Is Progress Wise and Sustainable?
A dialogue on environmentalist and secular humanist perspectives on our relation to nature
This is my second dialogue with Pierz Newton-John, about environmentalist and secular humanistic conceptions of progress in nature. Our first dialogue can be found here.
Benjamin Cain
There’s a tension in secular humanism since secularism implies scientific observations and rational explanations of nature, whereas humanism is about celebrating the apparent anomalies of personhood.
As secularists, then, we might emphasize our naturalness. People, too, have physical bodies that obey the laws of nature, so there can be no metaphysical dichotomy between cosmic processes such as the orbits of planets in our solar system, and the proliferation of cultural contents in our societies.
Yet this naturalism turns out to be vacuous because scientists deal only with a patchwork of models, not with an all-encompassing vision of the universe’s wholeness, akin to Spinoza’s “perspective of eternity” that grasps how everything belongs to the same metaphysical substance. Thus, there are dichotomies aplenty in nature, accompanying the gaps between models. Most famously, there’s a dichotomy between the quantum and relativistic worlds in theoretical…
