Roundtable 2005  Larry Rasmussen

ECUMENICAL ROUNDTABLE ON SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & FAITH – Friday, April 8.

         I warn you that our topic is hardly light calorie fare for after-dinner listening.  It may the intellectual equivalent of New York killer cheese cake.  Yet almost no one in either science or Christian ethics is asking what happens when venture science joins venture capitalism, despite the fact that almost everything about the actual practice is at stake here.

         Please note: I will not be talking about scientific method—formulating and testing hypotheses rigorously through planned experiments or extensive field observation.  I won’t be talking about the character of scientists, either.  I assume scientists run the same spectrum of strange and wonderful types, with the same range of foibles and virtues, as other homo sapien tribes.  They perform about the same as theologians or lumberjacks in balancing the checkbook, keeping their word, making others happy, and filing their taxes by the 15th. 

         So if science as method is not the subject, and if the character of individual scientists is not the subject, either, what is it?  It is the embeddedness of science and technology in the institutions and systems that forge the way we live.  More specifically, the subject is the place of science in the political economy that reigns. 

         We begin with an ad in The New York Times.  I will exegete it.  Then I will relate science and “modernity” to its successor, science and “eco-modernity.”  We will then return to the ad and draw some conclusions.

On June 2, 1998, New York’s American Museum of Natural History opened its new Hall of Biodiversity.  A full-page ad appeared that day in The New York Times.  It displays an eye-catching selection of flora and fauna from around the world.  Running across the top in large letters is the sentence: “We believe in equal opportunity regardless of race, creed, gender, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, or species.”  The creatures then tumble down the page, followed by somewhat smaller-lettered text: “All life is interconnected.  So without a supporting cast of millions of species, human survival is far from guaranteed.  This variety and interdependence of species is what’s called biodiversity.  And it matters to Monsanto in particular.  Our business depends on making discoveries in the world of genetic information.  Information that is lost forever when a species becomes extinct.  Information that offers solutions in agriculture, nutrition, and medicine never before thought possible.  For a population that’s growing.  On a planet that’s not.”  The logo—a growing plant—then appears next to the name and trademark: Monsanto: Food Health Hope.  The last line is: “Monsanto is honored to be a sponsor of the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History.  www.monsanto.com.” 

This ad is unthinkable apart from recent sciences and their impact, genetics, ecology and computing sciences, especially.  Its thought-world appears to be holistic thinking, succinctly put and based in good science.  The awareness of complex, living interdependence seems central.  At the outset the ad even strikes a notion of egalitarian bio-democracy worthy of St. Francis.  But by the bottom of the page we are keeping company with the soft utopianism and secular promise-and-fulfillment theology of so much biotechnology: “Monsanto: Food Health Hope” and “solutions in agriculture, nutrition, and medicine never before thought possible.”  (The slogan of a rival, ADM, is in the same vein: “The nature of things to come.”)  We are also keeping company with human subjectivism in ethics.  That is, this moral universe not only assumes that human beings are the sole moral arbiters; it assumes that in the end the only actions that matter are the ones affecting human beings.  No court of appeal beyond the human subject exists.  And by the very bottom, right hand corner of the page, we have placed good science and a viable way of life (“Food, Health, Hope”) firmly in the hands of global eco-modern business.  This is no longer “modernity” and its dualism, since long-standing boundaries of mind and matter, human culture and resistant nature, and sharp distinctions of humans from other creatures, have been erased in favor of “equal opportunity regardless of race…phylum…class…genus, or species” in a world where “[a]ll life is interconnected.”  Yet the actual practice of science and technology features human mind and culture as the creators, controllers, and high-tech bio-cowboys who work ecosystems and genomes as they would their ranchlands.  These creatures are generic, not particular.  They are not even truly creatures, as biological individuals; they are, categorically, and simply, “information” and “resources.”  Humans are thereby re-centered as masters without qualification, despite webbed interdependence, and ecology, molecular biology, genetics, and evolution itself find themselves, as practiced science, in the employ of a morality that views “all things bright and beautiful,” “all creatures great and small,” even “all things wise and wonderful,” as information, resources, and property, as capital pure and simple.  So in only one striking page, what begins as a confession of bio-democracy ends as (indispensable) user-friendly exploitation that promises, yet one more time, to do good by doing well, for profit and without (human) compromise and sacrifice.

To say it differently: genetics as a science may render us kin to roundworms, to say nothing of giraffes and bonobos.  Ecology may map in gratifying detail the awesome webbing of life.  And Evolution with a capital “E” may present a dynamic universe still on its pilgrim way, with us a stupendous expression of it, even if only a wink in its regime of time.  Yet these sciences are captured by capitalism for an ethic that retains modernity’s hubris as that is married to entrepreneurial courage and engineering confidence.  Life is still chiefly a production, management and security problem, subject to technological remedies based in rigorous science and the wizardry of the market.  Life is not a species problem, or a problem of the human soul or spirit, or a matter of evil and injustice and things going wildly awry on a regular basis by incremental means. 

But let’s dive into the details by relating “modernity” and “ecomodernity.”  I will draw from Aiden Davison in Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability and add my own remarks about Christian thought and practice.

Modernity/Ecomodernity

Modernity’s project, says Davison, has been the same since its inception: to organize nature itself as raw material for the technological production of human well-being.  Modern science and technology are rooted in this mission.  Eco-modernity continues this transformation and management of nature for human benefit on the terms of commerce and a technocratic agenda.  But now biological life systems themselves are among the objects of direct management and change.  Is modernity thereby revolutionized by ecology, genetics, and computing sciences? Many say “yes, emphatically”; Davison says “no, emphatically.”  He makes his case by discussing four elements: dualism, anthropocentrism, subjectivism, and productivism.  I take each in turn.

Dualism.  Dualism, though a strong mark of modernity, harkens back to Plato’s impact on Occidental thought. 

Western Christianity and ethics imbibed Platonic dualism, then neo-Platonic dualism, with millennial staying power.  Not least because of St. Augustine’s neo-Platonism, (354-430 C.E.), much of Western Christianity’s spiritual quest became the neo-Platonic pilgrim journey of the rational soul scaling the cosmic ladder in a life of ascetic ascent.  The more Christians journeyed upward toward union with God as Pure Mind and Spirit, the more Earth, corrupting nature, and bonds of materiality were left behind.[i]  Here a religious cosmology that thought itself accurate as a scientific cosmology as well articulated reality as a “Great Chain of Being.”[ii]  Great Chain of Being metaphysics yielded an ethic and way of life both dualistic and hierarchical, as we shall note later.  For now we continue to discuss dualism in the terms of Davison’s second trait; namely, subjectivism.

Subjectivism.  The most powerful dualism of all for the modern world was not Plato’s, however, but Descartes’.  This dualism emerged in the 17^th c., coincident with the emergence of modern science.  Rene Descartes neatly cleft the world “out there” from the mind “within,” and with that cleavage modernity’s subjectivism was born.  The gist of it is the Enlightenment’s fabled turn to the human subject as the only solid center of both knowing and knowledge. Yet Cartesian dualism is about valuing as well as knowing.  Thus Descartes’ thought experiment was crucial for both science and ethics.  His experiment was to doubt all things possible except the thinking “I” and then build up all knowing and ordering from there.  Descartes could hardly have imagined what a momentous change this was.  I will summarize it this way: from the 17^th c. onward, a Western culture that had considered meaning and purpose to be written into the order of nature and the cosmos by an awesome and incarnate God now assumed that the meaning and end of all nature has its effective value in the rational will and active agency of autonomous and sovereign humanity.  This is the essence of the secular modernity that has reigned in science; and, I hasten to add, in capitalist political economy and its varied theories and practices. 

In short, the essence of humanity is consciousness and mind; this essence radically distinguishes us from [the rest of] nature; the rest of nature is now “object” to us, rather than “subject”; and our relationship to this nature is in the manner of subject-over-object and mind-over-matter in an economic order that assumes nature is slave to humanity as steward and master.  Such is the notion of stewardship that reigns in biotechnology joined to commerce and driven by markets, as reflected in the Mansanto ad. 

Anthropocentrism. Davison continues his analysis with the next element—anthropocentrism.  The anthropocentrism of ecomodernity is as complex as ecomodernity itself, in part because of a subtle relationship to Western Christian ethics.  We must supplement Davison’s discussion with two others: patterns of superiority and inferiority in ethics and metaphysics, and the challenge of modern science. 

Superiority and inferiority.  Modernity’s mind-over-matter, subject-over-object relationship, with humans seemingly a species apart, drew from deep-running currents in Christian cosmology and ethics.  Christian sources fostered the anthropocentrism of species pride; and they rarely, if ever, called this particular form of pride sin.  Christians fostered this pride with a millennial emphasis on human uniqueness and favor.  Never mind that after that initial account in Genesis, the Hebrew Bible offers scant evidence that imago dei (“the image of God”)  plays any major role at all in subsequent biblical articulations of human being and human ways.  In the New Testament writings the only reference to imago dei is Paul’s; but it is to Jesus Christ as the image of God, not to humankind as an elect species.  Nonetheless, divinely-created high standing came to have extraordinary influence in Christian ethics and Western culture, including secularized culture.  Granted, much of it was meant to undergird sober moral responsibility on the part of stewards faithfully living out their place of honor in the cosmic chain.  But whether in sober stewardly fashion or not, imago dei status merged with the subject/object split-off of the human from the rest of nature.  And it did so in such a way that non-human creation is always lodged “below,” not only as the created hierarchy of nature in the Great Chain of Being, but as value or worth.  To label someone or something a “low life” is the ultimate put down.

To round out the power of these patterns of superiority and inferiority for the making of modernity, Western Christian cosmology and morality needed only sanction social orders in keeping with this hierarchy.   That it did on a global scale, in the Age of Discovery when, from the 15^th c. C. E. onward, European sailors learned to master the wind and water currents of the great oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific.  This meant European contact with peoples, religions, cultures, flora and fauna across the planet.  Sometimes that contact was on mutually beneficial terms.  More often the cruel side of conquest and colonization, commerce, Christianity and “civilization” as a package, was the result.  For Christian participation, important baselines were laid down as early as Constantine and Theodosius in the 4^th c. C. E.  Add to the Age of Discovery the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and the outcome is that neo-European settlements and systems would reign more than any other, and would transform lands and peoples together, nature and culture alike and both at once.  In passing, we should note that this global neo-Europeanizing of culture and nature together was served by the most learned European and expatriate minds of the day, including the best scientific minds.  The transformation of the planet in neo-European ways was thus accomplished with a confidence that can only be explained by the grip of these imperial chain-of-being cosmologies on the minds of scientists and philosophers, sailors, theologians, preachers, teachers, and merchants alike.   Men of science and religion (and they were men) might war with one another at home, but in matters of empire, they made common cause.

The challenge of modern science.  By now it will have occurred to most readers that ecology, genetics, astronomy, and evolutionary sciences challenge the anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism that typify modernity and that retain a steady beat in much Christian piety and ethics. They likewise challenge religiously sanctioned human alienation from the only home we have ever known and the only place we are fine-tuned to live.  These sciences are utterly clear in ways Christianity has not always been; we are, they assert without qualification, creatures of evolution and of Earth.  “Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe,” to cite The Earth Charter, which then goes on to speak of uniqueness.  It is not, however, the sort of uniqueness to which we grown accustomed; namely, our own as a species.  Rather, “[e]arth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life.” (Earth Charter, Preamble)

It would seem then that these sciences challenge much of inherited Christianity.  It would likewise seem that they challenge secular modernity and its ways, including its anthropocentrism.  But do they?  That brings us to Davison’s fourth element, productivism.  

Productivism.  Cartesian/Enlightenment mind-over-matter, subject-over-object relationships with the rest of nature took on a strongly Promethean character in the modern world.  Prometheus’s gift of fire, now in the hands of post-Enlightenment sovereign humanity (the hands of European and neo-European men, in real terms), symbolized the energy and drive of a new political economy and a new social class—Europe’s rising bourgeoisie.  This was the force that, with help from the zeal and ethic of newborn Protestantism, on the one hand, and the devastation of the Plague, on the other, sent feudalism off to dig its own grave and crawl in.  The new political economy would eventually acquire a name of its own—“capitalism.”  The point here, however, is that “productivism” meant, and still means, the domination of political economic life over the rest of life, whether as the mercantilism and trade of conquest and colonization, the later industrialism of neo-European societies newly in place around the globe, or, presently, political economic globalization as a force affecting all countries internally and externally, West, East, North, South.   Modernity’s master image may always have been mastery itself, as the organization of nature (and subjugated cultures) for human well-being (some humans far more than others, to be sure).  But nothing so served the creation of a world in our design as this Promethean economic spirit and the ways in which it effectively channeled other forces—science, technology, religion and culture.  And yes, morality and ethics, too, since for modernity the good life is the life of goods for a world of our own making.

But we must conclude.  Davison argues that the chief qualities of modernity—its dualism, anthropocentrism, subjectivism, and narrow-gauge utilitarian productivism—have become ecomodernity’s as well.

It need not have been so.  Science as taught by the heirs of Darwin, Mendel and Haeckel embed humans firmly in nature as an extraordinary expression of it.  Moral and spiritual qualities such as humility and awe, mystery, reverence, and gratitude could be nurtured in the process of cultivating just such consciousness.  Empathy might also be a mark, as well as shared responsibility.  Scientists themselves sometimes talk this way, effectively promoting virtues as these.  Some of them, as individual scientists, also embody these virtues in remarkable and moving degree.  (I am thinking of such as Ursula Goodenough in The Sacred Depths of Nature.)  Yet these values and virtues and their cosmology and consciousness never triumph.  Why?  Because ecology, genetics and evolution, as practiced science, are embedded in, and belong to, capitalist institutional arrangements.  Here, where entrepreneurs, engineers, bankers, patent lawyers, investors, and share holders hold as much sway as sages and scientists and work with them as players together in the “productivist” system, value resides in human ascription, labor and investment.  Plants are just weeds until they serve human purposes, minerals are just rocks, water is H20 as a commodity.  Biodiversity may have esthetic and even religious appeal, but its “real” usefulness and value belong to agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and the exploding frontiers of biotechnology.  Science is thus merged with market capitalism as a way of life in which commerce essentially co-opts nature to do the bidding of particular interests.  Thus does science end up serving short-term utility rather than embedding us more profoundly in nature and the grand scheme of things (“a vast evolving universe” and Earth’s “unique community of life,” to recall the Earth Charter). 

So it is that the language of ecology and genetics is taken up everywhere and even serves as metaphors for viewing self, society, and nature (“web of life,” “tree of life”) at the same time that nature outside us is absorbed, for all practical purposes, into modern subjectivism and nature’s life systems become valuable as part of our life system.  “Natural capital” simply joins other capital, including human capital, in the stream of investments and benefits.  Such is the slave status of nature I voiced earlier, only now it belongs to ecomodernity.   Slaves are indispensable, to be certain.  We cannot live without them.  But they can be replaced by other slaves.

So I return to the full-page ad in The New York Times on the day New York’s American Museum of Natural History opened its new Hall of Biodiversity.  Recall the text, but now in light of Davison’s analysis.  “We believe in equal opportunity regardless of race, creed, gender, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, or species.” “All life is interconnected.  So without a supporting cast of millions of species, human survival is far from guaranteed.  This variety and interdependence of species is what’s called biodiversity.  And it matters to Monsanto in particular.  Our business depends on making discoveries in the world of genetic information.  Information that is lost forever when a species becomes extinct.  Information that offers solutions in agriculture, nutrition, and medicine never before thought possible.  For a population that’s growing.  On a planet that’s not.”  “Monsanto: Food Health Hope.”  “Monsanto is honored to be a sponsor of the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History.  www.monsanto.com.” 

In the end, then, ecomodernity is a technical upgrade of modernity’s ethic of domination of nature-culture as a complex but single reality driven largely by market forces, with science very largely up for sale, from intitial research funding to final product.  Does it come as a surprise, then, that Food Health Hope Monsanto finds itself entangled in a nasty case of environmental racism in the poor and heavily African-American community of Anniston, Alabama, where it flushed tens of thousands of pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek each year over nearly four decades and millions of pounds more into a nearby landfill? (The New York Times 27 January: 20)  Or does Donna Haraway’s list of moral troublepoints surprise?  While her discussion is aimed specifically at biotechnology linked to economic globalization, it easily adapts to ecomodernism more broadly.  The troublepoints are these: “increasing capital concentration and the monopolization of the means of life, reproduction, and labor; appropriation of the commons of biological inheritance as the private preserve of corporations; the global deepening of inequality by region, nation, race, gender, and class; erosion of indigenous peoples’ self-determination and sovereignty in regions designated as biodiverse while indigenous lands and bodies become the object of intense gene prospecting and proprietary development; inadequately assessed and potentially dire environmental and health consequences; misplaced priorities for technoscientific investment funds; propagation of distorted and simplistic scientific explanations, such as genetic determinism; intensified cruelty to and clear domination over animals; depletion of biodiversity; and the undermining of established practices of human and nonhuman life, culture, and production without engaging those most affected in democratic decision-making.” (Haraway 1997, 60-61)

This brings our discussion to a close.  Recent science and its practice make biological life systems themselves subservient to human systems.  More precisely, they are subservient to the way(s) of life of the human “haves” who most shape these arrangements and most benefit from them in the kind of corporate political economy that rules.  And that means that good science (as sound use of scientific method), and good scientists (as conscientious scientists highly aware of their responsibilities as good citizens), do not and cannot, on these terms--namely, as method and personal character--address the root problem.  The problem is systemic.  It is the embedded nature of the practice of science in an unjust political economy.  The problem is thus fundamentally moral, even religious, just as it is fundamentally structural.  It is a problem worthy of the prophets.  Yet hardly any raise their voice, even though deep religious traditions stand at the ready: asceticism, sacramentalism, mysticism, and prophetic-liberative practices.  I hope the Ecumenical Roundtable on Science, Technology and Faith might raise its voice.