Symbolic Violence Pt2

The Scientist and the Lumberjack

Forests are common things to point to when people protest about the jugernaut of progress. In the context of the protests it is common to refer to forests as "the lungs of the planet" - an idea lifted from a scientific consideration of the ecosystem. But modern science is a symbolic system which might be taken to epitomise the violence our systems of signification inevitably do. Isn't it a commonplace now for science to be seen as the theoretical wing of the quest to dominate nature - that terrible historical will to power that leads to totalitarianism? At the risk of over-simplifying, it is as if the scientist studying rare species in the Amazonian rain forest is in league with the Brazilian lumberjack.

Of course the fundamental point concerns the categories employed by and constitutive of science; it doesn't refer, for instance, to the intentions or motives of individual scientists. To parrot Adorno: the categories of science necessarily fail to do justice to the sensuous particularity of the things themselves (although sensuous particularity is doubtless not the same thing as a Levinasian imponderable Alterity).

So: Is the scientist who genuinely cares about the Amazonian rain forest and wants to learn about it before it disappears involved in what might be called a peformative contradiction because what he assumes is an expression of his care actually does violence to the thing he cares about? Do his categories really resemble intellectual chainsaws? Would the level of violence be reduced if further scientific investigation of the rain forests were banned?

Sometimes I get the impression that the students of Levinas wish each and every tree were regarded as holy, thereby sparing them from disrespectful human practices such as scientific investigation.

Could you prune such a tree? Could you even plant one? But anyone who really cares about trees knows how much they can benefit from the right kind of considerate human intervention. In a similar way, the caring scientist inevitably uses a limited set of concepts that express a very partial view of things, but the point is to develop a deeper understanding of them - not just to put a number on them and get them quickly onto the supermarket shelves.

It is interesting in this regard to recall one of the things that Francis Bacon mentioned when he was tryng to champion modern scence in its earliest days when it was still struggling with more authoritarian forms of learning.

"We must lead men to the particulars themselves, and their series and order; while men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts." (Novum Organum Ch1 XXXVI)

Certainly compared to a Medieval scholasticism, modern science pays much more attention to the richness of the world of particular things. The pursuit of scientific knowledge surely involves a social aggregation of power. It is true that knowledge is power. The question, though, is how is the power to be used?

Surely the problem is not with the categories of science as such but with the ends of particular scientific projects. Surely there is an important distinction between scientific projects that want to comprehend the marvels of the rain forest and those that, for instance want to develop new species of trees that will grow faster so that they can be turned into timber more quickly. This reasoning about ends is admittedly categorically different from scientific explanation but it is not foreign to science as long as we see science as a project which inevitably pursues ends, whether they have been discussed or not.

To take a different example: there is the notorious lack of interest shown in developing drugs for tropical diseases, prefering instead to develop treatments, for instance, for toe fungus (e.g. Lamsil) which will sell well to the more affluent. If all of science is levelled because it implies an increase in power over things, we lose sight of the way science can be pursued so as to relieve the plight of those who would otherwise be downtrodden and ignored in the most disrespectful of ways.

It is not irrelevant that research groups have increasingly been forced to rely on private finance and links with business to secure funding. This inevitably involves removing those projects from a public sphere in which there might be discussions about what sorts of projects should be pursued and scientists end up being accomplices in the amoral business of money making.

Ultimately the problem is a political one - a problem concerning the way scientific activities are integrated into the social matrix - but this is obscured by an undue focus on the particular (in all its alterity) and the universals so ruthlessly and inevitably imposed by scientists as they pin back the wings of butterlies.