Reinventing nature - Exploring the Foundations of Humanism - Cover Story

Humanist, March-April, 1998 by Jeremy Rifkin

Every major economic and social revolution in history has been accompanied by a new explanation of the creation of life and the workings of nature. The new concept of nature is always the most important strand of the matrix that makes up any new social order. In each instance, the new cosmology serves to justify the rightness and inevitability of the new way human beings are organizing their world by suggesting that nature itself is organized along similar lines. Thus, every society can feel comfortable that the way it is conducting its activities is compatible with the natural order of things and, therefore, a legitimate reflection of nature's grand design.

For more than a century, our ideas about nature, human nature, and the meaning of existence have reflected the extraordinary influence of Charles Darwin' theory of the origin and development of species. It would be difficult for most of us to imagine a world without his theory to inform and guide our journey. Now, however, this pillar of twentieth-century thought is being shaken from its foundation. Our ideas about nature, evolution, and the meaning of life are being fundamentally revamped as we enter the Biotech Century. Even the language and text we use to describe the evolutionary process is being rewritten. The new ideas about nature that are emerging will likely reshape our consciousness, values, and culture as significantly as did Darwin's theory of evolution when it replaced the God-centered creationist view of Christianity more than one hundred years ago.

This is not to suggest that people's cosmologies are mere fabrications, as many social relativists claim. Some social critics would have us believe that our cosmologies have no real footing at all in the external world. The social relativists contend that our ideas about nature are completely subjective and bear no resemblance to the world as it exists in fact. While they are right in assuming that our ideas about nature are socially biased and deeply influenced by the cultural context in which we live, they are wrong in assuming that such ideas are without a basis in the "real" world. The fact is, our cosmologies are based on the workings of the real world, but only that small portion of the real world where society and nature interact. People learn things about nature in the process of organizing it. The things that they learn are useful. They allow people to interact with nature, to manipulate and appropriate it. The problem is that people take the things that they have learned about nature and puff them up in such a way as to create an all-encompassing explanation of the workings of the cosmos. Cosmologies, then, are distortions. They are society's way of inflating its rather limited "real world" relationship to the environment -- at any given time -- into universal truth. Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.

Darwin's world, for example, was populated by machinelike creatures. Nature was conceived as an aggregate of interchangeable parts assembled into various functional combinations. This mechanical conception of living beings robbed sentient creatures of any remaining sacred qualities. The denaturing and mechanizing of the biological kingdom eliminated intrinsic value and replaced it with John Locke's notion of utility value. Most scientists, as well as the general public, came to share Rene Descartes' view of living creatures as "soulless automata," whose movements were little different from those of the automated puppetry that danced upon the Strasbourg clock.

Today's revised notions of evolution replace the idea of life as machinery with the idea of life as information. By resolving structure into function and reducing function to information flows, the new cosmology all but eliminates the idea of species integrity. Living things are no longer perceived as birds and bees, foxes and hens, but as bundles of information. All living beings are drained of their substance and turned into abstract messages. Life becomes a code to be deciphered. There is no longer any question of sacredness or specialness. How could there be when there are no longer any recognizable boundaries to respect? In the new way of thinking about evolution, structure is abandoned. Nothing exists in the moment. Everything is pure activity, pure process. How can any living thing be deemed sacred when it is just a pattern of information?

Eliminating structural boundaries and reducing all living entities to information provides the proper degree of desacralization for the bioengineering of life. After all, in order to justify the engineering of living material across biological boundaries, it is first necessary to challenge the whole idea of an organism as an identifiable, discrete being, with a permanent set of attributes. In the age of biotechnology, separate species with separate names gradually give way to systems of information that can be reprogrammed into an infinite number of biological combinations. It is much easier for the human mind to accept the idea of programming a system of information than the idea of engineering a dog, chimpanzee, or human being. In the coming age, it will be much more accurate to describe a being as a very specific pattern of information unfolding over a period of time.