Opinion: Science is dead
Conservatives and Republicans seem to talk a lot about how their policies are aimed as being beneficial to the individual. But an individual is a social construct, something that was created in order to control. Being “individual” to conservatives and Republicans means to be a success businessman and to make enough money to take care of yourself. Is this comprehensible to all the different facets of humanity?
The liberals are a bit bigger in some ideas of art within their identities, but they are all part of the same system. In this same body we are constrained to be gay, feminist, Christian, white, or black, when in reality, all these things are applied after we are, as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would say, “thrown into the world”.
This system is one of capitalism where all value is placed on capital and money; where there is no room for real human expression, nor any respect for the natural world that we come from. God is dead and we have replaced him with science and technology. Technology will solve all our problems and the end of philosophy will come about because science will answer all our questions.
But whenever we find an answer, a thousand more questions pop up. As Ludwig Wittgenstein, the linguist philosopher, said, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all”.
Since the invention of man at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Enlightenment has said that to be human is to be conscious and to be rational. We believe our rationality and consciousness make us better than and superior to other animals and nature.
The opposite is true, as we are beholden to the same passions and instincts that shape the world. As humans, there is something deeper than just being thinking conscious agents - we care about something, something matters to us. We find things in this world that are important to us, essential to our being. Our caring spreads out amongst all planes of existence. It takes root into what is most primitive about us, our home. It is our sense of place. Being open in the world and letting it rush in as if the dam that separates us was nothing more than a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. Being in the world is where names and identities slide on our persons like a stamp that is too wet.
What better way to understand what a human is by identifying what it definitely is not. The only completely rational thing is a computer, cold and calculating. It makes decisions without any sense of moral ambiguity but instead thinks with rules and propositions, rather than feelings and perspectives. What separates us from computers is that we care about something and in short, computers just don’t give a damn. This caring only distinguishes us from computers, but what separates us from other animals? Consciousness?
Many animals have varying degrees of consciousness, our level of consciousness is a product of evolution, not our superiority. Is it our ability to care? Many animals share this aspect of us as well. So what is it? What sets us apart, above? The fact of the matter is there is no one thing that makes us better than animals and the place life all arouse - nature. Boundaries between humanity and nature are illusions, social constructs that have been created so that we can exploit the natural world while being detached from it. We make the universe self aware, we give it consciousness, just as other animals give it attributes that make it more complex, more beautiful.
We belong to a community of subjects, not a collection of objects. Our existence is part of the creation, not separation, of the world. It is all just another complexity that’s part of the constant unfolding of the universe. Let’s try to open up the conversation to what this means in terms of what direction our economy, education, and whole political structure ought to take. In short, f*ck those who say that in order to live a good life you have to know science, you have to understand math, and you have to make money because when you’re on your death bed looking at your loved ones, if you even had any, then none of those damn social things will matter. All that will matter is whether or not you would live the life you have lived again and again...into eternity.