Around the globe there is a rising awareness that ‘politics’ is in the process of hijacking scientific inquiry.    While the ‘global warming obsession’ may be bringing this situation into the central foreground of our attention, it is by no means a recent or a single-issue based development, but an endemic socio-political process with deep psychological roots.

There is a dysfunction here wherein ‘man’ as the ‘child-of-nature’ sees himself as the ‘parent-of-nature’.  The inverting of the true relationship parallels our popular error in treating storm-cells in the flow of the atmosphere (children-of-the-flow) as the source of the turbulent flow (as a disturbance with its own local agency) or as ‘parents-of-the-flow’.

The storm-cell is the ‘result’ of the flow and so too is ‘man’ the result of the dynamic space of nature.  The intended use of ‘result’ here is ‘spatial’ rather than before-and-after ‘time-of-existence’ oriented; i.e. the flow continues on while the storm-cells gather and re-gather within it.

Western man, however, has promoted the notion of ‘progress’ wherein ‘modern man’ is ‘superior’ to ancient man and/or to ‘aboriginal cultures’ that retain an ancient world view.

This notional ‘superiority’ of modern man has been based on ‘what modern man can do’; i.e. on his ability to predict and control what unfolds.  However, since the days of Galileo, where Galileo found that it was easier to describe the motion of material objects as if they were moving in a vacuum (generalizing the laws and principles of motion so as to remove the spatial-relational particulars), our scientific habit has been to model dynamics in these general ‘situation-free’ or ‘spatial-medium-free’ terms.  Thus, as McLuhan observed in ‘Understanding Media’, we are very skilled at specifying how we are going to construct machinery and at predicting its operations and output, but in terms of what really transpires, it matters little if the machinery is producing Cadillacs or  cornflakes, what ‘really’ matters is how our relationships with one another and the environment are transformed by such operations. (more…)