Technological
progress is like an ax in the hands of a pathological criminal.
…….Albert
Einstein
"It
is for the painters to find something new"
……Niels
Bohr
Conquest,
control and domination have been an underlying theme that has propelled
Eurasian civilization from its inception in the Athenian polis. These motives
were concerted against a nature perceived as inimical to the human. The first
objective was to liberate humans from the physical limits imposed by nature.
Science, to the ancients and for two millenia thereafter, was simply the
disinterested objective consideration of nature. Its application to technology
would come later, when empirical method reinforced theoretical invention. But
the course, and motive, was first set by art; an art of scrupulous description
altered only by an idealized beauty and a corresponding ambition toward
imagined perfection. Realism in art, of whatever stripe, is a celebration of
control; it is the use of technique to imitate nature with the implicit promise
that what can be physically understood and imitated can also be controlled and
altered.
From the
17th century to our own era, descriptive realism in art as prophecy became
self-fulfilling in technology. The reaction against classical realism beginning
with the Impressionists would presage the transition from a Newtonian physics
to the present of relativity and quanta. In the mind of most though, in science
and art as well as in popular conception, the reflex of pre-Newtonian mechanism
and descriptive art (not to mention the "hostile universe" syndrome)
still holds sway by inherited instinct.
But the
achievements of science and technology overwhelmed any claims made by other
fields -including art. Dominion over nature was achieved, though few noticed
that the ten to fifteen hours of survival work typical of hunter-gatherers had
extended to seventy-two and the egalitarian tribe had become a hierarchy of
kleptocracy. Now we begin to see that fabled "dominion "as another
kind of wishful thinking. The painting is showing craquelure and it extends to
the very supports.
As a
knowledge-system science has made possible a great many physical benefits, as a
belief-system or a proto-religion, it has brought a level of threat and
destruction previously inconceivable. Certainly no religion or aggregate of
religions were able to give us the power to end the very existence of life on
the planet. We are now faced with the ironic realization that we must use
technology and science to counteract the effects of technology and science. We
wait for some monolithic Science to tell us what to do. But science is not a
monolith, it is not even a co-ordinated whole. There are hundreds of
sub-disciplines under its tent, each with itw own specialized concerns and
language. They cannot even communicate with each other, let alone present a
view of the whole. Waiting for a single vision is like hoping for a consensus
in Esperanto from the Tower of Babel. This does not diminish what science
offers, it just throws the responsibility back where it belongs—in our lap. The
sciences can give us reliable information about their findings but what is done
with these remains with the choices we make based on our vision of life as a
whole system.
Scientists
often speak of their emotional response to discovery in terms like wonder and
awe. But we should keep in mind that then they are speaking from the affective
poetic side of their own humanity. Some of the most movingly evocative essays
have been written by scientists like Freeman Dyson and Loren Eisley. They
should be taken as inspiration for artists in every medium. Still we must
remember that the source for these reflections is nature, not the scientific
formulations in themselves, which are only descriptive and conceptual
approximations. Guaged only according to the demands of science the most
efficient researcher and recipient of every Nobel prize might be a powerful
analytical machine: no living tissue or felt experience required-except for the
desire that programs it in the first place, without which nothing would happen
at all.
Inheriting
a world-view that set humans apart and above, Descartes took it further. Humans
were not only separate (having "mind" and "soul") but
everything else was mindless mechanism. Today we might see this as psychopathic
but the Enlightenment ran with it. Until today, when we can be viewed by some
as mindless machines ourselves. Certainly, this is appropriate for science in
its brief to study only physical interaction. Although scientists, as human
beings, tended not to apply physicality as a final description, our society
adopted it more and more. Thinking of the world as a thing to be used led to
thinking of ourselves as things programmable for use. Science promised the
"whole world" while reassuring us that we had no soul to lose. The
decay of this project now can be recognized in the failure of the machine
analogy itself. It works, but means nothing.
The most
incisive criticism of the mechanistic view comes, quite inadvertently, from one
of its most devoted adherents, the physicist Steven Weinberg, who offered,
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems
pointless." If the universe is only a spinning machine with no product,
it is surely pointless. This statement though, is not science as such, it is a
philosophical conclusion inevitably derived from a mechanical metaphysic and
it marks the collapse of that world-view as well. Yet there is an alternative
view from a physicist every bit as credible in science as Weinberg’s, offered
by Dyson, who observes the living mind operating on all levels of the universe
from the quark to the cosmos.
The human
mind will always insist on a structure of meaning-there can be no such thing as
a "post-metaphysical culture" because the end of one metaphysic is
always followed by the rise of another. Even nihilism is a metaphysic. The
search then is for an interpretation, a metaphysic, that allows for the most
creative order within the greatest diversity-something nature does well. If we
inevitably adopt a metaphysic but it cannot be proved beyond doubt, why should
we choose one that fails to enhance our experience of life and that of others
as well?
From an
outside, objective, view we can all be described causally as machines-
producing a painting can be considered as a step-by-step sequence of events
leading to a result with no need to posit a mind, invisible to the viewer
directing it. It was Warhol’s explicit wish to be a machine— do we accept that
he succeeded? Still, it is because we objectively resemble the painter and
are subjectively aware of our own mind that we give the painter the benefit of
the doubt by assuming that she or he has one. Furthermore, there is no good
reason to confine that assumption just to what resembles us. One day we may
meet (or make) something very different and hope it doesn’t think of us as a
raw material or a toy.
In the
West we’ve gone through two stages so far. First, the world as a machine run by
an external puppet-master. Then, the first revolution, where the puppet-master
was dethroned and the chimp in the lab-coat took over the machine. Our
originating Western myth isolated us from the universe and nature but our
revolution just carried this to its end and cast it in concrete- we ignored
both the suggestion of intuition and the wider range of reason, making power
and self-absorption our metaphysic. Now we wonder why it is insufficient. Our
isolation has rendered us, not the universe, pointless. We begin to ask the
question; "what if it’s not a machine?" This may be the beginning of the
second revolution.
What does
art bring to the discussion? Art creates models of experience that act on the
whole mind, including imagination and feeling as well as reason. It can
stimulate us to explore the unfamiliar as well as remind us of the familiar we
value. Experience is felt as an end-result rather than just a means to
something else. Art affects the mind directly through perception, its sensory
stimulus creates a response similar to one we have in the life-world but not
confined to a literal action in that world. Our response to a visual work is
not limited to the effect of photons hitting our retina. A work of art may
encourage us to take a whole range of actions (or none)but it does not
physically compel anything at all. Even the most effective advertisement
doesn’t actually push anyone into a store. A drawing is no more than marks on a
piece of paper but it can evoke a whole range of experience well beyond its
literal nature. A picture of an elephant is not an animal but we respond almost
as if it were-and without getting trampled in the bargain. A movie, itself
nothing but photographic film, can propel us into the urgency and misery of
war without killing or being killed. Some paintings have done this without
even the expense of actors and sets.
Although
art has no physical function its psychological affect may be profound. Simply
put, art provides the value of experience without the collateral damage of
consequence. Does this mean art is separate from and irrelevant to life? Quite
the opposite; it may teach us how to appreciate the world without having to
turn it into a cog in our machine.
Another
part of the appreciative response encouraged by art brings a certain distance
from our experiences in life- those we either take too much for granted or
summarize by some conventional reaction. This "distancing" of art can
help us both evaluate and appreciate without the knee-jerk reaction of the
ordinary and centric self. In this way art allows our reason to join emotion
and train our ability to evaluate intuitively.
Surely art
will not be guided longer by the puerile fantasies of literary theory that held
reality to be captive of text. Science may have borders to its view but they
are not either so ludicrous or strained. We have had decades of mainstream art
celebrating the mindless slavery of production and consumption regarded with
the slave’s blank indifference. This was jarred only by the raw sensation that
prods instinctual reflex, which all together sum to no more than a nihilist impotence
that feeds the greed of dominion. These are the values that are killing us.
Will the
"painters find something new "? The study of dissipative systems
shows us the arrow of time goes one way. We can change. But we can’t go back.
We wake to the smell of coffee burning but is there time to get to the switch?
Sources:
Jared
Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Antonio
Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens
Mary
Midgley, Evolution as a Religion
Elisabet
Sahtouris, Earthdance, Living Systems in Evolution
Lynn
Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible; Art, Science and the Spiritual
George
Johnson, Fire in the Mind
Christian
DeQuincey, Radical Nature
Richard
Feynman, The Value of Science
Christian
de Duve, Life Evolving
Jean-Pierre
Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think?
David
Gelernter, Machine Beauty
Hans
Moravec, Robot
Richard
Taylor, The Visual Complexity of Pollock’s Dripped Fractals
Robin
Hogarth, The Advantages and Disadvantages of Analytic and Intuitive Thought
Richard
Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons ( NYTimes Book Review. 1/9/97 |
