BURIED AMID the largely vacuous coverage of Tony Blair overtaking
Clement Attlee as the longest serving Labour prime minister were a
couple of interesting facts. The Independent on Sunday put together a
mass of figures to try to establish whether or not we are better off
now than we were in 1950, when Attlee was prime minister.
Predictably enough, most of the figures recorded considerable material
progress. Real average household income, for example, is twice the
level it was 50 years ago. But then there was this titbit:
"Attlee's Britain evidently felt less need to believe in the fantastic.
In 1950, Gallup found that only 10 percent said they believed in
ghosts; by 1998 this was 40 percent. In 1951, only 13 percent said they
believed in telling the future by cards or astrology; now it is 56
percent." These are remarkable figures.
Living standards have risen thanks to the application of scientific
knowledge to raise the productivity of labour. To a far greater extent
than in 1950 everyday life is permeated by complex technologies that
are materialisations of difficult to understand theories-think of
mobile phones and personal computers.
Yet this has been accompanied by a huge growth in belief in the idea
that our lives are ruled by the stars and in a world of spirits unknown
to the sciences. There are others signs of the same kind of
superstition. Popular television programmes revel in the existence of
vampires, demons, witches, werewolves and all sorts of other beasts and
ghouls.
And when TV fiction purports to take science seriously, as in CSI Crime
Scene Investigation, it is reduced to a kind of magic that mechanically
extracts the truth from the evidence.
Leading politicians display the same kind of schizophrenia, oscillating
between blind superstition and a fetishised science. George W Bush goes
from prayer meetings in the White House to ordering high-tech bombing
missions.
Tony Blair combines earnest Christianity with attempts to win support
for genetically modified foods. And his personal court seems to be
ruled increasingly by Carole Caplin, Cherie Booth's "lifestyle" guru
and a specialist in New Age fads.
The Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins put the growth in this kind of
mumbo-jumbo down to ignorance about science. But we have enormous
numbers of excellent popularisations of different kinds of scientific
knowledge. Richard Dawkins is an old-fashioned 19th century materialist
who wants to reduce everything to different combinations of DNA.
He doesn't see that the social world has its laws that need to be
understood in their own right. Why do people need to believe in
supernatural forces? One answer is disillusionment with science after
disasters like Chernobyl. This doesn't really explain why superstition
has grown so much in the past 50 years.
Maybe there was more naive faith in the liberating powers of science in
the late 1940s, but it would be a mistake to push this too far. In the
aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was a cliche that science could
destroy as well as liberate.
It was moreover in this era that the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno
made a pioneering study of astrology. In The Stars Down to Earth, an
analysis of the astrology column in the Los Angeles Times in 1952-3, he
stressed the similarity between believing in the stars and paranoia.
Adorno wrote that, "Most people...feel that everything is linked up
with everything else and that they have no way out, but at the same
time the whole mechanism is so complicated that they fail to understand
the reason for its existence. Even more, they suspect that this closed
and systematic organisation of society does not really serve their
wants and needs, but has a fetishistic, self perpetuating 'irrational'
quality, strangely alienated from the life that is thus being
structured."
In a nutshell-living under an irrational system encourages belief in
the irrational. Certainly paranoia in the shape of conspiracy theories
is another striking feature of contemporary mass culture.
In The X-Files paranoia was married to the most gigantic credulity
about every conceivable superstition and folk myth. More recently 24
has woven conspiracy within conspiracy like a set of Russian dolls.
Our experience since the 1950s has been one of great material progress
that has not made the world any easier to understand or control. On the
contrary, higher productivity is accompanied by growing inequality and
poverty.
Even the weather is changing thanks to human actions, but no one seems
to be doing anything about it. No wonder many take refuge in belief in
supernatural forces. Under capitalism, progress and regression are
bound together.
The only escape is to win people to the recognition that collective
action can create a world that does make sense.
* Alex Callinicos is the author of An Anti-Capitalist
Manifesto and The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx.
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No. 1558:
WE O'ERCOME BY ART
Today, an old debate in a new arena. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that
make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
We've talked about the wonderful Greek word tecnh. It means technique or skill in making
either art or artifacts. In early Homeric Greece a sculptor or a mason
was viewed with respect. For later Greeks, during the Golden Age of
Athens, that shifted.
Plato said that tecnh was an innate
human virtue. At the same time he said quite clearly that members of
the ruling class shouldn't mess with technique because they had enough
to do without it. Tecnh was the work of the
underclass -- slaves and foreigners. Philosophy was another matter -- a
higher order of work.
The superb mechanician Archimedes talked the same way a century
later. Plutarch tells how Archimedes so impressed his king with levers
and pulleys that the king asked him to develop weapons. Archimedes said
no. He said, the work of an engineer and every art that ministers
to the needs of life [is] ignoble and vulgar.
The Greek orator Antiphon cast light on that unsettling remark
when he said: Mastered by nature, we o'ercome by art. Antiphon
saw artisans in the business of tricking nature. A lever or a pulley
was a gadget that mocked the natural order of things.
So Archimedes went beyond the Athenian Greeks when he applied
mathematics to machinery. He knew he was crossing the line by mixing
philosophy with base art. He wanted to cast his lot with natural
philosophers, not with tricksters.
The Greeks made their mark on western thinking right down to this
very day because they gave philosophy and theoretical thinking such a
place of honor. The Romans after them gave little to philosophy, math,
or science. Nor did they put much stock in invention. The Romans were
superb organizers and builders, but their imprint on western thinking
was far less than the Greeks'.
So I think you see the problem here. It's the same problem we face
in our schools today. Archimedes practiced his mechanics, and his keen
understanding of what machines could do, in a world that protected
theoretical knowledge. That protection broke down in the Roman world.
The Romans were able to coast for a few centuries on what the Greek
world had provided. Then their establishment fell apart. At the same
time, the Greeks had limited themselves by failing to honor
the process of overcoming nature by art.
Great scientists of later ages, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, all
walked tightropes on these matters. Each, like Archimedes, stirred a
shrewd knowledge of tecnh in with hard
abstract thought. But each of them also donned the camouflage of
prevailing attitudes.
These are matters to think about as we try to repair modern
education. When we quote Antiphon, we'd better see that, if o'ercoming
nature by art means tricking nature, it's only in the sense of knowing
how to go with nature's flow. It ultimately has to mean showing our
students how to honor theoretical understanding, and letting their
hands touch tools, at the same time.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're
interested in the way inventive minds work.