On several occasions — perhaps most recently at an Occupy Wall Street protest rally in New York — philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek has remarked that we can imagine the end of the world but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.
Žižek’s point, of course, is that it is a serious and strange paradox that we allow ourselves to think of apocalyptic destruction as possible, while rejecting the possibility of making relatively small changes to our economic systems and collective ways of life. This paradox is solved rather easily by taking Žižek’s point to its logical conclusion: the possibility for an end to capitalism is at least equivalent to the possible end of the world.
In any case, Žižek’s ruminations prompt us to seriously contemplate the end of the world.
The End of the World as We Know It
The world whose end I want to contemplate is the world created by modern science and its progeny, modern technology. If, or when, science brings an end to the modern world it has helped to create, is a world after science possible? Can a new world emerge after the quintessentially modern scientific worldview has worn and weathered?
Some might look to Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal After Virtue, one of the strongest philosophical critiques of modernity in the 20th century, for one answer to such questions. Others might look to the foil of that book: Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest critics of modernity in the 19th century.
I would like to look in a simpler direction: ecology.
As the natural sciences have grown more sophisticated and advanced, our planetary ecosystem has suffered tremendously unnatural harms. The late modern reaction has been to use science to fix itself, and there is some evidence of the efficacy of this approach. But no widespread act of contrition has been undertaken by science. After all, science promised a better, more peaceful world, but the last century has been remarkably and uniquely violent.
This violence has been widespread and is well documented in its human casualties. But it has also been devastating to other forms of life. Those who show concern for non-human forms of life also tend to hold a secular worldview that often fails to hold science accountable to its modern promises. The unapologetic appeal to science as the circular answer to its own failures is considered preferable to a regressive retreat toward some pre-, proto-, or pseudo-science.
This scientific preference is largely defensive, motivated by a fear of going “back” to religion. And for good reason: science has not yet given us time machines to go back and “fix” the religious past, and many religious reactions against modernity ring hollow or are downright dangerous.
Where Do We Go from Here?
What about a way forward? Is it possible to imagine what comes after modern science, without assuming that we must return to what came before it?
In the epigraph to Morris Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World, Octavio Paz puts it this way:
God and philosophy could not live together peacefully; can philosophy survive without God? Once its adversary has disappeared, metaphysics ceases to be the science of the sciences and becomes logic, psychology, anthropology, history, economics, linguistics. What was once the great realm of philosophy has today become the ever-shrinking territory not yet explored by the experimental sciences. If we are to believe the logicians, all that remains of metaphysics is no more than the nonscientific residuum of thought—a few errors of language. Perhaps tomorrow’s metaphysics, should man feel a need to think metaphysically, will begin as a critique of science, just as in classical antiquity it began as a critique of the gods. This metaphysics would ask itself the same questions as in classical philosophy, but the starting point of the interrogation would not be the traditional one before all science but one after the sciences.
The sentiment of this passage — and other similarly held views, including, in different ways, both MacIntyre and Nietzsche — is sometimes confused with a facile, religious romanticism of sorts. This is not the case, at least not for me. In my view, a return to religion cannot wholly turn away from reason and science, pretending as though modernity never happened. The insight from Paz and Berman is that re-enchantment begins in a way that is old and new, at once modest and radical: the mere possibility that there is something after science.
This recalls Žižek’s approach to his Marxist project. He consistently rejects all “returns” to the revolutions of the past century. The harder work, he claims, is to imagine the present possibility for life after capitalism.
In a similar move, the way forward cannot be an either/or. We cannot rewind or fast-forward between religion and science. We will need a double-move, the sort of move we observe in flourishing ecologies: a balanced, attuned move that is neither ahistorical nor limited by historical possibility.
Most of all, this move will have to overcome the fears of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern accounts of the world. We must imagine the world anew, a world that has been, is, and never was. This will require a poetic, creative, and — in precisely this sense — a thoroughly “religious” imagination.
A New Enchantment
As Paz suggests, the new metaphysical interrogation of science would shift from a self-contained contemplation of past and present contending modernities, to a future-oriented imagination of how those contentions might themselves lead to something beyond modernity itself.
This new enchantment would not suffer from amnesia or nostalgia — at least not in its ideal. It would make new promises to be made, broken, and renewed.
Like the gods and sciences of old.
I really want to be able to accept your thesis–because I worry about what Paul Feyerabend calls the “chauvinism of science” as much as Zizek would worry about the chauvinism of capitalism. And I share your hope that we can get beyond it without discarding it. But I don’t quite know if I can.
“The new metaphysical interrogation of science would shift from a self-contained contemplation of past and present contending modernities, to a future-oriented imagination of how those contentions might themselves lead to something beyond modernity itself.”
Is this not what modern green initiatives and environmental concerns aim to do? How is what you are proposing different from what you (rightly) claim is the circular use of science to correct science? Isn’t this merely using rationalism to correct rationalism?
The problem with any effort to get beyond modernity is that it will be the same sort of effort that got us into modernity in the first place. Modernity attempted to correct the extravagances of religion. The result was a whole new set of (arguably) more dangerous extravagances that came with rationalism. What’s to say that this new age you say we should push toward would not be worse?
Perhaps, though, you are making a more subtle point: that we as people living in modernity should push beyond modernity at a more individual or community level. That we should recognize the extravagances of modernity, be wary of them, but not cloister ourselves from modernity. This sort of point would be much more agreeable to me, as a counter-culture within modernity would have more of a check against extravagance than would a large-scale culture change.
My thesis — or perhaps my attempt to avoid making one — is akin to Zizek’s. (He fields many questions that share parallels to your excellent question.) I only have the question, a very leading question of course, of whether there is an “after science.” It seems odd that it is so obvious that there is life after religion, but not life after science. Maybe there is life after both, no?
The question you ask that is much difficult for me is this one: “How is what you are proposing different from what you (rightly) claim is the circular use of science to correct science? Isn’t this merely using rationalism to correct rationalism? ”
In one sense, I suppose I have no option but to use the same strategy. After all, I like anyone else, am product of my environment; I am a modern man through and through, a man of technology, a man who blogs and tweets. But I am also a practicing Catholic and a practicing artist (a musician, a writer, and a teacher). As such, I live in different worlds a lot of the time. To the extent that all my work is autobiographical, perhaps my desire is more for myself than for anything or anyone else: maybe I, like other multiplpe-world-dwellers (such as yourself?), am trying to make sense of these worlds and dwell in one world — a trinitarian sort of challenge — without the fragmentation and alienation that seems so common.
My interest in this question also carries into education and schooling. For those interested in those interests, I just posted a related essay titled, “Does Education Need Science,” at the blog Formative Justice. Here is the link: http://formativejustice.com/2012/06/12/does-education-need-science/
SR
The largest problem with imagining a world after science, is that there is no such thing… in academia. This is so by the very definition of academia and the manner in which it wriggles on today.
I think we do (or some at least) live in a world “after science” but academia is too blind to realize the state our society (and itself) is in today. The constant lenses through which we here view the world are primarily academic. This blindness allows the academy to continue to thrive, imposing its outmoded descriptions of the world on us. Without shame or self-reflection it wriggles on the hook of its own nebulous (ir)relevance.
Was it not the academy that brought us into modernity? Back when the academy actually (italics)influenced(italics) the world is plunged it into the modern era.
This is so, I maintain strongly that there is life beyond science in precisely the way you describe its possible possibility. But it is not only possible, it is present. Look to it.
I propose a new question: Is the academy dead? Can we imagine a world without it?