How Science Enslaves the Natural Order

And how philosophy zombifies physical objects

Is there a uni-verse such that the apparent multiplicity of everything is really a single, unified natural order that’s susceptible to being explained by us?

Science indicates that there is, in that scientific methods have succeeded in demystifying many phenomena and in integrating domains from cosmology to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology in a coherent family of theories.

But science also presupposes as much in that its methods and institutions take on faith the lack of irreconcilable divisions in nature, which is to say the lack of miracles. The faith in question is known as “humanism,” and in the West it derives from Greco-Roman philosophy. Humanism is the hubristic assumption that our species (or people more generally) ought to rule the universe with our rational and creative powers.

Even in disavowing the gods of naïve religions, secular humanists are still, therefore, profoundly anthropocentric. True, these humanists no longer think the universe necessarily revolves around anyone’s will since they deny the existence of an eternal, primordial mind. Nevertheless, atheistic humanists behave as though they believe that the wilderness ought to bend to people’s will.

People have rights while physical objects, as such, as well as all strictly impersonal phenomena have none. Physical things exist as brute facts, as mindless causes and effects. There are natural laws and human discoverers of the corresponding real patterns, but paradoxically there’s no natural or supernatural lawgiver. Again, evolved people are the only lawgivers, but those laws are social and they’re the programs of our technosphere, of the humanized order of civilizations and cultures that we assume ought to replace the biosphere.

If people alone have the spark of quasi-divinity, or at least moral rights, owing to our selfhood (to our relatively high intelligence, self-awareness, autonomy, imagination, ingenuity, ambition, and so on), what must nonpersons be by contrast? How would we be expected to understand the wilderness, the sum of all such wild things and places? What metaphors would come to mind, aiding our intuitions?

When we objectify, we enslave. The more knowledge we have of how something works internally or as a matter of natural fact, the more potential power we have over it. With our models, conceptions, and analyses, we divide and conquer nature. To have a well-tested theory of how something works is to have the equivalent of what primitive people called the thing’s sacred name. With these essential blueprints we can reverse and re-engineer natural phenomena or devise artificial alternatives to them.

Why would we wish to do so? Partly because that’s what we evolved to do, to use our brain to outsmart our environment and to apply those mental maps with technology to further our goals in life.

But more existentially, the reason is that the objective, mindless, godless domain is inherently revolting to social mammals like us. We evolved not just to be reasonable but to be social. We’ve always lived in groups and are therefore self-absorbed. True, in extreme cases, when we’re rich enough to indulge our appetites, we often turn into narcissists. But even when we’re only minimally social, we demonstrate an abhorrence for that which is overtly anti-social, for violations of our rights and traditional expectations.

Nothing violates sociality more than nature’s impersonality. The wilderness, then, is fully absurd and even zombie-like in its horrific modes of self-perpetuation. Sure, scientists understand how things work, but not how the natural as such could have come to be, because scientists explain nature only by positing more nature, that is, more elements, forces, initial conditions, brute constants, physical causes, and so forth.

Thus, every natural phenomenon is simultaneously monstrous, and that’s so precisely to the extent that the thing is scientifically explained. Every physical object, whether it’s a star, a rock, a tool, or anything else that’s impersonal or “soulless” can’t help but be antisocial. Nature has no respect for the laws we live by. Nature is therefore wild, like children raised by wolves who are thus natural-born criminals.

Moreover, natural events happen ultimately for no reason. We can trace causal chains back for billions of years to the Big Bang. But philosophically, all naturalistic explanations leave us in the dark. Scientists can model how a natural system works right down to its subatomic constituents. But as to why there are natural causes and systems in the first place, scientists are professionally enjoined to revert to nature’s brute facticity.

Yet that’s exactly the standpoint of the horrified onlooker who observes a corpse rising from the grave, as in the zombie trope. Like the natural law codified by no divine lawgiver, zombie fiction’s undying corpse just is.

Physical objects have, then, two sides, depending on whether we view them from the perspectives of secular humanism or of cosmicist or existential philosophy. On the one hand, the scientific picture of nature is greatly empowering since without gods and miracles, there’s no malevolence behind natural events nor any metaphysical surprise in store for us. The world’s operations are predictable because they’re mindless, meaning there’s no freewill in natural causes and effects.

But when we contemplate the philosophical implications of that picture, horror dawns. Friedrich Nietzsche saw as much when he famously said not just that God is dead, but that the truth of atheism is a cultural catastrophe.

After all, what in the human sphere is supposed to be animate while lacking any freewill? Slaves.

Patriarchal men thought women and foreigners lacked personhood or a “divine spark,” and they treated them as playthings or servants. These subordinates were toys and slaves, human simulacra that were devoid of rights. Patriarchies were inspired to such feats of dehumanization by their prehistoric ancestors’ domestication of wild animals and plants.

Although late-modern societies award all humans the civil rights that follow from personhood, we devise replacements for those pseudo-mindless labourers, namely robots and artificially intelligent computer programs.

Thus, when we objectify nature, ignoring the mystical foundations of naturalism or the epistemic bruteness of that which is natural, we’re liable to compare wild natural systems to the portions we’ve managed to tame. Indeed, “wild” means pre-tamed. Judging from the scope of technoscientific, modern civilized progress, this comparison is hardly idle because we’ve actively embarked on domesticating the wilderness wherever it’s found. The wilderness is therefore that which isn’t yet brought to heel as a domesticated slave.

But just as human slaves came back to life, as it were, as humanists recognized their error and the personhood of all humans, and just as fiction depicts AI, too, as being liable to surprise us with its godlike powers, the natural order that’s supposed to be disenchanted may end up being re-enchanted. The corpse may stir to quasi-life, as the secular humanistic perspective is joined with the more darkly philosophical one.

When we situate our progressive hubris in the context of our existential predicament, as we fathom the foundations of all things, we might wonder whether the conception of an enslaved, humanized natural order should give way to neo-animistic pantheism.