Do you doubt that artifice has captured the imagination of our human kind?
We live in an age of virtuality.
Humanity is punch-drunk in love with virtuality. And the associated orientation of endearment with respect to abstraction has been dominant for some time. The more virtual, the less concrete, the more universal, the less particular, the better. The face-to-face and one-at-a-time approaches to negotiating this World have been abandoned.
The more generalizable the better, the fewer the outliers the worthier, which is to say, things more predictable are preferable, things more unconditioned and unifying, formulas proofs and doctrines, models and patterns and programs.
Guiding threads and global markets, common purposes and organizing principles, the eternal mantra and the aum of God’s name, spiritual enlightenment and ultimate redemption.
The divine event, embracing vision, undifferentiated oneness, single element, fundamental law, supreme truth, theory of everything … congratulations, your affirmation entitles you to wealth and salvation.
Actual Earthly organic substances under attack by intangibility?—such imagery may or may not help us to spread the message effectively, but we surely can and should protest that Life is under siege, and there’s nothing metaphoric about it.
In trouble … things that have originated and developed, and have been shaped free of human plotting, are in trouble. Things that are vital and vulnerable, as well as the real-time one-on-one exchanges and interactions between such living breathing beings … are in trouble.
In trouble … species communities languages cultures and ecologies are in trouble. The fabric of Life is in trouble, frayed and torn more each day, and the various distinguishing features of Life … are in trouble.
In the manner of providing a broad reminder, I bring to mind that our program to disavow integrative appetites involves veering away from universal laws to shine light, absolute truths to provide moral direction, organizing principles to guide, and fundamental patterns to lead.
Field biologists provide us with Life case studies and narratives, floras not physics not chaos theory not complexity science, histories not formulas not equations help to reveal why bees visit certain flowers more than others, not declarations that herald cosmology or astronomy or astrology, not laws of thermodynamics or volumes or gravitation that are counted on to furnish reasons and answers they can’t provide.
“Darwin really danced for joy over a slide of paramecia swimming?”
To crack codes of Nature we have experimental research, grant-guzzling large-scale studies to supply scientific proof as high degrees of confidence, portfolio-padding theoretical research to dispel reasonable doubt, technological research with its reductive exactness.
Better to discover Life’s emergent holism along aerated stream banks, to flip over sheltering rocks and find tiny thriving ecosystems of creatures, or to brave predawn alarm-clock shocks in order to have a try at bird watching, or to gather up and press then dry and study plants to ignite lines of thought about ecologies and phylogenies.
Whereas we can, at least, inspect how academic research is derived, that’s not the case with peddlers of everlasting spiritual truths who pluck assertions from the air (or lift them from historic theological texts) and by this provide cover for their own imperial campaigns.
The larger point to be made here is that larger points aren’t worth making. Specificities harbor the answers we seek.