Comments on: Thesis #23: Civilization has no monopoly on knowledge.

By: Jason Godesky

Jason Godesky — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:29:48 +0000

As jhereg mentions, the Enlightenment was reactionary in that it was a reaction. The problem with reactionary movements is that they’re so concerned with correcting the problems they’re reacting to that they’re prone to overcorrection. As argued in the article, while valuable, science is neither the only nor necessarily the best way of knowing, as the Enlightenment contends. It’s worth noting that when making this argument, Enlightenment authors didn’t prove the value of science scientifically (as speedbird pointed out, that’s impossible), but instead adopt the language of preachers and evangelists, because the unthinking, absolutist rhetoric that has surrounded science since the Enlightenment isn’t science. It’s really quite unscientific; it is, in fact, simply a profession of epistemological faith.

By: jhereg

jhereg — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:48:16 +0000

Hmmm, I believe Jason does mean reactionary in terms of a “reaction”.

The Enlightenment brought the world a straw man argument that has confused the world ever since: Faith vs Reason. Reason wins that match easily.

And I don’t think it told us to “hold all beliefs up to rational scrutiny” (that’s a severe ethnocentricity), so much as “reductionist thinking is supreme in all ways to integrative thinking”. It seems that in the last few decades, we’ve started to realize the fallacies in that stance.

my 2 cents, take it or leave it….

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:24:35 +0000

I think you go too far and are inaccurate in characterising the enlightenment as “reactionary”, if by reactionary is meant an attempt to “turn back the clock” and not merely, as is often stated, a “reaction” to a prevailing ideology. It is true that the Enlightenment was a response to the domnance of the Church at the time and was deeply inspired by the scientific revolution which promised another route to knowledge. It is also true that enlightenment thinkers cast as “superstition” all that had gone on before western science, including all “primitive” thought. But at the same time, they promoted the crucially important point that all belief must be subject to rational scrutiny, a belief which is apparently shared by you since you also provide empirical and rational grounds for your ideas. We don’t need to throw enlightenment thought completely out the window because of the excesses and limitations of some of their thinkers and I think it is positively dangerous to advocate a total rejection of enlightenment ideals in a time such as ours, in which the voice of reason is being increasingly drowned out (again) by religious extremisms both at home and elsewhere.
professorfunky@hotmail.com

By: The Anthropik Network » Thesis #27: Collapse increases quality of life.

The Anthropik Network » Thesis #27: Collapse increases quality of life. — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:56:46 +0000

[…] Now that we can see that civilization did not give us medicine (see thesis #22), or knowledge (see thesis #23), or art (see thesis #24)–but it does give us illness (see thesis #21), makes our lives […]

By: “The Savages are Truly Noble” (The Anthropik Network)

“The Savages are Truly Noble” (The Anthropik Network) — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:28:15 +0000

[…] The myth of progress is one far more deserving of our scorn. Where is the evidence for it? Our medicine,50 our knowledge,51 nor even our art52 can truly be said to have advanced beyond what it was 10,000 years ago. Yet for this way of life we suffer an inferior quality of life, even by our own skewed standards.53 […]

By: Basic Primtivism Refresher (The Anthropik Network)

Basic Primtivism Refresher (The Anthropik Network) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:53:02 +0000

[…] What is the “baby” we should be careful to not throw out here? Is it art? Medicine? These are universals, shared by all human cultures. As I argued in thesis #22, Western medicine is simply our own ethnomedicine. We, like the people of any culture, believe our medicine to be the most effective and all others to be mere superstition, but this is mere ethnocentrism. The simple fact of the matter is that a shaman in the jungles of Peru has the same sort of success rate with his patients as a modern doctor in a good hospital. In thesis #24 I discussed the profundity of “primitive” art, easily on par with our own. For example, though unwritten, Pygmy songs have for millennia maintained a polyphonic complexity that Europe was unable to rival until the 14th century. Or is it knowledge? Surely, civilization has given us knowledge we would not otherwise have…? Again, not really; in thesis #23, I touched on some of the immense indigenous knowledge we dispensed with at the beginning of the civilized project. We’ve gradually worked our way back to about where we started, so the whole thing’s something of a wash. Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom is the type of book I’d think Pop Occulture readers could appreciate, though I personally prefer David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous. […]

By: The Anthropik Network » Writing, Language & Thought

The Anthropik Network » Writing, Language & Thought — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:40:38 +0000

[…] The essential problem E-Prime tries (often clumsily) to address is the static nature implied by normal English usage. We imply that “redness” is an objective fact about the coat, when in fact it is only a subjective matter of our perception of the coat. This is, I think, a problem that English has inherited from literacy. Written words are written as they are. They do not change. There is a static nature to them, thus suggesting a static nature to the thoughts they express. Literacy leads us to believe that there is a static, unchanging element to the world. Even when we begin to understand that most things in reality are in relatively constant flux, literate peoples often have a difficult time internalizing this idea, or understanding it except on an intellectual level. Literate people talk about “stability” and “closure” as basic psychological needs, with the assumption that such things are possible—an assumption built on the premise that there are static elements to reality. Orality, on the other hand, breeds precisely the opposite prejuidice. No telling is precisely the same as the other. Information is always recieved in a social context. Each telling is simultaneously (1) a communal expression formed by all the previous speakers who have left their mark on the information, and (2) an individual expression of the particular speaker, adding his own mark to it. This constant telling and retelling not only encourages oral peoples to see beyond particulars to underlying patterns, and attempt to unify knowledge (consilience), rather than to break it down with discernment and reductionism. The cost might be science as we know it, but certainly not knowledge.11 The reward is another way of knowing that treats us like humans rather than computers, with the adaptive effect that its accomplishments often seem, to us, nigh miraculous.12 […]

By: The Failure of Reductionism » The Anthropik Network

The Failure of Reductionism » The Anthropik Network — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 14:22:11 +0000

[…] More often here, you’ll find us using systems thinking. Complexity theory and chaos theory are the favorites of E.O. Wilson. Beyond those, there are realms that are entirely non-scientific: intuitive thinking, mythological thinking, metaphorical thinking, et cetera ad infinitum. In thesis #23, we discussed many of the non-scientific ways of knowing that existed long before civilization. […]

By: speedbird

speedbird — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:35:49 +0000

“I can cite you several examples of top-notch “scientists” crediting breakthroughs in some of their discoveries to dreams or hunches or intuition that they then followed up scientifically”

Yes indeedy. I contend that ALL good science comes from a place scientists don’t like to talk about. Science is subordinate to a greater phenomenon. Where do hypotheses come from, for example?

It’s good to remember where the scientific method itself came from: Decartes came up with it one day in a fevered vision. Having crawled into an oven to get warm, he fell asleep and dreamed of angels.

My whole approach to science, as a professional scientist, changed the day I realised that you can’t prove the validity of scientific method - because to do so, you’d have to assume the validity of scientific method, and that would be self-defeating.

By: Gary Ewell

Gary Ewell — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 21:23:57 +0000

Another recent data point about the limitations and successes of science and technology

20 January 2006

Ancient lakes of the Sahara
The Sahara has not always been the arid, inhospitable place that it is today – it was once a savannah teeming with life, according to researchers at the Universities of Reading and Leicester. Eight years of studies in the Libyan desert area of Fazzan have revealed swings in its climate that have caused considerably wetter periods, lasting for thousands of years, when the desert turned to savannah and lakes provided water for people and animals. This, in turn, has given us vital clues about the history of humans in the area and how these ancient inhabitants coped with climate change as the land began to dry up around them again.
In their article ‘Ancient lakes of the Sahara’, which appears in the January-February issue of American Scientist magazine, Dr Kevin White of the University of Reading and Professor David Mattingly of the University of Leicester explain how they used satellite technology and archaeological evidence to reveal new clues about both the past environment of the Sahara and of human prehistory in the area. “The climate of the Sahara has been highly variable over the millennia and we have been able to provide much more specific dating of these changes,” said Dr White. “Over the last 10,000 years, there have been two distinct humid phases, separated by an interval of highly variable but generally drying conditions between roughly 8,000 and 7,000 years ago. Another drying trend took place after about 5,000 years ago, leading to today’s parched environment.”
The researchers determined where surface water was once present by using radar images of the desert taken from space. “This information was essential because archaeologists need to focus their efforts near ancient rivers, lakes and springs, where people used to congregate due to their basic need for water,” said Dr White. “We found large quantities of stone tools around the ancient water sources, indicating at least two separate phases of human occupation.”
The earliest humans in the area were Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, who lived in the Fazzan between about 400,000 and 70,000 years ago. A prolonged arid phase from about 70,000 to 12,000 years ago apparently drove humans out of the region, but then the rains returned – along with the people. Around 5,000 years ago the climate began to dry out again, but this time people adapted by developing an agricultural civilization with towns and villages based around oases. This process culminated with the emergence of the Garamantian society in the first millennium BCE.
Professor Mattingly said: “We have been given a completely new view of this elusive and remarkable society. The Garamantes were known to the ancient Romans as a race of desert warriors, but archaeology has shown they had agriculture, cities and a phenomenally advanced system of water extraction that kept their civilisation going for 1,000 years as the land was drying up around them.” They cultivated a variety of high-grade cereals, such as wheat and barley, and other crops such as date palms, vines, olives, cotton, vegetables and pulses. As the Saharan climate began to dry out they drew their water from a large subterranean aquifer (an underground bed of rock that yields water) and transported it through a network of tunnels.
“The gradual drying up of springs and dessication of the surrounding landscape must have seemed ominous, but the Garamantes knew they had to develop sophisticated methods to cope with it. But even this remarkably adaptable society – one of the first urban civilisations built in a desert – could not cope forever with a falling water table and intensifying aridity. Sometime around 500 CE, the Garamantian society collapsed and their irrigation system fell into disuse,” Professor Mattingly said.

Source: Innovations report (19 January 2006)

http://www.stonepages.com/news/archives/001714.html