Reflection: Tao

There Need to Be Other Perspectives Than Science 

This semester for me has been a long and deep reflection on humanity for the past few hundred years, since the beginning of the anthropocene, or I should say, the capitalocene. It has placed a heavy impact on me and how I view the world. The readings and discussions in this class have humbled me for my blind faith in Western science and its ethics (as what I believe is the ultimate objectivity). It made me realize the intrinsic impossibility of such objectivity, and the danger to only live by one fixed perspective. 

This fixed perspective was born first in the West from its mother, Christianity. It inherited a strong concept of the separation between man and nature, in other words, the separation between the self and the others. This concept allowed Western civilizations to gradually develop what we call modern science: the procedures to objectively observe results from controlled variables; the process of coming to a conclusion requires strict deductive logic. From conceptual math and physics to practical biochemistry and economics, Western-centric science redefined how to live as a human being, and indirectly influenced generations. Personally, I was very moved by the narrative to understand the world. WhileI continued to study physics to try to piece up a scientific understanding of the world around me, I took psychology courses to try to understand myself. For a while I believed that religions were intrinsically tools for governments of ancient civilizations to mentally control their people; their assumptions of their worlds stood on no factual basis and appeared to be obsolete compared to those of scientific insights. Therefore, it seemed to me ethical and practical to secularize religions and treat them purely as culture in the 21st century. I appreciated the seemingly objective nature of science; to me, that’s the closest we can ever get to the ultimate truth. Science was, in a way, my religion. What I mean by science here doesn’t only cover the domain of different categories of science, but also all the science related to human activities. 

It took a lot of reading and reflection for me to realize that isn’t the whole picture. In fact, I found myself in a paradox. I realized that the Western scientific thinking was a perspective in itself. We accept by default that scientific thinking is the only way to access other forms of thinking, often forgetting that we have been observing with the lens of science all along. A MacBook computer that uses the iOS may have all the knowledge of the Windows system, but it would never be able to experience fully from the Windows system’s perspective. Similarly, modern science discredits religion and spirituality as it finds no meaningful practicality in them, but that conclusion only follows from a scientific perspective. 

But as I dive deeper, the statement “science is objective” no longer stands. In the early 20th century, after Darwin’s Theory of Evolution gained popularity, the study of eugenics also rose. Through strict study of statistics, eugenicists came to conclusions that we nowadays see as mistaken; and the influence of such studies directly caused genocide of millions. Science also favored utilitarianism, but the applications of this philosophy also caused mass humanitarian disasters. As James Gibson states in his Affordance Theory, we humans use subjective understanding of what the environment can offer to us - affordance - to understand our environment. This suggests that we can never experience objectivity. The seeming objectivity of science is an illusion. Everyone is familiar with the detrimental nature of capitalism, yet we study capitalist economy as a department of science; we even offer Nobel Prizes for the scholars in this field. 

This is where the problems come in. The history of the Western civilizations was built upon primitive accumulation. Colonialism and slavery were the basis of the capitalist economy, which gave the influence to the rise of science. The Northern Atlantic nations benefited from all thids but left uncountable physical and spiritual suffering to the people of the Global South. Nowadays we look at this piece of history as a tragic memory, but we forget that we are still living in the consequences of it. Civilizations in the Americas were annihilated and cultures vanished, yet sadly we struggle to hear their stories through their own perspective, rather than the lens of their colonizers. Here lies the most dangerous problem: science silences other voices. 

With the wave of secularization of religions, humankind have been losing uncountable numbers of different perspectives. The voice of science gradually covers over the other ones of spirituality. As a result we, as people living in the modern era, are more than ever fixed on only one perspective. In the era of the anthropocene, we face global catastrophic changes caused by our blinded actions in the name of science. Reconsidering religion and spirituality is not only to respect and include all stakeholders on this planet, but it’s a necessary alternative in order to stop the current tendency of self-destruction. 

(XL)