The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Reductionist Science and Religion / 155
together from the outside—and that reductionism then creates the
ethical anesthesia that basically says: ‘You don’t have to worry about
the ethics of your relationship because this is just a bundle of matter
which is in your hands to play around with.’ It’s as if you’re playing
with plasticine.
“And it also gives you the actual manipulative power to get more
milk out of a cow, to produce more lean meat in the cows, to stock
cows in smaller spaces, to slaughter them more quickly.
“These are the systems by which capital uses the reductionism of
science for capital accumulation and appropriation of life from
beings who have a right to their own life.”
—Vandana Shiva, Ph.D. 1
Rooted in the fallacious Cartesian split between mind and matter,
conventional reductionist science flatly denies the existence of any reality
beyond what can be physically quantified. This materialist mythos
ignores spirituality and the mysterious adventure of consciousness, and
tends to reduce both animals and humans to mere survival machines propelled
by genetic and chemical forces. It intrinsically reinforces the delusion
that beings struggle and compete in a universe that is devoid of any
innate meaning or purpose. This has made reductionist science a potent
tool of the wealthy elite and the military-industrial complex it controls.
In stripping away the inherent meaning and worth of animals and
nature and reducing life to material processes, genetic programming, and
operant conditioning, our own meaning, our worth, and our status are
redefined in terms of how efficiently we serve the ends of the
economic/political complex. Reductionist science cultivates the cold and
calculating eye that validates reducing beings to numbers in the cost/benefit
analyses carried out by industrial economists and military strategists.
It has helped legitimize the herding culture’s practice of commodifying
animals and nature and, by extension, each other and ourselves.
Reductionist science serves the herding mentality faithfully. It has
turned the pathological disconnectedness of masculine domination of
nature, animals, and people into a reputable and prestigious art form.
Today we can actually go to Dachau and stand in the same concrete