognition of limits to the expansion of markets; capitalist enthusiasts have believed, against all intuition and evidence, that the Earth will never be exhausted.
This sheer arrogance dates back to the biblical command that nature is to be subservient to man. In the “Creation Mandate” of the Book of Genesis, many understood “subdue the Earth and have dominion over it” as license for ecological carelessness as opposed to interpreting it as a command to steward it well. The reckoning we are facing is proof that one of these interpretations has been catastrophic. For example: India and China are intensely polluted. Societies never collectively developed an ingrained commitment to environmental preservation, certainly not on a scale commensurate with the threat our descendants will face. And now, the unfortunate truth is that climate change is an undeniable reality. Mass species extinctions are no longer science fiction. And virtual technology continues to polarize us and make us less patient, less accepting of the world as it is.
Of course, it is incoherent to suggest that we reject technology. Worse than incoherent, it would be evil. The 20th century, following genocidal ambition and unparalleled bloodshed, has offered the world massive prosperity in the fusion of global capital with technological innovation. We would be wrong to deny that. But all dominant systems of belief ultimately face serious challenges by radical changes taking place in the world, with some beliefs being displaced altogether. If our Promethean ambitions are undermining the environment, then perhaps we have reached a point where we have exhausted the limitations of seeing ourselves as totally separate from nature. Perhaps, in viewing nature as a machine that can be controlled through technology, we have unwittingly transformed human beings into the very same subjects of torture.
The Enlightenment ideal of human mastery over nature is swallowing its own tail. A new relationship to nature must be rediscovered, one that likely won’t emerge from science, but the dreams of artists. The science fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, who imagined biological spaceships and a focus on bio-technical cultures, sought to describe a more harmonious and integrated relationship between human beings and their technology. The collapse of the far future into the distant past in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun saga points to an archaic revival at the peak of technological progress.
I cannot say what this future will look like, but I can only describe its necessity. The right, broadly speaking, does not want to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real. The left, also broadly speaking, does not want to believe that evolution has shaped the human brain. Our ideologies have grown detached from nature, and our civilization now stands to pollute and excavate nature to the final scrap. We need moderation. We need to rediscover ourselves as a part of nature, not transhumanist monsters born to conquer it.
