Anti-Science and Organic Daydreams

For many of those who find science distasteful, the question of whether or not it is of net material benefit to mankind is irrelevant. Science is condemned precisely insofar as it is preoccupied with meeting material needs and wants, and (to use Bacon’s terms) its ‘experiments of use’ outnumber its ‘experiments of light’. Worse, the successes of science have encouraged scientists — and many others in the centuries dominated by science-based technology — to believe in progress. Progress, however, is an illusion: technology has not commuted the common sentence of mortality nor has it brought a definitive understanding of the universe, even less of our place in it. So the scientists’ optimism — even their commitment to improving the world — is condemned as ‘shallow’. Technological advances, however impressive, do not solve the tragedy of the human condition, they merely blunt our perception of it

Cognitive psychology · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Illusion · Linguistics · Optimism · Perception · Political science · Sentence · Social science · Sociology · Tragedy (event) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Philosophy · Psychology