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It was an early argument from design for the existence of God.
Isaac Newton
(1642-1727) revolutionised science with his law of gravity. He
hypothesised in a letter to Thomas Burnath that the earth’s
rotation had originally occurred very slowly, producing days
virtually of any length, in order to square the Biblical story
of the creation of the world in seven days with geological
evidence of the earth’s antiquity.
Voltaire
(1694-1778) was too much of a deist and Newtonian to accept
thoroughgoing materialism. Beginning with 1740s he issued a
series of sharp attacks on the materialists such as Buffon
(1707-1778) and Holbach.
According to
Marx and Engels, the dualistic philosophy of Descartes was a
materialism in physics accompanied by a metaphysics of the
mind.
For a
dialectical materialist, Hegel’s speculative philosophy was
a rational justification for what still amounted to an
essentially theological worldview, in which human
self-consciousness and material existence were sacrificed on
the altar of the abstract spirit.
Nevertheless,
all this meant that the theological view was on the defensive
since it now sought to prove God’s existence primarily
through his works (as revealed by nature and science) rather
than divine revelation.
We, in India,
do not know how hostile society was to science down to the
19th century. European secularism has the strength of
sacrifices made in course of time. It did not came cheap.
Holach’s
"System of Nature" (1770) was condemned by
parliamentary decree to be burned in the very year of its
publication.
In his days
the inventor of phrenology (mental traits are indicated by the
configuration of the skull) Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) had
a much more respectable reception and hard life. His discovery
of materialistic interpretation of the body-mind relationship
led to the banning of his lectures in Vienna in 1802 because
they were dangerous to religion. In 1807 he emigrated to Paris
where his books were placed on the Index (Librorum
Prohibutorum) by the Catholic Church. On his death he was
denied a religious burial.
In 1819
William Lawrence of the Royal College of Surgeons published
"Lecturers on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural
History of Man". Lawrence had to withdraw the book
because of the storm of public outrage. Three years later a
publisher brought out a pirate edition. Lawrence sued the
publisher. The court ruled that the book, being seditious and
immoral, the author had no property rights in it. Thus the
publisher was legally entitled to the pirated edition.
Between 1837
and 1842 newspapers were full of the notorious activities of
Chartists, Owenites and others who espoused materialism in the
cause of social reform.
In June,
1860, at a meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science there was confrontation between the
Bishop of Oxford and the biologist Thomas Huxley. After
speaking at length on Darwin’s "Origin of Species"
the Bishop asked Huxley whether the apes were on the maternal
or paternal side of his family. To which the biologist
replied: "If a man highly endowed by nature and possessed
of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties
and influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule
into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm
that I would rather have a miserable ape for a
grandfather."
Robert
Fitzroy, the captain of the HMS Beagle, in which Darwin had
made his famous voyage, was also at the meeting. He had become
mentally unhinged because of Darwinian attack in teleology. He
stalked out during the confrontation holding the Bible on head
and shouting "The Book, the Book" – "The
Origin of Species".
Charles
Leyall, the geologist on a visit to the USA complained to his
friends that his own country was more parson ridden than any
in Europe except Spain.
One can
enliven this depressing subject with a reference to the
Scottish skeptical philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) who
cheered himself in the face of approaching death by re-reading
Lucretius.
Dialectical
materialism is two-way materialism. Mankind acts on nature;
nature, in turn, acts on man; and the two are mutually
changed. In dialectical materialism there is no room for final
causes, teleology or God. That is why Marxist ambition was —
"natural science will in time subsume the science of man
just as the science of man will subsume natural science: there
will be one science." It will ensure a practical politics
to free man from his alienation.
In
contradistinction with other animals, man produces his food,
clothing, shelter and apparatus of civilisation. Individually,
a man cannot survive in nature. Man wrestles with nature
through changing historical, social organisation.
Ten thousand
years ago agricultural revolution changed the human landscape
of the earth Mosquito-breading sites developed in jungle
clearings along with stagnant pools of water by the human
dwellings. Fleas and lice colonised the outside of human body;
amoeba, hook-worms and parasites invaded the interior.
Domestication of animals made us share diseases with them: 65
with dogs, 50 with cattle, 46 with sheep and goats, 42 with
pigs, 35 with horses; and 26 with poultry.
John Evelyn
(1620-1706) was already a proponent of conservation. In his
"Sylva" (1664) he complained of the prodigious havoc
wreaked on the English forests by the demands of shipping,
glassworks and iron furnaces.
Ever since
the middle ages, the superfluous has been easier to produce
than the necessary. The tendency becomes a rage when exchange
value dominates the use-value of goods.
Marx speaks
of the universal pollution to be found in the large towns.
"Light, air, etc. simple animal cleanliness ceases to be
a need for man. Dirt, this pollution and putrefaction of man,
the sewage (this word is to be understood in its literal
sense) of civilisation becomes an element of life for him.
Universal unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, becomes an
element of life for him."
Engels wrote:
"Let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our
human victories over nature. For each such victory nature
takes its revenge on us. Each victory, in the first place,
brings about the results we expected, but in the second and
third places it has quite different, unseen effects which only
too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia,
Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere destroyed the forests never
dreamed... that they were laying the basis for the present
forlorn state of those countries."
Ernest
Haeckel (1834-1919) coined the word ecology in 1866. "By
ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy
of nature — the investigation of the total relations of the
animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment
including, above all, its friendly and inimical relations with
those animals and plants with which it comes directly and
indirectly into contact; in a word, ecology is the study of
all those complex interrelations..."
It is only in
this sense we can understand global warming making the seas
rise to drown low-lying islands, the Netherlands and
Bangladesh.
A young
friend of old Marx (1847-1929) E. Ray Lankester has this to
say. "The sight of one of these death stricken black
filth gutters makes one shudder as the picture rises in one’s
mind of a world in which all the rivers and waters of the
seashore will be thus dedicated to acrid sterility and the
meadows and hillsides will be drenched with nauseating
chemical manures. Such a state of things is possibly in store
for future generation of men! It is not ‘science’ that
will be to blame for these harrors, but should they come
about, they will be due to the reckless greed and the mere
insect like increase of humanity."
Foster writes
despite the title of his book — "Marx and Engels did
not generally treat environmental destruction (apart from the
role it played in the direct life of the proletariat...) as a
major factor in the revolutionary movement against capitalism
that they saw as imminent. Where they emphasised ecological
contradictions, they did not seem to believe that they were to
play a central role in the transition to socialism. Rather
such considerations with regard to the creation of a
sustainable relation to nature were a part of — even a
distinguishing feature — of the later dialectic of the
constitution of communism". He is scholastically busy
with "deeper materialism" to deduce environmentalism
from the Marxist idea of metabolism, that is, the conversion
of the materials of nature into utilities and their return to
nature. Extinction of species and the end of rain forests are
not even mentioned, probably because he had so brilliantly
portrayed their approaching doom in the "Vulnerable
Planet"..
Perhaps
Polanyi’s argument is nearer the mark. "Money is the
universal and self-constituted value of all things, it has
therefore deprived the entire world, both the world of man and
of nature, of its specific value" — Marx. According to
Polanyi, capitalism turns everything into money. Canadians are
mining million-year-old frost for the Japanese because its
cubes glow in drink glasses. In his Great Transformation"
(1944) he speaks of market economy growing in the interstices
of society like the famous kotwal (the head of the city
police) of our history books fixing prices. Today the market
economy has not only burst the bonds of society but also has
begun to weigh heavily on nature.
There was an article
"Towards Alternatives: Rereading the Great
Transformation" in the Monthly Review Vol. 47, No. 2 June,
1995. Unaccountably, Polanyi is absent from the book.
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