How Civilization Devours Nature like a Black Hole
The unnaturalness of our progress in the cosmic wilderness
These days scientists and philosophers are quick to dismiss Rene Descartes’ dichotomy between mind and matter.
Descartes said these are two metaphysical “substances” that are subject to different sets of laws, and never the twain shall meet. Within the realm of either, the other substance’s activities would be miraculous. Implicitly, then, a divine overseer is needed to ensure that the independent material and mental worlds cohere so that the pair’s interactions don’t degenerate into chaos.
Late modern, “naturalistic” thinkers are having none of that defeatist dualism. Their ambition is to explain everything in unified, ultimately materialistic terms, to naturalize all phenomena, including consciousness, reason, and freewill, leaving nothing inexplicable to science or more broadly to human reason.
Yet that very progress in our understanding presupposes a less abstract or technical kind of dualism that’s practically just as absolute, namely the duality between wild and civilized domains.
How naturalists humanize nature
So-called philosophical naturalists are supposed to say that everything is fundamentally…
