The Central Project of Properly Scientific Civilizations
In the previous post here, Properly Scientific Civilization, I formulated a way to understand scientific civilization in parallel to my formulations about spacefaring civilizations in Indifferently Spacefaring Civilization (and which, in the same post, I showed how the same schematism could be applied to transhumanism).
I identified a properly scientific civilization as a civilization that has science integral to its central project (or raison d'être), as I had previously identified a properly spacefaring civilization as a civilization that has spacefaring as its central project, or a properly transhumanist civilization as a civilization that has transhumanism as its central project. The scenario that I discussed in Virtual Optimization as a Civilizational Imperative could be understood as a civilization that takes the development of the virtual world as its central project, thus a properly virtual civilization.
There is, of course, much more to be said about a civilization that takes science as its central project. For example, for an idea or a practice to bear the burden of being a central project, that idea or practice must have reached a certain level of maturity that proves that the focus of the central project has passed the test of time. If a civilization has adopted an immature idea or practice as its central project, it may find that, as this project develops, it is not able to stand the test of time, or that it develops in unexpected directions and with unwelcome unintended consequences.
This is what I see as the great challenge of civilization today that takes the Enlightenment project as its central project. The Enlightenment was drafted into being the central project of western civilization at a very early stage in its development, replacing the failing social institutions of feudalism and the church. When Christianity assumed the role of central project of nascent western civilization in late antiquity, Christianity was already several hundred years old, and had proved itself in persecution and in its ability to attract the greatest minds and the most powerful and effective leaders. This was not the case as western civilization found itself searching for a new central project in the early modern period, and eventually settled on the Enlightenment project.
Science was part and parcel of the Enlightenment project as that project came into being, but it was not as central as we once thought. In our own time, we can see the beginning of the cracks that reveal that science and the Enlightenment project may lead in different directions, and we may be forced to make a choice, or compromise the one or the other in order for two to continue to function as part of the cluster of related ideas that makes up the central project of western civilization (or banish one or the other into the intellectual superstructure).
Science was part and parcel of the Enlightenment, but science predated the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution marked the beginning of the end of the traditional central project of western civilization. In my post Modernity without Industrialism I argued that there was a distinctive kind of civilization in western Europe from approximately 1500-1800, after the scientific revolution got started, but before the industrial revolution made itself felt.
In retrospect, I realize that what I was discussing in Modernity without Industrialism was a nascent scientific civilization in which science was on the verge of being a central project of civilization, but it was as yet insufficiently mature to function as such. Today we have an entire cosmology that has grown out of centuries of scientific research, but in the early modern period science was only beginning to challenge traditional cosmology, which was based on religious and philosophical models of the universe.
These reflections point to important ways to understand what is and what is not a viable candidate as the central project of a civilization. In my 2017 talk The Role of Lunar Civilization in Interstellar Buildout, I stated that central projects emerge organically from the life of a people. This organicism of central project is related to their maturity. A central project that arises from the ordinary life of a people as they converge upon a modus vivendi in a given biome is a central project that has stood the test of time and is consistent with human nature over the longue durée.
An idea must be consistent with human nature for it to function effectively as a central project -- that, or humanity must be made to be consistent with the idea. And we often do, in fact, find that utopian central projects have as a theme the making of a “new man” (for example, the idea that the Soviet Union would shape a “new Soviet man,” homo sovieticus). This “new man” will be the citizen that the new political order deserves, and who will make this political project a success.
Utopian projects usually fail because they are based upon immature ideas that are pressed into service too early and cannot bear the burden that being a central project of a civilization imposes upon them. The familiar critique of the French Revolution by Edmund Burke, and the more reactionary critique of the French Revolution by Joseph de Maistre, was implicitly based on this observation that immature ideas are not ready to function as a principle to hold together a coherent society, though Burke and de Maistre formulated their critique in religious terms, as the only fully developed ideas with which they were familiar were religious conceptions of society.
For Burke and de Maistre, the problem with the Enlightenment project as the basis of society was that the ideas of the Enlightenment were “artificial” and were not sanctioned from all eternity. But these ideas -- and others as well -- appeared artificial because they were new and human beings were not yet accustomed to them. Science, too, was a new-fangled idea in the early modern period, and not at that time sufficiently robust or mature to function as a central project. However, in the next hundred years or so, science may come to a level of maturity at which it could function as a viable central project of a civilization -- and this may occur at a time when the Enlightenment project has been judged to fail, so that civilization will be once again casting about for something that can serve as a central project.
However, for science to emerge organically from the life of a people as a central project, that life would have to be through-and-through scientific, that is to say, ordinary people in their daily lives would have to exemplify the spirit and the practice of science. While there are already intimations of this in the world today, there is nothing like the broadly-based appreciation of science that would be necessary to the organic emergence of science as a central project. Thus, at this time, science is still a utopian ideal in terms of coherent social vision.
