Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Robbery



Here is another great irony: 
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While the quantification of the universe and the reduction of reality to mathematics brought all existence into the human realm.
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It also excluded from reality everything that makes us human.
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The most significant parts of life became secondary. 
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Reduced to force and motion. 
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Chemistry and electricity. 
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Or their existence denied altogether.
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I am not saying that some other element infuses human emotion, consciousness, and perception
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An immaterial spirit added to the electrochemical-physical mix.
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No.
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My issue is with what is primary.
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Galileo's distinction between primary and secondary qualities is nothing but an ideology.
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We could equally call motion, force, and extension secondary, and say that these are but how the human qualities are enacted.
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Matter, we could say, is the mere agent for enacting what is primary: emotions, beliefs, ideas, perceptions, consciousness, dreams, spirit, poetry, art, love, beauty, divinity.
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What a monstrous doctrine it is, to declare all these things unreal, and what a monstrous civilization it has produced.
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How can it be that we have created a religion—science—that explicitly denies the very fabric of human experience?
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I want you to be amazed and aghast.
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Implicit in this doctrine is the devaluation of everything that makes us human, and our reduction, therefore, to the status of automatons.
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It is a doctrine that robs us of life itself.
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Can you see the audacity of this robbery?
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We will take your emotions—they are, after all, mere configurations of hormones, blood vessels, and neurons.
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We will take your perceptions—they are, after all, merely the neurological result of absorption spectra and other properties of matter.
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We will take your sacredness, your poetry, your art.
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We will exile you to the cold hard world of force and reason.
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Charles Eisenstein

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