List,
I second Gene's views. A most important post.A most important CSP quote!
Kirsti Määttänen
Eugene Halton kirjoitti 5.3.2018 23:01:
Dear Gary R.
You mention the problem of greed, Gary, denying that it is
a problem of science and claiming that it is a misuse of science by
“the world’s power players,” ie., outsiders to science. You say,
“Peirce himself almost certainly did find the essential “wicked
problems” to be a consequence of the political-economic system, not
science itself.” I disagree. Peirce actually did severly criticise
the science of political economy itself as a philosophy of greed:
“The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we
all begin to review its doings and to think what character it is
destined to bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of
future historians. It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century;
for political economy has more direct relations with all the branches
of its activity than has any other science. Well, political economy
has its formula of redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence in the
service of greed ensures the justest prices, the fairest contracts,
the most enlightened conduct of all the dealings between men, and
leads to the _summum bonum_, food in plenty and perfect comfort. Food
for whom? Why, for the greedy master of intelligence. I do not mean to
say that this is one of the legitimate conclusions of political
economy, the scientific character of which I fully acknowledge. But
the study of doctrines, themselves true, will often temporarily
encourage generalizations extremely false, as the study of physics has
encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that the great
attention paid to economical questions during our century has induced
an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the
unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a
philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great
agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the
universe.” 6.290:
Peirce was criticizing the science of political economy of
his time as reaching what Peirce held to be a false generalization.
But it was the science itself that held this false generalization, not
simply outsiders. And Peirce’s criticism extended to Darwin’s
scientific theory of natural selection:
“The Origin of Species of Darwin merely extends
politico-economical views of progress to the entire realm of animal
and vegetable life. The vast majority of our contemporary naturalists
hold the opinion that the true cause of those exquisite and marvelous
adaptations of nature for which, when I was a boy, men used to extol
the divine wisdom, is that creatures are so crowded together that
those of them that happen to have the slightest advantage force those
less pushing into situations unfavorable to multiplication or even
kill them before they reach the age of reproduction. Among animals,
the mere mechanical individualism is vastly re-enforced as a power
making for good by the animal's ruthless greed. As Darwin puts it on
his title-page, it is the struggle for existence; and he should have
added for his motto: Every individual for himself, and the Devil take
the hindmost!” 6.293
Peirce did not reject Darwin’s theory, which he admired,
but argued that it was a partial view of evolution, to which Peirce
added two other modalities to produce a three category model. But it
was Darwin’s scientific theory, not oligarch Andrew Carnegie’s
capitalist expropriation of it, that Peirce criticized.
My criticism of the overreach of science and technology
comes from somewhat of a similar place. I’m criticizing the costs of
outlooks which take precise elements of reality as the whole of
reality, myopically, while excluding real elements in ways whose costs
and consequences have now brought the biosphere to the gates of
catastrophe. Yes, I would agree that Peirce offers a much broader
understanding of science, but that does not excuse the ways in which
science and technology have been willing perps in unsustainability as
well.
Gene H
PS Dear Edwina, I did not address fossil fuels, perhaps you were
responding to Gary R’s discussion of fossil fuels. But I would say
that there, as in any technology, it is not simply a question about
human comfort, but rather the question of sustainable limits: not
simply for human comfort, but for a longer “seven generations”
outlook inclusive of the community of life.
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