Ours Is A Scientific World: Efficient, Transparent — And Charmless

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — The writer G.K. Chesterton said “the madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.” Chesterton, a perceptive Englishman and practicing Christian of the early 20th century, describes a type of insanity that is all too evident in the world today. We chose science and technology as the only systems fit to govern our individuality, and they in turn are fueling egotistical individualism that could make society ungovernable.

This irresponsible delegation of duties is not harmless, as it has to do with reshaping our identities. Our individualism may be in overdrive, but our identities are quietly, unwittingly, slipping into the grip of technocratic slavery. As the Roman playwright Terence observed, slavery can be so degrading that it makes slaves love their condition.

We are willingly surrendering to this planetary power without thinking of its intrinsic ability to penetrate our hearts and minds. We have already ceded to the technocratic reality — which insists it is the only reality — our ability to think and feel by ourselves. We allow programs and algorithms to think on our behalf. They feel close and familiar, and are so useful that we barely perceive their invasive sway. But the price of their utility is to live in a world that is fast losing its charm — or worse, its power to charm.

Disenchanted world

The German thinker Max Weber noted in the early 20th century the imperceptible, yet unrelenting pace of this technical takeover. One of modernity’s biggest swindles is to make us think we can share in the prestige of science just by using its fruits or applications. We imagine we have become a bit of a scientist in our own right.

We fancy ourselves as communicating with other free beings by joining an online community, but there is no community there.

We trust science and technology enough to give them our authority over ourselves, and are turning ourselves into prosthetic limbs at their service. And all these limbs can do, it seems, is to keep data circulating. We fancy ourselves as communicating with other free beings by joining an online community, but there is no community there. We are simply processing data, like employees. The writer and academic Byung-Chul Han terms all this, dataism.

A disenchanted world is a world without wisdom or mystery. There can be no epiphany amid its unyielding reality, nor any meaningful encounters without real communities. Technocratic rationality, in this its imperial form, has banished fantasy and the gods of yesteryear, supposedly to offer us a more orderly, predictable universe.

Yet as the Romantic poet Novalis said, “Specters rule where the gods are absent.” So today, expect macabre visions in a world cleansed of all charm. It is transparent, certainly, but there is little to see. The reality of our time is not bigger and better, but a repetitive, insipid little show.

*Álvarez Teijeiro is a professor of postgraduate Communication Ethics at Argentina’s Austral University.