The old heresy of our age
Science is now not a theory of knowledge acquisition, it is now a monolithic prophet that knows all and determines truth.
There are no new heresies. The old heresy of our age is social darwinism, that insidious belief that there is no morality and that what is taken by force is all that there is.
Eugenics is back in fashion, dressed as it was before in science and ‘rationalism’. To oppose it, it is maliciously implied, is to oppose the pursuit of knowledge itself. Science is now not a theory of knowledge acquisition, it is now a monolithic prophet that knows all and determines truth.
It is put to work on every aspect of our lives: how we think, how we feel, where we are and why. All facets of our personalities are now a symptom and we are encouraged endlessly to psychoanalyse ourselves to figure why we took some action over another, why we did this or that or the other. As we psychoanalyse ourselves, or pay a snake oil salesman to do it for us, we deny the own reality of our free will and we reduce ourselves to biologically determined beings that exist only to climb ‘hierarchies’.
With individualism run amok, we are now all encouraged to be con men. Our position is said to be everything, we must ‘occupy space’ and be seen; because of course we are nothing but a featherless peacock with no purpose other than to reflect sunlight. Yet how can one be seen amongst so many? The answer of course is to dominate, to hoard and then to show off, or, to place it in a nice metaphor, to trample all the other flowers around us that dare to try and live. Simply outcompete others and force our way to the top.
Science is simply a method of finding truth about the material world, to place it as an idol is to narrow ourselves only to material things and to make ourselves out as being only a clump of cells. Only using science as a guide removes from us many of our very human faculties and thoughts, including our age-old deliberations over morality.
To abandon morality is not just to cease to be civilised, it is to cease to become human. Strength is nothing when unguided; it is a tool that is only useful when subjugated to ethics, otherwise nothing separates the strong from the tyrant, or ourselves from the tiger. Stripped of any concept of the common good, we are cut from the side of our fellow man and forced to reenter the state of nature that our ancestors managed to crawl their way out of all of those thousands of years ago.
As we once again beat each other to death for scraps of food, I shall remember that there is no evil that cannot be born out of the mind of a psychologist to be forced onto the rest of us.
