I appreciate your earnest response to the article, but I beg to differ with your criticisms.
Indeed, I’ve read some recent science popularizers, and watched their videos. I’m familiar with how Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, and others celebrate science and nature. I watched Tyson’s Cosmos show, and Netflix’s Our Universe. I’ve watched some of Attenborough's documentaries and wrote about the recent environmentalist one on Netflix.
I agree, then, that many scientists think along those uplifting lines, as opposed to regarding themselves as anything like slaveholders or dominators. Of course that’s not how they think of themselves! Not even Christian slaveholders in the nineteenth century thought of themselves as villains. We all paint ourselves in the best light. But beyond that, science is indeed humanistic, and secular humanism is far from wholly evil, which is why I’m only ambivalent about it.
However, you simply ignore the possibility of massive hypocrisy on the part of scientists. There’s what science popularizers say, or how science is sold, and then there’s what scientists systematically do in fueling the modern world. My criticism of scientific objectification does the opposite: I ignore how science is sold, how scientists think of themselves, and even what their personal intentions might be, and I focus on the evident role played by scientific institutions in developed societies.
There’s no verbal trick in my talk about objects. The syntactic role of “object” in a sentence is irrelevant to my case. What my article points out is the evolved, pragmatic asymmetry in the brain’s processing of information, which becomes stark in the social practice of objectification. And with Weber, I construe scientific objectivity as a kind of disenchanting objectification.
You strawman what I say about animism. I agree that nature isn’t alive in the old animist’s sense. That’s why I speak of “Animism 2.0,” as I’ve called it (link below), of a kind of secular, naturalistic pantheism that takes physical systems and processes to be zombie-like in their godless patterns. That’s the difference between theistic and atheistic animism/pantheism: the former personifies nature, while the latter is barred from doing so, due to scientific discoveries and modern jadedness.
We know better than to think that all of nature is alive since indeed scientists have largely explained the difference between life and nonlife. Nevertheless, methodological naturalists set themselves the task of explaining the natural order without positing a divine lawgiver. Inevitably, in that context, nature will seem zombie-like, which makes for a dark, cosmicist re-enchantment of nature.
I agree that Attenborough’s documentaries are scientific, but that doesn’t mean they’re only scientific. Clearly, he’s motivated by a kind of conservationist humanism, by an almost religious sense of life’s sacredness. And that’s consistent with the pantheism I explore.
Moreover, his A Life on Our Planet is consistent with my criticism of science because that documentary, too, focusses on the negative impact of modern progress, disregarding our intentions and convenient self-images.
I agree that science doesn’t dictate how we should relate to nature. Yet science isn’t wholly walled off from the rest of society. Sure, there’s pure and there’s applied science, but even pure science is implicitly antagonistic towards nature in being a hyper-rational enterprise. Reason evolved to enable us to flourish by outwitting prey and predators, and by negotiating our social hierarchies.
Yet when you say, “it is human nature to develop an affinity towards what we know,” again I think of the big picture, of history going back to the advent of behavioural modernity tens of thousands of years ago. To the extent that that history is progressive, “affinity” isn’t the right word to characterize our developing relationship with the environment. What I see, instead, is effective antagonism towards nature, as in resentment, alienation, and horror for the wilderness, and a preference for civilization, for artificiality at the expense of the natural. I see that in our domestication of plants, animals, and so-called lower classes of people. I see that in the growth of civilizations and in the destruction of the biosphere.
Obviously, scientists aren’t the sole culprits here; likely, they’re not even the main ones. But their contribution to this “progress” has been a necessary condition, and scientific “objectivity”—in contrast to animistic or theistic personification--is at the heart of it.
I don’t quite understand your parting argument by analogy, regarding art. In any case, I’m not anti-science. As I said, I’m ambivalent about modern progress and secular humanism. Optimistically, I look forward to the prospects of transhumanism, as I’ve written in numerous articles. Pessimistically, I fear the Faustian, Luciferian functions of modernity may prove self-destructive.
