It is now definitely time to rethink. What our fathers and grandfathers called progress is destroying our planet. Science is not an end in itself, not everything technically possible is good, not everything that is fun and satisfies our senses is meaningful. Now we hear again and again from many sides that we should concentrate on the small steps in front of us; only in this way would we move forward together. This may occasionally be right too, but it distracts from what is essential. Where do we actually want to go?
Does it make sense to fly into space and burn up our Earth in the process? Is it really a good idea to put our extremely complex biodiversity here at risk in order to search for water on a desert planet and think about how we can artificially create the most elementary conditions for life there? Why do so many believe this is meaningful?
Structures of knowledge
There are Indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with nature for millennia. The wealth of experience grows very slowly, is passed orally from one generation to the next. This oral tradition is a bottleneck. On the one hand, oral transmission requires narratives. On the other, the flow of information is limited. Knowledge dies with its bearer. Only what has been told onward and retained in memory survives. There is no substantial accumulation of knowledge. Outdated knowledge dies out and is replaced by new knowledge. There is a concentration and selection of knowledge.
In ‘advanced civilizations’, by contrast, knowledge is archived. Everything is stored in repositories of knowledge such as libraries or networks. It is accessible to very many people and allows extreme specialization. This specialization loses sight of the context. Arbitrary maxims become guiding motifs: prosperity, power, enjoyment. Knowledge is instrumentalized to serve these maxims. We call this the freedom of science. Knowledge was detached from the great narratives and liberated. We say secularized or modernized (Galileo).
Now we have this tower of accumulated knowledge. In a Babylonian confusion of tongues, we no longer know where we want to go. We break the master narrative and release micronarratives. We call this plurality or postmodern (Lyotard).
Much has been written about all this. We have produced a world that is wonderfully complex. In many places there is a shimmering tolerance, our creativity was unleashed and our mind given wings. We have technology that allows us to transform our knowledge, our communication, our bodies, space and time. It certainly makes no sense to want to turn back time. Not everything was better before.
Biological and mental repositories of knowledge
What seems important to me is the direction of the gaze. In the industrialized nations, we focus on technology. What is on the internet is real. We arrived in the hyperreal (Baudrillard) long ago. Only slowly are we (again) recognizing the complexity of biological and mental repositories of knowledge. If knowledge is stored in living ‘archives’, it is part of life. This does not mean it is always good; on the contrary, it is probably value-neutral. But it is part of a complex system. We should not, however, understand this ‘system’ cybernetically. The goal is not deciphering and imitation or simulation (biomimicry). Rather, the goal should be to reintegrate ourselves, become part of nature and consciousness again.
I do not think this has to be a step backward. I only doubt the belief in a technological singularity. The ideology of Silicon Valley that the next great step, transferring consciousness to a hard drive, integrating it into the net or hyperreality, really helps us. For the biological human being it would be more of a nightmare. The question remains, surely, why we strive for this. The dream of immortality is the engine, at its core the preservation of the Self. But precisely this illusion must be overcome. If we succeed, as part of what do we then want to understand ourselves? Computer processors, nature and/or consciousness?
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