The epoch beginning in the middle of the twentieth century was described by the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen as the ‘Anthropocene’ – a historical watershed which, for him, is characterised by the rampant transformation of the environment by humans. But apart from the fact that this term is not generally recognised in the scientific community, it merely focuses on an external characteristic. It would be much more correct to specify the spiritual basis of this transformation. In this case, we would have to speak of our time as the age of science – Scientiacene, if we were to look for a concise term.
This epoch did not just begin around the middle of the twentieth century, but already started in the 17th century. The age of science was democratic and anti-authoritarian from its very beginning. Everyone was entitled to examine the processes of nature in experiments and draw their own conclusions. However, these were never regarded as articles of faith, i.e. as unchallengeable dogmas. Anyone was allowed and able to question them by providing evidence to the contrary. In this way, a corpus of knowledge and very specific methodological procedures emerged, with which the new epoch acquired an ever-larger canon of ‘objective’ knowledge about nature. Objective in the sense that such knowledge was not like some fairy tell invented by humans and in this sense subjective and arbitrary, but that it described verifiable properties and laws of external nature (even if the descriptive terms used in the process were necessarily based on human convention).
In a very short time, the new approach to nature was to conquer the entire globe spreading from its origin in Europe. Hindus, Muslims, Confucians, shamans and Jehovah’s Witnesses may follow very different paths in their beliefs, but they are united in their daily reliance on demonstrable scientific knowledge. They all use electricity, nuclear power and the whole range of modern products that science has bequeathed to them. The prophetic dictum of the great physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, when, just over a century ago, he justified the truth of the scientific world view with its practical success, has long since been confirmed.
‘It is not logic, not philosophy, not metaphysics that ultimately decides whether something is true or false, but action. That’s why I don’t regard the achievements of technology as incidental detritus of natural science, I regard them as logical proof. If we had not made these practical achievements, we would not know how to draw conclusions. Only those conclusions that have practical success are correct.’
What a Muslim or a shaman believes, a Christian may reject as pure nonsense – and vice versa. There is no generally recognised evidence that would prove as a verifiable fact that we can communicate with spirits or that the dogma of the virgin birth constitutes an indisputable truth. On the other hand, the new age of science has piled up a thousand times over generally accepted evidence. Televisions and computers work with the same reliability in Bantu society as in Greenland and New Guinea. Is there any better proof of the objectivity of physics than the fact that rockets to the moon or Mars actually reach their destination, whereas all previous world systems were merely the stuff of fantastic fairy tales and unprovable myths? This question is so trivial that one is almost ashamed to ask it – if it weren’t for people like Paul Feyerabend and his successors, who use a maximum of intelligence to deny the evidence and confuse common sense…
Myths and fairy tales were beautiful, though, pure poetry compared to the sober reality of our current scientific age, but this poetry lacked demonstrable action to prove it. That is why it became powerless and largely perished as more or less impotent tradition. The Enlightenment of the 18th century followed Nietzsche’s call to give an additional push to what was already falling. It wanted to put a definitive end to all faith, all fairy tales, all mere fiction. Écrasez l’infâme, was the notorious formula invented by Voltaire.
But it is precisely at this point, that we should be perplexed. Boltzmann’s dictum inspires us to draw a further conclusion. Let’s take a closer look at what the great physicist said back then. Whether something is true or false, he stated, is ultimately decided by successful action – not by decree, mere assertion or belief. But then we are confronted with paradox. The truth of science, proven by successful action, appears to us in a completely different form, depending on whether we define practical success for single achievements or for the whole.
The success of single achievements is so undeniable that we repeatedly witness a kind of mass hysteria when, for example, the first rocket reaches Mars, a new telescope is launched into space or medicine succeeds in skilfully replacing another part of the human body – joints, the heart, lung or other organs. These are all admirable and undisputed feats of human ingenuity that have led to science being pursued today with a vigour, even an obsession, that was previously only characteristic of religions.
The new concept of a truth that is both democratic and anti-authoritarian proved to be so powerful that it radically changed the face of the world within just three centuries. Meanwhile the Scientiacene has created an artificial second reality of all kinds of gadgets, machines, material and immaterial transport routes and energy centres, that partly destroyed and partly reshaped pristine first nature beyond recognition and continues to do so at an exponential pace as all the rest of the world, Inner Asia, South America and the African continent, are no longer able to escape its pull. In contrast to all earlier systems explaining and dominating the world, only the scientific one is capable of infinite expansion. Religions consisting of an interpretation of the world and the associated rituals were at some point complete, some of them soon reached a stage of fossilisation. But the modern scientific system consisting of research and technology is never complete. We may easily imagine a world in which the entire production of food and consumer goods will be completely automated, the entire population being devoted exclusively to research and technology. The leading industrialised nations of the West as well as China have already come very close to this stage, while the rest of the world is following them with some delay.
The age of triumphant science resembles the earlier religious world views only in one significant respect, namely that, like them, it has omniscience and omnipotence as its telos. In the past, God possessed this prerogative and his representatives, the priests, imagined that they had a share in it; now it is man himself – homo deus – who has seized this quite intoxicating illusion. It is the real driving force behind the quasi-religious fascination that is turning an ever-increasing proportion of humanity into researchers and technicians. After all, the scientific age promises both: infinite, never-ending knowledge and – based on this – the all-conquering deed.
So, in this respect, Ludwig Boltzmann has remained right to this day. But what if we define success in terms of the whole? Then the situation suddenly looks entirely different. The triumphant success in individual achievements turns into a threatening or even apocalyptic failure for the whole. For the age of science comprises six dimensions that all previous ages lacked.
Firstly, there is the pure knowledge of basic research and all concrete knowledge based on it.
Secondly, there is the dimension of all those useful products derived from it, some of which enrich our lives to such an extent that we can no longer live or want to live without them.
The third dimension is represented by the products of destruction, which are based on the same kind of scientific knowledge and which are being developed into apocalyptic weapons all over the world with just the same obsession.
Fourthly, we are dealing with a dimension that destroys in the long term just as effectively as weapons do within a short space of time. It is the dimension of waste. All products end up as waste after a more or less short period of use. Nature reacted to the organic waste of earlier times with a countless army of organisms that immediately decomposed this waste and thus in principle operated an eternal cycle of restoration. But nature is not prepared for modern waste consisting of electronic garbage and hundreds of thousands of different plastics and gases such as CO2. Instead of being recycled back into its original constituents, this new type of waste is poisoning the surface of the earth in ever-increasing doses, polluting the oceans, the atmosphere and the satellite belt surrounding the earth. More and more microplastics are accumulating even within the human brain. Recycling can help us only in theory but not in practice, because breaking it down into the original materials requires huge amounts of energy, but this is precisely what we need to save.
Fifthly, not only does every individual have the democratic right to contribute to the understanding of reality; in the capitalist economic system they are offered the opportunity to play a concrete role in shaping the world, be it as the head of a company, as an inventor, as an engineer or in thousands of other professions. Compared to the past, when up to ninety per cent of the masses in all major civilisations were employed in agriculture and worked according to a predetermined pattern that used to be stationary over the centuries, this situation is indeed unique. Eight billion people are now more or less intensively engaged in changing the appearance of the globe.
The sixth dimension is a spectacular absence characterising modern sciences. What they can do is to provide us with the means to a better life. But they cannot tell us about its purpose because no experiment can and will tell us. The purposes of our existence arise from human freedom. Former religions have each understood this freedom and thus the purpose of human existence in their own particular way. Science has to remain silent on this main and pivotal point.
If success or failure in action determines whether something is true or not, we must recognise the greatest possible truth in the age of science with regard to its individual brilliant inventions and products and the greatest possible failure with regard to the whole, which it has never yet been able to understand let alone to shape according to human needs. After all, all previous epochs in human history have never been able to fundamentally jeopardise the whole, namely the survival of Homo faber. The Scientiacene, however, threatens mankind for the first time with precisely this danger. It is for this reason that the battle between the two camps, each of which defines the success of the new age in its own way, had to break out. It will accompany us with increasing ferocity and determine the future.
Organisations such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Last Generation and Scientist Rebellion are convinced that our current industrial economic system is so unsustainable that it will sooner or later lead to the collapse of the ecosystem. All leading climate experts agree that the anthropogenic greenhouse effect will make the globe uninhabitable for humans in the long tun if not stopped in due time. Although the protest of these groups is primarily fuelled by climate change, the human-induced destruction of the ecosystem goes far beyond this, because carbon dioxide is only the most conspicuous form of ecological desaster and only extends to the atmosphere. In fact, industrial littering threatens to pollute all continents and entire oceans. As already mentioned, omnipresent littering in the form of microplastics is now even reaching the human brain.
The enemies of the existing economic system are therefore quite right to demand a radical departure from the current economic system. But in doing so, they are in sharpest confrontation not only with the governments of all leading industrialised nations but also with an overwhelming majority of their populations. After all, what would a departure from the existing economic system mean in concrete terms? Let’s assume that all consumer goods sold would have a tenfold longer lifespan, i.e. on the one hand they would have to be produced ten times more durably, on the other hand mere modifications to the design, such as those that artificially promote sales now, would no longer be permitted. The waste problem – including the production of greenhouse gases – would be significantly alleviated because, calculated over a period of, say, a hundred years, only the tenth part of products would have to be manufactured and therefore only a tenth of CO2 emissions would be released into the atmosphere. What would be the consequence of such a measure?
It would be an ecological salvation and a social catastrophe at the same time. The beneficial effects on the environment are obvious, as are its disastrous social consequences. Even a reduction in sales of a few per cent can cause a company to go into a tailspin, a reduction in production to a tenth would cause mass unemployment on a scale rarely seen even in times of war. Exports, which are the basis of the wealth of all leading industrialised countries, would be reduced to zero because there would be no profit to finance research and development. The welfare state would have abdicated. So let’s openly say what this means. Any government that even dared to contemplate such a step would be swept away by mass protest.
In fact, such measures would not only affect the economic system but would at the same time put an end to the scientific age, because, as Boltzmann had already correctly recognised in his day, the scientific age is ultimately based on action and the success it achieves. It is because people have been conditioned over the past three hundred years to constantly replace older products with the latest ones that a superstructure of science and production could emerge which then transformed this need into an imperative. In hundreds of thousands of laboratories and scientific institutes, research is constantly being carried out to find the latest solutions to some real and lots of fictitious problems. The resulting demand for the production of goods and the corresponding output of waste has thus become an indispensable part of our scientific age. Degrowth, which would – for example – require a tenfold increase in the lifespan of all commodities, would not only force us to abandon our current economic system, it would at the same time mean the end of the scientific age.
If two battle positions are equally correct, but the victory of one – a radical reorganisation of the economic system – would instantly drive a state to ruin, while the victory of the other – the omission of all radical measures – ‘merely’ causes a slow, gradual walk into disaster, then we can easily predict which direction the world will choose. The leading industrialised nations will continue to preach ‘green’, but they will never voluntarily reduce their emissions of goods and waste to such an extent that their current standard of living is seriously jeopardised – their populations would simply not accept such a course. Nor will developing countries, whose material standard of living is still far below that of the West, renounce the blessings of industrialisation. India, Central Asia and the whole of Africa will follow China’s example and convert their hitherto largely sustainable economies to a more and more accelerated production of goods and waste (including CO2). This is the most likely development up to the point where global warming and the increasingly severe storms produced by it not only jeopardise the economy itself but also the life of our species on an increasingly overheated globe.
All informed scientists and thinking people are clearly aware of this path to disaster. But the world stands paralysed in the face of a foreseeable catastrophe as the opposing camps are both correct in their predictions. It is not only the current economic system that is at stake, but even our triumphant scientific era. The spectacular deeds of science have given mankind the small paradise of unique devices and ingenious inventions while at the same time they are responsilbe for the utmost evil of an apocalyptic arms race and world-wide pollution. The means and instruments of science have triumphed over the end, which science cannot provide us with. The end would be a mindset embracing the whole of humanity and enabling us to survive in the future on that only globe we can inhabit. Once everybody becomes aware of this purpose will the right action follow from it, because, as Boltzmann says, the truth of our theoretical knowledge is only proven by right deeds.*
*I dwell on these and similar observations in great detail and with reference to the most knowledgeable authorities in my latest book ‘Homo Faber’.