Does living in an artificial world, largely cut off from nature, make us more or less human?

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This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at Aeon Conversations

A lot of us take a pragmatic stance and are happy to use the fruits of science and technology, to better our understanding of the world, including nature, around us. A scientific understanding of nature, moreover, may even improve our respect or reverence for nature.


Image Credit: CCO Public Domain via Pixabay

n his excellent essay Gene Tracy mentions how anthropologists would point out that there is no clear line between a story and a testable theory of the world. Another anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss distinguished between a “functional” and “statistical” and model of societies. An example of the former is the way human societies operate. Each individual assumes certain responsibilities which, as Ilya Prigogine explains, “translate at each level different aspects of the society as a whole.”  An example of the latter model is a termite colony where there is no “global mastermind” at work. The former approach is impelled by necessity (pace Jacques Monod) and purposeful invention whereas the latter is driven by chance. We began to move away from nature the moment we discovered fire, tools and language - and our behaviour became more “functional” and less “statistical”. Science too catalysed this process by replacing acts of god with acts of nature and by making the latter increasingly explicable.
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The price we paid for this social evolution is that we have become less aware of how “tenderly the haughty day fills the blue urn with fire,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed. This of course doesn’t mean that we have all become unquestioning minions of science and material progress. Moreover, practical imperatives may also prevent some of us from wearing nature on our sleeves, as it were. Not all of us can afford to call ourselves acolytes of Thoreau or convert to tree-hugging. A lot of us instead take a pragmatic stance and are happy to use the fruits of science
Image Credit: CCO Public Domain via Pixabay
and technology, to better our understanding of the world, including nature, around us. A scientific understanding of nature, moreover, may even improve our respect or reverence for nature.

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