From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 22:43:54 BST
Here’s a little essay I took the time to write. Have fun, Patrick.
Towards a return to a cosmological perspective of values and morals
It is frequently discussed in this forum that cartesian philosophy,
or ‘SOM’, can be transcended by the MoQ. Here I argue that part of
Descartes’ error was to cut us of from a wide, meaningful cosmos, and
how a system like a metaphysics of quality can throw us back in a more
valueable cosmos.
Cartesian philosophy has the following properties:
a) The mind and the material world are two different things.
b)We can only understand both worlds by means of reason and
experimentation.
In the evolution of science, only the material world was emenable to
experimentation, so knowledge about the material has evolved
dramatically, whereas the mind was pushed in a small, trivial ephimeral
and epiphenomal corner of reality. This alone cuts us of from a
meaningful place in the world, or the universe at large.
But the priority of subjecting nature to experimentation has had the
particular consequence, that those parts of the world which are most
easily subjected to our experimental drive, have gained priority in our
worldview. In science, this means that newtonian and quantum mechanical
science has gained priority over relativity. Experiments on relativity
are quite hard to perform.
Experimentalism in science has swung further to instrumentalism: only
what can be manipulated, should be investigated and schould be applied
in technological devices. Obviously this has created a whole new world
from ca. 1700 to anno 2003 as compared to the rest of earth’s history.
There were virtually no computers 50 years ago, let alone in the 4
billion years before that.
From fundamental science to applied mass-technology, there is another
swing in the instrumentalistic direction in society as a whole, called
consumentalism. Although technology has made it possible not to spend
most of our times growing and harvesting food, we work only to be able
to buy food, cd’s and dvd’s, gasoline for our cars, organized holidays
and so on. I’m not saying here that this is a bad thing all in all, only
that we obviously value those things money can buy.
What we miss, is our contact with these parts of the world science
can’t put to use. An obvious example is our place in Earth’s ecosystem.
Tigers and lions aren’t a threat for us anymore. Most ‘wild’ or free
animals don’t cross our paths anymore.
Outside Earth’s sphere ;-), asside from an incidental newsreport on a
newly discovered planet outside our solar system, or that Mars is
exceptionally close to Earth on August 27, 2003, we don’t integrate
stories about the world outside our planet in our daily lifes. There’s
no obvious way to manipulate it, so we don’t value paying attention to
the wider scheme of things.
A devotion of the universe, or even the sun as the Egypts did, is no
longer there. Our religion is focussed on what money can buy for us
today or tommorrow. The vast world outside Earth- that our power can’t
affect- is ignored, or pushed in a marginal place. But that need not be.
Values can be changed by changing our morals. This can be achieved
even when standing in a traffic-jam on the highway. Instead of trying to
push the next car with your eyes, let them wander in the sky or onto the
trees (if it creates no danger!). No, there’s nothing we can do to
change the weather, but personally I find a tree waving in the wind
always quite intriguing to watch. And what I see, is what is part of me,
as schemes like the MoQ acknowledge.
So our morals, I argue, should expand to the non-controlable. Our
identity lies not only in what we can put to use today. Our identity
stretches out to every star in the universe, every bacterium or even
virus, and to every tree and plant and flower in our rooms. When we can
rationally conclude, as the MoQ allows us to do, that the stars are
meaningful for our identity, merely because they are part of what we see
and what we can understand, then we can live in a meaningful cosmos
again. We are not only what we can manipulate.
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