Humanity first--Science second

Humanity first—Science second

The scientific method has made MAN INTO A CIPHER. We had created a science that has become a Science; we have created a monster that can be spelled with a capital “S”. Women and men served best when they were hidden, unobserved behind the tubes and belts. Newton’s method demanded an observer who was inconspicuous and replaceable by a machine whenever possible. The laws governing the movement of the spheres where number one; humanity was the machine’s servant.

The Age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth century, began with a belief; the belief “that nature was kind and good”. After the Lisbon earthquake and resulting fire there precipitated a reexamination. While others succumbed to despair Rousseau optimistically proposed an ideal; Liberty had to be the goal of all institutions. It was to be a well-defined ideal, “a model of man”. Morality must be a human design forming “a secular map for human moral action”.

Rousseau was offering “the Science of Society something great, unprecedented—just what it needed: an ideal type of man…it was holistic, spiritual, nonreductive, descriptive, phenomenal…to describe man taken as a total thinking, feeling, free agent.” Rousseau showed that morality could be designed by woman and man in accordance to an ideal created by them. Rousseau determined that the “science of man” could have meaning only as “an active ideal-type science”.

Newtonian science left little room of such an idealistic model. It propounded a science of Science; the scientific method made man into a cipher, which served best when served lest. Rousseau pushed back; make humanity first and science second. When humanity is placed first “Existence is the thing—Man—the mass of men—Humanity; human music not the music of the spheres, that’s what interests man, the man of flesh and blood.”

The scientific method has made man into a cipher. Women and men served best when they were hidden, unobserved behind the tubes and belts. Newton’s method demanded an observer who was inconspicuous and replaceable by a machine whenever possible. The laws governing the movement of the spheres where number one; humanity was the machine’s servant.

The seventeenth century Enlightenment determined that knowledge should be controlled based upon the needs of humanity. The spirit of the age demanded a science of man that could run parallel with Newtonian science of objects. The judgment of this age was that mechanistic Science was morally unedifying. The Age of Enlightenment rediscovered the concept of alienation as it applied to women and men. Humanity became alienated from their nature by the Science of science. Subjects were deprived of their subjectivity in servitude to machines.

The Enlightenment gave us a science worthy of men and women, a subjective science, a science of human value and not a neutral science of machines. What are the greatest gifts for mankind, if not those that point the way to the maximization of liberation of human creative energies?

According to Maslow, it’s those “gifts” that first feed and clothe us.

But your point is well taken.

Though the scientific method lead us out of the flat-earth dark ages and into the enlightenment of conclusively presenting that a human being, a person, begins to live at conception implicitly complete with foundational human rights, there is a downside to idolizing even the most useful of progressively developed tools.

Freedom and security must exist in fluid dynamic balance in a healthy world.

If one, let’s say, freedom, becomes more “active” for a time, it won’t be long before our unmet need for security in equal measure is fulfilled in a sometimes drastic pendulum swing energized by the religion-like “worship” of sometimes, in compromise, the very thing which “took away” that security in the first place.

We would do well when in the midst of revolutionary discovery not to lose sight of our need for security.

That’s not to say we should censor the freedom to express “creative energies” in the name of comforting old-guard security, just as it is likewise dangerous to abandon a firm secure foundation on the whim of a new idea.

It’s that, when in the process of epistemolgoical discovery, we would be better served to remember that ontology is rightly the foundation of our grasp of reality, no matter what new knowledge may be waiting for our kind to learn.

Security is of great concern for all of us and the twentieth century plus the start of the twenty first century certainly should make us all aware that we have a serious problem and that problem is that we have yet to learn how to live together on this ever smaller planet.

The wars of the last century are devastating to examine and the wars already in this century promise no rest. We destroy it as soon as we build it. These wars are great for industry, at least that industry not in the range of the “Guns of August”.