The following was a contribution to a discussion at World in Common on 14 August 2005.

Beware epistemic violence; dangerous things, words. Consider ‘materialism’ and ‘science’.

John M Allegro was the only atheist in the team translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. Later he wrote a ‘blasphemous’ book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), setting out the philological underpinnings of his theory that Christianity, other ‘religions of the Book’ and Classical mythology, derive from an ancient fertility cult originating 10,000 years BP in the fertile crescent of the Near East. What is interesting for our present discussion is that these beliefs and practices were originally useful (‘materialist’), given their role in sustaining economies based on settled agriculture.

Science is similar. Deriving from the Age of Reason: Bacon’s experimental method, controlled manipulations of nature, Newton’s laws of motion, later Justus von Liebig’s NPK fertiliser – all that relied ideologically on the idea that nature doesn’t have needs or feelings ‘like ours’. [Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (New Delhi: Zed, 1989) is good on the science/exploitation connection.] (Incidentally, the same idea was necessary to Slavery: it was claimed that the negro was like an animal & supposed not to have feelings ‘like ours’; only short term memory…) This materialist, mechanistic science ideology (‘scientism’) suits capitalism beautifully: fine to exploit nature, destroy forests, establish land-degrading monocultures, pollute even human habitat (muck is brass) because it’s all just matter, no needs or feelings ‘like ours’. And in common usage ‘science’ still usually refers to the empirical method, the cogs, ballistics, test tubes, all the hard paraphernalia; it’s less comfortable with relativity, quantum theory, the involvement of the experimenter in the outcome etc. let alone Goethean science, Sheldrake’s morphic fields, Bohm’s implicate order, or any other non-mechanistic model of how the world lives and evolves (rather than ‘works’). Ecology can be OK science as long as it’s statistical: counting bugs in a meter square. Stuff like chaos theory and some of the new science has been tamed by bringing in mathematical modelling: replicate it on computer and it’s orthodox. And so it goes…

Interestingly, science and religion are quite comfortable bedfellows: remember the ghost is in a machine. ‘Science’ has (had?) such a respectable reputation that everyone wants to cuddle up to it: Christian science, indigenous science, Scientology. Some permies like to say permaculture is a science. Usually they prefer to focus on design. Maybe that’s what Bush means when he says ‘Intelligent Design’ should be taught in schools – I don’t think so.

Anyway, ‘science’ has ceased to be a term of approval for me, as a socialist (and atheist with a maths & science background). I now tend to call it scientism. As for materialism, I prefer pragmatism – still an ism but hopefully with less baggage.

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