Empirical Science Began as a Domination Fantasy

Meaningful discoveries happen from the bottom up

Science is not a cold abstraction, but a product of directly felt human experience.

If we think of science as the knowledge of nature, then it makes sense that its discoveries often come from those who are most intimately dependent on its processes: sailors, hunters, miners, healers, and others whose livelihoods involve direct encounters with nature’s ways. Nearly every plant and animal species we eat is the result of selective breeding — a gentle form of genetic engineering, really — by working farmers long before Mendel founded the discipline of genetics. Our knowledge of the oceans and tides came from people whom Benjamin Franklin described as “simple whalers.” Contemporary medicine still retrieves occasional insights from nontraditional sources.

Modern scientists are cautious not to romanticize the practices of healers and shamans, for along with any real science they may have unearthed came distinctly unscientific practices, from astrology to voodoo. By refusing to separate themselves from nature, the rationalists argue, these amateur practitioners were unable to achieve objectivity.

This view was best expressed in the 1600s by King James’s famed advisor, Francis Bacon. He believed that nature held secrets in her womb, and needed to be forcibly penetrated to make her give them up: “Nature must be taken by the forelock . . . lay hold of her and capture her . . . conquer and subdue her.. .” In the unrepentant language of a rape fantasy, he argued that we must see nature as a feminized object, rather than as a larger system of which we ourselves are part.

Science’s great innovation—and limitation—was to break things down into their component parts. Science, from the root sci-, meaning “to split or cleave,” dissects things in order to understand them. This makes sense: isolate a particular process, make a hypothesis about it, formulate an experiment, see if it produces repeatable results, and then share the knowledge with others. This is how we found out that objects have inertia, that sound has a speed, and that plants absorb CO2.

These isolated, repeatable discoveries, in turn, make very particular things possible: for example, antibiotics—first used by ancient Egyptians but later refined in the lab—which turned lethal infections into minor annoyances. But to doctors armed with antibiotics, every problem started looking like a microbe. While antibiotics effectively killed their targets, they also killed helpful bacteria, compromised a patient’s immune response, and encouraged the development of resistant strains. Worse, medical professionals were incentivized to develop ever more tightly focused medicines and treatments that could be monopolized for profit. The discovery that a common but unpatentable substance such as olive leaf extract has anti-viral properties doesn’t benefit the pharmaceutical industry any more than soil-enriching crop rotation benefits chemical companies.

Science must again become a holistic, human pursuit.

This was section 77 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here.