Scientific Progress as the Ogling and Ravaging of Nature

Objectification and the surpassing of animistic myths with Luciferian ones

Scientists are objective, we say. Indeed, science is the height of objectivity.

But notice how that characterization already sets up nature as being in a passive role in relation to us, as being the object of our thought. That asymmetry doesn’t amount to a neutral stance of detachment. Indeed, an object as such isn’t discovered; rather, the thing’s objecthood is mentally constructed when the system, process, cycle, or other content is deemed pacified by our model which maps out the thing’s limitations, loopholes, and other weaknesses.

Objects are slaves of thought.

Just compare, for instance, how you’d think of your pet dog as a subject, as a beloved member of your family, with how you’d think of the dog as an object. In so far as the dog would be objectified and deemed just a hunk of matter with various physical properties and instinctive behaviours, you’d have to detach yourself from your personal feelings about that companion. The abstraction that posits the mere object of the dog’s mass, body, and reflexes is a blueprint for using, not for loving the animal.

Or think of the opposite of objectivity, as in the animist’s naïve personification of nature. The prehistoric animist thought nature is full of spirits, minds, values, and purposes. There were no objects, only subjects or animated, living events. Animists subjectified their environment, as opposed to objectifying it.

What, then, is objectification? What is it to make something an object of our thought? After all, the animated wind, rain, and daylight were targets or subjects of the animist’s thought, too, in that the animist might have reflected on nature in planning how to negotiate with events with prayers, divinations, and other magical techniques. What else is needed for something to become an objectified content of thought?

Why “objectified” is pejorative

What’s needed is the asymmetry so that the subject matter becomes a mere object. “Object,” in this sense, is a pejorative word. Objectified contents are disenchanted, demystified, and drained of their seeming vitality.

Think of the objectified woman, when the sexist man stares at her body and treats her not as a person or as an end in herself, but as a desirable thing. Objectification here is belittlement, which applies to how scientific methods overcame theological and animistic personifications. The difference is only that we believe women are people, whereas nature was never a society of spirits in the first place. Animism was naïve, whereas humanism isn’t.

Still, scientific objectification encompassed not just nature but human history. Science was progressive in correcting our early habit of mentally projecting personhood onto the inhuman wilderness. But that’s not to say scientists are neutral towards their demystified subject matter. To objectify something is to treat it as a passive bearer of thoughts. Sexist men objectify women, humanistic people objectify wild animals, and scientists objectify everything in the universe that seems to have physical dimensions, including us.

Scientists do so with models, mathematical analyses, and experiments. Those tools enable scientists to understand how things work, in that those tools highlight how nature is made up of systems whose behaviour conforms to laws that force the components to play their role in an orderly, predictable fashion.

Objects are thus tricksters in that they’re animated after all; only, they’re drained of life and rights, like the objectified woman whom the sexist man might contemplate raping. As a person, a woman has rights, whereas an objectified woman is a body whose mind has been ignored, abstracted away, or demonized.

Likewise, scientists dismiss animism and the appearance of nature’s enchantment. After all, nature is full of activity, order, and thus potential life and meaning. But scientists are professionally obliged to disregard those intuitions. Animism is foolish and childish, compared to scientific objectivity. Nature is active and ordered, yes, but not alive, not brimming with inherent purpose or value. Objectified nature is amoral, indifferent, and thus devoid of rights. Models of objective facts are like blueprints of how natural systems work, which in turn are like the sexist man’s plans for having his way with the objectified woman.

What’s the difference between an objective event in nature and a human slave? Again, the latter, we assume, has an inner life that the master cruelly ignores. The human slave is a living person that’s treated like a mere object, like a tool that’s subject to the master’s designs.

An objective event like the sun’s shining or the rain’s falling has no inner life or mentality, we assume, whereas primitive people assumed the opposite. The master who owns the slave ignores a fact and abuses the enslaved person, whereas the scientist only ignores the animist’s errors and therefore can’t abuse nature. An enslaved person has rights that are being disregarded, whereas the wilderness has none.

That’s the humanist’s conviction, at least.

Objectivity in the modern mythos

But at what point exactly do scientists confirm that nature is lifeless and rightless? Only when scientists apply their methods and understand how nature’s parts work. Only by objectifying nature, by assuming methodological naturalism and taking nature to be part of a lifeless, explicable, unified order do scientists undermine their subject matter by positing its physicality.

A physical object is the ultimate slave, a passive, raw material that’s never had a sacred soul or essence. Nature first poses a question to the scientist, “What am I?” and the scientist answers by disregarding the animist’s childlike presumption, and by positing objectivity or physicality. Nature is an objective, physical domain, a realm of mostly lifeless bodies made of matter and energy, driven by forces, and governed by ghostly laws that were supplied by no divine lawgiver.

Of course, scientists will insist that while their enterprise may have begun with the degrading presumption that everything is fundamentally objective (including people, don’t forget), surely by now scientists have established that animism is false, that the natural order has no inherent rights because it consists of objects rather than subjects.

But this misconceives of animism as protoscience. The animist wasn’t positing the fact of animating spirits but enacting a human way of life. Animism is how nature feels when you treat the world as sacred. You feel as innocent as a child, as though you were at home in the wild, surrounded by millions of friends because your intentions towards the environment are humble and fair.

Similarly, science isn’t just a method of discovery, but the engine of the “modern” way of life. Scientific objectification is how the world feels when we treat it as worthless and absurd. We feel mature and jaded, masterful and power-hungry. Consequently, we’re alienated from the universe because we’re proud of how we alone are persons with rights, while we’re also shocked by the horror show of our many enemies, by the zombie events that assemble themselves into natural systems, stages, and ordered levels of being.

Our mature intentions towards nature are totalitarian rather than adorably naïve.

We mean to conquer the territory we scientifically map. We objectify nature, dividing it into parts and dissecting them in our minds and in laboratories. We ogle nature the way the sexist man ogles a woman, and we manipulate nature the way the master handles his enslaved person. Scientists quantify nature’s parts, laying bare their physicality, that is, their soulless essence as zombie bodies, as by-products of mindless atomic collisions.

Why this allusion to zombies? Because zombies, too, are perfect slaves and because their animation is as inexplicable — and horrific — as godless nature’s. The zombie shuffles on for no reason, with no inner life. Likewise, the universe evolves and complexifies with no inner will and without having been intended or planned.

Has science shown, though, that animism is false, and that nature is lifeless? Not exactly since that would enjoin the scientist to indulge in metaphysical speculation. Animism isn’t a scientific hypothesis, but a metaphysical or a theological story that might inspire us to adopt a certain lifestyle. Likewise, scientific objectification is a method that presupposes the modern, naturalistic narrative or myth.

And we know that we sophisticated secularists bow to myths, too, because of the gaping holes in our presuppositions. Even after the death of God we speak of “laws of nature.” We call these laws and the corresponding patterns in the world “brute facts,” meaning we don’t care to ponder any further how they might have come to be. The scientist’s job is done when the law and the pattern are discovered. As to the metaphysical question of why there’s something rather than nothing, that’s above (or below) the scientist’s paygrade.

Except that that protestation of scientific humility, or that backhanded compliment to philosophy and to religion is false. There are no philistines in foxholes, and all mortal life is a foxhole. Scientists, engineers, industrialists, and the consumers who flock to purchase the fruits of modern labour have their myths, too, even if they’re inclined only to presuppose them, as opposed to openly celebrating them.

One such myth, we can surmise, is that nature is the object of human thought, meaning that nature is effectively a zombie plenum, a perfect slave that’s susceptible to being improved on with civilization. We study the wilderness so we can replace it with our artificial wonderlands. There’s no divine plan that governs nature; instead, there are the social, right-giving laws that mortal minds posit, which laws we take with us wherever we go. We, then, are the godlike beings that can conquer nature, filling its monstrous form with purpose and rights.

We call that smiting of nature “progress.” And that’s one of our secular metanarratives.

Scientists socially construct objects, then, by supporting a Faustian, Luciferian attitude towards nature. The attitude isn’t based just on conservative inductions about how nature seems lifeless and pointless. We puny mammals have discovered no such grand truth. Instead, in our hubris, we posit foundational narratives, and we pretend they’re passive discoveries, as though Moses discovered God on a mountaintop, mystics discover that consciousness is everywhere, and scientists discover that all of nature is our perfect slave.

No, slaves are made rather than discovered. Scientists are pragmatic in presuming that we can maximize our utility by treating the universe as though there were no God, purpose, or rights in it — only “laws” that magically persist and that we can exploit. The laws of nature are ghostly echoes of the social rules we mean to impose. The master orders his slave, and in the absence of a deity, we mean to command nature by domesticating the wild places, by forcing the environment to serve us, as when civilization complies with our whims at the touch of a button.

Is objective truth real?

Does any of this mean there’s no such thing as objective truth? No, I’ve tried to explain, rather, what objective truth is. The objective facts are the ones that obtain when minds plot to reign over the world. Objective truth is the fuel that feeds the fire of our ascendance.

Does that mean there were no objective facts before the emergence of life? In a way, yes, there weren’t any such facts, assuming an object is that which occupies a passive role in relation to thought. After all, there were no thinkers before the emergence of life. At that time, rather, there were noumenal facts, not the ones we posit in our attempt to understand the world with our reconstructions.

Take, for instance, the formation of our solar system. A billion years before life emerged on Earth, according to a scientific model, Theia smacked into our planet and formed the Moon. Now, did that event happen? Was it an objective fact?

Yes, it happened (assuming that’s the best explanation), but it didn’t happen exactly as we understand it. That’s because the act of understanding something necessarily simplifies the facts with our concepts and expectations. The map never fully encompasses the terrain. What we call the event of the Moon’s formation was connected to everything else that was going on in the Milky Way. For instance, gravitational perturbations by Venus could have sent Theia on its collision course with Earth, which means the formation of the Moon had to include Venus. And Venus, in turn, was orbiting the Sun, and the Sun was in some alignment with the other stars in our part of the galaxy, and so on.

So, the real event that made for the Moon’s formation was much larger than the collision itself. And that’s what makes that real event noumenal as opposed to objective. Real events are always too complicated to fit into anyone’s mind, which is why we simplify them with models, stereotypes, and heuristics. The myths and agendas of objectification are just some of those simplifications, which we use to put our stamp on things.