Because science and industry do decide wars, or so it seems.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein , Culture and Value, 63
Wittgenstein hoped that science and industry would collapse, yet he feared his hope might be "nothing but a dream." I think of Wittgenstein as trying to solve the problem of culture and science by clearing up linguistic/philosophical confusions, saving humanistic culture, hoping to stave off or limit humanity's dangerous fascination with science and technology. He saw civilization as something that had been infected, sickened by science and scientific thinking, and wished to effect a cure.
I believe he is right about science having "infected" humanity, but I do not believe this infection can be reversed. Rather than getting rid of science and technology, I believe the best hope is in adapting culture to science and technology. That means that the cores of our value systems must be founded on a more rational, scientific basis. Only by doing this will culture be given the strength it needs to survive in a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. The alternative is the collapse, not of science and technology, but of culture and humanity.
2 comments:
science and traditional culture may indeed converge. a main trend in the progression of technology has been from the gargantuan formalisms of the enlightenment and the century or two after, to the design of systems which gain their wisdom once they're unleashed from human hands. once human artifacts themselves are out of the reach of our capacity for enumerative formalism, they'll blend more readily with the natural world; it is to the natural world (human and social behavior included) that traditional cultures have evolved their wisdom.
its sounds like you are basically saying that there have been new systems in which only the basic elements have been designed and which only attain their mature form when they are let out "into the wild". i.e., rational thought produces the groundwork, and the rest is up to artists and history. this is, by the way the sort of thing i have in mind for the societies a future social science would allow, but i do not see that anything like this has already been created.
to clarify matters, i'd like to know if you can provide an example or two of such systems. also: do you think these systems have real "staying power"? or, are they, as i am inclined to view matters, peculiar to a human/social environment which they themselves cannot sustain?
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