Empiricism and Culture

INTRODUCTION: EMPIRICISM AND CULTURE

If life, in the eye of the evolutionary biologist, is a game played by a planetary coalition of organisms in which Nature is the opponent, then the entirety of the rules of such a game — biosphere versus necrosphere — is contained in the theory of homeostasis. These rules have been incarnated in every individual organism. They sit in its morphological and functional structure. This structure defines them, determines them in such a way that they are actually its incorporation. For systems behave, from an evolutionary perspective, sensibly only to the extent that they do not self-destruct. So everything that serves their survival in them and from them — as mechanisms and tactics for their application — cannot be questioned at all until the very principle of life — persistence despite all destructive influences and disruptions — is not questioned. In this sense, neither the whole game played nor any of its members can be extra-adaptively valued. Whatever serves survival is thus already good; whatever hinders it is evil. Good and evil appear as counterbalances to a purely instrumental calculus, according to the paradigm that establishes patterns — of an optimal living homeostat and an optimal strategy of its games with Nature.

The biological nucleus of the survival game is inherited by humans from the pre-cultural stage of anthropogenesis. It is endowed with the entire wealth of the locomotor, sensory, sexual, and other inventories. This nucleus is then incorporated into emerging cultural formations. Because no culture can negatively question any purely biological needs of the organism. It can subject them to any kind of renaming. It can segment them against the truth of empirical findings (as the Trobriand Islanders did, considering the biological father of a child as not the true father). It can liturgise them. It can detach certain functions, such as locomotion or sensory functions, from the rational adaptational stem and grant them the status of “ludic” or “sacred” behaviours — in the form of dance, fine arts, etc. It can label other functions as “inferior”, subject to cultural obfuscation, and only tacitly, in some narrow sector of behaviour, allow their realisation (for example, this is how puritanism relates to sexuality). However, most obviously, there has never been a culture that simply prohibited the satisfaction of these elementary needs since human life could not persist without them; what is empirically equal (e.g., locomotion and sex) was considered of different value. But nothing more happened in this field.

Over the centuries, there was a lack of cultural relativism that prevailed. Each formation considered its values to be ultimate and unique; from this perspective, one culture would assess every other. Of course, in practice, the axiology backed by stronger instruments prevailed. That is why all the original cultures preserved at the Neolithic and post-Neolithic levels from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century were ruined by colonialism.

In turn, cultural relativism, which is becoming more modern, is an expression of the knowledge that no human behaviour and no human deeds are proper under metaphysical sanction. If we consider anything to be wrong, it is only because of the effects that this thing or that act may have on certain people: we do not believe, however, that by doing wrong to people, e.g. by inflicting suffering on them, we are furthermore transgressing a transcendentally established order. If empiricism tells us, for example, that a certain sexual anomaly, such as homosexuality, is not socially harmful, does not offend anyone and does not violate any norms of eternal necessity, then we conclude that such behaviour should not be subject to taboo prohibitions. Anything that empiricism deems harmless, that does not violate a human’s physical and mental wholeness, can, therefore, be implemented as long as it pleases someone and as long as it does not ricochet against any outside interest. Whatever one might say when evaluating such a trend of aligning the cultural norm with empirically derived knowledge will be articulated from a non-heretical standpoint. I can be against the practice of homosexuality, but I cannot prove my position by empirical means. For there are none.

A new ally, or rather an old but ever-growing in strength guardian of our needs, is more and more overtly technology, in its products and their totality, creating an artificial environment favourable to man. But this one-sided caretaker role can also be detrimental on another front of its contacts with society. It is easiest to imagine such optimisation of satisfaction becoming a destroyer of personal motivational attitudes because when everything comes too easily, nothing is worth much. It is then easier for anti-conformism to manifest itself in the form of destructive rather than somehow creative actions. Thus, the nihilistic reflex can be seen as a warning signal against the spectre of total axiological collapse. However, techno-evolution not only promotes existence; it can also strain it by causing a steady increase in individual and social dependence on the reliable functioning of artificial devices that make up the living environment. The more precisely the technique cares for us, the more carefully it must be cared for in turn. Both its most efficient movement and its constant improvement thus turn out to be the central instrumental values of a technically oriented civilisation. The deeper culture immerses itself in this evolutionary direction, the more it exposes itself to all the good and evil it may contain. Progress, in turn, has this in common with the fact that it is clearly correlated with a steady intensification of the complexity of all holistic structures — energy, production, information, and so on. Thus, with time, those who live in an artificially constructed environment find it increasingly difficult to orient themselves in the mechanisms and regularities of this environment. In terms of sensory convenience, this situation does not invite objection, but it can be questioned from the standpoint of man’s intellectual sovereignty because this is how one enters a realm in which civilisation is — as a structural whole — the accumulated sum of experience and wisdom which no individual mind can any longer assimilate. In particular, fictitious becomes the type of democratic government within a structure so complex that only a specialist still knows how to figure out the effects of any manipulation of its fragments.

This is how civilisation is created, managed, and regulated by experts. There are domains where superior knowledge — as specialised expertise — exists and can manifest itself in a regulatory and controlling manner. This knowledge may, at times, conflict with traditional cultural norms and values if it recommends actions that contradict them. However, the general increase in empirical knowledge simultaneously leads to an increase in the freedom of multifaceted actions, i.e. it creates an area where certain decisions must be made, even though empiricism remains silent on what decisions are optimal. We are becoming accustomed to the idea that matters of technology, economics, and information technology should be left to specialists. But there is a tendency for such values, which were considered eternally sovereign and inviolable, to come under the authority of experts.

It is about a historically new type of relationship between empiricism and culture. We have learned from empiricism what makes it possible to regard cultural values as relative in the sense that the customs, ethos, and beliefs of another culture are neither better nor worse than our own. However, this is a differentiation of norms only within the context of the biological nucleus proper to man. For the fact that we consider the prohibitions and precepts of various cultures to be relative and changeable does not mean that we can analogically relativise the morphological-functional core of the human organism. That we should, say, acknowledge that the motor, sensual, sexual functions of the human being are also relative, i.e. that they could be exchanged for some radically different ones. Moving from one culture to another, one can observe changes, even inversions, of custom (with us, black is the colour of mourning; with the Chinese, it is supposedly white, etc.). However, one cannot observe cross-cultural differences in human biology because it is the same in all possible formations. This is how it was in the past and is still the case, but it need not be so at all in the future. Relativism, which has already absorbed our cultural norms, can, in turn, encroach upon the hitherto biological invariance of man. Until now, man has adapted himself to systemic forms and cultural formations as a highly malleable being in terms of his mind, but the adaptation that took place in this way was reversible. Biotechnological interventions, at first appearing as isolates, but aiming at a vision of the self-evolution of our species, on the other hand, pose a dilemma which could be formulated most succinctly in the following words: should man adapt himself to the artificial world he has created simply by being able to do so? One can already hear that from the point of view of information-processing, man is beginning or will soon begin to be inferior to intelectronic machines, that from the point of view of “endurance”, man is not particularly suitable as a passenger in spaceships which would develop such accelerations as are possible from a purely technical point of view, and so on. A human being, auto-evolutionarily adapted to the technological world, could — probably — be a perfectly happy being! Enough to imagine, for example, such a state of affairs: thanks to the spread of ectogenetic techniques of fertilisation and embryogenesis, the whole sphere of sexual intercourse has become an area of purely “ludic” satisfaction as it has been cut off from procreative needs; to bring it back, but in a completely new way, to the social needs, the brain will be transformed in such a way that intensive creative work or — the precise operation of certain machines or — any activity, however socially necessary as a certain type of work — will provide intense sexual pleasure (because the centres of its sensation will be connected with the motivation centres in an appropriate way through newly created neural transmission routes). Why — will the rationalist, an advocate of such a project of transformation, ask — would we drag through the next centuries an anachronistic, even archaic constitution of the system, which contributed to the creation of the opposition “soul – body”, “higher mental activities - lower sensual activities”, etc.? Would it not be better to make rational use of sex so that from now on, every kind of socially necessary work will be performed by the individual with the greatest enthusiasm (because it will give them the highest sensual pleasure)? Of course — the programme thus sketched is both fantastic and today — unlikely. But it goes to the bold extrapolation of a trend that is already emerging.

Its first fruits are already to be found. For breaking the coupling of copulation and procreation belongs to “counter-biological” actions: we do what is convenient or pleasing to us, contrary to what is naturally built into us. It may also be convenient to allow humans to breathe underwater with the help of gills or an artificial apparatus or — to stay on airless planets and do without air or oxygen. Such projects are already known not as fantastic writing ideas but, for example, as the so-called “cyborgisation” plan for the organism.

But such a trend, in its further course, after all, allows us to question more and more evolutionary solutions and to replace what evolution has created with what we, taking its place, will create. Transformation of the bloodstream; rendering it free from the afflictions of an organ working so intensely as the heart; “alienation” of the continuation of the species by taking the process of fertilisation outside the organism (sex can remain here as a “pure pleasure”, devoid of procreative sense, or it can be “instrumentally” exploited, as mentioned); gene engineering of “orchestrating” new traits in the hereditary plasm as the embodiment in the somatic solution of Homo — such systems, organs, functions that neither they nor any living species have ever had on Earth; expansion of the brain, freely transforming it; variable connectivity to it — of sensory aggregates, sensitive not only to those narrow spheres of stimuli to which the natural sensory organs are sensitive; transformation of the whole of our apparatus of emotional experiences; a different “sculpture” than the given — of affective-impulsive life; incorporation into the organism upon the rights of its components — of sub-systems of non-biological origin; the creation of “synthetic-natural hybrids”; making available, according to all that has been sketched, new types of information processing in the body and mind; new types of sensation, new qualities of consciousness, new forms of pleasure, a sense of sublimity, a sense of intellectual comprehending and grasping of the sense of phenomena beyond — perhaps? — potency hitherto known to us. And all this we can already imagine. And it is a well-known fact that the underestimation of causal possibilities is the rule of every predictive effort that has been made historically.

And since sex today is already separated from reproduction; since even today — temporary, it is true — character changes can be induced by psychopharmaceutical techniques; since even today one can replace a heart with a heart, a liver with a liver, a lung with a lung, a kidney with a kidney, since one can insert into the human body artificial blood vessels and artificial joints, artificial neural stimulators, etc., no one dares claim that by saying what we have just said we are recklessly fantasising.

It is not about any fantasies and has not been for a long time. It is only the ossified thought, desperately defending itself against the abyss into which it does not want to look, which stubbornly and steadfastly holds to its position — that these phenomena do not change anything in principle, that in fact, “everything has already happened in history”, that “somehow man will adapt to these things”, that - to put it another way, because it all amounts to the same thing — culture will be able to assimilate them. Culture, however, has been relativised and, in its collapse, has already relied on biology: some claim that “we can rely on sex” as a generator of values, that it was with us when we were still living an animal life, and that it will remain with us as a guarantee of the permanence of sensations and as an organiser of behaviour. But it does not take many words to reveal the fear-filled falsity of such theses. Culture has succumbed to relativism, and biology cannot be its unwavering support because, in turn, empiricism, which is instrumentally expansive and unstoppable in this regard, relativises our biology. If I can choose neither the sex of my child, nor my own physical appearance, nor the functions of my body or mind, if all of this is determined outside of me by the biological fate of the species, which is successively incarnated in individual specimens, the existential situation is genuinely different from one in which I can subject my own appearance and that of my child, as well as the parameters of intellect, sensation and somatic faculties, to modifications of any magnitude. What is then possible? Everything is within the realm of possibility. After the relativisation of culture, the relativisation of biological norms — as the last basis of axiology — becomes a foreseeable fact.

The suppositions that initially only sectors of biotechnology enabling the dissemination of health and beauty standards, given by evolution, can be mastered because the ability to make retouches and transformations of systemic structures that alter the biological species norm, may emerge only later, in the next historical stage of development — such presumptions are nearly invalidated every day by occurring facts. The subtext of such suppositions is the unjustifiably optimistic hypothesis that the material world has been deliberately prepared for us and that, therefore, the sequence in which we acquire portions of instrumental information, correlated with the gradation of the difficulty of its acquisition, has been deliberately planned so that the progress of knowledge could never harm us. Of course, nothing of the sort has occurred or is occurring; the replacement of worn-out hearts with functional ones is not normal from any evolutionary point of view, just as the separation of copulation from procreation means a drastic change in the evolutionarily given parameters; the situation is no different with psychedelic drugs, or the possibility of choosing the sex of the child and moving its foetal development beyond the boundaries of the organism - and these are all procedures either already in progress or already being realised, whose implementation will be made available in the coming years. So, the hopeful thought that we will not do ourselves any harm because, with its objectively existing structure, the world will not allow it, cannot be sustained.

Let us summarise what has been said. Up to now, techno-evolution has been an independent variable of Earth’s civilisation, and the fixed parameter of this civilisation has been the species-biological norm of the human system. Now it is a question of preventing techno-evolution from absorbing this parameter, making it subordinate to itself, which will be the case if the man finds himself forced — under the pressure of the techno-evolutionary gradients created — to mentally and physically attune himself to machines, to the entire synthetic environment that has been “built” for him in the course of the last centuries. His only refuge, his non-technological fulcrum, can be culture in its proper autonomous values. Archimedes had no support for moving the Earth off its foundations with his lever, but in relation to technology, we have such a point of support, or rather — we can have it.

In saying so, we are revealing perhaps one of the most important themes for science fiction because it is also literature, which means it should be, according to its name — ascribed to cultural values and is, moreover, a literary reconnaissance that has established beachheads on the shores of scientific knowledge and technology. Science Fiction can both create visions endorsing certain forms of auto-evolutionary realisations within the outlined problem space and provide us with warnings by predicting what will happen if culture, instead of being a guardian of axiology, instead of defending the entrance to the labyrinths of human omni-transformability, allows itself to be tamed and dominated by technological trends that prioritise the interests of days and years over the interests of decades and centuries.

The immaturity of Science Fiction manifests itself, unfortunately, in the fact that it does not even attempt to deal with issues called marginal. For instead of clear futurological visions, both positive and negative, i.e. showing the magnificent possibilities and terrifying horrors of instrumentalism harnessed to the workings of civilisation, it provides Cassandra-like cries of terror and disgust, if only one does not indulge in escapist fantasies, completely alienated from the thicket of the problematic world. As a matter of fact — as we will try to show — Anima Phantastica is overall, without any differentiation, generally disinclined towards science and empiricism; it is as anti-scientific in the most prominent Science Fiction creators of today as it is in the circles of creators of traditional humanities and literature. However, those who provide condemnatory and desperate gestures instead of specific warnings, those who condemn everything in civilisation, offer no assistance and provide no guidance.

Indeed, we have witnessed anti-rationalist betrayal within our own camp, the heresy of anti-scientism, the resurgence of irrationalism and nihilism in the camp of “scientific” fantasy, which was supposed to rejuvenate us and fortify us with powerful doses of informational serum. Undoubtedly, the unwavering affirmation ready to swear blindly by every innovation, as if it must automatically equate to progress, can only be worthy of condemnation. However, equally worthy of it is the unwavering negation of all values that, as the achievements of science, alone can ensure a future for humanity better than its past.

This article was originally published in the 'Fantasy and Futurology' volume, 1970.