Our science and our technology are based on the belief that an understanding of nature implies domination of nature by man. I use the word man here because I am talking about a very important connection between the mechanistic worldview in science and the patriarchal value system, the male tendency of wanting to control everything. In the history of Western science and philosophy this connection is personified by Francis Bacon who, in the seventeenth century, advocated the new empirical method of science in passionate and often outright vicious terms. Nature has to be ‘hounded in her wanderings,’ wrote Bacon, ‘bound into service’ and made a ‘slave’. She is to be ‘put in constraint,’ and the aim of the scientists is to ‘torture nature’s secrets from her’.
It is this most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is so hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition. Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain but our emotional and mental pain as well. We not only bury our dead as if they were still alive, but we also bury our pains as if they were not really there. We have become so used to this state of anesthesia, that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us. When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do ...
Comentários
Gostava de perceber até que ponto o Capra tem razão, ou se o Francis Bacon não estaria só a ser poético, ou qualquer coisa assim.